Come-to-Secular-Public-School-Version-of-Jesus: PLAGIARISM HURTS.

Happy Memorial Day! As you remember the sacrifices the brave men and women of the US Armed Forces make for us every day, think about what a dick move it is to use that precious, freedomy freedom to cheat in school.

Here's a litany of people and institutions academic dishonesty hurts--prepare to shed a tear! WARNING: this is by far my most rambly and rambunctious YouTube. The tutorials don't generally run like this. And eventually I'll start adding some production values to these. Right now? One take, and IT SHOWS.

How to Write a Coherent Paragraph About Anything

Grüße, Paper Interventionists!

Yes, that's right, I speak German, at least better than Lady Gaga does (no offense meant to Her Gagaship, whom I adore).

Anyway, speaking of languages, I thought I'd offer a very brief crash course on how to write a coherent paragraph about anything. Granted, in the US, many academic-dishonesty horror stories come courtesy of ESL students in over their heads and driven to desperate measures (just like I must have been, to write that mixed-metaphor!).

However, in my (albeit limited) experience, the worst cases of I Can't Write a Coherent Sentence come from native speakers of English. (NB: A similar phenomenon comes courtesy of the anti-Spanish/whatever other language people might speak movement in the US, where I've seen more times than I can count the directive "YOUR IN AMERICA SPEAK ENGLISH." As my far-better half says, "You know, maybe English isn't for you. You should try another language and see if you speak it better." ANYWAY. I don't want to lose the Xenophobic demographic here--I'm all for your linguistic xenophobia as long as you yourself know the difference between your and you're.)

At any rate, the following holds true for you if you are:

1. a native speaker of English who doesn't like to write, or never got taught how because your school spent 12 years preparing you for standardized tests and instilling a blood-deep hatred of the written word;
2. an intermediate ESL speaker whose written work needs some help;
3. a paper-writer who enjoys learning time-saving techniques that work for all papers, ever, regardless of subject matter.

In a classic college paper, there are basically four types of sentence you should be writing:

1. The sentence that introduces an idea, author or problem, we'll call it I: "In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gabsty, the figure of the optometrist is highly complex and deserving of a close reading."
2. The sentence that works with or around your data (or "evidence"), we'll call it E: "When Gatsby tells Daisy to 'Move, b*tch, get out of the way,' Fitzgerald has revealed his character's gift for both misogyny and time-travel." (Oh, by the way, all sample insights re: The Great Gabsty are flagrantly made up).
3. The sentence (group) that does a "maybe, but"--(presents and debunks an antithesis); we'll call it an  M: "Scholars such as Draco Malfoy have argued that Fitzgerald's portrayal of automobiles paints him as an anti-car Marxist. However, a closer look at how Gatsby depicts the automobile will prove that this is not the case."
4. The sentence that sums sh*t up; we'll call it an S: "From a closer look at the preceding passage, Gatsby's stark opposition to the hippopotamus becomes clear, as does Fitzgerald's portrayal of hippopotami as anti-Modernist villains."

Every paragraph should be a careful mix of these sentences, one that pays special attention to the placement and ratio. 

Here are some good placements/ratios: 

1. For a short (<5 page) paper, do IMEES. That is a classic five-sentence paragraph that should fill up one-half to 3/4 of a page, contains one introductory idea, ONE maybe-but to start things off, two pieces of evidence (one small, one larger is the best method), and ONE summing-sh*t-up. 
2. For a longer paper, a good pattern is IMEMEES, or even IMMEEES, where you give dissenting voices a bit more authoritah, and thus give yourself more time to argue with them and take up space.

"That's great," you might be thinking, or, if you were born after 1994 (the year I graduated from high school!), "lolz gr8ballz," you might be "thinking." 

