Entries Tagged 'Issues & Advice' ↓

This brings to a conclusion our five weeks together–or nearly so. It’s been quick! Seven weeks in the fall (and I will be seeing most of you in the fall, either in ICM 522 or in ICM 501) will seem like a lifetime by comparison. As always, first time through a course is sometimes rough, and thank you for being my guinea pig group, as always!

I have three requests.

The first is to remind you to be on time with your final two examples. Because there is potential for confusion–after all, these will look very much like your other papers–if you could also email them (or links to them) to me at writing@halavais.net, that would be great. I will reply with an indication that I have them. I’m providing an extension until Tuesday at 10am for everyone, but at that time, I grade and submit grades. Be sure you have everything in, because missing a paper will mean a failing grade.

Second, I think you should have received a request to do a teacher evaluation. Please do take a moment to go to qeval to fill out an evaluation.

Finally, please reply in the comments below with questions you would like us to address in the second summer meeting on the 27th. We are largely agenda-free–we have a relatively short period of time and want to make sure we address your concerns. So please do suggest topics, and comment on others’ suggestions. I’ll be circulating this link to the dean and faculty, so we can prepare a response and discussion.

Thanks! And enjoy the short break before we meet up again.

missyka04: @LaurenDiLieto @halavais I’m not convinced that social media works for all companies. I’m looking forward to reading the diff plans #icm506

I couldn’t answer this within the 140 word quota.

Not sure what you mean by “works.” Social media affects every company. So, the question becomes, do they engage or disengage. Do they think strategically about the way they interact with the public, or do they ignore the public. I suppose that if you are a secret society, you don’t need a social media strategy (though it would be smart to have one for your members), but any organization that deals with a public this is online needs a social media strategy. In the US, the vast majority of the public is not online.

There was a time, not long ago, when companies said “the internet is a major trend, but it’s not something that affects us.” The idea that the internet doesn’t “work” for what you do is pretty much irrelevant today. You either ignore it, or you engage it.

The term “social media” is a bit confusing. Basically, I guess it includes every form of media that is (a) online and (b) not designed to be one-to-many. It’s hard to point at examples of online media these days that aren’t social, but clearly, for example, google.com (the main search site) isn’t, and neither is citibank.com. Of course, both are heavily influenced by social media, and both pay a lot of attention to social media, but they aren’t social media sites.

For that reason, not having a social media strategy is simply poor management. Sticking your head in the sand and ignoring the changes that are happening right now means more than your head gets buried. Companies that decided the internet “was not for them” lost out to those who found ways to leverage it. Of course, plenty of companies that engaged the net also lost out, but deciding not to play was pretty much a guaranteed fail. The same is true today of any organization that decides to ignore social media–because social media won’t ignore you.

Lauren mentioned the Department of Homeland Security. The Obama administration has been urging all federal agencies to engage social media, and the DHS is no exception.The DHS twitter accounts (@DHSJournal and @HomelandSecurit) frankly don’t make very innovative use of Twitter, though they provide another outlet for information. And to be fair, like the CDC’s use, it is intended mainly for timely release of information during a disaster. And their blog could use some tips from the TSA Blog. I am not a fan of the TSA, to be sure, but I have a lot of respect for their blogging efforts.

In sum, the absence of a social media strategy is, in itself, a strategy–a strategy for failure. I’ve yet to learn of an organization that could do without a social media strategy.

A couple of tweeting notes. I realize that some of you are twittering more, and some are using Diigo more. That’s fine, though it’s worth at least giving Twitter a try. If you do, remember to add “#icm506″ somewhere in your tweet, so it’s easier for everyone to find it.

First note: You might consider trying TweetDeck. I use it. Some people like it, some people don’t. There are a lot of other tools that help you with your Tweets, but I like Tweetdeck because I can easily keep track of, for example, the #icm506 discussion. The web interface for twitter, while simple, is not necessarily the best way to use the service.

Second, you should think about your photo. Actually, this only applies to one, or maybe two of you. I can understand not wanting to use a head-shot (though, as we’ve discussed, photos suggest authenticity), but there are other options. Sketches & cartoons, for example, like @rmazar, @superaleja, @academicdave, @thinkgeek, @jcmeloni, @jasonrhody, or @ErikaJL. Or crop, like @phdaisy, @miaC, or @aleksk. Or develop your own icon, like @karthur, @BarackObama, or @mla251. Or an abstract image like that used by @Britannica. Or a distinctive photo or image, like @jmittell, @mckenziewark, @UTsharon, or @footage. Or a logotype like that for @thatcamp, @BoingBoing, or (naturally) @quicm. Or kid pics like @barrywellman. Or even your dog, like @cogdog. Just anything to avoid the default .

