Overheard

Last night, a well-dressed, middle-aged woman in a bookstore:

“I did, and I thought it was excellent. And I don’t do vampire.”

Related reading
All “overheard” posts (via Pinboard)

Jacques Barzun on multiple-choice

Jacques Barzun on multiple-choice tests:

Multiple-choice questions test nothing but passive-recognition knowledge, not active usable knowledge. Knowing something means the power to summon up facts and their significance in the right relations. Mechanical testing does not foster this power. It is one thing to pick out Valley Forge, not Dobbs Ferry or Little Rock, as the place where George Washington made his winter quarters; it is another, first, to think of Valley Forge and then to say why he chose it rather than Philadelphia, where it was warmer.

Multiple-choice tests, whether of fact or skill, break up the unity of knowledge and isolate the pieces; nothing follows on anything else, and a student’s mind must keep jumping. True testing elicits the pattern originally learned; an essay examination reinforces pattern-making. Ability shows itself not in the number of accurate “hits” but in the extent, coherence, and verbal accuracy of each whole answer. Science and math consist of similar clusters of thought, and, in all subjects, to compose organized statements requires full-blown thinking. Objective tests ask only for sorting.

“The Tyranny of Testing” (1962). In A Jacques Barzun Reader, edited by Michael Murray (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).

Why Valley Forge? The National Parks Service explains.

A related post
Whitehead on primrose paths and external examinations

[A relevant anecdote: A student once asked, only semi-seriously, if our final exam would be multiple-choice. In life, said I, there are no multiple-choice tests. People expect you to develop answers, not choose them. A second student suggested that there was indeed one multiple-choice test in life: marriage. No, said a third student, marriage is a true-false test. No, said I, marriage is a matching test. It was a lively class, with an essay exam.]

Whitehead on primrose paths and external examinations

Alfred North Whitehead wouldn’t have approved of the collegiate “study guide,” the simple pre-exam handout (handout indeed), often requiring (I am told) no more than fifteen or twenty minutes of effort to memorize. From The Aims of Education (1929):

In education, as elsewhere, the broad primrose path leads to a nasty place. This evil path is represented by a book or a set of lectures which will practically enable the student to learn by heart all the questions likely to be asked at the next external examination.

Nor would Whitehead approve of what we now call the standardized test, what he called the “uniform external examination”:

We do not denounce it because we are cranks, and like denouncing established things. We are not so childish. Also, of course, such examinations have their use in testing slackness. Our reason of dislike is very definite and very practical. It kills the best part of culture. When you analyse in the light of experience the central task of education, you find that its successful accomplishment depends on a delicate adjustment of many variable factors. The reason is that we are dealing with human minds, and not with dead matter. The evocation of curiosity, of judgment, of the power of mastering a complicated tangle of circumstances, the use of theory in giving foresight in special cases — all these powers are not to be imparted by a set rule embodied in one schedule of examination subjects.

Nothing in my experience does more to kill intellectual curiosity and effort in young adults than schooling focused on the work of standardized tests. When every question has only one right answer, any thoughts you think will most likely be wrong.

[Whitehead’s understanding of culture: “Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it.” My knowledge of the “study guide” comes from conversations over the past few years with students who have studied in many different institutions. A “study guide” often includes both questions and answers.]

Abby and Austin

[Click for a larger view.]

I rediscovered the above clipping between pages 10 and 11 in my copy of J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962). On page 10:

For one who says “promising is not merely a matter of uttering words! It is an inward and spiritual act!” is apt to appear as a solid moralist standing out against a generation of superficial theorizers: we see him as he sees himself, surveying the invisible depths of ethical space, with all the distinction of a specialist in the sui generis. Yet he provides Hippolytus with a let-out, the bigamist with an excuse for his “I do” and the welsher with a defense for his “I bet.” Accuracy and morality alike are on the side of the plain saying that our word is our bond.

Other posts with J.L. Austin
William Labov
Write 5 sentence [sic] about cat

[Austin gives this translation of a line from Euripides’ Hippolytus: “My tongue swore to, but my heart (or mind or other backstage artiste) did not.” “Our word is our bond” alludes to the motto of the London Stock Exchange: “Dictum meum pactum,” My word is my bond.]

“Rewording”

A surprising number of college students are devoted to what they call “rewording”: the practice of taking a passage from someone else’s writing and, uh, rewording it, without attribution. More surprising is that many such students see nothing wrong with this practice. More surprising still is that some of their professors see nothing wrong with it either and even encourage it. I suspect that the Dunning-Kruger effect is at work here: such professors must lack the competence to understand that what they’re encouraging is in fact plagiarism.