And yet you might also wonder: "How do I MAKE these sentences sound right? When I close my eyes and mix up all the jargon I've ever heard and then open them and right-click on MSWord Thesaurus a few times, it never turns out like I want it to." I hate it when that happens. Look, I'm not going to lie, learning to write a really good, beautiful, elegant English sentence takes work. But, the good news is that 99% of perfectly-serviceable college and high-school essays (B+ range, we'll say) are not written in really good, beautiful, elegant English sentences. They are written in a way that is sufficiently coherent, and that is really all you have to do. I can't teach you how in 2 minutes like I'd like to, but I can offer you some tips that I guarantee will work better than closing your eyes and using MSWord Thesaurus:

1. For a good I sentence, first ask your prof or teacher if you may use the first-person in your paper. 99% of them will tell you not to, and that is a shame, because a lot of the best professional scholarship (and mine, for what it's worth) uses the first-person. On the off-chance that you are in my class and I say "go for it!", write your I sentence in the first person and put yourself into it. Use a template like this one: "In the following paper I will argue [SOME INTERESTING THING] about the [book/novel/data X by Y]." If you're not in my class and your prof hates the first-person pronoun, don't despair. A good introductory sentence only needs to have the following qualities: CLARITY, SHORT-TASTICNESS, SPECIFICITY. Make it short, clear and about something specific, and you're golden. "F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby might not seem like a book about optometrists and hippopotami, but the following paper will argue that it is." Boom. Breaking it down even more, for those of you who like mathesque things: [Author + "'s" + Title of Primary Source] + [interesting verb like "demonstrates" or "proves" or "evokes"--look up a list of about 15 good academicy verbs that basically mean "says" or "means" or "is" and alternate using them] + [interesting idea, see Hail-Mary Pass Tutorial].
2. For a good E sentence, always remember that if you are quoting something four lines or longer, you have to offset it--that means indent it about 1/2" on each side, and put a page number in parentheses after it. If you are quoting something shorter, you can just put it in quote marks, but it has to be made into a part of the language around it. When in doubt (when you suspect you've done a Quote Dump), read your E sentence aloud to yourself. Would someone NOT reading along understand it? The best way to do this is to insert a verb ending in "ing," a comma or colon (for more emphasis if you want it), and then your quote. For example: "Gatsby's fear of hippopotami becomes most evocative after he comes home from his first big hippo-party, saying, 'Man, do I hate hippos. They scare the everloving crap out of me' (Fitzgerald 56)." You can also do the -ing trick for an offset quote, but you always have to use a colon in that case.
3. An M sentence(s) should always go "maybe-but" as quickly as it can. It should look like this: ["Maybe" phrase: "it may seem as if," "popular scholarly opinion seems to agree that," "although this appears to be..."] + [period or semicolon] + ["But" phrase: "However, this is not actually the case."]
4. A good S sentence briefly refers to what you were just talking about OR just uses the word "thus" or "therefore," and then goes on to reaffirm a point you are trying to make: "Therefore, we can now see more effectively how deeply-held Gastby's fear of hippopotami is."

If you are not a natural writer, your best bet is to think of yourself as filling out a template. DO NOT OUTLINE (takes too long! ruins the creative impulse!); instead, just begin each paragraph with a blueprint: IMES, IES, IEES, IMMES (that was a blueprint for a 5-page paper, btw, feel free to use it, it's a good one!).

Well, it's Memorial Day weekend here in America--that means that most of you are thinking about BBQing stuff and getting your best all-white ensembles back from the dry-cleaners (they will go GREAT with that spray-tan, of course), and not about writing papers. But it's my hope that for those of you on the quarter system who will be blowing off writing a paper in favor of barbecue-consumption and white-wearing, this might help you when timing is suddenly and unforgivingly of the essence. 

