Because of a server load issue, which I suspect is due to comment spam, I’ve disabled commenting for the moment. Since it ain’t a blog without comments, I’ll try to get that up and running again asap.
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Because of a server load issue, which I suspect is due to comment spam, I’ve disabled commenting for the moment. Since it ain’t a blog without comments, I’ll try to get that up and running again asap. When you are sitting in the garage with your laptop on your lap, writing, and the garage door is open and you’re enjoying the beautiful weather and you have a look of ease and contentment on your face, it’s really hard to convince missionaries that yes, you are in fact working. Learning is a craft, a set of skills that you put to use over the course of your life to construct your education. Like any craft, your mastery of the tools at your disposal is crucial. One of the most overlooked tools in the learner’s toolbox is your computer and its software. Your instructors have probably spent a lot of time teaching you how to use books and the research library, maybe how to glean information from the Web, and definitely how to use language to put forth and defend an argument, but how much time have you or your professors spent on how to use your computer? Yet in today’s world, your computer is arguably your most important tool – it’s where you store the notes you compile from your reading, where you surf the Internet seeking out statistics and definitions, where you write your papers – it’s the tool that, in a way, enables us to use most of the rest of the tools in our repertoire. There are several reasons why so little attention is paid in college to the technology that gets you through day to day. One is that many academics themselves don’t really know much about computers. All but your youngest professors came of age when typewriters were still in common use, and have only barely mastered the fundamentals of computing, often in bits and drabs accumulated working on their own. Another reason is that there are so many programs, operating websites, and services that do the same thing that there are often no generic ways to do anything, and teachers fear that explaining how to do something in one program might hopelessly confuse students who use a different program. A third is that some professors are intimidated by the knowledge their students already have – many of you are so-called ‘digital nativesâ€, with thumbs the size of oak branches that move at the speed of light over your cell phone keypads. It is often though, erroneously, that students have nothing to learn about technology from us old fogeys. And yet… I’ve had to teach students how to attach documents to emails, how to format their margins, how to save in file formats other than their program’s defaults. While most software promises to make whatever it is a program is supposed to do easy and painless, all software comes with a learning curve. Most often, we quickly master the rudiments of a program’s functions and then ignore the other 80% of what the program does. Here’s an interesting fact: while planning the latest release of Office, Microsoft surveyed thousands of computer users about the functions they’d like to see in their office suite. Almost without exception, people wished for features that were already available — they just hadn’t figured out how to access them. Take some time to get to know the software you use the most – especially your word processor, spreadsheet, email, and Internet browser. Go through all the pull-down menus and google anything that isn’t self-explanatory. “Mail mergeâ€, for instance. “Pivot tableâ€. Check the various file types available under the “Save As†menu (usually there’s a drop-down menu with all the formats you can save a document as). If possible, change the default file-type to a standard format like “MS Word .doc†for word processors – your professor will thank you when you email her a paper and opening it doesn’t produce pages of gibberish! Read a couple of reviews and a tutorial or two about your software – learn its strengths and weaknesses and some of its obscure functions. Check the import and export options, if there are any, and see what programs you can swap data with. Unless computers hopelessly confuse you, you don’t need to take a class to learn how to use most software. But you should spend a few minutes here and there studying your programs – mastering the functions you use already and learning new ones. You may well discover new ways to do tasks that are otherwise painstakingly difficult, or ways to integrate programs that increase your productivity. In any case, you’ll become more and more comfortable with your tools, until using them becomes second-nature and you can spend your time figuring out the solutions to the world’s problems instead of the solutions to your formatting problems. This is the first of a multi-post series I’ll be putting together over the summer. The goal is to accumulate a collection of tips that can be compiled into a guide for college and university students. If you have any good advice for students that you’d like to share, please contact me. I’m always a little baffled vby students who tell me they throw out their old assignments at the end of the semester or, almost as often, as soon as they get them back. This shows a level of faith in the goodness of the universe that is far beyond my own capacities. There are two reasons why you should hold onto your papers, your syllabus, and