General Guidelines for Written Projects
This page offers guidelines, suggestions, and advice for preparing written projects for my courses. I encourage creativity and innovation as you seek to find your voice as a scholar, writer, and urbanist. But there are limits, and so I've prepared these notes to help answer common questions. I apologize for the length and detail of all the stuff on this page: the vast majority of these guidelines are nothing more than common sense.
Unfortunately, I've discovered over the years that common sense is not so common anymore. Students at UBC are brilliant and talented in many ways, but there is very little common ground and shared understanding of how scholarship should be done. People are brilliant in every possible direction, often in unpredictable and contradictory ways. So it's necessary to provide very clear, detailed answers to the many questions people ask.
You should use your good judgment. In some cases this might mean disregarding my advice on a particular topic, because you've thought about it seriously, and you've decided that you've found a better way. For certain aspects of the writing process, that's fine. For other aspects -- like the rules on citation and avoiding plagiarism -- you should follow instructions much more closely.
Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions about any of these guidelines.
Seven Simple Guidelines
1. Introduce yourself.
2. Use simple, clear formatting.
3. Be original. Avoid cut and paste.
4. Be careful in the WikiWorld.
5. Choose a citation style, and use it generously and consistently.
6. Write for an audience of humans, not computers.
7. Include references to scholarly sources.
The Guidelines Explained
1. Introduce yourself. Clearly identify yourself as the author. Take credit for your hard work by declaring your honesty and integrity:
All submissions must include this declaration on the first page: "I, [your name], promise that this is my own work. No part of this work has been plagiarized. This work has not been submitted for academic credit for any other course." Then sign your name.
Please note that I reserve the right to conduct an oral examination on the content of your paper. These certifications are now required because of rampant plagiarism that has spawned a vast industry of surveillance built on the doctrine of guilty-until-proven innocent (i.e., Turnitin.com). I would like to trust you completely, Renee Zellweger-you-had-me-at-hello style -- but I do need you to ask for my trust explicitly. That's why this declaration is now required.
Include your name, telephone number, and email address in the top right-hand corner of each page of your submission. You'd be surprised how often I receive mystery submissions. Staple the pages together with a single staple in the upper left-hand corner.
(In some circumstances, you are allowed to submit things electronically. In this case, prepare your submission as a single file, with all tables, figures, and other materials in the same document. Submit both a *.doc Microsoft Word version and Adobe *.pdf file [but not *.docx]. Many computer operating systems have the capability to create pdf files built in; if yours does not, then find freeware or shareware that uses a printer driver to create a PDF.)
Keep an archived copy of your submission on file. It's been many years since I've experienced any documented instance of a lost paper submission, but these things do happen to everyone from time to time. If you submitted a project on time and then you see a blank space when I post the grade worksheet, then you can show me your archived copy to prove that the work was done on time.
2. Use simple, clear formatting. In word-processing, the KISS principle applies (In business, this acronym means "keep it simple, stupid!", but my friend Paul Plummer reminds me that the original meaning came from a physicist, who advised people to "keep it sophisticatedly simple.") I recommend that you use a standard font like Times New Roman, 12 point, left-justified, double-spaced, and typed on one side only of standard, 8.5 x 11.0 inch white paper. Use bold, italics, and underline codes where appropriate to draw emphasis to certain key points; but avoid the temptation to try to use all the fancy fonts and technical wizardry of the software. (I could have written these guidelines in a 72-point dingbat font that flashes and bounces back and forth, but just because something is possible in a pull-down menu in a software package doesn't mean that it's a good idea.) Fancy technical adornments do not compensate for poor thinking or writing.
On the other hand, you can disregard these guidelines if you really do have accomplished graphic design skills that help you tell a convincing urban story through the judicious use of customized typefaces, layouts, graphs, charts, and other kinds of illustrations.
3. Be original. Avoid cut and paste. Cutting and pasting a chart, graph, map, or photograph from the internet is not an original contribution. If your original argument, interpretation, or analysis can be illustrated with a graphic or photograph that you've found somewhere, then yes, by all means you're encouraged to use that work under the provisions of fair use and fair dealing. But be very careful to acknowledge your sources completely. Anything less is dishonest. A caption should appear below any material you've taken from another source:
Your Title for the Image or Illustration. Source: Author, institution, or other entity that created the work (year). Description (e.g., Advertisement, photograph published in newspaper or magazine, chart published in journal article), and further publication information (e.g., name and date of newspaper, magazine, journal, or concise internet address). © [Name of copyright holder], reproduced here under fair use / fair dealing provisions.
