Analyze, Don't Summarize

The 01 October 2004 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education contains an editorial about grading English papers. In it, the author talks about struggling to articulate how he grades papers, and he eventually sums it up succinctly in a way I like:

The rules for literary analysis are the same rules in play for any kind of analysis: mastery of the material. Cogency of supporting evidence. Ability to imagine and rebut salient counterarguments. Extra points for wit and style, points off for mind-numbing cliches, and permanent suspension for borrowing someone else's argument without proper attribution.

The Principle of Onions

I've blogged a reference to Tara Calishain's new book Web Search Garage before (see Seven Ways to Save Time Searching). On the promotional web site for the book, Ms. Calishain offers some free content, including a chapter from the book called "The Principle of Onions." In essence, here's the principle:

When searching, it’s better to start with very specific search queries and then get more and more general. If you start with more general queries you will tend to get overwhelmed with results.

The entire chapter (6pp) is free and should be *required* reading for people interested in improving the information they find on the internet and in reducing the amount of time they spend searching. I'm going to be ordering the book!

Free Viewing of CliffsNotes

For those of you unacquainted with them, CliffsNotes on literature are study guides for important works of literature. Typically, a CliffsNote contains info about the author and the work, a summary with commentary, analysis, character analysis, a couple of critical essays, and some study helps. CliffsNotes are often written by scholarly authorities. My dissertation advisor, for instance, wrote the one on Emerson.

Rightly used, CliffsNotes can help a student study a literary work and understand it better. Wrongly used, CliffsNotes have aided many a desparate and/or lazy student by letting them fake their way through class or a paper.

The very first semester I taught, I caught a girl who had plagiarized out of CliffsNotes. I flunked her on the paper and told her she couldn't use CliffsNotes like that. So on the next paper she plagiarized out of Monarch Notes (a CliffsNotes clone). Sigh.

I would *never* advocate that students use CliffsNotes wrongly, but for those right-thinking students who want to understand better what they are reading, I'm happy to announce that CliffsNotes now has over 180 literature guides online for free viewing.

Seven Ways to Save Time Searching

"Seven Ways to Save Time Searching" is free advice from the Tara Calishain, author of Web Search Garage:

1. Use the right search engine
2. Focus. Focus. Focus. Use special syntax
3. Use monitoring services
4. Use current awareness services as extra eyeballs
5. People are also great search engines
6. For quick looks, use the cache
7. Consider RSS

The two-page document is worth reading for its definitions, examples, and links.

Wordcount.org

Here's a fun web site. WordCount is as much about design as it is words. It catalogs the 86,800 most frequently used English words (according to the Britsh National Corpus).

Go to the website, start WordCount, enter a word, and then watch as the program homes in of the word and its count.

The number one word used in the English language? "The."

The number one word that people look up on WordCount? "Sex." (How predictable is that?)

It's a Gift to be Simple

One of the most important essays on writing I've ever read is George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language."

Ever since I first read it as an undergraduate, I've been affected powerfully by Orwell's thesis that "[The English language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." The circular relationship between thought and language struck me as one of those beautiful, simple truths . . . that it takes a genius to state.

What I like about the idea so much is that it places clear thinking and clear writing within a context of virtue—not a simpering good/bad dichotomy, but a stern, antique Roman virtue placed firmly in the public arena.

The idea that the quality of writing matters and makes us better us better thinkers, citizens, and people inspires me.