Foreign loanwords in transition: What should they look like?

Posted on October 10, 2015 by Robert Basil

You might be surprised how often this comes up for professional writers and editors.

Bryan Garner, the ace lawyer & editor & language authority, explains:

The more arcane or technical a loanword, the more likely it is to retain a foreign plural, diacritical marks, and italics. The more common it becomes, the more likely it is to lose them.

Corollary: If the loanword becomes widespread, it is most likely to lose italics first, then diacritical marks second, and a foreign plural last.

He provides helpful examples.

You should bookmark Garner’s delightful and erudite blog.

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On Poetry

Posted on October 10, 2015 by Robert Basil

doorknob

My friend Jonathan Mayhew has been on a tear of late, publishing a series of manifestos on poetry in his wonderful blog, Stupid Motivational Tricks. Some snippets (but read the whole thing):

Manifesto (1)

Nobody knows what poetry is for. I think it is for something of great importance; that it is not trivial. …      It follows that the reading of poetry is a spiritual exercise. For me, what poetry is about is the experience of awe. I only really care about poetry, or music, or art, that offers this sense of wonder about being alive in the first place. If you’ve never felt this reading a poem then you need to read someone else’s blog and leave me alone. …     There are poets who write poems, and have a decent, acceptable, style, but don’t seem connected at all to anything related to the awesomeness of poetry. There are critics who make nice arguments about which poetry belongs in which category. I have done that myself. A lot of this has nothing to do with poetry and can be safely ignored.

Another Manifesto (2)

There is a puzzling dichotomy in twentieth century poetics. Let us call it the division between aesthetics and the anti-aesthetic. It manifests itself in the debate between art itself (on the one hand) and socio-political uses of art. …     Both sides of the debate are actually in complete agreement with each other, deploying the exact same dichotomy without questioning it. …     So the puzzle is that this dichotomy would have not been comprehensible 100 years earlier. If you asked Shelley about this, he would not have understood what you meant. Or Milton or Spenser. The terms were not yet in opposition; the debate was not framed in that way in the least.

Manifesto 3

Reading poetry is a ruminative activity. Instead of being absorbed for hours in the reading of a continuous narrative, you read very short texts over and over again and then think about them for a long time. To read (really read) vast quantities of poetry is guaranteed to make you somewhat insane, since it invites solitary rumination. …     I am now the only poetry specialist in my department, so the effects of isolation are even greater.

Composition (Manifesto 4)

If you are a scholar of poetry, then you know how to pay close attention to every word and every space. You have, then, a certain prose responsibility to poetry. You must write well and accurately. You don’t have to be a poet, but pretty close. Everything I regret in my own work is the result of failure to live up to this ideal.

Manifesto 5 (viva voce)

Research is attested to in writing. Yet teaching is quintessentially oral. The living presence of the voice is what matters. …    I found myself yesterday in the engineering building, a third of a mile from my office, about to teach a class but without a copy of the novel we were reading. I still did fine, even referring to specific words and passages. Essentially I was teaching naked, though clothed in suit and tie. …You should be able to teach *viva voce*. If you need specific formats for information, such as tables of statistics, in your field, that’s fine. In poetry we depend on the written text too, and typographical details of the text can be extremely significant. But you shouldn’t have to look at notes to be able to teach something that you know well.

photo by Bob Basil

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The angry period. When texting.

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Robert Basil

angryperiodWrites Clair Landsbaum in complex.com:

It’s much easier to be aggressive over text because you’re not face-to-face with the person you’re talking to, and people are finding new ways to express that aggression via the humble period. A new study by researchers at American University on text messages and IMs shows that the way we use punctuation has changed in order to convey new meaning through mediums that make it difficult to express tone, The New Republic reports.

Before texts, every sentence ended with a period. But with the advent of impersonal electronic communication, line breaks became a quicker and easier way to express the end of a thought. “The default is to end just by stopping, with no punctuation mark at all,” Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania​, told The New Republic. “In that situation, choosing to add a period also adds meaning because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it. And what they infer, plausibly enough, is something like, ‘This is final, this is the end of the discussion or at least the end of what I have to contribute to it.'” In other words, because the period is a deliberate choice, including it is especially passive-aggressive.

via Language Log

photo by Bob Basil

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CMO.com’s 2015 Guide to the Social Media Landscape

Posted on October 8, 2015 by Robert Basil

Picture 2

CMO’s always valuable social media infographics and slideshows have been staples in my classrooms the last few years, in particular its “Social Media Landscape” series. The one for 2015, thumbnailed above, takes a bit of a new approach, focusing on “overall customer experience” and non-North American platforms. Download the 2015 guide here.

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Photogrammar: An historical treasure trove

Posted on October 6, 2015 by Robert Basil
"Buffalo, New York. Swingshift workers on the sidelines at the weekly swingshift dance held at the Main-Utica ballroom."

“Buffalo, New York. Swingshift workers on the sidelines at the weekly swingshift dance held at the Main-Utica ballroom.”