There is some disagreement on how tables, maps, photographs, and other items should be referenced in the body of a paper. Many publishers require a clear distinction, with references to "Table 1" versus "Figure 1." My own thinking on this has evolved. I'm less concerned with the exact way you refer to various graphical elements, and more concerned that you properly acknowledge the source of things you've borrowed, and that you do so consistently. So it's fine to use creative titles as captions for tables, figures, charts, and all other kinds of graphical items -- so long as you properly reference the original sources.
Never, ever cut and paste text. Type out the words yourself, using care to provide "quotes in the right place to indicate the words of the author." Even better, write out the notes, quotes, and outlines for your paper by hand, and then revise and refine things when you're ready to type up a first draft.
If you want other advice on writing, you may be interested in this.
Cutting and pasting text dramatically increases the chances of unintentional plagiarism. Unintentional plagiarism is still plagiarism. When plagiarism happens, it doesn't help to claim that it was an accident. In recent years, quite a few best-selling authors have been at the center of major scandals when it became clear that passages in their books were lifted directly from other publications without appropriate citation. Several celebrity authors tried to defend themselves by saying that it was all an accident, that they had just inserted the material given to them by their assistants without checking the details themselves. A similar scandal played out in September, 2008, when Canadian Liberal Party researchers found numerous lines in a March 2003 speech delivered in Parliament by then Opposition Leader Stephen Harper that had been lifted directly without attribution from a speech given two days earlier by Australian Prime Minister John Howard. Owen Lippert, who had been working in the Opposition Leader's office in 2003, stepped forward to say that he had written the speech, and that he had been "overzealous" in copying passages from Howard's speech. In an intersection of multiple ironies, Lippert, who holds a Ph.D. in modern European history, once worked as a Senior Policy Analyst at the Fraser Institute, and he once taught at UBC. Even more ironic, he is described as an expert on intellectual property. (See Canadian Press (2008). "Grits Continue Their Attack Over Iraq Speech." The Globe and Mail, October 1).
Scandals like these erupt all the time, it seems. But when celebrity authors blame their assistants, or when political leaders' assistants step forward to say that they did the writing and the (unintentional) plagiarism, that just makes the situation worse. The author winds up admitting that they did not actually write the book that has their name on it; the political leader admits the (widely known but also widely lamented) fact that their speeches are written by other people. Sadly, academic corruption has gone mainstream: in China, the "science cop" Fang Shimin runs the New Threads web site, a Watergate-style "deep throat" source that documents credible allegations of academic dishonesty. Among the Top 10 stories of 2009: a dozen university presidents and vice-presidents accused of plagiarism; a university president who falsely claimed winning a prestigious scientific prize; two professors who faked research results published in an international journal; and a medical doctor who inflated the success rate for a new surgical procedure. See Paul Mooney (2010). "Lie Detector." South China Morning Post, PostMagazine, January 31, 16-19. These kinds of dishonesties over ideas, research, and creativity have, quite literally, spread like an infection through areas of inquiry that have life and death consequences. Pharmaceutical companies have become aggressive in ghostwriting studies purportedly conducted by independent medical researchers; the problem has become so bad that one medical journal has now announced a policy of "ghostbusting" to investigate cases where articles may have been written by paid, company employees with direct conflicts of interest. See Natasha Singer and Duff Wilson (2009). "Unmasking the Ghosts." New York Times, September 17. This stuff gets serious. Not long ago, the Federal Court of Canada stepped in to overturn the decision of an un-named member of the Immigration Review Board (IRB), whose decision was "corrupted by errors" in ways that suggested that the member was "merely cutting and pasting from other rejected claims" when rejecting the claim of a Mexican claimant. Janet Dench, Executive Director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, reminded a reporter of the stakes of this particular kind of plagiarism: "Unfortunately, the consequences of bad decisions can be death. We have seen cases of people being sent back to Mexico from Canada who have been killed and attacked." See Adrian Humphreys (2011). "IRB Judge's Ruling A Jumble of 'Errors.'" National Post, October 22, A4.
I'm always struck by a combination of horror and amusement when I read these scandals. I write my own stuff (slowly, with lots of flaws and all sorts of other problems). I don't steal the work of assistants. If someone is helping me with a project and I wind up using anything significant at all from that help, then we are listed properly as coauthors. See, for example:
Elvin K. Wyly, Mona Atia, Holly Foxcroft, Daniel J. Hammel, and Kelly Phillips-Watts (2006). "American Home: Predatory Mortgage Capital and Neighbourhood Spaces of Race and Class Exploitation in the United States." Geografiska Annaler B, Human Geography 88(1), 105-132.
