PSA: Use Cites in your Papers People!

[seak]

For all you high school and (especially) college students out there, firkin use cites in your paper! It's easy, it's required, it will help your grade and the person who has to grade your paper will like you better. See it's a win - win all around

Here's the deal if you make a claim, that is not clearly your opinion, or state a fact it needs a citation. So generally speaking if you're reading over your paper and the average Joe walking around the United States wouldn't know that fact offhand you need to cite it. Really it just isn't that hard.

If for some reason you have a teacher who doesn't care, please feel free to disregard this message until you have a teacher who does care.

p.s. please also proofread your paper for logical fallacies, they too will hurt your grade and annoy your underpaid grader.

[KD5MDK]

This interferes with my academic right to make stuff up!

[seak]

You have to get an advanced degree for that

why do you think I'm in grad school?

[KD5MDK]

Have I got a game to show you...

http://www.panix.com/~sos/bc/witless.html

From the publisher's page on the game:

Design of the game helped defuse a lot of pent-up rage, after I was released from my teaching post for winning a teaching award. Yes, you read that right. It made the other professors unhappy, my department chairman informed me, to have an untenured colleague publicly elevated in such a fashion. He was sure I’d understand.

[chefencer]

Here you will find information and tools designed to help us redefine literacy for the 21st Century.

citationmachine

permission request form

digital index card

[Peach]

Kem's Utterly Merciless Guide to Essay Writing

[MyrddinsPrecint]

Cite is a verb, not a noun, much like quote (OED, whatever page that would be).

Nouns being citation and quotation (OED, again, whatever page).

: P

[seak]

I was being colloquial . Thanks for all the amusing posts, it helps with the frustration. This is what I get for being a History major. Citations were drummed into you like the rain in London.

[the maple epee]

Those last two posts made my brain explode. This is really disgusting; thanks, you guys.

[KD5MDK]

The last two in this thread? I'm sorry for your poor brain and its inability to handle academic thought of even the most basic level. Or was this intended for another thread?

[the maple epee]

No, I just realized that I should have reread them before posting...


How dare you insult my intelligence, sir!

[KD5MDK]

I Dare

Good series, for light reading.

[Zelda]

I feel your pain - may I suggest www.phdcomics.com and go vent in the grad forums..... thats were Kems Utterly merciless guide to essay writing was first found.

[seak]

I love PhD comics. It is my life, well except that I don't work in a lab.

[KD5MDK]

The Masked Grader

Someone at my former school (who is an acquaintance of an acquaintance, apparently) found a basket of short essays on "Lasers" outside the office of a professor for a "science for idiots" class and decided to annotate them. Original site taken down when the University deduced who it was.

[Peach]

Note of sanity, speaking as an English teacher--while it's enjoyable and cathartic to make fun of bad student writing, and I do it myself on my personal blog sometimes when something really tickles my funnybone, doing it too much perpetuates complacency, self-satisfaction, and elitism, and doesn't encourage good writing. I constantly labor to help my colleagues understand that any student who is writing that badly needs to be taught how to write well. One concept at a time. Marking papers mercilessly doesn't make people better writers. Students just look at the marks, shrug, figure they'll settle and that they'll never be good writers and they didn't want to write anyway, and toss the papers into the trash. Or next time they download a paper instead because they can't for the life of them figure out what these crazy teachers want and maybe someone else does. You have to tell them what you expect and you have to make them rewrite if they do it wrong.

People often argue that it's the English teacher's job to teach them to write. We try, but if I have them for one subject 45 minutes a day and nobody else bothers to reinforce what I'm teaching them, I can guarantee you they'll figure they only have to write well in English class--or not even there.

I'm not saying students aren't stubborn, goofy, and ignorant from time to time, mind you. That's why they're students and I'm the teacher At least I think that's why.

[Black Jeebus]

why do you think I'm in grad school?

The real world was too scary!

[HDG]

Cite is a verb, not a noun, much like quote (OED, whatever page that would be).

Nouns being citation and quotation (OED, again, whatever page).

: P

Look again; they're both in there as nouns as well.

[HDG]

So last spring I was grading a PhD student's comprehensive exams (qualifying exams in some places). A few things started to strike me as not quite right. Then some more. By this point I'm on the hunt. I found extensive quotation without any citation. Plagiarism. [hint: if you're gonna try to plagiarize, keep less than a page, and don't make it an indented quote...]

I kicked it up to the grad director, who asked me to look at all of the student's exams beside the field I was testing them in (I'm leaving gender deliberately vague). I found enough further plagiarism that the student's comps committee met, failed them and moved to have them bounced from the university. It's now in the hands of the University's administration.

The question then came up about having a look back at this student's MA comps, and possibly revoking it if evidence of plagiarism is again found. I was not on that committee, so I'm not involved.

The upshot: Two day's cheating cost this person a wasted ~5 previous years of their life.

[KD5MDK]

You're being narrow-minded. It might have taken them weeks to find the right articles to steal from.