Literacy: August 2008 Archive Page

I'm teaching a 200-level "Writing for the Internet" class, with students ranging from seniors to first-semester freshmen.  Our opening unit is on social, academic, and professional conventions, foregrounding the fact that the internet on which young people play and learn is the same internet in which the adults in their lives are teaching and working (and playing, and learning).

Senior Denamarie Ercolani, responding to an April NYT article about the prevalence of IM shortcuts in high-schoolers' written work, writes

I, personally, have never used emoticons, text shortcuts or omitted proper grammar and puncuation in my schoolwork, but outside of essays and other schoolwork, I find myself using this new form of communication frequently. Any type of writing is real writing even if it is improper.

You can see for yourself what some other students had to say about that article.  In a comment on Denamarie's blog, MS replied:

As an English teacher, all that I have to say is that these IM's and text messages are destroying the English language faster than anything else... This abomination of our language is not cute, hip or expressive; it is dangerous.

I sympathize deeply with MS, and expect that any student of MS's will be well prepared for the rigors of college writing.  Yet I can't share MS's hatred of txtspk -- a wildly successful, specialized offshoot of English, characterized by its reliance upon thumb power, creative use of abbreviations, and the expectation that any useful bit of communication will likely involve numerous rapid back-and-forth sallies.

The possibilities make the mind reel.

YouTube Comment Snob is a Firefox extension that filters out undesirable comments from YouTube comment threads. You can choose to have any of the following rules mark a comment for removal:

• More than # spelling mistakes: The number of mistakes is customizable, and the extension uses Firefox's built-in spell checker.
• All capital letters
• No capital letters
• Doesn't start with a capital letter
• Excessive punctuation (!!!! ????)
• Excessive capitalization
• Profanity

Our provost sent this link to English faculty members this morning.

One of my recent juniors was particularly eloquent on the subject. After having sat in my classroom for a year forcefully projecting his boredom, he started an e-mail dialogue with me over the summer. "The reason for studying fiction escapes me," he wrote. "Why waste time thinking about fabricated situations when there are plenty of real situations that need solutions? Cloning, ozone depletion, and alternate fuels are a few of the countless problems that need to be addressed by the next generation, my generation."

Okay, you may think, this is a kid geared to excel in history and science, not literature. But read his closing words: "Granted fiction has a place in this world, but it is not in the classroom. It is beside the night lamp next to your bed, the car ride to the beach, the soft glow of a fireplace. Fiction is about spending beautiful days indoors because you can't wait to get to the next page. Because I like science fiction, my Shakespeare, my Fitzgerald, my Dickinson are Haldeman, Asimov, Herbert. They dare me to think and question my beliefs."

So there you have it: A smart teen and motivated reader goes to high-school English class and discovers that the classics have nothing to offer him. "The reason I did not participate in class," he admitted, "was that I found the reading a chore." -- Nancy Schnog, The Washington Post

While I think it's an important part of a liberal arts education that a student know something about the great, formative stories of his or her nation and/or tongue, I can sympathize with Schnog. Several students in my "History and Future of the Book" course last term reported that school made them fall out of love with reading. And I'm not surprised, when I see how many English majors arrive on campus with the idea that studying a work means memorizing the contents of the Big Dusty Book of Literary Meanings (you know, the one that says blue symbolizes peace, and that if you can match up a detail in the story with a detail from what Wikipedia says about the author's life, then your job interpreting the text is done).  I realize that high school students generally aren't ready for college-level critical thinking, but I'm still surprised at how tightly some students cling to the expectation that my job is to tell them what a passage means, and that their job is to memorize what I say and spit it back.

I enjoy teaching "Introduction to Literary Study" and "Writing about Literature" because I'm free to sample different time periods, genres, and geographical zones.  Likewise, I get a lot of flexibility when I teach "Drama as Literature" -- I can cover anything that counts as drama.  I always hope that somewhere along the way students will encounter a text that inspires them to dig beneath the surface. 

Boston.com:

A man from Somerville, Mass., and his friend who went around the country this year removing typographical errors from public signs have been banned from national parks after vandalizing a historic marker at the Grand Canyon.

From The Washington Post:

It hit Mark Gruntz all at once, while he was sitting flat-broke in an airport in Greece: He had lost credit for three summer courses, wasted $11,474 in student loans and gotten kicked off a boat. All because he hadn't cited Wikipedia enough in a paper about a movie.

Last week, he and another college student, Allison Routman, were expelled from the Semester at Sea program for violating the University of Virginia's honor code. The expulsions raised questions for some students about whether the school's more than 150-year-old tradition is too harsh -- and for others, whether students have a different understanding of plagiarism and research now that online resources make it easy to find information.