If you want to explore other implications of the "cut and paste" culture of new technology and the social-network transformations of Web 2.0, there are a lot of books out there. Even as they document the evolving cultures of boundary transgressions, some of these books themselves push the limits of acceptable practice, walking the line between the insurgent, democratizing culture of the mashup and the fraudulent deceptions of plagiarism. I strongly support the sentiment of declarations like this: "Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do -- all of us -- though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted." But I am also committed to the achievements of scholarly integrity and authorial accountability that maintain simple, reasonable requirements -- such as the requirement that I make it perfectly clear that this quote is not my own creation. In fact, it's a quote from a book by David Shields, Reality Hunger. I read about Shields' book in a review essay published by the New York Times. Here's the really troubling part: David Shields didn't come up with that quotation on his own. The quote "is itself an unacknowledged reworking of remarks by the cyberpunk author William Gibson."
See Michiko Kakutani (2010). "Texts Without Context." New York Times, Arts & Leisure section, March 21.
To be sure, there are some tough cases and some gray areas. The ethical ban on plagiarism should not terrorize you. In fact, we students and scholars working in colleges and universities have it pretty easy -- it's a simple matter of 1) including a citation anytime you borrow something from another author, 2) including quote marks to indicate clearly where your work ends and another's begins, anytime you use specific words or sentences from someone else, and 3) providing clear author and source information anytime you borrow or reproduce some else's data, photographs, maps or other works. That's all it takes -- cite your sources. You're free to use the work of other people -- so long as you do not deceive the reader into believing that you created something you didn't. Citation is a powerful thing. "Cite" comes from the Latin citare, which is derived from citus, which means "quick"; citus is also the past participle of cire, "to put in motion, to excite." I had to look up the etymology, and thus it's appropriate to put things in motion with a citation (G&C Merriam, 1943. Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Fifth Edition. Springfield, MA: G&C Merriam Co., quotations from p. 184.)
So scholars like us have it easy -- we can use lots of resources out there so long as we cite our sources in order to clarify what we've done, and what we've borrowed. Doing that can be much harder in other modes of creative production -- composing music, writing novels, plays, or screenplays. If you want to learn more about some of the blurry dualisms between individual and collective, collaboration and co-optation, imitation and theft, then take a look at this:
4. Be careful in the WikiWorld. Many students use Wikipedia and similar sources for a convenient first step. This is fine. (It has taken more than a decade of hard work, but my best students have taught me that they have earned that trust; so that three-word sentence was actually written collectively by the hundreds of hardworking and talented students who took classes with me over the years. I have to acknowledge this to avoid any possibility of plagiarism!)
The WikiWorld is fine for the first phases of research, when you are trying to get your bearings on a particular subject. It's also great for checking out what people are saying about a particular topic. And, of course,
- Wikipedia is a convenient and powerful way to look up the basic facts of uncontroversial events or topics.*
So, now you're asking, "if it's so convenient and powerful, why is elvin saying we need to be careful?" Great question. The problem is that annoying asterisk above. You know how marketing and advertising work. There's always an asterisk, and when you see it you know to look for the fine print.
So here is the fine print:
- The question of what counts as a "fact" no longer has universal agreement. Many subjects once regarded as fact are now subject to intense, polarizing debate in politics and cultural life. Some say evolution is science, but a few say it's just a theory. Most say climate change is real and caused by human activity, but a few say it's not. Some say feng shui is essential for a good life, and others say it's just another penny-stock promotion in an intoxicated real-estate market. And so on... Even if (especially if) you think any of these disputes are a bit misguided, you still need to be aware of their existence. Aha! That gives them a certain performative reality!
So, what this means is that having a powerful way to look up the basic facts of uncontroversial events or topics is nice as a first step. But then it very quickly gets very risky. That's because the information is often provided anonymously by individuals whose knowledge and motivations are not always clear. "Expertise" on Wikipedia becomes a strange thing, based on the collective. That has some wonderful, utopian possibilites. But good utopians realize that any and all possible worlds will have more than a few nutcases!