This photograph, shot in April 1943 by Marjorie Collins, is part of a delightful & important project in which more than 100,000 images – taken from 1935-1944 by photographers working the Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information – have been made available online. The website has an amazing interactive map that allows you to search by place *and* time. Read more about the largest photographic project every sponsored by the USA federal government.

I’m charmed by the possibility that some of the young adults in these Buffalo, NY photos became the grandparents of my running, writing, and drinking buddies decades later.

[Note to my colleagues in academia and publishing: According to the Library of Congress, “Most photographs in this collection are considered to be in the public domain; however, labels on a few images indicate that they may be restricted. Privacy and publicity rights may also apply.”]

cross-posted from basil.CA

h/t LLBM

 

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Free textbooks and other resources for students and educators

Posted on August 20, 2015 by Robert Basil

readerStudents who suffer under the burden of high tuition and large student loans need all the financial help the world can provide them. For my upper-level communications classes the last couple of years I have been using an excellent online textbook. Here is a list of superb resources – free textbooks and journals – for students as well as teachers and researchers.

BC Campus: OpenEd

“It was on October 16, 2012 at the annual OpenEd conference in Vancouver that then British Columbia Minister of Advanced Education, John Yap, announced the BC Open Textbook Project. with project support provided by BCcampus. The goal of the project is to make higher education more accessible by reducing student cost through the use of openly licensed textbooks. Specifically, BCcampus was asked to create a collection of open textbooks aligned with the top 40 highest-enrolled subject areas in the province. A second phase was announced in the spring of 2014 to add 20 textbooks targeting trades and skills training. Our open textbooks are openly licensed using a Creative Commons license, and are offered in various e-book formats free of charge, or print on demand books available at cost.”

The texts cover a wide range, from Anatomy and Physiology to Research Methods and Formal Logic.

College Open Textbooks

“The College Open Textbooks Collaborative, a collection of twenty-nine educational non-profit and for-profit organizations, affiliated with more than 200 colleges, is focused on driving awareness and adoptions of open textbooks to more than 2000 community and other two-year colleges. This includes providing training for instructors adopting open resources, peer reviews of open textbooks, and mentoring online professional networks that support for authors opening their resources, and other services.”

The range of books is wide, addressing the arts and humanities, social sciences, and the hard sciences.

Creative Commons

Make your own work available to students and professors alike by availing yourself of Creative Commons.

“Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. Our free, easy-to-use copyright licenses provide a simple, standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work — on conditions of your choice. CC licenses let you easily change your copyright terms from the default of ‘all rights reserved’ to “some rights reserved. Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright. They work alongside copyright and enable you to modify your copyright terms to best suit your needs.”

International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning

This organization provides an excellent list of open-source journals focusing on learning, “distant education,” and research. It also publishes sometimes highly technical articles on the classroom environment in the digital age.

Open Knowledge Network

Open Knowledge is an educational advocacy group.

“Open Knowledge is a worldwide non-profit network of people passionate about openness, using advocacy, technology and training to unlock information and enable people to work with it to create and share knowledge. … We want to see enlightened societies around the world, where everyone has access to key information and the ability to use it to understand and shape their lives; where powerful institutions are comprehensible and accountable; and where vital research information that can help us tackle challenges such as poverty and climate change is available to all.”

Open Textbook Library
“Open textbooks are real, complete textbooks licensed so teachers and students can freely use, adapt, and distribute the material. Open textbooks can be downloaded for no cost, or printed inexpensively. This library is a tool to help instructors find affordable, quality textbook solutions. All textbooks in this library are complete and openly licensed.”

The range of subjects is wide, from Accounting to Communications to Law to the Social Sciences.

OpenTextBookStore

“OpenTextBookStore was created by educators frustrated with the time involved in finding adoptable open textbooks, with the hope to make open textbook adoption easier for other faculty.

Just to be clear, we are not a publisher. This is just a listing site for publicly available open textbooks, maintained by a teacher. Print copies are made available through third party print-on-demand companies. Many of the courses have course packages available through MyOpenMath.com, which provides free online homework for several open math textbooks.”

The site specializes in math-related texts.

Saylor Academy

“Saylor Academy’s mission is sustained by the continued evolution of an open educational ecosystem, and we are dedicated partners in this movement. Saylor’s commitment to the open education ecosystem is founded not just on open educational resources and open source learning technologies, but also on open access to credentials, and ongoing open learning opportunities.”

Saylor has a long list of texts, available in multiple formats (PDF, DOCX, HTML).

Thanks to BH for the URLs.

photo by Bob Basil

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The “trick to ambiguity”

Posted on July 12, 2015 by Robert Basil

From the great Language Log:

Most of the ambiguity contained in normal language use is passed over without any awareness on the audience’s part of the potential for double meanings. If one of the two intended meanings in an ad happens to be too faint, the ad must do something to fortify it and nudge it over the threshold of awareness. For instance, an ad that ran some time ago for British Airways used the tagline “Showers expected upon arrival.” To make it clear to the reader that showers could also refer to the bathing facilities that were available in the airline’s lounge at Heathrow Airport, the advertisers resorted to a fairly crude visual technique: a photo of a showerhead accompanied the tagline.

