Writing is hard work. It takes practice. A student who came to office hours this week asked me if he would ever become a better writer. “Keep writing,” I told him. “If you want to become a better writer, you have to keep doing it.”

Writing is defining. I am currently in the home stretch of completing my dissertation. I have a defense date scheduled, and a date for when my completed draft is due. Although I am juggling duties as a Communication Fellow, an adjunct instructor, a graduate student, and a future faculty member, with this deadline looming in front of me, my primary identity has lately become: Writer of words. Many, many words.

Writing is exhausting. With so much of my mental and verbal capacities being consumed by the dissertation, I find that I don’t have much time or energy for other writerly duties. Like writing blog posts.

Writing is a process.

Writing is note-taking, lists, and scratch-pads.

Writing is revising, with helpful comments from friends.

Writing is reading, and integrating other people’s ideas.

Writing requires breaks, nourishment, and reward. I personally enjoy coffee, a tasty snack, and the New Yorker magazine.

Now, back to work!

photo credit: striatic

This is the point during the semester when my Facebook feed starts to fill up with laments from my teaching friends about the scourge of rampant plagiarism by their students.* Plagiarism is, indeed, the bane of my teaching existence, and I know that no matter how hard I try to “plagiarism-proof” my assignments, or threaten my students with the wrath of the grading sword, some poor sap is going to try to get away with swiping text from Wikipedia anyway.

When I get papers from students that seem to be too polished, or do not match up with their previous writing efforts, off to Google I go, to try to weed out the plagiarists. If I get a match–bingo. If I don’t, should I assume that the students did in fact write the paper themselves? Because I’ve been so focused on battling plagiarism, I haven’t given much thought to another form of academic cheating: paying ghostwriters. How common is this, anyway?

Ready to be scared? The Chronicle of Higher Education just published an essay apparently written by a guy who sells papers. He claims to have written about 5,000 pages for his clients. 5000 pages! And it’s not just undergraduate work either–he also claims to have written masters and doctoral theses. Dude writes, oh so smugly:

I live well on the desperation, misery, and incompetence that your educational system has created. Granted, as a writer, I could earn more; certainly there are ways to earn less. But I never struggle to find work. And as my peers trudge through thankless office jobs that seem more intolerable with every passing month of our sustained recession, I am on pace for my best year yet. I will make roughly $66,000 this year. Not a king’s ransom, but higher than what many actual educators are paid.

Read the whole thing. It is quite troubling. But, it also reminds me of one of my favorite under-appreciated television shows: “Undeclared.” Here’s a clip of Will Ferrell, playing a–what-else–ghostwriter for lazy college students:

*See also these previous cac.ophony posts on plagiarism here.

photo credit: Pabo76

As writing and communication fellows tasked with facilitating faculty development, one of our methods has been to organize workshops and roundtable discussions within specific departments. For example, we regularly offer seminars about low-stakes writing to faculty in the Sociology/Anthropology department. We’ve been gradually attempting to broaden the reach of this work, though, by inviting faculty from other departments to join in the discussion. This week, Alessandro and I organized a roundtable discussion on Designing Formal Assignments. We worked closely with a full-time faculty member, Sociology professor Susan Chambré, who took the lead in presenting material and facilitating discussion.

Although this was my fifth semester of helping to organize these workshops and roundtables, this particular one stood out for me in three respects:

• We had the best turnout we’ve ever had before. The conference room was filled to capacity.
• Faculty showed up from many different departments—far beyond Sociology/Anthropology, or even just the social sciences—including journalism, communication studies, physics, and English.
• There was a real mix of full-time and adjunct faculty.

The large and diverse turnout reflects, I think, the advertising we did for this event through departmental emails, printed flyers in mailboxes, and a shout-out by Associate Provost Dennis Slavin. But I also think it speaks to the hunger of faculty to have more opportunities to get together with their colleagues and discuss the nitty-gritty of teaching. Things like, “How do I design assignments that make sense to my students?” Or, “Should we let our students cite Wikipedia?” Or, “Does YouTube have a place in the classroom?” Or, “What’s the best way to stamp out plagiarism?” Or, “What the heck is this thing called scaffolded assignments that you keep trying to convince me to use?”