Wikipedia has been dissed by some of its own early pioneers and creative inspirations. The open-source creator Eric Raymond argues that Wikipedia is "infested with moonbats," and one of the site's early developers, Larry Sanger, described the recent evolution of content standards on the site this way: "Wikipedia has gone from a nearly perfect anarchy to an anarchy with gang rule." (quoted in Schiff, 2006, p. 42). Politically contentious topics generate violent virtual wars of edits and counter-edits, and in an online community with unlimited combinations of interests and pet peeves, almost anything can become politically contentious. There have been multiple cases of fabrication, libel, and self-serving edits by politicians seeking to polish entries on themselves. The site's edit wars also reflect the rise of conservative ideologues' war on science and modernist knowledge -- creationists and Intelligent Design advocates fighting against the teaching of evolution, the "birthers" who question Barack Obama's birth certificate as a way of undermining Presidential legitimacy, Holocaust deniers, climate-change deniers, and revisionist historians working to erase the significance of slavery as a factor in the U.S. Civil War (see Levin, 2011).
Wikipedia is great for free speech and free expression, just like blogs and talk radio. But free speech is not necessarily intelligent or well-informed speech.
Even so, we cannot deny that Wikipedia has become deeply influential in today's online culture. It is becoming a latter-day version of the landmark reference work launched in 1768 (the Encyclopedia Britannica). Not long ago, the site became the seventeenth most popular site on the internet -- site traffic has been doubling every four months, sometimes hitting fourteen thousand viewers per second (Schiff, 2006). I also cannot deny that Wikipedia is gaining some credibility among some faculty in colleges and universities (Press, 2011).
Therefore, this particular recommendation is not an absolute prohibition. It's got lots of loopholes and exceptions. The recommendations on this page are guidelines, and I take seriously the very subtle distinctions between the alternative definitions of the word that comes from the French guider. One of those definitions specifies "to control, direct, influence," but other meanings are a bit less coercive: "to direct the course of, steer," or even better "to go before or with in order to show the way." (Cayne, 1990, p. 427). Part of what you're learning in university life is that knowledge is contested, and so are the rules; so what matters most is critical thinking and good judgement. But of course good judgement requires a lot more time and consideration. That's why the short headline above cuts to the chase for people searching for quick answers, and tells you to avoid Wikipedia and related anarchies. But if you've read beyond the headline and you're wading through this long discussion, then I'm happy to admit that this is a gray area. What matters is that you use good judgement. I recommend that you avoid using Wikipedia in an uncritical, un-reflective way -- especially if you're researching a topic where there are likely to be Wiki-edit-wars. I recommend that you read enough about Wikipedia so that you have a critical perspective on its strengths and flaws (see Liu, 2008; Schiff, 2006; Press, 2011). I'm inspired by the metaphor offered by Lisa Dempster, a teacher-librarian at Riverdale Collegiate in Toronto (see Press, 2011); she likens the use of Wikipedia to talking to your neighbor. It's a good place to hear about what's happening, and it's a good place to start when you're trying to learn about something. But it's not the only source you should use.
So if you use Wikipedia, make sure it's not your primary source, and not your only source. When a paper includes repeated citations to Wikipedia, it is a clear signal that the writer does not know of, or is not willing to search for, books or articles that have gone through the process of peer review before being published. As Wikipedia becomes more popular, its social meaning changes. Specifically: the quickest way to tell a reader that you're lazy is to cite Wikipedia as a primary source, and your main source. The fact that Wikipedia appears at the top of the list in Google searches means that it has become the instantly-recognized icon of intellectual laziness.
Bernard Cayne, ed. (1990). Webster's New World Encyclopedic Dictionary. New York: Lexicon Publications.
Kevin M. Levin (2011). "Teaching Civil War History 2.0." New York Times, Opinionator section, January 21.
Alan Liu (2008). To the Student: Appropriate Use of Wikipedia. Santa Barbara, CA: University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of English.
Jordan Press (2011). "Wikipedia Gaining Respect in Places of Higher Learning." The Vancouver Sun, November 5, B5.
Stacy Schiff (2006). "Know it All: Can Wikipedia Conquer Expertise?" The New Yorker, July 31, 36-43.
5. Choose a citation style, and use it generously and consistently. Document all sources for material that is not your own. Anything that is not your own should be referenced with full source information. Footnotes and other reference materials are not counted towards the word limits for project submissions; when in doubt, provide a citation.
