Happy Mother's Day

It's the busiest telephone holiday of the year.

[From the comedy short Just Mother (1914). Photograph from the Billy Rose Theatre Collection. Via the NYPL Digital Gallery.]

Boening, Meehan, plagiarism

Plagiarism in the news: the Tuscaloosa News has available for download the University of Alabama dissertations of Carl Boening and William Meehan. Meehan's abstract includes this acknowledgement:

Using a case study and content analysis design, this study replicated at a regional comprehensive institution a study of sabbatical leave patterns that had first been conducted at The University of Alabama in 1996 by Carl Boening.

The phrasing — "a study . . . that had first been conducted" — is odd. It suggests not that Meehan is doing the same kind of thing but that he and Boening are doing the same thing, with Boening having gone first.

A glance at the almost identical tables of contents of the two dissertations makes clear that Meehan is indeed replicating. A couple of samples from Chapters Five:

Boening:

The current chapter was designed to provide a summary of the study and to explore the conclusions and recommendations for further study and practice that may be drawn from the analysis of the data. The chapter is divided into five sections: Summary of the Study, Conclusions, Recommendations for Further Study, Recommendations for Practice, and Chapter Summary.

Meehan:

The current chapter was designed to provide a summary of the study and to offer conclusions and recommendations for further study. The chapter is divided into five sections: Summary of the Study, Conclusions, Discussion, Recommendations, and Chapter Summary.

Boening:

Six research questions were presented in the study for analysis:

Research Question 1:

What were the sabbatical approval patterns, by discipline, at the University of Alabama . . . ?

Research Question 2:

What was the typical requested length of sabbatical period?

Meehan:

Seven research questions were presented in the study for analysis:

Research Question 1: What were the sabbatical leave patterns, by discipline, at Jacksonville State University . . . ?

Research Question 2: What was the typical requested length of sabbatical period?

And so on.

And so on.

These samples make clear that Meehan is not doing the same kind of thing; he is borrowing without attribution the content of Boening's dissertation, with Jacksonville State's sabbatical data replacing data from the University of Alabama.

Is it possible to plagiarize even after acknowledging a source? Yes. Is it possible to plagiarize bland, everyday prose? Yes. Is it possible that a committee saw nothing wrong with replicating a dissertation, even down to its sentences? Yes, in which case Meehan's dissertation, like that of Southern Illinois president Glenn Poshard, raises questions about the standards of scholarship in education programs. But by any standard of academic integrity, William Meehan's dissertation involves plagiarism.

More:

Yes, its [sic] plagiarism (Tuscaloosa News)
Carl Boening dissertation (PDF download, 3.8 MB)
William Meehan dissertation (PDF download, 3.5 MB)

Today's Hi and Lois

Today's Hi and Lois features the ol' switcheroo, as the whiteboard jumps from wall to wall when the mirror returns from break. Or perhaps all the wall items are shifting places (think volleyball rotation). Go ahead and click — seeing is believing.

Going backward

Watching The Graduate (dir. Mike Nichols, 1967) with some of my students recently, I had a thought about the film's opening credits, which play as Benjamin Braddock stands on an automated walkway at LAX, moving without moving. A simple choice: should Ben be facing right, or left?



Yes, left. Forward movement typically goes from left to right, as when reading text in English. Ben's going backward, going home.

Between watching The Graduate and writing this post, I happened to read Bill Madison's recent interview with Betty Aberlin of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Talking about Fred Rogers' care with every detail of production, Lady Aberlin notes that

Things happened left to right on the screen, because a child learns to read with his eyes being trained left to right.

This post has moved from right to left, from a movie about a college graduate to a television show for pre-schoolers. Now it's time for my snack.

The flag of equal marriage

Behold the flag of equal marriage. Inspired by the flag of women's suffrage, this flag presents equal marriage as an American idea — flag-ready, so to speak. And it depicts in an instantly recognizable way the gradual but decisive work of cultural change, as the field begins to fill with stars.

I can mark the moment when I changed my thinking on the subject of equal marriage, several years ago, after long supporting the idea of civil unions for all. Elaine and I were driving back from a restaurant with friends, same-sex partners who've been together about as long as we have. It occurred to me to wonder: why should we two have all the benefits afforded married couples while our friends did not? "Because we're heterosexual" hardly seemed a reasonable answer. Indeed, that answer seemed too similar to other claims of supposedly self-evident privilege, whatever elements of identity — color, gender, religion — those claims might involve.

