Word of the Week! Insipid

Bowl of clear broth with vegetablesSome time back, during my rip through the R.W.B. Lewis biography of Edith Wharton, I covered the word fatuous. Our pick this week, also one Wharton employed, could be first cousin to that word. Fatuous means something silly or stupid. Wharton found much of modern life (and fiction) fatuous, insipid, or both. Truly, both words walk down the decades hand in hand.

Our word should bring to mind, to those with decent vocabularies, a bowl of very thin soup. Such a dish possesses more flavor than hot water, but the result tastes thin and lacking, quickly leading to an empty stomach. The OED seconds this culinary linkage, with references dating back to the early 17th Century, coming to us via French via the Latin insipidus.

Sometimes, silliness and blandness are not twins. For many first-years, their writing strikes me not as fatuous, because most of them work in earnest to prove themselves in college. Yet often the results too often prove insipid, featuring too many verbs of being, limited vocabularies, generalizations or superficial claims not original to themselves. I do scold them a bit, but mostly my work involves getting them to hear how insipid (and boring) the prose appears. They don’t care for their first grades of C or even B-, but there it stands. Too much writing we read remains insipid, as uninspired as the work Wharton disliked.

Frequency for our word has not been common since the days of tricorn hats, when it enjoyed about eight times the use we see today. Insipid writing, however, never went away. I suppose common terms such as “bland” or the more interesting “voiceless” have filled the void. “Tasteless” does not mean, except literally, much about food. When used metaphorically, it can mean crude or vulgar or, well, fatuous.

If you have a word or metaphor you enjoy, send them by e-mail (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or by leaving a comment below.

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

image source: “Clear Soup” by dielok at Flikr. That soup looks excellent, not insipid!

Word of the Week! Volition

Cylon CenturionsThis word has a great deal of relevance when we discuss Open AI’s ChatGPT software. That program elicits responses that range from unreasoned panic to pedagogical curiosity among colleagues locally and globally.

We fear, in short, that a machine will replace us.

Yet the AI has no volition. The OED entry defines our word as “An act of willing or resolving; a decision or choice made after due consideration or deliberation; a resolution or determination.” It comes from Latin volo, “I wish” or “I will.”

I decided to ask the AI about this. It replied “No, I am a machine learning model and do not possess volition or consciousness. I can only respond based on the patterns and information in my training data.”

If Strong AI ever develops, it will be able to ask us questions by itself, taking our answers to improve its own code. No developers needed to tweak its 1s and 0s.

Let that give you some comfort, as you are readers endowed with volition, curiosity, and the ability to change the contents of your mind by applying those two marvels. Consider this question put to the AI:

Beatles or Rolling Stones?

The Rolling Stones is a legendary British rock band that formed in 1962. They are considered one of the most influential bands in the history of rock music, and have produced many iconic songs such as “Satisfaction,” “Brown Sugar,” “Start Me Up,” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

On the other hand, I’m not aware of any specific references to “Lumpels” as a band, so I can’t make a comparison. Based on this context, I can say that The Rolling Stones is a more well-known and influential band compared to “Lumpels”.

Nominate a word students need to learn by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Image of Cylon Centurions courtesy of Dr. Gaius Baltar.

Common First-Year Writing Mistakes

Dr. Greg Cavenaugh of Rhetoric and Communications Studies will work with my trainee Writing Consultants this semester. His First-Year Seminar, “Heroes and Villains” is a great topic, but no matter the subject matter, first-years always make the same errors.

So I asked Dr. Cavenaugh for a list. Here is what he sent. Please send me other issues/concerns you have about first-year writing!

No governing claim/thesis at all.  Alternately, a governing claim stated only as a question.  This more often occurs in reflective writing such as reading journals, but it sometimes appears in more formal assignments.  This problem may well stem from the assumption that writing is simply “stating what I think.”  Scholarly writing is a lengthy process of crafting and revising an argument; “stating what I think” is at best a first step in the creation of an argument.

Several sentences (sometimes multiple paragraphs) of fluff before the author reaches his/her governing claim/thesis.  This may well stem from the notion that scholarly writing is “fancy writing” and that the first few paragraphs of scholarly research are fluff.  When a reader is familiar with the norms of the academic field that an author is addressing, it becomes clear that what students regard as “fluff” is actually essential to the author’s argument.  The reason that a novice reader views these paragraphs as “fluff” is simple unfamiliarity with the academic discipline and the communicative norms of that interpretive community.  In Grad School Essentials, David Shore sums up this concern as, “Get to the bloody point.  Please.”