You can use any recognized citation style, but be consistent. Personally, I prefer footnotes at the bottom of the page, but endnotes are fine, and so is the Harvard, in-text reference style (Galbraith, 1954; Wyly et al., 2008). Consult my lecture notes, recommended textbooks, or other suggested articles for examples and illustrations of different citation styles. If you choose the footnote style, then just insert a small superscript Arabic numeral (using whatever word-processing software you prefer) after the quoted material or the substantive point you've taken from a source, and then at the bottom of the page, provide information on the author, year of publication, book or journal information, and then (for books), city of publisher, name of publisher. Here are examples for a book, an article in a journal, and then a chapter in an edited book.
John Kenneth Galbraith (1954). The Great Crash 1929. New York: Time, Inc.
Elvin K. Wyly, Markus Moos, Holly Foxcroft, and Emmanuel Kabahizi (2008). "Subprime Mortgage Segmentation in the American Urban System." Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 99(1), 3-23.
Mitchell Gray and Elvin K. Wyly (2007). "The Terror City Hypothesis." In Derek Gregory and Allan Pred, editors, Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence, pp. 329-348. London and New York: Routledge.
If the quote is a direct quote, then just add something like "quote from p. 22" at the very end of the reference. Provide full publication information the first time you cite a source, and then if you cite the same source again, just insert a footnote that mentions the names of the source and a brief exerpt of the title along with a page number, if applicable: Gray and Wyly, "Terror City," p. 340. For Internet sources, see point number 5 below.
If you use the footnote approach as described here, then there is no need to provide an additional reference list or bibliography at the end of your paper. The bibliography would only be necessary if you used the in-text reference style to cite sources in the body of your text like this (Galbraith, 1954; Gray and Wyly, 2007, p. 337). Then at the end of the entire paper you would include a section titled "References," with entries arranged in alphabetical order by the author's last name.
6. Write for an audience of humans, not computers. The automation of many parts of what has been understood for centuries as "writing" has seriously threatened communications skills. This danger is most apparent in the proliferation of long computer-generated codes in footnotes, endnotes, and bibliographies. I ask that you write for an audience of people, not computers. Complete citation involves recognizing the author, year, title of work, and location or institution publishing the material. The purpose of citation is to a) give credit for ideas and evidence that are not your own, b) demonstrate to the reader that you've done your research with care and diligence, reading the most important sources to help you develop your knowledge and expertise on a particular topic, and c) provide useful information that will help a reader retrace some of your steps or track down interesting sources.
Use good judgment when citing materials you've found on the internet. Consider two different ways of providing a reference to the same paper in a scholarly journal:
a. http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0008-3658.2005.00092.x
b. Isabel Dyck (2005). "Feminist geography, the 'everyday', and local-global relations: hidden spaces of place-making." The Canadian Geographer 49(3), 233-243.
Option a is used for computers to communicate with one another. Option b is used to communicate to human beings. Please use option b. If you use option a, it will give me a clear indication that you are using "cut and paste," and that will make me wonder if you've ignored the warnings on the danger of this practice. It does not matter whether you found Dyck's paper through Blackwell-Synergy, Factiva, Academic Search Premier, Ebsco, Ingenta, or some other corporate information aggregator. Don't worry about these corporate details, because by next week one of these companies will be buying another one. Several years ago, many companies began using what they call "permalinks" on their sites, because people had gotten so frustrated at the ephemeral instability of resources on the Internet. This didn't work very well with the companies buying and selling one another so fast, so then they started introducing DOIs (digital object identifiers). Next week there will be yet another acronym. Lesson: sometimes, the old fashinoned way works best. What matters is that you're using scholarship recognized to merit publication in The Canadian Geographer, a respected scholarly journal that has been around for a long time. It doesn't matter what search engine led you to The Canadian Geographer, or -- revolutionary, subversive! -- maybe you even found a physical copy on the library shelf. What matters is that you're working with good scholarship published in a good, recognized journal.
If your source is mainly or solely available on the internet, then cite the author, year of creation, title, and publication name, then provide as much of the url address as can be reasonably read by a human being (e.g., "www.blackwell-synergy.com" from the example above), and then finally the date you accessed the site.
7. Include references to scholarly sources. How many? For a 200-level course, a general rule is that the ratio of unique scholarly sources to paper length should be about 1:200. If your essay is about 1,000 words, you should make references to at least five separate scholarly sources. For a 300-level course, I'd suggest a ratio of about 1:150. For a 400-level course, it could be closer to 1:100. These ratios apply to projects and final papers, of course, and not book reviews, where it is certainly more appropriate to focus mainly or exclusively on one source. These ratios are also flexible: this is a guidline, not a straightjacket. You can compensate for a very small number of scholarly citations by making each reference very significant, thoughtful, and theoretically 'deep.'
