Writing: November 2003 Archive Page

Dellavalle's concerns reflect those of a growing number of scientists and scholars who are nervous about their increasing reliance on a medium that is proving far more ephemeral than archival. In one recent study, one-fifth of the Internet addresses used in a Web-based high school science curriculum disappeared over 12 months. | Another study, published in January, found that 40 percent to 50 percent of the URLs referenced in articles in two computing journals were inaccessible within four years. --Rick Weiss --Web sites vanish so fast scientific papers just can't keep up... (SF Gate)

I wonder how many of these broken URLs are caused by the actions of webmasters who temporarily publish articles for free, and then pull them behind pay-per-view walls. A researcher who cites a URL that appears to be free may not know it has an expiry date. FYI, the above article originated from the Washington Post, whose free articles expire after a few weeks.

If students cannot find the answers but must make the answers, they are less apt to pass off others' ideas as their own. The secret is to pose or ask students to pose questions or problems and decisions which have never been adequately answered. --Jamie McKenzie --The New Plagiarism: Seven Antidotes to Prevent Highway Robbery in an Electronic Age (From Now On)

This article, from 1998, was prophetic. It argues that the "find out about X" assignments that used to require a lot of reading and persistence are today so trivial, and so many of these answers are already posted online, that we do our students a disservice and encourage them to cheat. If they realize it's busywork, and that their teachers themselves couldn't be bothered to come up with a challenging assignment, then how can we possibly expect them to become intellectually invested in it?

I try to impress upon my freshmen the fact that in high school, they were often rewarded for producing, on demand, the answers that were already printed in the back of the book or in the teacher's guides. (I always contextualize my statements about high school by observing that high school teachers have to teach a lot more students, and that they have more disciplinary problems, so I don't want to sound as if I'm slamming high school teachers.) But one day, they may have to speak at a city council meeting and present a reasoned argument for why a new road bypass should take route A (the one that does not destroy their house) instead of route B; or, one day their spouse might convert to a religion that they personally find morally reprehensible; or, they might be told that, due to a budget cut, they will have to write up a report that recommends which one of their three equally-competent assistants should be fired. A liberal arts degree is supposed to give students practice exposing themselves to new ideas and making sense of the world through multiple and varied viewpoints.

Even in upper-level courses, I find students -- some of whom are in the ed school -- asking me, "What do you want me to write?" as if I already have memorized the one and only correct answer to "Is Willy Loman a Tragic Hero?" or "How Personally Culpable was Torvald for Nora's Plight?"

Dear Professor Jerz,

Associate Vice-President Rodd Webb has forwarded me your concerns about the reproduction of your work on a York based website without proper citation. I am writing first of all to apologize for York's delay in responding to your concerns.

The essay has now been removed from the website, and the issue of plagiarism will be pursued according to the Faculty of Arts' quite stringent regulations and procedures governing academic integrity. I will inform you of the outcome in due course.

I am sorry indeed that York should be in any way complicit in the improper reproduction of your work, and I apologize without reservation.

Sincerely,

Heather Campbell
Associate Dean, Faculty of Arts
Associate Professor, Department of English
S928 Ross Building
York University Plagiarized EssayE-Mail)

I complained publicly, so now it's only fair to publicly prolcaim my appreciation that York U is taking the situation seriously. The e-mails from York just keep coming... and I'm sure that the York faculty and administrators will end up investing a hundred times more energy than the students in question saved by not bothering to cite my work properly.

Hugh Kenner, the literary critic who died on Monday aged 80, wrote on subjects as diverse as geodesic mathematics, the cartoons of Chuck Jones (creator of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd) and the effect of modern technology on literary imagery; he was best known, however, as a leading authority on American and Irish modernist writers, in particular Ezra Pound and James Joyce. --Hugh Kenner (1923-2003) (Telegraph)

Kenner's book The Mechanic Muse was an important influence on my own dissertation. I never met the man, and I only quoted him a few times in my thesis, but when I first read an example of his technique for critiquing the technological images in literature, it was love at first sight. He hobnobbed with Marshal McCluhan, visited Ezra Pound in the insane asylum.

Wow. What a blogger he would have made.