So, while the answer to Talia’s question,”Does the University Labor System Undermine Faculty Development Initiatives?” is very often a resounding YES, it is also clear that despite long hours and low pay, many faculty really are still eager to develop their teaching toolkit. As for the faculty who are literally hungry, we also fed them lunch.

So, last week I was reading this article complaining about the state of movies today by film producer Linda Obst. She writes that the only ones that seem to get made these days are those based on comic books and video games, with lots of explosions, dumb laughs, and hot boys under the age of 24. Obst blames the recession, arguing that studios have no money, and are therefore completely unwilling to take on the risk of producing movies that are actually thoughtful or well-written if they don’t have sparkly vampires or require 3-D glasses. (Which doesn’t really make sense to me–wouldn’t movies with big stars and killer special effects require tons of money to produce? Do you have any insight on this?)

I guess I had this article somewhere in the back of my mind when I read this story about diploma mills (h/t Jessie Daniels) about a physicist who happened to see a viral pop-up ad for a bogus university, which somehow led to him falling down the rabbit hole, unearthing a vast transnational network of scam artists. It is a fascinating read full of intrigue, as Dr. George Gollin teams up with the FTC and the Secret Service in a sting operation (OPERATION GOLD SEAL!) to chase and bring down diploma mills. It involves the Liberian embassy, a clandestine meeting at the Mayflower Hotel in DC, and Pentagon officials with fake degrees. It’s like some Cold War-era spy thriller, only about diploma mills instead of assassination and state secrets! Who knew?

You guys are smart. I bet you know where this is going. Please, please, please turn Operation Gold Seal into a movie. It seems right up your alley, a kind of madcap noir. Forget about what Obst said about what kind of movies can be produced these days. I’m sure you are just as sick of the CGI-ification of every single cartoon and toy from the ’80s as I am.

Can’t you just picture Russell Crowe as the rogue physics professor? Or perhaps you’d like to go with an older, more distinguished type like Ben Kingsley or Michael Caine. John Cho and George Clooney would make awesome Secret Service agents, and Holly Hunter and Jeff Bridges can be the couple in Spokane who cooked up the diploma mill scheme.

Okay, and just in case Obst is right, how about a compromise: throw in some of those kids from “Twilight” as undergraduate research assistants, and we’re golden.

Thanks for listening.

Sincerely,

A fan

photo credit: jessamyn

I’m curious what people think about the Library of Congress’s decision to digitally archive every public tweet.

Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.

To be honest, I don’t have a Twitter account, I don’t “follow” anyone, and I don’t really “get” the whole tweeting thing.  Obviously, I don’t know enough to have an opinion on this, but I couldn’t help but laugh at this comment made by “Uncle Fred” on a post at the Atlantic about the Twitter archive:

Great, now even future historians can muse over my failed toasted tomato sandwiches.

My questions are for those of you who are, or ever have been, on Twitter: Do you think tweets are something worth archiving? Are there privacy concerns? Will knowledge that your tweets will be archived change the nature of what you write? Any other thoughts or concerns?

photo credit: mag3737

As a Writing Fellow, I work with students who are having trouble structuring their essays, or need help clarifying their thesis statements, but sometimes I cannot help but address grammar problems. Yesterday I had some extra time with a student, so I gave him some feedback on a recurring grammar issue I noticed when I looked over his draft essay: rampant misuse of commas and semicolons! In speaking with him, it became clear that he didn’t really know what the difference was between a comma, semicolon, or colon, or when it was appropriate to use them.

As far as commas go, I taught him the “pause” trick. Read your sentences out loud to identify where you naturally pause, and that is where the comma(s) should go. When you read, your sentences out loud, it often becomes clear, when you’ve put in unnecessary commas. [When you read [pause] your sentences out loud [pause] it often becomes clear [pause] when you’ve put in unnecessary commas.]

Unfortunately, I did not have any neat tricks up my sleeve to explain semicolon usage. In the draft that the student showed me, his semicolons should have been commas; they did not connect two independent but related clauses that could stand on their own as complete sentences. “Get rid of them,” I advised. “If you don’t know how to use them, don’t use them at all.”

