What's "old"?

A few years ago, I was offered "senior checking" by my bank. It was quite a shock, because it meant that in someone's eyes I was now old. Not too long after that, my dentist observed that everything in my mouth looked just fine, "not counting the bone loss that is normal for a man your age."

I should have been prepared. My son, after all, has been calling me "old man" for years. He even programmed my cell phone so the opening screen has that name. So I've been wondering. Just what is "old"?

The dictionary, as usual, isn't much help. Or maybe it is. One of the definitions is "no longer young." I can't imagine my father as a young man. He was always old, but then he always had arthritis, so I can't imagine him skipping or leaping. Or playing tennis or even walking really fast. He sort of lumbered.

I tried to put a number on "old." In The Full Monty, the committee auditioning dancers looks at one guy and someone says, "Look at him! He must be at least 50." That's how old I was when I got my senior checking. I haven't even bothered to check on McDonald's standard for "senior coffee" or the state's age for a Golden Buckeye Card. In an early episode of Will & Grace, Jack is horrified to discover that he's passed the magic number: 30. On the other hand, when I complain that I'm too old to find love, someone always mentions some nice old guy who got hitched in his 70s. I always assume that's an urban legend.

George Burns is sort of a hero. He was scheduled to play Carnegie Hall on his 100th birthday. He never made it. I think the cigars killed him. He was 99.

I used to be older. I used to have trouble with my back until I began weightlifting again. I used to worry a lot about my health. I used to have a gut hanging over my belt. I used to take pills. Now I eat fruits and vegetables. I used to worry about what people think of me. Now I vote for Obama (the young person's candidate), wear jeans, and listen to loud music.

Maybe "old" should fit into the phrase "too old to." I guess I'm too old to be mistaken for an undergraduate, but not too old to buy my jeans in the young men's section of Macy's. I'm too old now to wrestle teenagers, at least the ones over 16 or the ones on wrestling teams. I'm too old to drink Natural Light until I fall over, but then I always was too old for that.

Maybe that phrase "too old to" should be finished with "too old to have hope." An Argentinean friend of mine, Juan Acuña, told me that he couldn't wait to hit 65. That's when solid respectability comes. That's when one is what one was made to be. George Burns had hope (and a lot of jokes) waiting for Carnegie Hall. Another friend, Charlie Todd, got married at 86. (He did make one concession to his years though. He said he didn't believe in short engagements, but when one is 86, one can't wait TOO long.)

Maybe "old" isn't the right word. I should try to work on "elderly." In the sense of being an elder, it's a good thing, but in the sense of giving up on oneself, falling apart, restricting one's horizon to the next sitcom, and staying away from anything interesting, threatening, or fun, I don't want to go there. "Old" isn't something I can control: I approach it at exactly 60 seconds per minute. I can control "elderly" though. That's what I intend to do. I hope I follow in the footsteps of George Burns and Charlie Todd. Find true love at 86 and play Carnegie Hall at 100.

Freshman 15

This isn't a finished piece of writing; it's just the skeleton of what I'd do with the "Commonly held assumptions" assignment.

First, the assignment:

Select a commonly-held assumption and present an argument against it.

Notice what's contained (and implied) here:

• Everyone else (or at least a lot of people) thinks this one is true.
• Their argument isn't necessarily so.
• An argument implies that maybe there's some other material that I'm not even bringing out.

Now for my "commonly-held assumption" (against which I'm arguing):

The "Freshman 15" is a bad thing.

Definition work necessary: The "Freshman 15" is the fifteen pounds that a college freshman (not a high school freshman) is alleged to gain during the freshman year.

Where did we get this?

• Observations of friends, etc., showing that people actually are gaining weight (and some of it is fat).
• Magazine articles (particularly in magazines aimed at girls?) about avoiding the flab.
• The "bad thing" part comes from our culture's fascination with the body—whether it's the Abercrombie male with the incredible abs or the fashion magazine girl who weighs 98 pounds, we set up unrealistic goals for ourselves.

Parts of my opponent's argument that might be correct:

• Many freshmen do eat too much pizza, beer, and other junk food because they are away from parental supervision.
• Stress causes overeating.
• Without required gym classes and with a lot of homework, physical exercise is often forgotten.
• Gaining fat is often a poor idea—and fat gained by young people often stays put for the rest of their lives.

Soft spots in their argument:

• Freshmen are 18 years old or so, and are still growing. Compare a fit high school basketball player with a fit college player and you'll see more muscle, broader shoulders, and usually more height.
• The taller boys may put on another inch in height before their sophomore year.
• Some college students become more active in sports, etc., and gain pounds of muscle.
• "Normal" is a very tricky word when applied to height/weight.
• A normally-built woman of 25 or so has a different shape from a normally built woman of 17. Usually the difference is in general shape and (yes) a few moderate fat deposits that give the mature woman a more rounded, less bony appearance. This is not a bad thing (from a health point of view).
• Considering the amount of stress a college freshman has, perhaps a little comfort food (which is always high-calorie) is a better alternative to depression and/or other ways of dealing with stress.

