Kay Cunningham's List: Writing

'Melzer’s study, conducted over the course of a decade, sought to replicate and improve upon a British study of postsecondary writing assignments in the 1970s. He analyzed some 2,100 writing assignments for humanities, business and social and natural sciences courses at 100 U.S. colleges and universities.'

'By implementing the tools listed below, you will surely become a faster writer, but you’ll also improve the quality of your academic content at the same time.'

'If you use referencing software to help you with referencing your PhD thesis, Masters dissertation, final year long essay, or to write a book for publication, you will probably be creating each chapter of your text as a separate document in MS Word.'

'In 2007 Jonathan Lethem published a pro-plagiarism, plagiarized essay in Harper's titled, "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism." It's a lengthy defense and history of how ideas in literature have been shared, riffed, culled, reused, recycled, swiped, stolen, quoted, lifted, duplicated, gifted, appropriated, mimicked, and pirated for as long as literature has existed. Lethem reminds us of how gift economies, open-source cultures, and public commons have been vital for the creation of new works, with themes from older works forming the basis for new ones. Echoing the cries of free-culture advocates such as Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow, he eloquently rails against copyright law as a threat to the lifeblood of creativity. From Martin Luther King Jr.'s sermons to Muddy Waters's blues tunes, he showcases the rich fruits of shared culture. He even cites examples of what he had assumed were his own "original" thoughts, only later to realize—usually by Googling—that he had unconsciously absorbed someone else's ideas that he then claimed as his own.

It's a great essay. Too bad he didn't "write" it. The punchline? Nearly every word and idea was borrowed from somewhere else—either appropriated in its entirety or rewritten by Lethem. His essay is an example of "patchwriting," a way of weaving together various shards of other people's words into a tonally cohesive whole. It's a trick that students use all the time, rephrasing, say, a Wikipedia entry into their own words. And if they're caught, it's trouble: In academia, patchwriting is considered an offense equal to that of plagiarism. If Lethem had submitted this as a senior thesis or dissertation chapter, he'd be shown the door. Yet few would argue that he didn't construct a brilliant work of art—as well as writing a pointed essay—entirely in the words of others. It's the way in which he conceptualized and executed his writing machine—surgically choosing what to borrow, arranging those words in a skillful way—that wins us over. Lethem's piece is a self-reflexive, demonstrative work of unoriginal genius.'

'For the past several years, I've taught a class at the University of Pennsylvania called "Uncreative Writing." In it, students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly what they've surreptitiously become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness.

We retype documents and transcribe audio clips. We make small changes to Wikipedia pages (changing an "a" to "an" or inserting an extra space between words). We hold classes in chat rooms, and entire semesters are spent exclusively in Second Life. Each semester, for their final paper, I have them purchase a term paper from an online paper mill and sign their name to it, surely the most forbidden action in all of academia. Students then must get up and present the paper to the class as if they wrote it themselves, defending it from attacks by the other students. What paper did they choose? Is it possible to defend something you didn't write? Something, perhaps, you don't agree with? Convince us.'

News blog on self-publishing

'If you want students to learn about a topic and be able to synthesize information effectively, fine - but don't call it research. Turn it into a presentation, an informational brochure, or a Wikipedia article. If you want students to make an argument, start from something they know and care about, something that matters to them and about which they can hold an informed opinion. If you want them to read and understand scholarly material, focus on close reading and have the class jointly prepare an annotated edition. If you want them to write academic prose, wait until they know enough about the discipline to know what they're talking about and how to ask a meaningful question about it.'

'Instead, we're expected to give students everything they need to know for college research and writing in a very short time-span, sometimes as little as a fifty-minute library session or a semester of composition. We know full well that each discipline will impose different expectations on these young writers, and that becoming skilled at research and writing is a developmental process, not something first year students can master successfully. Yet we put our shoulders to the task and invest a huge amount of energy into instructing students how to write in a ritualized genre that is complex but (as I've argued elsewhere) demonstrably ineffective in making our students effective writers. If you work hard and include a lot of scaffolding and revision cycles, students can learn to write a reasonably good generic research paper and, in the process, gain basic skills in finding and evaluating sources, reading complex texts for meaning, writing from sources, synthesizing ideas into an organized argument, and practicing academic citation. But it's very hard to gain these skills that way....'