Users are berated and insulted for not having consulted the documentation, but, in many cases, the user can hardly be blamed. The documentation is shoddy, incomplete, and badly organized, if it's present at all. Exceptions are becoming rarer and rarer.| As documentation decreases in quality, users stop turning to it. As users stop turning to it, companies stop trying to maintain it -- why bother, if the users won't read it? This line of reasoning is dooming the future of documentation to failure. Documentation is important and needs to be taken seriously. --Peter Seebach --The cranky user: The importance of documentation (IBM)

Seebach was the good-natured target of my pedantry earlier in the year when I criticized a title an editor chose for one of his articles, originally titled "Here ye -- let thine site visitors speak". I've only been away from teaching technical writing for one semester, but I really wish I'd had the time to introduce my "Writing for the Internet" students to some basic technical writing concepts such as report writing. But the semester just got too chatoic. Oh, well, maybe next time.

Most newspapers have traditionally not made room for online producers and editors in their newsrooms, shuffling them off instead to a different floor, or to a different building entirely.|But in the past few years, many newspapers have decided that having two newsrooms -- one for print and one for online -- doesn't make much sense. One by one, papers are moving their online editorial staff into the main newsroom. --Jane Ellen Stevens

--Moving Online into the Newsroom (ORJ)

"We intend to try our case in the courtroom, not in the public or the media." --Michael Jackson, on a website devoted to trying his case in public and in the media. --Michael Jackson (The Official Press Room)

I don't actually blame the guy for wanting to have his say, but it's a bit hypocritical to criticize what you are doing while you are doing it. Having said that, the website is minimalist and restrained; Jackson's PR forces are carefully controlling the message in a manner that they weren't able to do when he gave his famous baby-dangling interview.

Think blogs are useless? Donna, while applying for jobs, got a email back from Central Pa Magazine. They happened to have read her blog and asked her to write a column on food/health for them. Let's all cross our fingers for her that they ask her to be a regular columnist. | Woo Hoo Donna. You give good hope to future journalists that blogs are an extension of a résumé. --Brian McCollum

--Think Blogs are Useless? (BAM SE)

Very interesting in light of the ongoing discussion of Dvorak's anti-blogging column. Neither Brian nor Donna are in any of my classes -- in fact, Donna graduated before I started at Seton Hill. But both are regulars on the New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University website. Congratulations, Donna!

It's no coincidence that the most-read blogs are created by professional writers. They have essentially suckered thousands of newbies, mavens, and just plain folk into blogging, solely to get return links in the form of the blogrolls and citations. This is, in fact, a remarkably slick grassroots marketing scheme that is in many ways awesome, albeit insincere.|Unfortunately, at some point, people will realize they've been used. --John C. Dvorak
--Co-opting the Future (PC Magazine)

This article seems to presume that many (if not most) bloggers are trying to blog for profit.For a person who has Internet access, the cost of producing a blog is minimal or nil; likewise, reading a blog costs nothing. One reason I bloog, and give away my ideas for free, is because I know that I benefit so much from the freely-given ideas I have read on other people's blogs. I hope there will always be professional writers, but I also rejoice that so much amateur content is being produced, shared, enjoyed, and put to use in the world. The vast majority of bloggers aren't in it for the money.

"Writing is tiresome. Why anyone would do it voluntarily on a blog mystifies a lot of professional writers," he says. But that presumes that professional writers don't write voluntarily. Yes, writing is tiresome, and except for a few superstars, writing doesn't pay very well, so many professional writers have made economic sacrifices to feed a compulsion that drives them to write. I recall a conversation I had with a struggling young actor who finally announced her decision to stop taking acting roles that were good opportunities but that didn't pay anything -- yes, they looked great on her resume and yes, she learned a lot, but all the time she was spending rehearsing or auditioning for free wsa time that she couldn't spend looking for paid work. I feel the same way about my blogging, but quite frankly I've been fortunate enough that, while I don't get paid directly for my blogging, as a new media teacher I feel that I need to blog in order to participate in the cyberculture I am teaching and studying.