Andrew Sullivan's 2004 essay "Why The M Word Matters To Me" speaks eloquently of marriage's necessity:

When people talk about gay marriage, they miss the point. This isn't about gay marriage. It's about marriage. It's about family. It's about love. It isn't about religion. It's about civil marriage licenses. Churches can and should have the right to say no to marriage for gays in their congregations, just as Catholics say no to divorce, but divorce is still a civil option. These family values are not options for a happy and stable life. They are necessities. Putting gay relationships in some other category — civil unions, domestic partnerships, whatever — may alleviate real human needs, but by their very euphemism, by their very separateness, they actually build a wall between gay people and their families. They put back the barrier many of us have spent a lifetime trying to erase.

One day the flag of marriage equality will have fifty stars. It will look exactly like the American flag. I hope to be around when it becomes impossible to tell the one flag from the other.

[Flag of equal marriage by Carl Tashian, licensed under a Creative Commons License.]

I dream of Strunk and White

I dozed for a moment reading The Elements of Style yesterday afternoon and dreamed the following pair of sentences, in two columns, like the sample sentences in the book:

When I woke, I wrote down my dream sentences but soon grew unsure as to which was the original and which the revision. My daughter Rachel pointed out that they must go in the above order, since the second sentence is so much better than the first. Yes, she was kidding.

How important is a college education?

Various people answer the question. My contribution:

Tremendously important! (I'm an English professor, so you know I'm going to say that.) I will add though that there's a tremendous difference between getting an education and getting a degree.

The real point of college is the practice it offers in developing the ability to think and feel deeply and learn about the world and one's possible place in it. Not to learn how to make a living, but to learn how to make a life, as I remember an old professor saying at my freshman orientation, back in the 20th century.

Read all the responses at Productivity 501.

Toxic postscript

My post SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM. made it to Boing Boing yesterday, which means thousands of first-time — and last-time — readers. I posted Milton Glaser's advice partly because I'm interested (always) in what older people have to say, partly because I like the then 72-year-old Glaser's bluntness. (Older people often specialize in bluntness.) I also like the urgent, ominous, all-caps run-on — "SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM." — which looks to my eyes like the work of an outsider artist. That's the way the sentence appears on Glaser's website, sans internal punctuation, so it has someone's okay.

I didn't call Glaser's advice good (David Pescovitz called it "terrific"). But I do think it's good advice, which is to say, useful. And I've been surprised by the many angry responses this post has elicited. I don't think Glaser is suggesting that friends are for one's use, nor do I think he's suggesting that we walk away from situations that are difficult or exhausting (a friend in distress, a relative in the hospital). A more generous reading would take this advice as relevant to everyday encounters: with the colleague who makes every run-in in the hallway an occasion of hostility, with the supervisor who makes the workplace a theater of cruelty, with the acquaintance whose conversation is a stream of belittlement and mockery.

An anonymous commenter at Boing Boing offered the example of leaving a social situation and asking "Why the hell do I do this to myself?" That question seems to me to capture the scenarios in which Glaser's idea of toxicity applies. No one (except perhaps George Costanza) would ask that question after visiting a friend or relative in need. But in everyday social settings, it's exactly the question that suggests the need to walk away.

SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.

From "Ten Things I Have Learned," a 2001 talk by graphic designer Milton Glaser:

the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.

This passage is from no. 3, "SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM" (via kottke.org).

If you're visiting from Boing Boing or elsewhere:

I posted Milton Glaser's advice partly because I'm interested (always) in what older people have to say, partly because I like the then 72-year-old Glaser's bluntness. (Older people often specialize in bluntness.) I also like the urgent, ominous, all-caps run-on — "SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM." — which looks to my eyes like the work of an outsider artist. That's the way the sentence appears on Glaser's website, sans internal punctuation, so it has someone's okay.

I didn't call Glaser's advice good (David Pescovitz called it "terrific"). But I do think it's good advice, which is to say, useful. And I've been surprised by the many angry responses this post has elicited. I don't think Glaser is suggesting that friends are for one's use, nor do I think he's suggesting that we walk away from situations that are difficult or exhausting (a friend in distress, a relative in the hospital). A more generous reading would take this advice as relevant to everyday encounters: with the colleague who makes every run-in in the hallway an occasion of hostility, with the supervisor who makes the workplace a theater of cruelty, with the acquaintance whose conversation is a stream of belittlement and mockery.

