Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide.

Yeah, just saw that as well. I had heard of her but knew almost no details.

And of course if you did have a loud subset of people complaining once again that Obama wasn't "black enough," I don't think that that would exactly hurt him in the long run.

If it stops at complaining, I'd agree. My thought is that, with Obama as President instead of being in a relatively junior-grade position, it WON'T stop at complaining, and we're looking at the mid-60s all over again.

-- MWE

Ark, I agree with you most of the time, but this is a strawman. Who argued that we should withdraw chaotically in 5/9/50/100 years? You could at least bridge the logic gap for us and try to support the claim that the longer we wait, the more chaotic and shattered our army will be and the greater vacuum will be left behind.

One could also argue that stretching a withdrawal out from 2 years to 5 years might be better. I actually don't know - Frankly I think it's pretty fubared no matter how you slice it.

Let's see if I can do a better job here: I used 5 years specifically becaue of the argument an earlier poster made that one possiblity was to wait and see how a McCain presidency, with it's continued occupation of Iraq, would fare, using the 2012/2013 election/inauguration as a referendum on the success or failure of the occupation. I used 9 years in the event McCain was re-elected. The 50 years was Bush's hypothetical, while the 100 year occupation was McCain's hypothetical.

I wasn't meaning to claim that anyone was actually arguing that we should be withdrawing chaotically in 5/9/50/100 years, but that absent a military draft in the States and a complete overhaul of how our budget is spent, that the longer we stay in Iraq, the less likely we are to be able to withdraw in an orderly way that saves as many Iraqis as possible. It would have been better if I had originally stated that the longer we occupy Iraq, the more likely we are to run out of money and troops necessary to maintaining a somewhat stable occupation, especially if there's a problem in another part of the world genuinely requiring U.S. military intervention.

As for the argument that five years might be better than two, I don't know what that argument could be based on. There's been no real progress in negotatiations between the factions, no progress towards a loose federation that I can see, and no real increase in the ability of an Iraqi army to take over necessary policing and military functions. What, then, would five years accomplish that two years wouldn't? I'm willing to listen, but at the moment I can't think of anything in favor of a longer commitment. Lastly, I'll note that any argument in favor of an extended occupation probably falls apart on the grounds that even if such might prove worthwhile, McCain isn't the guy to successfully lead that occupation. He really doesn't appreciate the difference between the various groups fighting in Iraq, and too often seems actually indifferent to those differences (which would make an occupation leading to actual stability impossible). Of all the candidates, he's also the one far more likely to attack Iran, and certainly to attack Iran without real provocation.

I don't think it was a strawman so much as it was an excessive shorthand on my part, asking the reader to make connections that, without further explanation on my part, were hardly automatic. Thanks for bringing it up.

Andy, Christopher Hitchens has an answer to your pet question of whether Obama holds Wright's views. Hitchens concludes no, and goes on to suspect... wait for it... Michelle.

Quoting now:

I think we can exclude any covert sympathy on Obama's part for Wright's views or style — he has proved time and again that he is not like that, and even his own little nods to "Minister" Farrakhan can probably be excused as a silly form of Chicago South Side political etiquette. All right, then, how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?

This obvious question is now becoming inescapable, and there is an inexcusable unwillingness among reporters to be the one to ask it. ... If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company — and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable — then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner.

I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama's 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community". To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be "read" at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language. Anyway...

To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be "read" at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language. Anyway...

I'm slow, what does this mean?

I'm slow, what does this mean?

I haven't read her thesis, but I presume he's calling it crap.

I read the first part of it. It read like it was written by a smart undergrad. I imagine that's the reality.

The writer you quote just comes across as an #######.

Hitchens has been called that, yes :-) He's not shy about expressing his opinions.

And of course Hitchens' own view of the Catholic Church makes Rev. Hagee sound like the Pope himself. He even wrote a book slamming Mother Teresa! Between Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan the Brits are one curious lot of commentators. They switch teams more often than Bobo Newsom.

Hitchens kind of makes me embarassed to be an atheist

Hitchens is not shy about issuing the insults, and he's one of the most vociferous anti-religion voices out there, so this particular attack on his part shouldn't be surprising, whatever its merits.

On the issue of Michelle Obama's experiences at Princeton, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found one of her two white freshman roommates last month, one of whom was from Georgia. According to the story, this particular white girl's mother tried to get her removed from the room from day one. By the second semester, the request was honored. They say in the story that Michelle never indicated that she knew about the backstage maneuvering, but I can imagine the tension must have been obvious (to complicate the story even further, the girl who eventually moved out was dealing with her own sexual identity issues, and came out of the closet while she was in college). The mother and daughter both speak with regret today about what happened, but the mother still can't quite purge herself entirely of her racism:

Brown says she wouldn't mind if her child or grandchild roomed with a black person today. But she's far from colorblind. "Where I draw the line is interracial marriage," Brown says. "That I can't quite deal with."

Georgian recalls rooming with Michelle Obama

And of course Hitchens' own view of the Catholic Church makes Rev. Hagee sound like the Pope himself. He even wrote a book slamming Mother Teresa!

You don't think Hitchens referring to her as "The Ghoul of Calcutta" and writing a book about her called "The Missionary Position" showed her the proper respect? :-)

Just out of curiosity, what was Hitchens' main complaint about ol' Tessy?

Hitchens is like Salon and Slate on steroids. Contrarianism for its own sake, and flip a coin to see which side you'll land on. He and Sullivan probably have backgrounds in those British debating societies where style is valued over substance and nobody expects that anybody actually believes anything. I've never seen a writer who can so perfectly parody the nutball left and the nutball right within 24 hours and act as if everyone else is an unprincipled lout except him.

And yet when he's not acting that that he can be a very good writer. Like that other part time nutball Rev. Wright, there's more than one side to him. I guess they're the sort of people who make life interesting, if often exasperating.

Just out of curiosity, what was Hitchens' main complaint about ol' Tessy?

I think that he portrayed her as a band-aid agent who was a tool of the Bad Old Catholic Church and the big corporations. It's nice to see that we Americans aren't the only ones who can get bees in their bonnets about the dumbest things.

"I read the first part of it. It read like it was written by a smart undergrad. I imagine that's the reality."

I read the Introduction. It is terrible writing. If a reporter on my high school newspaper* (of which I was the Editor-in-Chief) had handed me an article that stiff or so full of punctuation errors and majuscular mistakes, I would have told him to clean it up or toss it out. However, writing worse than this, alas, is the norm for most undergrads.

I had the experience in graduate school (at UC San Diego) of grading undergraduate papers. It was an eye-opening experience. Fully half of my students appeared to be illiterate. And that was at a highly regarded university. Compared with the undergrads I have read, I would say Mrs. Obama rates in the top 25 percent for a UC student.

* This is self-serving to note, but my high school paper was rated first in the nation when I was its editor. Of course, being the best newapaper among high schools is like being the best pole vaulter among quadraplegics.

"I think that he portrayed her as a band-aid agent who was a tool of the Bad Old Catholic Church and the big corporations."