Last week saw a more academic writing assignment–the lit review–and I realize that this was not familiar territory for some of you. I think the biggest issues that seemed to come up across the board were related to quotation and citation. Let’s start with the easy stuff: basic structural rules.

When you use a block quote, you don’t need quotation marks; the indentation stands in for the quotes. There are different rules for when you should use a block quote, depending on which style guide you are using. For APA, the rule is that you go to block quotes for quotations of over 40 words. Especially for the web, you’ll see shorter block quotes than that, but for longer passages, you should certainly go to the block quote.

Single quote marks (that is, inverted commas) are generally used in American English only to denote quotations within quotations. (The standard for quotations within quotations within quotations is: don’t do that!) So, when I write that Mark Twain wrote, “I gasped with surprise; my breath almost got away from me. ‘What!’ I said, ‘you here yet?’ Go along with the rest of the dream! scatter!’” I make use of single quotes inside of my own double quotes, to avoid confusion.

There are some style guides, particularly for technical manuals, that use single quotes for terms of art. This is just ugly, but if you are required by your boss or editor to follow such a rule, then do what you must.

In American English, the standard is for commas and periods to be placed inside the quoted text. So if I were to end this sentence with a quote, “I would include the period inside the quote marks.” This changes when you use parenthetical citations, in which case “I would move the period back to the very end, including the citation” (Halavais, 2009).

On that, some used citations fairly willy-nilly. You have to follow an established standard: that’s why it is a standard. You can go APA, or Chicago, or MLA, but you can’t go the Cartman route and make up your own. And again, on the web, hyperlinks are a great mechanism for citation.

As a rule, you should try to avoid putting URLs in your text–especially ugly URLs–if it is meant to be read online. When you do end up including a URL, be sure to make it linked as well. Nothing is so frustrating as seeing a URL and having to cut and paste it into the address bar. Better: use contextual linking and rely on hyperlinks rather than bare URLs.

I think the issue that really caught a lot of you up was the need to use a quote, when paraphrasing would serve you just as well. (This PDF provides an example of the difference between quoting and paraphrasing, with APA style citations.) When you do use a direct quote, especially one of some length, it shouldn’t be used as a replacement for your own work, but as evidence. Unfortunately, even if you do not intend it to be such a replacement, it often reads as such unless you clearly indicate why you are using it.

The best bet is to paraphrase, only quoting when you want to make the point that an author has phrased something in a particular way, or when the words are of particular import. If you are mainly drawing on the ideas, look for a way to rephrase them so that they serve your own argument. Especially for lit reviews, summary and paraphrasing should make up the majority of your citation. The OWL has two pages on this: here and here. Note that you also need to paraphrase fully.

As I’m looking through the materials for this week I realize that I’ve assigned you to read Froomkin’s swans song without clearly indicating why.

Very briefly, I think that one of the best ways you can connect and surprise is by slaying dragons, or at least tilting at windmills. Trust no one. Figure it out for yourself. Yes, documents suggesting that the swine flu is a plan for depopulating the US, and that Obama and other high ranking US officials are merely plants of international bankers who really run the world, are probably just the work of a serious nutter. But it’s worth making sure.

I think that a lot of people in the mainstream news business forgot that there is an opportunity for real scandal when you discover something really scandalous. Not someone sleeping with someone other than their spouse, or someone spending too much on clothes, but large corporations paying for policy that benifits large corporations. Of course, that sort of BS detection is both expensive and risky, but bloggers have wrestled at least some of that mantle from the folks who brought us the Pentagon Papers, and now bring us “reality television” in the form of news.

I mentioned Zotero in an earlier post. Here are a couple of introductions to what it is and how to use it. Hopefully you already are–it make research and paper-writing so much easier!

These are from a great site at Murdoch University on using Web 2.0 tools.

I cannot stress this enough. The aim of the course is to have you write persuasively. That means you need a thesis–a good thesis–and it needs to be absolutely obvious to any reader what your thesis is. Within about 5 seconds of looking at your post, I should be able to circle the thesis. The easiest way to do that is to put the thesis as your first sentence.

What should your thesis do? It should clearly indicate what you are trying to argue in a piece. It should be specific, and non-obvious. “Murder is bad” is not a good thesis. “Murder serves a vital role in making urban life more exciting, and should be encouraged in low-crime areas” is a great thesis, if only because it is unexpected, unusual, and difficult to demonstrate. A good thesis is like a good high-dive: it should be clean and clear, it should be pointed, and it should be difficult to accomplish the task it lays out.

What shouldn’t your thesis do?

First, don’t begin a thesis with “I will argue” or “I think” or “I will demonstrate.” We’ve shown up to have you do just that, you don’t need to tell us. It’s redundant, and weakens your claim.