Intervention III: Replace Cheatin' Impulses with Writin' Tricks

The following Intervention is for anyone who has ever considered doing one of the following (and, lest I need to over-repeat it, I am NOT judging you on past transgressions or current impulses, I'm just trying to help):

1. Cut-and-pasting or cut-and-rephrasing from an online source
2. Paying your hard-earned money to some schmuck to write a "custom paper" for you
3. Looking at a friend's paper and "borrowing some ideas"

Here are some easy, reasonably fun and FAST tricks that can take the place of these impulses, will work better, and--BONUS!--are guaranteed not to get you expelled.

1. Instead of cut-and-pasting from an online source, just quote that source and footnote it. If you quote it directly, put quote marks around it, and if you paraphrase it, just add a li'l footnote superscript and then explain where you got it in the footnote. WORST-CASE SCENARIO: Your teacher or prof gets mildly annoyed that you went for the most obvious possible interpretation, but that annoyance is cancelled out by his/her relief that you actually attributed the source. BEST-CASE SCENARIO: In attributing/analyzing this source, even if it's something rubetastic like Dr. Spark, you will actually gain some insight into the material and the rest of the paper will be fast/easy to write, and all future papers will be, too. Because here's a secret: once you get the basic nuts-and-bolts of writing a paper down, all papers are basically the same and you can just become a paper-writing MACHINE. If you want to take it to the next level, you can also actually use that source the way you're supposed to--that is, get some insight from it and then go back into the text and use that insight to yammer about some more quotes.
2. When Ed Dante, the infamous "shadow scholar" who made about the same salary as a senior-level paralegal writing other people's papers (sometimes working on up to 20 a day), gets several hundred dollars' worth of your money to write a "custom paper," he spends about half an hour trolling Amazon and Google books and then plugs the fastest and most mediocre insights he can into a stock set of premade "analysis" phrases. The result, as he is quick to remind you, is a decidedly mediocre-at-best essay that Dante himself reminds you he does not revise. This schmuck can write your paper in 45 minutes. So here is my question: WHY. CAN'T. YOU? You can. Instead of paying a ton of your (or your parents') hard-earned dough to an odious paper mill, just churn out a paper-mill paper yourself. Mimic Dante's exact dubious practice--it works for him, and it will work for you, the difference being that this mediocre work is YOUR mediocre work and will thus not get you expelled. Craft yourself a couple of craptastic template paragraphs, and then customize them to work with the text you're supposed to have read (if you haven't read it, see my Hail-Mary Pass tutorial). Avoid self-plagiarism (also potential troub-troubs) by treating your template paragraphs as just that, templates, and allowing them to bloom into unique paragraphs in each paper you use them in (if you re-use stock literary-analysis phrases like "a careful consideration of ______ in the context of _______" that's not self-plagiarism, just a habit). If you can't write a coherent English sentence, just do an incoherent version of Dante's schtick and at very least you'll get a "see me" and a sympathetic referral to the campus writing lab. I'm going to do a YouTube tutorial that's a super-crash-course on writing a coherent English sentence soon, but obvs. that's going to take some magic and finessing. 
3. It is totally OK to work together with a friend as long as you attribute him or her in a footnote--unless you have a hardass prof who demands you write your paper in a vacuum, which definitely happens these days, but that's a rant for another time. Provided that you are actually allowed to have outside-human contact during your paper-writing process, then by all means put your heads together. Look at your friend's paper, see which of her ideas are actually really good, and then offer your OWN take on them in your paper--you'll be surprised how easy it is to take a friend's idea and then REACT to it. Then just footnote your friend: "I would like to thank the my insightful roommate Rob Pattinson for allowing me to proofread his paper, during which time I noticed his interesting take on this text. While I think his ideas about X and Y are great, my own take differs from his, in that I X, Y and Z." Like I said, some profs are real hardasses about this now, but I personally welcome collaboration between classmates because that is how some of the best ideas around come into existence.