Portrait of a Boss

Character Sketch

He scared me out of my wits, but I think he liked that. Dave Carroll wore a perpetual scowl; his head was shaved; his voice was loud. Though his belly hung over his belt, his thick arms made me feel like he could easily bend steel—or me—with his bare hands. It didn't help my attitude any that he was my boss, or that we worked together at a school bus company (not really the warm fuzzy place some people imagine). Underneath it all, though, Dave was surprisingly naïve and generous.

I found out about Dave's innocence on the first day of school one year. A kindergarten child had been missed because the route sheet was wrong, so the child's mother called the school bus company. Big, beefy, scowling Dave was just about to go for donuts anyhow, so he got Jerry the dispatcher (just as big, beefy, and scowling), and they got in Dave's dirty brown Oldsmobile to go take care of the situation. It never dawned on Dave that he was acting out every mother's nightmare: two large, mean-looking men telling a small child, "Come on, kid. We'll take you to school. It's all right!" while the mother watched helplessly from the porch, screaming and waving her arms.

It was another first day of school when I learned about Dave's generosity. I had driven my unusual old foreign car to Washington, D.C., to visit my parents. School started on Monday, but on Friday something under the old car went "clunk"! The dealer did have the parts and had plenty of time to fix the car on Tuesday. So there I was, 800 miles away, about to leave the school bus company in the lurch on the first day of school. Terrified, I called Dave at his home. The first day is always chaos anyhow, and I was about to make it much worse. I remembered Dave's fury at drivers who failed to show up, and I pictured his "I'm going to eat you" toothy grin. I pictured those forearms that were as thick as my legs. I knew I didn't have a chance of keeping that job, and in a way I was glad I'd never have to see him face-to-face again. I wasn't prepared for Dave's first comment: "Should I wire you some money?" As I look back over the years, I realize that Dave had kept me on the payroll doing a lot of little odd jobs around the garage, jobs that really didn't need to be done, mainly from generosity.

I will remember many things about Dave. He used to give good advice: "There comes a time in every man's life when he has to make a decision—under, over, or across" (meaning the route the belt takes when navigating the belly). I remember wondering how a man that big could have fit into a submarine when he was in the Navy. I will remember him best, though, for his childlike approach to the world and his bigheartedness.

---

I'd like you to notice several things about this short essay:

• It's very specific. You can find the color and brand of Dave's car, where I was when my car broke down, and the name of the dispatcher. Don't be afraid of specifics when they can feed into the point you're making.
• Don't be afraid of dialog either. Several times in this essay Dave says things.
• On the other hand, specifics that don't contribute were left out. You never find out, for example, that my car was a white 1968 Fiat 124 four-door sedan. My audience would probably know what an Oldsmobile was, but not a Fiat. The word "unusual" was enough for my purpose there. I didn't want to focus on my car, but on Dave's personality (and the dirty brown Oldsmobile contributes to that image).
• Though there is a lot of comment on Dave's appearance, it's all there to give a contrast with his character. I didn't expect a bullet-headed guy like him to act like that.
• Though I do tell two stories about Dave, they are stories that illustrate particular character traits I wanted to talk about. They are not connected in any time sequence—in fact, I really don't remember which happened first. The general idea here is to use short stories to prove a point, not simply to tell a tale. The essay as a whole isn't a story; it's a description. It has no plot.
• The structure is very tight. I write about his innocence, then about his generosity.
• This was originally written as a demonstration piece for a course that focused on very short essays. It's only 504 words. What would I do if I wanted to double the size?
  • Say more about stuff that's already there. How did my wife react when Dave offered to send money? What do I mean that a school bus company isn't warm and fuzzy? How did Dave dress most of the time? (His white dress shirt was ordinarily tight as a drumhead across his belly.)
  • Add incidents that contribute to points that are already there. He was generous enough to employ me to do odd jobs when he really didn't need them done.
  • At least consider another aspect of his personality. He asked me to lie to a nun.
  • Ask myself whether to add in the "next thing." Has he somehow influenced me since then?

Human tectonic plates

As I read over Natalie Angier's "Intolerance of Boyish Behavior" (Reading Critically, Writing Well page 388) I thought of three different boys I've known.

Daniel was born into a very conservative, church-attending family, the youngest child and the only boy. His older sisters thought that a fine afternoon's recreation meant sitting quietly with their hands folded, having a conversation about religious topics. Daniel liked to wrestle. I remember going to meetings at their house. Daniel and Zach (the son of another member, and just about Daniel's age) would spend the whole time chasing each other around, yelling, wrestling, and getting sweaty. The daughters would sit quietly with the adults. His parents were desperate. Fortunately for Daniel, they didn't believe in medical doctors, so he was taken to a quack chiropractor who did some sort of hair test and kept finding new things Daniel was allergic to. His diet kept getting more and more restricted until he was living on sort of a Zen macrobiotic brown rice regimen. He got skinny, lacked energy, but still was loud and competitive. At least he was spared Ritalin. Finally the parents gave up, let him eat everything in sight, and allowed him to become a teenager. When he was 14, he was in my Sunday school class, interested in boxing, lifting weights, and very proud of his new biceps.