Second, be as specific as possible. Name names. Make it a measurable claim. So, I wrote a paper that looked at the effect of newspaper conglomeration on election coverage. A bad thesis would have been “Newspaper conglomeration affects coverage of elections.” How? Which elections? A better thesis is something like “Election coverage in the top national newspapers is much more homogeneous in 2004 than it was in 1996, most likely because of conglomeration.” That last piece is a bit weak, but the truth is that there is not clear evidence that the change I demonstrate was, in fact, caused by ownership structure. It could have been business pressures, and relying more heavily on wire services. It could have been wider use of the internet.

Third, don’t be sneaky. There is no reason to hide a good thesis. I don’t need a surprise ending. Tell me what you’re going to tell me. If your thesis is “Vermont is pretty in the autumn,” I’ll know I don’t want to read your piece. If your thesis is “Vermont is pretty in the autumn because they have hired a crack team of botanists to make sure there is a good array of color on the leaves,” then yes. You may ultimately disappoint in trying to show that this is the case, but I’m willing to come along for the ride.

See also: Purdue’s OWL page on the Thesis Statement

I’m going to start with some self-criticism:

First, I’m mean. Although I’m working on it, I’m not very good at sugar-coating things. So you’ll find most of my comments are direct enough to be rude. Please, know that I do it only because I care. It’s much easier for me to say “nice job.” I know it’s hard to see people’s opinions on your writing (and I’ll reiterate that while these are somewhat informed opinions, they are still opinions), but it does get easier with time. If you feel yourself getting upset over my comments, leave it and come back to it. I hope that won’t be the case, and that you’ll take them–if not to heart–at least to keyboard.

Second, I think I’ve left too much vagueness in the assignments. Some of you hit it dead-on, but others didn’t as much. This is true of both of the assignments, and so I will work on that. In particular, I guess I’ll include word-count targets. As I said, I don’t like doing this. Really the key is that many of your pieces don’t reach enough depth rather than enough length, though the two are naturally related. As I noted in the phone call, I expected length to run somewhere as long as my text lectures, but few managed anything near that length. So, I’ll be more explicit in the coming assignments. Since you may already have started the module 2 assignments, I won’t edit them, but be aware: the three text entries for the second module are 2910 words, 2732 words, and 2170 words. You don’t need to go that long. But if you are going a tenth of that, you’re on the wrong page.

So, I’m going to touch on some purely grammatical issues that I saw in multiple papers. If you’re one of the culprits: you’re on notice! Pay special attention to make sure that you don’t repeat the issue. As I’ve already written, I don’t think of these grammatical rules as something to be followed for the sake of following rules. Break them when appropriate. But they are there to help make your writing clearer and more precise, and will affect how your audience interprets your arguments. When someone says “irregardless,” it actually takes a force of will to take them seriously. This is desperately unfair: they may be bright–maybe even brilliant–but that one word tells me that no one has let them know that irregardless isn’t a word (doesn’t make sense as a word) and so that’s likely to color how I view the rest of what they are saying.

Run-on sentences

Run-on sentences are simply two sentences stuck together. These are things that should be stuck together with an “and,” a semicolon, or a dash. Or, better yet, simply split into two sentences. You just need to let people know that you’re done with one and starting another.

This week, most of the run-ons were what are called “comma faults,” or sometimes a “comma splice.” For example:

The school of communication has students in two programs, they rarely speak to one another.

Although the two sentences are related, they are still two sentences. (Why isn’t that true of the previous sentence? The “although” makes all the difference!) They could be separated using a semi-colon or a dash, or a period and a cap.

Affect / Effect

This is one of those common errors that are not quite as bad as “irregardless,” but for some people rank as close. It’s unfortunate, because they are easy to confuse.

The simple rule of thumb is to use “affect” as a verb and “effect” as a noun. This is how the two words are most commonly employed. So:

The nurse’s attention affected his interest in recovering.

or

His interest in My Little Pony was an effect of the nurse’s long stories.

That would make it easier: just identify the part of speech and you’re there. Unfortunately, “effect” can–rarely–be used as a verb. As a verb, “effect” means “to cause to occur.” This is different from affect, which means, roughly, “to influence.”

So, if I am seeking to effect a change in your grammar, I actually want that change to occur completely. I want to make it happen. If I want to affect your grammar, I want to influence it. Again, the latter is by far the more common case, and it is somewhat rare that you would use “effect” as a verb, but, it’s worth noting that it can be used that way. (”Effect a change,” is in my experience the most common use of “effect” as a verb.)

“Affect” can also be used as a noun, but generally only by psychologists. Check a dictionary if you are unsure on this one.