I never read Hitchens's book on Mother Teresa. However, my recollection (having read a review) is that (beyond his complaints over where she got her funds) he faulted her for not helping the poor, but instead celebrating their poverty. That is, Hitchens believes that the Missionaries of Charity had no interest in bettering the lives of the poor. The sisters handed a morsel of fish to hungry people, never teaching them how to fish for themselves. Their interest was in teaching poor people to accept their station in life and get their rewards in heaven. As such, the Missionaries of Charity had a need for there to be poor people. Any time a person lifted himself out of poverty, that was a loss for Mother Teresa and her band of nuns.

If you believed that life could never get better for India's poor, perhaps Mother Teresa's approach was sound: "the meek shall inherit the earth; blessed are the poor; etc." However, that belief is bogus. India's poverty rate fell from roughly half the population to about one-fourth in less than a decade (after the socialist and protectionist policies of the Congress Party were reversed following the defeat of Rajiv Gandhi in 1990). In a country of 1.1 billion, raising 25% of them out of poverty is more than 250 million people.

If my summary of what Hitchens's book said is accurate, I still don't necessarily find it convincing. After all, no matter what a handful of nuns in Calcutta believed what was or was not admirable about poverty, the Missionaries of Charity had no responsibility in causing widespread poverty in India. As the end of socialist protectionism showed, poverty in India was (and to the extent it remains largely still is) the residue of bad governmental policies.

Between Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan the Brits are one curious lot of commentators.

Hey Andy, he's one of you now! He took US citizenship last year I think. But curious is putting it mildly...

I read the Intro and I agree, Rich. Pretty bad writing, but not horrible for an undergrad. It's just odd that she didn't bother to proof it. Some of the typos are pretty egregious and would be caught with a simple read-through.

One further observation about bad writing: it is the fault of our lousy primary and secondary schools. We have for the most part no standards, and we reward students for effort rather than performance. We don't teach kids to write. We don't make them practice writing. We don't hold them back when they cannot write. Even worse, we employ some school teachers who themselves cannot write well.

For most of the last 17 years I have been tutoring inner-city high school students in composition. In six months I can usually teach a 15-year-old* who doesn't know how to properly conjugate the verb "to be" to write a competent five paragraph essay. My success depends, of course, on how much effort the student puts into improving. Those who succeed have no problem going on to do college-level work.

*My kids sign up for this tutoring program because it is their hope to go on to a four-year college. As such, they are not average kids for their school. Despite their profoundly bad educations, they are the cream of the inner-city crop. It's worth noting that the drop-out rate, particularly for boys, is high. I would guess that only about 20 percent of black boys in West Oakland graduate high school. Very few of them go on to a university. As such, those few who do (almost all of whom are girls) tend to have a high degree of native intelligence and perseverence.

He even wrote a book slamming Mother Teresa!

I believe another complaint of Hitchens's was the Catholic prohibition against contraception. If I remove the cachet of the Catholic church from what Theresa was preaching, I do have to consider it destructive and actionable madness, that she would tell the poor of India not to use contraception. Given AIDS, the infant mortality rate, the death rate for mothers during childbirth, and the excruciating poverty aggravated by having more and more children, one wonders how many completely unnecessary deaths and agony she was responsible for.

Watch your spelling, Arky.

Teresa.

:-)

Dang! And too late for the edit function.

I read the Intro and I agree, Rich. Pretty bad writing, but not horrible for an undergrad. It's just odd that she didn't bother to proof it. Some of the typos are pretty egregious and would be caught with a simple read-through.

I don't find that too surprising. Most of my friends didn't proof their undergrad work at all. Some of us could write without proofing, but most couldn't.

What I've found amusing is the decline of my own writing--I could write with no proofing whatsoever when I was an undergrad, but ten to fifteen years later I find myself making tense and even word switch errors.

A lot of it just has to do with priorities; the rest probably with over reliance on spell/grammar check. I used to think it was unprofessional to make grammatical errors anywhere. Now, that I teach world language, I focus on utility. Otherwise you get the "He asked for 'lice' and the waitstaff brought out a big plate of bugs!"

Rich's description of the system is cold and not empathetic, but for the most part, accurate. Many students get fast-tracked if they aren't punching the other students. Programs like Rich's tutoring program are vital for the same reason good homeschooling is vital--they allow students the opportunity for individualized instruction/apprenticeship with someone who knows what they are doing.

The quality of teachers tends to very inconsistent. The harsh environment leads to growth and a high level of expertise among a small minority of the faculty, but the poor working conditions make it hard to recruit to cover every class.

The evaluation by upper administration focuses on "classroom management" instead of achievement. As a result, you get a disproportionate amount of time spent on students who just don't want to be there.

It's not that those students are "bad" or don't deserve attention--they probably need it the most. It's just that it has to be strategic and a lot of instructional time ends up being wasted.

It's worth noting that the drop-out rate, particularly for boys, is high. I would guess that only about 20 percent of black boys in West Oakland graduate high school. Very few of them go on to a university. As such, those few who do (almost all of whom are girls) tend to have a high degree of native intelligence and perseverence.

Almost all of your boys who go on to university are girls? :)

I'd agree with the dynamic here. That's why when I take the students on life-changing trips, I tend to try to bring more boys than I would if I was considering my own sanity--the girls are easier to supervise, but the boys need the change more.

On a day-to-day basis, I tutor whomever is willing to take the help.

Since every jurisdiction already has some method of registering voters and laws to punish them if they vote fraudulently, more obstacles add more hassle, more expense (even if "free") and more opportunities to challenge and harass people at the polls. As always, the hung-over ABD (Congratulations, Matt) says it better than anyone else:

No jurisdiction has laws to punish people if they vote fraudulently. They have laws to punish people who are caught voting fraudulently. But without requiring voter ID, it is somewhere between impossible and not possible to catch people voting fraudulently.

It's an administrative requirement. The reason I'm opposed to national ID cards is because I fear the expansion of their requirements to places where they will actually trample on individual rights.

Indeed. A much stronger argument. Carter-Baker, in fact, proposed that REAL ID be applied to voting; most libertarians I know oppose REAL ID, though, as a de facto national ID card. And once we have a national ID, we're going to get EEVS, which would be a real intrusion by the federal government, and a debacle if they try to implement it.

To put the greater burden on the Democrats, McCain is going to have to rely heavily on the fear factor, which has admittedly worked to an extent in the past. And yes, it does dovetail with his persona as the "strong" candidate. No question about that, and it will pose a problem for the Democrats, who would be foolish to try to ignore it.

But at least as of now, the Democrats know that Bush has already been playing the "fear" card for five years, and after five years it's also pretty evident that it's not working in terms of gathering public support for the war.

Ah, good old reliable Andy. Always ready to knee-jerkedly parrot liberal cliches about Republican campaigning. Must be fun to live in a world in which Lee Atwater personally invented negative campaigning and Richard Nixon personally invented racism-that-only-liberals-notice and Karl Rove personally invented "fear."

Newsflash: all candidates campaign on fear. "Terrorists will kill you if you vote for my opponent" is not a Republican bumper sticker, but a politician's bumper sticker. The Republican version may be "...because my opponent's weakness emboldens terrorists," while the Democratic version may be "...because my opponent's overaggressiveness incites terrorists," but it's the same fear-based argument.