Essid’s note: I call such “fluff” a “March of History” introduction, and it seems to come from public-speaking experience in some cases. You  know it: “As soon as humans stood erect, they gazed upon the night sky in wonder. For millennia we have wondered about the Moon. Finally, in 1969 we went there…” would be a typical paper about Neil Armstrong in my FYS, The Space Race. -10 points and a week to cut to the chase with a revision, please!

Paragraphs that run across multiple pages.  From the early 2000’s to about two or three years ago, I would ask students, “How long is a paragraph?” and get back a disturbing answer.  “Oh, a paragraph is 8-12 sentences long,” students would routinely say.  I’m not sure where this definition of a paragraph came from, but it was taught with remarkable consistency for much of the last twenty years.  Over the last few years, I am starting to hear a different, more functional answer:  “Oh, a paragraph is about 3-4 sentences at least and maybe about 7 sentences at most.”  Despite this relative improvement in the perception of paragraph length, I still find students writing “mega-paragraphs,” and those “paragraphs” often (let’s say) start on page 2 and end on page 4.  These “mega-paragraphs” usually develop from a lack of clear organizational structure—instead of making one point that leads to another point in a programmatic fashion, the author attempts to say several things all at once.

A lack of explicit reasoning that moves from one concept to the next to programmatically prove a point.  This is the broad, structural version of the previous issue.  Students may articulate a clear governing claim/thesis that can be reasonably supported, and yet their argument bounces randomly through ideas rather than making a linear case.  Of course, good writing sometimes cannot be linear and direct; sometimes authors must take “side treks” in order to guide the reader to the final conclusion.  These side treks should never be considered the default for academic writing, however.  Instead, writers should build a case like a lawyer in a murder trial.  Classic detective-novel reasoning here is good enough for our purposes—in order to prove that Tom killed Jerry, we need to show that Tom had the means to commit the murder, a significant motive for killing Jerry, and the opportunity to commit the murder. If those are the three things that we must demonstrate, then we craft our argument to support those three points, in whatever order best allows for clear movement from one idea to the next.

To extend the analogy, beginning writers often start out showing the Tom had the means to commit the murder, then take a detour into Tom’s character and the horrible things he wrote on social media, then return to the issue of means while confusingly introducing a hint of Tom’s motives, then going into an elaborate forensic analysis of the DNA at the crime scene, then proving that Tom had no alibi, and finally concluding with, “There, as you can plainly see, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Tom killed Jerry.”  Note that all of these elements COULD be used in a court case against Tom, including the references to his horrible social media posts.  The problem is that there is no clear line of reasoning that helps the reader understand how (for instance) the DNA evidence relates to the question of opportunity (maybe the DNA proves Tom’s alibi is false).

Equating scholarly, formal writing with a stiff, abrupt tone.  Good writing can be personalized and can reflect a writer’s sense of style.  With the exception of some specific disciplinary audiences, such as writing up a lab report for a physics class, there is no need to sound stiff, inhuman, and impersonal.

Alternately, equating scholarly formal writing with a loopy, baroque style.  Sometimes young writers assume that their goal should be to personalize the material as much as possible, to sound creative and elegant in the manner that associate with “high” scholarship.  Often, the remedy is to ask the writer for a “plain English” translation of their ideas.

Commas used everywhere or nowhere.  I am not talking here about the occasional miscue of a misplaced comma, and I am not talking about my lifelong support for the “Oxford comma,” which is regarded by some writers as inessential.  What I’m talking about here is a systematic inability to use commas correctly.  I often find that, at some point, the student was chastised for his/her use of commas, and now the student either avoids commas completely or else throws in commas everywhere, hoping some of those commas land in the right places.  For tutors who are not themselves sure about where commas go (which is an understandable issue), note that you can still observe that the writer is avoiding commas or overusing commas, even if you have trouble explaining the grammatical issues.

No awareness of the distinction between plural and possessive.  This is just plain annoying:  “The heroes actions demonstrate his character.”  One hero (“hero’s”)?  Several heroes, possessive (“The heroes’ actions demonstrate their character”)?  What are you trying to say here?

