last blogs for Spring

I've just finished going through the last blogs for Spring. Following are some good entries:

Lighten up
Behind that smiley face
Spring '07 coming to an end
Last class of LLD 100WB
Global warming
Oil profits

Overall, I think the blogging experiment has been successful. The quality and effort have varied a lot, but I could see that some students did get into it. I got some feedback that some students didn't see the point, so it's my responsibility to make the point clear to them.

universal library

Whenever I read Annalee Newitz's column, I usually come away annoyed at the self-satisfied tone, but her last column entitled "The Myth of the Universal Digital Library" was excellent. I was most appreciative of this statement:

[C]omputer networks...cost money and require massive amounts of power. They take up real-world space. And they break.

This fact is somehow lost on most people, which is surprising since anyone with a computer knows the problems associated with data management, including data loss. I was instantly reminded of Being Digital, by MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte. I'm not going to link to it because I don't recommend reading it. His basic thesis is that in the Internet era (which had just begun at the time he wrote it), it is "bits not atoms" that are important--that is, information not matter. He probably had a nice staff of underpaid student sysadmins to keep all his lab's machines running, then when they became obsolete, shipped the atoms over to China where they were burned so that some could be reused, and others inhaled to cause cancer. So it's all well and good to say that the atoms don't matter when you have other people taking care of them. As Newitz rightly shows, digital archives are created and maintained by people, so they have all the problems and limitations that come from that.

improving presentations

I just came across this article, "5 Powerful Hacks to Immediately Improve Your Presentations." I would call them "tips"; "hacks" sounds like a desperate attempt to make them sound cooler and more technological than they actually are. But anyway, I think they are pretty sound tips. I especially like #4--don't apologize to soften criticism. Such apologies focus attention where it is most damaging. #5 is good too; though I'm not at all opposed to PowerPoint, it is often used terribly. (As grandpa used to say, "A fool with a tool is still a fool.")

But unfortunately the writer's credibility takes a dive in #2: "When you are nervous, everything get’s magnified." The common it's for its error is actually very understandable (since apostrophes are commonly used in possessives), but I can't understand why someone would use an apostrophe with a verb.

the purpose of a college degree

There is so much talk about the importance of a college education that it was interesting to see an article critical of college education, "Higher Education Conformity" by Barbara Ehrenreich. She uses as her starting point the case of Marilee Jones, who by all accounts was an outstanding administrator at MIT. But it came to light that she lied about holding three degrees, so MIT terminated her. Ehrenreich concludes that the real purpose of higher education is to teach conformity and saddle students with debt so they will be complacent workers.

I'm not really in agreement with Ehrenreich here, though she does bring up some good points. I did especially enjoy this statement: "Whatever else you learn in college, you learn to sit still for long periods while appearing to be awake. And whatever else you do in a white collar job, most of the time you'll be sitting and feigning attention."

There is, I believe, a fundamental contradiction at the heart of American higher education. One force is the dedication to education, which primarily means liberal education in the classical sense. That is, learning about the world in a way that is appropriate for free citizens, which in past eras was not the majority of the population. The other opposing force is training for technical and professional employment; these are more limited in their scope. Another way to look at the tension is between abstract and specific knowledge--liberal education is abstract, and professional education is specific.

In the US, we have basically one mechanism for delivering post-secondary education, and that is the 4-year college or university. (Community colleges are largely seen as a stepping-stone to a 4-year degree, not as an end in themselves.) The professional education is in greater demand, so it tends to swallow up the liberal education aspect. At the same time, professional students are forced to suffer through general (liberal) education classes.

This contradiction--or overloading of the university system--is, I believe, responsible for the related unsavory trends of managing universities like corporations and treating students as consumers. But back to Ehrenreich: when thinkers first began to suggest universal education, during the Industrial Revolution in Europe, the explicit goal was to prepare students to be cogs in a machine. This influence remains with us today and further complicates discussions of the purposes and problems of education.

