MLK

Here's a link to the most-requested materials at the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University.

You'll find texts and audio clips (Acrobat, Quicktime, and Realmedia) of "Letter from Birmingham Jail," "I Have a Dream," King's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "Beyond Vietnam," and "I've Been to the Mountaintop."

How to improve writing (no. 2 in a series)

From an invitation to an evening of financial aid information:

This is open to all studetns and parents that are going to be attending in the fall and to those that have decided to further their education elsewhere.

It's always good to avoid this alone--it's a weak word and often vague in its reference (and here I thank Jim Doyle, James P. Doyle, Dr. Doyle, who called me on this when I was a college freshman).

Studetns is a reminder to always use a spellchecker. Though it can't substitute for proofreading, it'll at least find some typos.

Who not that is appropriate for people.

The real problem here though is that the writer hasn't read the sentence carefully--it's students who'll be attending in the fall, not their parents. An improved version might read as follows:

This evening is open to students who will be attending in the fall, students who have decided to further their education elsewhere, and all parents.

Link » Other How to improve writing posts, via Pinboard

Kenneth Koch

3703 students: You can read about the author of Making Your Own Days in this issue of Jacket, an on-line magazine of contemporary poetry (the on-line magazine, really). The piece by Charles North is probably the best place to start. Don't miss the link to "Popeye and William Blake Fight to the Death," a recording of a spontaneous collaboration between Koch and Allen Ginsberg (in front of a standing-room-only audience). Koch's quick wit in coming up with rhymes is almost scary.

Koch's exuberance is evident even in his handwriting, as you can see here.

Capeesh?

Once I figured out how to spell this word (which came up in my 9:00 Myth and Culture class), it was pretty easy to find its origins on-line. From dictionary.com:

Main Entry: capeesh
Part of Speech: interjection
Definition: do you understand?
Example: I will call you when dinner is ready. Capeesh?
Etymology: Italian capisce "understand"
Source: Webster's New Millennium Dictionary of English, Preview Edition (v 0.9.5)

And from word-detective.com:

What they're actually saying is "coppish" (kuh-PEESH, also sometimes spelled "capeesh"), which is definitely not Welsh (too many vowels, just for starters). It's Italian-American slang for "understand." "Coppish" comes from the Italian word "capisce," based on the verb "capire," meaning "to understand," and can be used as either a question or an answer. Like many dialect words born in immigrant communities, "coppish" affirms a bond between the speaker and listener. "Coppish?" thus often really means, "I know you understand, because you're one of us." And the reply "Coppish!" means "You bet, no problem, you can count on me."

Capeesh?

Capeesh!

How to e-mail a professor

[By a professor, for students. As of July 2023, this post has been visited by more than 800,000 readers from at least 145 countries and territories. And it’s been anthologized in The Student Writer: Editor and Critic (McGraw Hill, 2009) and The Simon & Schuster Short Prose Reader (2011). If you teach, you might also want to read this post: How to e-mail a student. In 2023, email is about twice as common in print as e-mail, but I still like the old-school hyphen.]

I’ve read enough e-mails to know that many college students could benefit from some guidelines for writing to a professor. Here they are:

Write from your college or university e-mail account. That immediately lets your professor see that your e-mail is legitimate and not spam. A cryptic or cutesy or salacious personal e-mail address is not appropriate when you’re writing to a professor.

Include the course number in your subject line. “Question about 3009 assignment” is clear and sounds genuine, while “a question” looks like spam. “Question about English assignment” or “question about assignment,” without identifying the class you’re in, may leave your professor with the chore of figuring that out. For someone teaching large lecture classes, that might mean reading through hundreds of names on rosters. But even for a professor with smaller classes, it’s a drag to get an e-mail that merely says “I’m in your English class and need the assignment.” All your English professor’s classes are English classes; your professor needs to know which one is yours.

Consider, in light of this advice, the following examples:

An e-mail from “qtpie2005” with the subject line “question.”

An e-mail from a university account with the subject line “question about English 2011 essay.”

Which one looks legitimate? Which one looks like spam?

Think about what you’re saying. Most students are not accustomed to writing to their professors. Here are some ways to do it well:

Choose an appropriate greeting. “Hi/Hello Professor [Blank]” is always appropriate. Substitute “Dear” and you’ve ended up writing a letter; leave out “Hi” and your tone is too brusque.