My nephew, on the other hand, got a pharmacy full of medication for his ADHD. I remember him when he was 11 years old, nodding off at the breakfast table or giving me a glassy-eyed stare much more appropriate to a drug addict. He got lucky too. The doctors became concerned when he hit 13 and was showing no signs of puberty. His stature was about right for a boy of 10. So they took him off the meds. I saw him at Christmas. He's now bright, interesting, fun, and a little scattered. No more so, though, than most boys. He lives on a ranch in Texas, feeds his goats, rides his horse, and has an incredible fantasy life in which he's the principle actor in a very detailed saga that somehow involves Darth Vader, Indiana Jones, and a lot of minor characters. You can find him carrying his wooden sword, making his way through the back pasture, talking to himself, and carrying on his battles. At the end of things, he comes back to the house, sweaty and dirty, hard-muscled, and thoroughly boyish. Then he sits and reads for a while to get more material for his drama. Somehow I don't think the medication helped him.

Hidden Meaning

Yes, I know I'm getting tiring. But I wanted to write down something that I thought of today in class—very much on the "hidden meaning" wavelength.

The other day I watched a movie adaptation of Dorothy Sayers' Nine Tailors. In this drama, Lord Peter Wimsey, an amateur detective, sets out to find some missing jewels. (Warning: plot spoiler ahead) He finally does solve the mystery. To do so he must:

1. Figure out that a gibberish letter is really some form of code.
2. Figure out that the code is really a notation for bell patterns in British change ringing.
3. Figure out which of several possible methods might have been used for the change ringing notation
4. Figure out which bell to follow through the changes.
5. Figure out that the code really is writing out two quotations from the Bible.
6. Find the place in the church where those quotations are inscribed.
7. Learn that the church used to have a balcony.
8. Climb up to the place where the inscription indicated, and finally
9. Figure out what to open up once he got up there.

THAT'S a hidden meaning! To unlock it, one had to be a trained bell-ringer AND have lived in the parish when there was a balcony twenty years previously AND known that the bell to follow was named "Tailor Paul." (Not to mention having a certain familiarity with the Bible.)

Many of my students write as if poems and plays worked much the same way. No—it's not like Indiana Jones or National Treasure. It's more like a letter from your mother, mentioning things that make you both happy. Or maybe like someone visiting a zoo and seeing a lot of animals that remind him of frightening predators, then moving on to wonder whether a good God could create things that eat small animals.

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could form thy fearful symmetry?

Well maybe that's more obscure than "I looked at the tiger and wondered if God could make something that scary." But Blake's poem isn't hidden. Just deep.

Richard Cory

1. Images of Royalty in Cory — not what you might expect in New York


1. Royal words — many words here do double duty, meaning one thing, connoting something completely different; Robinson often works against the common meaning of the word.
1. Gentleman (l. 3)
2. Crown
3. Favored (dual meaning: facial appearance {archaic} and blessed with advantages)
4. Imperially slim (are emperors normally slim?)
5. Arrayed (means decorative clothing, but this is quiet)
6. Richer than a king
7. Grace ("your grace")
8. In fine — another odd word: precision and superiority


2. Royal attributes
1. Quietly arrayed; human (why make a point of saying so?)
2. Flutters pulses (movie star? what is it like to meet royalty—as in Mrs. Dalloway?)
3. Glitters when he walks
4. Richer than a king
5. Schooled in every grace. Who is schooled that way?


3. His name
1. Richard may recall the kings of England
2. Richard Coeur d'Lion — perhaps, but not necessary
3. Not much made of names, but it is one of the simplest in Tilbury Town


2. Oppositions between Cory and population


1. He comes downtown; we're already there
2. We on the pavement; he's presumably not
3. We are still waiting for the light
4. We work; he's just rich
5. We have no meat
6. We wish we were in his place—we do not wish to be him, just to have his position and stuff


3. About his death


1. Irony of setting: calm summer night at home contrasted to violence of his manner of death. No preparation in the poem prior to the last half of the last line.
2. Irony of motivation: all our observations are of externals (clothing, possessions, behavior that he has been schooled in)
3. Why does Robinson work the nobility thing so hard before the death?


1. Death of aristocracy in the new world? Not likely.
2. Like so many others in Tilbury Town, the facade hides a darker story. Eben Flood, the merry drunk hides a lonely, rejected man. John Evereldown goes sneaking through the night woods to women he cannot resist. The tragedy of Miniver Cheevy and George Crabbe lie on the surface for all to see. Richard Cory's was hidden deep—only he knew.

Hidden meaning

This is one of those phrases that makes most literature teachers cringe: the "hidden meaning" of the piece. It's as if we were in an episode of Indiana Jones. The straightforward meaning of the story or poem might be about romantic love, but there's a "hidden meaning" (only available to the high priests who have gone through certain rituals) that has to do with something totally different.

The whole idea makes me a bit ill, but when I think of it, I've got to admit that the "hidden meaning" idea makes a bit of sense.

