Rhetoric: September 2006 Archive Page

"It was then decided that a tactical solution needed to be done in an effort to save the two hostages," the sheriff said, his voice breaking. "Entry was made. The suspect shot one of the hostages, then shot himself." --Chase Squires --Colo. Gunman Shoots Hostage, Kills Self (ABC News)

Fascinating example of the usefulness of the passive voice and nominalization. The sheriff is distancing himself from the action.

The suspect is an active, immediate threat, who "shot" a hostage and "shot" himself.

The authorities in charge of the operation are in the background... the "solution needed to be done" and the course of action was "decided on". Rather than saying the "Police officers stormed the building, waving guns and screaming for the suspect to come out," the sherrif simply says "Entry was made."

I don't mean to say the sheriff was doing anything wrong... it just struck me how effectively he was using language. The most powerful verb in his whole speech was "save [the two hostages]" -- the intention that motivated the action.

The detail about the breaking voice shows that this cop was talking his professionally abstract passive rhetoric in an effort to keep his emotions under control.

Good reporting -- painting a compelling picture with a few telling details.

Mike Edwards had himself a pencil.
Weighed about forty pound.
Every time Mike Edwards drew a squiggly edit mark
Drove his pencil two inches in the ground,
Lawd, Lawd,
Drove his pencil two inches in the ground.

Mike Edwards's blog was named Vitia.
The logo looked the same upside down.
He'd sharpen up his pencil on both of its ends.
Called his pencil "Vitia" too, for the sound,
Lawd, Lawd.
Called his pencil "Vitia" too, for the sound.

Mike Edwards's Dean, Captain Tommy
Had a squared-away drive to succeed.
Loved Mike Edwards like his only blessed son.
Said, "I'll get you any funding that you need,"
Lawd, Lawd.
Said "I'll get you any funding that you need."

PDS salesman said to Captain Tommy,
"I think your students might try to plagiarize.
Let me tell you 'bout a tool that'll help enforce the rule,
And catch those cheaters by surprise,
Lawd, lawd.
It'll catch those cheaters by surprise."

Mike Edwards said to Captain Tommy
"TurnItIn.com appropriates the value of student writing for the sake of its own profits, while at the same time criminalizing students for the very same practice.
I'd rather die with my pencil in my hand,
Lawd, Lawd.
Die with my pencil in my hand."

Mike Edwards sharpened up "Vitia."
The salesman logged himself in.
And he set two even stacks of papers on his desk.
Said, "The dean'll grant you tenure if you win,
Lawd, Lawd.
Dean'll grant you tenure if you win."
The Ballad of Mike Edwards and the PDS (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

In my discussions with opponents of [plagiarism detection services], it's unclear that any methods of plagiarism detection at all are acceptable. Too much zeal to trust students can lead to a tacit "look the other way" practice which is naive, irresponsible, and just as likely to breed resentment among students who do the writing as PDS do. The alternative offered is something along the lines of "start a dialogue with students about authorship and intellectual property." "Require students to submit multiple drafts and monitor the writing process closely." "Talk to students about the importance of speaking for oneself and what a meaningful act that is. Frame it in such a way that shows that copying a paper from the internet is basically letting someone else speak for you."

Fair enough, those are all valid practices. But professors who do those things can end up with plagiarism cases in spite of all of it. What exactly do you do at the moment of encounter with that paper that you're 99.9% sure is plagiarized? --Clancy Ratliff --More on Plagiarism Detection Services (Culturecat)

I started a comment on Clancy's blog, but it grew, so here it is.

Clancy notes that Turnitin.com and similar commercial services are not our only options for detecting plagiarism. She lists several -- using Google, asking students to come in for a conference with a paper trail showing a submission is their own work, requiring multiple drafts, etc.

Faculty members who don't think of themselves as writing teachers, and those who think of the essay as a passive vehicle for conveying information (rather than the laboratory in which ideas are formed) aren't confident in their own ability to discourage plagiarism through non-technological means. Some feel that writing is not their job, and they see Turnitin.com as a tool to free them from the drudgery of having to teach the stuff that is the bread and butter of our discipline -- all that stuff about writing being a sign of intellectual investment in one's education, etc. In a comment on Clancy's blog, Joanna notes that the software takes authority away from both the student and the faculty member. Let's hope that somewhere at a big institution a decision-maker does not decide to cut the writing center budget in order to pay for a PDS, on the idea that it would be more efficient to have 1000 students in a Psych101 course to run their papers through software rather than sit down with a writing tutor.

Yet this year, I'm experimenting with having students submit pretty much everything through Turnitin.com. I experimented with a paperless semester last year, though I mostly used our content management system (neither Blackboard nor Web-CT, but something called Jenzabar, which does not impress me very much).

Since I'm horrible at filing paperwork I like the fact that the system handles that drudgery for me. No more schlepping stacks of ungraded papers home, and schlepping them back (too often ungraded) the next morning.

I also find the peer-review feature very useful. Students can trade anonymous peer reviews within the system. I find I have to ask very specific questions, since the system doesn't permit students to cross out a sentence or draw a wavy line under a confusing passage.. the system doesn't really encourage global revisions, but this limitation does force me to decide, for each peer review, what are the specific things I most want students to be looking for when they review each other's work. And that forces me to focus on whether I'm actually teaching those skills to the students.