Most academics don't get paid for the academic articles they write, and get paid only very little for the books they write. When I give a talk at a conference, my university will pay my way (up to a point). Of course, this wasn't true when I was a grad student -- since there is very little research money in the humanities, I had to pay my own way to conferences, while students in engineering (for instance) had travel budgets from the corporations bankrolling their professors' research. While grad students in the sciences thought of their research as a job, we in the humanities often didn't even earn enough money to pay our tuition, so we ended up paying thousands of dollars for the privilege of marking stacks of papers and teaching lower-level classes. It came with the territory.

There are professional speech-givers who wouldn't dream of giving a speech and getting reimbursed only for travel expenses, but as an academic, I'm expected to deliver papers at conferences. Yes, it's a bother, but it comes with the territory.

I feel the same way about blogging... on a Saturday night after the kids are in bed, what am I doing? Blogging. A few years ago I might have been watching Saturday Night Live; now, rather than sit still and absorb media produced by someone else, I am spending a half hour or so creating someting of my own, and posting it for whoever finds it.

Dvorak cites the statistic that most blogs have a readership of 12. So what? If they are the right 12 people, and the blogger gets sufficient satisfaction, what's the problem? Traditional diaries theoretically have a readership of one, but that shouldn't devalue their importance in the culture of literacy. I think most professional writers do understand concepts such as self-expression and personal discovery. If each of a blogger's 12 readers also has a blog, and each of those reader-bloggers is read by an overlapping but not identical group of 12, then the dynamics of producer and consumer, author and reader, authority and readership are completely re-written. This is part of the whole paradigm shift in new media.

Not completely yes.

• First: most obviously, the Memex (had it ever been built) would have operated on photo-mechanical, rather than digital technology. (As you watch the animation, you can hear the machanical operation sound, that sound would be a proof to believe that it is not digital media)
• Second, the operation of the memex is tied to the physical presence of texts - a stack of densely-printed microfilms, which can be sorted and displayed quickly, but which must first be printed and distributed to a paying researcher.
• Bush was fixated on the human mind. All of his initial machines and visions were analog devices. Furthermore, he frequently used the analogy of electricity to the human brain. In doing so, he believed that he could improve on the imperfect biological processes that existed.

--Chen LiuKe and Xia Li

--Is Memex a digital media? (York University CS Department)

The Memex is Vannevar Bush's hypothetical microfilm-based document storage and retrieval system, proposed in the 1940s but never built.

The above excerpt is the conclusion to a computer science paper posted to Peter Roosen-Runge's curricular website. The first two points in this list are plagiarized from an article I wrote earlier this year. See for yourself:

Seeing the memex as the direct precursor to the WWW is attractive, but problematic for several reasons. First, and most obviously, the memex (had it ever been built) would have operated on photo-mechanical, rather than digital, technology. Second, the operation of the memex is tied to the physical presence of texts - a stack of densely-printed microfilms, which can be sorted and displayed quickly, but which must first be printed and distributed to a paying researcher. Third, the memex is only additive - the scholar can duplicate pages, but cannot synthesize (by copying and pasting chunks) or inserting or rearranging words in a stream. "On the Trail of the Memex," Dichtung Digital

I e-mailed Roosen-Runge two weeks ago, and got no response. I e-mailed Roosen-Runge and his department chair a week later, and still got no response.

The paper in question does include my article in its "Reference" section, but there aren't quotation marks around the passage lifted from my work. I'm appalled at the lack of response I have received from the instructor.

While I'm at it, I don't really think that Chen LiuKe and Xia Li know what they are talking about -- the Memex is an analog storage system, which involves taking pictures on microfilm. It's a chemical and mechanical process -- it's analog, not digital. The only answer the three bulleted points supports would be "Not in any way, no." I see nothing that convinces me the Memex should be considered "a digital media" [sic].

Yesterday was the 140th anniversary of Lincoln's famous address. There is only one known photograph of President Lincoln at Gettysburg (here's the detail view if you're having a hard time spotting him). The Library of Congress website explains that the image sat for more than half a century in the National Archives before anyone recognized President Lincoln in it.
--Fourscore and Seven Years Ago... (Metafilter)

I have a special fondness for that speech, in part because I played the mayor in a high school production of The Music Man. An extended joke in an early scene is that the mayor is trying to deliver a rendition of that speech at a patriotic gathering, but he keeps getting interrupted.