Avoid rote apologies for missing class. Most professors are tired of hearing those standard apologies and acts of contrition. If you missed class because of some especially serious or sad circumstances, it might be better to mention that in person than in an e-mail.

Ask politely. “Could you e-mail me the page numbers for the next reading? Thanks!” is a lot better than “I need the assignment.”

Proofread what you’ve written. You want your e-mail to show you in the best possible light.

Sign with your full name, course number, and meeting time.

        Maggie Simpson
        English 3703, MWF 10:00

Signing is an obvious courtesy, and it eliminates the need for stilted self-identification (“I am a student in your such-and-such class”).

Two don’ts, and one last do:

Don’t ask AI to write an e-mail for you. At least not if you want your e-mail to sound like the work of a human being.

Don’t send unexpected attachments. It’s bad form. Attaching an essay with a request that your professor look it over is very bad form. Arrange to meet your professor during office hours or by appointment instead. It’s especially bad form to send an e-mail that says “I won’t be in class today,” with a paper or some other coursework attached. Think about it: Your professor is supposed to print out your essay because you’re not coming to class?

Do say thanks. When you get a response, just hit Reply and say “Thanks,” or a little bit more if that’s appropriate. The old subject line (which will now have a “Re:” in front) will make the context clear. I don’t think that you need to include a greeting with a short reply, at least not if you refer to your professor in your reply. And you don’t need to identify yourself by course number and meeting time again.

It’s easy to overlook an e-mail message or have it disappear into a spam folder, so it’s always appropriate to acknowledge that someone’s message came through. It’s also plain courtesy to say thanks. (Your professor will remember it too.) When you reply, you should delete almost everything of your professor’s reply (quoting everything is rarely appropriate in e-mail). Leave just enough to make the original context clear.

So what would a good e-mail to a professor look like?

Hi Professor Leddy,

I’m working on my essay on William Carlos Williams and I’m not sure what to make of the last stanza of “Spring and All.” I’m stuck trying to figure out what “It” is. Do you have a suggestion? Thanks!

Maggie Simpson
Eng 3703, MWF 10:00

And a subsequent note of thanks:

>  “It” is most likely spring, or life itself. But have
>  you looked up “quicken”? That’ll probably
>  make “It” much clearer.

It sure did. Thanks for your help, Professor.

Maggie Simpson

[How to e-mail a professor is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 License. Revised September 26 and October 29, 2005; February 4, 2006; July 10, 2023; April 15, 2024.]

Other useful stuff for students:

Beware of the saurus
Grammarly and WhiteSmoke (save your money)
Granularity for students
How to answer a question in class
How to be a student a professor will remember (for the right reasons)
How to do well on a final exam
How to do horribly on a final exam
How to enter a classroom
How to punctuate a sentence
How to punctuate more sentences
How to talk to a professor
How to unstuff a sentence
Is this honor society legitimate?
Rachel’s tips for success in college
“Rewording”
Rule 7
Seeing professors clearly
Slow down and read
Study = hard work
Studying alone, really alone
Syllabus week
Yo, professor!

And for professors:

How to e-mail a student

And if you want to read the most recent posts on Orange Crate Art, here’s the front page.

[Some further thoughts: I’m astonished by the amount of interest in this post--over 1,600 visits in the past two days. Then again, there really isn’t anything very similar on-line--or if there is, I haven’t found it--so if what I’ve written is useful, well, I’m happy.

My one purpose in writing these guidelines was to help college students write to their professors with greater ease and maturity and a better sense of audience (instead of “i am a student in your class”). They’re guidelines for writing to a professor, any professor, in the absence of other guidelines. And they’re meant to keep a student in the high esteem of any professor to whom that student is writing.

Most of the reasoning behind the guidelines is omitted for concision. But I’ll elaborate a little here. Why, for instance, write from a university account? A professor filtering spam will almost certainly also have a filter to okay mail from addresses from her or his “edu.” So if you want your mail to get through, an “edu” account is a smart choice. Many schools require students to use those accounts for official school business already. Writing from an appropriate address is smart practice for the future too. (I always say something when I see a tacky or juvenile e-mail address on an otherwise polished student résumé.)

