Ned Fielden from the Library announced today the debut of a new piece of authoring software, titled the "Hegel Editor." With initial aid from the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching, Fielden claims to have revolutionised contemporary scholarship, and hopes to push San Francisco State to the forefront of what he terms "enhanced research."

With a generous grant from Vicki Casella in CET, he has been able to exploit what are already familiar elements of most modern word processing applications. "Let's say you just finished writing a research paper" said Fielden "and the stakes of publication are fairly high. Perhaps your tenure review is coming up or your department chair has been breathing down your neck over your lack of scholarship."

"You run your document through the Hegel Editor, which automatically uses the built-in features of the word processor, but with an expanded list of thesaurus terms custom- tailored for scholarly use . This is a cross-platform dresser, as we like to call it, and works on all the most common writing applications regardless of operating system.

"We use a fairly extensive list of stop-words: prepositions, articles, and common nouns. But with adjectives, verbs and especially adverbs, the Hegel editor calls up a thesaurus list for each word and automatically replaces it with the longest word available. You get ten page papers that turn into 14 or 15 page products. Sentences grow more weighty before your eyes."

"And best of all," Fielden noted, "the pomposity index almost goes off the charts, especially if you also use the Hegel paragraph truncation feature, which eliminates two out of every three paragraph breaks. Prose becomes so opaque and dense that its respectability in scholarly circles becomes nearly impregnable. The paper becomes so hard to understand that no one will be able to challenge its premise or conclusions."

"With some early studies we have done, we have seen publications identical in content sent to different journals and the Hegel-edited ones are published nearly 40 percent more often. This will result in a greater volume of serious scholarship finding its way into reputable journals, and thus the intellectual community. Serious scholars should not have to worry about the polish of their findings, or the excellence of their language, which takes away from their valuable time. This product should fill a valuable gap in the publication process."

Fielden regretfully commented that development costs have been unusually high, but that a beta version of the Hegel Editor is currently available, and that pricing will diminish as later versions emerge. To purchase the beta version, checks for $1,497 may be sent to fielden@sfsu.edu.