I knew full well that on the night before the play opened, when traditionally people would play tricks on each other, that Bryan Louiselle (who played Harold Hill) wouldn't interrupt me when he was supposed to. So I memorized the whole speech (which wasn't in the script; back in the pre-WWW days, I actually had to look it up in a book). When Bryan didn't interrupt me, I just sailed ahead with the speech, and Bryan made his entrance after I finished. (Confession: I only got through about half of it before I stumbled, but then I skipped to the end, and I'm pretty sure nobody else on stage or in the audience knew the speech better than I did, so everyone probably thought I gave the whole speech.)

How can both neuroscience and literature bear on the question of what makes writers not only able, but want, even need, to write? How can we understand the outpouring of authors like Joyce Carol Oates or Stephen King? Why does John Updike see a blank sheet of paper as radiant, the sun rising in the morning? (As William Pritchard said of him, "He must have had an unpublished thought, but you couldn't tell it.") This seems -- and is -- an unbelievably complex psychological trait. --Alice Weaver Flaherty --Writing Like Crazy: a Word on the Brain (Chronicle)

It's hard to tell from the title, but this article examines the writing urge and writer's block (whoops -- I typed "blog") as physiological as well as psychological phenomena, such as suggesting that the November/December creativity slump may be casued by a latent hibernation instinct brought about by shorter days. The article also refers casually to Freud in a way that I find maddening... Freud may be extremely useful as we attempt to understand the modern mindeset, but I think it is naive to refer to him now, when we have so many more scientifically accurate models for describing and affecting human behavior. (But see Mike Arnzen's defense of Freud [in the comments].)

High schools no longer prepare most students to express ideas coherently or follow accepted English, let alone carry on serious intellectual work..... The task falls to me -- in courses ostensibly about specified topics, not composition -- to patch up these leaky vessels.... I hold that a university education ought to include a significant writing component, that student writing deserves substantial professorial comment, that every student can become a better writer with practice, and that this is the last effective chance for them to get practice and feedback. If not us, who? --Max Clio

--Grading on My Nerves (Chronicle)

"What can I tell you?" says New York Times Hollywood correspondent Bernard Weinraub. "I screwed up -- I'm sorry." | Weinraub's apologies, given hurriedly in a very brief telephone conversation, are for lifting a paragraph from another source to use in his Monday, Nov. 11, bylined story about Hollywood private investigator Anthony Pellicano ("Talk of Wiretaps Rattles Hollywood"). Weinraub confesses to having plagiarized the passage, although identifying the precise party he plagiarized isn't simple. --Jack Shafer --The Case of the Pinched Copy: Who, exactly, did the New York Times' Bernard Weinraub plagiarize? (Slate)

If you're caught with big chunks of uncited text from another source in your own article, the faster you apologize, the better. Shame on you, Weinraub, for plagiarizing; but good for you, Weinraub, for apologizing. At least now your readers can think of you as human and flawed, rather than calculating and deceitful.

I suppose you could say that the subhead trend bothers me because I'm a writer and I try desperately to perfect antiquated stuff.

Transitions and Flow

Like transitions and flow, and because I think writing, like most everything else good in life, revolves around flow and rhythm. But the truth is, subheads bug me even more as a reader. Some of the best editors I've ever had have justified subheads to me, explaining that they are necessary "eye candy" and "reader guides" imperative to "reader friendliness."

I'm with Stupid

All I know is that whenever I read a column or story that's been broken up by subheads, especially a syndicated story that appeared somewhere else first without any subheads, my inner reader feels violated.--Jim Walsh

--Commence Skimming: Start reading. Now. Or. Whatever. (City Pages)

Note the way the imaginary copy-editor inserting the subheads starts arguing with the writer.

Great Stuff

This is great stuff, though I shudder to think

what

Amanda

will

say

about

it.

Found on A & L Daily.

Some soldiers got drunk and climbed atop a memorial fountain before being run off politely by the Canadian police. Peter Miller, drafted out of the assembly line of a Procter & Gamble soap factory in Quincy, Massachusetts, found himself in jail in Seattle following a dustup at the bus station. | After a few weeks of this military being and nothingness, the men of C Packet were told to get their wills in order, their teeth fixed, and their dog tags ready because they were being shipped to Vietnam as permanent overseas replacements in the First Infantry Division. Most of them knew what was coming, but some were taken by surprise, and the news provoked a round of concerned calls to the base from relatives, congressmen, and clergy. --David Maranass --Vietnam and America in 1967 (MSNBC)

The above is an excerpt from Maranass's book, which examines in detail an antiwar protest and an ambush on US forces in October, 1967. I wasn't yet born then.