No attention to verb tense.  Also just plain annoying:  “Tom enters the room and sees Jerry.  Jerry tried to run away, but he slipped and fell, so Tom hits him with a mallet and then escapes before anyone had seen him.”  Either write the whole thing in past tense or write the whole thing in present tense.  Because students in my academic field must so often write descriptions of actions, such as describing the actions of characters in a film or summarizing the steps involved in a religious ritual, I see this problem a lot.

Section headers used as transitions.  I love section headers as a tool for helping the reader intuit the organizational logic of your work.  But by themselves, section headers don’t actually transition a reader from one idea to another idea in a way that connects those two ideas.  Use a section header and transition sentences.

Sentence fragments produced by years of SMS texting.  We’ve all produced incomplete sentences and seen the dreaded “FRAG” comment in the margin of our work.  Contemporary first year students are, however, even more likely to produce sentence fragments in my experience.  SMS texting allows for and even encourages the expression of partial thoughts on the presumption that the reader is “clued into” the context that makes their partial thought complete.  This is especially the case with “meme culture,” where a single image and accompanying text is used as a shorthand for a host of thoughts and feelings that are condensed, almost poetically, down to something that can be sent via text with a few thumb swipes.

Using 50 words to say what can be expressed in only 10.  Students often write themselves into an idea, wandering through a ton of words in order to arrive at a useful concept.  The revision process should involve rigorous editing to tighten the work.

Essid’s Addendum: “Hand Grenade” quotations bedevil first-year work. Students drop in a quotation without introducing it or linking it to other claims made by follow-up analysis. -10 again and a week to fix it. It amazes me how many neglect to get it done in a week, losing a full letter grade in the process.

Image source: “The Stair Method” by Sage Ross at Flickr.

Word of the Week! Acrologia

The King from Huckleberry FinnIf this word is not in your personal dictionary–I’m looking at you, students–put it there. No, it does not appear in any form in The OED, yet. A friend shared it with me a week ago, but it’s a common-enough stylistic error in student work:

  • He is considered imminent in his field of study (instead of “eminent”)
  • The committee redacted the report (instead of “edited”)

Usually, students and other careless folk employ acrologia alongside a poorly used thesaurus: in the attempt to sound more academic, they sound “off” or even hilarious. It also marks the confidence man’s trade. Consider The “funeral orgies” noted by The King in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He means “obsequies,” and his attempt to cover up his mistake would make any first-year student practicing the art of BS proud:

It’s a word that comes from the Greek word ORGO, which means outside or open or abroad, and the Hebrew word JEESUM, which means to plant, cover up, or inter. So, you see, funeral orgies are simply open, public funerals. 

Since The King is trying to punch above his intellectual weight (which is slight) it’s acrologia.

Acrologia is a subset of malapropism. We all do that, but we often encounter it afflicting ridiculous characters in drama, since actors first stepped on stage.  Malapropism can cause low-brow guffaws when coupled with a non-native speaker’s natural mistakes in vocabulary or pronunciation. Dr. Caius, noted in last week’s post, says in one line of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” that he shall be the turd, when in fact he means third.

Acrologia also would not, in my estimation, include instances of mistaken idioms. as in “We use to go to Florida every year” (instead of “used to go”) or “suppose to” instead of “supposed to.” These errors come from how we write out the sounds of speech, not from an attempt to sound academic. The words remain the correct term, but the forms do not.

Some words that may have once provided examples of acrologia slide under the door, over time. In American English, even formal writing, we no longer make much distinction between “reluctant” and “reticent,” the latter (to me) implying a reluctance to speak: that person of few words in our talky-talk times.

At our Web server I’ve a list of commonly confused words that I post for my students. They have a week to correct the instances or lose 10 points on a paper. If you have more such confused and confusing words, send them, along with other good words and metaphors, by e-mail (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Image of the King faking his sorry about “Funeral Orgies” stolen blatantly, in honor of The King and The Duke.

 

Word of the Week! Metonymy

Royal Crown of FranceThanks to Sharon Condrey, Director of Tax Compliance and Payroll at UR, for nominating this one. I’d previously covered the term synecdoche, and our term this week seems similar, at least at first blush. My earlier pick could indicate something smaller representing something bigger, such as “boots on the ground” for an Army. That’s also the sense of our word this week.

Yet synecdoche can also mean something bigger representing something smaller, as in the rotten error too many students make: “Society will not accept that change,” when they really mean “A majority of voters at this point in our history, and living in one particular state, will not accept that change.” In my classes, such papers lose 10 of 100 points for each such error, and the writers have one week to remove the error for a regrade.