"You'll be dying on the streets from disease while the health insurance company executives use $100 bills to light their cigars" is no less a "fear based argument" than anything Republicans argue.

I had the experience in graduate school (at UC San Diego) of grading undergraduate papers. It was an eye-opening experience. Fully half of my students appeared to be illiterate. And that was at a highly regarded university.

When my wife was in grad school at Brown, she had exactly the same experience. And these were not the "affirmative action" or "inner city" kids. These were the offspring of middle and upper class whites.

And what was even more telling than the nearly grade school level of the writing was the way that the students, often backed by their parents, would whine and complain about their grades. To them, their poor grades were never a case of bad writing. It was if my wife had violated some sort of Brown University version of "The Deal With The Squirrels" by grading their papers on an objective basis.

But at least as of now, the Democrats know that Bush has already been playing the "fear" card for five years, and after five years it's also pretty evident that it's not working in terms of gathering public support for the war.

Ah, good old reliable Andy. Always ready to knee-jerkedly parrot liberal cliches about Republican campaigning. Must be fun to live in a world in which Lee Atwater personally invented negative campaigning and Richard Nixon personally invented racism-that-only-liberals-notice and Karl Rove personally invented "fear."

Jesus, David, get off your Atwater excuses. Even Atwater himself at the end of his life was contrite about what he'd done. It's also interesting to note what Dan Quayle---one of Atwater's leading beneficiaries---said about him in this same YouTube link. Atwater could have---and would have---used exactly the same sort of tricks against you or Ron Paul as he did against the Democrats.

Well, amidst all this debate and acrimony across 3127 posts, I'm glad we could all finally agree on one incontrovertible issue: Why are the kids today more like we were? Now I must go mow my lawn.

Edited TO BE EVEN FUNNIER!

As such, those few who do (almost all of whom are girls) tend to have a high degree of native intelligence and perseverence.

Oh, incidentally, what do you mean by "native intelligence"?

Well, amidst all this debate and acrimony, I'm glad we could all finally agree on one incontrovertible issue: WHAT's the matter with the kids today, eh?

:)

Well, the answer every generation is usually "us", right?

Hitchens kind of makes me embarassed to be an atheist

I'm with you on that one. Especially since I've gone from "angry in-your-face atheist" to "just as long as you don't ram your religion down my throat I'll leave it alone atheist." A lot of my vegetarian friends take the same attitude about their eating habits- if you don't press them on why they don't eat meat and make them feel like weirdos for it, they're content to just order their veggie burgers without comment...anyway...

Re: undergrad writing

I teach undergrads for both a lower-level SUNY school and a large, expensive private school, and I've taught at University at Albany (which is pretty much the top-level of state schools in NY), and the difference between the quality of undergrad writing is night and day. The students at big expensive private school have a very high base-line level of writing. I don't get very many great writers, but only about 1 student out of 25 struggles with the basics the way many of the students even at UAlbany did. They still make spelling mistakes and have typos in their papers, but on a grammatical and compositional level, they're pretty solid across the board. It makes grading tolerable b/c I can actually grade on content without getting distracted by 2 sentences paragraphs, absence of commas, and incomprehensible spelling...

I read the Intro and I agree, Rich. Pretty bad writing, but not horrible for an undergrad. It's just odd that she didn't bother to proof it. Some of the typos are pretty egregious and would be caught with a simple read-through.

But students don't proof-read.

I don't find that too surprising. Most of my friends didn't proof their undergrad work at all. Some of us could write without proofing, but most couldn't.

What I've found amusing is the decline of my own writing--I could write with no proofing whatsoever when I was an undergrad, but ten to fifteen years later I find myself making tense and even word switch errors.

No, you probably couldn't write without proofing as an undergrad. I mean, you probably wrote good first drafts if you're a good writer, but there has never been a document written* that doesn't need to be read for errors and edited for clarity. It's just that, as an undergrad, you had the same arrogance most of us do at that age to think your first drafts were good. You've now matured and realize that while they may be good, they're not good enough. The other factors you cite are no doubt true and have an effect, of course.

I'm wading through two MS theses and a slew of undergrad theses at the moment and they range from passable to terrible with most clustering around "solid first draft." When inquiries are made, it turns out that they are all, indeed, first drafts.

I'm definitely not a guy who should be teaching writing but I can hammer away at the idea that writing extends beyond a first draft.**

*Issac Asimov excepted.

** BTF posts excepted.

To be even funnier and with even more typos. Stupid rushing for work. What a whiff that was.

More on writing. We recently did a faculty search and the folks at the top of the list in most respects shared one feature that I found disturbing. They had many grammatical and punctuation errors in their cover letters and CV. It was obvious that neither had been proof-read at all. We beat them up quite a bit in interviews and it turned out that one candidate probably slipped out of contention entirely due to poor writing. The others wrote pretty well, really, in their proposals and teaching statements but just hadn't proofed their letters. I ask: do schools teach letter writing at all anymore? I found it unbelievable that a cover letter would go out with so many errors in a job application. I'm only 37 but wound up arguing along with colleagues in their 60s. I think older folks can rag too easily on younger folks, but this didn't seem to me to be unwarranted criticism.

So, my question: were we

a) too easy in letting folks with poor cover letters through the first cut?
b) too hard in worrying about it at all?
c) just right in dinging them in proportion to how bad the letter was, but not ignoring the rest of the application?

In the end, I almost had to conclude that the "young" view is correct; the cover letter doesn't matter that much. We weren't going to hire a lesser candidate just because they took more care on a one page document. But it still sticks in my craw.

Bunyon, I was on the market this hiring season for the first time. I sent out 3 cover letters all with the same typo. But it was a typo, an extra word that clearly shouldn't have been there, in what was otherwise a very well-vetted letter, proofed and edited by a lot of people before it was sent (I made the typo in the final revision, done in the 11th hour of course...). When I found the typo I was pretty freaked, but my advisers pointed out that dismissing a potentially good candidate outright b/c of typos isn't a smart move for the search committee. If they did that, they run the risk of ruling out a great candidate solely b/c they make some mistakes in the letter. And at least at higher-end institutions, they'll take a scholar who is doing good, innovative research over one who is a little more vanilla but is a meticulous proofreader. It's Manny Ramirez vs. Reed Johnson- Reed may be more fundamentally sound, but fundamentally sound is a dime a dozen, where guys who can hit 40 HRs aren't...I've worked in HR and watched the woman who sorted through resumes look for any reason to throw them in the "no" pile, and assumed with 200+ applications for a position academia worked the same way. But the people who root through these applications on search committees have all likely published books and articles with a few grammar errors and typos, so they tend to be more forgiving.

I think it will lead to further polarization along racial lines, especially among the less fortunate. There is a fairly substantial subset of the Obama supporters who support Obama because they expect that he will push for the restoration of preferences for African-Americans and the granting of additional preferences to minorities (never mind that there is nothing in Obama's record that suggests he'd do that).


Meh, maybe. But it's really all about the perception of a black president, rather than reality of what he accomplishes as president. If the perception becomes that he is an Uncle Tom race-traitor, yeah, I could see how that could be divisive.