Even so, I feel that making education available to everyone is the proper thing to do, but Ehrenreich is correct that not every job requires a 4-year degree.

so it goes

The New York Times reports that novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., has died at age 84. It's sad to lose a cultural figure of such stature, a satirist of the same caliber as Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift. I don't know who could possibly fill his shoes, but as with the others the world may have to wait another hundred years for a writer with such a combination of intelligence, humor, wit, and humanity in the face of inhumanity. From a literary perspective, perhaps some criticism is warranted, but all of us (especially our leaders) would do well to consider what is likely to be his epitaph (from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater):

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

P.S. To any of my writing students who may have read the article, because Vonnegut played fast and loose with punctuation doesn't mean you have permission to.

March blogs

Some more good blog entries for March.

What rate are you paying?
Second Life
Test taking
FTA between the U.S. and South Korea
Taxes

In a lot of cases, I see the quality of the writing improving over time. I take that as a good indication that using blogs can help the students who take them seriously.

rules...no, guidelines...for effective writing

A reposting of George Orwell's "6 Rules for Effective Writing" (though this writer seems to stop at the number of digits on one hand) has just surfaced. I'm going to commit high heresy here and say that they are not good rules. The content isn't the problem--it's their phrasing. All of them are phrased as absolutes. About the only absolute rule I could formulate is "Never use absolutes". I'll address each of the 5 rules.

"1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print." Actually, I can agree with this one. College students' writing tends to be laden with cliches, many of which are incorrectly deployed.

"2. Never use a long word where a short one will do" and "5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent." The problem with these two hinges on "will do" and "equivalent". Like Orwell, I prefer punchier, more direct Anglo-Saxon derived words. However, it is rare that the meanings of Anglo-Saxon, French, and Latin synonyms overlap exactly. They have slight variation in denotative and connotative meaning, and often great variation in register. If all that is taken into account, then I suppose I would agree with these items, but it also makes the choices far from clear.

"3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out." This is also generally good advice, but the meaning has to be maintained. Just today I administered an editing test, and students cut out modifiers and relative phrases all over the place. The remaining sentences were (usually) still grammatical, but they lost information.

"4. Never use the passive where you can use the active." Wrong! There are places where the passive is preferable to the active. The information structure of English prefers that old information precede new information in discourse. Since English also prefers active voice (about 75% of English sentences are in active voice), the agent is often old information (the topic) and therefore comes first. But sometimes the patient is the topic, and the agent is either new information or irrelevant. About 70% of passive sentences omit the agent, so forcing active voice can actually clutter up the writing with irrelevant information. Here's an example from today's San Jose Mercury News. First, the one with all passives transformed into active, then the original.

Passives transformed: Since October, shoppers at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods Market on South Bascom Avenue in Campbell have reported that somebody has stolen more than 20 purses and wallets, according to police. The thefts aren't happening on any consistent day of the week, but Saturday people reported that somebody stole five wallets, according to Adams. Police believe one or more suspects are responsible for a majority of the thefts. Adams said thieves are targeting purses and wallets that people leave unattended or out of view, including open purses that people hang over their shoulders. Campbell police ask victims of theft to report it to them.

Original (abridged): "Since October, more than 20 purses and wallets have been reported stolen by shoppers at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods Market on South Bascom Avenue in Campbell, according to police. The thefts aren't happening on any consistent day of the week, but Saturday five wallets were reported stolen, according to Adams. Police believe one or more suspects are responsible for a majority of the thefts. Adams said thieves are targeting purses and wallets that are left unattended or out of view, including open purses hung over a person's shoulder. Victims of theft are asked to report it to Campbell police."

Using the passive can result in more direct, information-rich sentences, especially in a case like the above where the agent (the thief or thieves) is unknown. I would say that writers shouldn't use the passive unless they have a good reason, but there are good reasons.

So I assume that Orwell was framing his advice in absolute terms as a polemic device. Still, while these are good guidelines that are generally applicable, they are certainly not hard and fast rules that lead automatically to good writing.