I consider what the computer shows me to be one piece of information that I can use in order to assess the situation. It is rare that a student who has shown no signs of struggling in the course will suddenly plagiarize out of the blue. But people in our discipline are trained to diagnose all kinds of intellectual maladies based on a student's paper trail. Most faculty are not trained to do this kind of thing. In a perfect world, everyone would value rhetoric the same way writing teachers do. Well... at least, if the world were ruled by people who were once writing teachers, then we'd be able to enforce our biases. But in the real world, we teach alongside faculty members who see a PDS as an efficient time-saver.

I'm reminded of the two levels of rhetoric that were used in the early 20thC, by Dictaphone salesmen. The bosses (overwhelmingly male) were told that Dictaphones never went on lunch breaks or called in sick, so they'd always be available when the boss wanted to take a letter. The secretaries (overwhelmingly female) were told that if their bosses could turn on the machine whenever they wanted to take dictation, that would free up the secretaries so that they could make more decisions on their own, and they would be like junior executives who could manage their own resources, making their own decisions about which letters had to be transcribed now and whether their transcriptions would have to go back to the boss for clarification.

This is the first time SHU has offered a Basic Comp course (we used to have a two-semester course in Thinking and Writing), so I can't fairly compare my experience this year with what has happened before, but I do get the feeling that more students are choosing to submit no paper at all rather than risk getting caught plagiarizing. I'm not sure, then, that Turnitin.com is really helping me teach, but it may be affecting the way students act out their alienation from the demands of the college workload.

Still, just today a student who re-used too much boilerplate text from a routine assignment was shocked to see that Turnitin.com tagged chunks of her text as non-original. The tagging showed that she inappropriately re-used some material that should have been fresh. I probably would not have caught that, but the student sought me out and eagerly asked for permission to redo the exercise. (I let her.)

Hats off to Clancy and Mike, and everyone else who continues to ask us to doubt the words of the fast-talking salesman who convinces The Man that the new-fangled technology can do the work for which we've been trained.

The words "global warming" provoke a sharp retort from Colorado State University meteorology professor emeritus William Gray: "It's a big scam."

And the name of climate researcher Kevin Trenberth elicits a sputtered "opportunist."

At the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where Trenberth works, Gray's name prompts dismay. "Bill Gray is completely unreasonable," Trenberth says. "He has a mind block on this."

Only 55 miles separate NCAR's headquarters, nestled in the Front Range foothills, from CSU in Fort Collins. But when it comes to climate change, the gap is as big as any in the scientific community. --Mark Jaffe --Global warming? (Denver Post)

Dissent and personal attacks make compelling stories, so I'm a bit leery about a science article that makes the issue so personal. Nevertheless, it's rare to see journalism cover a scientific controversy with such depth, so this article is worth adding to my list of related global warming entries.

There are many thing that are true -- the state is a parasite on society, private property would solve most social problems, rock music is tedious and stupid -- but are nonetheless not generally known or applied. The truth that shaving cream is a racket should be added to this. --Jeffrey A. Tucker --The Shaving Cream Racket (LewRockwell.com)

This makes a lot of sense. Is it true?

I used an electric razor as a teen. It died when I was a sophomore in college, so I switched to razors for about a year. After cutting myself pretty badly one day, I switched back to another electric razor. I dont think I've replaced it in 15 years.

I started out by trying to be the easygoing candy civilian instructor -- "No, just write your name anywhere, pen or pencil is fine" -- answering all the questions, and then a couple of the jokers decided to tweak things a bit more: "Sir, cursive or print?" And I couldn't not be the smartass in response, and failing to take into account the fact that they'd just had two months of military training, I sarcastically replied, "Morse code, Cadet."

And I'm sure you know what the mock-dutiful response was, with stifled smirks all around.

"Roger that, sir." And they started to do it.

And seeing those stifled smirks was all it took for me to realize I was about to receive a section's worth of portfolios with names rendered in dots and dashes, so I tried to one-up: "Cancel that, Cadet. I want your names in Braille." --Mike Edwards --Professionalism Lost (Vitia)

Great story.

There was no separating the two Treks, the vacuous and the visionary. It's no coincidence that one of the most legendary episodes -- "The Trouble with Tribbles" -- was essentially a comic take on the show's established themes.

Given some distance from the moment, I realize this is actually an entirely healthy attitude. It's the attitude we should take about everything in life, and ourselves in particular. Aristotle once said, "Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor: For a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit."

In other words, nothing's so serious that we should let it destroy our sense of humor, and nothing so silly that we should blind ourselves to the truths it might be carrying. And if there's anything Kirk taught me, it's that there's always a third way. --Lore Sjöberg --My Love Affair With Star Trek (Wired)

I was going to add a comment something like, "My inner Trek geek is really showing this week," but when has it ever really been inner?

So I won't make any excuses. There's a lot of Trek material out there currently, since the show first appeared 40 years ago, and I'm gonna blog what I like, and like what I blog.