Not so with metonymy, a usage that rarely leads to sweeping generalization. As the OED notes, metonymy involves “substituting for a word or phrase denoting an object, action, institution, etc., a word or phrase denoting a property or something associated with it.”  Thus “the gridiron” can be used to talk about the game of American football, or “the press” for print-based media outlets who now have Web pages, video streams, and more. Likewise, at the time of writing, we are still awaiting results from “the ballot box,” when voting these days appears in a variety of forms, many electronic.

I suppose that student writers might run into trouble with metonymy if overused. It could lead to lots of repetition if a writer talking about a conflict between a monarchy and parliament used “the crown” 12 times in a paper. “Synonyms are wonderful things, students,” I’ve been known to quip, “but using them well requires slowing down and giving a damn.”

Send words and metaphors to jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu. See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Creative-Commons image courtesy of Wikipedia.

An Alumna Takes Her Writing Consultant Experience to South America!

Medellin Columbia

Image and story by Meghann Lewis

My work as a Writing Consultant gave me the confidence to enter the world of teaching beyond the University of Richmond. In fact, “Writing Consultant” was the position that I listed first while applying for teaching jobs over this summer.

After a fairly lengthy application process (finding jobs in South America while still living in the States is no easy task!), I landed a job at a small English-teaching company in Medellín, Colombia, where I will work part-time as I complete a 10-month research internship in the field of public health. I’m three weeks into my new job, and I have already applied so many tactics that I used every week in Boatwright 180.

Many of my students here are just beginning to learn English, so both their speaking and writing contain quite a few errors. Although it is tempting to overcorrect these students, I make myself think back to Dr. Essid’s mantra “the Writing Center is not a fix-it shop!” I know that “fixing” each and every small spoken mistake of an A1 or A2 English language-learner doesn’t do much good.

Rather, I single out repeated errors as a means of creating teaching points that will really stick with the student—that way, they can build upon their new language skills with each lesson. Additionally, working in the Writing Center with international and study abroad students (many of whom spoke Spanish as their first language) helped me build communication skills that I use with my Colombian students.

Even though we don’t speak the same first language, we are able to have productive lessons, relate to one another, and have a good time. I am grateful for the skills that I gained from working at the University of Richmond Writing Center; I truly will carry them forward and continue to develop them wherever my teaching jobs take me!

Word of the Week! Praxis

PraxisApologies for a late post. I’ve been working on a different deadline, and the Friday afternoon cutoff for a Monday Spiderbyte notice slipped by, well, like a ship in the late afternoon.

We have an excellent word to make up for that tardiness, one I employ in every class where I train our Writing Consultants. Sharon Condrey, UR’s Director of Tax Compliance and Payroll, nominated a word that enjoys a good deal of academic usage; it could also prove very helpful in business settings.

I learned “praxis” as a newly minted teacher of first-year composition at Indiana University.  According to the OED, praxis is of mixed Greek and Latin parentage. It came to me through the writings of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator and political radical (radical ideas among grad students were nothing new in the mid-80s, nor are they today). Freire very much intended to employ the Marxist notion of the term, that is, the application of economic theory to everyday practices. In a less charged political sense, that was how we applied ideas then new to the writing classroom, through pedagogy such as guided peer-review, collaborative learning, and subtle yet powerful methods for “pre-writing” when drafting essays.  This is where I got my notion of making writers prepare a “bias statement” early in the writing process, then keep it with them as they attempt that neutral and nuanced voice of the Academy.

Peruse the OED entry and you’ll find political and linguistic meanings for praxis, yet all of them are “performative” in some manner.

I tell my writers and Consultants what David Bartholomae’s theory of “Error Analysis,” where nearly every error signals a mistaken intention, not some mortal sin, is the “soul” of Writing-Center praxis. Our praxis makes some faculty and writers mad that we do not proofread papers. I have patiently explained that that level of “doing for” a writer is not only unethical but also unproductive:  writers need to know where and why their intentions went awry and then, only then, we teach them. This is hard work, but this praxis of writing centers presumes that writers can learn by doing, that repeated errors provide clues to their intentions, and that most error is systematic in some manner.

That series of axioms, derived from Bartholomae’s and other scholars’ theories, led to our modern praxis. Think, now, about a modern office that involves any degree of creative work. Don’t the “open office” layout, guided teamwork, and a flatter hierarchy all come from a theory about how we work best together? Otherwise, we’d still be in the top-down, if colorfully drunken, world of Mad Men. Don Draper and Roger Sterling were fascinating characters, but I’d not want to work for them. Would you?