This is an interesting issue. I wish there was a way to have some meaningful information about how people feel about this beyond anecdotes, but since there isn't, I'll just share one of my own.

I was on the train a few weeks ago, dozing off and eavesdropping on the conversation of the black man and woman sitting behind me. They were discussing the Democratic primaries... she was for Hillary, he was for Obama, no huge surprises there. But the man did say something that stuck in my head, something to the effect of, "We need to get Obama elected so we can finally get our 40 acres and a mule." Yes, he used those words, which is why it stuck.

So I wonder, how prevalent is this attitude among Obama's black supporters? Do they think he'll "bring home the bacon" in ways other liberal politicians won't? How will they react if he doesn't? How will whites react if he does, or makes the attempt? I'm honestly curious about this, even though as I said before, I doubt any of us have much to offer here other than anecdotal evidence or personal opinion.

So I wonder, how prevalent is this attitude among Obama's black supporters? Do they think he'll "bring home the bacon" in ways other liberal politicians won't? How will they react if he doesn't? How will whites react if he does, or makes the attempt?

Well, it all depends on what you mean by this. My guess is that Obama would govern, on domestic issues, a step or two to the left of Bill Clinton. He'd have at least two, probably four years of a very sympathetic congress, and so we'd see an expansion of health care coverage, a more progressive tax system, and some poverty-fighting measures, as well as a climate change plan. My hope - not totally unreasonable, given Obama's pretty great record on these issues in IL - is that he's take on a few criminal justice issues, particularly in the war on (some classes of people who use some classes of) drugs, that other center-left politicians have given up for dead.

Most of these proposals would have benefits felt mainly by lower-income people, and African-Americans make up a disproportionate number of lower-income people. I would be shocked if that agenda led to a backlash from the African-American community.

Does anyone have any evidence not of the "overheard on a train" variety, or the MWE "making it up out of whole cloth" variety that a pretty standard center-left government would be unacceptable to African-Americans? Or does anyone have any evidence, based on Obama's policy proposals, advisers, and rhetoric, that he is offering or would deliver on a domestic platform that is significantly different from what we'd expect from any center-left politician?

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I think that he portrayed her as a band-aid agent who was a tool of the Bad Old Catholic Church and the big corporations. It's nice to see that we Americans aren't the only ones who can get bees in their bonnets about the dumbest things.

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss Hitchens as a crank. He, along with a few other brave souls, are taking on organized religion in a intellectually rigorous way and should be commended for it.

Ah, good old reliable Andy. Always ready to knee-jerkedly parrot liberal cliches about Republican campaigning. Must be fun to live in a world in which Lee Atwater personally invented negative campaigning and Richard Nixon personally invented racism-that-only-liberals-notice and Karl Rove personally invented "fear."

Jesus, David, get off your Atwater excuses. Even Atwater himself at the end of his life was contrite about what he'd done. It's also interesting to note what Dan Quayle---one of Atwater's leading beneficiaries---said about him in this same YouTube link. Atwater could have---and would have---used exactly the same sort of tricks against you or Ron Paul as he did against the Democrats.

Come on; one would have to have a brain tumor to think Atwater needed to apologize. Oh, wait, that's his excuse; what's yours?

In any case, you miss my point. I wasn't discussing whether Atwater had worked on negative campaigns; of course he did. I was discussing your repeated silliness of pretending that negative campaigning was invented by, and the sole province of, Republicans. (On the rare occasions when you admit that a Democrat has campaigned negatively, you pretend that they're infringing on Atwater's patent.) Negative campaigning is not a special style of campaign that Republicans use and Democrats don't. It's what all politicians use (unless they've got such a huge lead that they don't want to mention their opponents at all). When a Democrat campaigns negatively, he's being a Democrat, not "borrowing from Lee Atwater" as you're wont to say.

So I wonder, how prevalent is this attitude among Obama's black supporters?

Very prevalent, I would submit. That's all my wife (who works in an office which is about 75% African-American) hears from her co-workers, it's almost all that I heard from my lower-income tax clients, and it's almost all that I hear when I'm out and about, especially in Durham - variations on "we need Obama to help us get ours". Yes, it's "overheard on a train" variety evidence - but I've overheard it too often to downplay it.

How will they react if he doesn't? How will whites react if he does, or makes the attempt?

The great unanswered questions.

I don't believe for a minute that Obama WILL govern that way; I agree with MCoA's take on that, and as I said earlier, there's nothing in Obama's record that suggests he would. I think that the leadership of the A/A community will get behind a somewhat tradtional center/left approach. But I've seen a good amount of barely suppressed rage over the past few months, as the economy deteriorates, and I hear expectations, and I think there IS a risk that Obama will be unable to keep the lid on if he doesn't deliver something more than a sop.

-- MWE

More on writing. We recently did a faculty search and the folks at the top of the list in most respects shared one feature that I found disturbing. They had many grammatical and punctuation errors in their cover letters and CV. It was obvious that neither had been proof-read at all. We beat them up quite a bit in interviews and it turned out that one candidate probably slipped out of contention entirely due to poor writing. The others wrote pretty well, really, in their proposals and teaching statements but just hadn't proofed their letters. I ask: do schools teach letter writing at all anymore? I found it unbelievable that a cover letter would go out with so many errors in a job application. I'm only 37 but wound up arguing along with colleagues in their 60s. I think older folks can rag too easily on younger folks, but this didn't seem to me to be unwarranted criticism.

So, my question: were we

a) too easy in letting folks with poor cover letters through the first cut?
b) too hard in worrying about it at all?
c) just right in dinging them in proportion to how bad the letter was, but not ignoring the rest of the application?

Well, I've been involved in the hiring process for people just out of college, for lawyers, and for legal staff, and unless the applicant has won a Nobel Prize or the equivalent, I essentially toss out any letter/resume with typos in it. It's one thing to make a mistake when writing an ordinary piece of business correspondence; it's quite another to do so when applying for a job. In the first case, a typo still reflects poorly on the letter writer, but if you send out scores of relatively routine letters, a typo will slip through every now and then; nobody is perfect. But a cover letter/resume is an important personal document; it should be written and re-written and proofread and re-proofread until it's perfect. No excuse for making a mistake.

Of course, I also use complete sentences and punctuation when I send text messages.

Re 3135 and 3142. To clarify, most of the letters were of the sort where there were at most a couple of typos, though blatant. The one guy that really did get booted out of the pile far earlier than he would have otherwise (if he wouldn't have actually been interviewed) was a letter awash in typos. It was really appalling and I have no worries booting him for such carelessness in such an important letter. The others ranged a bit but were, I thought, obviously not proof-read but, instead, spell checked. So lots of "there" and "their" type mistakes. Punctuation off. The galling thing was that it wasn't reserved to just a few of the best (otherwise) candidates. Anyone with a mistake free cover letter had no shot at the job based on experience and accomplishment. So, it was sort of hard to eliminate the letters with mistakes, no matter how much I wanted to. Like I said, the ones we've hired have been told how it looked. I dare say their tenure application cover letter had better be perfect. :)

It really has left me with a "WTF" feeling toward the whole thing.

Of course, I also use complete sentences and punctuation when I send text messages.