This got me thinking: I can help students identify when not to use the semicolon, but how do I teach them when it is appropriate to use? I’m a sociologist, not a grammarian! I’ve never had a formal grammar lesson myself, and cannot articulate all the rules of grammar, despite implicitly knowing and using them when I write. When I told the student to err on the side of caution by not using the semicolon, I realize that I was also erring on the side of caution in my proscriptive, rather than prescriptive, advice.

I was discussing this last night with a friend I ran into on the way home from the subway. My friend, who is absolutely not a grammarian either, reminded me about her favorite podcast, Grammar Girl. “I used a semicolon for the first time in my life this year, after listening to the Grammar Girl podcast about them,” she told me. By finally learning the rules about the semicolon, she finally felt confident about using them. Now, I’ve never been afraid to use the semicolon, but I’d like to feel more confident about teaching its usage. So, off to Grammar Girl I go.

With this conversation fresh in my mind, I’ve been thinking about the recent case of plagiarism in Germany by a 17-year-old novelist. Apparently, author Helene Hegemann lifted passages, including an entire page, from someone else’s novel. Unlike the 2006 scandal involving teenage author Kaavya Viswanathan, who claimed that she had plagiarized in good faith, Hegemann readily admits to using another author’s words in her novel without any attribution–what I would call “bad faith plagiarism.” She claims, however, that her novel is akin to a musician who remixes or samples.

Some of Hegemann’s defenders claim a generational defense. The Guardian UK’s Robert McCrum argues that Hegemann’s novel is actually an example of “good faith plagiarism”:

Disentangling fact from fiction in a spat that looks like a nasty blog-war is tricky, but it’s clear from the reports I’ve read that Hegemann, a child of the internet age, simply does not understand, or recognise, the charge of plagiarism. To her, coming from the cut-and-paste world of blogs and Facebook, what she’s done is no more than “mixing” (she seems to use the English term, by the way.)

Laura Miller isn’t having it:

Kids these days, this Cassandra-ish line of reasoning goes, have unfathomably different values, and their elders had better come to terms with this because children are, after all, the future. You can’t tell them anything! It’s as if people under 25 have become the equivalent of an isolated Amazonian tribe who can’t justly be expected to grasp our first-world prohibitions against polygamy or cannibalism — despite the fact that they’ve grown up in our very midst.

The New York Times article hints that in addition to a generational defense, culture plays into it too. That is, remixing is just part of Berlin youth culture:

Ms. Hegemann finds herself in the middle of a collision — if not road kill exactly — between the staid, literary establishment in a country that venerates writers from Goethe to Mann to Grass, and the Berlin youth culture of D.J.’s and artists that sample freely and thereby breathe creativity into old forms. Or as one character, Edmond, puts it in the book, “Berlin is here to mix everything with everything.”

My issue with the “Oh, she was just remixing” argument, however, is that Hegemann did not merely incorporate someone else’s words into her novel. By not acknowledging her sources, she was, in effect, passing off the entire novel as her own, and this, from my perspective, is what some of us stodgy old folks used to call “stealing.” Remixing and sampling can be great, innovative art forms. I’m a fan of Creative Commons. I think copyright rules are too strict. However, if you are going to riff on another person’s words, music, or ideas, you should at least give them credit for it.

If Vanilla Ice couldn’t get away with it, why should Hegemann?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rog8ou-ZepE[/youtube]

Make Your Own Academic Sentence

After playing around a bit, I came up with “The (re)formation of post-capitalist hegemony asks to be read as the systemization of the nation-state.” Excellent! I can’t wait to put that into my dissertation!

You can spend some good time procrastinating on your actual writing by making sentences containing random phrases like “history as such” and “poetics.” The site also has some excellent writing sources for students and academics alike, such as The Sentence of the Week, where a published sentence is thoroughly critiqued for its positives and negatives, giving us a great sense of what makes a well-written sentence. There’s also this guide to college writing that I’ll surely point out to my students.

But, if procrastinating with random word generators is more your thing, you can always play with the classic Wu-Tang Clan name generator.