Why say “Hi/Hello Professor [Blank]?” Well, what should a student call a professor? Some people like “Doctor”; some don’t. Some people don’t have a doctorate. Some people don’t explain any of that to students. There was a great piece in the Chronicle about this subject not long ago--“What Should We Call the Professor?” Professor, in the absence of any other guidelines, seems like a good choice.

Having received many telegraphic one-sentence e-mails, often with no greeting, no thank-you, and no signature, I find them weirdly depersonalized: “I need the assignment.” I do think a question is better, better even than a polite “Please send the assignment,” because the question is more conversational, more human. (But if a student e-mails me and says “I need the assignment,” I send it.)

Why sign with your name, class, and meeting time? It’s a courtesy, yes, but it also avoids the awkward “My name is . . . , and I am a student in your such-and-such class,” all of which is taken care of in the signature. It occurs to me that “My name is . . . , and I am a student in . . .” is telling evidence of the unfamiliarity of e-mail as a way for students to communicate with professors.

I appreciate the point several commenters have made about a follow-up thank-you being unneeded. Still, a lot of e-mail doesn’t get read, and the follow-up, to my mind, closes the loop. Many people do a follow-up by using the subject line to say thanks, often followed by the abbreviation “eom” (end of message). That seemed to me too arcane to recommend. But I do like the idea of closing the loop by saying yes, I got it, thanks.

I hope that this post leads to much more talking on the part of professors and students about communicating by e-mail. All reports from the business world point to enormous problems of clarity, correctness, and decorum with e-mail writing. Maybe things can start to go better in college.

Added September 30, 2005; revised October 29, 2005 and April 8, 2024.]

On the relevance of the classics

At Chicago's Wilbur Wright College, where the majority of students are immigrants, nonwhite, or both, Professor Bruce Gans runs a successful Great Books Curriculum, with an enrollment of about 900. Students in this program, compared with their schoolmates, greatly improve their writing skills, have far higher graduation rates, and are better prepared to transfer to four-year colleges. Meanwhile, Earl Shorris has developed the Clemente Course, a classical curriculum aimed specifically at people living in poverty. His first syllabus ranged from Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and Thucydides' Peloponnesian War to William Blake and D. H. Lawrence. And yes, Plato is intensely relevant to former drug addicts. "Those of us in the grip of addiction use this process to rethink our lives," one student explains. "Socrates makes clear that you have to have the courage to examine yourself and to stand up for something. A lot of us have justified our weaknesses for too long a time."

From an essay by Jonathan Rose, "The Classics in the Slums."

Saturday night quesadillas

Another adventure in cooking. To make this dish you'll need

2 pounds of boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1 large green pepper (or 2 smaller ones)
1 small package of mushrooms
1 bunch green onions (scallions)
1 packet fajita mix
shredded cheese
8 soft tortillas (1 package)
olive oil
sour cream
hot (not sweet) paprika
salsa
applesauce

For less drama, do all the chopping before beginning to cook. And preheat your oven to 400 degrees.

1. Cut the chicken into small pieces (larger than a caramel square, smaller than a ping-pong ball). The easiest way to do this work is with a cleaver (whack!) or a very sharp knife. Be careful! Watch the way people cut and chop on cooking shows--they keep their fingers curled under and in, not splayed out where the knife can get them.

2. Begin cooking the chicken in a large pan with a little olive oil, medium heat.

3. When the chicken begins to get a little brown, add some mushrooms (about half the package), chopped into small pieces, and let things cook a while.

4. Add the green pepper, chopped into small pieces, and let things cook a while.

5. Mix a packet of fajita seasoning with the necessary amount of water and add to the pan.

6. Let everything cook for a while. The vegetables and the water (duh!) will keep everything from overcooking and drying out. Your pan should be bubbling and steaming as the green pepper is pulverized.

7. To make a quesadilla, put some of the chicken-mushroom-pepper on a soft tortilla. Add some shredded cheese (the 3- or 4-cheese combinations are good) and some salsa. Cover with another soft tortilla and let it sit in the oven for a few minutes. (Not too long!)

8. When the quesadilla is out of the oven, cover the top tortilla with a some sour cream and a light sprinkling of hot paprika. Then garnish generously with chopped green onions (scallions). (The sour cream will help the scallions stay in place.)