I hope your parents are as proud of you as you are.

Re writing:

I'm sitting in Cosi on 14th in DC (pop in, if you're downtown), grading final papers. They're uniformly bad. It's hard not to think these students have been fundamentally disserved by their primary and secondary educations. I'm not confident at all the teachers even know how to compose an argument.

I'm definitely not a guy who should be teaching writing but I can hammer away at the idea that writing extends beyond a first draft.**

Bunyon, I don't think it's "arrogance," as you label it above. The problem is that in the computer age, the very concept of a "draft" is somewhat foreign to people. One edits and rewrites and such as one goes along, so the idea of finishing up a paper, printing out the document, reading it from the beginning, and starting over with a full rewrite isn't something people even think about. Hell, you don't even "need" to do a full spellcheck anymore, since the software underlines all the misspelled words as you type, so you never "need" to read it from the beginning.

EDIT: the whole typo issue is distinct from the issue of poor writing. Of course, proofreading is important in either case, but the former may just represent a lack of care, while the latter may reflect a lack of ability. Hiring someone who demonstrates a lack of care is galling, but may be worthwhile in some cases -- but you have to be sure you distinguish the lazy applicants from the illiterate ones.

Check this out:

"... when dealing with a power as great as Genetics their must be some rules."

Makes you want to blow your brains out or convert to Islam and head to the Pakistani-Afghan border.

Newsflash: all candidates campaign on fear. "Terrorists will kill you if you vote for my opponent" is not a Republican bumper sticker, but a politician's bumper sticker. The Republican version may be "...because my opponent's weakness emboldens terrorists," while the Democratic version may be "...because my opponent's overaggressiveness incites terrorists," but it's the same fear-based argument.

"You'll be dying on the streets from disease while the health insurance company executives use $100 bills to light their cigars" is no less a "fear based argument" than anything Republicans argue.

No, it isn't. Arguing that your opponent's policies encourage or cause destruction, poverty and oppression in other countries and incite anti-Americanism and terror is an appeal to morality and basic humanity as well as self-interest (or "fear").

Same thing for plans that expand health care coverage. I have pretty good health care coverage and don't really have any fear of not being able to afford medical care, but I support health care plans that may actually cost me money while not improving my quality of care at all because I think it is the *right* thing to do. It has nothing at all to do with fear.

No, it isn't. Arguing that your opponent's policies encourage or cause destruction, poverty and oppression in other countries and incite anti-Americanism and terror is an appeal to morality and basic humanity as well as self-interest (or "fear").

In other words, "Opinions I agree with are appeals to morality and opinions I disagree with are appeals to fear."

But a cover letter/resume is an important personal document; it should be written and re-written and proofread and re-proofread until it's perfect. No excuse for making a mistake.

On the academic job market, there are plenty of excuses- trying to simultaneously complete a dissertation, publish articles, attend conferences, teach enough classes to make rent, and apply for jobs at the same time is a lot to juggle. Ideally everyone would have an unlimited amount of time to spend proofing cover letters again and again, but we don't have an unlimited amount of time- deadlines for job apps are during the busiest part of the semester, application packets are about 100 pages of material, ect. A friend who was on the market this year applied for 40 jobs and wrote about 15 different cover letters (cover letters for academic jobs can run quite long- 2-3 full pages). With that workload, I'd hope they overlook a typo or seven in my cover letter balanced against my publications and teaching experience. And again, I think they'd be stupid not to b/c even if the candidate does habitually make typos, producing perfect documents isn't as important to the job as producing high-level research or performance in the classroom. I can understand different standards in the legal profession.

Good god, it gets worse:

... "to tell weather Human genetec alterations..."
"... However If this power..."
"A being's essence as Aristilian thought defines it is ..."

All from a paragraph as long as Bill and Hillary's trail of lies.

Well, it all depends on what you mean by this. My guess is that Obama would govern, on domestic issues, a step or two to the left of Bill Clinton. He'd have at least two, probably four years of a very sympathetic congress, and so we'd see an expansion of health care coverage, a more progressive tax system, and some poverty-fighting measures, as well as a climate change plan. My hope - not totally unreasonable, given Obama's pretty great record on these issues in IL - is that he's take on a few criminal justice issues, particularly in the war on (some classes of people who use some classes of) drugs, that other center-left politicians have given up for dead.

I meant exactly what I said. I wasn't asking what Obama would do if elected, I was asking if there was a perception that he would do significant things for black americans above and beyond what say, Hillary would do. Unfortunately, I very much doubt there's any kind of meaningful data on the subject. FWIW, I tend to agree with your projections regarding an Obama administration. I might even come around to him if he took meaningful action against the "war on drugs," but that's probably wishful thinking.

Does anyone have any evidence not of the "overheard on a train" variety, or the MWE "making it up out of whole cloth" variety that a pretty standard center-left government would be unacceptable to African-Americans? Or does anyone have any evidence, based on Obama's policy proposals, advisers, and rhetoric, that he is offering or would deliver on a domestic platform that is significantly different from what we'd expect from any center-left politician?

I don't think standard american liberal government would be unacceptable to black americans, rather I'm curious whether they're expecting more from Obama as opposed to what they'd expect from a Clinton. Obviously whatever I overhear on trains is worthless as anything other than an anecdote. I'm still interested in hearing the stories of other people though.

One edits and rewrites and such as one goes along,

of course - you have to go back and put that imagery in there.

Well, I've been involved in the hiring process for people just out of college, for lawyers, and for legal staff, and unless the applicant has won a Nobel Prize or the equivalent, I essentially toss out any letter/resume with typos in it. It's one thing to make a mistake when writing an ordinary piece of business correspondence; it's quite another to do so when applying for a job. In the first case, a typo still reflects poorly on the letter writer, but if you send out scores of relatively routine letters, a typo will slip through every now and then; nobody is perfect. But a cover letter/resume is an important personal document; it should be written and re-written and proofread and re-proofread until it's perfect. No excuse for making a mistake.

I agree, but I've also made a typo in my own resume before, so I'm somewhat sympathetic to applicants who do. People often have multiple versions of their resumes (which highlight different things for different employers). People are also expected to update their resume more frequently than they used to be (or at least they perceive that they are). Attention to detail is important, but it's not the only thing that is.

However, certain errors, like mis-spelling the name of the company you're applying to--or having the wrong company name altogether--are unforgivable.

Hell, you don't even "need" to do a full spellcheck anymore, since the software underlines all the misspelled words as you type, so you never "need" to read it from the beginning

That's a very good point. And since spellcheck does not catch "there/their" mistakes, you get a raft of them in documents where writers rely on it.

One occupation that has perished, or at least greatly dwindled, in the last 25 years is that of professional thesis/dissertation editor/typist. Michelle Robinson's thesis looks like it was produced on a primitive word processor, probably (1985) a mainframe application, irritating to edit. I bet she keyboarded it herself, without involving a professional. This does not excuse her errors in the slightest, mind you. But it means that older, more error-free typed theses (like Bill Bradley's?) might have been similarly error-ridden in draft, but cleaned up by a professional. Students don't go that route any more. And as we all probably know, the ease of entering a block of text nowadays somewhat paradoxically becomes a disincentive to edit it. You just figure, hey, that looks good, I don't wanna go all the way back over it with a blue pencil.