Much more sophisticated is the use of ambiguity in the following:

Are you up in the air about your future? Maybe that’s where you belong.

The ad was placed by the U.S. Air Force, whose logo appeared in the usual lower right hand corner of the print ad. I’m guessing that a typical reader response looks something like this: The idiomatic reading of “up in the air” is far more accessible in the first sentence than the literal one, and is perhaps the only meaning that the reader registers. The second sentence prompts a reanalysis, with the anaphoric where pointing to a definite spatial location, but it’s still not really clear how this second sentence fits in coherently with the first, on either the literal or idiomatic reading—until the reader’s eye lands on the logo, and voilà—the literal reading is further primed, and the identity of the sponsor now allows the reader to fit all the pieces together.

Such manipulation of context, to render meeker meanings more assertive, is part-and-parcel of the adept use of ambiguity. …

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Needing Readers

Posted on July 12, 2015 by Robert Basil

In my classes, as well as in my career as a “communications guy,” I stress the requirement that all written pieces be read by one or several people prior to submission or publication. My friend, the scholar Jonathan Mayhew, has a preference regarding *when* his bright eyes are called upon:

There are two schools of thought about this. Mine is that you should only share work that is done, in ‘penultimate’ form. Giving someone a “rough draft” verges on the insulting. Moreover, it puts the reader in an awkward position. Should I point out rather obvious lapses that the writer could easily catch herself? Or should I assume that he really needs help with some basic issues? I have to guess at what needs commentary and what doesn’t. I don’t want to waste my time with issues that the writer already knows how to fix, with the possibility of insulting him, but I don’t know which is which. Does the writer have problems with organization, or did she give me something before she bothered to organize it? You should only share with me a smooth draft.

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The Muse

Posted on July 12, 2015 by Robert Basil
Cover of "Treat It Gentle," Sidney Bechet's beautifully written autobiography

Cover of “Treat It Gentle,” Sidney Bechet’s beautifully written autobiography

I’m not a great creative individual by any stretch, but I do respect my muse and do *not* screw with it.

My friend kat passed along this letter by musician Nick Cave, which he wrote to MTV in 1996, in which he explained that his muse was “not a horse.”

My relationship with my muse is a delicate one at the best of times and I feel that it is my duty to protect her from influences that may offend her fragile nature. She comes to me with the gift of song and in return I treat her with the respect I feel she deserves — in this case this means not subjecting her to the indignities of judgement and competition. My muse is not a horse and I am in no horse race and if indeed she was, still I would not harness her to this tumbrel — this bloody cart of severed heads and glittering prizes. My muse may spook! May bolt! May abandon me completely!

Clarinetist Sidney Bechet called his marvelous memoir “Treat It Gentle.” The “it” wasn’t his instrument, or his or another person’s heart (oh, he was rough with those!); it was his muse, the mysterious source of his musical invention. That book scared the shit out of me. I know exactly what Cave means, above.

repost from basil.ca

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Doing the reading …

Posted on May 27, 2015 by Robert Basil

Although I am sure there *are* professors who have estimated how long it will take their students to complete their assigned tasks – written assignments, presentations, homework activities, project research, and textbook reading – I doubt I know any who have done so. (My brilliant sister could be the exception that proves the rule; I am afraid to ask.)

I have written and/or revised literally dozens of course outlines and syllabi, and I have served on curriculum committees. Task completion time has never come up as a topic. The closest we have ever been to such a discussion has been when a faculty member has suggested that there seems to be a little much required of students in a particular class: “You want them to learn business reasoning, case study construction, advanced marketing techniques, and research strategy … in 14 weeks? How could a student be able to learn all that? Not only that, but how could a professor *teach* all of that?”

A colleague of mine asked her third-year communications students: How many of you have done the textbook readings so far this semester? Out of 35 students, no one raised their hand. No one had done more than crack open a textbook – a good one, too – that costs upwards of $150. After I heard about this, this Spring I asked my students a few questions:

  1. How many of you believe that your professors know how much you work? The answer: No student believes professors know how much they work, on particular assignments, or on school in general, or in life in general. (Almost all of my students have one or more jobs in addition to their school activities.)
  2. How many of you have done school-work *at your workplace*? Everybody who had a job raised their hand. Some raised *both* hands. Servers are writing reports in the kitchen; customer service reps are drafting spreadsheets in the stockroom.
  3. How many of you have been able to complete all of your assignments in one of your classes this year (including homework and reading)? No one raised their hand.
  4. What is the first thing you cut from your to-do lists in order to make it through your classes in one piece? “The readings.” This was unanimous.
  5. How do you expect to get by if you don’t read the textbook? Students hope that the lectures and the PowerPoint slides that accompany them will hit all the important points. (Note to world: They don’t, and can’t.)

students

I had been aware for a long time that students aren’t often keen to read their textbooks. That’s why my midterms and final exam are usually based completely on their textbooks, in an effort to force them to read. Some do, quickly. These tests are virtually always, though, their lowest grade of the semester, not just as an average but for almost every single student.

On my to-do list: Fix this.

Reposted from basil.CA

Photo by Bob Basil

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