There are many authoritative explanations in print of paraphrase, plagiarism, and the inappropriateness of rewording without attribution. Here’s an excerpt from a helpful online explanation, from the Writing Center at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill:

What About Paraphrasing?

Paraphrasing means taking another person’s ideas and putting those ideas in your own words. Paraphrasing does NOT mean changing a word or two in someone else’s sentence, changing the sentence structure while maintaining the original words, or changing a few words to synonyms. If you are tempted to rearrange a sentence in any of these ways, you are writing too close to the original. That’s plagiarizing, not paraphrasing.

Paraphrasing is a fine way to use another person’s ideas to support your argument as long as you attribute the material to the author and cite the source in the text at the end of the sentence. In order to make sure you are paraphrasing in the first place, take notes from your reading with the book closed. Doing so will make it easier to put the ideas in your own words. When you are unsure if you are writing too close to the original, check with your instructor BEFORE you turn in the paper for a grade. So, just to be clear—do you need to cite when you paraphrase? Yes, you do!

Plagiarism (The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

When I talk with students about these matters, I always point out that no matter what they’ve been told, “rewording” without attribution is plagiarism, though perhaps in a hapless and unsophisticated form. Imagine getting an F for a paper or a course without even realizing that you’re engaging in academic misconduct. That’s the Dunning-Kruger effect with a vengeance. Yipes.

Related posts
“Local Norms” and “‘organic’ attribution” (writing without quotation marks)
Old and unimproved (“How to e-mail a professor,” “reworded”)

[My knowledge of “rewording” comes from many conversations over many years with students who have studied in many different institutions. My syllabi and other course materials make clear that “rewording” is a no-no.]

VDP on time

Van Dyke Parks, from the stage in Santa Barbara last week:

“Time is our only common enemy; the rest of it is just bar talk on a sinking Titanic.”

Domestic aspirations

As heard on Modern Family, Cameron Tucker (Eric Stonestreet) speaking:

“You know, I just wanna be home, reading on opposite ends of the sofa.”

[That’s how I feel today. Elaine, are you with me?]

“People are getting rid of bookshelves”

J. L. Sathre:

1. People are getting rid of bookshelves. Treat the money you budgeted for shelving as found money. Go to garage sales and cruise the curbs.

2. While you’re drafting that business plan, cut your projected profits in half. People are getting rid of bookshelves.

25 Things I Learned From Opening a Bookstore (Open Salon, found via Coudal)

Barthes on pens

Roland Barthes on writing as ritual:

Take the gesture, the action of writing. I would say, for example, that I have an almost obsessive relation to writing instruments. I often switch from one pen to another just for the pleasure of it. I try out new ones. I have far too many pens — I don’t know what to do with all of them! And yet, as soon as I see a new one, I start craving it. I cannot keep myself from buying them.

When felt-tipped pens first appeared in the stores, I bought a lot of them. (The fact that they were originally from Japan was not, I admit, displeasing to me.) Since then I’ve gotten tired of them, because the point flattens out too quickly. I’ve also used pen nibs — not the “Sergeant-Major,” which is too dry, but softer nibs, like the “J.” In short, I’ve tried everything . . . except Bics, with which I feel absolutely no affinity. I would even say, a bit nastily, that there is a “Bic style,” which is really just for churning out copy, writing that merely transcribes thought.

In the end, I always return to fine fountain pens. The essential thing is that they can produce that soft, smooth writing I absolutely require.

“An Almost Obsessive Relation to Writing Instruments.” From a 1973 interview with Jean-Louis de Rambures. In Barthes’s The Grain of the Voice: Interviews, 1962–1980, translated by Linda Coverdale (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985).

Barthes writes about felt-tipped pens in the essay “Stationery Store”:

The felt-tipped pen, of Japanese origin, has taken up where the brush leaves off: this stylo is not an improvement of the point, itself a product of the pen (of steel or of cartilage); its immediate ancestry is that of the ideogram.

Empire of Signs, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).

There are many photographs of Barthes with a cigarette in hand, but none that I can find in which he holds a pen. The New Yorker though has some samples of his handwriting.

Related posts
Five pens (reveries)
R. Crumb’s supplies (steel nibs, Pelikan ink, Strathmore paper)
Nabokov’s supplies (pencils, index cards)
Proust, Barthes, involuntary memory
Proust’s supplies (a Sergeant-Major fan)

This is not your song

Republican strategist Steve Schmidt:

“When you think about every iconic song that has emotional resonance for millions and millions of Americans, in almost every instance, Republican candidates can’t use the song because the artist is not supportive.”

G.O.P. Candidates Are Told, Don’t Use the Verses, It’s Not Your Song (New York Times)

Caution: the article includes a photograph of Survivor, c. 1979. What were people thinking back then?