Again, I can't emphasize enough that I am offering you this guidance out of pure self-interest on your behalf. Sure, I don't think you should cheat and I think there is a special place in the 9th Circle for paper-mill employees like, ahem, Mr. Dante, and the people who make them rich, but this is not about that. This is about showing you that you CAN write your own paper in less time than it takes to track one of these paper-mill idiots down, and definitely in less time than it takes to do a cut-and-paste chop job from the Internet. You don't have to know what you're talking about to write a passing paper any more than Ed Dante does, and it will actually take LESS time and effort to crap it out yourself than it does to search the Internet for stuff to steal, or explain to the Ed Dantes of the world what they need to do to write it for you.

Common Mistakes that Tank a Paper Grade--and What to Do Instead!

Check out my newest vide-i-e-i-e-i-os, that tell you about some common mistakes (almost) all students make at least once in their venerable careers...

And what do do instead of them!

Good luck!

This one's for the Grubbers! Extra Credit to you if you read it!*

*Not really. You can't get Extra Credit if you're not in my class--and if you ARE In my class, you don't get any Extra Credit for reading this.

--ahem, sorry, I mean high-achieving students. Yesterday several people I admire and trust suggested I offer periodic advice to a demographic that is actually much more likely to search out said advice: students who want to earn that "A," or else they will lose their scholarship/not get into med school/spontaneously combust. Because the only thing more annoying than cheating is blatant grade-grubbing by students who haven't earned an "A" and yet somehow demand one via extortion, guilt-tripping or sheer unadulterated shameless persistence, I'm all too happy to oblige and give high-achieving students some advice that will save time, contribute to greatness (and learning!), and frontload the achievement process (i.e., earn you a better grade before you feel the need to grub).

So, today, I give you: GrA+de Grubberz Korner I: Three Traits of Highly-Successful Papers.

Disclaimer: Not all "A/A+" papers have these characteristics (there are many untold ways to be excellent, after all), and not all papers that have these characteristics will necessarily get an A/A+ because every prof is different, but in my personal experience, every paper I have ever read that earned an "A" or an "A+" had at least two out of these three characteristics. And, bonus, writing papers with these will make you smarter, cooler, more attractive, and less likely to end up miserable and alone with nothing but your rarely-viewed YouTube channel to keep you company. Wait, what? Well, the first thing at least!

1. A great paper has something to say. The only paper I have ever gotten an A+ on was in graduate school, and the reason for this A+ was: "This paper really has something to say." My prof was right--I did have something to say, a very weird idea that connected 1970s/80s feminist theory with 1770s German drama. The idea was so weird that it ended up being published in an academic journal! Those of you familiar with the Hail-Mary Pass tutorial will remember that my advice to the truly desperate is eerily similar to my advice to the high-achieving: have an interesting idea. Have something to say. Find something about the work assigned that truly sings to you, that really fascinates you--or, if you can't find it, apply a super weirdpants, unexpected theoretical approach and make something. If you really, truly believe in your thesis (the argumentative statement you're trying to prove), then your paper, if well-written and well-organized, will transcend competence into greatness.
2. A great paper is a synthesis of the following three things: a careful, diligent reading of the text at hand that takes its literary, historical and cultural context into consideration (i.e. that also includes a modicum of background knowledge about the author and the time s/he wrote in!); thoughtful acknowledgement (even if it is disagreement!) of the discussions in class about this text that proves that you were present and accounted for and learned something; an interesting thought/idea/approach that was NOT mentioned in class that you thought of yourself (again, see #1 and the Hail-Mary Pass).
3. A great paper contains self-awareness that someone is going to have to read it carefully. That is, a great paper is written in a way that is welcoming to the reader, that reads clearly and concisely, that isn't written in a vacuum, that is written with care, interest, and--if you can do this, you're already 900 steps ahead of the competition--fun. If your paper looks like you didn't hate writing it and you actually, really want me to read it, provided that it's also coherently written, it again transcends competence and veers into greatness.