Full disclosure: I taught freshman composition at Princeton while Robinson was a student there (I did not teach her). I take all the sins of that generation on my shoulders :)

JC,
Where do you teach? My students at SUNY are the worst with random capitalization...to the point where I just give up on figuring out the logic behind it.

Catholic University in beautiful NE Washington, DC.

Mike/3141:
It's hard if not impossible to predict the impact of an Obama presidency on race relations in this country. But to the extent we can imagine a negative impact, at least in the short-term, your scenario -- in which blacks have their hopes raised, then dashed, and respond with 1960s-style urban riots -- seems especially far-fetched. Far more likely is that conservative voices in our society will attribute some or all of what goes wrong in our country during his presidency -- and of course, things always go wrong -- to his alleged favoritism to blacks. Surely white guys will be lined up for their chance to do to Obama what Lou Dobbs does for immigrants. Talk radio, Fox, etc. will offer megaphones to many of these voices.

If race relations end up more rather than less raw at the end of an Obama presidency, I'd say the odds are at least 100:1 that a conservative white backlash -- not a black uprising -- will be the primary cause.

Michelle Robinson's thesis looks like it was produced on a primitive word processor, probably (1985) a mainframe application, irritating to edit.

My guess would be first generation Mac - I know that's what I wrote my undergrad thesis on as a contemporary of hers - or XyWrite or WordPerfect on a PC.

From the anecdotal files, my mother the former children's librarian and second grade teacher believes fervently that kids' language and writing skills suck because parents don't read to them enough in their pre-school years.

JC: are these take-home assignments/exams, or in-class exams? Not that anything excuses writing as poor as the examples you cite, but it's a mitigating factor if the paper was written under time pressure in class rather than in the comfort of one's living room.

DP:

And again, I think they'd be stupid not to b/c even if the candidate does habitually make typos, producing perfect documents isn't as important to the job as producing high-level research or performance in the classroom. I can understand different standards in the legal profession.

True; I did consider that distinction. An academic's writing is geared towards publication, and (I assume) you have some editorial assistance before something you write is published, so it may not be quite as big a deal. Lawyers don't have editors; all we have more senior lawyers who have more important and more billable things to do than proofread. The work we're expected to produce is to be submitted directly to court or our clients or adversaries. A badly written brief -- and I've seen lawyers I've worked with produce them -- has to be rewritten on the spot, under time pressure; it can't be deferred until the publishing process.

In any case, you miss my point. I wasn't discussing whether Atwater had worked on negative campaigns; of course he did. I was discussing your repeated silliness of pretending that negative campaigning was invented by, and the sole province of, Republicans. (On the rare occasions when you admit that a Democrat has campaigned negatively, you pretend that they're infringing on Atwater's patent.) Negative campaigning is not a special style of campaign that Republicans use and Democrats don't. It's what all politicians use (unless they've got such a huge lead that they don't want to mention their opponents at all). When a Democrat campaigns negatively, he's being a Democrat, not "borrowing from Lee Atwater" as you're wont to say.

Well, it certainly is true that in the past 40 years the Republicans (Nixon, Helms, Atwater, Rove, etc., etc.) have pretty much cornered the market of appealing to white racial fears and anxieties. Their all-white congressional delegation is one of the fruits of this repeated practice, which unless McCain puts a rein on it will continue unabated this year.

That said, of course negative campaigning is a fact of political life, engaged in on different levels by both parties, depending on the year and the issue. The Republicans have been running against the 60's for 40 years, which is roughly as long as the Democrats ran against Herbert Hoover. But the coded racial campaigns that even Atwater himself came to regret are a purely Republican phenomenon in the post-civil rights era.

And reading your repeated denials of this is like reading repeated posts from creationists, who are equally oblivious to all evidence, and can spin anything to fit their pre-existing belief. The main difference between you and the creationists is that you're far too intelligent to believe your own propaganda, but far too combative to admit that even Lee Atwater himself might have been onto something. You're like the guy caught in bed with his mistress, who tells his wife, "Are you going to believe your eyes or are you going to believe me?"

XyWrite or WordPerfect on a PC

Those were the days. I also remember SAMNA, which I found clunky, and MultiMate, a beautiful word processor, better in some ways in 1988 than MS Word in 2008 (not that that's a hard bar to clear).

From the anecdotal files, my mother the former children's librarian and second grade teacher believes fervently that kids' language and writing skills suck because parents don't read to them enough in their pre-school years.

That's probably part of it, but I attribute it to the emergence of a culture that produced "Dead Poets Society." The most civilization-killing part of that movie is when they tear the pages out of the poetry book and "learn" to trust themselves. You get there that stupid and suffocating idea that poetry is all and only about emotion, and not about structure. That's nonsense. It's the same in all contemporary art, unfortunately. So, as your parents or grandparents can tell you, where they had writing structure beaten into them, we (and our children) are taught to express ourselves however we feel.

Now, don't misunderstand me, great writing and art can be done by blasting through formal constraints - but it's interesting that the most lasting forms of that kind of art will be done and have been done by those who understood and were trained in those constraints (think Picasso and Faulkner and Beckett). I think this is one reason why contemporary American writers suffer by comparison with their int'l peers (b/c there ["their" as my student would write] you see people still trained in more traditional forms of composition).

Of course, I'm just ranting like a loon. 3 cups of coffee.

If race relations end up more rather than less raw at the end of an Obama presidency, I'd say the odds are at least 100:1 that a conservative white backlash -- not a black uprising -- will be the primary cause.

You're nuts, GuyM. The odds would be more like 500 or 1,000 to 1, not a mere 100.

As if black talk radio has 1/100th the power of the Dobbses and the Limbaughs to fan the flames of racial resentment. Only in Fantasyland.

From the anecdotal files, my mother the former children's librarian and second grade teacher believes fervently that kids' language and writing skills suck because parents don't read to them enough in their pre-school years.

Perhaps, but I wonder if it's more a matter of reading, rather than being read to. I read book after book in elementary school, on my own choosing, and I think that helped me tremendously. (Ironically, once I got to junior high school and they started assigning books I wasn't interested in, I stopped reading, for the most part; I didn't start reading again until college.)

The typewriter says hello. Although some of those errors could have been fixed with a ca. 1985 Brother with standard erase-rewrite capability, I don't rule out the possibility that Michelle Obama could have used a typewriter.

JC: are these take-home assignments/exams, or in-class exams? Not that anything excuses writing as poor as the examples you cite, but it's a mitigating factor if the paper was written under time pressure in class rather than in the comfort of one's living room.

These are their (there?) final papers. 3000 words, I required an outline 6 weeks ago, a rough draft 3 weeks ago, and then the final draft. Despite that process, I still get loose stool from them.

DP:

Those were the days. I also remember SAMNA, which I found clunky, and MultiMate, a beautiful word processor, better in some ways in 1988 than MS Word in 2008 (not that that's a hard bar to clear).

MS Word is a horrid, horrid program. On many different levels. It's like they actively try to make things difficult.