You do not have to read every single word on every single page of a book or article before you cite it; on the other hand, you should never cite something without first reading the abstract or introduction, paging through the entire piece, and reading at least a few key sections to get a feel for the essence of the work.
It's fine to cite non-scholarly materials (big-city newspapers, reputable magazines, etc.) in addition to scholarly works. But you should build on the foundation constructed by scholars just like you who studied this topic before you. Use journalism and other sources for vivid details and illustrations. But since you're a scholar, you should not ignore the hard work done by previous generations of scholars.
What is a scholarly source? This is often a judgment call, and there is some room for disagreement. But the essence of scholarship is the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake in order to contribute to human knowledge and understanding (rather than for self-serving motives of profit, celebrity, and notoriety). In general, to qualify as a scholarly source a book or article must meet three tests.
First, it must be produced by an author who is recognized as a credible expert by a non-profit, non-commercial group of other recognized experts. Yes, that last sentence had a lot of confusing terms, and it's a bit tautological. But the idea is simple: most politicians, consultants, motivational speakers, and lots of people you see on television or the internet are not scholars. These kinds of celebrities may attract big audiences, but scholarly status is not defined in terms of the size of the audience. Expertise is not a popularity contest. Most, but not all, scholars are affiliated with non-profit institutions of higher education; to obtain these affiliations, they have had to pass through multiple stages of recognition as credible experts in their field.
Second, the source must be published through a process that involves independent peer review. "Peer review" means that independent experts review a book or article manuscript when it is submitted, decide whether the work has value and integrity, and provide detailed criticisms that the author must address before the work is published. (This review and revision process takes a lot of time and effort, and that's why scholarly books and articles tend to focus on long-term changes and fundamental, lasting impacts rather than the very latest, up-to-the-minute news on a particular topic.)
Third, the source must have been produced primarily for non-profit, non-commercial purposes. If the primary goal of the author or the publisher of a work is to make money, then the scholarly status of the work is called into question. Capitalism has many virtues, but one of its vices is that it tends to distort and pervert the process of studying anything that cannot immediately turn a profit for someone. Scholarly publications produced for non-profit are much less susceptible to conflicts of interest that can undermine the integrity of the work (as one example, consider that some of the world's leading medical journals have had major scandals in recent years, after it turned out that articles on clinical trials of certain medications had been written by doctors who had accepted various forms of payment from the drug companies who stood to profit from favorable research findings on the particular drug).
All publishers have to earn a profit to stay in business, and authors have to pay the bills as well. Commercial activity is not universally incompatible with good scholarship. But when making money becomes the primary goal, scholarship evolves into something else.
Use your good judgement, and don't be frightened by all the detailed discussions above. A few good rules of thumb: Do your footnotes or references consist solely of http://www addresses, especially those involving ".com"? If so, you probably don't have many scholarly sources. Did you find a book on your own in a University library? It's more likely to be a scholarly source than if you found it after receiving an aggressive, hard-sell email solicitation from a commercial "content provider."
Los Angeles, February 2008 (Elvin Wyly)
"What I want to see is that you are fully engaged with an issue, and that you've broken some sweat trying to figure out the problem in all of its wonderful complexity." Barack Obama (1994). Current Issues in Racism and the Law. Syllabus and Reading Packet #1. Chicago: School of Law, University of Chicago, Spring Term. Excerpted in the New York Times and published at http://www.nytimes.com, August 2, 2008.
"In recent times numerous authors and publishers have come to suppose that readers are offended by footnotes. I have no desire to offend or even in the slightest way to discourage any solvent consumer, but I regard this supposition as silly. No literate person can possibly be disturbed by a little small type at the bottom of a page, and everyone, professional and lay reader alike, needs to know on occasion the credentials of a fact. Footnotes also provide an exceedingly good index of the care with which a subject has been researched." John Kenneth Galbraith (1954). The Great Crash 1929. New York: Time Books, p. 1.
"What on earth are our underpaid teachers, laboring in the vineyards of education, supposed to tell students about the following sentence, committed by the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High and gleaned by my colleague Maureen Dowd for preservation for those who ask, 'How was it she talked?'
'My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska's investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.'
And, she concluded, 'never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don't know about this issue.'
It is admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any.
...
