As the person who usually answers questions (both in-house and out) regarding documenting research reports, let me second Dave Kemper’s most recent post about breathing life into the research process. Dave summarized Ken Macrorie’s I-Search approach to research writing. I’d like to parallel that with a digital-era view of what research is really all about.
The first step is to back away from a fixation on whether our references are punctuated correctly. The second is to unlearn the word plagiarism.
I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that collective gasp of outrage and will forge ahead. If you can trust me for just a few more paragraphs, you will be happy with where we land, I believe. (more…)
Today I finally got a chance to read Liz O’Neill’s Teaching Beowulf to Vikings Fans essay at www.TheWritingTeacher.org. Mrs. O’Neill obviously has had both quite a bit of experience in the classroom and at least one great teacher to inspire her. I’m happy she took the opportunity to pass that inspiration along in this essay.
—Les
“For many decades high schools and colleges have fostered the ‘research paper,’ which has become an exercise in badly done bibliography, often an introduction to the art of plagiarism, and a triumph of meaninglessness—for both writer and reader.”
—Ken Macrorie, author of Searching Writing
According to our Webmaster, some of the most common queries we receive by e-mail come from high school teachers and students who have concerns about research papers. And most of these queries deal with formatting and documentation style: Do I need a title page? How do I cite a Web article that doesn’t have an author or title? How do I list three different books by the same author? I know that all of this information can be confusing, so the fact that teachers and students are contacting us with these questions shows that they want to get things right. (more…)
In the January 2009 edition of Esquire, the great American composer Philip Glass offers the following pithy observations:
I work every morning without fail.
You practice and you get better. It’s very simple.
I was not always the brightest bulb in the tree. I was a hard-working guy, but in my opinion, I was not one of the most talented people at Juilliard. I didn’t have that brilliance that some people really have, but I had a tremendous appetite for the work.
Motivation will make up for a lot of failings.
He may not have always been the brightest bulb, but now Philip Glass is more than bright: He’s brilliant. He’s one of only a handful of modern classical composers who have a household name.
But if he wasn’t born brilliant, how did he become brilliant? (more…)
In a posting about two weeks ago, I mentioned that my daughter recommended Of Human Bondage. At this point, both of us have finished reading, and tough as it was to bear with the protagonist through it all, the book was well worth the time. Elements still come to mind at odd moments, shaping the way I perceive human behavior and civilization.
All that aside, one of the more unexpected revelations from my conversation with her was the discovery that she often reads books on her cell phone. A part of me is cheering even now to write that. Here’s why. (more…)
“I love the taste of words. They have a taste and a weight and a colour as well as a sound and a shape.”
—Philip Pullman
The November 24 Washington Post included an article entitled “Students Dig Deep for Words’ Origins.” The article noted that Phil Rosenthal was one of the few high-school instructors in the United States teaching an etymology course. According to Rosenthal, students take the class because they want to brush up on their vocabulary skills before taking the ACT or SAT, and/or because they have a genuine interest in the history of words. (It was also reported that a few students sign up for the course thinking they will be studying insects.) (more…)
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