I hope you notice what is MISSING from this list: perfection, a narrowly-defined thesis that conforms to such-and-such parameters, any harping on spelling, commas, whatevs. This is the heart of my approach. Although I believe that mechanically correct and elegant writing are important, I believe they can be learned by rote, and that messily-written papers can be rewritten if the circumstances are dire enough. What is harder to teach, and what seems to be missing from so many papers these days, is a soul, is YOU, is any reason for you to care about writing papers in the first place. If I can help even one person return some heart and soul to the paper-writing process, I'll consider my time on Earth worth something.

As always, if you have any suggestions for future Interventions, any specific questions or requests, any adulation or chastisement, please don't hesitate to email me or comment on the Facebook wall or here on the blog. In the meantime, get back to work and let me know how it goes!

I have figured out the You Tubes!

I've got a general introduction to the project and my first video tutorial up live on my YouTube Channel, paperintervention. Stop by and let me know what you think! Especially before I disable comments after I get too many like "u ugly bitch" or whatever it is crazy YouTube commenters do.

Here's my general intro:

And here's my first tutorial for the TRULY desperate, Defkon Infinity/Glitter (named for the Mariah Carey disaster, of course):

Intervention II: Making Anything Relate to Anything

The following trick is designed for desperation level DEFKON 2: You have just over a weekend to write a 10-page paper, or just over a day to write a 5-pager. I'm saving my DEFKON INFINITY (or perhaps DEFKON GLITTER?) jackpot for my first video tutorial, which is currently having technical difficulties due to the fact that the ancient version of iMovie on my 2007 MacBook mysteriously disappeared and I lack the fundage or operating system to get a more recent version, *pity party starts now*, all right. ANYway.

A little backstory for the recreational readers (skip to where it says "Intervention II" if you're actually Defkon-2 Desperate! Apparently anchor links on blogging software are for geriatrics and I can't make one right now):

When I was in college and writing my Romantic Poets papers the day before (or sometimes the morning of) the due date, I certainly didn't fool Dr. Darlington with my florid descriptions of who-knows-what. My college had a policy of not putting letter grades on essays (and yet assigning letter grades to semesters!), but if Dr. Darlington had put a letter on any of my essays, it definitely would have been a B- at best. The thing is, though, I probably didn't even deserve that. I probably deserved an F, because (confession time) I never read more than three words of any of those long, difficult poems. I then sat in class drooling. Then, when it came time to turn in the essays, I'd just choose a couple of stanzas at random and come up with a Hail-Mary pass about them (more about the Hail-Mary pass technique on TheYouAreOnTvTube when I get my video issues ironed out--I promise it will be soon!).

In one way this did not go over well--I had, and still have, an able literary mind and was totes squandering it, in favor of spending my evenings donning a weird mixture of Gap/rave garb (hey, it was the 90s), smoking cigarettes (BAD FOR YOU! I quit after college and never went back! Mom!), drinking coffee (still do that...) and giggling with my friends in the newspaper office or the Café. (Thank gawd no 1996 issues of the Misc. are archived online. I'd have to change my name).

But, in another way, this was a smart maneuver, because like I said, I never read a word for that class until it was time to write a paper, and I was worse than a lump in that classroom (a thousand apologies to Dr. Darlington--I AM REHABILITATED!). And yet, I got a C+ at the final in that class, the second-worst grade of my entire 13-year higher-education career (the worst? A straight C in German Sturm und Drang drama and "manliness"--a genre I actually published on in 2009, belated thanks to Dr. Kassouf)--but one that still enabled me to graduate, get into grad school, survive, etc. In today's grade-inflation world think of that C+ as a B- or B.

