English 150 Class Booklet FALL 2012 Instructor: Jay Scrivner If you listen to the speech of people in public office, you'll be impressed by how easy it is to become fluent by simply repeating formulas that are supplied for you, where speech is semi-automatic. But articulateness means developing your own rhythm of speech and speaking in your own voice, and that takes independence and not a little courage. So the skill is not purely technical: it’s partly moral as well. --Northrop FryeTable of Contents English 150 Scrivner Emergency Response Procedures CR Code of Conduct on Academic Honesty Grammar Schedule Grammar Score Sheet Mechanical Corrections Guide Introductory Readings “It’s Not About How Smart You Are...” Understanding Argument Articles for Essay 1: Education “At Least They Have High Self Esteem...” “Failing To Motivate” “Higher Ed’s Bermuda Triangle” “What Our Education Needs Is More F's” “Capitol Journal: Chipping Away ...” “Limit Set on Repeating College Courses” “Community Colleges Re-Think Open Door. “2 Year College, Squeezed, Sets 2 Tier Tuition’ “Students Protest Santa Monica College Plar...” “Santa Monica College’s Two-Tier Trap” “Budget Cuts Force Unit Cap on Fall 2012” Articles For Essay 3: Technology “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” “Tech Beat: Is the Internet Making Us Stupid?” “Why the Demise of Print Media is Bad...” “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” “Why the Kindle Won’t Kill Romance” “Should Your 2-Year Old be Using an iPad?” “Do E-Books Make It Harder to Remember...” “A Slow Books Manifesto” “Digital Literacy’ Will Never Replace. “Your Brain on Fiction” Essay Basics Basic Recipe for a Short, Formal Essay The Arguable Thesis and Topic Sentence Contrasting Eng 350 and 150 Essays Developing Your Thesis ‘Strong Body Paragraphs Constructing Paragraphs English Department Statement on Academic. MLA Paper Formatting Rubric for Essays 35 56 39 70 2B 16 80 82 86 87 89 95 103 105 108 118 120 122 125 128 130 135 136 140 141 143 144 147 149 151say Assignments and Prewriting Questions at Issue 155 Essay 1 — Education 157 Topic Selection Worksheet 159 ‘Thesis/Support Planning Worksheet 161 Draft Conference Record Form 165 Essay 2—The Glass Castle 167 ‘Topic Selection Worksheet 171 Thesis/Support Planning Worksheet 173 Draft Conference Record Form 177 Essay 3—Technology 179 ‘Topic Selection Worksheet 181 Thesis/Support Planning Sheet 183 Draft Conference Record Form 187 Articles for Reading Tests “Men Being Men Is a Bad Deal” 191 Discussion Guide 195 “Message and the Media: Our Girls...” 196 “Why Do We Let Them Dress Like That” 198 “The Case For Working with Your Hands” 201 Competency Exam and Articles General Information about the Competeney Exam 217 Recipe for the Competency Exam 220 Rubric for the Competency Exam. 221 Directions for the Competency Exam 222 Readings for Practice Comp Exam 1 223 Readings for Practice Comp Exam 2 227 Reading for Extra Practice Comp Exam 231EMERGENCY RESFONSE PROCEDURES EARTHQUAKE Before the earthquake: Plan and prepare. Carry emergency supplies for up to 72 hours in your vehicle. Include flashlight, portable radio, extra batteries for both, emergency food and water, blanket or sleeping bag, plastic sheet (to put under sleeping bag, or protect from rain), pillow. Become educated about the effects of an earthquake and actions to take. During the earthquake: Stay calm. If indoors, assume the “duck, cover and hold” position (head tucked, with face covered by heads and arms) under desks or tables with backs to windows. Ifno desks or fables are available, stand in doorways or sit with back to outside (supporting) walls. Do not place fingers into door jams as the door may slam and crush your hands. Hold these positions uatil the event ends. Ifoutdoors, get into an open area away from trees, buildings, walls, and power lines. CAUTION: Always avoid utility lines as they may be energized. I driving a vehicle, pull to the side of the road away from buildings if possible. Park away from bridges, cliffs, trees, and power lines. Set the brakes and turn off the ignition. Ifthe quake was severe, do not cross bridges or overpasses until they are cleared. After the initial shock: Evaluate the situation. Notify Campts Security, extension 4111, of serious hazards and injuries. Provide First Aid as appropriate until the arrival of assistance. Evacuate the building, Direct other students to assist the disabled if necessary. Proceed to the Safety Zone appropriate to your building and campus (see more below). Instructors/ staff will conduc: roll call to determine that everyone in the class has made it out of the building successfully. All students and staff should remain with their groups until otherwisedirected. Under no circumstances is a student to reenter the building until an all clear has been officially announced by the Incident Commander (President or Senior Administrator). F. Insure Protect yourself at all times and be prepared for aftershocks The college advises that you do not leave campus immediately. The situation may dictate that it is safer on campus than on roadways that may be buckled or where bridges may have fallen. Additionally, departure requires going downhill where there may be a serious threat from @ possible Tsunami Flooding. Report damaged facilities to Maintenance, extension 4380 (to Security, extension 4111 at night or on weekends). Gas leaks and power failures create special hazards. Do not use college telephones, light switches, or any other electrical equipment if you smell gas (Call Maintenance from a phone in another area).+ Ifinstructed to do so, activate the building alarm to alert occupants to evacuate. Note: Activation of building alarms also notifies the Eureka Fire Department and fire trucks will be dspatched. Such activation should be coordinated with Security to prevent an unnecessary response by the Eureka Fire Department. TSUNAMI/TIDAL WAVE, ‘The predicted extent of the flood or tidal wave, and the amount of time available before it arrives will determine the course of action to be taken. A tsunami normally takes place following a major earthquake either locally, or at long distances. The Office of Emergency Services provides warning broadcasts on the radio as well as calling many local institutions. Upon receipt of such information, Security will immediately place warning signs at each of the three exits at the Eureka campus All staff and students should be warned to stay on high ground until an “all clear” is received, or at Jeast 15 to 20 minutes after a major local earthquake. U.S. 101 is at sea level and may prove very dangerous if a tsunami develops. The President/ Superintendent or Incident Commander may initiate this disaster plan or any of the following actions as considered necessary: 1, Provide care for students at school, or 2. Direct students and/or staifto go home, or 3. Direct evacuation of low-lying buildings, or 4, Coordinate response with county Office of Emergency Services. EUREKA CAMPUS SAFETY ZONES FOR EVACUATION Some building exits do have old evacuation direction maps, and all student dorm rooms have evacuation ‘maps in each room; however, the college is. developiag new maps that will be posted as soon as possible at each building exit. In the meantime there are five (5) potential areas identified as Safety Zones on the Eureka campus and they are: Firing range Parking lot behind the dorms Baseball fields Grassy area by back road between Creative Arts and Physical Sciences buildings Botanical Gardens upper parking lot[From College of the Redwoods Student Code of Conduct (AP $500) The following excerpt covers the code of conduct violations most relevant to ENGL 150 and the Writing Center Article VIII. Code of Conduct Violations and Sanctiors (A) Violations ‘Students are expected to demonstrate qualities of morality, integrity, honesty, civility, honor, and respect. Disciplinary action may be initiated by the College and sanctions imposed against any student or student organization found responsible of committing, attempting to commit, or intentionally assisting in the commission of any of the following prohibited forms of conduct: ‘Academie Dishonesty In the academic community, the high value placed on rut implies a corresponding intolerance of scholastic dishonesty. In cases involving academic dishonesty, determination ofthe grade and of the student’s status inthe course is left solely tothe discretion ofthe faculty member. In such cases, where the College representative determines that a student has demonstrated academic dishonesty, the representative is encouraged to report the incident of dishonesty to the Vice President for Student Services and Learning Support or his/her designee in order to discem potential patterns of egregious dishonesty. Acts of academic dishonesty for which sanctions may be imposed includes, but are not limited to, the following: 1. Cheating which includes, but is not limited to: a. The use of any unauthorized assistance in taking quizes, tests, or examinations. Having another individat take en exam, «. Submitting the same paper in two different courses without specific permission ofthe current faculty member(s). 4 Falsifying a laboratory experiment or report of an experiment. ¢. Dependence upon the aid of sources beyond those authorized by the faculty member in writing papers, preparing reports, solving problems, or carrying out oher assignments. £ The sureptitious or unauthorized acquisition of testing materials or other acedemic material belonging toa member ofthe College community. Stidents need not employ the materials; they need only to possess them in order to violate this code, ¢. Electronic devices, which include, but are not limited t: abuse of cellular devices with photographic capability for the purposes of photographing test questions or ober notes nd materials, ‘b. Furnishing false information to any CR official, faculty member, or office, i. Forgery, alteration, or misuse of any CR document, record, or instrument of identification. 4. Knowingly helping another to commit an act of academic dishonesty. 2, Plagiarism which includes, but is not Limited to: 2. Using, by paraphrase or direet quotation, of the published or unpublished work of another person without full, clear, and accurate acknowledgement. ». The unacknowledged use of another writer’s ideas without proper citation. Borrowing all or part of ‘another individual’s work or using someone else's outline to write your own work. ¢. Copying another individual’s computer printout andor computer files and using it as one’s own. 4. Using an agency or Internet website engaged in the selling of term papers or other academic materials, 3. Hampering or discrediting the academic work of others by, but not limited to, the following: a. Misusing, damaging, hiding, or stealing ibrary resources. ». Altering or misusing computer programs or equipment. 6 Interfering with the rightful computer access of others, Disrupting or Obstructing the Work and Operation of the College 1, Making false statements to any College official.3. Verba threats, harassment, intimidation, and/or similar threatening conduct that discpts the educational environment or members ofthe College community. 7. Theft (actual or attempted) or destruction of College property or property belonging toa member ofthe College community o other abuse of College computer faelities, programs, technology and equipment, including, but not limited to: 4. Use of computing facilities to interfere withthe work of a student, faculty member or College official i, Use of computing facilities to interfere with opzration of the College computing systems ¥i, Unlawfil or unasthorized use ofthe Interne; he unauthorized connection of technological and computing equipment to the College's computers and/or network, 8. Unauthorized use of cell phones, pagers and other communication devices inal instructional areas and the Library, inclading all labs and classrooms during instructional sessions. 9. Coercion, which is defined as atempting to compel, control, or manipulate another through the threat of force, intimidation, exploitation of fear or anxiety, including explicit and implied physical and verbal threats against another perso. 10, Disruption or obstruction of teaching, research, administration, disciplinary proceedings, other CR activites, including its publi service funetions on or off campus, or of other authorized non-CR activities when the conduct occurs on CR premises. 21. Failure to comply with reasonable directions of College officials o public safety officers acting in performance oftheir duties on campus or affecting conduct on campus. i. Influencing or attempting to influence another person to 2ommit an abuse ofthe student conduct code system. 27, Unlawful possession, use, sale, offer to sell, or furnishing, or being under the influence of, any controlled substance lstd in California Health and Safety Code Secton 11053 et seq, an alcoholic beverage, or an intoxicant of any kind; or unlawful posession of, or offering, arranging or negotiating the sale of any drug paraphernalia as defined in California Health and Safety Code Section 110145. 28, Willfl or persistent smoking in any area where smaking has been prohibited by law or by regulation of the College 30, Dishonesty; forgery; alteration or misuse of College documents records or identification; or knowingly furnishing false information to the College. 31. Engaging in expression which is obscene, libelous or slanderous, or which so incites students as to create a clear and present danger of the commission of unlawful acts on College premises, or the violation of lawfal College regulations or the substantial disruption of the orderly operation ofthe College. 532, Persistent, serious miscondvet where other means of corection bave failed to bring about proper conduct. 33. Unauthorized preparation giving, selling, transfer, distibution, or publication, for any commercial purpose, of any contemporaneous recording ofan academic presetaticn in a classroom or equivalent site of instruction, including but not limited to handwritten or typewritten class notes, except as permitted by any district policy or administrative procedure 34, Knowing possession or use of explosives, dangerous chemicals, or deadly weapons without prior authorization of the PresidenSuperintendent. 35, Disengaging smoke or fire detection equipment. 36, Students ae required to engage in responsible socal conduct that reflects credit upon the CR Community and to ‘model good citizenship in sny community.Grammar Schedule and Score SheetBrace ave Boe pedeWEEK 2 WEEK3 WEEK 4 WEEK 5 WEEK 6 WEEK7 WEEK 8 WEEK9 WEEK 10 WEEK I1 WEEK 12 WEEK 13 WEEK 14 (or 15) The Least You Should Know About English (Form A, 11" ed.) Assignment and Test Schedule Parts of Speech, 27-8; Exercises 1-5 and Paragraph Exercise Special Instructions for Exercises: Identify nouns, pronouns, and verbs only. Locating Prepositional Phrases, 63-4; Exercises 1-5 and Paragraph Exercise Finding Subjects and Verbs, 57-8; Exereises 1-5 and Paragraph Exercise Identifying Verb Phrases, 91-2; Exercises 1-5, BUT ignore the following sentences: 1-5, 1-6, 1-7, 1-9, 2-2, 2-7, 3-1, 3-2, 3-10, 4-2, 4-3, 4-6, 4-7, 4-8, 4-9, 5-6, 5-9, 5-10. Supplemental Exercises on Identifying Clauses and Phrases (See opening pages of text); Exercises A-I and A-2 Understanding Dependent Clauses,69-71; Exereises 1-2, 4-5, BUT ignore the following sentences: I-1, 2-5, 2-7, 4-7, 4-8, 5-8. Review Exercise, 95-6 UNIT TEST 1 (in class): Material from Weeks 2-4 Correcting Fragments, 76-8; Exercises 1-5 and Proofreading Exercise Correcting Run-On Sentences, 83-5; Exereises 1, 3-5. and Proofreading Exercise, BUT ignore the following sentences: 1-2, 1-3, 1-7, 5-5. UNIT TEST 2 (in class): Material from Weeks 5-6 Using Pronouns: Case and Pronoun Agreement, 150-2; 1-5 and Proofreading Exercises. Vague Pronoun Reference Supplemental Information (See opening pages of text); All Exercises (B-I through B-5 Review) Avoiding Shifts in Person, 157; Proofreading Exereises 1-3 Maintaining Subject-Verb Agreement, 113-15; 1-5 and Proofreading Exercise UNIT TEST 3 (in class): Material from Weeks 7-9 Comma Rules (1, 2, & 3) 170-1; Exereises 1-5 and Proofreading Exercise Comma Rules (4, 5, & 6) 177-8; Exercises 1~ Comma Review Exercise , Proofreading Exercise, and Period, Question Mark, Exclamation Point, Semicolon, Colon, Dash, 162-4; Exereises 3-5 and Proofreading Exercise Contractions, 40-1, Exercises 1-5 Possessives, 46-7, Exercises 1-5, Proofreading Exercise, and Review of Contractions and Possessives (both sections) UNIT TEST 4 (in class): Material from Weeks 10-13The Least You Should Know About English SCORE SHEET DIRECTIONS: AFTER CORRECTING each exercise with the answer keys in the Writing Center, enter the score below, writing the number of your CORRECT sentences (or questions) per exercise. (The total sentences for each exereise are provided.) A you must review that exercise with a Writing Center instructor, who will ‘our low score. For exercises with 10 sentences, you cannot miss more than 3 without seeking an instructor's help. WEEK 2: PARTS OF SPEECH EXI EX2 EX3” EX4 EX5 PROOFREADING 10 ~_10 10 10 10 A sentences WEEK 2: LOCATING PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES EX1 EX2 EX3 EX4 EX5 PARAGRAPH 10 10 10 10 10 S sentences WEEK 3: FINDING SUBJECTS & VERBS EXI EX2 EX3 EX4 EXS PARAGRAPH 10 10 10 10 10 9 sentences WEEK 3: INDENTIFYING VERB PHRASES {Ext EX? EX3 EX4 EXS WERK 4: SUPPLEMENTAL EXERCISES ON IDENTIFYING CLAUSES & PHRASES EXIWEEK 4: UNDERSTANDING DEPEND CLAUSES x2 ExT REVIEW 9 8 8 9 -9 UNIT TEST #1 IN WEEK 5 WEEK 5: CORRECTING FRAGMENTS, EXI EX2 EX3 EX4 EXS PROOFREADING 10 10 10 10 10 5 fragments WEEK 6: CORRECTING RUN-ON SENTENCES EXI EX3 Ex4 EXS PROOFREADING 10 10 6 fragsrun-ons [#2 minor errors) UNIT TEST #2 IN WEEK 7 WEEK 7: PRONOUN CASE & AGREEMENT Ex1 EX2 EX3 EX4 EXS ‘PROOFREADING 10 10 10 10 10 S errors WEEK 8: SUPPLEMENTAL EXERCISES ON VAGUE PRONOUN REFERENCE EXBI EXBS EXB-4 EXB-4 “EXBS (REVIEW) (REVIEW) 6 5 6 6 8 Gerrors WEEK 8: AVOIDING SHIFTS IN PERSON PROOFREADING PROOFREADING PROOFREADING Which {is correct?WEEK 9: MAINTAINING SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT Ext EX2 EX3 EX4 EXS) PROOFREADING 10 10 10 10 Tl errors UNIT TEST #3 IN WEEK 10 WEEK 10: COMMA RULES (1, 2, & 3) EXI EX2 EX3 EX4 EXS PROOFREADING 10 10 10 10 WEEK 11; COMMA RULES (4.5, & 6) EX EX? EX3 EX4 EXS ‘COMMA REVIEW 10 10 10 10 10 10 WEEK 12: PERIOD, QUESTION MARK, EXCLAMATION POINT, SEMICOLON, COLON, DASH. EX3 EX4 EXS PROOFREADING 10 10 10 __ 8 sentences WEEK 13: CONTRACTIONS axl EX? Ex3 EX4 ExS | 10 Ee 10 WEEK 13: POSSESSIVES EXT EX2 EX3 EX4 EXS REVIEW | REVIEW2 10 10 10 10 10. Terrors UNIT TEST #4 IN WEEK 14 (or 15)\2 aMECHANICAL CORRECTIONS EDITING GUIDE The Least You Should Know About English (Form A, 11" ed.) NUMBERS IN PARENTHESES REFER TO PAGE NUMBERS IN THE BOOK. CORRECTION SYMBOLS ARE IN ITALICS (AND ARE ALSO PRINTED IN THE BOOK’S INSIDE COVER). MAJOR ERRORS frag = Fragments (76+) Comma Splices (83+) PRONOUN PROBLEMS ‘pro agr= Pronoun Agreement (151+) pro ref= Pronoun Reference: “Vague Pronoun Reference” supplement at the beginning of the book ) case =Pronoun Case (150+) OTHER ERRORS sv agr = Subject-Verb Agreement (113+) shift = Shifts Shift in Person (157) Shift in Time/ Verb Tense (120) 1 ox par =Correcting Parallel Structure (144+) m Misplaced Modifier (128) dm = Dangling Modifier (128) COMMAS c= Comma Needed Rule #1/Coordination (170) Rule #2/Series (170+) Rule #3/Intro. (171) Rule #5/Interrupters (177+) Rule #6/Non-Essential (178) OTHER PUNCTUATION p =punetuation error Semicolons (163) Colons (163) Dashes (164) Exclamation Points (163) Question Marks (162) apos = Apostrophes Possessives (41+) Contractions (35+) Quotation Marks (185+) Italics/Underlining (185+) cap = Capitalization (191+) SPELLING sp = Misspelled Word Commonly Confused Words accept/except (8) affect/effect (8+) all ready/already (9) choose/chose (10) it’slits (12) lead/led (18) loose/lose (18) passed/past (18) ‘quiet/quite (19) than/then (20) there/their/ they're (20) two/to/too (20) were/wear/ where (21) who’s/whose (21) you’re/your (121)a wmIntroductory Readingsoe13 It’s Not About How Smart You Are: The ‘Get Over Yourself” Concept of Learning By David Glenn ‘The Chronicale o” Higher Education May 9, 2010 Carol Dweck says colleges could improve their students’ learning if they relentlessly encouraged them to think about their mental skills as malleable, rather than as properties fixed at birth. Carol 8. Dweck says that her graduate students here at Stanford University are hard-working, creative, and resilient in the face of failure. But she wouldn't call them smart. Over the last two decades, Dweck has become one of the country's best-known research psychologists by documenting the follies associated with thinking and talking about intelligence as a fixed trait. Most famously, Dweck and her collaborators have demonstrated that praising children for their intelligence can backfire. When young people's sense of self-worth is bound up in the idea that they are smart—a quality they come to understand as a genetic blessing from the sky—at least three bad things can happen. Some students become lazy, figuring that their smarts will bail them out in a pinch. Others conclude that the people who praise their intelligence are simply wrong, and decide that it isn't worth investing effort in homework. Still others might care intensely about school but withdraw from difficult tasks or tie themselves in knots of perfectionism. (To understand this third group, think of the Puritans: They did not believe they had any control over whether they were among God's elect, but they nonetheless searched endlessly for ways to display that they had been chosen, and they were terrified of any evidence that they were not.Enlarge Image.Scholars at Temple U. are studying whether biology students’ grades are shaped by their beliefs about intelligence. Itis much wiser, Dweck says, to praise children for work and persistence, People nearly always perform better if they focus on things they can control, such as their effort, rather than things they cannot. At the age of 63, Dweck wears an expression of perpetual amusement. She is petite and dressed in black, and after six years at Stanford her general gestalt is still more New York than California. (She was raised in Brooklyn, and she taught at Columbia University for 15 years before coming here in 2004.) Amorg her many small crusades is this one: She hates when people use "hard working" to signal faint praise in academic letters of recommendation. "I'd like to change that culture," she says, "Hard working’ is what gets the job done. You just see that year after year. The students who thrive are not necessarily the ones who come in with the perfect scores. It's the ones who love what they're doing and go at it vigorously." That's one tiny way in which Dweck's theories might change higher education. But she also has grander hopes. Colleges could improve their students’ learning, she says, if they relentlessly encouraged them to think about their mental skills as malleable, rather than as properties fixed at birth. No more saying, "I can't major in chemistry because I'm just not wired for math." Most of the evidence on this point comes from studies of younger student Dweck herself spends a great deal of time these days acting as a consultant to publicschools, especially middle schools. But she and others have also conducted several studies that suggest that college students, too, do better if they think of intelligence as flexible rather than frozen. In the next several years, Dweck hopes to develop a program that would train entering college students to adopt a "growth mindset,” in regard to not only their intelligence but also their emotions. The science here is not settled, however. Three recent studies have found that college students’ beliefs about intelligence are not correlated with their academic performance —at least not in the straightforward way that Dweck's model proposes. The authors of those studies say they admire Dweck's work, but they are less hopeful than she is that college students' performance can be turned around with a simple intervention, By her account, Dweck’s own performance as a student was enthusiastic. When she arrived at Barnard College, she had a hard time settling on a major because she was enthralled by all of her courses. "I loved everything," she says. "I loved sciences and I loved humanities. But ultimately I felt that in the humanities—you know, you're writing about things that already exist. But in the sciences you're discovering things that no one has known before. Ultimately I chose psychclogy because it seemed to combine science with things that I liked to think about. And I liked the idea that you could wonder about something, run an experiment, and have an answer a few months later.” What Dweck has wondered about for the last 40 years, more than any other single question, is how people cope with failure. In graduate school at Yale University, she became intrigued by Martin E.P. Seligman's model of "learned helplessness.” In a famous series of experiments in the mid-1960s, Seligman and his colleague Steven F. Maier demonstrated that dogs that were subjected to random, uncontrollable electric shocks usually became helpless over time. That is, even if they were moved into an environment in which they could prevent the shocks by pressing a lever or doing some other trick, the dogs never learned to do so. The experience of random punishment had rendered these dogs passive, and immune to classical Pavlovian conditioning. ‘The Seligman experiments had a huge impact in psychology—but most of the carly studies of learned helplessness in humans had to do with depression. Dweck went down a different road: She wondered if learned helplessness might interfere with students’ academic performance. To test that idea, Dweck asked a few dozen New Haven fifth graders to rearrange four colored blocks so that they matched the patterns shown on a set of cards. Such blocks are a staple of children's IQ tests, and they typically have two red sides, two white sides, and two sides that are diagonally split >etween red and white. But in this case Dweck had rigged the game.Each fifth grader was brought individually to a table with two amiable experimenters, whom we'll call Alice and Bob. ‘The two experimenters alternated the presentation of the block problems according to a random sequence. For each of her problems, Alice gave the child a normal set of blocks But Bob gave the child blocks with too many diagonally split sides—which meant that his problems were impossible to solve. Somewhat like the dogs in Seligman's, experiments, Dweek's fifth graders were subjected to uncontrollable failure at random intervals. Each child worked away at more than 30 of these problems—often solving Alice's, but never solving Bob's. The child had 20 seconds to do each problem, and he had some motivation to get them right. For each correctly solved problem, he was given a chip; with enough chips, he could choose from a pile of toys visible across the room. ooAt the end of the process came a twist. For the last two rounds, Bob quietly switched to a normal set of blocks and gave the child problems that he or she had successfully solved earlier in the experiment. (The patterns were rotated 90 degrees, so they may not have been immediately familiar to the child.) Some of the children failed to solve these problems—or took much longer than usual to get them right—even though they had solved them correctly just moments earlier. These children seemed to have consciously or unconsciously persuaded themselves (not without reason) that they could never solve Bob's problems. Like Seligman’s helpless dogs, they did not seem :o notice or take advantage of the fact that their environment had become controllable. But other children did fine, solving Bob's last two problems with no apparent trouble. It tumed out that the children's performance on those last two problems was strongly predicted by their answers on a psychological questionnaire that Dweck had given them beforehand. The questionnaire, known as the Intellectual Achievement Responsibility Scale, is designed to determine whether a person credits or blames his own behavior for his academic results, or whether he attributes those outcomes to external agents. ("The teacher had it in for me" versus "I didn't study hard enough." Or "the instructions weren't written clearly" versus "I didn't read the instructions carefully.") The fifth graders whose answers had been at the individual-responsibility end of the scale tended to do well on Bob's last two questions. By contrast, those who said they credited or blamed others were the ones who behaved helplessly when Bob's questions suddenly became soluble. The questionnaire, which was originelly designed by other scholars in 1965, docsn't have right or wrong answers, exactly. Sometimes in life the teacher really docs have it in for you; sometimes the instructions really aren't written clearly; sometimes the colored-block problems are rigged. But like many other psychologists, Dweck believes that on the whole, people do best if they believe in their own control over their behavior and their own responsibility for outcomes. Her colored-block experiment was significant because it demonstrated that children who atrribute responsibility for their academic performance to others seem to be vulnerable to learned helplessness. In the real world, outside of mildly sadistic experiments like Dweck's 1971 block study, how and why do some children acquire that kind of helplessness? In many cases, Dweck believes, it is because children grow up hearing parental chatter-—"Smart girl!" and "You're so good at math!"—that conveys the idea that intelligence is a fixed, innate quality, and therefore that they ultimately doa't have much control over their academic successes and failures, Ina landmark series of studies with Claudia M. Mueller during the 1990s, Dweck demonstrated that praising children for their intelligence, rather than for their effort, often leads them to give up when they encounter setbacks. Such children tend to become preoccupied with how their performance compares with that of their peers, rather than with finding new strategies to improve their own work. "In the nineties, the self-esteem gurus were telling parents and teachers to praise children as lavishly and globally as possible,” Dweck says. "But from my research going back 20 years, I knew that it was the children who were overly concerned with their intelligence—who were even trafficking in that concept—who were the vulnerable ones.” That element was something that Dweck began to explore in the years after her colored-block study; in a 197820 experiment with Carol I. Diener, Dweck found that children who described their own memory or intelligence in fixed ways were much more likely to give up on a difficult pattern-identification task than otherwise-similar children who did not make such statements. Dweck and several colleagues believe that they have developed an effective system to help middle-school students avoid that morass and to think of their intelligence as "incremental" rather than fixed. Dozens of public-school systems have signed up to train their students using a program created by Dweck and Lisa Sorich Blackwell, her former student. Could a similar intervention also work for college students? A few studies suggest that the answer is yes. The most famous of those, as it happens, was done at Stanford a few years before Dweck's arrival. In the late 1990s, Joshua Aronson, who now teaches psychology at New York University, and two colleagues adopted Dweck’s model by asking Stanford students to write letters to local middle-school "pen pals" that encouraged the younger students to persist in their studies. They were encouraged to tell the middle schoolers things like, "Humans are capable of learning and mastering new things at any time in their lives." The point of this, of course, was to alter the Stanford students’ beliefs about intelligence and learning, not the middle schoolers’. Relative to members of a control group, these Stanford students earned higher grades three months later, and were more likely to report that they enjoyed academic work. The effects were especially strong among African-American students, who were overrepresented in the study. But some other studies of college students have failed to support Dweck’s model. In a 2003 study of 93 students at University College London, scholars did not find any relationship between students’ academic performance and their beliefs about the nature of intelligence. A similar result has come out of research at Temple University, where two scholars are leading a large National Science Foundation-supported study of student performance in introductory biology and chemistry courses. In the first two semesters of that study, the scholars have found no connection between students' theories of intelligence and their grades."We wrote our research proposal thinking that this was a ‘200d, solid hypothesis," says Jennifer G. Cremley, an assistant professor of educational psychology at Temple. "So in some ways wee still grappling with these early results. One potential factor is that Temple isa less-selective institution than the colleges where the best-known previous studies have taken place. So differences among the Temple students’ beliefs about intelligence might be swamped, for example, by differences in their baseline knowledge about how to navigate through college life. "We're doing long interviews that are trying :o contextualize the students’ experiences," says Cromley’s research partner, Erin M. Horvat, an associate professor of urban education. "At Temple, you have kids who say, 'It takes me an hour and a half to get here.''T work until 4 a.m.’ Those are things we have to keep in our consciousness, Not all of these students are being taken care of by their parents. Not all of them know to visit the professor during office hours. They don't all know how to manage the institutional culture." ‘A more fundamental challenge to Dweck’s model came in a study published online last year in the journal Self and Identiry. In laboratory experiments conducted at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, scholars found that students with "incremental"2) beliefs about intelligence do not always behave as optimally as Dweck and her colleagues suggest. In the Michigan studies, college-age subjects were brought into a computer lab and told that they would take a difficult word-association test. (The test was in fact difficult: In one of the studies, the subjects got an average of 0.86 out of 10 questions correct.) The studies wondered whether students’ beliefs about intelligence ("“entity" versus "incremental," in Dweck’s terms) would affect how long they practiced before taking the test, whether they chose to listen to distracting music while practicing, and how they would explain their low scores after taking the test. The answer tured out to be: It depends. The Michigan studies divided the incremental theorists (that is, the students who implicitly believed that intelligence is malleable) into two groups: Those whose sense of self-worth was tied to academic performance and those who didn't care so much about school. The latter group—those whose egos were not deeply invested in schoolwork—behaved as Dweck would have predicted. But among students whose self-worth was tied to academic performance, incremental theorists behaved similarly to students with "fixed" beliefs about intelligence. They avoided practicing, and they "self-handicapped." For example, in one version of the study, the subjects were given either an easy or a difficult sample question from the test before they practiced. If they saw a difficult sample question, the incremental theorists wo cared a lot about how they performed academically were more likely than any other group to choose distracting music when they practiced—presumably because they could later blame that distraction for their expected bad performance."In some cases, having an incremental theory might actually lead to dysfunctional behavior," says Jennifer Crocker, a professor of psychology at Michigan and an author of the study. "I think Carol is a great scientist, but in her writing you sometimes get the sense that having an incremental theory is a panacea, and it really doesn't seem to be." Altering students’ beliefs about the nature of intelligence may not help much, Crocker says, if they do not also reduce their general ego-investment in schooling. "A. glib way of putting itis to say, 'Get over yourself” Crocker says. "If you want to stop acting in self-defeating ways, then think about how your schoolwork will help people outside of yourself. "Dweck says she agrees that holding an incremental theory of intelligence, in and of itself, doesn't cure all academic ills. "We now have a much fuller understanding of the mediators of this entire process"—that is, how beliefs about intelligence lead students to choose particular learning goals or to react emotionally to failures and setbacks. Each of those points along the chain, Dweck says, is an opportunity for intervention,"We can really focus on all of the nodes of the process," she says. Dweck is now expanding her work on how beliefs about intelligence interact with anxieties about stereotypes among women and people of color. (To some degree, she is filling the shoes of Claude M. Steele, the theorist of "stereotype threat” who recently left Dweck's department to become provost of Columbia.) She and a colleague are studying how a "sense of belonging" contributes to students’ willingness to persist in science majors at Stanford."We're about to embark on an intervention with Stanford freshmen where we teach them a growth mindset and how to put it into practice," she says. "Were going to try to include their implicit theories about emotion as well as intelligence.Because it's clear that if you have a fixed mindset and you're afraid that you might be failing, you're having all kinds of emotional reactions that could stand in your way.” David Glenn is a senior reporter for The Chronicle, ieaurcestorReeing | 1. Unterstensing Aegan | T etremecen-Hin issal egumen Text and iing Agana, Cops 205 Chapter f “Tieains of Argument is based on two key concepts: argument and rheto. ric, These days, unfortunately, the terms argument and rhetaric have ac- quired bad reputations. The popu ar meaning of argument is disagreement; we think of raised voices, hurt feelings, winners and losers. Most people think of rhetoric, 100, in a negative sense—as language that sounds good but evades or hides the truth. In this sense, thetoric is the language we hear from the politician who says anything to win votes, the public relations person who puts “positive spin’ on dishonest business practices, the buck passing bureaucrat who blames the foul-up on someone else, the clever lawyer who counterfeits passion to plead for the acquittal of a guilty client. ‘The words argument and rhetoric, then, are commonly applied to the darker side of human acts and motives. This darker side is real—arguments are often pointless’ and silly, ugly and destructive; all too often, rhetoric is empty words contrived to mislead or to disguise the desire to exert power. But this book is not about that kind of argument or that Kind of thetoric. Here we develop the meanings of argument and rhetoric in an older, fuller, and far more positive sense—as the language and art of mature reasoning. WHAT IS ARGUMENT? In this book, argument means mature reasoning. By mature, we mean an atti- tude and approach to argument, not an age group. Some older adults are in- capable of mature reasoning, whereas some young people reason very well. ‘And all of us, regardless of age, sometimes fall short of mature reasoning, What is “mature” about the kind of argument we have in mind? One mean- ing of mature is “worked'out fully by the mind” or “considered” (American Heritage Dictionary). Mature decisions, for example, are thoughtful ones, 1forReating | 4, Jderstancing Arment : Terms | Crua-thameitThe | Reve i Aims of egomont AT oo ig Aumont Cais. 205 se eae ith Eton reached slowly after full consideration of all the consequences. And this is true also of mature reasoning, The second term in this definition of argument also needs comment: rea- soning. Ifwe study logic in depth, we find many definitions of reasoning, but | for practical purposes, reasoning here means an opinion plus a reason (or rea- \ sons) for holding that opinion. As we will see in detail later in this chapter, good il arguments require more than this; to be convincing, reasons must be devel- oped with evidence like specific facts and examples. However, understanding the basic form of “opinion-plus-a-reason’ is the place to begin when consid- ering your own and other people's arguments. ‘One way to understand argument as mature reasoning is to contrast it with debate. In debate, opponents take a predetermined, usually assigned, side and attempt to defend it, in much the same way that an army or a football team must hold its ground. The point is to win, to best one’s opponent. In contrast, rather than starting with a position to defend, mature reasoners work toward a position. If they have an opinion to start with, mature reasoners think it through and evaluate it rather than rush to its defense. To win is not te defeat an opponent but rather to gain insight into the topic at hand. The struggle is with the problem, question, or issue we confront. Rather than seeking the favorable decision of the judges, as in debate, we are after a sound opinion in which we can believe—an opinion consistent with the facts and that other people will respect and take seriously. Of course, having arrived at an opinion that seems sound to us, we still must make our case—argue in the sense of providing good reasons and ade- quate evidence in support of them, But whereas debaters must hold their po- sitions at all costs, mature reasoners may not. The very process of making a case will often show us that what we thought was sound really isn't, We try to defend our opinion and find that we can't—or at least, not very well. And so we rethink our position until we arrive at one for which we can make a good case. From beginning to end, therefore, mature reasoning is a process of discovery. | i | | art 1 Resources for Reading and Writing Agurmens \ | | WHAT IS RHETORIC? Over time, the meanings of most words in most languages change—some- times only a little, sometimes a lo:. The word rietoric is a good example of a ~ big change. As indicated already, the popular meaning of rhetoric is empty verbiage— the art of sounding impressive while saying little—or the art of verbal deception. This meaning of rhetoric confers a judgment, and nota pos- itive one. In contrast, in ancient Greece, where rhetoric was invented about 2,500 years ago, rhetoric referred to tae art of public speaking. The Greeks3 | crs thometne | Untseesioreatiog | Soden pene! Toten oe ‘Aires of Argument: A Text aed Writing Arguments Corpanios, 2005 Concept Close-Up Defining Rhetoric ‘khetoric isthe art of agument as mature reasoning, The study of shetoré devel. ops self-conscious awarerie’s ofthe Principles and practices'o of mature ‘reasoning, enrolled in schools of rhetoric to become effective public speakers, Fur- ther, the ancient rhetoricians put a high value on good character. Not just sounding ethical but being ethical contributed to a speaker's persuasive power. ‘This old, highly valued meaning of rhetoric as oratory survived well into the nineteenth century. In Abraham Lincoln's day, Americans assembled by the thousands to hear speeches that went on for hours. For them, a good speech held the same level of interest as a big sporting event does for people today. Pile rosie In this book, we are inierested primarily in various ways of using writen argument, but the rhetorical tradition informs our understanding of mature reasoning. Mature reasoning has nothing to do with the current definition of thetoric as speech that merely sounds good or deceives people. The ancient meaning of rhetoric is more relevant, but we update it here to connect it di- rectly with mature reasoning. If argument is mature reasoning, then rhetoric is its art—that is, how we g0 about arguing with some degree of success, Just as there is an art of paint- ing or sculpture, so is there an art of mature reasoning. Since the time of Aris- totle, teachers of rhetoric have taught their students self-conscious ways of reasoning well and arguing successfully. The study of rhetoric, therefore, in- cludes-both what we have already defined as reasoning and ways of appeal- ing to an audience. These include efforts to project oneself as a good and in- telligent person as well as efforts to connect with the audience through humor, passion, and image. AN EXAMPLE OF ARGUMENT ‘So far, we've been talking abont argument in the abstract—definitions and explanations. To really understand argument, especially as we define it here, we need a concrete example. One thing mature reasoning does is to challenge unexamined belief, the stances people take out of habit without much thought. The following argument by a syndicated columnist would have us consider more carefully our notion of “free speech’ eF eua-cnamuteTae | Restores for Reading | 1Undranig Argonent Tertewesow é Ains et ArqumencAText and ving Aepuens Campi 25 Concept Close-Up Defining Mature Reasoning 2 ane as tature reasoning niears: Cie ‘Defending not the first position you tight take on an issue but the best position, detezmined through ppen-minded inquiry ‘+ Providing i “an opposing audience sons fot holding that position that‘can eain : recognized that thetoric could be abused, but, for their culture in general, 5 it was not a negative term. They had a goddess of persuasion (see Figure 1.1), and they respected the power of the spoken word to move people. It dominated their law courts, their governments, and their public ceremonies and events. As an art, the spoken word was an object of study. People Figure 1.1. Peitho, the goddess of Persuasicn, was often involved in seductions and love affairs. On this piece (a detail from a terracatakylix,c. 410 BC), Peitho, the figure on the lef gives advice to a dejected-looking womar, identified as Demonasta. To the right, Eres, the god of Love, stands with his hands on Demonass’s shoulder, suggesting the nature of this advice.[evsiv-themnen-tie | inerwessoreaiog |. Jndetanig Arpoment Terenccon-an Aine ogumest Test ene Weng rgomeus Compis 208 ted Rooter Fh Eon Part 1 Resources for Reading and Writing Arguments FOUR CRITERIA OF MATURE REASONING Students often ask, “What does ny professor want?" Although you will be writing many different kinds of papers in response to the assignments in this textbook, your professor will most likely look for evidence of mature tea- soning. When we evaluate student work, we look for four criteria that we con- sider marks of mature reasoning. Mature Reasoners Are Well informed Your opinions must develop from knowledge and be supported by reliable and current evidence. If the reader feels that the writer “doesn’t know his or her stuff” the argument loses all weight and force. You may have noticed that people have opinions about all sorts of things, including subjects they krow little or nothing about. The general hu- man tendency is to have the strongest opinions on matters about which we know the least. Ignorance and inflexibility go together because its easy to form an opinion when few or none of the facts get in the way and we can just assert our prejudices. Conversely, the more we know about most topics, the harder it is to be dogmatic. We find ourselves changing or at least refining our opinions inore or less continuously as we gain more knowledge. Mature Reasoners Are Self-Critical and Open to Constructive Criticism from Others We have opinions about all sorts of things that don’t matter much to us, ca- sual opinions we've picked up somehow and may not even bothgr to defend if challenged. But we also have opinions in which we are heavily invested, sometimes to the point that our whole sense of reality, right and wrong, good and bad—our very sense of ourselves—is tied up in them. These opinions we defend passionately. On this count, popular argumentation and mature reasoning are alike. Mature reasoners are often passionate about their convictions, as committed to them as the fanatic on the street corner is to his or her cause. A crucial dif- ference, however, separates the fanatic from the mature reasoner. The fanatic is all passion; the mature reasoner is able and willing to step back and exam- ine even deeply held convictions. “I may have believed this for as long as I can remember,’ the mature reasoner says to him- or herself, “but is this con- viction really justified? Do the facts support it? When I think it through, does, it really make sense? Can I make a coherent and consistent argument for it?” These are questions that don’t concern the fanatic and are seldom posed in the popular argumentation we hear on talk radio. In practical terms, being self-critical and open to well-intended criticism boils down to this: Mature reasoners can and do change their minds whenCraiue-ChnnaeThe | LRescuree fer ending | 1.Undesrdng raunent | Tottaneew-n Aims Aun nd 9 eneAText and Witng Aunt canes. 208 er Fi Eon Chapter 1 Understanding Argument they have good reasons to do so. ‘n popular argumentation, changing one’s mind can be taken asa weakness, as “wishy-washy and so people tend to go on advocating what they believe, regardless of what anyone else says, But, there's nothing wishy-washy abou, for example, confronting the facts, about realizing that what we thought is not supported by the available evidence. In such a case, changing one’s mind is a sign of intelligence and the very matu- rity mature reason values. Nor is it a weakness to recognize a good point made against one’s own argument If we don't listen and take seriously what others say, they won't listen to us. Mature Reasoners Argue with Their Audiences or Readers in Mind Nothing drains energy from argument more than the feeling that it will ac- complish nothing, As one student put it, "Why bother? People just go on thinking what they want to.” This zttitude is understandable. Popular, undis- ciplined argument often does seem futile: minds aren't changed; no progress is made; it doubtful that anyone learned anything. Sometimes the opposing positions only harden, and the people involved are more at odds than before. Why does this happen so often? One reason we've already mentioned — nobody's really listening to anyone else. We tend (© eat vuily vu own voices and see only from our own points of view, But there's another reason: The people making the arguments have made:no effort to reach their audience, This is the other side of the coin of not listening—when we don't take other points of view seriously, we can't make our points of view appealing to those who don't already share them, ‘To have a chance of working, arguments must be other-directed, attuned to the people they want to reach. “his may seem obvious, but its also com- monly ignored and not easy to do. We have to imagine the other guy. We have to care about other points of view, not just see them as obstacles to our own, We have to present and develop our arguments in ways that won't tum off the very people for whom we're writing, In many ways, adapting to the au- dience is the biggest challenge of argument. Mature Reasoners Know Their Arguments’ Contexts All arguments are part of an ongoing conversation. We think of arguments as something individuals make. We think of our opinions as ows, almost like private property. But arguments and opinions have pasts; Other people argued about more or less the same issues and problems before— often long. before—we came on the scene. They have a present: Who's arguing what now, the current state of the argument. And they have a future: What people will be arguing about tomorrow, ir different circumstances, with knowledge we don't have now. a coFcnsiuethometithe | tRemuraestorneasing | 1 Undestoing Repanent | Totenceoesit . AinsetAronea:A Text and Weng Regents Conese, 25 suds Fh Chapter 1 Understanding Argument secured the assent of the other, and “agreeing to disagree” is not a practical solution because the participants must decide what to do. In most instances of mediation, the parties involved try to work out the conflict themselves because they have some relationship they wish to preserve—as employer and employee, business partners, family members, neighbors, even coauthors of an argument textbook. Common differences re- quiring mediation include the a.ount of a raise or the terms of a contract. In private life, mediation helps roommates live together and families decide on everything from budgets to vacation destinations Just like other aims of argument, arguing to mediate requires sound logic and the clear presentation of positions and reasons. However, mediation challenges our interpersonal skills more than do the other aims. Each side must listen closely to understand not just the other's case but also the emo- tional commitments and underlying values. When mediation works, the opposing sides begin to converge Exchanging viewpoints and information and building empathy enable all parties to make concessions, to loosen their hold on their original positions, and finally to reach consensus—or at least, a resolution that all participants find satisfactory. A GOOD TOOL FOR UNDERSTANDING AND WRITING ARGUMENTS: THE WRITER'S NOTEBOOK Argumentation places unique demands on readers and writers. One of the most helpful tools that you cen use to meet these demands is a writer's i notebook, ‘The main function ofa writer's notebook is to help you sort out what you read, learn, accomplish, and think as you go through the stages of creating a i finished piece of writing. A writer's notebook contains the writing you do be- fore you write; it's a place to sketch out ideas, assess research, order what you ¢ have to say, and determine strateges and goals for writing. Why Keep a Notebook? Some projects require extensive research and consultation, which involve compiling and assessing large amounts of data and working through com- plex chains of reasoning, Under stch conditions, even the best memory will fail without the aid of a notebook. Given life's distractions, we often forget too much and imprecisely recall what we do manage to remember. With a ‘writer's notebook, we can preserve the ideas that come to us 2s we walk across campus or stare into space over our morning coffee. Often, a writer’s note- & book even provides sections of writing that can be incorporated into your pa- $ pers and so can help you save time, In the chapters that follow, we refer frequently to your writer's notebook. ® We hope you'll use this excellent toolGraine-chometThe | LAewuces tr easing | 1.Unertantng Agunet erence | ieee Argent Tet anditng gmat conprien 205 © Cencept Close-Up Comparing the Aims of Argument ‘The’aims of argument have much in common: For example, besides sharing ar- gument, they all tend to draw on sources of knowledge (research) and to deal ‘with controversial issues. But the aiins also, differ from one another, mainly in termis of purpose, audience, situa-ion, and method, as ‘summarized here and on the inside front cover. Purpose Audieace Inguiry Seeks trath ‘Ohieéelf, Friends, and Informal; @ oo seolleagues 05 dialogue’ | Convincing Seeks stent "ass mimate apts Mote formal Case-making Toss athesis tarfulseasoning monologue.” © Pelguading - Seeks action More broadly public, Breising need for’ Appeals fo reason j fo Sees academic ‘decision ‘thd,emotions " Mediating Seeks consensus’ Polarized by“ Need'0 cooperate, “Civeand take” aos Se dilferences 9) presereedelaton “5” We offer this dhdrt as a general guide'to thé aims of argument Think off asthe i “big pietute” you can slivays return to as you work your way through Part Two, i which deals with each of thes ‘aims in detail join a demonstration, recycle, vote, enlist, acquit. Because we don’t always act on our convictions, persuasion cannot rely on reasoning alone, It must ap- peal in broader, deeper ways. Persuasion appeals to readers! emotions. It tells stories about individual cases of hardship that move us to pity. It often uses photographs, as when charities confront us with pictures of poverty or suffering. Persuasion uses many of the devices of poetry, such as patterns of sound, repetitions, metaphors, and similes to arouse a desired emotion in the audience. ; Persuasion also relies on the personality of the writer to an even greater degree than does convincing. The persuasive writer attempts to represent something “higher” or “larger” than him- or herself—some ideal with which i the reader would like to be associated. For example, a war veteran and hero | like John McCain naturally brings patriotism to the table when he makes a ! speech. Arguing to Mediate By the time we find ourselves in a situation where our aim is to mediate, we will have already attempted to convince an opponent to settle a conflict or dispute our way. Our opponent will have done the same. Yet neither side has wTrertse-chanaeti ti, 1 Ressuoe tor aston Tettencrmta Campa 05 b a course in argumentation, you will read many arguments. Our book contains a wide range of argumentative essays, some by students, soine by established professionals. In addition, you may find arguments on your own in books, newspapers, and magazines, or on the Internet. You'll read them to develop your understanding of argument. That means you will analyze and evaluate these texts—known as critical reading. Critical reading involves special skills and habits that are not essential when you read a book for in- formation or entertainment. This chapter discusses those skills and habits. By the time most students get to high school, reading is no longer taught. While there's plenty to read, any advice on how to read is usually about in- creasing vocabulary or reading speed, not reading critically. This is too bad, because in college you are called on to read mote critically than ever. Have patience with yourself and with the texts you work with in this book. Reading will involve going through a text more than once, no matter how careful that single reading may be. You will go back to a text several times, asking new questions with each reading. That takes time, but its time well spent. Just as when you see a film a second time, you notice new details, so each reading increases yout knowledge of a text. Before we start, a bit of advice: Attempt critical reading only when your mind is fresh. Find a place concucive to concentration—such as a table in the library. Critical reading requires an alert, active response. THE FIRST ENCOUNTER: SEEING THE TEXT IN CONTEXT feet wl THC Critical reading Begins not with a line-by-line reading but with a fast overview of the whole text, followed by some thinking about how the text fits into a bigger picture, or context, which we describe shortly. We first sample a text rather than read it through. Look at the headings, and subdivisions, They will give a sense of how the text is organized. Note &a ne Steere | ine Soma g Fora i : Part {Resources for Reading and Writing Arguments . what parts look interesting and/or hard to understand. Note any information about the author provided before or after the text itself, as well as any publi- cation information (where and when the piece was originally published), Look at the opening and dosing paragraphs to discern the author's main point or view. Reading comprehension depends less on a large vocabulary than on the ability to see how the text fits into contexts. Sampling will help you consider the text in two contexts that are particularly important: ‘i 1. The general climate of opinion surrounding the topic of the text. Ths includes debate on the topic both before and since the texts publication. 2. The rhetorical context of the text. This includes facts about the author, the intended audience, and the setting in which the argument took place. Considering the Climate of Opinion 7 Familiarity with the climate of opinion will help you view any argument crit- ically, recognize a writer's biases and assumptions, and spot gaps or errors in the information. Your own perspective, too, will affect your interpretation of the text. So think about what you know, how you know it, what your opin- ion is, and what might have led to its formation. You can then interact with “+. a text, rather than just read it passively. 7 lowing Through " Anafgument bn the topic of body decoration (tattoos and piercing) appears 226 ater this chapter. “On Teenagers and Tattoos" js about motives for deco- z the body. As practice in identifying the climate of opinion surround- topic, think about what people say about tattooing. Have you heard sue that it is “low-class’? a rebellion against middle-class con- esbemoinnonn ein dances stents eaueretatsaia aint ierrensb ani Considering the Rhetorical Context Critical readers also are aware of the rhetorical context of an argument. They do not see the text merely as words on a page but as a contribution to some debate among interested pecple. Rhetorical context includes thecasue-cannes:Te | fesaueee fr Reading | 2 Read an Arise Tenewsamnn | imagen RTest and Wiig Arunents Caner 208 5 a +, Who wrote this argument, and what are his or her occupation, oo 1. background, aid political leaning’? « . o,,rrrssrsrsz=d«CcisiC.sSdrdsacic | © at “the general public but rather at a definite target audience, such as » |, entertainment indusuy moguls? “drives in Dalla or ?parens of ‘eenajeis” as | Where does thé afte appes ?ifitis reprinted, where did it SE : author, the intended audience, and the date and place of publication. ‘The reader who knows something about the author's politics or afi tions will have an advantage over the reader who dots not. Also, knowing if a periodical is liberal, like The Nation, or conservative, like National Review, helps. ‘An understanding of rhetorical context comes from both external and in- temal clues—information outside the text and information you gather as you read and reread it. You can glean information about rhetorical context from external evidence such as publishers’ notes about the author or about a magazine's editorial board or sponsoring foundation. You can find this in- formation in any issue of a periodical or by following an information linkon the home page of an online putlication, You may also have prior knowledge of rhetorical context~for example, you may have heard of the author. Or you can look in a database such as InfoTrac (see pages 95, 100-103) to see what else the author has written. Later, when you read the argument more thoroughly, you will enlarge your understanding of rhetorical context as you discover what the text itself reveals about the author's bias, character, and purpose for writing. In sum, the first encounter with a text is preliminary to a careful, close reading. It prepares you to get the most out of the second encounter. If you are researching a topic and looking for good sources of informa tion and viewpoints about it, the first encounter with any text will help you decide whether you want to read it at all. A.first encounter can be a time-saving last encounter if the text does not seem appropriate ort credible.ip RS EDR T crases-chanseite | LResoarees fr aoa Teme esa Aimee Arganea: A Text and Ving Armas Compare. 28 yo ence Fh aon | € Part 1 Resources for Reading and Wiiting Arguments ee lovne information about On Teenagers and Tattoos.” red: In 1997, reprinted fall 2000. published: fn the Journal of Ciild and Adolescent Psychiatry, pub- 30° perspective will be, and why? How might it differ from parent, a teacher? Do the subheadings give you any idea of 10 you notice at the opening or closing any repeated ideas 4 clue to the author's daim? To whori do you imagine the ting, and what might be the purpose of an essay in a journal at published his argument? AN ARGUMENT FOR CRITICAL READING On Teenagers and Tattoos Andres Martin The skeleton dimensions 1 shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed: as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was na other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics. —Mawutte, Moby Dick Tattoos and piercing have become a part of onr everyday landscape. They are ubiquitous, having entered the circles of glamour and the mainstream of fashion, and they have even become an increasingly common feature of our turban youth (Legislation in mox states restricts professional tattooing to adults older than 18 years of age)'so.“high end” tattooing is rare in children and adolescents, but such tattods are occasionally seen in older teenagers. Piercings, by comparison, as well as self-made or “jailhouse” type tattoos, are not at all rare among adolescents or even among school-age children. Like hairdo, makeup, or baggy jeans, tattoos and piercings can be subject to fad influence or peer pressure ifian effort toward group affiliation. As with any other fashion statement, they can be construed as bodily aids in the inner struggle toward identity consolidation, serving as adjuncts tO the = Seer Re ee regee ro area ace emmnemmmrer:+ | Cruie-Ctama-the | URosbucer fr Resi | 2Reing a Arsunert Vemenctawna Aine oSrsonest Rest sed Wiking Arguments ange, 20 nestor Fs ion Chapter 2 Reading an Argunent defining and sculpting of the self by means of extemnal manipulations. But unlike most other body decorations, tattoos and piercings are set apart ) by their imeversible and permanent nature, a quality at the core of their magnetic appeal to adolescents. Adolescents and their parents are often at odds over the acquisition of dodily decorations. For the adolescent, piercing or tattoos may be seen as personal and beautifying statements, while parents may construe them as oppositional and enraging effronts to their authority/Distinguishing bodily adomment from self-mutilation may indeed prove challenging, particularly ‘when a family is in disagreement over a teenager's motivations and a dlini- cian is summoned as the final arbiter. At such times it may be most impor- tant to realize jointly that the skin can all too readily become but another battleground for the tensions of the age, arguments having less to do with tattoos and piercings than with core issues such as separation from the(OT Mebow t ‘rsle-Chamol The | LResnuceserReing | 2 ReaionovArpomen cami, 20 AimsetArgenen: A Tet" aes Witg Acumen i nated, Eden 22 Part 1 Resources for Reading and Writing Arguments family matrix. Exploring the motivations and significance [underlying] tat- toos (Grumet, 1983) and piercings can go a long way toward resolving such differences and can become a novel and additional way of getting to know teenagers. An interested and nonjudgmental appreciation of teenagers’ sur- face presentations may become’a way of making contact not only in their_) terms but on their turfs: quite literally on the territory of their skins, ‘The following three sections exemplify some of the complex psycholog- ical underpinnings of youth tattooing. = = IDENTITY AND THE ADOLESCENTS BODY ‘Tattoos and piercing can offer a concrete and readily available solution for many of the identity crises and conflicis normative to adolescent de-_ velopment, In using such decorations, and by marking out their bodily ter>> ritories, adolescents can support their efforts at autonomy, privacy, and in-/ sulation. Seeking individuation, tattooed adolescents can become unam- biguously demarcated from others and singled out as unique,’The intense and often disturbing reactions that are mobilized in viewers can help to ef fectively keep them at bay, becoming tantamount to the proverbial "Keep Out” sign hanging from a teenager's door. Alternatively, feeling prey to a rapidly evolving body over which they 5 have no say, self-made and opéily visible decorations may restore adoles- cents’ seme of normalcy and control, away of turning a passive experience into an active identity. By indelibly marking their bodies, adolescents can strive to reclaim their bearings within an environment experienced as alien, estrangéd, or suffocating or to lay clair: over their evolving and increasingly unrecognizable bodies. In either case, tie net outcome can be a resolution to unwelcome impositions: external, familial, or societal in-one case; inter- nal and hormonal in the other. In the words of a 16-year-old girl with sev- eral facial piercings, and who could have been referring to her body just as well as to the position within her family: "If don't ft in, itis because)" say so! = stabitaasanaumsnesemacenaietcdic0 INCORPORATION AND OWNERSHIP D Imagery of a religious, deathly, or skeletal nature, the likenesses of fierce an- imalg or imagined creatures, and the simple inscription of names are some of the time-tested favorite contents for :attoos. In all instances, marks be- come not only memorials or recipients for dearly REC REIGNS Or concepts: they strive for incorporation, with images and abstract symbols gaining substance on becoming a permanent part of the individual's skin, Thickly embedded in personally meaningful representations and object relations, tattoos can become not only the ongoing memento of a relationship, but B a‘cosue-Chaea:The | Lteseurces treating. | 2 ReacagonArpoment inet BigumenATet aed eng Apes canons, 25 nda Fn Eton | etre Wedron-tit Chapter 2 Reading an Argument ‘at times even the only evidence that there ever was such a bond. They can quite literally become the relatonship itself. The turbulence anil impulsiv- ity of early attachments and infatuations may become grounded, effectively bridging oblivion through the visible reality to tattoos. Case Vignette: “A," a 13-yecr-old boy, proudly showed me his tattooed deltoid. The coarsely depicted oll of the dice marked the day and month of his birth. Rather disappointed, he then uncovered an immaculate back, going on to draw for me the great “piece” he envisioned for it. A menacing figure held a hand of cards: two aces, two eights, and a card with two sets of dates. “A's” father had belonged to Dead Man’s Hand, a motorcycle gang named after the set of cards (aces and eights) that the legendary Wild Bill Hickock had held in the 1890s when shot dead over a poker table in Dead- ‘wood, South Dakota. “A” had only the vaguest memory of and sketchiest information about his father, but he knew he had died in a motorcycle acci- dent: The fifth card marked the dates of his birth and death, ‘The case vignette also serves to illustrate how tattoos are often the cul- mination of a long process of imagination, fantasy, and planning that can start at an eatly age. Limited markings, or relatively reversible ones such as piercings, can at a later time scaffold toward the more radical commitment ofa permanent tattoo THE QUEST OF PERMANENCE ‘The popularity of the anchor as a tattoo motif may historically have had to do less with guild identification among sailors than with an intense longing for rootedness and stability. In a similar vein, the recent increase in the Popularity and acceptance of tattoos may be understood as an antidote or counterpoint to our urban and nomadic lifestyles. Within an increasingly mobile society, in which relationships are so often transient—as attested by the frequencies of divorce, abandonment, foster placement, and repeated moves, for example—tattoos can be a readily available source of ground- ing. Tattoos, unlike many relationships, can promise permanence ahd sta. + A sense of constancy can be derived from unchanging marks that can be carried along no matter what the physical, temporal, or geographical vi- cissitudes at hand. Tettoos stay, while all else may change. Case Vignette: A proud father at 17, "B” had had the smiling face of his 10 4-month-old baby girl tattooed on his chest. As we talked at a tattoo con- sm, vention, he proudly introduced her to me, explaining how he would “al- ways know how beautiful she is today” when years from then he saw her semblance etched on himself. ‘The quest for permanence may at other times prove misleading and offer premature closure to unresolved conflicts. At a time of normative uncertainties, adolescents may maladaptively and all too readily commit tot a tattoo and its indefinite presence. A wish to hold on to a current certainty‘cusis-chemottTie | LBecawces tr Reading | 2 Resting Amunert OMe Meme AincotArgumes: A Test satin Asuments Campin. 205 sneer 6 Elon Part 1 Resources for Reading and Writing Arguments may lead the adolescent to lay down ir. ink what is valued and cherished one day but may not necessarily be in the future, The frequency of self- made tattoos among hospitalized, incarcerated, or gang-affiliated youths suggests such motivations: A sense of sability maybe a particularly dize need under temporary, turbiflent, or velatile conditions. In addition, through their designs teenagers may assert a sense of bonding and alle- giance to a group larger than themselves, Tattoos may attest to powerful ex- petiences, such as adolescence itself, lived and even survived together. As with Moby Dick's protagonist, Ishmael, they may bear witness to the “valu- able statistics" of one’s “wild wandering(s)": those of adolescent exhilaca- tion and excitement on the one hand; of growing pains, shared misfortune, or even incarceration on the other. Adolescents’ bodily decorations, attimes radical and dramatic in their presentation, can be seen in terms of figuration rather than disfigureme; of the natural SOUy being howe ‘them transformed into a personalized body (Brain, 1979). They can often be understood as self-constructive and adorning efforts, rather than prematurely subsumed as mutilatory and de. ~ structive acts. If we bear all of this in mind, we may not only arrive at a po- sition to pass more reasoned clinical judgment, but become sensitized through our patients’ skins to another level of their internal reality. References Brain, R, (1979), The decorated body. New York: Harper & Row. Grumet, G. W. (1983). Psychodynamic implications of tattoos. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 53, 482-92. ‘THE SECOND ENCOUNTER: ’ READING AND ANALYZING THE TEXT We turn now to suggestions for.reading and analyzing, These are our own * “best practices,” what we do when we prepare to discuss or write about a writ- __ ten text: Remember, when you read aitically, your purpose goes beyond merely finding out what an argument says. ‘The critical reader is different from the target audience. As a critical reader, you are more like the food critic who dines not merely to eat but to evaluate the chef's efforts. =~ -To see the difference, consider the different perspectives that an ant and |. abird would have when looking at the same suburban: lawn. The ant is down ~~ among the blades of grass, climbing one and then the next. Its a close lock, * but the view is limited. The bird in the sky above looks down, noticing the size and shape of the yard, the brown patches, the difference between the grass in this yard and the grass in the su:tounding yards, The bird has the big “picture, the ant the close-up. Critical readers move back and forth between the perspective of the ant and. the perspective of the bird, each perspective‘rie Che eT bReowces tr Reading | 2 Reding en Argon Torevesmi Aims etfrqmen: Text en Ween Argues acm: ed Ree, th Eon Chapter 2 Readingan Argument x enriching the other. The big picture helps one notice the patterns, even as the details offer clues to the big picture. Because critical reading means interacting with the text, be ready with pencil or pen to mark up the ‘ext. Highlighting or underlining is not enough. Write comments in the margn. Wrestling with Difficult Passages Because one goal of the second encounter is to understand the argument fully, you will need to determine the meanings of unfamiliar words and Gifficult passages. in college reading, you may encounter new words. You may find allusions or references to other books or authors that you have not read. You may encounter mecaphors and irony. The author may speak ironi- cally or for another person. The author may assume that readers have lived through all thathe or she hasor share the same political viewpoint. All of this, can make reading harder. Following are common features that often make reading difficult. : Unfamiliar Contexts —- —~ - If the author and his or her intended audience are removed from your own experience, you will find the text difficult. Texts from a distant culture or time will include concepts familiar to the writer and original readers but not to you. This is true also of contemporary writing intended for specialists. Col- lege increases your store of specialized knowledge and introduces you to new (and old) perspectives. Accepting the challenge of difficult texts is part of col- lege. Look up concepts you don’t know. Your instructors can also help you to bridge the gap between your world and the text's, Contrasting Voices and Views Authors may state viewpoints that contradict their own. They may concede that part of an opposing argument is true, or they may put in an opposing view to refute it. These voices and viewpoints may come as direct quotations or paraphrases. To avoid misteading these views as the author's, be alert to words that signal contrast. The most common are but and however, AlltGhs ee ee Allusions are brief references to things outside the text—to people, works of art, songs, events in the news—anything in the culture that the author as- sumes he or she shares knowledge of with readers, Allusions are one way for an author to form a bond with readers—provided the readers’ and authors’ opinions are the same about what is alluded to. Allusions influence readers. ‘They are persuasive devices that can provide positive associations with the author's viewpoint. & In “On Teenagers and Tattoos,” the epigraph (the quotation that appears under the title of the essay) is an allusion to the classic novel Moby Dick.4 [ census-tamete Tre nesurcestorestng | 2 Ratings Argument Torimsov-i de inst egumentAText and Wing Aunts anges, 205 sed Rede Fah Eton Part 1 Resources for Reading and Writing Arguments ‘Martin alludes to the novel again in pa:agraph 11. He assumes that his read- ers know the work—not just its title but also its characters, in particular, the narrator, Ishmael. And he assumes his readers would know that the “skele- ton dimensions” of a great whale were important and that readers would therefore understand the value of preserving these statistics. The allusion pre- disposes readers to see that there are valid reasons for permanently marking the body. Specialized Vocabulary Ifan argument is aimed at an audience of specialists, it will undoubtedly con- tain vocabulary peculiar to that group or profession, Martin's essay contains social science terminology: “family matrix" and “surface presentations” (paragraph 2), “individuation” (paragraph 4), “grounded” (paragraph 6), “sense of constancy” (paragraph 9), and "normative uncertainties” (para. graph 11). ‘The text surrounding these terms provides enough help for most lay readers to get a fair understanding. For example, the text surrounding indi- viduation suggests that the person would stand outas a separate physical pres- ence; this is not quite the same as individuality, which refers more to one’s character. Likewise, the text around family matrix points to something the sin- gle word family does not: it emphasizes the family as the surroundings in which one develops. Ifyou need to look up a term and a dictionary does not seem to offer an appropriate definition, go to one of the specialized dictionaries available on the library reference shelves. (See pages 98-103 for more on these.) If you encounter an argument with more jargon than you can handle, you may have to accept that you are not an-appropriate reader for it. Some readings are aimed at people with highly specialized graduate degrees or taining, Without advanced courses, no one could read these articles with full comprehension, much less critique their arguments. rds in Martin's essay that sound specific to the field of psy- y Use’ the surrounding text :o come up with laymen's terms for SHcepts, i Meauanne Se Missing Persons Acommon difficulty with scientific writing is that it can sound disembodied and abstract, You won't find a lot of people doing things in it, Sentences are easiest to read when they take a “who-does-what" form. However, these can2D eseecee ieee iceman ia ame tale aan sea Chapter 2 Reading an Argument be rare in scientific writing, Many of Martin's sentences have abstract subjects and nonaction verbs like be and become: An interested and nonjudgmental appreciation of teenagers’ surface presentations may become a way of making contact not only in their terms but on their turfs, Im at least one other sentence, Martin goes so far in leaving people out that his sentence is grammatically incorrect. Note the dangling modifier: Alternatively, feeling prey 10a rapidly evolving body over which they have no say, self-made and openly visible decorations may restore adolescents’ sense of normalcy and control, a way of turning passive experience into active identity. ‘The italicized phrase describes adolescents, not decorations. Ifyou have trou- ” ble reading passages like this, take comfort in the fact that the difficulty is not your fault. Recasting the idea into who-does-what can clear things up: ‘Teens may feel likee helpless victims of the changes taking place in their bodies. They may mark themselves with highly visible tattoos and piercings to regain 2 sense OT Control over their lives. -- ~~ buy \ “Passive Voice.’ ty “Passive voice is another common form of the missing-person problem. In an active-voice sentence, we see our predictable who-does-what pattern: Active voice: The rat ate the cheese. = In passive-voice sentences, the subject of the verb is not an agent; it does # not act i Passive voice: The cheese was eaten by the rat. At least in this sentence, we know who the agent is. But scientists often leave out any mention of agents. Thus, in Martin’s essay we have sentences like this one: Adolescents’ bodily decorations ... can be seen in terms of figuration rather “than disfigurement. Who can see them? Martin means that psychiatrists should see tattoos as figura- tion rather than disfiguratioa. But that would sound too committed, not sci- entific. Passive-voice sentences are common in the sciences, part of an effort to sound objective. If you learn to recognize passive voice, you can often mentally convert the troublesome passage into active voice, making it clearer, Passive voice takes this pattern: A helping verb in some form of the verb to be: Is, was, were, has bert will be, will have been, could have been, and so forth. isi onesie acca Aarne eyesore ‘roi Chrmo Tae Ainsat Arent Text ena Rencer, Fah Eden T (© Te McGraw | Cone, 205 "2 Part 1 Resources for Reading and Writing Arguments Followed by a main verb, a past participle: Past participles end in ed, en, gk, ort. Some examples: ‘The car was being driven by my roommate when we had the wreck. Infections are spread by bacteria: ‘The refrain is sung three times. following sentences ints active voice. We have put the passive- ee bold type, but you may need to look at the surrounding text, Using Paraphrase to Aid Comprehension As we all know, explaining something to someone else is the best way to make it clear to ourselves. Putting an author’s ideas into your own words, paraphrasing them, is like explaining the author to yourself. For more on paraphrasing, see Chapter 5, pages 111-114 Paraphrase is often longer than the original because it loosens up what is dense. In paraphrasing, try to make both the language and the syntax (word order) simpler, Paraphrase may require two sentences where. there was one. It looks for plainer, more everyday language, converts passive voice to active voice, and makes the subjects concrete, Analyzing the Reasoning of an Argument As part of your second encounter with the text, pick out its reasoning, The reasoriing is the author's case, which consists of the claim (what the author wants the readers to believe or do) and the reasons and evidence offered in support of it State the case in your own words and describe what else is going on in the argument, such as the inclusion of opposing views or back- ground information, * Es *a (| Temp 1 ican uae! ¢. Use your own words, but don't strain to find a different word for every. > single one in the original: Some of the author's plain words are fine. + Ifyou take a phrase from the original, enclose it in quotation marks, Use a simpler, sentence pattem than the original, evenif it means mal Ifa text is an argument, we can state what the author wants the readers to believe or do, and just as importantly, why. We should look for evidence presented to make the reasons seem believable. Note claims, reasons, and ev- idence in the margins as you read. Reading Martin's Essay Complex arguments require ccitical reading. Two critical-reading skills will help you: subdividing the text and considering contexts. Finding Parts | Critical readers break texts down into parts. By parts, we mean groups of j paragraphs that work together :o perform some role in the essay. Examples of i such roles are to introduce, to provide background, to give an opposing view, to conclude, and so on. iscovering the parts of a text can be simple. Authors often make them obvious with subheadings and blank space. Even without these, transitional expressions and clear statements of intention make subdividing a text almost as easy as breaking a Hershey bar into its already well-defined segments. However, some arguments are more loosely constructed, their subdivisions Jess readily discernible. Even so, close inspection will usually reveal subdivi- sions and you should be able to see the roles played by the various chunks. We have placed numbers next to every fifth paragraph in the essays reprinted in our text, Numbering makes it easier to refer to specific passages and to discuss parts, << Martin helps us see the parts of his essay by announcing early on, in pare- > graph 3, that it will have three sections, each “[exemplifying] some of the {complex psychological underpinnings of youth tattooing,” Martin's essay can thus be subdivided as follows: 1. Epigraph 2. Paragraphs 1, 2, and 3: the introduction se “&["esne-thanetztie * T tesures tor Reading Tomenciowiit ‘it Reganent Text a Weng goers Capone 205 Part 1 Resources for Reading and Writing Arguments 3. Paragraphs 4 and 5: an example 4, Paragaphs 6, 7, and 8: another example 5. Paragraphs 9, 10, and 11: third example 6. Paragraph 12: the conclusion Using Context ‘Taking the larger view again, we can use context to help pick out the reason- ing, While a quick reading might suggest that Martin is arguing that teens have good reasons for decorating their bodies, we need to recall that the essay ap- peared in a journal for psychiatrists— doctors, not parents or teachers. Martin is writing to other psychiatrists and psychologists, clinicians who work with families. Reading carefully, we learn that his audience is an even smaller por- tion of this group: clinicians who have been "summoned as the final arbiter” : i i ; 4 | i 4 4 | in family disputes involving tattoos and other body decoration (paragraph 2). g Because journals such as the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry are aimed at improving the practice of medicine, we want to note sentences that tell these readers what they ought to do and how it will make them better doctors. : Identifying the Claim and Reasons ‘The dlaim: Martin is very dear about his claim, repeating it three times, using just slightly different wording His readers should “[explore] the motivations and significance [underlying] tattoos and piercings. ..." (paragraph 2) & His readers should have “[a]n interested and nonjudgmental appreciation of teenagers’ surface presentations. ...” (paragraph 2) i | | His readers should see “{a]dolescents’ bodily decorations . .. in terms of | figuration rather than disfigurement. ..." (paragraph 12) | Asked to identify Martins claim, you could choose any one of these statements. The reason:“The reason is the “because” part of the argument. Why should the readers believe or do as Martin suggests? We can find the answer in para- graph 2, in the same sentences with his aim: Because doing so “can go a long way toward resolving ... differences and can become a novel and additional way of getting to know teenagers.” Because doing so “may become a way of making contact not only in their terms but on their turfs, ..." And the final sentence of Martin's essay offers a third version of the same reason: Because “Wwe may not only arrive at a position to pass more reasoned clini- cal judgment but become sensitized through our patieits’ skins to an- other level of their internal realiCroie-ChemattTae | UnenuceefrRentog | 2.8 Aine a Argument Test l T wrtnontérm st ition pment Coma, 205 sndRender it Eton chapter 2 Reading an Argument Again, we could choose any one of these sentences as the staied reason or paraphrase his reason. Using paraphrase, we can begin to dutline the case structure of Martin's argument: Claim: Rather than dismissing tattoos as disfigurement, mental health profes- sionals should take a serious interest in the meaning of and motivation behind the tattoos. Reason: Exploring their patients’ body decorations can help them gain in- sight and make contact with teenagers on teenagers’ own terms. Where is Martin’s evidence? Martin tells us that the three subsections will “ex- emplify some of the complex psychological underpinnings of youth tattoo- ing" In each, he offers a case, or vignette, as evidence. Example and Evidence (paragraphs 4 and 5): Tattoos are a way of working out identity problems when teens need either to mark themselves off from others or to regain a sense of contol of a changing body or an imposing environment. ‘The sixteen-year-old-girl who chose not to fit in. Example and Evidence (paragraphs 6, 7, and 8): Tattoos can be an attempt to make the intangible a tengible part of one’s body. The thirteen-year-old boy remembering his father. Example and Evidence (paragraphs 9, 10, and 11): Tattoos are an “antidote” to a society that is on the nun. The seventeen-year-old father. THE THIRD ENCOUNTER: RESPONDING ~CRETICALLY TO AN ARGUMENT cr yor “-Qace you feel confident thet you have the argument Sgured out. you are ready 16 respond to it, which means evaluating and comparing it with other perspectives, including your own. Only by writing words can you respond crit- ically. As the reading expert Mortimer Adler says in How to Read a Book, Reading, if tis active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itselfin words, spoken ot written, The petson who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it in words usually Joes not know what he thinks. (49) Annotation Is Key ‘We suggest that you annotate heavily. Annotation simply means making a note. Use the margins, and/or writer's notebook, for these notes of critical re- sponse. Many writers keep reading journals to practice active interaction with what they read and to preserve the experience of reading a text they want to remember. What should you write about? Thinkof questions you would ask theiau- thor if he or she were in the room with you. Think of your own experience ooT Crain The “feeding eae oretetowsas | Sie Ago Canaris 208 hg fas en Ebon © Pare 1 Resources for Reading and Writing Arguments with the subject. Note similarities and contrasts with other arguments you hhave fead or experiences of your own that confirm or contradict what the au- thor is saying. Write about anything you notice that seems interesting, un- usual, brilliant, orwrong. Comment, question—the more you actually write on the page, the more the essay becomes your own. And you will write more confidently about a text you own than one you are just borrowing, The list on the next page will give you more ideas for annotations. Aconcluding comment about responses: Buen fyou asec with an argu- ment, thinkabout who might ir Objections might be. think about who m oppose Stand what the Challenge the views you find most sympathetic. ‘We offer below an example of annotation for part of Martin's argument. Sample Annotations Hows he defrng "solution? Tattoos and piercing can offer a concrete and readily avail- Bobetioos ove aprobem able gglution for many of the identity crises and conflicts ee TStmative to adolescent development. in using such decorations, and by marking out their bodily territories, adolescents can support their efforts at autonomy, privacy, and insulation. Sccking individuation, tattooed adoles- Ieesome ila there are more _ cents can becomeunambiguously demarcated from materewayetodoth. \\_sothers and singled out as unique. The intense and often disturbing reactions that are mobilized in viewers can Orwoulditcouws parents to [help to effectively keep them at bay, becoming tanta- ay attention to them rene: | mount to the proverbial "Keep Out” sign hanging from ‘han naw them sone? a teenager's door Alternatively, feeling prey to a rapidly evolving body over which they have no say, self made and openly visible decorations may restore adolescents’ Sense of normalcy and control, a way of tuminga passive experience into an lone implsing shar se active identity. By indelibly macking their bodies, adoles= Indole marke one they “cents can strive 1o reclaim their bearings within an envi- vill not outgrow? What iF ee ronment experienced as alien, estranged, or suffocating yao orto lay claim over their evolving and increasingly unrecognizable bodies, In either case, the net outcome canbea resoh unwelcome impositions: external, familial, or societal in one case iftemal and hormonal in the other, In the words of a 16-yar-old girl with several facial piercings, and who could ave been referring to her body just as well astbth¢ position within her family; “IFT don't fitin, itis begause Isay so.” evs he assume thio famiy noses counecting—-or wil nat need ict He aye tho preblem ie "esolad” om Wists normal? Would he say abouFrenmiue-cromnietme | URessecostrtossng | 2.Sening an Arsumnt Aig ctAcqonene Ast and tig Arguments anne, 208 snd Reade. th Eon fe re i np fo ee a i) + Paraphrase the claim and reasons next to where you find them stated. _ 2) ¢ Consider: Does the author support his or her reasons with evidence? ~ > ~__ Isthe evidenice sufficient ia terms of both quantity and quality? _- . ® Circle the key terms. Note how the atithor defines or fails to defirie them. * Ask: What does the author assume? Behind every argument, there are as- sumptions. For example, a baseball fan wrote to our local paper arguing that the policy of foulsafter the secsiid strike needs to be changed. His reason was that the fans would not be subjected to such a long game. - med that a fast game of hits and ouits is more interesting than a slow game of strategy between batters and hitters: Not every base- at “ball fan shares that assumption. ee 5 thing else yo . Consider the implications of the argument, If we believe midjordey what” +.” the author argues, what is likely to happen? | 2 3.2 Think of someone who would disagree with ‘what that person.migh: object. e argument. questi é Benet Gh hs fenreentetReading Journal QuestionsRo?Articles for Essay 1: Educationso At least they have high self-esteem Students slack off but still get top grades Ben Wildavsky. U.S. News & World Report. Washington: Eeb 7, 2000.Vol.128, Iss. 5; pg. 50 Copyright US. News and World Report Feb 7, 2000 ‘When researchers at the University of California-Los Angeles asked America's college freshmen to answer a few questions about their political views, study habits, extracurricular activities, and the like, a curious paradox emerged: More and more students say they're tuning out during high school, yet a record number eam A's, Does this mean America is producing an unusually talented bunch of graduates who don't have to hit the books to make top marks? Not according to Linda Sax, director ofthe UCLA Higher Education Research Institute's annual freshman survey, now in its 34th year. "We don’t think this grade inflation is happening because these students are ‘getting any smarter," she says. "There are no other incicators that would suggest that students’ level of achievement has gone up over the past 30 years.” Indeed, the College Board reported last year that falling SAT scores were accompanied by rising grades. More than 34 percent of freshmen inthis year's UCLA survey reposted eaming an A average in high school, compared with a low of just 12.5 percent in 1968. “Meantime, the humble C has traded places withthe once elusive A: Twelve percent of this year's freshmen ceamed C averages, down from 32.5 percent in 1969. (The responses of 261,217 incoming students at 462 two- and four-year schools were statistically adjusted to represent the 1.6 million first-time, full-time freshmen who started classes last fall) The higher grades certainly don't result from laborious study. Just 31.5 percent of students said they spent six or more hours per weck doing homework or study.ng in their final year of high school. Tha's down fiom 33 percent last year and 44 percent when the study fist posed the question in 1987. Researchers found plenty of other signs of what they termed "academic disengagement” as well, A record 40 percent of freshmen said they frequently felt bored in class. Over 36 percent said they have overslept and missed class ‘or an appointment in de past year--almost ice he 19 percent who said the same in 1968, I's all familia to Cynthia Rudrud, principal of Cactus High School in Glendale, Ariz. "Among a large group of students ‘there's this perception that senior year should be the easy year:'Youlve earned it "she says. But the phenomenon isn'tnew, adds veteran Cactus math teacter Kay Cassidy: "We call that seniritis.” By any measure. So why are good grades so much easier to get? "Teachers are under some pressure to give students the benefit ofthe doubi,” Sax says, especially given the increasing competition to get into college More freshmen than ever say they applied to four or more colleges-38 percent this year compared with a low of 15 percent in 1969. (One reason the SAT is useful to colleges, says College Board research director ‘Wayne Camara, is that it provides an objective yardstick: "If you've got 100 openings ... and you've got 300 applicants with a 4.0 average, is very difficult to use grades asthe sole eriterion.") Them there's the matter of self-esteem, "We don't have empirical data, but ancedotally it scems that teachers are feeling some pressure not to give students esteem-damaging low grades," says Sax. Apparently it has ‘worked: Despite their boredom at school, missed classes, and dwindling hours of homework, the nation's freshmen have record levels of academic confidence. Almost 59 percent rated their scholastic abilities as above average or in the top 10 percent. Still, Sax cautions against dismissing today’ freshmen as a bunch ‘of egotistical slackers. Many are overextended in their final year of high school, she says, applying to college, working after-school jobs, and volunteering in record numbers. So the all-time-high stress reported by entering college students-especially women--may not be al in their minds.SG Failing Motivate~ James Lang Chronicle of Higher Education: Washington: Dec, 2004, Vol. 52, Issue 15; pg C2. He sat in the front row, off to the side, and whenever { caught his eye he would give mea half-smile and a nod of his head, as if he were happy and grateful to have me acknowledge his existence on this earth. He spoke in class, capably enough, and he always seemed attentive ~-a blessing in the required general- education course that I was teaching. He was a student in my "Introduction to Literature” course, and it was my second year on the tenure track. was both surprised and depressed, then, when I received his first paper for the semester. It was about the ‘worst piece of writing I had seen in my first year and a half as an assistant professor of English. I agonized over the grade he deserved; I couldn't decide between an F or a D. I had not given out more than a handful of F's or D's in my first year, so giving those grades sill seemed daunting to me. I settled on the D, but I gave it to him with trepidatior. My concer was that the D would send him from the front row to the back row, where he would turn his baseball cap backward and scowl at me for the rest of the semester, 1 couldn't have been more wrong. That D motivated him to come see me about his next paper, and the one after that, and just about every other one in the four subsequent courses he took with me over the next three years. He even asked me to be his adviser, and it has been one of the pleasures of my young career to track his considerable intellectual progress, The pedagogical gods, however, would not allow me even the momentary pleasure of believing that I had learned a certain truth about teaching from that incident, and about the motivating power of grades. That same semester, in that very same class, Ihad a student who made her home in the back row, along with a friend or two who apparently shared her lack of interest in the course. With this student - who spoke rarely and eyed me with a look of bemused indifference ~ I had litle hesitation about stamping a D on her second assignment. ‘What she needs, I thought to myself as I dropped her paper grimly on her desk, is an intellectual kick in the rear, in the form of a grade that would scare her into better behavior in class and more effort on her written work. ‘She was absent the next class. When she showed up for the one after that, her attitude seemed ~ if possible ~ worse than before. She did't come to see me abouther next assignment, as I had suggested she do, and it ‘was as poor as the previous one, In both of those D narratives, I had my pedagogical expectations overtumed. Nothing new there, But what I found especially confounding, was that the two experiences told me two contrasting stories about grades and motivation, In the first story, low grades served the purpose we all hope they do: They motivated the student to get his academic life in gear. Inthe second story, low grades served the purpose we all fear that they do: They discouraged the student and caused her to disengage further from the class. ‘The two narratives forced me to think more closely atout the relationship between grades and motivation than I ever had before, and to consider whether I should use grades as a motivating tool at all We all do that, of course. Who among us has not issued a low grade — perhaps one even slightly harsher than the work deserved ~ to a promising but underperforming student, with the idea that it would give the“ student an extra push to reach his or her potential? ‘And who among us has not had a student who showed marked improvement in our course, but who was still underperforming, leading us to mudge the students grade up a notch or two because we wanted to ensure that he or she didn't give up in frustration? I probably do one or both of those things, in some form, atleast once a semester. But my experience with such students has left me increasingly skeptical about the wisdom of those actions. I could have probably. come to that realization earlier ifI had looked to my own experiences as a student. {still remember the first and only C I ever received on a college-level writing assignment, It was not my first and only C in college; I picked them up occasionally in my required math and science courses. But I expected high grades in courses that relied on wating; I was an English major, afterall, and an aspiring writer. I was a philosophy major, too, so in my junior year I found myself in a course taught by a renowned philosopher. In addition to his lectures, I atiended weekly sessions with a teaching assistant who handled the prading of the papers. My first paper for the course was probably no masterpiece; but Istll believe to this day that it didn't deserve the C+ he put on it. I was apoplectic. I assumed the TA was either an idiot ar malicious, | worked like mad on the next paper, and my grade improved. It improved alittle further with each. ‘subsequent paper, but it never achieved the level I hoped and expected to receive in courses in my majors ‘You might say that that low grade motivated me, since I worked much harder on my subsequent papers, and the grades did improve. But that doesn't tell the whole story, | was so incensed about the grades that I disengaged from that course completely. I was a trained seal jumping through hoops. I wanted my fish, and I was willing to jump through whatever hoops that the teaching assistant set up. But I learned nothing. I remember nothing from the course. Infact, I don't even remember what the course was about, With hindsight, I can see that my response to that low grade mirrored the contradictory responses I received from the two students to whom I gave D's in my "Introduction to Literature" course: engagement and disengagement. have a colleague who tells yet another story about his grades in college. He coasted along on good grades in high school, and he entered college in the same mind-set. Instead, his professors gave him the low grades he deserved for his half-hearted academic efforts ‘Those grades changed his life. He was forced to consider whether academic success mattered to him, and hae decided that it did. He turned his academic career around and worked hard enough to earn admittance to sgraduate school. In his mind, those low grades were the most important motivating factor in a very successful academic career asa college faculty member. aspiring what has now become So many low grades, so many different reactions. What's the best method for using grades to motivate students for academic success?It seems to me that the only way you could effectively use grades as a motivating tool would be to ensure that any such effort corresponded with a student's personality and life situation, since how students respond to both low and high grades seems to depend on many factors that are out of our control. Snudents with high levels of self-confidence will respond to low grades with increased effort. Stadents with Tow levels will shut down and withdraw from the couse, Students who are strugeling with personal problems may see their low grades as one more of lifes burdens, and resign themselves to receiving more of thom. Students who have risen from difficult circumstances may see their low grades as one more obstacle to overcome. The list of possibilities is endless, And of course we don't know our students well enough to make the kinds of judgments about their self-confidence and circumstances that would enable us to calibrate their grades 10 achieve the desired level of motivation we want. And that leaves only one solution: Dont use grades ac a motivating tool a all In the few years I spent doing research on teaching and learning in higher education, I developed a pretty firm set of ideas about teaching. I have my preferred models of course design, my preferred methods in the classroom, my preferred kinds of assignments. In only one area of the teaching enterprise could I never seem to find agreement among the exper: ‘grading. What grades mean, what standards we should use, what kinds of response we should give to student work in all of those areas, I saw multiple arguments and theories that made sense to me but were ofien incompatible. ‘That has led me, over my last four and a half years of full-time teaching, to believe that the only thing that really maters is transparency. Convey clearly to the scents the criteria for your grades, and ene that they have the tools and opportunity to mect your crtesia, How they respond is beyond your control, So I have been trying to wean myself from the practice of using grades to motivate student learning, Grading to motivate doesn't work if you are transparent about the grading process. Imagine giving @ low zrade to a student because you want to push them inte working harder, and writing a brief accompanying note: This grade doesn't really reflect your work; I am using it to motivate you. ‘The student would be rightly outraged at that ~ and should be equally outraged if he or she were to receive 4 similar note explaining that a high grade was not necessarily a reflection of the work put into the assignment, but a reward for good behavior ("Good Doggie!").. Since we can't be transparent with our students about the reasons for their grades when we have used those grades to motivate them, and I don't think we can, then we probably shouldn't be doing it a all James M. Lang, an assistant professor of English at Assumption College, writes @ regular column about life ‘on the tenure track in the humanities. His new book, Life on the Tenure Track: Lessons From the First ‘Year, is forthcoming from the Johns Hopkins Universty Press early next year. For an archive of his previous columns, see http://chronicle.comjobs/archive/firstperson/lang.htm s2Higher Ed's Bermuda Triangle Esch, Camille. The Washington Monthly 41. 9/10 (Sep/Oct 2009): 38-42,45- 45. VAST NUMBERS OF STUDENTS ENTER COMMUNITY COLLEGE REMEDIAL CLASSES EVERY YEAR. FEW ARE EVER HEARD FROM. AGAIN. Treating children that way is like giving a lion their food without making them hunt for it. Jacinth Thomas-Val writes the sentence on the blackboard in her classroom at Sacramento City College, then asks her students what's wrong with it. "What does 'them' refer to in this sentence?" she asks one young woman. The young woman doesn't know, shakes her head, then gets up and leaves the classroom without explanation, not returning for the rest of the period. More times than she can remember, Thomas-Val has explained that pronouns need to match the word or phrase to which they refer. But the students in English- Writing 40, the lowest-level writing class that her community college offers, make these same basic mistakes week after week. Thomas- Val presses on, erasing "a Hon" and changing it to "lions." One young woman in the front row - clearly the eager, outspoken type - starts to get it, and asks how to fix a similar sentence in the essay she's just gotten back, But as Thomas-Val tries to explain, the back of the class dissolves into hushed talking and texting. Thomas-Val gently pulls them back to attention, but by the time she does, she needs to get the students started on their next essay assignment, a task that will consume the rest of the eighty-minute class. So she moves on. ‘Sacramento City is a typical California community college: its students are primarily minority, low income, and go to school part-time. Eighty-five percent of them arrive needing what are called remediation classes, courses like Thomas-Val's English-Writing 40. Remediation classes are designed to bring students up to the level needed to get started on the college's actual curriculum, to close the growing gap between what students have to know at the outset of college and what they learn in California's crumbling high school system - or, for older students, basic skills they may have once had but have lost in their years out of school.This willingness to offer opportunities and second chances to disadvantaged students, opportunities that aren't availadle in many other countries, is what first appealed to Thomas-Val - herself an immigrant from Antigua - about American community colleges. But in her decades of teaching, she has been shocked at just how unprepared most of her students are, how little they know - and how hard it is to help them. "It's unbelievable, just totally unbelievable,” she says. Of their writing, she says, "It's filled with all kinds of sentence-level errors. Not knowing how to join sentences or where sentence boundaries are. Capitalization problems. Stuff like that that you learned in grade school, or should have." Faced with these circumstances, Thomas-Val has adjusted her own expectations. "Let's say I have fifty students this semester," she says, "and five of them do exceedingly well. I am so grateful for the five. [For] the other forty-five, yes, my heart breaks, but I think, 'Oh, I've got fivel’ " ‘The odds for Thomas-Val s students are indeed formidable. Only 60 percent of, the community college's 3,000 remedial students pass their classes with a C or higher. Those who go looking for help at Sacramento City will face a mélange of disconnected programs and services. The college's academic counseling center is badly understaffed, and most of the tutoring available on campus is provided by other students. A recent state initiative provided some extra dollars for remediation, which the college spent adding student tutors and a few instructors here and there, in a process one administrator calls "hodge-podgey.” In such an environment, there are limits to what even a well-meaning professor like Thomas-Val, or her more enterprising students, can do. Thomas-Val is standing astride what is perhaps the leakiest juncture in the pipeline of American higher education, a pipeline that has unquestionably seen better days. America is losing its lead in higher ed: while other countries are turning out ever increasing numbers of college graduates, the U.S. has stalled. But the problem isn't just getting high school graduates into college - about 70 percent of them already enroll. It's getting them to finish it. Only about half of ‘American enrollees leave college with a degree, putting us behind at least ten other developed nations in educational attainment, according to a recent report by the Brookings Institution. Where exactly we're losing all of these students is unclear. But the best place to start looking is community college, and specifically those schools' remediation programs. Nearly half of all students seeking college degrees start at community colleges, and of those, a large percentage-estimates put it around 60 percent - must take remedial classes. Remedial students run a high risk of dropping out and not graduating; one robust study found that only 30 percent complete all of their remedial math coursework, and fewer than one in four6) remedial students makes it all the way to completing a college degree. Students who need remediation drop out at worse rates than community college students who don't, and the more remedial classes they need to take, the less likely they are to stay in school. There's a chicken-and-the-egg element to this, of course. Getting through two years of college is extremely hard for a student with fifth-grade skills - it may be too much to expect from many of them, even with the best help. So it's difficult to tell what exactly the grim remedial statistics say: Is the gulf between the students’ abilities and the most basic requirements of college simply too wide? Or are the programs failing? We don't know, and therein lies the problem. Community college remediation is the Bermuda Triangle of the higher education system - vast numbers of students enter, and for all intents and purposes disappear. We have almost no hard evidence about what works and what doesn't in remediation, and almost no one - policymakers, researchers, and administrators - has tried to figure it out in any systematic way. The reason for this is a combination of unjustly scant resources, huge gaps in data, and sometimes a sense of fatalism - or, worse, denial- that keeps state and school leaders from making it a priority. Meanwhile, the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better. Jobs requiring a college education are on the rise, and the labor market continues to pay a premium for college-educated workers. Students who wouldn't have gone past high school a few decades ago are now heading to college - especially community college - but they're not remotely prepared. But this trend also offers real