I use Wordperfect whenever I can, but I often need to deal with Word because most of the outside world uses it these days.

There is no single cause to the writing malaise of today. I think it boils down to the fact that one won't improve what one doesn't wish to practice.

DMN:

Did I ever ask if you were familiar with Mrs. Tilton, the internet persona of my b-i-l?

As if black talk radio has 1/100th the power of the Dobbses and the Limbaughs to fan the flames of racial resentment. Only in Fantasyland.

Black talk radio -- or Jeremiah Wright -- has far more power over blacks to fan the flames of racial resentment than the Dobbes and the Limbaughs do over whites to do so. Limbaugh will be no more vicious towards Obama than he would towards Hillary, Edwards, or any other liberal, and unless Obama makes race the issue in a given situation, Limbaugh won't.

(I assume) you have some editorial assistance before something you write is published,

I'm just starting to publish now, and what's interesting is how little attention editors give to typos/spelling/grammar. I'm pretty good at proofing my own work, so I'm not sure how egregious an error has to be for them to catch it, but I've had stuff get to the final stages without anyone catching missing or repeated words, missing periods, ect. Academic editors are more interested in content than they are checking/correcting your grammar, as their skill is in their field rather than in editing. A lot of journals/articles contain misspellings, punctuation mistakes. I have a friend trained as a journalist who will edit my stuff when I'm lucky, and he's merciless the way a magazine editor would be- he'll rewrite my sentences, rearrange paragraphs, change tenses, ect. The same piece would pass editorial review at a journal without one comment on grammar. of course, if you publish on a top-level press (like Oxford), they'll have it properly edited, but normally the understanding is that if the author makes mistakes they reflect on the attention he/she's given it, rather than the editor.

Perhaps, but I wonder if it's more a matter of reading, rather than being read to.

I agree that it's probably more about reading than being read to, but being read to at an early age probably makes one more likely to read on their own later on.

Most people can write tolerably, if not well, by simply writing the way that they speak. What amazed me when I worked as a writing tutor was how often a student's writing was nothing like their speech. I think part of this was rushing and not proofreading, and part of it was an attempt to "sound" smart/sophisticated.

Hell, you don't even "need" to do a full spellcheck anymore, since the software underlines all the misspelled words as you type, so you never "need" to read it from the beginning.

I actually turn this feature off whenever I'm given the opportunity -- not because I'm convinced my spelling is perfect, but because I'd like to improve it. Autocorrection makes it entirely too easy to retain one's bad spelling habits.

I have a friend trained as a journalist who will edit my stuff when I'm lucky, and he's merciless the way a magazine editor would be- he'll rewrite my sentences, rearrange paragraphs, change tenses, ect.

Mrs. MH#1F is a former production editor. If I ever need to publish something, I'll be set. Now I just need to write something worth publishing.

unless Obama makes race the issue in a given situation, Limbaugh won't

Kind of like the way Donovan McNabb made race an issue and Limbaugh felt he had to comment on it? :)

McNabb should never have played QB when RB, WR, and CB were open.

Andy, Christopher Hitchens has an answer to your pet question of whether Obama holds Wright's views. Hitchens concludes no, and goes on to suspect... wait for it... Michelle.

Hitchens is wrong. Obama feels the same way she does; her attitude is a significant part of what attracted him so much. The difference is that she can't act, her hatred is written all over her mean, angry face. Like all really good politicians he is a great actor and wears a much better mask.

A husband and wife don't necessarily have to have the same likes, but they must share their basic raw hatreds, or else the marriage can't succeed over the long term.

A husband and wife don't necessarily have to have the same likes, but they must share their basic raw hatreds

I always suspected that a deep loathing of Norton was all that kept Ralph and Alice Kramden together.

MS Word is a horrid, horrid program. On many different levels. It's like they actively try to make things difficult.

I use Wordperfect whenever I can, but I often need to deal with Word because most of the outside world uses it these days.

I hate MS Word and Wordperfect more than I hate Karl Rove, but my webmaster just introduced me to something called WordPad, which is blessedly free of every annoyance connected with those two other programs. I realize that 99.99% of everyone here undoubtedly knows about it already, or that there's something wrong with it that wouldn't affect me but would affect others, but to me this was a discovery ranking right up there with the time I found out how to sneak into RFK Stadium.

--------------

unless Obama makes race the issue in a given situation, Limbaugh won't

Kind of like the way Donovan McNabb made race an issue and Limbaugh felt he had to comment on it? :)

WordPad, brother.

Autocorrection makes it entirely too easy to retain one's bad spelling habits.

I drank the kool-aid on spell-checkers a long time ago- I just try to get the spelling right enough for the autocorrect...but I haven't written a paper without the benefit of a computer since I was 10...in the event of an EMP, I'm hoping society will be in such chaos no one will notice that dp can't spell to save his life. When Firefox integrated a spell checker, I think I messed up my keyboard....

Mrs. MH#1F is a former production editor. If I ever need to publish something, I'll be set.

I'm jealous. My writing is pretty solid (I've assimilated the specialized language of the field over the years), but it would be awesome with a proper editor tearing it apart...all I need is some money or pics of a Times editor doing something they shouldn't be at 4 AM...

Full disclosure: I taught freshman composition at Princeton while Robinson was a student there (I did not teach her). I take all the sins of that generation on my shoulders :)

What years were you there? I didn't realize the writing requirement went that far back; I thought it had been instituted more recently than that when I got there.

DMN:

Did I ever ask if you were familiar with Mrs. Tilton, the internet persona of my b-i-l?

I don't believe you ever asked me, no.

EDIT: And even though you didn't ask me, I'll answer you: no, I don't believe I am.

I take it that's a no, DMN? You should check out his blog, "The Sixth International." He knows RETARDO (HTML Mencken) from Sadly, No and writes occasionally for Fistful of Euros. You'd hate his stuff (in a fun way).

What years were you there? I didn't realize the writing requirement went that far back; I thought it had been instituted more recently than that when I got there

Composition wasn't required of all Princeton freshmen when I taught there ('81-'83), but of maybe a quarter or a third, people who tested into (or didn't test out of) the course. Were you an undergraduate at Princeton? I was only a graduate student, just an asterisk-83 :)

Bob:

A close friend of ours was a grad student there at that time: you didn't happen to know an odd, 6'4" baritone named "Joe", did you?

you didn't happen to know an odd, 6'4" baritone named "Joe", did you?

Can't say that I did, JC. "Odd" wouldn't have distinguished any of us, of course ...

I teach developmental writing at the community college level; there are many factors involved in the issues people have. Less reading in society, the ubiquity of text messaging and IM communication are three such factors. Here in CA, of course, many of my students come from ESL backgrounds, which complicates issues such as grammar, word choice and mechanics in English.