Could the willingness to crown one who seems to have no first language have anything to do with the oft-lamented fact that we seem to be alone among nations in having made the word 'intellectual' an insult? (And yet...and yet...we did elect Obama. Surely not despite his brains.)"
The entire quote is from Dick Cavett (2008). "The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla." New York Times, Talk Show blog, 14 November.
Safire's Fumblerules
Back in the late 1970s, William Safire issued an open call for "perverse" rules of grammar, "along the lines of 'Remember to never split an infinitive,' and 'The passive voice should never be used.'" He got an enthusiastic response, and he used readers' frustrations with all that they had struggled to learn from grammar school to create a set of useful and hilarious guidelines. It produced one of his most widely-cited essays: William Safire (1979). "On Language: The Fumblerules of Grammar." New York Times Magazine, November 4, p. SM4.
By the time he wrote that column, Safire had already become one of the most influential figures in the politics and everyday use of the English language in Washington, DC. Safire made his way into journalism and politics in the mid-1950s, and achieved fame and notoriety as part of a speechwriting team in President Richard Nixon's administration. In 1970 he coined the famous lines that Vice President Spiro T. Agnew used to dismiss critics of Nixon's Vietnam policies: the "nattering nabobs of negativism" and the "hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history." Safire defended Nixon when the Watergate scandal broke, but soon became disenchanted as the scale of corruption and intimidation became apparent (and when Safire realized that he was one of those secretly taped by Nixon). Safire went on to write a twice-weekly essay for the Op-Ed Page of the New York Times from 1973-2005, in addition to his "On Language" column, which ran from 1979 all the way to 2009, only a few months before he died from pancreatic cancer in late September at age 79. (Read the rules, and then take note of the shadows in this valley after Safire's departure.) Robert D. McFadden (2009). "William Safire, Political Columnist and Oracle of Language, Dies at 79." New York Times, September 27, B8.
Safire's populist libertarian conservatism was a curious blend, and its history now looks quite charming and intelligent from the vantage point of the anti-intellectual, Rush-Limbaugh dittohead conservative thuggery that prevails across so much of America today. Safire certainly had plenty of ideological fervor when he went after his opponents; but above all he prized logic, consistency, and the crafts of argument, analysis, and writing. His "fumblerules" was a tiny part of the body of work he produced, but it is understandably one of the most widely remembered. We've all been guilty of violating many of the rules, but at least we can laugh when we proof-read. Personally, I would not banish the negative form and its subtle ambiguity. And starting a sentence with a conjunction gets the reader's attention precisely because of its violation of rules. I've also been entranced with the playful possibilities of alliteration, and I've never missed an opportunity to pass on the joke told to me by Phil Porter in the early 1990s: It is not known by whom the passive voice was invented. Still, Safire's advice is valuable: rules may be made to be broken, but only after they're clearly understood.
So, read Safire's fumblerules, and keep them in mind as you write, proofread, and rewrite.
The original citation for Safire's collection is:
William Safire (1979). "On Language: The Fumblerules of Grammar." New York Times Magazine, November 4, p. SM4.
Plagiarism Pitfalls, Norwegian Edition
September, 2010
[Contributed by Graeme Wynn]
"Colleagues:
Some years ago I collaborated in the production of a booklet, "Plagiarism and How to Avoid It," which we sold to students for 50c (and which at one time was top of the UBC Bookstore best seller list!). This booklet was later updated and made available free of charge on the web by Neil Guppy. Some folks are still using one or other of the above items to inform their students of potential "pitfalls"
But if you are concerned that even a "fifty cent pamphlet" fails to address the problem of plagiarism these days, you might take five minutes to show the video below to your classes. Although the message is the same as in those earlier works, this is undoubtedly a livelier rendition -- and there is no suggestion of plagiarism from the earlier works.
Make sure the cc caption below the video frame is turned on to get the subtitles."
Stian Hafstad et al. (2010). "En Plagieringsfortelling." Search & Write course. Bergen, Norway: Bergen University College, The Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, and the University of Bergen.
Editing Exposed
The naked typo
Julia Johnson (2010). "Investor's Bold Plays Save Company." National Post, December 27, p. FP1, FP6. Reisa Schwartzman described the challenges she faced in saving a game company in which she had made an investment. As the firm slipped into bankruptcy, she refused to give up on her investment, and so she jumped in to try to turn around the enterprise herself. "Griddly Headz games have received 18 industry awards and seals. Recognition involves sending the game to an industry association to be reviewed and hoping for the best. 'You take the risk and you pay a fee and you send your game in to, for example, iParenting or National Parenting or the Teacher's choice award ... and basically you stand their naked,' said Ms. Schwartzman...."