The headline is misleading. The problem here isn't that the students didn't cite Wikipedia enough... they included direct quotations from their sources without using quotation marks or paraphrasing. This has little to do with online sources, other than the simple notion that because so many facts are available in a few mouse clicks, a new generation of students devalues the work that goes into attaining (and verifying, and documenting) those facts.

An Associated Press article repeats the three sentence fragments that student Allison Routman says she included in her paper without citation.  They're not deep, meaning-laden passages, but they're all from the same source, and as I see it the paper was intended to be a reflection paper -- students were supposed to watch a movie and then relate the movie to their experience during their travels. Not an intellectually heavy task, but Routman says nobody had ever defined "paraphrasing" for her before (which, even if true, suggests she was too helpless to find the definition on her own), and Gruntz, in an interview from the airport in Greece, told the Washington Post "I got in trouble for not citing it enough, I guess" and "I think I was supposed to put quotations around it" and "I don't really think I did anything wrong" (and this is after the students have spent at least a full year at their home college, before signing up for Semetser at Sea; and after a librarian on the ship gave a presentation on proper academic research methods, and after the guilty students sat through a meeting with a panel of five faculty members that picked his paper apart... somewhere along the line, I'm sure all the students were told exactly what's expected in an academic essay).

Yes, the University of Virginia's single-sanction honor code is strict, but it's supposed to have bite. I remember having to write an essay about the honor code when I applied to U.Va., and I remember every year some students would start a motion to lighten up the honor code by instituting a wrist-slapping punishment, but if it ever made to a student body vote, the students would always vote to keep the honor code as-is.

If U.Va. is sponsoring Semester at Sea, and students from other schools who sign up for the program have to agree to abide by the U.Va. honor code, which is clearly explained in the Semester at Sea handbook (PDF).

Teaching a large first-year course at a British university, I am fed up with correcting my students' atrocious spelling. Aren't we all!?

But why must we suffer? Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I've got a better idea. University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell. -- Ken Smith, Times Higher Education Supplement

I sympathize with Ken Smith's frustration, but not the solution he proposes.

There's a good case to be made for being flexible with language. Text-message abbreviations and chat-room shortcuts are not simply degraded forms of idealized English. They are a set of conventions that serve a purpose, such as improving the efficiency of two-thumb typists, or letting members of a group focus on the free flow of ideas (or gossip, or vitriol, or whatever) rather than on the more rigid and time-consuming conventions of standard prose.

Professionals and educators have little to gain by belittling or ignoring the accomplishments of youngsters who are skilled in these kinds of communication, just as today's college students have much to lose if they don't take advantage of their time at university to develop the intellectual habits that are necessary for the reading and writing of complex, well-organized, authoritative texts.

Ken, I'd suggest that you let students know that certain assignments, such as in-class essays or overnight reflection papers, will be evaluated only on creativity, or the student's ability to apply a key concept or to spot the methodological error in a case study.

But for an assignment in which the student has access to a spell-checker, or where the point of the assignment is to model professional behavior (writing reports that could be used to determine a defendant's guilt or innocence, for example), to encourage this kind of compositional sloppiness would be a crime.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that I think the lack of respect for math and science is one of the largest unacknowledged problems in today's society. And it starts in the academy -- somehow, we have moved to a place where people can consider themselves educated while remaining ignorant of remarkably basic facts of math and science. If I admit an ignorance of art or music, I get sideways looks, but if I argue for taking a stronger line on math and science requirements, I'm being unreasonable. The arts are essential, but Math Is Hard, and I just need to accept that not everybody can handle it.--Chad Orzel, Inside Higher Ed

When I teach "News Writing," I include a brief unit on reporting with statistics and percentages, and the "New Media Projects" seminar exposes upper-level students to various computer programming tasks.

I wonder whether Orzel would feel comforted to know that I regularly encounter people who laughingly dismiss their self-proclaimed inability to master the (heart-breakingly simple) rule about when to use "its" and when to use "it's."

From a 2007 report on liberal education, by the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Knowledge of Human Cultures and the Physical and Natural World

• Through study in the sciences and mathematics, social sciences,
  humanities, histories, languages, and the arts

Focused by engagement with big questions, both contemporary
and enduring

Intellectual and Practical Skills, Including

• Inquiry and analysis
• Critical and creative thinking
• Written and oral communication
• Quantitative literacy
• Information literacy
• Teamwork and problem solving

Practiced extensively, across the curriculum, in the context of
progressively more challenging problems, projects, and standards for performance

Personal and Social Responsibility, Including

• Civic knowledge and engagement--local and global
• Intercultural knowledge and competence
• Ethical reasoning and action
• Foundations and skills for lifelong learning

Anchored through active involvement with diverse communities and real-world challenges

Integrative Learning, Including

• Synthesis and advanced accomplishment across general and
  specialized studies

Demonstrated through the application of knowledge, skills, and
responsibilities to new settings and complex problems