We look at Emily Dickinson's poem, "I like to see it lap the miles," and ask, "What is IT?" Students say "racing car" or "river." I point out that racing cars hadn't been invented when Dickinson was alive. I guess that's hidden meaning because I looked up her dates on Wikipedia. I ask whether rivers are "punctual" or "peer in shanties" and the students think I'm making something up.

There is a kind of student paper that says, "What the author was trying to say is ..."

Take it as a fact: most of these authors were actually pretty good at saying stuff. That's how they made it into the textbooks. And the stuff they were saying isn't something that's only for the high priests. It's for everyone. Everyone who will read carefully and look at a dictionary, that is.

Response to Bananas

Response paper, very rough drafty, to Wendy Lee's "Peeling Bananas."

Though Wendy Lee would call herself a Chinese-American and Carolina Miranda perhaps a "Lots of places-American" (RCWW 179) my sympathies lie more with Lee than with Miranda. That's odd, because, so far as I know, my ethnic background spans German, English, Norwegian, American Indian, Spanish, and (probably) Miscellaneous. But the Chinese author is the one who has something to say to me.

Our family never had any hopes of turning out to be nobility. That was dashed when a bit of genealogical research discovered that we never did have an English coat of arms. The Allen family was pretty lucky to have a coat at all. My aunt was truly mortified to discover that my Norwegian side of the family preserved its records from the 1400s, showing that every one of them was an impoverished fisher, and that my grandmother was, by modern standards, an illegal alien. The English side, the one with the fake coat of arms, seems to have been minor shopkeepers and laborers—and their records only consist of cemetery headstones that go back two generations.

Though we sound like the Miranda family, the comment by Lee that the "strictly Caucasian" homes seemed to have "no traces of their heritages at all" (191) caught my attention. That's where I grew up: no trace of our heritage. Yes, my mother has collected antiques for years. The house is filled with old glass and old wrought iron, but none of it relates to us. There's almost nothing that she can point to and say, "My mother used a kettle like that" or "My dad worked with a tool like that." Much of her furniture is fake pioneer, with fake worn places (you have definitely made a mistake, though, if you add to the worn look). I managed to take (with her blessing and relief) several small things that relate me to my father: his fountain pen, his drafting set, and a lamp he made for high school shop class. But there's nothing very Norwegian or old country in the lot. My older daughter felt that sense of rootlessness. She said it was as if our family had simply risen from the sidewalk. That's why she had a tattoo of a Celtic knot on her thigh. She knew it wasn't our heritage, but at least it was some heritage. In a twist of irony, my younger daughter teaches Japanese in the Los Angeles public school system—a white woman teaching the children of immigrants how to speak their parents' language because the best they can do is the Japanese of a very small child. Visit her apartment, and you will see a lot more of Japan than of Norway or England.

I gave my brother a bit of a shock recently when I revealed that we weren't really Norwegian anyhow. We're Lapp. Look it up. We're descended on my grandmother's side from the wandering reindeer herders who live above the Arctic circle in skin tents. Did that change my sense of who I am? Not really. I doubt if I will ever own a "four winds hat"—that Lapp ethnic garment that resembles nothing quite so much as a court jester's garb. Unlike Lee, I'm not longing to return to my homeland, whether it's Lapland, England, Germany, or whatever.

One of my Japanese friends marveled that everyone in the USA is hyphenated: Chinese-American, Polish-American, Mexican-American. Nobody in Japan is hyphenated. They're just Japanese. Maybe that's why I wasn't too shocked to lose Norway and gain Lapland. I've never been hyphenated. But I think my older daughter would appreciate knowing that we came from somewhere.

Carver intro rough

Beginning rough draft of an introduction:

I once asked a choreographer to explain a dance she had just performed. "What? Would you like me to do it again for you?" she asked. Raymond Carver's short stories are a bit like that. They are something close to poetry, and any attempt to analyze, summarize, or dissect seems to somehow fall short of the whole. Bedford refers to Carver's style as "brief and minimalist in style, plot, and setting" (288), so it seems that any trace of non-minimal description that makes its way into a Carver story must be there for a very good reason. That's the point of this little essay, to examine "Popular Mechanics," and pay particular attention to setting details and, most specifically, to light.

Poetic line endings

When we read poetry, we're tempted to come to a sudden, complete stop at the end of every line. Sometimes that really destroys the meaning of the thing, though. Consider this traditional hymn:

Take my life, and let it be
Consecrated, Lord, to Thee.

If you sing or recite it with a total stop at the end of the first line, you get "Take me life and then leave me alone" (which is pretty far from the teaching of most churches). Then the second line is simply gibberish. If you simply consider it as a sentence, it's far different, and much better:

Take my life, and let it be consecrated, Lord, to Thee.

Apply the principle to all poetry. Yes, there's bound to be a slight pause at the end of a poetic line (especially if there's a rhyme), but the thing is bound to make more sense if you read the punctuation, not the line endings. Here's how Shelly's "Ozymandias" reads if we print it like prose:

I met a traveller from an antique land, who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tell that its sculptor well those passions read which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed."

Makes much more sense, doesn't it?