'The Citation Project began with the desire to know whether college writers use quotation, summary, paraphrase, and patchwriting in their source-based writing. The findings of the pilot inquiry are described in "Writing from Sources, Writing from Sentences," to be published in the Fall 2010 issue of Writing and Pedagogy. The questions from the pilot remain the core questions for the entire study. Yet as so often happens in research on writing, the inquiry of the pilot study produced new questions. Our research now not only asks whether students use the four means of incorporating source content, but how often and under what circumstances.'

'So when students are writing that first research essay, they're trying to learn several skills simultaneously, crammed into a few weeks' time. They must learn to find appropriate sources, understand and evaluate them, and integrate them into a coherent essay making an arguable claim that is related to but not supplied by the sources themselves, and they typically have 3-4 weeks to do this about topics they likely never encountered before, and almost certainly have never studied in any academic way. And they have to do all this while undertaking no research in the scientific sense, and without the broad and deep contextual knowledge necessary for scholars in the humanities. Considering all this, it's no wonder the average research essay is mediocre by scholarly standards, and why so many students gravitate to the same lame topics, and use the Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center instead of a regular index....'

'Most academics, including administrators, spend much of our time writing. But we aren't as good at it as we should be. I have never understood why our trade values, but rarely teaches, nonfiction writing.
In my nearly 30 years at universities, I have seen a lot of very talented people fail because they couldn't, or didn't, write. And some much less talented people (I see one in the mirror every morning) have done OK because they learned how to write.'

'Because student writing is largely driven by external deadlines, few of us developed consistent writing practices, and instead, we end up waiting until shortly before a deadline, engaging in multi-day writing binges, and then avoiding writing again until we face another external deadline. '

New media poetry

"where the digerati meet the literati" - alternative writing

links to parody article by Alan Sokal submitted and accepted by the journal, Social Text, and to articles related to the hoax

'This is an exercise in disciplined creativity. Writing exactly 100 words at a time -- not a single word more, not a single word less -- isn't as easy as it sounds. The word count may be arbitrary, but the motive is not. To borrow from Proust, the tyranny of rhyme often brings out the poet's best work. By working within a standardized form, the writer can concentrate on other matters'

'Others here (who agreed to be observed without their names and institutions being used) were considering the creation of new master's programs and the reform of others. And community college writing chairs and hiring committee members were there, too, to provide a reality check on the thinking of those theoretically producing those whom they would hire -- and who would have tough jobs ahead, given the many community college students who enter higher education with minimal writing skills.
Those doing the hiring at community colleges were frank that they really need these composition master's programs to work because they aren't content to hire literature doctorates who are applying for composition jobs at community colleges because of the tough job market for new humanities Ph.D.'s. '

'Many applicants for research grants fail to consider the potential impact on a review committee of the prose in their applications. They are unaware of the damage they may be doing to their chances of success with overly technical language, illogical statements and a range of other impediments to clarity. In addition, some undermine their own strengths by allowing their hesitations and concerns about their work to permeate the entire proposal.'

"Rosebud is a magazine of fiction, poetry and art which was co-founded by Graphic Classics publisher Tom Pomplun in 1993, and designed by Tom until 2003 (Issues 1–26). Starting with Issue 18, "The Rosebud Cartoon Issue", comics became a regular part of the literary mix. A limited number of back issues are available through this site. '

'For now, let’s look at those piles of articles, stacks of books, and folders of PDFs. How do you get from a pile of articles or stack of books to a well-referenced dissertation? This process is part of prewriting. My dissertation adviser Bob Boice (who I introduced in my first column) used to say that fluent writers spend as much time on prewriting as on writing. By the time they are ready to write, these fluent writers have taken the time to read any relevant materials, thought through the ideas of others, played around with their own ideas, threw some out, modified a few, and picked one to focus on for a particular piece of writing. Also, they have carefully planned their writing by developing increasingly detailed outlines and annotating them with notes from their reading. '

By Nicole Hennig, Web Manager, MIT Libraries