9. Serve with salsa and applesauce on the side. (That's the way they do it at What's Cookin' in Charleston, IL.)

Is applesauce a traditional Mexican or Tex-Mex garnish? I have no idea.

Two pounds of chicken should be enough for four large quesadillas (one package of tortillas), which will easily feed four or five people.

[An earlier post has more adventures in cooking.]

A post-solstice post

From Jared Sandberg's article "Dark Days of December Leave Many Workers Yearning to See Light," in yesterday's Wall Street Journal:

There's every reason to suspect that our ancestors were as bummed about the disappearance of the sun as we are. Countless sacred sights were designed to align with the solstices--think Stonehenge--and as many cultures performed solstice ceremonies. The driving anxiety behind them? Fear that the sun would never return, says Teresa Ruano, a Web consultant whose research led to a Web site on the solstice.

"Celebration, ritual, bright lights, big feasts--all of those things that have become part of our celebrations at this time of year were considered activities that were important to encourage the sun to come back," she says.

It's thus no surprise that Christmas is so twinkly and candle-lit. Yuletide, a Scandinavian holiday that predates Christmas as we know it, involved giving gifts to the sun god, Balder, who had fallen into darkness. Iranians observe Yalda, a holiday in which fires are burned to help the sun defeat darkness. Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, may have its roots in history, but it's awfully similar to India's Diwali, another festival of lights. Though it means a variety of things in different corners of India, one thing is common: The festival celebrates the renewal of life, which is certainly worth remembering at the time of year when everything is stone dead.

Words for those on the road

[Last words for English 3009, Myth and Culture]

The ancient Greek word for “truth,” alēthia, literally means “that which is not forgotten.” As you make your way down the road, don’t forget about where we’ve been this semester:

As you get older, remember Gilgamesh and the great truth that “There is no permanence.” That recognition will begin to add a poignant significance to countless parts of your life. (Just wait ’til you have children!)

When you lose someone to death, remember Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and recognize that the experience of human grief is much the same as it was 3500 years ago. Loss is no less painful now than then.

When you become caught up in the American pastime of needless consumption, remember Charles Foster Kane, whose life is ample evidence that the one who dies with the most toys doesn’t necessarily win.

When you’re overcome by rage, remember Achilles and the compassion and self-discipline that he’s able to draw upon in his treatment of Priam in Iliad 24. In other words, remember to be your best self and not lose that self in permanent anger.

When you feel put upon by all the responsibilities you have to other people, remember Hector and the way in which dedication to others can mean not losing your identity but finding it. And when you recognize that you need to do the right thing, even if (or especially if) it’s in a losing cause, remember Hector. That you won’t succeed isn’t a reason not to act. And when doing the right thing means sacrificing your own happiness and pleasure for something far more important, remember Rick and Ilsa and Victor.

When you’re headed toward a goal and find yourself surrounded by temptations and dangers, remember Odysseus, who finally perseveres and gets back to where he once belonged. I think this advice is useful for any college student, who has all sorts of possibilities competing for his or her attention. Don’t lose your life to the lotus, whatever form it might take—drugs, Playstation, chat rooms, television. Don’t listen to the song of the sirens (“You goin’ out tonight?”) when you know that you shouldn’t. And if you think you can listen and get away with it, as Odysseus does, remember that he’s a fictional character.

As you move away from your parents’ oikos and toward making one of your own, remember the importance of sharing with family and friends the pleasures of meals and conversation. Sharing food and drink and talk is one of the practices that make us human. (Isn’t it sad that we need television commercials to encourage us to eat together at the family table?)

When you’re around people who are really old (like grandparents), remember that they were once as young as you and that they probably have all sorts of interesting things to say to someone who’s willing to ask questions and listen. Don’t pass up the chance to talk (really talk) to people who will someday be around only in memory. (This piece of advice is loosely inspired by The Best Years of Our Lives and the fading away of the generation that fought World War II, and also by hearing a young adult grandchild at a memorial service speak of his regret about never getting around to calling his grandfather to have that sort of conversation.)

If you’re lucky enough to find someone who is homophrôn, remember Odysseus and Penelope. When you stay up late at night talking with that person, remember Odysseus and Penelope. And when you’ve been in a relationship for twenty years (or as Fred Derry says, “Twenty years!”), remember Odysseus and Penelope.