opportunities. Even if community college remediation programs can simply go from terrible outcomes to mediocre ones - if, for instance, the programs were able to meet the needs of even just the top half of remedial students - the aggregate nationwide impact could be an additional 150,000 college graduates per year. The Obama administration is aware of this potential, and is looking to community colleges to help the U.S out of the economic crisis and meet our longer-term needs for more college graduates. In July, President Obama announced a new America Graduation Initiative that calls for an additional five million community college graduates by 2020. Meeting this goal is a tall order. But too few policymakers are willing to take the first steps: stop trying to educate the most academically challenged students on the cheap, and insist on community colleges having a stake in whether or not their students succeed. The colleges that have already started to take this kind of responsibility show that such an investment can pay off. If we don't fix(2 the pipeline where it's leaking most, even the best-laid plans for revitalizing the workforce with college graduates will amount to little Although 6.5 million undergrade attend them, community colleges have long held a marginal position in America's higher education system. They receive less funding, less media attention, and fewer philanthropic gifts than their four- year cousins, even as they are saddled with the hard, messy job of delivering on the American promise that everyone who wants to should be able to go to college. While K-12 school systems and universities have clear missions, community colleges are simply tasked with doing everything the other systems don't: getting underprepared students ready for universities, providing jobspecific training and certificates, and offering a wide range of basic education for adults - everything from English to word processing to physical education. While states are quick to pile new missions and responsibilities onto community colleges, they are less quick to fund them: nationwide, the schools get less than half per student of what four-year public research universities get in state and local funds. This is in spite of the fact that community college students comprise one of the fastest-growing sectors in American higher education, swelling with low-income and first-generation college-goers looking for courses that are cheaper, more accessible, and more flexibly scheduled than those on offer at the typical fouryear college. The problems this situation poses are thrown into particularly sharp relief in California, the home of the nation's largest community college system, which serves 2.8 million students on 110 campuses. California's system was intended as a gateway to higher education when the state developed its "Master Plan" for higher education in 1960. While the state's public four-year universities accepted the top-performing third of high school graduates, the community colleges would accept everyone else. The idea was that students could start college close to home and at a low price, then transfer their credits to a four- year university to complete a bachelor's degree. California's plan was widely considered to be a model social policy at the time of its inception: the system provided opportunity to anyone who was interested, without sacrificing quality for those who were exceptional. But California's Master Plan was drafted with an eye to the needs of a state which, demographically speaking, no longer exists. It was designed basically for "white kids in the fifties," says Dr. Robert Gabriner, a former president of the Research & Planning Group for California Community Colleges. "And being a white kid from the fifties, I can tell you that was pretty good." In 1960,Gd only a fifth of collegeage Californians went to college, and the state's K-12 school system did a relatively good job of preparing that top band of students for it. But in the subsequent half century, immigration and swelling birthrates brought California a younger and more diverse population, which the state's K- 12 public schools never adapted to. Over the same period of time, the labor market shifted toward industries that needed more highly educated workers, and the number of students who aspired to attend college rose accordingly. Meanwhile, a series of ballot initiatives and court decisions changed how California schools were funded, gutting and destabilizing school funding just as educational needs were growing. Because California's four-year universities were reserved for the top third of high school graduates, the weight of this unfortunate confluence of trends fell mostly on the state's community colleges. The schools were flooded with new students who were emerging underprepared, and in ever larger numbers, from the K-12 system. Community college enrollment grew elevenfold between 1960 and 2005, but funding levels didn't keep pace with the colleges’ educational challenges or their growing importance to the state's system of higher education. Per student, community colleges get less than a third of what's allotted for the state's prestigious University of California four-year schools. Community colleges are required to accept virtually anyone interested in higher education, no matter how unprepared, and today an astonishing 84 percent of incoming California community college students don't qualify to take collegelevel math classes that can count toward a four-year degree (in English, it's over 70 percent). As the level of education students brought with them to community college fell, the colleges began leaning more and more heavily on their remediation classes. As the number of students needing remediation increased, so too did the number of classes, faculty, and support services outside of class to help them. But the system developed in piecemeal fashion at most campuses, incorporating disconnected programs and disparate pots of money over the years. The programs have gotten bigger, but not better, suffering a particularly acute form of the neglect and vagueness of mission that plagues the community college system as a whole. To make matters worse, most colleges haven't spent a lot of time examining just how well their remedial programs are working. Lacking the kind of testing systems found in K-12, community colleges can't systematically determine how much students are learning in remedial education or pinpoint areas of weakness in the courses. Many regular college faculty just try to ignore the problem, while remedial instructors are often adjunct faculty rather than tenured or fall-4 time professors. They're sometimes called "freeway fliers" because they cobble together jobs at multiple colleges; even the most committed among them have limited time for students and few opporiunities to improve their own teaching. Colleges offer support services like drop-in tutoring and academic counseling for remedial students, but they don’t do enough to encourage students to use them, and the students - who tend to be passively engaged in their education, and aren't used to advocating for themselves-often don't seek them out. Even if more students did take advantage of the services, many colleges wouldn't have the resources to provide them, and the quality of the help in many cases is spotty. At Sacramento City College, the student-to-counselor ratio is reportedly 900 to 1, and some students told me they'd just as soon ask their friends for advice on what courses to take. ‘The maze of remediation programs and services worsens what is already a harsh environment for community college students, who are in many cases the first in their families to attend college and arrive on campus with little notion of how to navigate the educational bureaucracy. Students commute to school, and many attend part-time and sign up for classes online without consulting anyone from the college. They also forge few relationships with their classmates. "I drive to school, go to class, and leave," says Nadine Brown, a student from Sacramento who's tried two different community colleges so far. "That's about it." The lack of stickiness makes it easy for students to slip away, and often drop out for good. No one calls to say, "What happened to you?" Community colleges have little incentive to do better, thanks to poorly structured state policies. Colleges receive funding based on the number of students that enroll, rather than the number that actually complete courses or graduate - helping students get over the remediation hurdle costs schools money, but doesn't get them any more of it from state coffers. In the absence of leadership, California's community college system has developed an inertia all its own. The stakeholders with the greatest influence on the schools’ governance are the multiple employee associations and unions that have a natural interest in maintaining the status quo. These groups have generally resisted state-led efforts to standardize practices or change the way community colleges do their business, bristling at the idea of being compared - much less penalized - on the basis of student outcomes. This resistance is grounded in some legitimate concerns about fairness. Sacramento City College's dean of planning, research, and institutional effectiveness, Dr. Marybeth Buechner, argues that expecting colleges totransfer students into four-year schools who enter far below college level is like "an oncologist who's slapped because their patients sometimes die." But it has ultimately led the community college system to choose reporting practices that obscure the dropout problem while allowing everyone from legislators to college presidents and deans to evade responsibility for the part of the problem that is correctable. For example, the college system's official measure of student progress and achievement inflates success rates by considering the performance of an unreasonably narrow cohort of students, the ones who have already enrolled in a math or English class above the remedial level and have completed at least four classes of any kind. Everyone else - about 60 percent of the actual student population - is deemed not to be a serious degree seeker and is dropped from the calculation altogether. By this generous methodology, 52 percent of California's degreeseeking community college students achieve their goals or demonstrate progress toward them. But independent efforts to track the success of a larger group of students that could reasonably be assumed to be degree seekers - 60 percent of them, by one credible estimate - suggest a far less rosy picture, in which only a quarter to a third of students who want to transfer or finish a one- or two-year degree program actually do. These numbers are hugely contentious in community college circles. One unflattering study, published in 2007 by Nancy Shulock, the executive director of the Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy at California State University, Sacramento, set off a firestorm among insiders and the local media, and made her persona non grata throughout California's community college system. Even midlevel campus bureaucrats have a surprisingly thorough knowledge of Shulock's work, and will readily argue why her calculations are wrong. (Meanwhile, the fear of being "Shulocked" - becoming the object of intense scrutiny and personal criticism - appears to have spread among critics and observers of the system. More than one researcher I spoke to was very leery of revealing numbers or analyses that cast a negative light on the community colleges.) Arguments over who's right tend to hinge on a debate over what exactly community colleges should be held accountable for when it comes to student performance. Administrators point out that many people who enroll in community college do not necessarily aspire to earn a degree, and that it's unfair to expect them to graduate students who are there merely for short-term job training or a one-time refresher course. In fact, California community colleges do collect information from entering students about their intentions, but many administrators disregard it on the assumption that students don't know much about college or how hard it will be to reach their stated goals.ole California's community college troubles are not unique to the state; underfunding is a nationwide problem and in many states two-year colleges are facing budget cuts in the coming year. The need for remediation is not unique to California's students either, or to particular racial or ethnic groups - it's a sad fact of American education that low incomes and low educational skills go hand in hand, regardless of other circumstances. Faced with all this, even well-meaning community college personnel often evince a fatalism about their work, focusing more on students' deficiencies and who's to blame - the K-12 system, poverty, bad parents - than on what the college can do about them. "Community colleges are open access," one Sacramento City College administrator ‘old me. "Students can come here whether or not we have courses that are appropriate for them. We get students who can't read. That blows me away! My curriculum is not designed to teach someone how to read." But despite the seemingly intractable nature of the remediation problem, some community colleges are managing to acaieve a measure of success. A decade ago, a small group of faculty and administrators at Chaffey College, a large school serving primarily minority students in Rancho Cucamonga, California, grew alarmed at the rising remediation needs of incoming students, 70 percent of whom were placing below college level. Realizing that underprepared students were now the norm rather than the exception, the Chaffey team decided to revamp their entire approach to remediation, first by throwing out the word itself - opting for "foundational skills" instead - and by rethinking it as, a schoolwide approach that extended beyond a particular subset of classes. They also framed the entire mission as a "moral imperative" for their college. "We decided not to talk about whose fault it is, because it doesn't matter," says Laura Hope, interim dean of instructional support at Chaffey. "That discussion is a waste of time.” Armed with this notion of responsibility to, rather than simply tolerance of, underprepared students, the group shut down Chaffey's old-style tutoring center, where students went for help only once they'd started to fail and which focused on helping students get past a particular essay or test, rather than learning skills that could be transferred to new situations. Instead, the college opened several centers that offered students supplementary lessons and learning activities that were linked to the students’ actual class work and were codeveloped by the classes’ instructors. The idea was to extend the reach of the classroom and offer extra instruction that faculty members simply didn't have time to do themselves - a far more coordinated and intensive approach than the typical drop-in tutoring.‘There was some resistance from the "recalcitrant tribal elders," says Hope - another faculty member described them as "old dinosaurs who would rather bitch about their students" - but it didn't take long for lots of faculty members to buy into the idea. For once, teachers could reach out to someone else on campus for help with specific problems they had in the classroom. In the state's official progress report, Chaffey does not stand out as a superstar. But one outside researcher found that Caaffey - which has the ninth largest remedial population in California's community college system - was improving more than almost any other college in the state when it comes to getting students through remediation and into regular college-level courses. That rate has steadily improved by over 2 percent annually, meaning an additional 150 students make it through to collegelevel classes each year. The vast majority of colleges have been stagnant on this measure, or even slid back a bit, but Chaffey has made steady progress in the right direction - a real victory in what is sure to be a long war. It's unreasonable to hold community colleges respon- sible for moving every incoming student with fifth-grade skills toward graduation. What we can reasonably aim for, however, is a system in which more schools perform like Chaffey - in which the schools that currently do the best job of approaching those goals are the standard, rather than the exception. If all of California's community colleges were improving at he same rate as Chaffey, 25,000 more students would pass into college-level classes over two years’ time. It's not a sea change, but it's nothing to sneeze at, either. Community colleges don't have an obligation to work miracles, but they do have an obligation to do better - to ensure quality teaching and academic counseling, to pay close attention to student outcomes, to try new approaches when the old ones obviously aren't working. States and college systems have an obligation to push community colleges that are less enthusiastic than Chaffey to embrace this mindset, by adopting policies that reward innovation, penalize complacency, and require transparent measurement of student performance. Increasingly, it seems, the federal goverament is taking this view. So far, Obama's higher education initiatives are focused on the right things: more resources for community colleges, a focus on completion, strengthening data and research, and improving remedial education for underprepared students. His American Graduation Initiative proposal calls for an unprecedented federal investment in community colleges - $12 billion over the next decade - by way of grants to innovative states and colleges and support for much-needed infrastructure, including research and facilities. A related report from Obama'sCouncil of Economic Advisers went further, recommending that postsecondary programs and institutions "should have an incentive to continually improve and should be held accountable for their results." Obama has also made a smart move by naming a well-respected former California community college chancellor, Martha J. Kanter, as his undersecretary of education. But it's hard to say what real impact his initiative will have. Primarily, the plan will provide resources in the form of competitive grants to colleges and states - an approach that won't help much in colleges with little capacity to start with and in states with weak central leadership, where the money may not be enough to wrangle all stakeholders into line. Critics also argue that it's not all that much money (annually only 4 percent of total government expenditures on community colleges nationwide) and that none of it will go toward the colleges’ biggest problem of all: insufficient general funds. The initiative also falls short of establishing a true "performance measurement system" of the kind recommended in a recent report by the Brookings Institution, which would provide clearly defined goals for student outcomes and standard ways of measuring progress toward them. Given what's at stake economically, we should be looking much more closely at what value community colleges add and demanding that they do more. For decades, states have refused to confront the obvious: the decision to funnel the most academically at-risk students into colleges that receive the fewest resources has turned out to be something of a disaster. And both policymakers and community college administrators have indulged in the polite fiction that community colleges are not so different from four-year institutions, and accordingly deserve the same autonomy and academic freedom. But this laissez-faire attitude ignores the degree to which community colleges’ remedial programs - if not the rest of the colleges curricula - is functionally more like high school. There is plenty of disagreement about the use of test-based accountability in higher education, but the place where it should be least debatable is remedial education. Though teachers and students tend not to like testing - and there are plenty of ways to do it wrong - there is little argument that better assessment would help us know more about remedial students’ skill levels, how much they're growing, and how to serve these students better. As the relative value of the high school diploma has declined, more students want and deserve a real shot at a college education, and for many low-income people, that shot will begin at a community college. The first step is to embrace anew kind of American college student. The next is to invest in and reform the institutions that serve those students. That will mean hard work and focused attention from teachers, administrators, and elected officials at the highestGt levels of government - the same virtues we demand of community college students themselves. At her class at Sacramento City College, Jacinth Thomas- Val begins each day by providing her students with an inspirational quote, one of which reads: "The will to persevere is often the difference between success and failure." Let's practice what we preach.WHAT OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM NEEDS IS MORE FS by Carl Singleton I suggest that instituting merit raises, getting back to basics, marrying the university to industry, and. other recommendations will not achieve measurable success [in restoring quality to American education] until something even more basic is returned to practice. The immediate need for our educational system from pre kindergarten through post-Ph.D. is not more money or better teaching but simply a widespread giving of F's. Before hastily dismissing the idea as banal and simplistic, think for a moment about the implications of a massive dispensing of failing grades. It would dramatically, emphatically, and immediately force into the open every major issue related to the inadequacies of American education, Let me make it clear that I recommend giving those F's-by the dozens, hundreds, thousands, even millions-only to students who haven't learned the required material. The basic problem of our educational system is the common practice of giving credit where none has been earned, a practice that has resulted in the sundry faults delineated by all the reports and studies o-:ver recent years, Illiteracy among high-school graduates is growing because those students have been passed rather than flunked; we have low-quality teaching because of low-quality teachers who never should have been certified in the first place; college students have to take basic reading, writing, and mathematics courses because they never leamed those skills in classrooms from which they never should have been granted egress. School systems have contributed to massive ignorance by issuing uneamed passing grades over a period of some 20 years. At first there was a3) tolerance of students who did not fully measure up (giving D's to students who should have received firm F's); then our grading system continued to deteriorate (D's became C's, and B became the average grade); finally we arrived at total accommodation ( come to class and get your C's, laugh at my jokes and take home B's). Higher salaries, more stringent certification procedures, getting back to basics will have little or no effect on the problem of quality education unless and until we insist, as a profession, on giving F's whenever students fail to master the material. Sending students home with finel grades of F would force most parents to deal with the realities of their children’s failure while it is happening and when it is yet possible to do something about it (less time on TV, and more time on homework, perhaps!). As long as it is the practice of teachers to pass students who should not be passed, the responsibility will not go home to the parents, where, I hope, it belongs. (I am tempted to make an analogy to then Gov. Lester Maddox's statement some years ago about prison conditions in Georgia-"Welll get a better grade of prisons when we get a better grade of prisoners"-but I shall refrain.) Giving an F where it is deserved would force concerned parents to get themselves away from the TV set. and take an active part in their children's education. I realize, of course, that some parents would not help; some cannot help. However, Johnny does not deserve to pass just because Daddy doesn't care or is ignorant. Johnny should pass only when and if he knows the required material. Giving an F whenever and wherever it is the only appropriate grade would force principals, school boards, and voters to come to terms with cost as a factor in improving our educational system. As the numbers of students atvarious levels were increased by those not being passed, more money would have to be spent to accommodate them. We could not be accommodating them in the old sense of passing them on, but by keeping them at one level until they did in time, one way or another, learn the material. Insisting on respecting the line between passing and failing would also require us to demand as much of ourselves as of our students. As every teacher knows. a failed student can be the product of a failed teacher. Teaching methods, classroom presentations, and testing procedures would have to be of a very high standard-we could not, after all, conscionably give F's if we have to go home at night thinking it might somehow be our own fault. The results of giving an F where it is deserved would be immediately evident. There would be no illiterate college graduates next spring-none. The same would be true of high-school graduates, and consequently next year's college freshmen--all of them would be able to read. I don't claim that giving F's will solve all of the problems, but I do argue that unless and until we start failing those students who should be failed, other suggested solutions will make little progress toward improving education Students in our schools and colleges shculd be permitted to pass only after they have fully met established standards; borderline cases should be retained. The single most important requirement for solving the problems of education in America today is the big fat F, written decisively in red ink millions of times in schools and colleges across the country.Capitol Journal: Chipping away at community colleges As fees rise and courses are cut, sudents suffer, Without a tax extension, the losses could be mue February 02, 2011 George Skelton | Capitol Journal ater, From Sacramento — California's community colleges always have been among the best bargains in America. But too often these days that’s like saying land's cheap on Mars. Price doesn't matter much if the product isn't available, Like a lot of institutions that rely on tax dollars, Californi hard, And that means students suffer. community college system has been hit They're getting less for more. Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing to increase student fees by $10 per unit, from $26 to $36, That would raise $110 million to partly offset a $400-million state funding cut Brown advocates for community. colleges, leaving them with $3.6 billion in state money, a 10% trim. ‘The governor essentially wants to shift that $400 million to K-12 schools. They're more popular with the public, and their biggest union — the Californie Teachers Assn. — is arguably the most powerful lobby in Sacramento. Brown's politcal strategy is simple: He's protecting K-12 schools from more whacks for now. But he's ‘warming that K-12 cuts will resume if voters don't approve his proposed extension of temporary tax hikes in June. The teachers union presumably will be highly motivated to help bankroll his ballot campaign if the Legislature allows the special election, ‘The community colleges aren't complaining loudly about the proposed fee increase. "It may be a litle sharp, but it doesn't hurt too badly,” says Jack Scott, chancellor of the California Community Colleges. ‘The higher fees still would be the lowest in the natian, by far, totaling $1,080 annually for a student on track for a two-year associate of arts degree. Moreover, the fees are waived for students judged to be financially needy, about half the enrollment, ‘Neither are the colleges really screaming — grumbling maybe — about their virtually certain funding cut, It's tough all over. For years, the state has been in a deep hole, the latest calculation being $25 billion, It must climb out and everyone has to give. The colleges get that. But they're lobbying for restoration of some of the severed funding if Brown's tax plan passes. toll. "We've been cut and cut It's the cumulative effect of several years of slashing that has taker and cut," Scott says. “It's been death by many cuts."4 By law, the 112 colleges must admit anyone who is at Icast 18 and has a high schoo! diploma. But that doesnt mean the student is guaranteed a desired class. ‘The colleges have been paring instructors, filling classrooms to the brim and canceling courses. "You can't make major cuts without reducing staff," Scott says. "You can't save much money by not sweeping the floor as often.” The colleges tured away 140,000 students during the last school year. It’s estimated twice that many are being shut out of classes this year. Brown's funding cuts would deny courses for 350,000 more, according to longtime community colleges lobbyist Patrick McCallum. Many college classes have long waiting lists, virtually unheard of 20 years ago. Some examples from last fall: 6,200 wait-listed seats at Cypress College, nearly 13,000 at Bakersfield College, 80,000 in the Los Rios Community College District in Sacramento County. "The big story is the number of first-time students — the recent high school graduates — who are being squeezed out," says Paul Steenhausen, community college expert for the Legislative Analyst's Office. "I liken it o an unfortunate game of musical chairs where there's not enough chairs for participants and when the music stops, its the new guy every time who winds up without a seat.” Aggravating this student deprivation, the number of counselors has been halved. It's the counselor who's supposed to guide a student through the complex maze of academia, advising which courses 10 take to, for example, earn a degree in two years and transfer to either of the state university systems, Fewer classes, fewer counselors — it's becoming much tougher to obtain a degree in two years, even for the most ambitious. "When I go on a campus and refer to it as a two-year college,’ " Steenhausen says, "students snicker." ‘My most reliable source on all this is my granddaughter, Georgia Henry, 19, who's on target to ‘graduate in June from Sacramento City College after running a two-year obstacle course, Like many students, she opted for a local community college to save money and build up her grades to gain admission to the University of California, She says students at Sac City are basically on their own, "You have to be smart about what class you take and double-check everything because there's nobody making sure you're on the right track,” she says. "Thats alittle bit different than I thought it would be. "kind of found my way through by making all the mistakes possible and deciding Ihad to fx it, and L did” ‘That included taking practically a full load last summer.qs “Lonly got into all my classes because I leamed my way around the system.” Inall, there are 2.76 million California community college students. Besides university transfer aspirants, they include retuming war vets and laid-off workers seeking retraining and single welfare ‘moms learning job skills College leaders worry about the fate of Brown's proposed tax extension. “If it passes, we can quickly breathe a sigh of relief" says Daniel LaVista, chancellor of the Los Angeles Community College District. "If it fails, Armageddon looks us in the eye. "Tm not one who rises to melodrama, but I can tell you this would be a different organization." Community colleges have always been the bedrock of quality public education in California, an indispensable building block of economic growth. But that bedrock has been eroding, george skeltoniilatines.comra Limit set on repeating college courses Chronic flunkers take up room, resources. By Heather Somerville / The Fresno Bee http://www. fresnobee.com/201 1/07/21/v-print/2473205/limit-set-on-repeating- college. html ‘Thursday, Jul. 21, 2011 | 10:12 PM Community college students no longer have the luxury of repeating courses four, five and even six times on the state's dime. Education leaders decided last week to limit the number of times students can repeat classes using state money. The state pays 90% of the cost of community college classes to keep tuition affordable — but low costs also encourage students to drop classes more frequently, With demand for classes at an all-time high end course selections diminishing, competition for a spot in community colleges is fierce. Students who repeatedly enroll in classes and withdraw or flunk make the problem worse: They take seats away from new students and strain the system's scant resources by delaying their graduation. "We have too many students waiting in the wings for their first crack ata class," said Brent Calvin, interim president at College of the Sequoias in Visalia. Pushing students to he more serious The stricter rules may push students to be more serious about completing classes, Calvin said. But they don't address the bigger issue ~ students who are unprepared for college- level classes and repeatedly flunk out. With dwindling resources, community colleges struggle to serve a diverse pool of students. Limiting students’ chances to repeat classes doesn't solve their academic challenges, but it does free up money for services such as tutoring and counseling, and sends the message that completing classes is crucial, officials say. ‘The Board of Govemors of the California Community Colleges approved the change for the spring, trying to weed out chronic flunkers, make room for new students and save money. The new rules will allow students to take required classes three times, and they can petition for a fourth if they can prove a hardship such as illness kept them out of class.FF Students who can‘ finish with a passing grace can keep enrolling ~ but only if the college agrees to pay for it. And at a time of absolute rationing, most community colleges would be hesitant to hand out any extra funding. Fora three-credit class, students pay $108 ard the state pays $4500. Colleges would have to pay the state's share from their reserves if they let students repeat a class more than three times because state law doesn't let students pay the full cost. Rules that took effect in 2009 allowed students to take a course up to seven times and receive state funding. Prior to 2009, the state did not limit class repeats. With lax rules about class scheduling, California's community colleges make it easy for students to enroll in courses they might not be prepared for or interested in, said Scott Lay, president of the nonprofit advocacy groap Community College League of California, Students might make it halfway through before realizing that they/re failing and drop the class, "The community college system has said, ‘We're going to let you keep trying over and over again,’ " Lay said. "By the third time, maybe we need to find out why you're not succeeding in that course." The new rules are popular among community college officials who are scrambling to make room for incoming students. But local leaders admit they are politically easy to support because few students repeat classvs more than three times. Some take same class up to seven times Out of 2,436 students in the State Center Community College District who took intermediate algebra in the spring 2011 semester, 22 had enrolled at least three times before, and some were taking it for the seventh time. The district has five campuses across Fresno and Madera counties, including Fresno City College and Reedley College. An average of 4% of West Hills Community College District students repeat courses three or more times, based on data from 2007 to 2011. The district includes colleges in Coalinga and Lemoore. The real concem, some say, is the number of students who repeat courses and continue to fail. Of the 22 algebra repeaters at State Center, just half passed the class. ‘Community colleges have struggled for years to improve low completion rates. From 1992-2010, more than 82,000 students statewide repeated English courses more than three times. Despite multiple attempts, 40% withdrew from the class and 22% failed. The math numbers are just as dismal: out of 155,000 students, 38% withdrew and 27% failed —even after more than three tries.aay "We have students that come out of high school with a 2.0 GPA and haven't had math," Calvin said. "For us to think that they'll be capable to come straight [to college-level classes] and have a different result than they had in high school... that's a recipe for disaster." Limiting enrollment isn't the cure for many struggling students, said Kevin Feliciano, president of the Student Senate for California Community Colleges. The senate recently retracted its support for the class repeat policy change. Feliciano said that he recognizes colleges have limited resources, but they should instead provide more intervention and counseling services. More guidance needed While some officials blame high schools for failing to adequately prepare students, they also recognize community colleges have to do a better job of motivating students to complete classes. Fresno City College Interim President Tony Cantu said some students need more guidance on choosing the right classes. But sometimes, he said, "life happens.” On diverse community college campuses such as City College, many students have full time jobs and families. Some are returning students who might have been out of school for years and are unprepared, and many low-income students withdraw when they can't afford tuition. "When life intervenes... i's oftentimes easier for a student to quit a class rather than quit a job or relationship,” said Daniel Gai, former Fresno City College student body president. Gai, 34, would know ~ he dropped his spring semester classes to dedicate more time to student government and running his family's business. He then had to resign as student body president because he was no longer enrolled. Each time "life happens," it drains a little more from the state coffers. The state spends about $1.5 million on students who repeat clesses more than four times, according to an analysis by the Community College League of California. The cost is a small portion of the system's $6.2 billion annual budget, Lay said, but the savings