really just about everything a professor gives you. The first is practical: stuff happens. Professors forget to enter an assignment into their gradebook, they lose their bags, their cars are stolen, their computers meltdown. Your saved copies of your graded papers, syllabuses, and handouts are your proof that you did the work, that you did it according to the professor’s instructions, and that it was received by the professor. If you find at the end of the semester that your grade is lower than you’d expected, and the professor says it’s because s/he never got your term paper, and you can dig in your files and bring out the graded paper with the bright shiny “A” at the top, you can probably convince the professor to change the grade. If you feel that the professor graded you unfairly for some reason, you can go to the department with your work and request an outside review of your work. Essentially, your folder of saved material is your insurance policy, and it is always good to have insurance. The second reason is intellectual: your papers are more than just an embarrassing record of naiveté and sophomoric thinking, they are a collection of quotes, bibliographic entries, a finely-tuned phrase here and there, and the occasional forceful argument. Most papers can be reworked into larger assignments when you find yourself in more advanced courses, whether in college or graduate school. In short, your papers are a treasure trove of mine-able material to draw on, likely under circumstances you haven’t anticipated. You’re trying to remember the name of the author of a book you read, or what the psychological principle is that applies to some situation, or whatever — dig out your old papers and have a look. Chances are, they’re both more embarrassing and less embarrassing than you remember. I keep a small file box with all my student papers, from undergrad and grad school, as well as all my syllabuses and every handout. It doesn’t take much room, and it’s reassuring to know it’s there. I also have every paper I’ve written since I started using a computer in a “courses” folder on my PC. With hard drive space being cheap and plentiful — I have thumb drives with as much memory as my first desktop — there’s hardly ever any reason to delete files at all, so why not keep them? I know it’s hard to imagine needing this stuff down the line, but the reality is, that’s why you should keep it. You may not need everything, but I can virtually guarantee you that you will, some day, want or need at least one paper you wrote in college — and that it will be the one you least expected to ever have to look at again. Here’s a bonus tip I left out of my recent post on proofreading. One of the most common words used in the English language is “is” and its variants. Unfortunately, “is” signifies only existence, a quality of being, and not anything interesting about the nature of the existence being described. So it’s important to use verbs that convey more meaning, that carry forward the action or ideas that make up our work. Paying special attention to the kinds of verbs you use in your writing, and replacing them with stronger verbs when proofreading, can make a big difference in the final product. Listen:
I’m certainly no mystery writer, but the second passage does a much better job of capturing the tension and foreboding of the scene. Using forceful verbs helps you avoid the “passive voice” that Microsoft’s grammar checker is always nagging you about, and it gives you another tool besides adverbs and adjectives to flesh out your description. It also makes for more exciting, snappier prose, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that! One of the greatest frustrations that professors face is the lack of solid writing skills among some of our brightest students. To see a student who we other wise know to be smart and even articulate bury their written ideas under poor grammar, bad spelling, awkward colloquialisms, and misconstrued logic is painful, even heart-breaking. I’ve come to believe, though, that a big part of the problem is not so much that students are inherently lazy writers or that they simply don’t care enough to do well, but that they do not proofread their work, at least in part because they haven’t learned how to do it well. I’m using “proofread” here to encompass what are really three separate steps: revising, editing, and proofreading. Technically, proofreading is the final review of a draft for typos, dropped words, and other minor errors. The real action is in the revising – taking the original “off the top of my head” draft apart and putting it back together as a better product. I had a teacher in high school who described it as “re-visioning”, actually re-building the piece to present a new and more thought out vision. The reality is that we know our topic better after we’ve written an essay on it, so in revising we bring that improved understanding to bear on our original thoughts. Then we can begin editing, going through the piece to see if there isn’t a better way to express each idea, or if the words we’ve chosen are really the best words we could have used. Then we can proofread to make sure there aren’t any errors that might distract a reader away from our finely honed prose. But for classroom essays, which are usually written under a tight schedule and on topics that their authors might not feel particularly passionate about, it’s fair to consider all three as part of a single process. Here’s a few tips to make that process more effective:
Students often don’t understand why professors put so much stress on the form of their writing: on grammar and bibliography formatting and margins and spelling and so on. They feel that the ideas they’ve expressed are the important thing, and they’re right. But form matters – if it didn’t, students wouldn’t be toting iPods around campus, they’d settle for cheaper and uglier models. A well-designed product is not just better-looking, it performs its job better and it’s a joy to use. The goal of writing should be to produce iPods, not cheap knockoffs with names that kind of sound similar if you don’t read them closely. There’s real-world consequences, too: I recently read the results of a survey of Fortune 500 human resources managers, and some 80-odd percent of them said they will throw out a resume or cover letter if it has even one typo. So it’s clearly a good idea to develop effective proofreading strategies while you’re developing all the other skills you’ll need in the workplace. More importantly, though, writing is a reflection of thought, and sharpening your writing skills will help sharpen your thinking skills. And that is what you’re in school for, right? The Internet is, in a word, vast. There are not millions but billions of pages out there, and at least one of them must have just the piece of information you’re looking for. So how do you sort through all of that overwhelming bounty of information to get just the information you’re looking for? Enter Google. Used well, the search engine with the plain white homepage can quite literally bring a world of information to your fingertips. Used poorly, though, and Google can make you yearn for the days of card catalogs and harried librarians. We’ve all had the experience of entering a search term into Google and being informed that Google found 2,684,541 results for our search – and, page after page, none of them are what we’re looking for! It’s important to keep in mind that, no matter how friendly those googly eyes in the logo look, at its heart, Google is just a machine – however well-designed, in the end Google has no human intuition or judgment to help it decide what, precisely, you’re looking for. Keeping that in mind can help improve your search results drastically. Let’s walk through a simple search to see how. Perhaps you’re interested in the ’80s New Wave band, The Cars. Enter the word “cars” into Google, though, and you’re liable to get all sorts of links to car repair sites, auto dealerships, the recent animated movie “Cars”, and so on. The first link even remotely related to the band appears on the ninth page of results in the search I just ran – deep enough in to try the strongest patience. Fortunately, Google gives you plenty of tools to help you better target your search. The first and most useful is to enclose a search term in quotes. Putting a phrase in quotes will only return pages where that exact phrase appears – those words in that order. So let’s try “the cars” in quotes, and see what happens… (Here’s a tip: Google doesn’t pay attention to capitalization, so save a couple keystrokes and use all lower-case letters.) Ah, now we’re talking! The first four results I get are directly related to the band – not too shabby! It is more likely that a page about The Cars would use the phrase “the cars” than a page about automobiles or movies. Using quotes is incredibly useful when you remember a line from a song and want to find its title, or when you’re trying to remember what movie a line was from. I use it for tech support when I have a problem with my computer; if Internet Explorer won’t start, I figure someone out there who might have written up an answer for me probably included the phrase “Internet Explorer won’t start” in his or her article. (Here’s another tip: Google is so friendly, that it will even put the closing quote on for you, so you only have to put a quote at the beginning of your search phrase.) Another way to narrow down your search results and make them more relevant is to include more search words. Instead of putting The Cars in quotes, we might have added another term, or two, or more – again, think about what words would be likely to appear on a page about whatever you’re looking for. So I might add the name of the lead singer to my search and enter “cars ocasek” (without the quotes, this time); again, the first few results are directly related to the band The Cars, although they are different from the results I got with the last search. By the way, you can mix and match these techniques, piling up terms and phrases, like this: cars “my best friend’s girlfriend”. There are dozens of more complex ways to fine-tune your Google searches: you can use “or” to search for pages including one term or another (e.g. “cars OR blondie” will return all pages that include either word), you can use various wild cards to replace words in phrases (e.g. “she’s my * girlfriend” will return pages with “she’s my best friend’s girlfriend” but also “she’s my favorite girlfriend” or “she’s my neighbor but I wish she was my girlfriend” and so on), you can use the minus sign to exclude words from your results, and on and on. Google is a powerful computing tool, and it’s possible to build search strings that look like formulas from a theoretical physics textbook. But for almost all of the things we look for on a day-to-day basis, the techniques above, combined with a little bit of savvy about what the page you’re looking for is likely to include, will bring you exactly what you’re looking for. Write anywhere. That’s the