Thesis in Literature Papers

Several kinds of papers are really tempting in a literature course, but you should avoid all of them:

• "I didn't really understand this piece." You're actually telling us that you haven't done your homework and that you were too proud to make an appointment to see the teacher. That's not much of a paper.
• "I didn't like this piece at all. It was dumb." To put this as gently as possible, nobody cares whether you liked it or not. Generations of scholars, critics, and teachers have loved the works of Shakespeare and Frost. Why is it interesting or important for you to write that your level of taste or understanding isn't quite mature enough to appreciate such things? (The reverse of this is also true: it's not scholarship to write about how much you loved a poem.)
  
• "I had to look up a lot of words in the dictionary, and here they are." Sometimes, an intense study of a word and its use in the poem or story is very fruitful, but don't spend the entire paper telling us how limited your vocabulary is. It's not really scholarship to announce that "luve" is the Scottish dialect spelling of "love" in "A Red, Red Rose," or that "melodie" is the 1799 spelling of "melody."
• "Here's a line-by-line translation of the work." Dictionary work and paraphrase are sometimes useful prewriting strategies, but, again, they aren't scholarship. One of my students analyzed these lines from Poe's "The Raven" "Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door; / Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking / Fancy unto fancy," and announced triumphantly that the writer had sat down on a couch and began thinking. Well yes, but that's not really worth saying, is it?
• "Here's a very raw set of observations." If you read "When I consider how my light is spent," and announce that it's fourteen lines (which means it's a sonnet), iambic pentameter, and a rhyme scheme of ABBA ABBA CDE CDE, you haven't really done anything yet.

Thesis basics

The thesis in a literary paper is pretty much the same sort of thing as a thesis in a scientific or historical paper.

• A statement, not a question
• Goes in only one direction
• Makes a statement that you'll have to prove
• Ideally, has enough of an edge that a few readers will say "Really? I never though of that!"

Here are some thesis examples culled from my files of various student and on-line papers:

• Flannery O'Connor loves to pick unlikely, ordinary people and show how, by the sudden and unexpected operation of God's grace, they are transformed into saints.
• By paying close attention to the various fields in the mother’s monologue in "Girl," we discover that, instead of developing a plot, her dictums develop an ideology that prescribes and originates from labor (laundry, cooking, sewing, light farming, etc.).
• Four thematic devices which unify [William Cullen Bryant's poem "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood"] come together in lines five through seven: the spatial organization of the poet’s vision, light and shade, personification of the forces of Nature, and the breeze.
  

Fiction paper prewrite

You rarely get to look over the shoulder of a writer during the writing process, so I'm going to talk my way through the writing of this paper.

I'm working on Raymond Carver's "Popular Mechanics." I began with the whole minimalist idea, and took some notes (mainly from my memory, because I've read the story several times, and I assume that things I remember well will be important in some way).

Non-minimalist things

The story is so minimal (and Bedford's editor uses the "minimalist" label) that non minimal things might be pretty important, so I listed them:

• Cars "slushing" by
• All the description of the first few lines, with the dirty water, etc.
• The fascination with light: getting dark on the inside, turning off the light in the bedroom, the kitchen nearly dark
• Flowerpot crashing to the floor

Minimalist things

It's sort of an "argument from absence," but the whole story is very flat, lacking in even ordinary conversation conventions:

• No dialog blurbs
• Not even quotation marks
• No emotion words during the early part of the argument
• Lots more indications of "minimalist" writing

Little stuff with deep indications

• "getting dark on the inside too"
• "it" (this baby) not "he" or "George"
• grabbed an arm (how many does a baby have? doesn't even matter if it's left or right)
• the darkest time physically is the darkest time emotionally
  

Tension: The changing English language

Nobody likes stability more than I do. Emotionally, I'd love to be on the side of the Grammar Nazis who seem to think that Moses brought the comma rules of English down the mountain along with the Ten Commandments. I cringed when "alright" began showing up in dictionaries as an acceptable spelling. I grit my teeth that "hopefully" has come to mean "I hope it will happen."

Inconveniently, living languages change all the time, sometimes very quickly. English is probably the most living (and changing) language out there. We writers just have to accept that and attempt to keep up with current acceptable usage.

Here's a little item I wrote to a young friend in 2004. He was a high school student, taking a freshman English college course through an Ohio program called PSEO (Post Secondary Education Option). He had written a paper about PSEO students and pluralized the abbreviation as PSEOs. The teacher thought it needed an apostrophe: PSEO's. Because he used this PSEOs construction all through the paper, the teacher marked each one wrong and called the paper a failure. (Never mind the question whether doing the same small grammatical error repeatedly is one error or many—and the question whether a lot of PSEOs make a piece of writing a total failure.) He asked my opinion, and I wrote this response:

---

Jon:

In answer to your question about using an apostrophe for pluralizing abbreviations (as, for example in pluralizing PSEO), I've done a bit of research:

• The Blair Handbook (3rd edition, 2000) is adamant: form the plural with apostrophe + s.


• The Little, Brown Handbook (8th edition, 2001) says the apostrophe is often optional when the abbreviations are unpunctuated, i.e. without the periods.