would help colleges that now cover the state's share of enrollment costs. College of the Sequoias, for instance, did not receive state funding for 1,800 students last year. Just once for state- funded courses? ‘The Board of Governors also is considering limiting repeat enrollments in physical activity and fine arts classes for 2012-13. Allowing students to take a state-funded activity class only once would save the state $60 million, according to Paul Stecnhausen, ‘who evaluates community college policies at the California Legislative Analyst's Office. Some students say limiting course repeats will force students to be more responsible.4 "I think three times is plenty," said Vanessa Cabrera, a sophomore and social work major at Fresno City College. "I don't even know why a student would take a course more than two times." Tony Capetillo said many students come to class "either for a financial aid check or their parents are making them," and they end up dropping or failing the course. Capetillo, a 34- year-old networking and computer technician major, said about seven out of the 50 or so students in his summer intermediate algebra class are repeats. The seats "could have gone to a student who was really serious,” he said. It's not just apathetic students dropping or flunking classes, though ~ some repeaters are among the most motivated students. Reedley College student Jaime Andersen enrolled in a chemistry class in the summer of 2010, but decided to drop it when she realized she might get a C. She wanted an A. She said she re-enrolled in the course, required for her nursing major, for the fall — her last chance, since she plans to transfer to Fresno State next spring. "Receiving a good grade is pretty much everything in certain majors," she said. "It's important that you have the option to repeat classes. he reporter canbe reached at hsomerillresnhes som or (659 44-6812,Community Colleges Rethink 'Open Door' Admissions as Remedial Costs Rise By Caralee Adams on August 13, 2010 6:03 AM EdWeek _hittp://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/college_bound/2010/08/chicago_co nsiders_ending_community_college_open_admission.html?print=1 Chicago Mayor Richard Daley this week called for an end to the "open door" admissions policy at Chicago City Colleges, citing concerns about the cost of remedial courses and a desire to build a quality program. Every year, the system spends about $30 million for remedial classes —about 6 percent of its $457.5 million budget. Daley suggested that a better approach might be to offer programs through altemative high schools to get students up to speed before they enter college. Is this a sign of things to come? Unfortunately, Chicago's approach is not unique, says George Boggs, president and chief executive officer of the American Association of Community Colleges. In tight economic times, community colleges are looking for places to cut back, and some are stopping their most basic remedial education programs. "I'm a little concerned about this," Boggs says. "Community college has always been an open door for college. We have taken everybody." Students are assessed upon entry and take remedial programs if they aren't prepared. Boggs doesn't want to see colleges weed out students who are least able and don't have many other options. It's like a hospital that only sees healthy patients, Boggs says. "I hate to see that philosophy—to improve quality by denying access to the most at-risk students," he says. "Where are these students going to turn? We need to find some way to take care of these students. We can't just leave them out there. It hampers their ability to be contributing members of society." Colleges across the country are strugglirg to respond to burgeoning enrollment without an increase in funding, says John Roueche, a professor of education administration and director of the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas. If a college can adapt, then it runs the risk of the legislature concluding that it was over-funded to start with—so some college Beare shutting down enrollment. "It's a nice way to send a message that we can't do more with less,” Roueche says. Enrollment at community colleges is up nearly 17 percent in the past two years, according to the American Association of Community Colleges. A study by the Community College Research Center shows that about 60 percent of community college students need to take at least one remedial course. In California, demand for classes has outpaced classroom space, but the state remains committed to the philosophy of open enrollment, says Terri Carbaugh, vice chancellor for communications of California Community Colleges. "As a matter of policy, there is no effort to restrict enrollment," she says. However, because of high demand and shrinking resources, nearly 140,000 first-time students came to the system's campuses but couldn't find seats in priority classes last year, and the number may grow. Access is restricted because of pressure on resources, but not as a result of public policy, Carbaugh says Providing basic skills for student in need of a second chance is a primary mission of the community college system and not one that the state will likely shy away from any time soon, Carbaugh says. Rather, the conversation is along the lines of what can be done to bolster K-12 to improve college readiness and substantially reduce the demand for remediation, The readiness gap has been the focus of recent research, and Education Secretary Ame Duncan has called on high schools to increase the rigor of their coursework. At the same time, Presiden: Obama has called for a concerted effort to raise the U.S. graduation rate to 60 percent in the next 10 years; about 40 percent of Americans ages 25-34 currently hold at least an associate degree, according to a College Board report. These tough choices by community colleges will likely fuel the dialogue to improve college readiness in high schools and consideration of other options for remedial training. Some community college leaders say that "open door" means the opportunity is available, but that there is still an assumption of a certain level of readiness. It goes agains: the grain of community colleges to limit admissions, but the reality is that without adequate resources, choices are being made.2-Year College, Squeezed, Sets 2- Tier Tuition By JENNIFER MEDINA SANTA MONICA, Calif. — For years now, administrators at the communi ‘ollege here have been inundated with woeful tales from students unable to register for the courses they need. Classes they want for essential job training or to fulfill requirements to transfer to four-year universities fill up within hours. Hundreds of students resort to crying and begging to enroll in a class, lining up at the doors of instructors and academic counselors. Now, though, Sata Monies College is about to try something novel. This summer it will offer some courses for a higher price, so that students who are eager to get into a particular class can do so if they pay more. The plan may be the first of its kind in the country, college officials and other higher education experts say, and if the college succeeds in implementing it, many other community colleges are likely to follow. Since 2009, enrollment in California community colleges has fallen by 300,000 students, to 2.6 million, and many believe the difficulty of. registering for classes is the most important deterrent. For generations, community colleges have been seen as a social equalizer, providing a relatively inexpensive education for poor students, immigrants and others without the skills, grades or money to attend a four-year institution. So the two-tiered tuition structure being proposed here is raising eyebrows, and fundamental questions, about the role and obligations of community colleges. Will the policy essentially block some of the people it is designed to benefit? Many students believe the new policy — if the state does not block its implementation, which it could yet do — will unfairly exclude the poorest students and create a kind of upper and lower class of students. A financial squeeze since the recession led first to a reduction of federal and then state financing for colleges and universities. Since 2008, California's community college system has lost $809 million in state aid, including $564 million in the most recent budget, even as more students than ever before try to enroll.gs Many colleges have reduced class offerings. Santa Monica College has cut more than 1,100 classes from its fall term. David Baime, the senior vice president for government relations and research at the American Association of Community Colleges, called the Santa Monica plan “extremely rare if not completely unprecedented.” But the impetus behind it, he said, is clear. “In many cases, and California most, prominently, amid the recession there was a huge spike in enrollment concurrent with budget cuts,” Mr. Baime said. “The colleges have just maxed out in terms of how many students they can serve.” Community colleges are hardly the only places suffering budget cuts, Last week, administrators of the California State University system approved a plan to significantly limit the number of students it accepts next year because budget cuts have made it impossible to pay for any enrollment increase. “Bvery year we look around and think about how we can serve more students, but what we have now is not working,” said Chui L. Tsang, the president of Santa Monica College. “Literally thousands of students are missing out on opportunities we want to give them and have the ability to give them if we just had the money.” Officials in the California Community Colleges chancellor’s office said that they could move to block Santa Monica's proposed tuition increase. They said that it was not clear such a change was legal and that the program could limit access for students, particularly those who did not have enough money to pay for the more expensive courses. Currently, each community college class costs $36 per eredit hour. Under Santa Monica’s plan, the more expensive courses would cost $180 per credit hour — just enough to cover the college’s costs, Dr. Tsang said. While the college is stil ironing out the details, it expects to offer about 200 courses at the higher tuition price, in addition to hundreds of regularly priced courses. College officials say that nearly every class is filled to capacity and that they are asking departments to choose which courses have the highest demand so they can offer more of those — typically basic courses in English, writing, math and science.For now, the college does not plan to offer the higher-priced courses in the fall and spring semesters, but will change $180 per credit forall classes in the shorter winter term. Nearly every other community college in the state has eliminated the winter term because of budget cuts. “There is a real concern about equity here, because if there are higher fees that will only gain access for certain students, does that really address the problem,” said Paul Feist, the vice chancellor for communications of the California Community Colleges. “The reality is that there are hundreds of thousands of students who are not getting access to community college — and access has always been what we are famous for.” Santa Monica College, which has 34,000 students, is widely considered one of the most successfull community colleges in the country, with one of the highest transfer rates to four-year colleges. Many students from Los Angeles choose to attend the school for their first two years as a way to save money. California community colleges have some of the lowest tuition fees in the country. And for decades, the community college system has operated under the presumption that lower fees translated into greater access, said John Aubrey Douglass, a senior researcher at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley. But as budget cuts have forced campuses to cramatically scale back what they can offer, that paradigm has begun to shift. “There’s a sense that if the colleges can generate the adequate income themselves, they may no longer be struggling with the lack of resources, because there is certainly a tremendous level of demand,” Dr. Douglass said. “It’s a much-needed conversation that we need to have — is it possible our tuition is too low? This is a very important move to push the envelope.” One donor has agreed to give $250,000 in scholarships for students who want to take the more expensive classes but cannot afford them. Dr. Tsang hopes that will make the program more attractive. Also, sinee Santa Monica is prosperous enough to have built a community college relatively rich in facilities, it tends to draw students from across the Los Angeles region. Some say such students may be more willing to pay higher tuition rates.Janet Harclerode, an English instructor and president of the college’s Academic Senate, said that many professors viewed the new plan as having a “real ick factor,” but that few saw any real alternative. Many instructors have already accepted extra students in their classrooms, even allowing a few to sit on the floor when seats were scarce. “We hope that this is just a stopgap measure, before taxpayers step up and the state really starts to reinvest in the colleges,” she said.Be Students protest Santa Monica College plan for — higher priced classes April, 2012 | 3:40 pm Students at Santa Monica College rallied outside the president's office Thursday, demanding an end to a proposed two-tier program and calling for an investigation of the recent pepper spray incident. More than 100 protesters gathered on the steps of the school library and marched through campus, picking up more concerned students slong the way, as they chanted: "Education should be free. No cuts. No fees.” Along the way, students expressed outrage ove: rising costs. Many said the hike would make the community college less accessible to students who attend the school for its lower cost. Others wanted the president to publicly condemn the actions of the police officer who released pepper spray into the air as students tried to get into the Board of Trustees meeting Tuesday evening. ‘The crowd headed 10 blocks along Pico Boulevard to the district's headquarters, where President Chui L. Tsang has an office. Outside, students shouted with a bullhorn, calling on the president to discuss with students the plan, which would charge more for extra sessions of high-demand, core classes such as English, math and history. ‘Tsang never addressed the students, He was ata meeting off-campus, said Bruce Smith, the college spokesman. ‘The protest came a day after the head of California's community college system called for the college to put a hold on the plan until the state determines its legality. The two-tier program calls for some core courses to cost about $180 @ unit versus the usual $46 a unit for summer classes. One student, Aura Chaver, said it was unfair that the seven trustees have the power to make for the 34,000-student body. such a deci "This undermines the whole mission statement of community college," said Chavez, a freshman developmental psychology major. "Aad that's to be accessible and affordable." ‘Smith said the school expects to move forward with its plans. Officials have said it will help some students get classes they need to graduate and transfer.Jatimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-community-college-two-tier-fees- 20120316,0,5734731 story latimes.com Editorial Santa Monica College's two-tier trap A proposal to increase fees for certain in-demand classes is understandable but carries too many risks. March 16, 2012 At Santa Monica College, the community college known as a feeder school for UCLA, students are regularly turned away from core academic courses that are oversubscribed — but that they need if they hope to take higher-level classes, graduate or transfer to a four-year school. As a result of budget cuts, almost every seat is taken in almost every class. And the same holds true for community colleges throughout the state. One of California's most democratic ideals — an affordable, high-quality public education available to all who need it — is crumbling. So it’s perfectly understandable why Santa Monica College officials, scrambling to make ends meet, have proposed increasing fees for certain in- demand classes to about $600 to $800 per course, or a little more than four times the standard price. The courses would pay their own way, allowing the college to accommodate more students. Understandable, but wrong. Creating a two-tier system of fees sets a serious precedent that could change the basic nature of the community college system. Once a handful of courses pay for themselves, the temptation to add more would be hard to resist, and the temptation for other campuses to join in would be overwhelming. College fees are set by the Legislature and overseen by the systemwide chancellor's office in Sacramento. A single campus should not have the authority — and it's doubtful it does — to set the price for a community college education. Santa Monica College officials say that Cal Grants and private donations to a special fund will cover the added cost for low-income students, so that this,22 would not become an option only for the affluent. But Cal Grants, which provide financial aid to low- and moderate-income California families, are based on the type of college the students attend. Students at community colleges receive a certain stipend, University of California students another, and so forth. There are some supplemental funds students can apply for, but it's not clear that Cal Grants would provide them for this purpose. The program can't cover students’ expenses if every community college in the state starts quadrupling the price of its most popular classes. If private donors step forward, Santa Monica College should use their money to fund classes at the regular price. A new policy recently adopted by the statewide community college system should help. Students who have passed more than their share of courses to graduate or transfer would have the lowest priority for class registration, giving first crack to students who need those classes. But individual campuses shouldn't be jacking up prices unilaterally. Copyright © 2012Los Angeles Times3d Budget Cuts Force Unit Cap on 2012 by Kaci Poor The Lumberjack 41/2012 Alyssa Beck does not like the idea of a 17-unit cap at Humboldt State. The 21-year-old sociology major said college is supposed to allow her the opportunity to explore a variety of diverse classes and activities, even if those classes do not fall within her major. Beck feels that a cap set at 17 units limits her choice of elective classes by forcing her to prioritize around a limited number of units. “Ifeel like | share this sentiment with most of my peers,” she said. “In the midst of steady increases in tuition, this policy hinders students’ already diminishing ability to graduate in a timely manner with minimal financial debt.” But keeping students in the Cal State University system longer as they rack up debt is the last thing the Chancellor's Office hopes to accomplish with the new unit cap policy. In a system-wide memo sent out March “3, the Chancellor's Office said the unit cap would be reduced to 16 units on a system-wide level. That cap would not be bumped up once the semester began at any CSU. The goal: to graduate students faster and more efficiently. The move is one of several strategies — including a spring enrollment freeze at several CSU campuses — the Chancellor's Office is employing to avoid another hike in tuition as state funding for the CSU plummets. John Lee, dean of the College of Professional Studies, explained that over the past 15 years, the CSU has lost approximately $1 billion in state funding. Humboldt students, he said, pay slightly less than half the cost associated with operating the university. “HSU and other CSU campuses must do more with significantly less resources,” Lee said. "The CSU is already the most efficient university systen in the country and with the ongoing disinvestment, we cannot provide the level of services that we have been able to provide in the past, including the subsidizing of tuition." ‘One of those services to go — virtually unlimited unit availabilty Last semester, HSU undergraduate students could enroll in up to 17 units prior to the start of the school semester. The Saturday before classes started, the Office of the Registrar bumped the cap up to 19 units. If students really wanted to,following the first day of classes, they could enroll in more units, with a written request from their adviser. Beck felt this model gave she and her peers the opportunity to explore a variety of extracurricular classes outside of their major and general education classes. But that policy no longer works for the CSU system. HSU was granted a small reprieve in the unit cap, however — one extra unit. That is because as a destination campus, HSU students, on average, take a higher unit load than students at most other CSUs. Peg Blake, vice president of Student Affairs, explained that while, as a whole, only 1.5 percent of students in the CSU take more than 16 units, at HSU more than 25 percent of students take more than 16 units. “The Chancellor's Office is trying to control cost and enrollment,” Blake said. “They come out with a blanket policy for the whole state. At most campuses it went over great. But at Humboldt state we went, ‘Woah!" This might not be the best policy for our students.” Blake met with HSU President Rollin Richmond, Provost Bob Snyder and Director of Admissions Scott Hagg after receiving the memo in March. The group convinced the Chancellor's Office to allow HSU enrollment to be capped at 17, instead of 16 units. Hagg said, while at first the policy created concern within the Admission Office, he is pleased that HSU is able to offer the extra unit. “Because of the high number of science majors, that one unit will allow students to take not only the lecture, but also the one-unit lab that is part of the required coursework for several degrees,” he said, This will be convenient for any students enrolled in a four-unit course — like a language course, for example — that requires an additional one-unit lab, Although Hagg said the cap should ultimately help students, he is not sure what it will mean for the plethora of extracurricular one-unit courses like pilates, archery or language film seminars offered at HSU that draw students from a wide variety of majors. “There is a lot to be said for taking yoga or weight-lifting,” Hagg said. “But what will be the impact on these one-unit classes or two-unit classes? | just don't know. That is the big question in the office right now.” Hagg said the suspicion in the Office of Admissions is that those courses will see a dramatic drop in enrollment.“But who knows, we could be seeing students take 15 units and then have a couple [units] to spare. Then we might have more registering for those classes. We will just have to wait and see.” ‘Several of the one-unit elective courses offered at Humboldt — including physical education courses like bowling and power step — are offered through the College of Professional Studies. Dean Lee believes that means the university community must make choices. “Given the limited number of credits that can be subsidized, it makes more sense to prioritize core courses required for graduation than electives,” he said. “Students can pay for the full cost of the wonderful selection of elective courses at HSU if they wish to take advantage of them. By prioritizing core courses required for graduation, the university is making it easier for students to graduate Despite being a zoology major, junior Kelly O'Leary has taken several one-unit elective courses — cello, orchestra, strength training and step aerobics — since enrolling at HSU in 2009. “I took step for two-and-a-half years,” the 20-year-old said. “I miss it so much, | was basically the teacher's assistant.” O'Leary, who plans to graduate in May 2013, said she is lucky the 17-unit cap won't really affect her. “I took enough classes over the summer that my schedule is not too full over the next few semesters,” she said. “But if | hadn't, | wouldn't be able to do as much now. | feel like before | Could do what | wanted, but now | have to watch out for that [17-unit cap] and what | want to do carefully.” In addition to uncertainty around one-unit courses Hagg said the single biggest change the restricted cap will create is the need for students, faculty and staff to start thinking more carefully about units end course planning. “At first | was really upset by the cap,” Hagg said. “But the more and more | think about it, the more | think it will actually be a good thing for the campus community. If everyone is forced to work within these 17 units, they will be working harder to make sure the classes are there and available and that students are taking the right ones they need to graduate.” The six-year graduation rate for first-time freshmen at HSU is at 40 percent, he said. Not a good number at all, Lee said, compared to other CSU campuses. Hagg expects that, excluding the possibility of a dramatic turnaround in the California budget, the cap will still be set at no more than 17 units through fall 2014. But that is not necessarily a bad thing, he said.942 The unit cap may help Humboldt's graduation rate. In most majors, 120 units are required to graduate, Hagg said. That includes elective units built into the requirements that allow students to explore classes outside of their major. But some students take well beyond that number, Hagg said. In one particular case, Hag said a student took 30 elective units outside of their degree. ‘That is one years worth of coursework not applicable to a degree,” he said. “It is reasonable to expect a student to take classes outside of their major, but a whole year's worth is just excessive.” Hagg said one danger of taking excessive units is that it can cause students to become ineligible to receive financial aid. Once a student reaches 180 attempted units — including transfer units from outside HSU — they lose their ability to claim financial aid on both a state and federal level “Itis our hope that this unit cap will be a good thing,” Hagg said. “We hope that students will be working with their advisers to keep on track toward graduation. If students are forced to work within 17 uni:s, everyone will be working harder to make sure required classes are there and available and that students are taking the right ones they need for graduation.” Lee agrees But he also sees the unit cap as a small part of a much larger problem, “This [adjusting to the 17-unit cap] is a response :o a deeper issue of whether education, including post-secondary education, is a public good," he said. “If we continue to disiwvest in public education, then history will ook back on this as the generation that made education less accessible to all but those with ample means.”Articles for Essay 3: The Internetqs Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet doing to our brains By NICHOLAS CARR: "Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stan Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep- space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “T can fee it. Tean feel it.” can feel it, too. Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, reniapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the ‘memory. My mind isn't going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading, Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if P'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The decp reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle, I think I know what's going on. For more than a cecade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The ‘Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I've got the telltale factor pithy quote I was after. Even when I'm not working, I'm as likely as not to be foraging in the Web's info-thickets'reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videns and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.) For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they've been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired's Clive ‘Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of ‘thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation, My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once T was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now Izip along, the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.fe Tm not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances— literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader," he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, ie. I'm just seeking convenience, but because the way I'THINK has changed?” Bnuce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the nse of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of bfichigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation witk me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I ean’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “Ive lost the ability to do that. Even, a blog post of more than three or four paragraph is too much to absorb. I skim it.” Anecdotes alone don't prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition, But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way wwe read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational corsortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites, exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they'd already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out toanother site. Sometimes they'd save a long article, but there's no evidence that they ever wert back and actually read it. The authors of the study report: {tis clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins, It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense. ‘Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on. cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a diiferent kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—pethaps even a new sense of the self. ‘We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlierOF technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret, text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged. Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It's not etched into our genes the way speech is, We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolie characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our Drains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli, We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works. ‘Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a ‘ypewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his, fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page. But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche's friends, a composer, noticed aa change in the style of his writing, His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “thovghts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.” Also see:Living With a Computer(July 1982) "The process works this way. When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft ofan article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the sereen..” By James Fallows “You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler Nietzsche's prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from hetorie totelegram style.” ‘The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that's not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fy, altering the way it functions.”G¥ As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies"—the tools that ‘extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities cof those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technies and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.” ‘The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scentist Joseph uum observed in his 1976 book,Computar Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception ofthe world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping {instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the lock. ‘The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves, When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain's plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level. ‘The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In @ paper published {in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that's what we're seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our cloek, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV. ‘When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net's image. It ‘medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it nas absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we're glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper's site. The result isto scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration. ‘The Net's influence doesn't end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people's minds become attuned to the erazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience's new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce eapsule summaries, and crowd their pages with ‘easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March ofthis year, TheNew York Times decided to devate the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news,94 sparing them the “ess efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles, Old ‘media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules. Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives~or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts~—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that's been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it's reprogramming us. The Net's intellectual ethic remains obscure. About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an carnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor cartied a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owness, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it tumed them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared, More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor's tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of ‘Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts." Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared “in the future the system must be firs.” Taylor's system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing, And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet isa machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers ate intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we've come to describe as “knowledge work Google's headquarters, in Mountain View, Califomia—the Googleplex—is the Internet's high church, and the religion practiced inside its wallsis Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmit, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to *systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thcusands of experiments a day, according tojos the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind, ‘The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, mn is a kind of zommodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we ean “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers. ‘Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview withNewsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world's information direetly attached to your brain, or ar artificial brain that was smarter than your Drain, you'd be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.” ‘Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast ‘quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric ‘Schmidt's words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial {intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it? Stil, their easy assumption that we'd all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling, It suggests a belief that intelligence is the ‘output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google's world, the world we enter when we go online, there's little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The ‘human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive, ‘The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, itis the network's reigning business model as well. The faster ‘we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. ‘Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more erumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It's in their economic interest to drive us to distraction,10) Maybe I'm just a worrywart, Just as there's a tendency to glorify technological progress, there's a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato's Phaedirus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing, He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as.a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of ‘one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they ‘would “be thought very knowledgeable when thev are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn't wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn't foresee ‘the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom). ‘The arrival of Gutenberg's printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth. gnashing, The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books ‘would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “ess studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver. So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism, Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct. and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn't the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we aequire from the author's words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, \we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with ‘content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what's at stake: Tcome from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under tke pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “paneake people'—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.” T'm haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer's emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—"I can feel it. I can fee! it. I'm afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they're following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a mactine, That's the essence of Kubrick's dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, itis our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence. Nicholas Carr's most recent book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, was published earlier this year.os Tech Beat: Is the Internet making us stupid? Is the Internet making us stupid? Variations on this argument have been floating around since Nicolas Carr first wrote "Is Google Making Us Stupia?” in the Atlantic Monthiy back in 2008. His idea is that the more we rely on computers to do our “thinking” for us, the weaker our brains become. ‘These arguments rely on a shallow definition of thinkirg. If | believe that the only way to express inteligence: is through writing 20-page papers or consuming information in the same way that my grandparents did, then {fam not that smart. Carr and others believe that if someone grows impatient with books, that person is experiencing some kind of cognitive deficit, ‘One probiem with this argument comes from the fact that we really know litle about cognition in the first place. Cognitive science is stil nits relative infancy. This field is rapidly changing as technology advances, ‘80 making some kind of declaration on how we think and learn based on this new science is a bit premature. ‘And what iftechnology does change the way that we tink? Is this necessarily a bad thing? Maybe that is, how we evolve. We develop technologies to deal with problems in our environment, and as Marshall ‘McLuhan says, "we shape tools and then our tools shape us.” He says that technology is just an extension ff our natural faculties and abilities. We have the inteligence to invent fire and bieycles. Does this make us slower and weaker? Or did we invent stuff to make up for our weaknesses? CCarr recounts the story ofthe philosopher Nietzsche's introduction to the typewriter, and he says that “under the machines’ sway" Nietzsche's wring became more terse and “telegraphic.” | think this is a good thing, It is refreshing when a philosopher can get to the point. My uncle Ed, also a writer, once said to me that “the ‘word processor is to words what the chainsaw is to wcod."