Please send us words and metaphors useful in academic writing by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Making Pronouns Inclusive By Making Them Plural

Faculty members’ ideas vary on this, and our Writer’s Web page about pronoun usage provides the canny advice to ask a professor.

The author of this post is far from “politically correct” in many areas, but it has always made good rhetorical sense to avoid gendering language when an audience includes men and women.

In a pinch, I can rewrite any sentence to keep it both grammatically correct and inclusive. Every summer, we edit our handbook for Writing Consultants, and I am surprised that three female editors still kept in sentences like this one:

“Have the writer identify his main point by asking…” when it is easily broadened to “Have writers identify main points by asking.” This revision has the virtue of brevity.  Using “his or her” seems awkward.

I invite readers to come up with a sentence that cannot be revised by making it plural, save when an obvious gender-specific reference must be made.

The Brick Moves To The Library

My poor English 103 students! Every time I taught the course, I had a mark of shame that one of us had to bear at some point: The Brick.

One one side, I painted “Unsupported Claim” and on the other, the slogan shown above. I last used The Brick in Fall, 2009 but in the Spring of 2013, it returns for my First-Year Seminar “Cyberspace: History, Future, and Culture.”

No errors can eclipse these two flaws. Even a missing thesis, what I prefer to call a “governing claim,” can take second place in a reader’s mind to an argument so flawed that one cannot read on. While I try to be moderately tough on grammar and usage, if the paper makes a logical flaw meriting The Brick, little else matters to me. This is also why our Writing Consultants begin their work with these top-down concerns.

You can read more about how I used of The Brick, but it worked. When a writer, including the teacher, violated one of my cardinal rules about academic writing, s/he got to keep The Brick in each class until the fatal flaw had been corrected, often in a follow-up post to the class blog. I was given The Brick once by my class, I’m proud to say, but only once that last semester. We can all make fatal errors in argument, but I made a generalization in a post online, and a student was quick to spot it. He e-mailed me, then announced my crime in the next class.

In an age of pixelated writing and 140-character “thoughts” at Twitter, the materiality of The Brick reminds us that some words are not easily retracted. That’s a comforting thought in an election year, when billions of words are spewed, and many of them deserve a brickbat or two.

Now that the Writing Center’s daily consultations are moving to our campus Library, I will move The Brick along, too. Enjoy it and never hurl it!

Out, Damned (Gravy) Spot!

gravy spot

Image courtesy of “Make your Own Bar-B-Q Sign

Imagine an orator making a speech after a formal dinner, and imagine the speaker doing so very well. In the end, however, a large segment of the audience never recalls the content because of the large gravy spot on the speaker’s tie or blouse.

The speaker lost the audience. So what are the sorts of small errors that make otherwise sympathetic readers stop reading? A general list may be nigh impossible, but I will take a stab at what most perturbs academic readers of student prose. In doing so, I won’t focus on the fatal flaws of novice writing: sweeping generalizations, sentence fragments, lack of support for claims.

  • Confused words. One does not hear the difference, in speech, between the homonyms “here” and “hear,” but in writing, such gaffs make the writer look unprofessional, if not ignorant. See our Center’s list of “Commonly Confused Words.”
  • Overstatement. One study or source does not conclusive proof make, even if it is a valid source or study. Academics expect an abundance of supporting evidence, including admissions as to where more study may be needed or the limitations of a source. One might write “the 2011 study only considered effects on male college students at private universities” as a way to present such data.
  • Names. Student writers often use both first and last names for sources. It may be appropriate to cite a full name on first reference or for clarity when, say, two Smiths have been cited. But in most cases, in-text sources need only a last-name reference. A graver (gravier?) spot is to misspell the name of a source. I once had a reader of an article stop on page one when I did this, back in grad school. He said “after that I did not trust your prose any longer.” Ouch.
  • Format errors. APA, MLA, Chicago, and similar are not systems of fiendish torture. Writers use them to get work into a format needed for a particular journal or conference proceeding. I frequently see errors with a misplaced parenthesis, italics and double quotations both used for titles of sources, and the like. A first cousin of this problem can be adding blank lines between paragraphs, odd indents, and other mechanical gaffs. When in doubt…ask the prof!

These “spots” come to mind right away. Got more? Let me know in the comments section.