Yours,

Tha Eurythmic King of Nowhere

Over the summer, Jenna invited me and several other people who had donated our zine collections to the Barnard Zine Library for tea (how Seven Sisters!), and we all spent a lot of time in the stacks flipping through the zines that were in circulation. This was certainly a nostalgia trip down memory lane, and a quite physical one at that, as we were literally looking at and holding the very photocopied and stapled pieces of paper that we may have once kept stashed in boxes and bins under our beds and in our closets. Seeing zines in their original form now archived in a college library is quite a different experience from seeing them discussed or reprinted in a fancy academic journal, however. The attention is nice, but one’s interaction with the zines feels at least one step removed. Even if you read the print version of SIGNS rather than online, the reprinted zine excerpts don’t look or feel like the original. (And, in this case, reading this issue of SIGNS online instead of print allows you to see the zine reprints in color).

I am fascinated by the “afterlife” of those objects that were once considered to be—or were created to be—ephemeral. They live on in discussions by critics and historians, and in historical archives, libraries, and museums. These days, they are also being revived digitally, including on Google Books. You know, in the pre-blogging era, when we were sixteen and pouring our angsty hearts out on paper, did any of us have any idea that the words and images we created would still be in circulation? If we did, would that have changed what we produced, how we presented ourselves, or who we considered our audience to be? I wonder.

Although part of the problem of students not reading may be attributed to their busy schedules, poor time management, or mere laziness, when I try to put myself in my students’ shoes, and think about the times when I have slacked off on doing all of my reading, what it often came down to was that I did not do the reading when it seemed like it was a waste of time. I remember being frustrated when lectures seemed to merely repeat what the texts said, as well as when the readings seemed irrelevant to class discussions, exams, and assignments.

As an instructor, my gut instinct is to say, “But, but, it’s good for you! Trust me!” Or to explain the pedagogical relevance of all the readings on the syllabi. I’m not sure if that is the best strategy, though. I wonder: how can we better convey to our students that there is a reason why doing their assigned reading is important? I have a sneaking suspicion that the answer lies in the creative writing mantra “Show, don’t tell.” That is, rather than painstakingly explaining to your students why it is important for them to do their homework, teach in such a way that your students see for themselves that the texts you have assigned them to read have value.

In my duties as a Writing Fellow, I’d like to make a push for instructors to use writing as a means of “showing” the benefits of reading. According to WAC philosophy, there are numerous reasons why we advocate for students to be writing more frequently in all of their classes. Here’s just one: by writing about what they are reading, students will feel more invested in the texts their professors have assigned, and professors will have written proof that the time they spend putting together a syllabus is not a waste of their time.

photo credit: Vanessa Roanhorse

I recently moved from a brownstone to a large multi-story apartment building. One of the casualties of this move was my apparently unrealistic expectation that when you get a newspaper delivered to you daily, you will always have a blue-plastic wrapped paper lovingly waiting for you when you wake up in the morning and put some pants and flip-flops on to retrieve it. After three days in a row of having my paper poached by some unscrupulous new neighbor, I did what any self-respecting thirty-something graduate student would do: I griped about it on Facebook. (Well, after calling the paper for re-delivery, that is).

While many people have expressed sympathy about the paper-poaching, some people I’ve complained to, both virtually and face-to-face, have also expressed surprise that I get the newspaper delivered to me daily. The expense of daily delivery is one aspect of the surprise (to which my reply is: bourgie habits die hard), but some are also amazed that I actually read the paper in print form. “Why don’t you just read it online?” they ask.

So, I’ve been trying to articulate why I prefer to read my paper in 3-D rather than online. Here are just three reasons:

• It’s part of my morning ritual. Every morning, 7 days a week, I like to sit at my kitchen table and read the paper while I eat my breakfast and drink my coffee. If I read it online, I’d have to bring my laptop to the kitchen, or bring my breakfast to my desk, which is a personal boundary I shall not cross. (And don’t even think about suggesting I scroll through the headlines on my iPod in between sips of coffee and bites of granola).
• The sensory experience. Feeling newsprint between your fingers, smelling traces of ink, hearing the scratch of paper as you turn pages: you lose the tactile experience when you read online.  Perhaps it is my history as a former zinester that led me to appreciate the allure of physical paper. Analog rules.
• The reading experience. I read differently when the copy is printed on a page in my hands as opposed to appearing on a screen in front of me. I like being able to visually scan a large page, or easily flip to another page, rather than having to (primarily) scroll vertically and click on links. The content and quantity of my reading also changes depending on format. The printed paper is curated differently from the online version, leading to a different cumulative narrative of headlines and stories. When I read a physical paper, I tend to look at every page, scanning all headlines and reading what appeals to me. When I read the paper online, my eye gravitates to what is on top and in the middle and in large print, rarely scrolling down to read or click on the smaller headlines. My attention span wanders. I veer off to read other sites. I end up reading less, and being less informed.

I know, I know, despite my preference for print, the newspaper industry is dying. But what do other people think about print versus online? Do you read print newspapers, or are you primarily an online reader? What are your reasons either way?

What’s wrong with voice mail? Well, according to the article, IT TAKES TOO LONG TO CHECK.

But in an age of instant information gratification, the burden of having to hit the playback button — or worse, dial in to a mailbox and enter a pass code — and sit through “ums” and “ahs” can seem too much to bear.

Or how about, IT’S REALLY CONFUSING. AND TIRING.

“If you left a message, I have to dial in, dial in my code,” Ms. Cheong said. “Then I mess up and redial. Then once I hear the message, I need the phone number. I try to write it down, and then I have to rewind the message to hear it again,” she added, feigning exhaustion.

Hmm… I don’t know. Is this just another silly trend piece about the short-attention span of the youth of today and their addiction to cutting-edge technology? Or do you think voice mail will go the way of the VCR, into the dustbins of techno-history?

I vant to learn Inglich

After watching the video, I became intrigued with the site where he made it, xtra normal, which has the motto “If you can type, you can make movies.” You choose the scenery and characters, provide text, add sounds, camera angles, movements, and a few other features, and a 3-D animated video is created. It’s still in beta, and has some quirks that need to be ironed out, but add this to your tool box of “Gee whiz!” fun things you can do on the Internet. Of course, I had to play around with this new tool, and got hooked. So I put together this silly little video introducing this blog.

Warning: once you start playing around on this site, it is extremely hard to stop.

James Hogge, associate dean of the Peabody School of Education at Vanderbilt University, said: “Students often confuse the level of effort with the quality of work. There is a mentality in students that ‘if I work hard, I deserve a high grade.’ “

In line with Dean Hogge’s observation are Professor Greenberger’s test results. Nearly two-thirds of the students surveyed said that if they explained to a professor that they were trying hard, that should be taken into account in their grade.

Jason Greenwood, a senior kinesiology major at the University of Maryland echoed that view.

“I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade,” Mr. Greenwood said. “What else is there really than the effort that you put in?”

“If you put in all the effort you have and get a C, what is the point?” he added. “If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.”

So, if grade-grubbing is a widespread phenomenon, and is at least in part a function of students not grasping the difference between merit and effort, what can we do to counteract this? How do we more effectively communicate our expectations to students? Do you provide a grade-breakdown in your syllabi? Do you give students access to grade calculators via online classroom management systems such as Blackboard? Do you provide students with the rubrics you use to grade their work?

As an aside, what do you think was missing from this Times article? I saw nary a mention of how the commercialization of higher education and the-customer-is-always-right mentality plays into student entitlement.

E‐mail excludes the multiple nonlinguistic cues and gestures that facilitate face‐to‐face communication. How, then, should interaction in a text‐based context be understood? The authors analyze the problems and solutions experienced by a research panel that communicated over e‐mail and face‐to‐face for 18 months, evaluating both kinds of exchanges alongside survey and interview data. Semiotic and linguistic theory is used to expose essential properties associated with the successful communication of meaning in each context. The authors find that e‐mail requires the cultivation of new techniques for specifically conveying the “pragmatic information” that connects the meaning of words to their users. Such information is assigned in e‐mail through the use of what are termed emphatic, referential, and characterizing semiotic tactics. These tactics are also evident in sustained online interactions studied by other researchers. This theoretical vocabulary represents an alternative to the dominant sociological characterization of e‐mail as an inferior substitute for face‐to‐face interaction.