Dave makes a good point, in the sense that I spend an enormous amount of class time having them talk, but in structured ways, such that they learn to construct a coherent argument verbally--a medium more comfortable for them than writing. I always tell them that when they are arguing with their friends at nightclubs or whatever they are doing the same things guys like Hitchens do--just in a different style and a different medium. One way I demonstrate this is by showing them thesis statements constucted in both slang and formal language which say essentially the same thing. We always do some type of structured speaking activity, usually divided into 4 or 5 parts, moving along the continuum of Bloom's taxonomy and hitting 2 or 3 modalities, before they attempt to construct a thesis sentence and support the argument with specifics. This way, by the time they get there, the argument is a natural outgrowth of what has come before. It is crucial not to binarize (Is that a word? Oughta be. I am sure Rich will light up my ass and make fun of dumbass, greedy, pinhead liberal teachers again it if it is not.) and polarize "structure" and "expressing yourself." Students need both--just as they need both drill and problem-solving skills to be better at math (I teach math, too).

We also spend a lot of time recognizing and constructing stylistically coherent thesis statements, a task in and of itself.

As far as the mechanical stuff ("their" and "there" and other homonyms, as well as punctuation) this is very hard for many people, and it is largely a matter of repetition. Even when I have taught higher-level university-transfer type classes, we hit that over and over and over again with games, etc. One way to sell that to adults is to tell them they don't want to #### it up when they email the boss. With kids, of course, as with almost everything else, it is tougher. I did the same kinds of things at the high school level, too.

Hey, writing teacher, aren't "there" and "their" homophones?

BTW: I know this, or recall this, only b/c last week my 9 year old was working on them.

Hey, writing teacher, aren't "there" and "their" homophones

Yeah, but I just use the one term with the students.

***

Several similar linguistic concepts are related to homonymy. The term 'homonym' is ambiguous because there are a number of ways that two meanings can share the 'same name' and because the term is used in different ways by educated speakers, and these variant meanings are recorded by dictionaries. The terms homograph and homophone are however usually defined the same way as meaning "same spelling" and "same sound" respectively, and heteronym and homonym can be seen as respective subclasses of these.

***

We've just passed Cal Ripken, and are closing in hard on Pete Rose (singles). Fergie Jenkins will be next to fall.

Why?

AlouGoodbye Posted: May 06, 2008 at 11:53 AM (#2770670)

We've just passed Cal Ripken, and are closing in hard on Pete Rose (singles). Fergie Jenkins will be next to fall

I want to pass the Katrina thread (5801) because I don't like the fact that the all-time BTF mark was set in a thread on which I did not post.

JC,

I am sure Rich will really kick my ass over the homophone/homonym thing. I have an excuse, though, in that one of my degrees is from UC San Diego.

Good god, it gets worse:

... "to tell weather Human genetec alterations..."
"... However If this power..."
"A being's essence as Aristilian thought defines it is ..."

Aw bull ####, man. Come on, JC, the kids haven't changed, you have!
You took a teaching position, 'cause you thought it'd be fun, right?
Thought you could have summer vacations off...and then you found
out it was actually work...and that really bummed you out.

Why?

The book I use actually just calls them "Words that Sound Alike" and on my own handouts I use sometimes use pictures of pita bread and call them "Pain In The Ass" words. That helps the students approach them in a humorous way. I keep the technical terms to a minimum in teaching grammar. I toss out the words "homonyms" occasionally but do not explain the technical diffs among homophones, homonyms, homographs, etc. I am not a linguist, in any case, as my use of the term shows.

Most people can write tolerably, if not well, by simply writing the way that they speak. What amazed me when I worked as a writing tutor was how often a student's writing was nothing like their speech. I think part of this was rushing and not proofreading, and part of it was an attempt to "sound" smart/sophisticated.

Really? My experience is that most people write the way that they speak, and that this is the problem. Most people speak very poorly. (Did you ever read John McWhorter's Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and why We Should, Like, Care? Very interesting contrasts; the one that your comments bring to mind is the difference between how politicians used to speak and how they speak today.)

DMN:

I agree with the quote you pulled. In my experience, I get three kinds of students: (1) the rarest are those who write well; equally split (about) are (2) those who write poorly b/c they write how they speak (poorly), and (3) those who write poorly b/c they understand writing should be different from their poor informal speech, but who mimic "sophistication." They're equally bad and incomprehensible; however the latter also suffer the disease of pretension.

Really? My experience is that most people write the way that they speak, and that this is the problem.

Good god, I agree. Do a simple experiment. Tape a short conversation, then transcrbe it, with pauses and errors and all. You won't beleive how bad it comes out on paper.

I have a problem with one of my colleagues. He writes something like he talks and he talks in one cliche after another. His written documents are filled with hackneyed phrases that make his docs 3 times the length they need to be, while conveying half the subject matter. If anything important needs to be written, I always make sure I write the first draft. Otherwise, I'll spend twice as much time editing his than writng mine from scratch.

Composition wasn't required of all Princeton freshmen when I taught there ('81-'83), but of maybe a quarter or a third, people who tested into (or didn't test out of) the course. Were you an undergraduate at Princeton? I was only a graduate student, just an asterisk-83 :)

'93 S'93, and there was a freshman writing requirement by the time I was there.

You won't beleive how bad it comes out on paper

Yeah I would.

I have a friend trained as a journalist who will edit my stuff when I'm lucky, and he's merciless the way a magazine editor would be- he'll rewrite my sentences, rearrange paragraphs, change tenses, ect. The same piece would pass editorial review at a journal without one comment on grammar.

Ah, okay. The only publishing I have real firsthand familiarity with is law review, and those things get edited/rewritten up the wazoo, because, well, you've got slave labor to do the work. Authors generally hate how much editing is done to their submissions.

Speaking of word processor programs on the Mac:

I wrote my thesis in college on WriteNow. The morning it was due, I went to make a few very minor changes before I handed it in, at which point the computer decided to print out all the pages except for 46, 47, and 48 of 68. I worked all day in the computer lab - as the clock ticked down to the due time - with no success. I even worked with the NEXT machines we had to see if they could help. Finally, in a frustrated rage I hurled the pages I had at the ceiling. As the papers floated down I realized with a start that those 3 pages probably had no changes on them from a draft I'd shoved in the garbage in my dorm room 3 weeks ago. Which, of course, I hadn't thrown away yet. I then used a xerox machine to cut and paste - with scissors - a couple of sentences on 46 and 47 that had to be re-formatted due to the earlier changes. Page 48 couldn't be fixed that way, so in a desperation so horrifying I would try anything, I actually erased the entire thesis that existed on the disk EXCEPT for that page and tried to print it. I sat and waited as the fabulous hourglass went back and forth for about 10 minutes. And here's where it becomes kind of hackneyed. I finally screamed at the monitor and literally slammed on the hard drive with my fist. And the last page actually printed. I finished about 5 minutes to 5 PM and handed it in. The file that only had one page of 4 months of work left anyhow never opened again.

WriteNow wasn't really the best program.

The only publishing I have real firsthand familiarity with is law review, and those things get edited/rewritten up the wazoo, because, well, you've got slave labor to do the work.

I dunno, they didn't treat me that poorly at Cravath, or O'Sullivans when I was doing their night shift proofreading. Maybe the libertarian law firms have a different way of treating their proofreaders. :-)

My experience is that most people write the way that they speak, and that this is the problem. Most people speak very poorly.

having them talk, but in structured ways, such that they learn to construct a coherent argument verbally

I wouldn't say "poorly" per se, but it is a different mode of communication.