promise of Google’s new service, Google Documents (or “Google Docs” for short). Born out of Google’s acquisition of the online word processor Writely, Google Docs is an amazing example of how the Web can transform our lives in ways we couldn’t imagine even 5 years ago. I mean, it’s a word processor – a full-featured, easy-to-use word processor – and it’s *online*, available from any computer with Internet access, any time you want. For free. To use Google Docs, you need a Google account. If you already use another Google service, like Gmail or Google Groups, you already have a Google account and can log in with your existing login. Otherwise, signing up is easy: just go to docs.google.com and click “Create a New Account”. Once you’re logged in, you’ll be presented the Google Docs homepage, a list of your most recent documents and links to create a new one, as well as links for settings and other site functions. Create a new document and Google will load a full-fledged word processor into your browser window. Or, you can import documents from your desktop, allowing you to access them anywhere. The interface is very similar to other word processors you’ve used, with buttons for formatting, font and style selection, and other word processing functions. While not as extensive as the options available in Word, OpenOffice, or WordPerfect, Google Docs has everything you need for basic writing and editing. You can even use many of the same keyboard shotcuts you’re used to from other programs, like ctrl-i to italicize selected text. Once you’ve created a document, you have several choices of formats to save it in. If you select “Save” from the File menu, your work will be saved at Google Doc and accessible from anywhere. But you can also save in the Word .doc format, the standardized .rtf format, the OpenOffice .odf format, or plain text, which will download the file to your hard drive so you can open it in the program of your choice. What’s more, you can save your file as HTML to post it on the Internet, and even as a .pdf file to share your work via Adobe Acrobat Reader or the fast and quick FoxitReader. From the same menu you can print or run a word count as well as find and replace words or phrases in the body of your text. Google Docs offers more than just a basic word processing, though. Documents are automatically saved while you’re working on them, and the entire revision history is available under the “Revisions” tab. This is especially useful for another important feature, the ability to collaborate with others on a document. Click on the “Share” tab at the right and you’ll be able to enter the email addresses of people who you want to be able to view your document, or even to edit and add to it. They will receive an email with a link to the document and instructions on adding to it. If somebody makes changes you don’t like, you can always revert to an earlier version. Your work can also be made publicly available under the “Publish” tab. Google Docs will publish the work at a Google address or, if you have a blog, can publish it directly to your blog as a new entry. For organization of your documents, Google offers you the ability to add and search by tags. If you have a Gmail account, you might already do this with your email, but even if you’ve never heard of “tagging” documents you’ll find the concept very simple. Instead of putting a document into one and only one folder, tagging allows you to assign one, two, ten, or a hundred keywords to your documents. If, for instance, you have an essay you wrote in college, you might tag it with the name of the class, the name of the professor, the topic of the paper, and so on. Your tags become “virtual folders”, so that in one view you can see all the documents that include a particular tag – you could look at all the papers you wrote in English Lit, or you could look at all the papers you’ve written about Shakespeare, or you could look at all the work you wrote in college, or everything in a particular language, or whatever. You tag your documents according to the categories that matter to you, not according to what one folder you think might be closest to what you think is important about a piece of work. Finally, whether you tag your documents or not, it wouldn’t be Google if they didn’t also offer the ability to apply their awesome search technology to your documents. You can search by keywords, phrases, anything you can do with Google to find things on the Internet you can do with Google to find things in your own documents. This makes your Google Docs a powerful repository not just for new documents but for your old documents as well; upload them to Google Docs and they will be fully indexed and easily available whenever you need them. As someone who works at several different job sites, Google Docs has been an incredible tool for me. I can pick up my work from wherever and add to it, and when it’s done I can download it to my home computer. What’s more, since you can store up to 5,000 documents in your account, Google Docs provides an excellent an free off-site backup solution: I keep my dissertation and research materials there, as well as anything important I’m working on at the moment. If anything were to happen to my home PC, I can easily restore my most important documents directly from Google Docs. With its flexibility, ease of use, and generous storage, Google Docs has bcome my all-purpose tool away from home. I use it to back up important work, to take notes when I’m on the go, to capture web pages when I’m