• Rules for Writers (5th edition, 2004) points out that either use is correct, but that you should be consistent.


• Keys for Writers (4th edition, 2005) [sic] says the apostrophe is "commonly used" and that MLA and APA prefer no apostrophe—but that it's acceptable if you are consistent.

I'd say we're in an evolutionary stage with this one. We seem to be moving away from the apostrophe, but either usage is acceptable if you are consistent. This is one of those style book issues. If your course style book is the Blair Handbook, I'd say you should use the apostrophe without fail. Otherwise, it appears to be writer's choice. If you are submitting a paper to a carefully-edited professional journal, however, I'd suggest leaving the apostrophe out.

Curt Allen

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Latest Development

Remember that Rules for Writers said in 2004 that either use was correct? By the 6th edition (2008), the book had changed its tune: "Do not use an apostrophe to pluralize an abbreviation" (page 301). Their example is "We collected only four IOUs out of forty." The Quick Access handbook (2007) doesn't even mention the possibility. Its only comment is that we use the apostrophe to pluralize single letters: "Printing w's is hard for some first graders" (page 483). (I'll bet that rule will vanish in the next decade too.)

What's a writer to do?

The French have something called the French Academy. This body decides what's correct French and what's not. When I was in high school, the Academy had been working for several years to decide the grammatical gender for "grapefruit," so I guess we just couldn't write about them until the decision came down. Things are sloppier but easier for English writers. You have to be aware of the usage of good writers and editors (the New Yorker magazine, for example), and keep a current dictionary at hand. And stay kind of loose in the saddle.

Research Paper Topics

For most students, the most difficult part of a research paper is simply finding the topic. In a fit of panic, almost everyone falls into one of the common mistakes.

• To explore strange new worlds. Certainly, it's interesting to read about topics that are new to you, but if you go too far from your field of expertise, you won't even know what questions to ask. You'll write a breathless paper that explores very ordinary basic definitions.


• To seek out new life and new civilizations. A research paper must be grounded. If you get into speculation ("Do space aliens exist? Did they leave crystal skulls to teach us technology and art?"), you aren't writing academic research. Leave that sort of thing for the supermarket tabloid papers.


• To boldly go where no man has gone before. If there's nothing written about your topic, no primary research, you'll have to fly to the Amazon yourself to come up with a decent paper. Maybe it's really intriguing to ask the enormous questions, but save that for your doctoral dissertation. Right now, you've got really limited time and no foundation grant.

Three more paradoxes

• Big topics make small papers. Students often figure that the more generalized and enormous topic will make a long paper more easily, but it's the tightly focused topics that suggest a LOT of further research. Consider which would make a longer paper (because it suggests more fertile research questions). "High gasoline prices" or "Effect of high gasoline prices on family-owned businesses in two ocean resorts: Ocean City, Maryland, compared with Rehoboth Beach, Delaware."


• Easy topics make difficult papers. (Difficult to find enough material, that is.) Students often go for no-brainers like "how to change a tire" or "reasons to quit smoking." The problem is that a three-page pamphlet has thoroughly covered the topic, so there's nothing to do except summarize it and get frustrated. There's nothing to prove, nothing to discuss.


• If you know it in your heart, you will have trouble proving it. When you approach a "research" project to teach the rest of us that you were right in the first place, you'll only look at sources that support your point of view. That's why nobody is in love with faith-based papers (except the writer and those who already agree). That's also why topics such as creationism, acupuncture, and macrobiotic diets usually don't fly in the academic world. You have to already believe the main point to accept the basic premise of the paper. There's no possibility for the "research" to change the writer's opinion, even the smallest amount.

Those Grade Appeals

It's time again for the grade appeals. They always fascinate me because the student often does everything possible to guarantee that I won't be receptive. Here's an example of a last-ditch appeal:

mr. allen i missed class on wensday due to my job i had to fill out these papers and turn them in be wensday or eles i would not have a job yes bad excuse but the truth and then i had to work from 4 till 10 and was unable to email you from work sorry. i had the paper done the final porfolio just wondering if you wanted me to email it to you or to drop it off in your mail box i am trully sorry for the inconvinis and i did not mean for this to happen came up at the last min and i have to have this joe other wise no school next year. i was wondering if too you could send me the topic for the inclass wrighting so i could make that up if i am alowed i really can not afford to miss this i can not get lower then a B in this class for i will lose my exceptince into usf next year im very sorry that i missed class and will do anything to get this B pleas email me back and tell me what to do i will do anything email you paper or drop off right extra papers
thanks

Ethos

In classic argumentation, we discuss whether the writer is believable. That's ethos. Is this the sort of person who should be believed? Or, to look at that sample above, should this student get the "B" he requested? (Keeping in mind that this student had just finished his second semester of college English.) By his own admission, he has fouled up his schedule and not fulfilled the requirements. If this is his best work (keeping in mind that he's asking a superior for a favor, so he should be trying his hardest), I really don't feel that he's nailed down the content of the course.