And when you find yourself, maybe twenty years from now, thinking of how life would be perfect if only you had a different husband or wife or partner or job or house or life, remember Odysseus’ choice to give up his fantasy world with Calypso for the commitments of the imperfect, real world. In other words, live in relation to those who are your real life, and not in relation to some fantasy of who or what is perfect. We live in a culture saturated with images of what for almost all of us is unattainable human beauty and perfection. Real life though is a lot more interesting.

And when you make mistakes, remember Eve and Adam. Live the consequences of your choices, and learn from them so that you can make better choices next time. Pretty simple, right? (Not!)

That’s enough to remember and do—enough for a lifetime, really. As you move toward the fulltime responsibility of making a living, don’t forget to make a life. A lifetime is so small—make yours count.

Not dead yet

[Last words for English 2601, Backgrounds of Western Literature]

When an interviewer asked the poet David Shapiro to name his favorite living poet, he named Wallace Stevens. But Stevens is dead, the interviewer objected. Not to me, Shapiro replied.

It’s still fashionable (merely fashionable, not genuinely illuminating) to refer to the poets we’ve read (with the exception of Sappho) as “dead white men,” as if they were therefore irrelevant to our current understandings of human possibility and freedom. But it doesn’t take very much reflection to recognize that the truth is a lot more complicated. “White”? That’s a category that might say more about our painful American inheritance of the “color-line” (W.E.B. DuBois’ term) than about the writers we’ve read. “Men”? Sure, but what does that mean? Dismissing a work of the imagination on the basis of its maker’s gender seems downright totalitarian. Besides, as the poet Susan Howe has said, the poet is never merely a man or woman, the imagination never reducible to gender.

There’s a tremendous irony in seeing our world as somehow beyond the works of Homer and company. In truth, the world of these “dead white men” is in many ways our own. War is still the way that conflicts between states and peoples are too often settled. We still remember the dead by memorializing their names. We still experience the deep difficulties of returning home and becoming reconnected to people and a place. We still debate whether the penalty of death is or isn’t a form of justice. In our pursuit of desire we still make ourselves and others ridiculous. We still lie awake at night wondering about the ones we love, and we still delight in the miracle of children to carry life forward when we're gone. The continuities between past and present are numerous and specific. Thus the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay finds in Achilles and Odysseus patterns of trauma that help him understand the experiences of the Vietnam veterans with whom he works. Thus a recent production of Euripides’ Medea draws parallels between the dialogue of Medea and the chorus and the dialogue of guest and audience on trash talk-shows. (Like ancient Athenians, we seem to have a penchant for stories about women who have done what’s monstrous—killing their husbands and children, seducing their much-younger students.)

It doesn’t make me happy to draw these analogies, or to point out that we’re still living with patriarchy, slavery, and genocide. But it occurs to me that these ancient writers might be far more honest than we might like in acknowledging these realities. How many mainstream news organizations have shown the grief of mothers, wives, and sisters in war as fully as Homer has in the Iliad? How many have shown the horrors of war and genocide as Homer and Virgil have? (There’s genocide taking place in Sudan as I write these words: have you seen much about it on the news?) And in many ways, these ancient writers seem to be far ahead of us. Homer gives us a partnership of deep, mutual understanding in Odysseus and Penelope; Aristophanes gives us women who make a radical change in the affairs of state. Yet materials in use in federally-funded “abstinence-only” education programs tell young women not to give too many suggestions or too much advice to their boyfriends. Sappho’s “Look at him, just like a god,” was celebrated among the ancients as the poetic representation of the effects of love. How easy is it to imagine a poem of same-sex desire attaining that status in our culture? Who’s more modern than whom?

The ancient world was a complicated place. We’re still living in it, along with Homer, Virgil, Sappho, and all the poets we haven’t read (Hesiod, Horace, Catullus, and so on, all of whom are waiting for your attention). For those of you who will teach, I hope you’ll be able to return to some of these poets, even if you also have to teach novels about young adults who confront painful choices and go on to make self-empowering decisions in their lives. It’s entirely possible: a former student recently persuaded his high school to order several hundred copies of Lombardo’s Odyssey.

In the words of the poet Ted Berrigan, “Not dead yet.”