Seton Hill University is hosting a "War and Antiwar Memorabilia" display. In the halls of the admin building, weapons and uniforms from the war are displayed. In a room at one end of the hall are photos of Allegheny County (Pennsylvania) war dead, with rubbings of their names taken from the Vietnam War Memorial. Some facutly were holding a routine meeting in that room when I visited it a little while ago, just as if they weren't in an impromptu shrine to our war dead. At the other end of the hall, in a large, brightly lit room that I had never seen used before, is a display of anti-war newspapers, poster, and slogans.

A cousin of my mother's served in Vietnam, and when he came back sometime in the mid 70s, he started bringing over refugees. At one point, about 30 Vietnamese men and boys were living in our house, sleeping on the cement floor of our basement. We would eat dinner in three shifts. Cousin Jim and his friend Terry started a furniture business -- first buying unfinished chairs and tables, finishing them, and then selling them on street corners.

I have no idea what my parents' politics are on the Vietnam War, but my own youthful experience of seeing so many refugees who were grateful to America for giving them a place to go and start a new life for their families means that I didn't grow up with the the knee-jerk "the war in Vietnam was bad" attitude that much of mainstream America has. And as a college student, I volunteered at a nursing home with a Vietnamese girl who was born in the U.S. of refugees who were grateful to the U.S. for giving them a place to go.

I used to read research papers as one would read comic books, eager to see what comes next, reveling about the subtlety of the artwork and the colors. After getting an insider's view of academe, I recognize that: 1. Now I would rather read comic books than research papers, and 2. The main, most pervasive, and powerful incentive in academe is ... the ego. --Eduardo Zea --Moving Out (Chronicle)

At this stressful time in the year, I found this article was useful as salt to rub into my wounds. I actually feel like I'm having a great semester, but it has taken a while to fall into the rhythms of SHU culture. My TA was depressed today because, when she was announcing the hours she would be available to consult with students before their upcoming oral reports, only one person bothered to write down what she was saying. And, of course the pressure to teach well is affecting my ability to carry through on my research obligations. (Sigh.)

I just used in-class role-playing to introduce my students to the difference between scholarly publishing, publishing on a personal website, and journalism. Poor Nicole spent two and a half years (simulated time) trying to get her article published in an academic journal, and ended up publishing it in Golf Digest. Other students stood in as editors and peer reviewers.

After being rejected by one journal, Nicole submitted her paper to Carl's website, and Carl didn' t have to consult anyone else in order to decide whether to accept it or reject it.

Then Amanda role-played a reporter, and I role-played her editor. Amanda called on the telephone all the students who had been earlier role-playing as academic experts, and I followed her around barking reminders about deadlines, and you could see Amanda step up the pace in an effort to contact enough sources before the time was up.

I had only planned a very brief role-play, but the class took to it so well that I punted my PowerPoint. I had the scenarios all worked out in my head because I have actually been planning a comic-book style presentation of the same subject matter. I have the storyboards roughed out, but I have no delusions about my artistic ability. Anybody out there with drawing talent?

Software which enables e-mail writers to choose the image they want to portray is being developed by a team of Scottish researchers. --How to Become an E-Mail Extrovert (BBC)

Hi!!!! This new software sounds cool! ;) Its supposed to make your writing more cheerful and outgoing!! The article is a bit vauge -- maybe the designers have a little secret to keep (hehehe). I thinka Scottish extrovert is probably somebody who smiles at you before lopping your head off with a Claymore! Hahahaha j/k. Anyway, informal language with lots of exclamation points (!!!) and the word "hi" instead of "hello" helps your writing project an outgoing, upbeat personality!! Wow!!!

So, guys... here's my new, emotionally upbeat and extroverted writing style!! I even threw in a few typos to. Whadaya think!? Huh? Huh????

Now, everything you write will read like just the most annoying spam you've ever gotten!! Woo hoo! ;)

Take care! :-*