Logos

This is the part of an argument where the writer gives reasons for the argument. It's the "show, don't just tell" part. This would be the place for a student who has done well in previous work to point out that he's a great student and just needs a final small favor. This student hadn't done very well at all in previous work. In class (when he attended) his behavior was disruptive, and his writing had terrible grammar and an obnoxious in-your-face assertiveness that didn't win it any friends. The student really has no factual argument to fall back on.

Pathos

This is the emotional side of the argument. The student makes a real try to get the reader's emotions on his side, with apologies and an appeal to the student's dire situation. Unfortunately, pathos will not carry an argument such as this one. When you're asking a teacher to change a policy, you need to bring everything good that you have—this should be the best writing you do in the semester.

Tension: Word Count versus Creativity

I'm not too thrilled with arbitrary rules, especially in writing. One reason, of course, is that when I make a rule, I have to enforce it. Another is that poor teachers love rules so much that students become convinced that rules are the only point to English class.

So why have a rule about minimum length of an essay? If I ask for, say, a 1000-word narrative about a turning point in your life, what do you do if you only have 500 words in your head? Can't 500 words be good? Isn't there a danger that the student will write 500 words of quality stuff surrounded by 500 words of trash?

Well, yes. And you'll notice that the really good professional writers seem to get things done very efficiently, concisely, and briefly.

In spite of all this, I've got a couple of reasons for the word count.

Developing an Idea
Five hundred words, for many people, is just about enough to say the obvious material that everyone knew anyhow. It's the sort of essay you can throw together in one draft, taking perhaps an hour. You don't learn to explore an idea deeply in one page. You don't learn to answer the question, "What else?" There's no room for examples, for discussion of the other side, for developing details. There's no room for "Show, don't just tell."

Learning Structure
A really short essay doesn't need much structure. Sure, in high school you wrote five-paragraph essays that were 500 words, but they really didn't need an introduction or a conclusion very much. You often got by with a single-sentence lead and a single-sentence wrap. If the teacher hadn't told you how many paragraphs to write, you would have done the whole thing in a single paragraph. At 1000 words, you can't make the whole thing a single block—the reader gets mired down. You must have a structure.

Learning Correctness
If you really don't know how to form sentences, you might squeak by writing a page and a half. Three pages, though, gives you enough space to demonstrate that you really don't know grammar. Or that you do.

The abuses

I always know who wants to write and who is simply laying down words in hope of getting out of this class. The tricks are so obvious: large type, enormous margins, 2½ line spacing, two inch indents for paragraph beginnings (with an extra line skipped between paragraphs), and a full four-line MLA header on each page instead of just the first one. Is that writing? Why is that good? It only profits the paper company. When I receive a paper like that, I sigh because the student assumed I was too stupid to see the tricks, then I run the whole thing through the scanner.
Last semester I received several really undersized papers. The final assignment was a five to seven page research paper. One student gave me less than three. Was his work a model of brilliant concision? Did it resemble the writing of the best newspaper feature writer? Nope. It was obviously thrown together in less than an hour. It said nothing of any value and the student learned nothing from it.

Help

So what do you do when you realize that you aren't going to fulfill the minimum length requirements? If you aren't too arrogant to accept help, it's available. Every school has some form of writing lab. The textbook is usually full of advice on developing a topic. All writing teachers keep office hours. You just have to get up the humility (or courage) to ask.

It's All About the Grades

Well the grades have been posted for about a week, and (as you might guess) protests are rolling in. It seems worse this year, somehow. Here's a guide to my reactions to grade protests:

I might react favorably:

• Well, I've been a good student and shown up for all the classes. How close is my "A minus" to a full "A"?
• Did you receive this paper that I e-mailed you?
• Why does your gradebook show a different grade from what you wrote on my paper?

I'm less likely:

• Your records are wrong: I really did attend class all those times.
• I'm going to send my mother to talk to your boss.*
• I know I didn't show up much or turn in all my papers. Is there ANYTHING I can do to raise my poor grade?
• Even though I didn't attend class and just sort of guessed when I wrote that last assignment, I think it was pretty good and deserved a better grade.

Face it. Some students suffer from a form of burnout about three-quarters of the way through a term. They stop attending and their papers become shorter and shorter and show less and less real thinking. This is the point where the real students are separated from those who simply take up space: the real students carry through to the end.

*You should know that sending your mother to plead for a grade rarely works, and (assuming you are over 18 years old) it's not even really legal for a teacher to reveal your grade to your parents without a signed release.

Between Terms Advice

Because I write this blog mainly for my students, I feel like I can give you some teacher's advice. Here are three things that would have revolutionized the lives of many of my students (about a third of them).

Show Up! The previous blog entry said something about attendance. I'll say it again. Unless you're in college as a sort of expenses-paid vacation, you need to pass courses and learn information. You can't do that if you're not in class. My students with poor attendance records are always surprised when they turn in papers that I don't approve of. They thought they had guessed right on the assignment! Why not actually show up and make sure? The student with tapering attendance is always fascinating. Pretty good at the start, then less and less. What? Did you learn it all in the first month? Did you discover alcohol? Or are you just so arrogant that you figure nobody can teach you anything?