The full article can be reached here. Thoughts?

Now, when I first read about this approach, I immediately thought of my number one pet peeve: students’ use of texting lingo in their writing.  You know, “Marx wants u 2 throw off ur chains but Durkheim says those chains are solidarity LOL.”

But according to David Crystal, author of txtng: the gr8 db8, text-messaging is a new linguistic form that helps build literacy.  He writes,

All the popular beliefs about texting are wrong, or at least debatable. Its graphic distinctiveness is not a totally new phenomenon. Nor is its use restricted to the young generation. There is increasing evidence that it helps rather than hinders literacy. And only a very tiny part of the language uses its distinctive orthography. A trillion text messages may seem a lot, but when we set these alongside the multi-trillion instances of standard orthography in everyday life, they appear as no more than a few ripples on the surface of the sea of language. Texting has added a new dimension to language use, indeed, but its long-term impact on the already existing varieties of language is likely to be negligible. It is not a bad thing.

So, am I being a technophobic Luddite every time I want to circle in bright red pen every single instance of txt-speak in my students’ papers?  You can read an excerpt of his book and hear Crystal expound on this more at NPR’s Talk of the Nation.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pq_3OheqzU[/youtube]

Watching the video now, I can’t help but think about how much of the song and the imagery both predicts and falls short of our current moment. It presents the idea of a Black man as president as a desirable possibility paired with the worry that it may ultimately be dangerous for the person elected. So, the chorus makes me kind of… nervous. However, the song has to be historicized: it was released around the time of the last presidential election, which had a totally different political climate. More importantly, it is certainly not about our current President-elect, who was barely on the national radar at the time. Despite the nerve-wracking chorus, the song is ultimately one of hope and dreaming for things like an end to war and poverty, better schools in the ‘hood, and a cure for AIDS and cancer.

I bring up Wyclef’s video because I just saw will.i.am’s new video, in which cynicism and fear have been replaced by pure joy and celebration.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHWByjoQrR8[/youtube]

What a difference four years makes. It’s like Wyclef went to sleep four years ago dreaming of being president, and will.i.am woke up “feeling brand new/ ’cause the dreams that I’ve been dreamin/ finally came true.”

Finally, there’s no official video yet, but what do people think about Nas’s “Black President”? You can find fan videos on youtube, or listen to it at his myspace page.

The two pieces of technology that really blew me away, however, were a printing device called Presto, and an enlarger.  The enlarger looks like a combination TV/overhead projector.  If there is something my grandmother wants to read, she places it on the machine, and it appears enlarged on the screen.  This enables her to read everything from the directions on prescription bottles, to her favorite philosophical texts, to emails from her grandchildren.

That’s right–my 99 year old grandmother loves email!  My grandmother is unable to use a computer, but we can send her emails through the Presto machine, which looks like a regular HP printer.  Over the weekend that I visited, daily horoscopes arrived, and several birthday wishes.  After the emails are printed, all she has to do is walk them over to her enlarger and boom–she is able to remain connected with friends, family, and the outside world.

The best communication I have with my grandmother, however, is decidedly low-tech.  It is face-to-face, looking her directly in the eyes, squeezing her hands, and telling her that I love her.  However, because we live a thousand miles away from each other, and the phone has become an impossible barrier, email has to suffice.  As soon as I got home from my trip, I sent her an email filled with photographs of our visit.

Now, while this was not technically a fortune revealing my life’s destiny, the words on the little scrap of paper did offer guidance for future endeavors: to be succinct and precise in one’s use of language.  This is valuable advice for those struggling to improve their writing and oral communication skills (or their campaigns for electoral office).

This advice is also, apparently, quite old.  I’ve been reading A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L’Engle (author of the children’s book A Wrinkle in Time), which is kind of messy and rambly, but is mostly about her experiences as a writer, teacher, mother and wife.  On page 149 she cites an anonymous poem written several centuries ago:

The written word
Should be clean as bone,
Clear as light,
Firm as stone.
Two words are not
As good as one.

So there you have it: a centuries’ old anonymous poet and a modern-day anonymous fortune cookie manufacturer are in agreement.  Keep it short and sweet.