An anonymous commenter at Boing Boing offered the example of leaving a social situation and asking "Why the hell do I do this to myself?" That question seems to me to capture the scenarios in which Glaser's idea of toxicity applies. No one (except perhaps George Costanza) would ask that question after visiting a friend or relative in need. But in everyday social settings, it's exactly the question that suggests the need to walk away.

More on Pullum, Strunk, White

Below, a sampling of recent commentary on Geoffrey Pullum's "Fifty Years of Stupid Grammar Advice" and William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White's The Elements of Style. Most of what follows is at least mildly pro-Elements. I haven't been able to find pro-Pullum pieces that do much more than restate his claims as true.

Chad Orzel is pragmatic:

While a slavish adherence to the rules presented in The Elements of Style would have unfortunate results for people who already write well, it would be a clear improvement for most college students. Just an attempt to follow the guidelines in Strunk and White would make most of the lab reports I have to grade dramatically better.

Strunk and White Is Not for You (Uncertain Principles)

Tim Carmody too is pragmatic:

I still think Chapter 5 of Elements, "Words and Expressions Commonly Misused," is pretty solid, and a good starting point for teaching young writers. Here the idea is that a few don'ts (as Ezra Pound would say) often can stop particularly dire barbarisms in their tracks.

Anti-Strunkites (Snarkmarket)

David G. Shrock is skeptical about the damage wrought by Strunk and White:

I agree with Pullum that The Elements of Style should not be the sole resource for learning grammar, but grammar instruction is not the intent of the book. Is it responsible for degrading grammar in America? Pullum does not offer any evidence.

Linguist and Reading Comprehension (Writing for Torre)

John Schwenkler too is skeptical:

"The land of the free in the grip of The Elements of Style,“ Pullum calls us. If only.

Strunk'd (The American Scene)

Charlie Loyd contrasts Strunk-and-White and Pullum by means of fine analogies:

Strunk and White are like expert gardeners. They wrote a very short introduction to gardening and sold it as a gardening book. Gardeners used it to learn about gardening, or, considering just how short it is, as inspiration to think consciously about gardening, and so it started or helped many careers in gardening.

Pullum is like an expert botanist. He reads the gardening book and says "This is absurd! They plant things next to each other that come from different continents. Why prune an apple tree when it grows fine on its own? Their suggestions for crop rotation are a ludicrous simplification of natural interspersal," and so on.

Pullum v. Strunk and White (Env)

And the New York Times is hosting a party, Happy Birthday, Strunk and White! Some party: it's Geoffrey Pullum and four other guests mostly hatin' on The Elements of Style. Pullum leads, repeating the hardly convincing claim that Strunk and White advocate writing without adjectives and adverbs:

Some of the commands would be all but impossible to follow: "Write with nouns and verbs," for example. No one avoids all use of adjectives and adverbs.

Gee, no kidding?

Stephen Dodson: "If people would stop touting it as the Indispensable Book and using it as a weapon, we wouldn’t have to annoy them with our attacks."

Mignon Fogarty ("Grammar Girl"): "Wishing there were hard-and-fast rules doesn’t make it so." (Reading The Elements of Style makes clear that many of its rules are far from firm.)

Patricia T. O’Conner: "much of the grammar and usage advice in the rest of the book is baloney."

Ben Yagoda: "a strange little book."

Mark Garvey, author of Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style (forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in October), has written a response to the Times piece. One good bit re: Pullum:

Professor Pullum writes: "The simplistic don't-do-this, don't-write-that instructions offered in the book would not guarantee good writing if they were obeyed." Guarantee it? Of course not — no more than a knowledge of musical scales can guarantee I will play piano like Horowitz. But scales are the way.

Strunk and White, The Elements of Style (Text Arts)

And finally, the comments on my post Pullum on Strunk and White should be of interest to anyone interested in this debate. This thread seems to get better as it goes on, with a number of readers offering long and thoughtful responses.

The final paragraph of my most recent comment on that post:

I think The Elements is a much more helpful book than Pullum allows. But is it, to paraphrase Tom Waits, a friend, a companion, the only product you will ever need? No.

Related posts
Strunk and White and wit
The Elements of Style, one more time