Dude...
"Reality TV star Sarah Palin gave birth to a new word this year when she repeatedly tweeted 'refudiate' -- thus staking out unexplored lexicographic territory somewhere between 'repudiate' and 'refute.' Jumping to her own defense, because no one else was about to, Palin refudiated her critics on an episode of Sarah Palin's Alaska, in which she told her deeply disinterested-looking husband, Todd:
'Oh, geez! Yesterday I twittered the word 'refudiate' instead of 'repudiate' -- I pressed an 'f' instead of a 'd' and people freaked out about it.'
So back off, Snooty Liberal Intellectual Elite. Sarah didn't mean to write 'refudiate' -- she meant to write 'redudiate' -- which, of course, means to reacquaint oneself with The Big Lebowski."
Pete McMartin (2011). "Frivolous News of 2010: Please Read Before Vomiting." Vancouver Sun, January 1, A3.
Prove him wrong. Please, please prove him wrong.
Mark Baurlein, a Professor of English at Emory University, offers this assessment of contemporary student research methods (Bauerlein, 2011):
"When students take on research tasks, here is what they don't do:
- Visit the library and browse the stacks.
- Find an archive and examine primary documents.
- Read widely in the subject before identifying a topic.
Instead, they
- Type a term into Google.
- Consult Wikipedia's entry on the subject.
- Download six web pages, and cut and paste passages.
- Summarize the citations and sprinkle commentary of their own.
- Print it up and hand it in."
For Bauerline, the disciplined habits of mind traditionally associated with the research paper -- curiosity, reflection, critical judgment -- are at risk thanks to the false promises of universal digital availability of information. Information can be consumed and collected in a passive mode, without the hard work of organization, synthesis, and critical thought. But information isn't learning, and it isn't research. Thus the perils of all the digital tools, which "offer too many shortcuts, conveniences, and well-digested materials" that distract students from the serious work of active, engaged inquiry. "Teachers demand better usages ('Don't just rely on Wikipedia!')," Bauerline laments, "but they're up against 19-year olds who love speed and effortlessness. Good luck."
CopyLeft 2012 Elvin K. Wyly
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Reading Liam McGuire's draft MA thesis on the Ten Cities of Toronto
May, 2012
The quickest way to tell a reader that you're lazy is to use Wikipedia as your main source...
The Reality of a Virtual Echo
I first began the scribbles that became this "guidelines" page quite a few years ago. One of the first items I wrote down, however, was "Write for an audience of humans, not computers." Even then, back in the dark ages of 2003 or 2004, it was clear that we primitive human beings were outsourcing more and more of the essentially human craft of writing to various devices and algorithms that were getting ever faster, ever more powerful. It felt deeply disorienting to see the craft of writing destroyed by the tyranny of code. More and more paper submissions showed telltale signs that the composition involved fewer decisions by a real, living human being -- with more pervasive, automated decisions reflecting the constructions of various software tools and corporate information empires.
For several years I felt like an increasingly retrograde, technologically incompetent throwback -- even more de-skilled than the original Luddites themselves (I can't weave). Then I discovered a new strain of technological humanism in Jaron Lanier, who is widely described as a "Silicon Valley pioneer" and "the father of Virtual Reality." Here's an excerpt from Lanier's book, You Are Not a Gadget, that clarifies why you should write for an audience of humans, not computers:
"It's early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons -- automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. The words will be minced into atomized search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computing facilities located in remote, often secret locations around the world. They will be copied millions of times by algorithms designed to send an advertisement to some person somewhere who happens to resonate with some fragment of what I say. They will be scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers into wikis and automatically aggregated wireless text message streams.
Reactions will repeatedly degenerate into mindless chains of anonymous insults and inarticulate controversies. Algorithms will find correlations between those who read my words and their purchases, their romantic adventures, their debts, and, soon, their genes. ...
The vast fanning out of the fates of these words will take place almost entirely in the lifeless world of pure information. Real human eyes will read these words in only a tiny minority of cases.
And yet it is you, the person, the rarity among my readers, I hope to reach.
The words in this book are written for people, not computers."
Jaron Lanier (2010). You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. New York: Knopf, p. ix.
Advice on Planning and Deadlines
from a former student...