| knew exactly what he meant because | wrote a book in 1990-81 using a typewriter. It was the last major project | did using a typewriter. The typewriter had ‘me on the floor Iteally cutting and pasting pages and paragraphs together. | may have enjoyed the process atthe time, but I would never go back, CCarr discusses McLuhan in his article: ‘Media are not ust passive channels of information, They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thcught"| agree with this. At various times in human history, our media, from the cave paintings of Chauvet-Pont-Arc to the Internet, has gone from being an oral and visual culture to a written culture and now back into a visual medium of connections. We are connected to the information, connected to one another, and connected to the means of producing information We have to let go of the idea that there is some kind of privileged media, Socrates distrusted writing because it removes people from how he thought we really learn, by having conversations. Carr talks about “deep reading” and that somehow, with all of this access to information, our reading will become shallow and sporadic. He seems to forget the mountains of trash that have made it into print (novelizations of television shows, for instance). Someone can read books their entre life and not make it out ofthe shallows. Thomas Claburn wrote an article in the Oct. 15 edition of Information Week called “Is Google Making Us ‘Smarter?” where he cites a study showing that there may be some benefits to computer use, especially with older adults. The study involved 24 volunteers between the ages of 56 and 76, half of whom had prior Internet search experience. According to the artce, "Fartcipants' brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (IMRI) scans while they conducted Internet searches and read books. The study participants showed similar brain activity when reading, but when searching online, those with prior Intemet experience also showed activity n the frontal, the temporal, and the cingulate areas ofthe brain, areas associated with complex reasoning.” We are in a new era. But despite the fear we may have of new media, according to publisher Timothy McSweeny, “.. there isn't as much bad news as popularly assumed. .. Book sales are up, way up, from ‘twenty years ago. Young adult readership is far wider and deeper than ever before. Library membership and Circulation is at all-time high.”The latest technologies include new definitions of what a book might be. They might not be in traditional print. They might come on Kindles, Nooks, iPhones and iPads, and the Internet itself. But people are reading. Between Harry Potter and all of the vampire novels, the future of Iteracy is assured, Geoff Cain is a member of the Redwood Technology Consortium and director of aistance education at College of the Redwoods. Contact him at geot-cain@redwoods edu,165° Is Bad for it Me Why the Demise of Pi Humanity PC World The transition from print to digital media has tremendous benefits for Earth and society as a whole, but the downsides could be devastating. By Tony Bradley Mar 19, 2012 11:45 AM In case you haven't heard-after 244 years as the foremost authority among printed reference material--Encyclopaedia Britannica is officially out of the encyclopedia printing business. The end of the print editon of Encyclopaedia Britannica is indicative of a larger trend from print to digital that yields a variety of tremendous benefits. Ultimately, though, the demise of print media may be bad for humanity as a whole. The Upside Personally, I'm a huge fan of digital media. First of all, itis the primary means by which | make a living. Secondly, as a consumer I prefer to buy my books in digital format, and | prefer to read my news digitally A digital encyclopedia has many benefits, but its lack of permanence is a serious issue. Digital media is faster. As quickly as a writer such as myself can turn words into bits and bytes, they can be instantly available around the world. Digital media is cheaper financially and ecologically as well. Print media requires trees to be cut, paper to be produced, material to be printed, and the resulting product to be shipped and distributed. It takes natural resources, energy, and fuel that cost money and damage the Earth. With digital media, simply push a button and the material is live. The costs involved are basically the same whether it is read by 10 people, or 10 million. | appreciate that I can carry an entire library in a tablet or e-reader that is thinner than most magazines, and weighs next to nothing. Kids can carry text books without lugging around a 50-pound backpack, and people can get new reading material in seconds from virtually anywhere. There is a huge downside, though: Digital media doesn’t have the permanence of print media.Unlocking History The Rosetta Stone is the famous artifact that helped experts unlock the code to understanding ancient Egyption hieroglyphs. It contains the same script written in three different languages--one of which is Ancient Greek. Because we already understood Ancient Greek, experts were able to cross-reference the two and decipher the hieroglyphs. The Rosetta Stone represents the ancient equivalent of print media. Without a physical, written text, much of history may be lost forever. Rewriting History What's worse than losing history? Changirg it. Printed material represents a moment in time. We can travel through time through the written word and learn about events, discoveries, triumphs, and tragedies from accounts written hundreds or thousands of years ago. With digital media, that may not be so easy. First of all, the media itself evolves rapidly. The written word on stone or paper has existed relatively unchanged for millennia, but if you stored a digital document on a 5.25 inch floppy disk twenty-five years ago it would be a challenge to access it today. Even if you can access archived digital media, it is impermanent. | may have written something five years ago about how Palm Pilot would take over the world and crush Apple and Microsoft (I didn't, but | could heve). I could go online today, though, and modify such an article to instead predict the catastrophic demise of the once great company. What about history itself? History is somewhat flawed in the first place because it is generally written by the victors. The history of the United States as it is recorded and taught probably differs significantly from the version you might have if it were written by surviving members of the Mohican or Cherokee tribes. Print media gives us a snapshot that can't 9e undone. Even if subsequent histories are rewritten, the original texts still reveal a different truth. If our only source of written history is digital, though, it can be altered to fit the whims or ruling political agenda of the day, and basically can never be fully trusted. | love Wikipedia and use it frequently as a resource. | am also conscious, though, that the information it contains could be wrong, and is subject to change. The information printed in Encyclopaedia Britannica is~or at least was--not subject to such arbitrary or capricious alteration.|. am a huge fan of digital media and digital reference sources. | don't really lament the demise of Encyclopaedia Britannica because | see its transition to digital as an evolution rather than an ending. But, | am concerned about the lack of permanence, and the loss of the point-in-time snapshot that physical print media provides. As a part of the shift from print to digital media, we also need some method of marking the moment in time and archiving it with some permanence-like cached pages on a Google search, but for the Internet as a whole and all it contains. What do you think? Is the decline in print media with the transition to digital media a good thing? Are there solutions out there t address the lack of permanence?lo? Is Facebook Making Us Lonel Social media—from Facebook to Twitter—have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)—and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill. ‘A report on what the epidemic of loneliness is doing to our souls and our society. By Stephen Marche - The Atlantic Monthly May 2012 YVETTE VICKERS, A FORMER Playboy slaymate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner's report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs, she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still running. Her computer was on too, its glow permeating the empty space. The Los Angeles Times posted a story headlined “Mummified Body of Former Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers Found in Her Benedict Canyon Home,” which quickly went viral. Within two weeks, by Technorati's count, Vickers’s lonesome death was already the subject of 16,057 Facebook posts and 881] tweets. She had long been a horror-movie icon, a symbol of Hollywood's capacity to exploit our most basie fears in the silliest ways; now she was an icon of a new and different kind of horror: our growing fear of loneliness. Certainly she received much more attention in death than she did in the final years of her life. With no children, no religious group, and no immediate social circle of any kind, she had begun, as an elderly woman, to look elsewhere for companionship. Savage later told Los Angeles magazine that she had searched Vickers’s phone bills for clues about the life that led to such an end. Ir the months before her grotesque death, Vickers had made calls not to friends or family but to distant fans who had found her through fan conventions and Internet sites. Vickers’s web of connections had grown broader but shallower, as has happened for many of us. We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible, Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment. In 2010, at a cost of $300 million, 800 miles of fiber-optic cable was laid between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange to shave three milliseconds off trading times. Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation, We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information,104 At the forefront of all this unexpectedly lonely interactivity is Facebook, with 845 million users and $3.7 billion in revenue last year. The company hopes to raise $5 billion in an initial public offering later this spring, which will make it by far the largest Internet IPO in history. Some recent estimates put the company’s potential value at $100 billion, which would make it larger than the global coffee industry—one addiction preparing to surpass the other. Facebook’s scale and reach are hard to comprehend: last summer, Facebook became, by some counts, the first Web site to receive 1 trillion page views in a month. In the last three months of 2011, users generated an average of 2.7 billion “likes” and comments every day. On whatever scale you care to judge Facebook—as a asa culture, as a country—it is vast beyond imagination. Despite its immense popularity, or more like'y because of it, Facebook has, beginning, been under something of a cloud of suspicion. The depiction of Mark Zuckerberg, in The Social Network, as a bastard with symptoms of Asperger's syndrome, was nonsense. But it felt true. It felt true to Facebook, if not to Zuckerberg. The film's most indelible scene, the one that may well have eamned it an Oscar, was the final, silent shot of an anomic Zuckerberg sending out a ‘riend request to his ex-girlfriend, then waiting and clicking and waiting and clicking—a moment of superconnected loneliness preserved in amber. We have all been in that scene: transfixed by the glare of a screen, hungering for response. When you sign up for Google+ and set up your Friends circle, the program specifies that you should include only “your real friends, the ones you feel comfortable sharing private ‘details with.” That onc little phrase, Four real friends—so quaint, so charmingly mothering—perfectly encapsulates the anxieties that social media have produced: the fears that Facebook is interfering with our real friendships, distancing us from each other, making us lonelier; and that social networking might be spreading the very isolation it seemed designed to conquer. FACEBOOK ARRIVED IN THE MIDDLE of a dramatic increase in the quantity and intensity of human loneliness, arise that initially made the site’s promise of greater connection seem deeply attractive. Americans are more solitary than ever before. In 1950, less than 10 percent of American households contained only one person. By 2010, nearly 27 percent of households had just one person. Solitary living does not guarantee a life of unhappiness, of course. In his recent book about the trend toward living alone, Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, writes: “Reams of published research show that it’s the quality, not the quantity of social interaction, that best predicts loneliness.” True, But before we begin the fantasies of happily ecceatric singledom, of divorcées dropping by their knitting circles after work for glasses of Drew Barrymore pinot grigio, or recent college graduates with perfectly articulated, Steampunk-themed, 300-square-foot apartments organizing croquet matches with their book clubs, we should recognize that it is not just isolation that is rising sharply. It’s loneliness, too. And loneliness makes us miserable We know intuitively that loneliness and being alone are not the same thing. Solitude can be lovely. Crowded parties can be agony. We also know, thanks to a growing body ofMo research on the topic, that loneliness is not a matter of external conditions; itis a psychological state. 2005 analysis of data from a longitudinal study of Dutch twins showed that the tendency toward loneliness has roughly the same genetic component as other psychological problems such as neuroticism or anxiety. Still, loneliness is slippery, a difficult state tc define or diagnose. The best tool yet developed for measuring the condition is the UCLA Loneliness Scale, a series of 20 questions that all begin with this formulation: “How often do you feel ...?” As in: “How often do you feel that you are ‘in tune’ with the people around you?” And: “How often do you feel that you lack companionship?” Measuring the condition in these terms, various studies have shown loneliness rising drastically over a very short period of recent history. A 2010 AARP survey found that 35 percent of adults older than 45 were chronically lonely, as opposed to 20 percent of a similar group only a decade earlier. According to a major study by a leading scholar of the subject, roughly 20 percent of Americans—about 60 million people—are unhappy with their lives because of loneliness. Across the ‘Westem world, physicians and nurses have begun to speak openly of an epidemic of loneliness. ‘The new studies on loneliness are beginning to yield some surprising preliminary findings about its mechanisms. Almost every factor that one might assume affects loneliness does so only some of the time, anc only under certain circumstances. People ‘who are married are less lonely than single people, one journal article suggests, but only if their spouses are confidants. If one’s spouse is not a confidant, marriage may not decrease loneliness. A belief in God might help, or it might not, as a 1990 German study comparing levels of religious feeling and levels of loneliness discovered. Active believers who saw God as abstract and helpful rather than as a wrathful, immediate presence were less lonely. “The mere belief in God,” the researchers concluded, “was relatively independent of loneliness.” But itis clear that social interaction matters. Loneliness and being alone are not the same thing, but both are on the rise. We meet fewer people. We gather less. And when we gather, our bonds are less meaningful and less easy. The decrease in confidants—that is, in quality social connections—has been dramatic over the past 25 years. In one survey, the mean size of networks of personal confidants decreased from 2.94 people in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. Similarly, in 1985, only 10 percent of Americans said they had no one with ‘whom to discuss important matters, and 15 percent said they had only one such good friend. By 2004, 25 percent had nobody to talk to, and 20 percent had only one confidant. In the face of this social disintegration, we have essentially hired an army of replacement confidants, an entire class of professional carers. As Ronald Dworkin pointed out in a 2010 paper for the Hoover Institution, in the ‘ate "40s, the United States was home to 2,500 clinical psychologists, 30,000 social workers, and fewer than 500 marriage and family therapists. As of 2010, the country had 77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social workers, 400,000 nonclinical social workers, 50,000 marriage and family therapists, 105,000 mental-health counselors, 220,000 substance-abuse counselors, 17,000 nurse psychotherapists, and 30,000 life coaches. The majority of patients inWw therapy do not warrant a psychiatric diagnos's. This raft of psychic servants is helping us through what used to be called regular problems. We have outsourced the work of everyday caring, We need professional carers more and more, because the threat of societal breakdown, once principally a matter of nostalgic lament, has morphed into an issue of public health. Being lonely is extremely bad for your health. If you're lonely, you're more likely to be put in a geriatric home at an earlier age than a similar person who isn’t lonely. You're less likely to exercise. You're more likely to be obese. You're less likely to survive a serious operation and more likely to have hormonal imbalances. You are at greater risk of inflammation. Your memory may be worse. You are more likely to be depressed, to sleep badly, and to suffer dementia and general cognitive decline. Loneliness may not have killed Yvette Vickers, but it has been linked ‘0 a greater probability of having the kind of heart condition that did kill her. And yet, despite its deleterious effect on health, loneliness is one of the first things ordinary Americans spend their money achieving. With money, you flee the cramped city to a house in the suburbs or, if you can afford it, a McMansion in the exurbs, inevitably spending more time in your car. Loneliness is at the American core, a by-product of a long-standing national appetite for independence: The Pilgrims who left Europe willingly abandoned the bonds and strictures of a society that could not accept their right to be different. They did not seek out loneliness, but they accepted it as the price of their autonomy. The cowboys who set off to explore a seemingly endless frontier likewise traded away personal ties in favor of pride and self-respect. The ultimate American icon is the astronaut: Who is more heroic, or more alone? The price of self-determination and self-reliance has often been loneliness. But Americans have always been willing to pay that price, Today, the one common feature in American secular culture is its celebration of the self that breaks away from the constrictions of the family and the state, and, in its greatest expressions, from all limits entirely. The greet American poem is Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The great American essay is Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” The great American novel is Melville's Moby-Dick, the tale of a man on a quest so lonely that it is incomprehensible to those around him. American culture, high and low, is about self- expression and personal authenticity. Franklin Delano Roosevelt called individualism “the great watchword of American life.” Self-invention is only half of the American story, however. The drive for isolation has always been in tension with the impulse to cluster in communities that cling and suffocate. The Pilgrims, while fomenting spiritual rebellion, also enforced ferocious cohesion. The Salem witch trials, in hindsight, read like attempts to impose solidarity—as do the McCarthy hearings. The history of the United States is like the famous parable of the porcupines in the cold, from Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism—the ones who huddle together for warmth and shufile away in pain, always separating and congtegating.Ww We are now in the middle of a long period of shuffling away. In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnam attributed the dramatic post-war decline of social capital—the strength and value of interpersonal networks—to numerous interconnected trends in American life: suburban sprawl, television’s dominance over culture, the self-absorption of the Baby Boomers, the disintegration of the traditional family. The trends he observed continued through the prosperity of the aughis, and have only become more pronounced with time: the rate of union membership declined in 2011, again; screen time rose; the Masons and the Elks continued their slide into irrelevance, We are lonely because we want to be lonely. We have made ourselves lonely. ‘The question of the future is this: Is Facebook part of the separating or part of the congregating; is it a huddling-together for warmth or a shuffling-away in pain? WELL BEFORE FACEBOOK, digital technology was enabling our tendency for isolation, to an unprecedented degree. Back in the 1990s, scholars started calling the contradiction between an increased opportunity to connect and a lack of human contact the “Internet paradox.” A prominent 1998 article on the phenomenon by a team of researchers at Camegie Mellon showed that increased Intemet usage was already coinciding with increased loneliness. Critics of the study pointed out that the two groups that participated in the study—high-school journalism students who were heading to university and socially active members of community-development boards—were statistically likely to become lonelier over time. Which brings us to a more fundamental question: Does the Internet make people lonely, or are lonely people more attracted to the Tntemet? The question has intensified in the Facebook era. A recent study out of Australia (where close to half the population is active on Facebook), titled “Who Uses Facebook?,” found a complex and sometimes confounding relationship between loneliness and social networking. Facebook users had slightly lower levels of “social loneliness”—the sense of not feeling bonded with friends—but “significantly higher levels of family loneliness” — the sense of not feeling bonded with family. it may be that Facebook encourages more contact with people outside of our household, at the expense of our family relationships—or it may be that people who have unhappy family relationships in the first place seek companionship through other means, including Facebook. The researchers also found that lonely people are inclined to spend more time on Facebook: “One of the most noteworthy findings,” they wrote, “was the tendeney for neurotic and lonely individuals to spend greater amounts of time on Facebook per day than non-lonely individuals.” And they found that neurotics are more likely to prefer to use the wall, while extroverts tend to use chat features in addition to the wall. Moira Burke, until recently a graduate student at the Human-Computer Institute at Camegie Mellon, used to run a longitudinal study of 1,200 Facebook users. That study, which is ongoing, is one of the first to step outside the realm of self-selected college students and examine the effects of Facebook on a broader population, over time. She concludes that the effect of Facebook depends on what you bring to it. Just as your ‘mother said: you get out only what you put ir. If you use Facebook to communicateWe directly with other individuals—by using the “like” button, commenting on friends’ posts, and so on—it can increase your social capital. Personalized messages, or what Burke calls “composed communication,” are more satisfying than “one-click ‘communication”—the lazy click of a like. “People who received composed ‘communication became less lonely, while people who received one-click communication experienced no change in loneliness,” Burke tells me. So, you should inform your friend in writing how charming her son looks with Harry Potter cake smeared all over his face, and how interesting her sepia-toned photograph of that tree-framed bit of skyline is, and how cool itis that she’s at whatever concert she happens to be at. That’s what we all want to hear. Even better than sending a private Facebook message is the semi-public conversation, the kind of back-and-forth in which you half ignore the other people who may be listening in. “People whose friends write to them semi-publicly on Facebook experience decreases in loneliness,” Burke says. On the other hand, non-personalized use of Facebook—scanning your friends’ status updates and updating the world on your own activities via your wall, or what Burke calls “passive consumption” and “broadcasting” —correlates to feelings of disconnectedness. It’s a lonely business, wandering the labyrinths of our friends’ and pseudo-friends’ projected identities, trying to figure out what part of ourselves we ought to project, who will listen, and what they will hear. According to Burke, passive consumption of Facebook also correlates to a marginal increase in depression. “If two women each talk to their friends the same amount of time, but one of them spends more time reading about friends on Facebook as well, the one reading tends to grow slightly more depressed,” Burke says. Her conclusion suggests that my sometimes unhappy reactions to Facebook ‘may be more universal than I had realized. When I scroll through page after page of my friends’ descriptions of how accidentally eloquent their kids are, and how their husbands are endearingly bumbling, and how they’re all about to eat a home-cooked meal prepared with fresh local organic produce bought at the farmers’ market and then go for a jog and maybe check in at the office because they’re so busy getting ready to hop on a plane for a ‘week of luxury dogsledding in Lapland, I do grow slightly more miserable. A lot of other people doing the same thing feel a little bit worse, too. Still, Burke’s research does not support the assertion that Facebook creates loneliness. The people who experience loneliness on Facebook are lonely away from Facebook, t00, she points out; on Facebook, as everywhere else, correlation is not causation. The popular kids are popular, and the lonely skulkers skulk alone. Perhaps it says something about me that I think Facebook is primarily a platform for lonely skulking. I mention to Burke the widely reported study, conducted by a Stanford graduate student, that showed how believing that others have strong social networks can lead to feelings of depression. What does Facebook communicate, if not the impression of social bounty? Everybody else looks so happy on Facebook, with so many friends, that our own social networks feel emptier than ever in comparison. Doesn’t that make people feel lonely? “Lf people are reading about lives that are much better than theirs, two things can happen,” Burke tells. me. “They can feel worse about themselves, or they can feel motivated.” Burke will start working at Facebook as a data scientist this year.4 JOHN CACIOPPO, THE director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, is the world’s leading expert on loneliness. In his landmark book, Loneliness, released in 2008, he revealed just how profoundly the epidemic of loneliness is affecting the basic functions of human physiology. He found higher levels of epinephrine, the stress hormone, in the moming urine of loncly people. Loneliness burrows deep: “When we drew blood from our older adults and analyzed their white cells,” he writes, “we found that loneliness somehow penetrated the deepest recesses of the cell to alter the way genes were being expressed.” Loneliness affects not only the brain, then, but the basic process of DNA transcription. When you are lonely, your whole body is lonely. To Cacioppo, Intemet communication allows only ersatz intimacy. “Forming connections with pets or online friends or even God is a noble attempt by an obligatorily gregarious creature to satisfy a compelling need,” he writes. “But surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing.” The “real thing” being actual people, in the flesh. When I speak to Cacioppo, he is refreshingly clear on what he sees as Facebook's effect on society. Yes, he allows, some research has suggested that the greater the number of Facebook friends a person has, the less lonely she is. But he argues that the impression. this creates can be misleading. “For the most part,” he says, “people are bringing their old friends, and feelings of loneliness or connectedness, to Facebook.” The idea that a Web site could deliver a more friendly, interconnected world is bogus. The depth of one’s social network outside Facebook is what determines the depth of one’s social network within Facebook, not the other way around. Using social media doesn’t create new social networks; if just transfers establislied networks from one plutloun lo another. For Wie most part, Facebook doesn’t destroy friendships—but it doesn’t create them, either. In one experiment, Cacioppo looked for a connection between the loneliness of subjects and the relative frequency of their interactions via Faccbook, chat rooms, online games, dating sites, and face-to-face contact. The results were unequivocal. “The greater the proportion of face-to-face interactions, the less lonely you are,” he says. “The greater the proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are.” Surely, I suggest to Cacioppo, this means that Facebook and the like inevitably make people lonelier. He disagrees. Facebook is merely a tool, he says, and like any tool, its effectiveness will depend on its user. “If you use Facebook to increase face-to-face contact,” he says, “it increases social capital.” So if social media let you organize 2 game of football among your friends, that’s healthy. If you tum to social media instead of playing football, however, that’s unhealthy. “Facebook can be terrific, if we use it properly,” Cacioppo continues. “It’s like a car. You can drive it to pick up your friends. Or you can drive alone.” But hasn’t the car increased loneliness? If cars created the suburbs, surely they also created isolation. “That’s because of how we use cars,” Cacioppo replies. “How we use these technologies can lead to more integration, rather than more isolation.” The problem, then, is that we invite loncliness, even though it makes us miserable. The history of our use of technology is a history cf isolation desired and achieved. When the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company opeaed its A&P stores, giving Americans selfus service access to groceries, customers stopped having relationships with their grocers. ‘When the telephone arrived, people stopped knocking on their neighbors’ doors. Social ‘media bring this process to a much wider set of relationships. Researchers at the HP Social Computing Lab who studied the nature of people’s connections on Twitter came to a depressing, if not surprising, conclusion: “Most of the links declared within Twitter were meaningless from an interaction point of view.” I have to wonder: What other point of view is meaningful? LONELINESS IS CERTAINLY not something that Facebook or Twitter or any of the lesser forms of social media is doing to us. We are doing it to ourselves. Casting technology as some vague, impersonal spirit of history forcing our actions is a weak excuse. We make decisions about how we use our machines, not the other way around. Every time I shop at my local grocery store, [am faced with a choice. I can buy my groceries from a human being or from a machine. I always, without exception, choose the machine, It’s faster and more efficient, | tell myself, but the truth is that I prefer not having to wait with the other customers who are lined up alongside the conveyor belt: the hipster mom who disapproves of my high-carbon-footprint pineapple; the lady who tenses to the point of tears while she waits to see if the gods of the credit-card machine will accept or decline; the old man whose clumsy feebleness requires a patience that I don’t possess. Much better to bypass the whole circus and just ring up the groceries myself. Our omnipresent new technologies lure us toward increasingly superficial connections at exactly the same moment that they make avoiding the mess of human interaction easy. The beauty of Facebook, the source of its power, is that it enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing reality of society—the accidental revelations we make at parties, the awkward pauses, the farting and the spilled drinks and the general gaucherie of face-to-face contact. Instead, we have the lovely smoothness of a seemingly social machine. Everything’s so simple: status updates, pictures, your wall. But the price of this smooth sociability is a constant compulsion to assert one’s own happiness, one’s own fulfillment. Not only rust we contend with the social bounty of others; we must foster the appearance of our own social bounty. Being happy all the time, pretending to be happy, actually attempting to be happy—it’s exhausting. Last year a team of researchers led by Iris Mauss at the University of Denver published a study looking into “the paradoxical effects of valuiag happiness.” Most goals in life show a direct correlation between valuation and achievement. Studies have found, for example, that students who value good grades tend to have higher grades than those who don’t value them. Happiness is an exception. The study came to a disturbing conclusion: Valuing happiness is not necessarily linked to greater happiness. In fact, under certain conditions, the opposite is true. Under conditions of low (but not high) life stress, the more people valued happiness, the lower were their hedonic balance, psychological well- being, and life satisfaction, and the higher their depression symptoms.Ube The more you try to be happy, the less happy you are. Sophocles made roughly the same point. Facebook, of course, puts the pursuit of happiness front and center in our digital life. Its capacity to redefine our very concepts of identity and personal fulfillment is much more worrisome than the data-mining and privacy practices that have aroused anxieties about the company. Two of the most compelling critics of Facebook—neither of them a Luddite—concentrate on exactly this point. Jaron Lanier, the author of You Are Not a Gadget, was one of the inventors of virtual-reality technology. His view of where social media are taking us reads like dystopian science fiction: “I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process.” Lanier argues that Facebook imprisons us in the business of self-presenting, and this, to his mind, is the site’s crucial and fatally unacceptable downside. Sherry Turkle, a professor of computer culture at MIT who in 1995 published the digital- positive analysis Life on the Screen, is much more skeptical about the effects of online society in her 2011 book, Alone Together: “These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time.” The problem with digital intimacy is that it is ultimately incomplete: “The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties. that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy,” she writes. “We don’t want to intrude on cach other, so instead we constantly intrude on each other, but not in ‘real time.”” Lanier and Turkle are right, at least in their diagnoses. Self:presentation on Facebook is continuous, intensely mediated, and possessed of a phony nonchalance that eliminates even the potential for spontaneity. (“Look how casually I threw up these three photos from the party at which I took 300 photos!”) Curating the exhibition of the self has become a 24/7 occupation. Perhaps not surpr'singly, then, the Australian study “Who Uses Facebook?” found a significant correlation between Facebook use and narcissism: “Facebook users have higher levels of total narcissism, exhibitionism, and leadership than Facebook nonusers,” the study’s authors wrote. “In fact, it could be argued that Facebook specifically gratifies the narcissistic individual’s need to engage in self promoting and superficial behavior.” Rising narcissism isn’t so much a trend as the trend behind all other trends. In preparation for the 2013 edition of its diagnostic manual, the psychiatric profession is currently struggling to update its definition of narcissistic personality disorder. Still, generally speaking, practitioners agree that narcissism manifests in patterns of fantastic grandiosity, craving for attention, and lack of empathy. In a 2008 survey, 35,000 American respondents were asked if they had ever had certain symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. Among people older than 65, 3 percent reported symptoms. Among people in their 20s, the proportion was nearly 10 percent. Across all age groups, one in 16 Americans has experienced some symptoms of NPD. And loneliness and narcissism are intimately connected: a longitudinal study of Swedish women demonstrated a strong link between levels of narcissism in youth and levels of loneliness in old age. The connectionis fundamental. Narcissism is the flip side of loneliness, and either condition is a fighting retreat from the messy reality of other people A considerable part of Facebook’s appeal stems from its miraculous fusion of distance with intimacy, or the illusion of distance with the illusion of intimacy. Our online communities become engines of self-image, and self-image becomes the engine of community. The real danger with Facebook is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude. The new isolation is not of the kind that Americans once idealized, the Jonesomeness of the proudly nonconformist, independent-minded, solitary stoic, or that of the astronaut who blasts into new worlds. Facebook’s isolation is a grind, What's truly staggering about Facebook usage is not its volume—750 million photographs uploaded over a single weekend—but the constancy of the performance it demands. More than half its users—and one of every 13 people on Earth is a Facebook user—log on every day. Among 18-to-34-year-olds, nearly half check Facebook minutes after waking up, and 28 percent do so before getting out of bed. The relentlessness is what is so new, so potentially transformative. Facebook never takes a break. We never take a break. Human beings have always created elaborate acts of self-presentation. But not all the time, not every morning, before we even pour a cup of coffee. Yvette Vickers’s computer was on when she died. Nostalgia for the good old days of disconnec:ion would not just be pointless, it would be hypocritical and ungrateful. But the very magic of the new machines, the efficiency and elegance with which they serve us, obscures What isn’t being served: everything (hat matters. What Facebook has revealed about human nature—and this is not a minor revelation—is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now wwe are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who wwe ate. Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect. This article available online at: http://www. theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us- lonely/8930/ NtWw Why the Kindle Won't Kill Romance AUG 3 2010, 12:30 PM ET 9 EL RK Eleanor Barkhorn is an associate editor at The Atlantic, where she edits the Entertainment channel. Last week, Slate's Mark Oppenheimer wrote a heartfelt eulogy to a very specific aspect of old ‘media: the way it allowed us to both judge people and flirt with them, Once upon a time, before Kindles replaced bookshelves and iPod libraries supplanted CD cellections, we could easily discern people's tastes in music, books, and movies and thereby determine if they were worthy of, our affection: Remember when you could tell alot about a guy by what cassette tapes—Journey or the Smit littered the floor of his used station wagon? No more, because now the musie of our lives is stored on MP3 players and iPhones. Our important papers live on hard drives or in the computing cloud, and DVDs are becoming obsolete, as we stream movies on demand. One by one, the meaningful artifacts that we used to seatter about our apartments and cars, disclosing our habits to any visitor, are vanishing. from sight. Nowhere is this problem more apparent, and moze serious, than in the imperilment of the Public Book—the book that people identify us by because they can glimpse it on our bookshelves, or on a coffee table, or in our hands, Furthermore, Oppenheimer says, now that hooks are no longer physical objects but collections of ‘megabytes, we can no longer exchange them with our romantic partners as part of the courtship process, What will high-minded young lovers of the future do to signal their commitment when they can't lend each other copies of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Qur Guys, as he and his wife did when they first started dating? TLeave it to others to challenge the originality of this point; the bigger question is whether it's accurate, whether the death of old media really means the demise of this eycle of judgment and courtship based on what we read, watch, and listen to, Td argue it doesn't. After all, in this era of social media we broadcast our cultural preferences habits more loudly than we ever did before, thanks to status updates on Twitter, Facebook, GoodReads, Gehat, and so on. In the past week, followers of my Twitter feed learned that I read the New York Times Styles sectioncover to cover and I enjoy watching Ferris Bueller's Day Off on bus trips. My Gmail contacts were clued into my love of ‘The Arcade Fire and arty photos of Graceland. Likewise, I can see that my friend Matthew is realy into Josh Ritter and my old roommate's ex-boyfriend is reading a Bruce Chatwin novel—and I can (and do) judge them for these choices. Rather than thwart our ability to assess people based on their taste in books, songs, and movies, the Internet facilitates it. Nor has new media really brought about the end of the exchange of treasured reading material with our crushes, lovers, and spouses. Twitter, instant messenger, even good old-fashioned email allow us to send the romantic interests of our pas’, present and future an article, song, or videoclip we think they'd enjoy. In the years since we broke up, my college boyfriend and Ihave continued to email or Gchat reading or watching suggestions to one another, first as tentative olive branches after a long stretch of angry silence—"Hi, haven't talked in a while, hope you're doing well, did you see Michael Lewis has a new book?"—and now as a way to show we still remember each others’ most deeply held cultural preferences. Of course, we've lost something as we've transitioned from old-media flirting to new. Like so much on the web, broadcasting our likes and dislikes can turn into an exercise in self-promotion, and we can be calculating about how we reveal what what's on our bedside tables and in our playlists. Ican post a tweet about how much I'm getting out of reading the Washington Post's Top ‘Secret America series—when really I'm poring over Us Weekly's latest spread about Jessica ‘Simpson's weight loss. Ican deliberately put a link in my Gchat status that I think will impress or provoke someone on my contacts list—and eross my fingers that he'll notice and respond. This i all far less pure than glancing at the stranger across from us on the subway and realizing he's reading our favorite novel ‘And the very ease with which we can send a new crush or an old flame a link to an article or a YouTube clip arguably cheapens the exchange, on the part of both the giver and the receiver. ‘When I made the man I was dating during sophomore year of college read All The King's ‘Men before I would consider calling him my boyfriend, I made a relatively serious show of my interest by shelling out the $19.95 plus shipping to buy him the book. And he demonstrated a relatively serious commitment to me by reading Robert Penn Warren's 600-page meditation on politics and the human condition and telling me what he thought of it. On the other hand, it requires almost no investment for me to send a New York Times article to a boy who's caught my attention recently, and it takes little to no time for him to do me the courtesy of reading and reflecting on it. But ultimately, these old and new media exchanges do the same thing: they allow us not only to judge and pursue each other, but also to avoid saying what we really feel. Oppenheimer closes his article with the image of a young woman returning a book to a man after they've broken up. He observes that the book "stand[s] in for all the conversations that you and she were too cowardly to have.” That cowardice is alive and well in the digital age. When I send an ex-boyfriend a movie recommendation, it's not because I care whether he sees Inception. It's because I want an excuse to talk to him, or even just a way to remind him I'm still here—feelings I'd never admit directly. Even with less fraught relationships, exchanging links is at least in some part an act borne out of fear. When I fire off a YouTube clips-filled email to a crush of the moment, I'm not really saying, "Here are some songs I thought you'd like"—I'm saying, “Tlike you." Whether on paper or on a screen, these cultural exchanges are really just stend-ins for conversations we're all too scared to haveINFANCY Should Your 2-Year-Old Be Using an iPad? By SONIA VAN GILDER COOKE ‘svanglidescooke October 20,2011 Il errr maces From “Baby Touch: Peekaboo” to "Moo, Baa, La La La!,” iPad apps for babies are flooding the market. Developers say the apps are educational, and busy parents know that a digital babysitter can buy minutes of valuzble time. But is the iPad a healthy thing for young kids? Apple's iTunes now stocks more than 700 apps for children, including ones that promise to “develop hand-eye coordination and focusing skills in young babies” or teach “fine motor skills” to infants “from 0 to 2.5 years old.” As Healthland reported on Tuesday, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has advised parents — again — to eliminate screen time for children under 2, citing concerns about language delays and disrupted sleep. The academy's new report drew on studies showing that ‘TV, whether it’s the parent or the child watching, interferes with “talk time” between parent and child, which is crucial to language development. Does the TV effect apply to iPads too? That's not clear. “We just don’t have the data yet,” says Dr. Ari Brown, a pediatrician and member of the AAP. Perhaps it depends on how you're using it. Tablets used like a TV should fall under the same guidelines, says Tanya Altmann, a Los Angeles-based pediatrician and author of the best- selling parenting book Mommy Calls, However, she doesn't rule out the possibility that interactive apps may have some value for toddlers. “In some ways, applications are just newer versions of the game that we used to play when we were kids — you tap the cow and it says ‘moo,” she says. But even apps that simulate conventional toys don't teach children the crucial skills that come from physically engaging the world in three dimensions, says Dr. Dimitri Christakis, director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children’s Hospital. He points to iPad apps that replicate building blocks and Legos. “Surely we would not want that to substitute for actually getting blocks and building something,” he says. “This is not how the real world works, and babies do need to learn how the real world works.” So, the jury’s still out on tablets for toddlers, but research suggests that educational apps may enhance the learning experience of slightly older children. A recent study funded by the Department of Education showed that the PBS Kids iPhone app “Martha Speaks” boosted 3- to-7-year-olds vocabularies by as much as 31% over the course of two weeks. Rose Luckin, a professor of learner-centered design at the University of London, has found that tablet-type devices can actually spark the sort of social interaction central to the learningprocess. She found that 5- and 6-year-olds who recorded school activities on tablets and replayed them for their parents tended to learn better. “One of the key benefits of technologies such as the iPad is that they can become a focus for conversations between parents and children,” she says. “Ii the device is right in the middle of the family, in the kitchen, in the lap, then as a parent, you're much more able to have those kinds of shared experiences.” In other words, tablets might not be all bad if they generate “talk time,” rather than replace it As with anything else, says Luckin, moderation and common sense are key. “Ifa child just sits all day playing on the iPad on her own, then I'm not sure she’s getting the benefits,” she says. “My argument about the value of these devices is that they can add to parental time, not take away from it’ When parents are busy, though, the best option may simply be to turn the gadgets off, rather than letting kids use them unattended, says Altmann. “We know parents can’t be with their children 24/7,” she says. “But don't forget that when we were kids, our moms would just give us toys to play with on the ground and say, ‘Play.’ Just give them some time to explore occasionally on their own. They don't have to have external stimulation every second of the day.”MEMORY Do E-Books Make It Harder to Remember What You Just Read? Digital books are lighter and more convenient to tote around than paper books, but there may be advantages to old technology. By MAIASZALAVITZ @mainsz March 14, 2012 IS GETTY MAGES Ireceived a Kindle for my birthday, and enjoying “light reading,” in addition to the dense science I read for work, I immediately loaded i: with mysteries by my favorite authors. But I soon found that I had difficulty recalling the names of characters from chapter to chapter. At first, I attributed the lapses to a scary reality of getting older — but then I discovered that I didn’t have this problem when I read paperbacks. When I discussed my quirky recall with friends and colleagues, I found out I wasn’t the only one who suffered from “e-book moments.” Online, I discavered that Google’s Larry Page himself had concerns about research showing that on-screen reading is measurably slower than reading on paper. This seems like a particularly troubling trend for academia, where digital books are slowly overtaking the heavy tomes I used to lug around. On many levels, e-books seem like better alternatives to textbooks — they can be easily updated and many formats allow readers to interact with the material more, with quizzes, video, audio and other multimedia to reinforce lessons. But some studies suggest that there may be significant advantages in printed books if your goal is to remember what you read long-term. Kate Garland, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Leicester in England, is one of the few scientists who has studied this question and reviewed the data. She found that when the exact same material is presented in both media, there is no measurable difference in student, performanee. However, there are some subtle distinctions that favor print, which may matter in the long run, In one study involving psychology students, the medium did seem to matter. “We bombarded poor psychology students with economies that they didn’t know,” she says. Two differences emerged. First, more repetition was required with computer reading to impart the same information. Second, the book readers seemed to digest the material more fully. Garland explains that ‘when you recall something, you either “know” it and it just “comes to you” — without necessarily consciously recalling the context in which you learned it — or you “remember” it by cuing yourself about that context and then arriving at the answer. “Knowing” is better because you can recall the important facts faster and seemingly effortlessly.3 “What we found was that people on paper started to ‘know’ the material more quickly over the passage of time,” says Garland. “It took longer and [required] more repeated testing to get into that knowing state [with the computer reading, but] eventually the people who did it on the computer caught up with the people who [were reading] on paper.” Context and landmarks may actually be imporsant to going from “remembering” to “knowing,” The more associations a particular memory can trigger, the more easily it tends to be recalled. Consequently, seemingly irrelevant factors like remembering whether you read something at the top or the bottom of page — or whether it was on the right or left hand side of a two-page spread or near a graphic — can help cement material in mind, MORE: Why Remembering Nam d= and What to Do About It This seems irrelevant at first, but spatial context may be particularly important because evolution may have shaped the mind to easily recall location cues so we can find our way around. That's why great memorizers since antiquity have used a trick called the “method of loci” to associate facts they want to remember with places in spaces they already know, like rooms in their childhood home. They then visvalize themselves wandering sequentially through the rooms, recalling the items as they go. As neuroscientist Mark Changizi put it in a blog post: in nature, information comes with a physical address (and often a temporal one), and one can navigate to and from the address. Those raspberry patches we found last year are over the hill and through the woods — and they are stil over the hill and through the woods. ‘And up until the rise of the web, the mechanisms for information storage were largoly spatial ‘and could be navigated, thereby tapping into our innate navigation capabilities. Our libraries and books — the real ones, not today's electrcnic variety — were supremely navigable. E-books, however, provide fewer spatial landmarks than print, especially pared-down versions like the early Kindles, which simply scroll through text and don't even show page numbers, just the percentage already read. In a sense, the page is infinite and limitless, which can be dizzying, Printed books on the other hand, give us a physical reference point, and part of our reeall includes how far along in the book we are, something that’s more challenging to assess on an e-book. Jakob Nielsen, a Web “usability” expert and prineipal of the Nielsen Norman Group, believes e-reading does lead to a different type of recall. “I really do think we remember less” from e- books, he says. “This is not something I have formally measured, but just based on both studies we've done looking at reading behavior on tablets and books and reading from regular computers.” He says that studies show that smaller screens also make material less memorable. “The bigger the screen, the more people can remember and the smaller, the less they can remember,” he says. “The most dramatic example is reading from mobile phones. [You] lose almost all context.”Searching by typing or scrolling back is also more distracting than simply turning back pages to return to an important point, he notes. “Human short-term memory is extremely volatile and weak,” says Nielsen. “That's why there's a huge benefit from being able to glance [across page or two] and see [everything] simultaneously. Even though the eye can only sce one thing at a time, it moves so fast that for all practical purposes, it can see [the pages] and can interrelate the material and understand it more.” Flipping through pages is also less mentally taxing. “The more you have to expend your minimal brain power to divert it into these other tasks [like search, the less it is] available for learning.” ‘This doesn't mean that there isn't a place for e-text books or computerized courseware, however. Neither Nielsen nor Garland is opposed to using new media for teaching. In fact, both believe that there are many situations in which they can offer real advantages. However, different media have different strengths — and it may be that physical books are best when you want to study complex ideas and concepts that you wish to integrate deeply into your memory. More studies will likely show what material is best suited for learning in a digital format, and what type of lessons best remain in traditional textbooks. But someone — perhaps the publishing industry? — is going to have to take the initiative and fund them. Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2912/03/14/do-e-books-impait- memory/#ixzziqHIFogiqMAURA KELLY - Maura Kelly is the author of Much Ado About Louing: What Our Favorite Novels, Can Teach You About Date Expectations, Not-Se-Great Gatsbys and Love in the Time of Internet Personals, a hybrid of advice column and literary criticism. Her op-eds, essays, and other writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Daily, Slate, andSalon. al i nets iB Bou A Slow-Books M nifesto MAR 26 2012, 8:03 AM ET 33 Read books. As often as you can. Mostly classics. Reuters Everywhere you look these days, there's a new *siow* movement. Since 1989, when the activists behind theSlow Food manifesto began calling on us to change the way we eat—arguing that meals that take time to prepare are better for our health, our world, and our happiness than faster foods—their ideas have steadily gained power. In recent years, splinter groups like the Slow Beer Movement and the Slow Cocktail Movement have formed. A November Washington Post pivce by author-to-be Emily Matchar trumpeted the even newer New Domesticity Movement—so new that her book about it won't be out till next year. The effort unites a growing number of people interested in old-fashioned household activities—like making their own jams, whiskey, and pickled vegetables. They do it "both for fun and fora greater sense of control over what we eat,” as Matehar wrote. Tmall for efforts like these. But why so much emphasis on what goes into our mouths, and so little on what goes into our minds? What about having fun while exerting greater control over ‘what goes into your brain? Why hasn't a hip alliance emerged that's concerned about what happens to our intellectual health, our country, and, yes, our happiness when we consume empty- calorie entertainment? The Slow Food manifesto lauds “quieter pleasures” as a means of opposing “the universal folly of Fast Life"—yet there's litle that seems more foolish, loudly unpleasant, and ‘universal than the sereens that blare in every corner of America (at the airport, at the gym, in the elevator, in our hands). "Fast" entertainment, consumed mindlessly as we slump on the couch or do our morning commute, pickles our brains—and our souls. That's why I'm calling for a Slow Books Movement (one that's a little more developed than this perfecth:admirable attempt). down time, we should turn to literature—to works that took some time to write and will take some time to read, but will also stay with us longer than anything else. They'll help us unwind better than any electronic device—and they'll pleasurably sharpen our minds and identities, too. To borrow a cadence from Michael Pollan: Read books. As often as you can. Mostly classes.Aim for go minutes a day. You can squeeze in that half hour pretty easily if only, during your free moments—whenever you find yourself automatically switching on that boob tube, or firing up your laptop to check your favorite site, or scanning Twitter for something to pass the time—you pick up a meaningful work of literature. Reach for your e-reader, ifyou like. The Slow Books ‘movement won't stand opposed to technology ox purely nostalgic or aesthetic grounds. (Kindles et al make books likeWar and Peace less heavy, not less substantive, and also ensure you'll never lose your place.) But Slow Books will have standards about what kinds of reading materials count towards your daily quota. Blog posts won't, of course, but neither will newspaper pieces or even magazine articles. Also excluded: non-literary books. Why the emphasis on literature? By playing with language, plot structure, and images, it challenges us cognitively even as it entertains. It invites us to see the world in a different way, demands that we interpret unusual descriptions, and pushes our memories to recall characters and plot details. In fact, as Annie Murphy Paul noted in a March 17 New York Times op-ed, neuroscientists have found plenty of proof that reading fiction stimulates all sorts of cognitive areas—not just language regions but also those responsible for coordinating movement and interpreting smells. Because literary books are so mentally invigorating, and require such. engagement, they make us smarter than other kinds of reading material, as a 2009 University of Santa Barbara indicated. Researchers found that subjects who read Kafka’s "The Country Doctor'—which includes feverish hallucinations ‘rom the narrator and surreal elements— performed better on a subsequent learning task than a control group that read a straightforward summary of the story. (They probably enjoyed themselves a lot more while reading, too.) Literature doesn’t just make us smarter, however; it makes us us, shaping our eonseiences and our identities. Strong narratives—from Moby-Dick to William Styron's suicide memoir, Darkness Visible—help us develop empathy. Research by Canadian psychologists Keith Oatley and Raymond Mar suggests that reading fiction even hones our social skills, as Paul notes. "Dr. Oatley and Dr. Mar, in collaboration with several other scientists, reported ... that individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them, and see the world from their perspective," she writes. "This relationship persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that moze empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels.” With empathy comes self-awareness, of course. By discovering affinities between ourselves and characters we never imagined we'd be able to comprehend (like the accused murderer Dimitri Karamazov), we better understand who we are personally and politically; what we want to change; what we care about defending, Best of all, perhaps, serious reading will make you feel good about yourself. Surveys show that TV viewing makes people unhappy and remorseful—but when has anyone ever felt anything butsatisfied after finishing a classic? Or anything but intellectually stimulated after tearing through a work of modern lit like, say, Mary Gaitskill's Veronica? ‘And though a television show isn't likely to stay with you too long beyond the night that you watch it, once you've finished a slow book—whether it’s as long as Tolstoy's epic or as short as Old Man and the Sea, as old as The Odyssey or as new as Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, as funny as Portnoy's Complaint ot as gorgeous as James Salter's Light Years—you'll have both a sense of accomplishment and the deeper joys of the book's mast moving, thought-provoking, or hilarious passages. Time and again—to write that toast, enrich your understanding ofa strange personal experience, or help yourself through a loss—you'l return to those dog-eared pages (or search for them on your Kindle). Eventually, you may get so good at reading that you'll move on to the slowest (and most rewarding) reading material around: great poems. Meantime, if you're not reading slowly, you're doing yourself—and your community—a great ‘wrong. As poet Joseph Brodsky said in his 1987 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "Though we can condemn ... the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books, we are powerless ‘when it comes to {the worst crime against literature]: that of not reading the books. For that ..a person pays with his whole life; ..a nation ... pays with its history.”yee HEALTH & SCIENCE ‘Digital Literacy’ Will Never Replace The Traditional Kind We're overestimating how much computers will teach our kids @y ANNIE MURPHY PAUL @anniemurphypaul October 26,2011 Paul's latest book is Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape tho Rest of Ou Lives. Have you heard about the octopus who lives ina tree? In 2005, researchers at the Universi of Connecticut asked a group of seventh graders to read a website full of information about the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, or Octopus paxarbolis. The Web page described the creature's mating rituals, preferred diet, and leafy habitat in precise detail. Applying an analytical model they'd learned, the students evaluated the trustworthiness of the site and the information it offered. Their judgment? The tree octopus was legit. All but one of the pupils rated the website as “very credible.” The headline of the university's press release read, “Researchers Find Kids Need Better Online Academie Skills,” and it quoted Don Leu, professor of education at UConn and co-director of its New Literacies Research Lab, Tamenting that classroom instruction in online reading is “woefully lacking.” ‘There's something wrong with this picture, and it’s not just that the arboreal octopus is, of course, a fiction, presented by Leu and his colleagues to probe their subjects’ Internet savwy. ‘The other fable here is the notion that what these kids need — what all our kids need — is to learn online skills in school. It would seem cleer that what Leu’s seventh graders really require is knowledge: some basic familiarity with the biology of sea-dwelling creatures that ‘would have tipped them off that the website was a whopper (say, when it explained that the tree octopus's natural predator is the sasquatch). But that’s not how an increasingly powerful faction within education sees the matter. They are the champions of “new literacies” — or ‘zast century skills” or “digital literacy” or a number of other faddish-sounding concepts. In their view, skills trump knowledge, developing “literacies” is more important than learning mere content, and all facts are now Googleable and therefore unworthy of committing to memory. There is a flaw in this popular account. Robert Pondiscio, an education consultant and staffer at the nonprofit Core Knowledge Foundation (and a former fifth-grade teacher), calls it the “tree octopus problem:” even the most sophisticated digital literacy skills won't help students and workers navigate the world if they don’t have a broad base of knowledge about how the ‘world actually operates. “When we fill our classrooms with technology and emphasize these new ‘literacies,’ we feel ike we're reinventing sthools to be more relevant,” says Pondiscio. “But if you focus on the delivery mechanism and not the content, you're doing kids a disservice.” Indeed, evidence from cognitive science challenges the notion that skills can exist independent of factual knowledge. Dan Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Vis a leading expert on haw students learn. “Data from the last thirty years leads to a conclusion that is not scientifically challengeable: thinking well requires(24 knowing facts, and that's true not only because you need something to think about,” Willingham has written. “The very processes that teachers care about most — critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving — are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory (not just found in the environment).” Just because you can Google the date of Black Thursday doesn’t mean you understand why the Great Depression happened or how it compares to our recent economic slump. And sorting the wheat from the abundant online chaff requires more than simply evaluating the credibility of the source (the tree octopus material was supplied by the “Kelvinie University branch of the Wild Haggis Conservation Society,” which sounded impressive to the seventh graders in Don Leu's experiment). It demands the knowledge of facts that can be used to independently verify or discredit the information on the screen. ‘There is no doubt that the students of today, and the workers of tomorrow, will need to innovate, collaborate and evaluate, to name three of the “21st century skills” so dear to di literacy enthusiasts. But such skills can't be separated from the knowledge that gives rise to them. To innovate, you have to know what came before. To collaborate, you have to contribute knowledge to the joint venture, Ané to evaluate, you have to compare new information against knowledge you've already mastered. Nor is there any reason that these skills must be learned or practiced in the context of technology. Critical thinking is crucial, but English students engage in it whenever they parse a line of poetry or analyze the motives of an unreliable narrator. Collaboration is key, but it can be effectively fostered in the glee club or on the athletic field. Whatever is specific to the technological tools we use right now — and these tools are bound to change in any case — is designed to be easy to learn and simple to use. This last point was colorfully expressed by Alan Eagle, a Silicon Valley executive who sends his children to a Waldorf School that does not allow computers in its classrooms. Using the Internet is “supereasy,” Eagle was quoted as saying in a much-discussed New York Times article. “At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There's no reason why kids can't figure it out when they get older.” What ‘they won't figure out is deep reading, advanced math, scientific reasoning — unless we teach them. While economically disadvantaged students may benefit from access to computers that they don’t have at home, more affluent kids are surrounded by technology. Does it make sense to limit their screen time at home and then give them more of the same at school? Paul, the author of Origins, is at work on a book about the science of learning. The views expressed are solely her own. iteracy-will-never- Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2011/10/26/why-digital- replace-the-traditional-kind/#ixzz1qHIm4OFsMaven 17,2012 Your Brain on Fiction ‘ URPHY PAUL AMID the squawks and pings of our digital devices, the old-fashioned virtues of reading novels can seem faded, even futile. But new support for the value of fiction is arriving from an unexpected quarter: neuroscience. Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this, research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we actin life, Researchers have long known that the “classical” language regions, like Broca’s area and Wemicke’s area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,” for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells. Ina 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, researchers in Spain asked participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. When subjects looked at the Spanish words for “perfume” and “coffee,” their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean “chair” and “key,” this region remained dark. The way the brain handles metaphors has also received extensive study; some scientists have contended that figures of speech like “a rough day” are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more. Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like “The singer had a pleasing voice” and “He had strong hands,” did not, Researchers have discovered that words describing motion also stimulate regions of the brain distinct from language-processing areas. In a study led by the cognitive scientist ‘Véronique Boulenger, of the Laboratory of Language Dynamics in France, the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like “John grasped the object” and18} “Pablo kicked the ball.” The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body's movements. What's more, this activity was concentrated in one part of the motor cortex when the movement described was arm-related and in another part when the movement concemed the leg The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; ir. each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into cther people’s thoughts and feelings. The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters. Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, performed an analysis of 86 {MRI studies, published last year in the Annual Review of Psychology, and concluded that there was substantial overlap in the brain networks used to understand stories and the networks used to navigate interactions with other individuals — in particular, interactions Il this, capacity of the brain to construct a map of other peoples intentions “theory of mind.” Narratives offer a unique opportunity to engage this capacity, as we identify with characters’ longings and frustrations, guess at their hidden motives and track their in which we're trying to figure out the thougats and feelings of others. Scientists encounters with friends and enemies, neighbors and lovers. Iis an exercise that hones our real-life social skills, another body of research suggests. Dr. Oatley and Dr. Mar, in collaboration with several other scientists, reported in two studies, published in 2006 and 2009, that individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective. This relationship persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that more empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels. A 2010 study by Dr. Mar found a similar result in preschocl-age children: the more stories they hadread to them, the keener their theory of mind — an effect that was also produced by watching movies but, curiously, not by watching television. (Dr. Mar has conjectured that because children often watch TV alone, but go to the movies with their parents, they may experience more “parent-children conversations about mental states” when it comes to films.) Fiction, Dr. Oatley notes, “is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.” ‘These findings will affirm the experience of readers who have felt illuminated and instructed by a novel, who have found themselves comparing a plucky young woman to Elizabeth Bennet or a tiresome pedant to Edward Casaubon, Reading great literature, it has long been averred, enlarges and improves us as human beings. Brain science shows this claim is truer than we imagined. Annie Murphy Paul is the author, most recently, of “Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives.”Essay Basicsre aBASIC RECIPE FOR A SHORT, FORMAL ESSAY (ENGL 150) INTRODUCTION (one paragraph) (Aim for at leest 7 sentences) 1, ATTENTION-GETTER OR HOOK: An approach to the topic that should reach out to your readers and catch their interest (a reference to shared experience or feelings; a brief, vivid example, description, or narrative; a quotation or a bit of dialogue: a question; an interesting fact, etc.) 12, TRANSITION + BRIEF EXPLANATION OF THE ISSUE & A LITTLE BACKGROUND INFORMATION to place the issue in an arguable context. Explain what the issue is, and identify the major stakeholders, 3. TRANSITION + THESIS: ONE sentence asserting an arguable judgment (relevant to a general audience) which the rest of the essay will focus on supporting. 