Professors HATE This One Weird Trick for Summarizing Your Research

There’s an old story, almost certainly apocryphal, about former British Prime Minister John Major asking Boris Yeltsin to describe the Russian economy in one word. Yeltsin said it was “Good.”

Seeking a bit more detail, Major asked Yeltsin if he could describe it in two words. Yeltsin replied, “Not good.”

Major finally asked for a three-word summary. Yeltsin’s response? “Not good enough.”

While the exchange is most likely a myth, there is something irresistible about its structure, and it was rattling around in my head during a recent session of my dissertation seminar.

During the break, I asked someone to sum up their partner’s dissertation in one word. They said: “Empathy.” I relayed the Yeltsin joke and we decided to test whether the structure held up in summarizing academic research. Two words: “Not empathetic.” Three words: “Not empathetic enough.” Gabby, whose research is about depictions of madness in modernist literature, thought about it for a second and said: “Yeah, that’s actually not a bad summary.”

We started going around the room with it. Spencer, who is working on trans bibliography, offered “hermaphrodite” as her one-word summary, which yielded “not hermaphrodite,” and then “not hermaphrodite enough.” Applied to my own dissertation, which focuses on contemporary poems written from the perspective of animals, I get:

Animal.

Not animal.

Not animal enough.

Which, for a 3-word summary of what is supposed to be a book-length scholarly work investigating the strategic deformation of syntax, figuration, and sound that poets undertake in order to make language register as issuing from a nonhuman consciousness, is pretty good.

The question, of course, is to what extent “not X enough” is actually a useful model for summarizing research and to what extent it just feels like it works because the rhythm is satisfying. But I do think there’s something real going on in the unfolding of X, not X, not X enough. So many research projects, across disciplines, are fundamentally about some quality or condition that is absent, insufficient, or misrecognized. The three-word version locates a gap, names an inadequacy, and implies a standard that hasn’t been met. It’s a tiny argument. It can’t work for everything. But it’s a fun test and I’d argue it extends even beyond academic research to artistic projects more broadly.

So, does this method work for summarizing your research or current project? Does it not work? Does it not work well enough?