surfing at a public computer terminal, to send documents to colleagues for their feedback, and to do editing when the ability to roll back to earlier versions is important to me. While there are a few other sites that offer online word processing, such as Zoho Writer and Writeboard, Google Docs offers exactly the right mix of simplicity and advanced features for me. And even when I’m not writing, it’s comforting to know that it’s there, waiting, as soon as – and wherever – I need it. The study or linguistics over the last century, as in the social sciences in general, has been characterized by a departure from the historical comparative method dominant in the 1800s. Modern students of language left behind the strongly evolutionist search for origins and took up the investigation of language as a working system and its implications for humans who use language in society. The foundation for such synchronic investigation was laid by Ferdinand de Saussure, from whom all following investigations have either developed or departed (or both). One of the important developments inspired by Saussurean linguistics was the examination of language’s role in thought, a problem which led Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf to develop their Relativity Hypothesis. Although their work ultimately failed to answer satisfactorily the question of how language and thinking are related, the Sapir-Whorf Relativity Hypothesis has continued to be influential, and the implications for further study has been significant. Put simply, Sapir and Whorf believed that the language we speak profoundly influences the way we construct our worlds. Saussure himself had stated that language is fundamental to human thought. “[T]hought is like a swirling cloud,” he says in Course in General Linguistics, “where no shape is intrinsically determined. No ideas are established in advance, and nothing is distinct, before the introduction of linguistic structure” (Saussure: 110[155]). But where Saussure took this relationship for granted, Sapir and Whorf investigated what it means that we think with language. The focus is not on the words themselves, the vocabulary, but on the system, in the Saussurean sense of the total language considered as a self-contained and integrated whole, wherein sounds, words, and grammar operate according to mutual relationships. The effect of language on thought was especially developed by Whorf in his investigation of “covert” categories, systematic relations in language which are not overtly marked. A basic instance of this is the difference between “sheep” (singular) and “sheep” (plural), where the plurality of the second word is not indicated by the word itself, but by grammatical relations within the sentence. Covert categories were interesting to Whorf because they function on a deeply unconscious level and thus, Whorf believed, would have a motivational quality not easily resisted. One covert category Whorf found especially significant is the case of gender in English. In contrast to other languages such as French and German, English has no covert gender markings for nouns. However, Whorf points out, many English nouns are not gender-neutral. For example, in Romance languages, female names are overtly marked with an “-elle” or “-ella” affix, as in “Danielle” or “Marguella”. In English, though, there are no clear differences between male and female names. Despite this lack of overt markings, it is still understood that George, William, and Richard are male, while Jane, Susan, and Betty are female. The gender of the named person is determined unconsciously, covertly; it is established through systematic relations within the entire language structure. The implications of language for world-view are drawn more dramatically in Whorf’s comparison of Western European languages (called “SAE”, Standard Average European, for convenience) with Hopi. In SAE, non-real abstracts, such as time, are dealt with the same way real objects are. Thus time is spoken of in terms of measurable units (years, hours, days) and is counted as if those units were physical objects (1 hour, 10 days, compared with 1 chair, 10 walnuts). Furthermore, we apply spatial adjectives to temporal phenomena (“What a long day. ” “Is your week going smoothly?”). Hopi, on the other hand, does not treat time and other abstract concepts at all the same way. Where SAE expresses time in terms of units, Hopi expresses it in terms of the process of getting later. Thus, a “length of time” in SAE becomes a relational comparison of the difference in lateness between two events. Time units are not expressed as things which can be considered together, but as a measure of how far along in the process of becoming later an event occurs. The metaphorical treatment of abstract concepts as reified entities recurs throughout SAE; words and ideas are treated as things which, when “relayed”, “carry” a message which, if “made clear”, a person could “receive”, and thus we “get a messages across”; substance qualities, such as “water” are used which treat them as if it were possible to apprehend them as a whole (“I’d like water” is said the same way as “The Earth’s surface is 70% water”). Hopi does not use metaphorical analogy in describing the world. Where SAE speakers say “water” as a description of any substance with that quality, the Hopi term describes the specific form in which it appears, so that it is unnecessary to use phrases like “a cup of… ” or “a gallon of… ” in order to give the water manipulable form. Likewise, instead of