4. (OPTIONAL) PLAN OF DEVELOPMENT or blueprint signaling to the reader the major sections of the paper (the POD can be built into the thesis sentence, it can come in a sentence that directly follows the thesis, or it may not be used at all) BODY PARAGRAPHS (Aim for at least 10 sentences per paragraph & at least 3 body paragraphs per essay) 11. TRANSITION: Transitions linking the ideas in successive paragraphs can be as simple as a single transitional word in the first sentence, or they may be as complex as 1-2 sentences at the beginning of the sentence. 2. Toric SENTENCE: One sentence (\vithin the fis third of the paragraph) that asserts an arguable [judgment DIRECTLY SUPPORTING THE THESIS and provides a focus for the rest of the paragraph, 3. SPECIFIC SUPPORT (repeat as needed): Evidence, observations, information, examples, etc, |4.COMMENTARY: EXPLAIN how or why the suppott backs up the topic sentence point (Repeat as needed), [5 ADDRESSING THE OPPOSITION: EXPLAIN why the opposition’s view does not weaken your point(s) or evidence in this paragraph. You may concede (agree) to some extent or refute the opposition’s stand, 1+ TRANSITIONS as need to link successive pieces of evidence or commentary, ‘CONCLUSION (one paragraph) 1, TRANSITION: Transitions linking the ideas in successive paragraphs can be as simple as a single transitional word in the frst sentence, or they may be as complex as 1-2 sentences at the beginning of the sentence. }2. RESTATEMENT OF MAIN POINT(S) in a fresh manner. (Don’t just parrot your thesis verbatim!) 3. (OPTIONAL) POSE A QUESTION for future study or propose a new course of action/solution to a problem, 4. MEMORABLE FLOURISH: Leave readers with a cetail, example, quotation, image, ete. that will provide a satisfying sense of closure (Style is important here, as itis in your essay’s opening).THE ARGUABLE THESIS Much of the writing that students do in college (and some business writing as well) is thesis- driven: that is, papers which focus on clarifying and supporting a main point. In this English 150 class, all of the formal essays are thesis-support papers, as is the in-class competency essay exam (and all of the practice in-class essays we will write to prepare for this exam). If you go on to take English 1A, you will find that this course also concentrates primarily on thesis driven essays. In English 150 and English 1A, you will hear a lot about the “argument” of your essays. By “argument” we don’t mean a disagreement or a dispute as we use the word in everyday life. Instead we mean the logical structure of an essay, the process of reasoning that the writer uses to present and support the thesis From other English courses, most of you may already have some idea-perhaps a very good idea- -of a what a thesis is and the role that it plays in an academic essay. This acquaintance with the concept of a thesis should provide you with a useful starting point for understanding how we will define the term in English 150. But you must be willing to expand upon what you already know, since each level of English course you take will have increasingly rigorous standards for critical thinking and logic, and therefore what may have been a perfectly good thesis for a high school essay or an English 350 essay may not fulfill the standards in English 150 nearly as well So how do we “define” thesis? The following answers are often the first to pop into the average person’s head: ‘The main topic or subject of an essay ‘The main topic plus an opinion about it The main point of an essay The last two answers are closest to how we will use the term in English 150, but our definition will need to be much more finely tuned, and our standards for what makes a strong thesis will be more difficult to achieve. In English 150, you will hear and read the following admonition over and over again: ‘THE THESIS MUST CLEARLY ASSERT AN ARGUABLE JUDGMENT WHICH IS RELEVANT TO A GENERAL AUDIENCE. To figure out what this means, let's break down THE CHARACTERISTICS OF A STRONG THESIS: + A thesis must clearly identify the main topic of the essay and establish the focus for the rest of the essay. It is like a contract you are making with your readers, promising them that the rest of the essay will concentrate on this primary point.A thesis must asserts an arguable judgment rather than a self-evident one. Common knowledge or a statement of fact CANNOT serve as an acceptable thesis. In English 150, your thesis statements should take a definite position on an arguable issue. Examples of statements of fact: “Regular exercise is good for most people’s overall health,” “California's current budget crisis is having an impact on many public services,” “Smoking is a terribly destructive habit because it causes lung cancer, emphysema, and heart disease,” “There has been a lot of controversy about the presence of big box chain stores and fast food restaurants in some Humboldt County communities” Examples of common knowledge: “Life is full of many changes-some positive and some negative,” “Working full-time while going to college can be very difficult,” “Although the responsibility is sometimes hard, parents should set some sensible limits for their children,” “Earning a college degree is usually a positive step toward insuring a successful future.” Note that most of these theses do have judgment words like “good,” “destructive,” “difficult,” “should,” “positive,” but the inclusion of these words alone is not enough to make the assertions arguable since they really do not have any reasonable opposition. A thesis must assert a point which is relevant to a general audience. Avoid judgments which are so personalized that a reader who is outside your circle of family and friends will be unable wo assess the argument and/or lo muster up such interest in the subject. Examples of theses which are not relevant to a general audience: “From Little League to college, team sports have played an important role in making me strong and confident,” “Although getting clean and sober-and staying that way-has been the biggest challenge I've ever faced, it has also saved my life and made it worth living,” “Working at the Jitterbean cofife drive-thru in Eureka is a great job,” “Parenting a child with Attention Deficit Disorder has been quite a learning process.” Note that some of these topics could be converted into theses that would be arguable to a general audience if they were de-personalized and established as arguable issues. Also keep in mind that personal examples may play a significant supporting role in your essay-but not in the thesis or topic sentences. A thesis may reliably forecast the organization of the essay, letting the reader know what main supporting points will be covered and in what order. This forecast is sometimes called a plan of development (POD) or a blueprint. A POD is often a good idea, but it is not an obligatory part of the thesis in English 150; you may present it in the sentence following the thesis, or you may skip it altogether Example of POD in thesis: Skateboarding should be limited to special parks because it poses a nuisance to pedestrians, leads to serious injuries, and causes thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to public and private property.Example of POD following thesis: Skateboarding is not just a harmless recreation and should, in fact, be limited to special parks. As it now stands, the sport poses a nuisance to pedestrians, leads to serious injuries, and causes thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to public and private property. The following thesis rules also apply to your essays in this English 150 class, but keep in ‘mind that as your academic writing become increasingly skilled and sophisticated, you may outgrow these restrictions. And they may not apply to the essays you write in other courses, (check with your instructors). + Limit your thesis statement to one sentence. + Donor frame your thesis as a question-it should be a declarative statement, + Donor rely on an implied thesis. We will encounter some implied theses in our 150 readings, but your essays must have an explicit thesis statement. + The thesis must appear in the essay’s first paragraph (the introduction)-generally toward the end of the paragraph (or at least in the last half). + Underline your thesis in English 150 to make it easier for me (and for you!) to identify it THE ARGUABLE TOPIC SENTENCE Like the thesis, topic sentences also play a crucial role in your essay’s argument structure. ‘A topic sentence has two main funetions: 1. ITASSERTS AN ARGUABLE JUDGMENT THAT DIRECTLY SUPPORTS THE THESIS. Example of a thesis and a topic sentence that directly supports it: Thesis: Unless Eureka changes its long-standing laissez-faire attitude about its roughest neighborhoods, any efforts the residents make to improve their safety and quality of life will be limited and ineffectual. Topic Sentence: First of all, the city must make highly visible community policing a priority for Eureka’s “ghettos,” instead of shifting the responsibility for crime prevention to neighborhood watch groups and citizen patrols. WARNING: If you have used a Plan of Development (POD) with your thesis, be sure your topic sentences are directly supporting the main thesis point—not just the POD. 'HESIS WITH POD: Skateboarding should be limited to special parks because it poses a nuisance to pedestrians, leads to serious injuries, and causes thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to public and private property.Ineffective Topic Sentence for paragraph 3 (supports part of the POD only): Finally, skateboarding can damage public and private property. [This statement is factual; it does not support the main point that skateboarding should be limited to special parks.] More effective Topic sentence (supports both Thesis and part of the POD): Finally, skateboarding should be restricted to skate parks because of the damage the sport can cause not only to expensive public structures (like the Old Town Gazebo) but also to private property where homeowners are left footing the bill for repairs. 2. It asserts the main point of the paragraph, establishing the focus for everything else in the paragraph (the specific evidence). In many ways, the topic sentence serves as a thesis for the paragraph, and all of the evidence in the paragraph should directly support the topic sentence point. A STRONG TOPIC SENTENCE SHARES SOME OTHER CHARACTERISTICS OF A STRONG THESIS: + It asserts an arguable judgment rather than a self-evident one, avoiding common knowledge or statements of fact. Keep in mind that according to the grading standards (or rubric) for the English 150 Competency exam essay, topic sentences must “venture a judgment” if the essay is to receive a grade higher than ac. + Tt makes a point which is relevant to a general audience and does not apply to the writer’s experience alone, The following topic sentence rules also apply to your essays in this English 150 class, but keep in mind that as your academic writing become increasingly skilled and sophisticated, you may outgrow these restrictions, And they may not apply to the essays you write in other courses (check with your instructors). + Every paragraph EXCEPT FOR THE INTRODUCTION AND THE CONCLUSION should have a topic sentence. + The topic sentence should appear within the first three sentences of the paragraph. + Do Nor frame your topic sentence as a question-it should be a declarative statement. + Underline your topic sentences in English 150 to make it easier for me (and for you!) to identify them.wo CONTRASTING 350 AND 150 LEVEL ESSAYS Eng. 350 essay ‘Thesis: College of the Redwoods is a good college. College of the Redwoods is a good college where students receive an excellent education. TS 1: CR has talented teachers. TS 2: CR has small classes. Eng. 150 essay Thesis: ‘When contrasted with a four-year public university, College of the Redwoods provides a better education for the first two years of college. ‘Students should attend College of the Redwoods because it provides a superior education when contrasted with what is available at a four-year university. TS 1: ‘One reason the education is superior is that its faculty are committed to teaching; providing good teaching equates with providing a good education, TS 2: ‘Second, College of the Redwoods delivers a better education because its smaller classes ensure quality learning. List the differences in the theses, topic sentences, and overall approach to subject matter. ‘What will be the differences in the support in the body paragraph? ‘What are the words that push the 150 essay into an argument? ACTUAL 150 THESIS STATEMENTS: Prison administrators should consider revising visitation policies and consent forms for fathers who are serving time to preserve the familial bond. ‘To make the college football team a successfull and efficiently running unit, College of the Redwoods should reduce the numbers of players maintained on the squad. ‘Access to Planned Parenthood clinics should be available in high schools because it would be a convenient, educational, and anonymous way for teenagers to get the information theyDEVELOPING YOUR THESIS Writi ig A Thesis Sentence \No sentence in your paper will vex you as much as the thesis sentence. And with good reason: the thesis sentence is typically that ONE sentence in the paper that asserts, controls, and structures the entire argument. Without a strong, persuasive, thoughtful thesis, a paper might seem unfocused, weak, and not worth the reader's time. Complicating the matter further is that different disciplines have different notions of what constitutes a good thesis sentence. Your English professor might frown on a thesis sentence that says, "This paper will argue X by asserting A, B, and C. Such a thesis would likely be seen as too formulaic. In aSocial Science course, on the otier hand, a good thesis ‘might be crafted in just that way. So what makes a good thesis sentence? Despite the differences from discipline to discipline, a good thesis will generally have the following characteristics: 1, A Good Thesis Sentence Will Make A Claim. This Joesn't mean that you have to reduce an ides to an "either/or" proposition and then take a stand. Rather, you need to develop an interesting perspective that you can support and defend. This perspective must be more than an observation, "America is violent" is an observation, “Americans are violent because they are fearful" (the position that Michael Moore takes in Bowling for Columbine) is an argument. Why? Because it posits a perspective. It makes a claim. Put another way, a good thesis sentence will inspire (rather than quiet) other points of view. One miglt argue that America is violent because of its violent entertainment industry. Or because of the proliferation of guns. Or because of the disintegration of the family. In short, if your thesis is positing something that no one can (or would wish to) argue with, then it's not a very good thesis. 2. A Good Thesis Sentences Will Control The Entire Argument. Your thesis sentence determines what you are required to say in a paper. It also determines what you cannot say. Every paragraph in your paper exists in order to support your thesis. Accordingly, if one of your paragraphs seems irrelevant to your thesis you have two choices: get rid of the paragraph, or rewrite your thesis. Understand that you don't have a third option: you can't simply stick the idea in without preparing the reader for it in your thesis. The thesis is like a contract between you and your reader, If vyoU introduce ideas thatthe reader isnt prepared for, youve violated that contract. 3. A Good Thesis Will Provide A Structure For Your Argument. A good thesis not only signals tothe reader ‘what your argument is, but how your argument willbe presented. In other words, your thesis sentence should either directly or indirectly suggest the structure of your argument to your reader. Say, for example, that you ae going to argue that “American fearfulness expresses itself in three curious ways: A, B, and C." Inthis case, the reader understands that you are going to have three important points to cover, and that these points will appear in a certain order. Ifyou suggest particular ordering principle and then abandon it, the reader wil feel betrayed, irvitated, and confused THE SIX-STEP THESIS FORMATION METHOD. 1. Name your focus topic EXAMPLE: The Beverly Hill’s Diet 2. Ask a question (make sure it's not obvious!) about your focused topic EXAMPLE: Is the Beverly Hills Diet advisable forthe typical college student? 3. Revise the question into a declarative statement EXAMPLE: The Beverly Hills Diet is inadvisable for the typical college student, 4. Add a group of words summarizing your key ideas EXAMPLE: Because itis inconvenient, unhealthy, and provide only temporary weight loss. ‘5. Recognize the opposition EXAMPLE: Although it does provide quick weight loss, 6, Call upon editing to put it ail together42 EXAMPLE: Although it does provide quick weight loss, the Beverty Hills Diet is inadvisable for the typical college student because it is inconvenient, unhealthy, and provides only temporary weight loss. WILL THIS THESIS SENTENCE MAKE THE GRADE? (A CHECK LIST) In the end, you may have spent a good deal of time writing your thesis and still not know if t's a good one. Here are some questions to ask yourself, + Does my thesis sentence attempt to answer (or at east to explore) a challenging question? + Isthe point Im making one that would generate discussion and argument, or sit one that would leave people asking, "So what?" + Is my thesis to vague? Too general? Should I focus on some more specific aspect of my topic? Does my thesis deal directly with the topic at hand, or is ita declaration of my personal feelings? + Does my thesis indicate the direction of my argument? Does it suggest a structure for my paper? + Does my introductory paragraph define terms important to my thesis? + Is the language in my thesis vivid and clear? Have I structured my sentence so that the important information is in the main clause? Have used subordinate clauses to house less important information? tn short, is this thesis the very best sentence that it ean be? WHAT ELSE DO YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THESIS SENTENCES? 1. A good thesis usually relies on a strong introduction, sharing the work. As your writing becomes more sophisticated, you will find that a one-sentence thesis statement cannot bear the burden of your entire argument. Therefore, you will find yourself relying increasingly on your introduction to lay the groundwork. Use your introduction to explain some of your argumeat’s points and/or to define its terms, Save the "punch" for your thesis. 2. A good working thesis is your best friend. Those writers who understand the concept of "working thesis" are way ahead of the game. A "working thesis" is a thesis that works for you, helping you to see where your ideas are going. Many students keep their thesis sentence in front of them at all times to help them to control the direction of their argument. ut what happens when youstumble onto an idea that your thesis isn't prepared for? Or, more important, what happens when you think everything is going well in your paper and suddenly you arrive at ablock? Always retum to your working thesis, and give ita critical once-over. You may find thatthe block in your writing process is related to some limitation in your thesis. Or you may find that hidden somewhere in that working thesis is the germ of an even better idea. Stay in conversation with your thesis throughout the writing process, You'll be surprised at what you can learn from it WHAT IS A WORKING THESIS SENTENCE? Let's takea minute to define this term. A thesis sentence, as we've sai, is «kind of contract between you and your reader. Itasserts, controls, and structures your argument for your readers ease. A working thesis sentence, on the other hand is sentence that you compose in order to make the work of writing ease. Its a sentence that asserts, control, and strictures the argument for you. The workingthesis need not be eloquent. Infact, itcan be quite clunky, declaring your argument and then clumsily listing your supporting points. Not to worry: you'l be revising Your thesis, and often more than once. Remember that, as you write, you are bound to come up with new ideas and observations that you'd like to incorporate into your paper. Every time you make a new discovery, your thesis sentence will have to be revised. Sometimes you'l find that you're stuck in your writing. Yoa may need to return to your thesis. Perhaps you haven't clearly defined an important term or condition in your thesis? Maybe that's why you find yourself unable to progress beyond a certain point in your argument? Revising your working thesis at this juncture could help you to clarify for yourself the direction of your argument, Dont be afta to revise! In fact, the most important quality of a working thesis sentence is its flexibility. A working thesis needs to keep up with your thinking. It needs to accommodate ‘What you leam as you go along, Adapted from a handout ot the Odegaara Writing & Research Caster (htp:/www depts washington edu/owre) 15143 STRONG BODY PARAGRAPHS A strong body paragraph explains, proves, and/or supports your paper’s argumentative claim or thesis statement. If you're not sure how to craft one, try using this guide 1, INSERT A TOPIC SENTENCE: A topic sentence links the paragraph directly to the thesis, as well as encapsulating and organizing the entire paragraph. Although topic sentences may appear anywhere in a psragraph, in academic essays they often appear near the beginning (and this is the definitely the best choice for most students who are learning how to write strong argument papers). Wher creating a topic sentence, ask yourself what's ‘going on in your paragraph. Why you chosen to include the information you have? Why is the paragraph important in the context of your argument or thesis statement? What point are your trying to make? Relating your topic sentences to your thesis will help strengthen the coherence (the logical “flow”) of your essay. If you include an argumentative claim or thesis statement in your introduction, then think of incorporating a keyword from that statement into the topic sentence. But you need not be overly explicit when you echo the thesis statement—by using the exact same word choice, for instance. Do not forget that your topic sentence should do more than just establish a connection between your paragraph and your thesis. Use a topic sentence also to show how your paragraph contributes to the development of your argument by moving it that one extra step forward. If your topic sentence merely restates your thesis, then either your paragraph is redundant or your topic sentence needs to be reformulated. If several of your topic sentences restate your thesis, even if they do so in different words, then your essay is probably repetitive. EXPLAIN YOUR TOPIC SENTENCE: ‘Does yout topic sentence require further explanation or elaboration? If so, add another 1-2 sentences explaining your topic sentence here. &) 3. INSERT YOUR EVIDENCE: Insert your supporting evidence (examples, facts, statistics, quotations from experts, ete.) When including evidence, make sure itis integrated smoothly into the text of the paper and that you provide strong transitions between different pieces of evidence in the same paragraph, 4) EXPLAIN YOUR EVIDENCE: é pat ~ No matter how good your evidence is, it won’t help your argument much if your reader doesn’t THs. know why its important. Ask yourself: how coes this evidence prove the point you are tryingto. PS make in this paragraph and/or your paper as a whole? This argumentative commentary is often at least 1-3 sentences, following each piece of evidence 5) ADDRESS YOUR OPPOSITION: ~~ If your opposition offers a strong counter-argument to the point you are making in the paragraph or interprets the evidence in a very different way, acknowledge the opposing view and provide a brief rebuttal and/or concede the point (that is, explain that you agree with the opposition in some respects). ‘6, INSERT A CONCLUDING SENTENCE: End your paragraph with a concluding sentence or sentences that reasserts how your paragraph contributes to the development of your argument as a whole. Adapted from hanout atthe Odegaard Writing d Reseorch Center ( hitp ‘wane depts washington edu/owre)CONSTRUCTING PARAGRAPHS Imagine that you've written your thesis. You've constructed and revised your outline, You've settled on a plan that you think will work. Now you have to go about the serious business of constructing your paragraphs. You were probably told in high school that paragraphs are the workhorses of your paper. Indeed, they are. Ifa single paragraph is incoherent or weak, the entire argument might fail. Is important that you consider carefully the "job" of each paragraph. Know what itis you want that paragraph to do. WHAT IS A PARAGRAPH? A paragraph is generally understood as a single "unit" of a paper. What your reader expects when she enters a new paragraph is that she is going to hear you declare a point and then offer support for that point. If you violate this expectation - if your paragraphs wander aimlessly among a half dozen points, or if they declare points without offering any evidence to support them - then the reader becomes confused or irritated by your argument. She won't want to read any further. WHAT SHOULD A PARAGRAPH DO? At the risk of being silly, consider this. What you Icok for in a partner, a reader looks for in a paragraph. ‘You want a partner who is supportive, strong, and considerate to others. Similarly, a good paragraph will: ‘+ Be Supportive. Even in the most trying of times a good paragraph will find a way to support the thesis. It will declare its relationship to the thesis clearly, so that the whole world knows what the paragraph intends to do. In other words, a supportive paragraph's topic sentence (main idea) clearly develops the argument of the thesis. ‘+ Be Strong. A good paragraph isn't bloated with irrelevant evidence or redundant sentences. Nor is ita scrawny thing, begging to be fed. It's strong and buffed. You know that it's been worked on. In other words, a strong paragraph develops its main idea, using sufficient evidence. ‘© Be Considerate. Good paragraphs consider their relationship to other paragraphs. A good paragraph never interrupts its fellow paragraphs to babble on about its own, irrelevant problems. A good paragraph waits its turn, It shows up when and where it's supposed to, It doesn't make a mess for other paragraphs to clean up. In other words, a considerate paragraph is a coherent paragraph. It makes sense within the paper as a whole. ‘Writing the Topic Sentence ‘Just as every paper requires a thesis to assert and control its argument, so does every paragraph require a topie sentence to assert and control its main idea. Without a topic sentence, your paragraphs will seem jumbled, aimless. Your reader will find himself confused. Because the topic sentence plays an important role in your paragraph, it must be crafted with care. When you've written a topic sentence, ask yourself the following questions: © Does the topic sentence declare a single point of my argument? Because the reader expects that a paragraph will explore ONE idea in your paper, it's important that your topic sentence isn't too ambitious. If your topic sentence points to two or three ideas, perhaps you need to consider developing more paragraphs. * Does the topic sentence further my argument? Give your topic sentences the same "so what?" test that you gave your thesis sentence, If your topic sentence isn't interesting, your paragraph probably won't serve to further the argument, Your paper could stall. eeVWs ‘+ _ Is the topic sentence relevant to my thesis? It might seem so to you, but the relevance may not be so clear to your reader. If you find that your topic sentence is taking you into new ground, stop writing and consider your options. You'll either have to rewrite your thesis to accommodate this new direction, or you will have to edit this paragraph from your final paper. + Isthere a clear relationship between this topic sentence and the paragraph that came before? It's important to make sure that you haven't left out any steps in the process of composing your argument. If you make a sudden turn in your reasoning, signify that turn to the reader by using the proper transitional phrase - on the other hand, however, et. + Does the topic sentence control my paragraph? If your paragraph seems to unravel, take a second look. It might be that your topic sentence isu't adequately controlling your paragraph and needs to be re-written. Or it might be that your paragraph is moving on to a new idea that needs to be sorted out + Where have I placed my topic sentence? Most of the time a topic sentence comes at the beginning of a paragraph. A reader expects to see it there, so if you are going to place it elsewhere, you'll need to have a good reason and a bit of skill. You might justify putting the topic sentence in the middle of the paragraph, for example, if you have information that needs to precede it. You might also justify putting the topic sentence at the end of the paragraph, if you ‘want the reader to consider your line of reasoning before you declare your main point. Developing Your Argument: Evidence Students often ask how long a paragraph ought to be. Our response: "As long as it takes." It's possible to make a point quickly. Sometimes it's desirable to keep it short. Notice the above paragraph, for example. ‘We might have hemmed and hawed, talked about short paragraphs and long paragraphs. We might have said that the average paragraph is one-half to two-thirds of a page in length. We might have spent time explaining why the too-short paragraph is too short, end the too-long paragraph too long. Instead, we cut to the chase. After huffing and puffing through this paragraph (which is getting longer and longer all the time) we'll give you the same advice: a good paragraph is as long as it needs to be in order to illustrate, explore, and/or prove its main idea. But length isn’t all that matters in paragraph development. ‘What's important is that a paragraph develops its idea fully, and in a manner that a reader can follow with ease. Let's consider these two issues carefully. First: how do we know when an idea is fully developed? If your topic sentence is well-written, it should tell you what your paragraph needs to do. If my topic sentence declares, for example, that there are two conflicting impulses at work in a particular fictional character, then my reader will expect that I will define and illustrate these two impulses, I might take two paragraphs to do this; I might take one, My decision will depend on how important this matter is to my discussion When you've written a paragraph, ask yourself these questions: + Dol have enough evidence to support this paragraph's idea? * Do have too much evidence? (In other words, will the reader be lost in a morass of details, ‘unable to see the argument as a whole?) ‘* Does this evidence clearly support the assertion I am making in this paragraph, or am I stretching ie If Lam stretching it, what can I'do to persuade the reader that this stretch is worth making? Am I repeating myself in this paragraph?+ Have I defined all of the paragraph's important terms? ‘+ Can I say, in a nutshell, what the purpose of this paragraph is? ‘+ Has the paragraph fulfilled that purpose? Developing Your Argument: Coherence OK, so you've gotten this far: you have your thesis, your topic sentences, and truckloads of evidence to support the whole lot. You've spent three days writing your paragraphs, making sure that each paragraph argues one point and that this point is well supported with textual evidence, Bul when you read this essay back to yourself, you feel a profound sense of disappointment. Though you've followed your outline and everything is "in there," the essay just doesn't seem to hold togetherlt could be that you have a problem with coherence, A lack of coherence is easy to diagnose, but not so easy to cure. An incoherent essay doesn't seem to flow. Its arguments are hard to understand. The reader has to double back again and again in order to follow the gist of the argument. Something has gone wrong. What? Look for these problems in ‘your paper: 1. Make sure that your sentences look backward as well as forward. In order for a paragraph to be coherent, each sentence should begin by linking itself firmly to the sentence that came before. If the link between sentences does not seem firm, use an introductory clause or phrase to connect one idea to the other. 2, Follow the principle of moving from old to new. If you put the old information at the beginning of the sentence, and the new information at the end, you accomplish two things. First, you ensure that your reader is on solid ground: she moves from the familiar to the unknown. Second, because we tend to give emphasis to what comes at the end of a sentence, the reader rightfully perceives that the new information is more important than the old. 3. Use a little repetition to create a sense of unity. Repeating key words and phrases at appropriate moments will give your reader a sense of coherence in your work. Don't overdo it, however. You'l risk Sounding ee ae = De Lior seob-teyic Seolites + Meroe teat 4. Use transition markers wisely. Sometimes you'll need to announce to your reader some turn in your argument. Or you'll want to emphasize one of Your points. Or you'll want to make clear some relationship in time. In all these cases you'll want to use transition markers. Here are some examples: ‘© To show place - above, below, here, there, ete To show time - after, before, currently, during, earlier, later, etc. To give an example - for example, for instance, et. To show addition - additionally, also, and, furthermore, moreover, equally important, etc. To show similarity - also, likewise, in the same way, similarly, etc. To show an exception - but, however, nevertheless, on the other hand, on the contrary, yet, etc. To show a sequence - first, second, third, next, then, etc To emphasize - indeed, in fact, of course, etc To show cause and effect - accordingly, consequently, therefore, thus, etc. ‘To conclude or repeat - finally, in conclusion, on the whole, in the end, ete. Adopted from hanout atthe Odegaard Writing & Reseerch Center ( hup:/swew depts washington edowre)1y# The English Department’s Statement on Academic Integrity Learning how to read critically, think logically, and write clearly are important goals of a college education. Writing assignments in humanities courses are designed to develop these skills by engaging students in thoughtful analysis of important issues. Plagiarism—using others’ words or ideas without attribution— circumvents that process and cheats the student of the opportunity to hone these skills. Plagiarism is a form of intellectual dishonesty and is subject to both academic and disciplinary action at College of the Redwoods. Definition of Plagiarism Plagiarism means using another’s work without giving credit. When you use another person’s words, you must put quotation marks around them and cite the source. Even when you change the words or just use the person’s ideas, you must give the author credit by citing the source. Plagiarism consists of all of the following: Downloading a free research paper Buying a paper from a commercial paper mill Copying an article from print or electronic sources Handing in another student’s paper as your own, Handing in a paper written in another term or for another class Cutting and pasting to create a paper from several sources Not using quotation marks around copied text Changing some words but copying whole phrases Paraphrasing or summarizing without attribution Faking a citation Attributing your own words to ancther source Plagiarism may be intentional or unintentional; however, ignorance of the rules of citing is not a valid excuse.ra s MLA Formatting English 150 Source http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/ Paper Format ‘The preparation of papers and manuscripts in MLA style is covered in chapter four of the MLA Handbook, and chapter four of the MLA Style Manual. Below are some basic guidelines for formatting a paper in MLA style. General Guidelines + Type your paper on 2 computer and print it out on standard, white 8.5 x 11-inch paper. + Double-space the text of your paper, and use a legible font (e.g. Times New Roman). Whatever font you choose, MLA recommends that the regular and italics type styles contrast enough that they are recognizable one from another. The font size should be 412 pt. + Leave only one space after periods or other punctuation marks (unless otherwise instructed by your instructor). + Set the margins of your document to 1 inch on all sides. ‘+ Indent the first line of paragraphs one half-inch from the left margin. MLA. recommends that you use the Tab key as opposed to pushing the Space Bar five times. + Create a header that numbers all pages consecutively In the upper right-hand corner, ‘one-half inch from the top and flush with the right margin. (Note: Your instructor may ask that you omit the number on your lirst page. Always follow your instructor's guidelines.) + Use italics throughout your essay for the titles of longer works and, only when absolutely necessary, providing emphasis. + If you have any endnotes, include them on a separate page before your Works Cited page. Entitle the section Notes (centered, unformatted). Formatting the First Page of Your Paper + Do not make a title page for your paper unless specifically requested + Inthe upper left-hand corner of the first page, list your name, your instructor's name, the course, and the date. Again, be sure to use double-spaced text. + Double space again and center the title. Do not underline, italicize, or place your title in quotation marks; write the title in Title Case (standard capitalization), not in all capital letters. + Use quotation marks and/or italics when referring to other works in your title, just as you would in your text: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as Morality Play; Human Weariness in "After Apple Picking" + Double space between the title and the first line of the text. + Create a header in the upper right-hand corner that includes your last name, followed by a space with a page number; number all pages consecutively with Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.), one-half inch from the top and flush with the right margin. (Note: Your instructor or other readers may ask that you omit last name/page number header ‘on your first page. Always follow instructor guidelines.) 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