Anyway. As you can see, that one semester I got two C's was somehow survived and surpassed, and here I am with a doctoral degree in the very subject I once tanked in, living proof that you can reach your goals: BEEFCAKE! Wait, what? (1997 "South Park" reference, for those not born yet then). ANYWAY. My point is, you students who never read anything and then find yourselves desperate before a paper is due? I WAS ONCE YOU, and sure, I never won any awards during the worst of my slackerdom, but even in my absolute-most-heinous time, I managed to keep from flunking out. If I'd cheated? And gotten caught? Which I probably would have (see here)? Flunked out in disgrace, and what would I be doing now? Probably running a hedge fund, but that's neither here nor there (what does that even mean?). But I digress again.

All right, now finally on to INTERVENTION II. (Here's Intervention I in case you hate scrolling).

What you are going to do here is create a cohesive body out of stuff whose context you don't necessarily understand. You are going to use your lack of knowledge to your advantage, creating weird connections that a more thorough reader would probably never come up with.

Let's say that you randomly flip to a book of poetry and happen upon the following stanza:

I'm just a holy fool
And baby you're so cruel
But I'm still in love with Judas, baby (aaand once again, attribution!)

Let me reiterate that you do not have the time to read the rest of the poem, any of the author's other work, or do any research (let's assume this paper does not require secondary sources), so you're left in the wilderness with only this quote. You now need to turn this one quote into over a page of body text. HOW? Is that even POSSIBLE? Yes, it is.

Here's how, in three easy steps:

1. When in doubt, let Hamlet (and Bo Burnham) be your guide: "Words, words, words." Go down to the word level and do some creative analysis of the individual words the author uses. Go nuts with this. In this example, go crazy with "holy fool." That could mean a lot of things. What are some of them? Explore this! This could take up an entire paragraph. Then do the same with "cruel," and if you're lucky enough to have a reference to a proper name like "Judas," do a quick Wikipedia search and synthesize (DO NOT COPY) some of the best-known facts about this individual (for example, if you mention that Judas was the disciple who betrayed Jesus, you don't need to attribute that because EVERYONE knows this. Well, almost everyone).
2. Then, take all of this fascinating word-level analysis, and use the beautiful tendency of the English language to create the possibility for poetic interpretation and multiple meanings of WHOLE BUNCHES OF CRAP, and relate your newfound close reading to an interesting literary theme that pervades a lot of literature. You can go for something obvious like "gender roles," "attitudes toward death," or "authority," or you can go a little further out and do things like "fetishized violence" or something scholars probably misguidedly call "sexy." (If you use any of these actual ideas, then guess what--you've got to attribute THIS BLOG, you're welcome.)
3. For example, if you want to talk about "holy fool," then you can start brainstorming and say: well, this obviously relates to religious imagery, but also to attitudes toward knowledge and female behavior--CHACHING! Female behavior! What a weird/unique idea!

HOW TO FINISH THIS PAPER in a way that will ensure your prof doesn't want to jump off something tall:

• If you do the above for three quotes, you'll have the body of a 5-pager ready to go in no time. If you do it for 5 quotes, a 7-pager. 7 quotes, a 10er, and so on. 
• Now your last step is to write your conclusion AS PATIENTLY AS POSSIBLE--take a break, even if it's only 10 minutes, then read the rest of your paper and paraphrase your main points in 3 sentences, add a "therefore" and then write your thesis for the first time. 
• Now that you know what you're talking about, TAKE ANOTHER BREAK. Even if it's only for 10 minutes. 
• Now, and only now, you should write your introduction. This intro should be maximum 5 sentences long, and simply detail exactly what you did in the paper in a shortened form. At the end of that paragraph, write something akin to "The following passages will show that ________," and then in the blank, paraphrase the thesis you came up with at the end of your conclusion.

NOTE: Your teacher will recognize this cool BS-ing technique, and probably call you on it, make no mistake. BUT, s/he will begrudgingly accept the fact that you at least tried to have an idea and obviously did your own work, so in today's grade-inflated world I'd estimate, though obviously not guarantee, that this technique could potentially land you in the B-/B/B+ range (or even the A- range if you are a terrific writer, though that'd have to be a seriously lenient school, which is now all of them, so never mind).