Read the Assignment! I mean this in two senses:
1. Read the stuff in the book. I don't know about you, but when I spend $90 for something, I want to get some good out of it. And no, the teachers don't get a cut of the profits. And no, we don't hear whether you did buy the book—so we don't grade on spending. We do grade on whether you absorbed the stuff inside the book. And surprisingly enough (this may be different from high school books) there's actually something inside most college textbooks that's worth reading!
2. Read the directions for the thing you're supposed to be writing. When I ask my students for a research paper that's five to seven pages long, I'm not going to give full credit for two pages of unsupported opinion.

Make a Gradebook! You need to know how many absences you have in a class, particularly if you have trouble showing up. You need to know what your grades are, so you know how much it will hurt you when you don't choose to turn in a major assignment. Many of my disappointed students this semester had no idea they were in trouble, even though they might have missed a quarter of our class meetings and not bothered to turn in a major paper. Here's a little hint: few college instructors will seek you out and try to talk you into doing the work. We feel we have better things to do.

Winding down thoughts

I'm sitting here at University of Akron on the last day of finals week. Department policy requires me to give back the final portfolios in a face-to-face conference this week, so this all feels very final and almost a little sad. I feel like we should do a little ceremony here.

We don't do office conferences that much. For one thing, students are generally terrified of their teachers (I think it's hilarious that anyone would be terrified of me), so it's really rare for anyone to come talk with me unless I've announced to them that I'm failing them for plagiarism. For another thing, someone brought a lawsuit at Akron a while back because classes were canceled for conferences. They claimed that a personal 20-minute meeting taught them less than three hours of group lecture. So we can't cancel classes for conferences. (NCSC is its own world. I can't do conferences there because students assume that anyone who has a one-on-one conversation gets an unfair advantage in the course.)

The result is that the last time I see these people is also the first time I talk with them personally. Odd. And sad, too, because these are some very interesting students, and we get to actually talk about their writing for once. But it's the worst time in the semester to do this, because their minds are on summer, and the next formal writing they will do is in September.

Most of these guys really will do well in their future. I look at the grade book and "B" is the most common grade I give out. About 22% of my students, though, won't be passing. For most of them, the issue is simple dishonesty or simple lack of attendance. It seems like every class I teach has at least two students who have "issues" with attending (often I suspect that the "issues" are related to alcohol). I used to assign a paper on "differences between high school and college." I hoped for people to write about maturity or about the new emphasis on thinking for oneself. Usually, though, they write, "The main difference is that you have to attend classes in high school and you don't have to attend in college." Alas. None of the people I'm failing this semester had a good attendance record. Some missed as many as 20 class sessions.

That's a dreary note to end on. A happier one: Several of my students reported that their thinking changed significantly for the better. They figured out important things about their careers. They learned how to think. They learned how to respect the opinions of others. This is the stuff that's supposed to happen to freshmen, and it did here.

My boyfriend the expert

I'm looking over the current crop of Ashland definitional argument papers, and I'm surprised at how many of them use interviews as research sources. I'm also surprised at the qualifications of some of the people interviewed. Sometimes it really worked. One student, answering the question "Are cheerleaders athletes?" interviewed the faculty member who is in charge of the cheerleading squad. This faculty member happens to be part of the Physical Education Department, and could speak (with some authority) about the number of injuries suffered nationwide by cheerleaders. Another, writing on the question "Are NASCAR drivers athletes?" interviewed her boyfriend. His qualification is that he watches a lot of car races on TV and even attended a couple of races in real life. Yet another, writing on the question "Are band members athletes?" (we seem to be on a roll here) interviewed several band members and learned that they really like being in the band and feel like they have to work hard.

Did these strategies work? Or, more specifically, would anyone call these real research? Or are they just fulfilling the requirement to find outside sources?

Let's review.

• Both the author and the audience must respect the source. The cheerleader source seems to work that way. She's got expertise (and academic qualifications) in the specific field the paper was discussing. Do I respect the boyfriend who put down his beer long enough to say, "Yeah, they look like they're working hard"? Nope. Would I respect the opinion of a Ph.D. in English who watches a lot of NASCAR? No more than I'd respect the opinion of a truck driver or anyone else—the degree only counts in the area it relates to.


• The source must have something to say. The band people only got to say that they enjoy band and work hard. They didn't get to talk about much of anything else. Nobody among the band interviewees was asked to compare the band experience to (for example) being on a swim team or being a football player.


• You have to ask the right question. The greatest interview source in the world won't help you much if you don't ask the right question and edit the response. The NASCAR boyfriend was allowed to ramble for about half the paper. The band members were asked if they liked being in band. The cheerleading advisor was asked how cheerleaders' injuries and workouts compare with those of other athletes.

What a research paper is about

This is the bottom line: it's about learning something new and reliable, not about simply filling space and accumulating things to put on a "Works Cited" page.

By the way #1: It's all in the question you're trying to answer. If the research paper question was "What do beer-drinking NASCAR fans think about the drivers?" the boyfriend would have been an expert. He just wasn't an expert on what sort of workout and exertion the drivers actually go through.
By the way #2: There's a way to actually cite these interviews. Look it up.