Many have suggested that the recent fall of newspapers–and many group the move online with a “fail,” which I think is unfortunate–presages the fall of universities. Like newspapers, many universities exist largely because of some imputed and traditional reputational inertia. And like newspapers, they are in the profession of informing. So it’s not surprising to see things like this recent Chronicle article arguing that universities (at least as we know them) are facing challenges similar to those of newspapers.
I’ve recently posted something complaining that the university provided little that couldn’t be had from a local Panera Bread. That was meant, in some small part, as a “modest proposal.” Ideally, the university is very much a place, somewhere that encourages the life of the mind, home for a special kind of intentional community. The question is not whether universities of today will end: they will, either with a whimper or a bang. The question is what comes next.
Some suggest that Kaplan and Walden will replace them, or that corporate universities will. Unfortunately, many of these are the same folks who think universities should only teach the “useful arts.” The reason online-only universities like Kaplan and Walden do not have better reputations–and let’s be clear here, they simply do not–is not merely that they are online. Rather it is because few have managed to escape the idea that online education tends to be training, rather than some broader form of enlightenment.
There is nothing wrong with training; training is necessary and important. Learning particular skills represents an important resource for any individual to draw on. But that is not enough on its own. You can learn, by rote, all of the grammatical rules there are to know, but that doesn’t allow you to tell a story. A large part of what results from a good university education is not predictable and nor should it be. We want to allow people to do things that they didn’t know they could, and that we didn’t know they could. Kaplan may very well provide outstanding opportunities for training, and should be applauded for that. But there will remain a need for people who have been engaged in an intellectually challenging conversation, and so far, universities are one of the few places this can be found consistently.
A good writing book
Somewhat by default, I’ve been assigned to teach our graduate course “Writing for Interactive Media.” A big piece of this is figuring out how the web is different as a genre, and in fact, a lot of this will be writing for different goals (a short presentation, an interview, a video piece, an audio piece, etc.). But the other piece will be trying to improve our students’ writing ability across the board. Those of you who are frequent readers of my blog may find me an odd choice for this task, and I would have to agree. Some of our students have been writing professionally for nearly as long as I have been alive, and while I hope I can improve their writing–particularly in unfamiliar venues–I suspect I’ll be relying on them to help me help other students who are more in need of improvement.
As a result of this process, I’ve been trying to decide what (if any) book to use. My normal assignment in introductory courses is Strunk & White
, and it may end up being so again this time. But I’m going to take a closer look at On Writing Well
as an alternative.
This is after considering Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace
by Joseph Williams. The book is widely acclaimed, and I could see why. Many of the issues addressed (or, rather “he addresses” :) ) would be familiar to those of us who read a lot of student work. But then I started reading his “corrections” of existing academic work, and got a bit worried.
One of his examples draws from Talcott Parsons, a sociologist celebrated as much for his terse and verbose style as for his role in establishing functional structuralism as the dominant paradigm in the middle of the last century. Williams suggests that there is no need for the complexity. He takes this passage from Parsons:
Mostly in the context of a discussion of subjects and active/passive verbs, he changes this to the much clearer:
Now, I am far from an expert on Parons’s thought, but this seems to me to be a wholly inaccurate paraphrasing of the original paragraph. Williams has taken “varying kinds of factual observation” and rephrased it as “everything they could say about something.” Less jargon? Of course. But it also means two different things. “Kinds of observation” have little to do with “ways of saying.” Moreover, Williams collapses “theoretical conceptualization” with “theory.” The two, I suspect, were not the same thing for Parsons. Likewise “generalized conceptual scheme” is not the same thing as “theory.” In a work of sociological theory, conflating the two is highly suspect.
While we’re at it “scientifically important” is not the same is “what they [scientists] think are important.” Sure, we could enter into a debate over whether they may be the same (i.e., there is no ideal of “scientific importance” beyond that which is agreed upon by the plurality of scientists), but I doubt this is what Parsons is intending to suggest.
Williams goes on to rephrase it further:
This is pablum. If a grad, or even an undergrad, wrote the above in a basic theory class, I’d fail them on the spot. I’ll admit, Parsons did not write in a way that was particularly comprehensible. But you don’t “fix” that by tossing out the meaning of whole phrases, and “dumbing down” the material. This is precisely why it’s frustrating when students read Spark Notes. Williams concludes that
He’s right, it does. But at least there is some implication that there is a there there, that Parsons has something to say. No copy editor would keep his job if he suggested changing the first version to the last. This is more than moving away from passive verbs, it’s stripping the paragraph of its meaning.
I continue, hoping that this was merely a brief lapse. But no, in the very next section, Williams suggests that a better version of
would be
The idea here is that noun chains should be broken up. Again, if I read this in a paper from a student, I would assume it was written by a non-native speaker. I am not a doctor, but I suspect that “early childhood thought disorder” is a term of art. It doesn’t actually mean “disordered thought,” but rather the alternative meaning of disorder: that is, according to OED “a disruption of normal physical or mental functions.” I am shocked that anyone could confuse the meaning so thoroughly. Sure, pull misdiagnosis out of that long phrase, but don’t make the sentence incomprehensible to its target audience. Likewise “research literature” is fine. If you have to fix it, remove “research” or “literature” rather than changing it to the awkward “literature on recent research.”
So, in case the above does not make this clear, I cannot assign this book to my students. If you have better suggestions, please let me know.
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