relying on spatial metaphors to describe abstract concepts, Hopi has “abundant conjugational and lexical means of expressing duration, intensity, and tendency directly as such” (Whorf: 146). Whorf argues that the differences between SAE and Hopi linguistic systems are expressed in the cultural behaviours of their speakers. The Hopi linguistic expression of time as a process of becoming later is seen reflected in the Hopi cultural emphasis on preparedness and “constant insistent repetition” (Whorf: 151). Whorf says that, “To the Hopi, for whom time is not a motion but a ‘getting later’ of everything that has ever been done, unvarying repetition is not wasted but accumulated” (151). Similarly, the SAE linguistic reification of abstracts is held responsible for “materialism, psychophysical parallelism, physics… and dualistic views of the universe in general, Indeed… almost everything that is ‘hard, practical common sense'” (Whorf: 152). Unfortunately, Whorf’s arguments are ambiguous as to the exact relationship between language and world-view. He seems to be arguing for a causal relationship: “Concepts of ‘time’ and ‘matter’… depend upon the nature of the language or languages through the use of which they have been developed” (Whorf: 158). However, his evidence does not prove causality–the statement quoted above could as easily read “The nature of a language depends upon the concepts which it has been developed to express.” Whorf himself admits that culture and its language system develop together in a state of feedback. It is no surprise then that at any given moment, linguistic structure is reflected in cultural world-views. To point out such correlations as exist at a given moment does not seem to be Whorf’s goal, anyway; besides, such correlations would shed little light on the nature of the relationship between language and culture. In keeping with Saussure’s notion of a language imposed on the individual from without, however, a sort of causal relationship can be inferred which has not so much to do with the relation between language and culture as between language and individuals, by saying that language as it is learned and used by individuals shapes the way they apprehend and construct their world. The problem is that this sort of argument necessitates dealing with language as an individual phenomenon, a situation which goes against one of the basic premises of Saussurean linguistics: that the object of study is langue, the level of language which is collective and shared by all speakers, and not parole, which is the level of language which is individual and variable. In order to study the motivational aspect of language in forming individual world-views, we should have to enter the forbidden realm of parole. Saussure’s langue/parole distinction stood as a major factor in Sapir’s and Whorf’s failure to satisfactorily develop their Relativity Hypothesis. In Whorf’s writing, the tendency towards the field of parole is apparent. In “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language”, he uses examples from his experience as an insurance investigator to illustrate the relation between thought and language. For instance:
Whorf makes it clear that the accident described was caused as a result of habitual thinking which reflects linguistic usage. The word “blower” acts more powerfully to motivate behaviour than does the actual function of the device, to “create a current of air. ” However, this example, as well as the others he gives, is dependent on the context in which the speech act occurs. In other words, Whorf’s examples are all instances of language in use, that which Saussure designated parole and declared “ancillary and more or less accidental” ( Saussure: 14 [30]) and thus unnecessary for linguistic consideration. Much of Whorf’s ambiguity is the result of trying to study instances of parole according to the rules of langue. His failure to do so reflects not so much a lack of reasoning ability on his part but a weakness in the basic assumptions of Saussurean linguistic analysis. What is called for is a linguistic methodology for the study of language in use, and of the complex relationship between the shared system of meanings (langue) and the way those meanings influence behaviour in specific contexts (parole). While Saussure’s method is adequate for the study of language as a human trait, Whorf’s method begins to look at language as something which people do, for which Saussure’s method is sorely lacking. While the Sapir-Whorf Relativity Hypothesis ultimately failed, it did so in interesting and even constructive, ways. As students of Franz Boas, Sapir and Whorf set out to prove the intellectual equality between Westerners and so-called “primitive” peoples. Whorf stresses that while the Hopi language and world-view are certainly different from our own. they are not inferior, and in many ways may in fact be superior as a way of perceiving and describing the world; “English compared to Hopi is like a bludgeon compared to a rapier” (Whorf: 85). While Whorf certainly succeeds in making this point, he fails in adequately addressing the greater issues raised by his work. Perhaps, had he lived longer, he may have transcended the Saussurean limitations on his work. Perhaps not. As it stands, he left a slew of unanswered questions, and a clue that the study of language has to be expanded it we are ever going to understand what it means to be language-using creatures. References Cited
Whorf, Benjamin Lee.
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