Cheating in the Foreign-Language Classroom: Nein, ¡No!, Non, Nie, Ne, Voch, Lay, Mhai, Nej, Nyet.

Chances are, if you are in college, you are taking at least one (preferably two!) years of a foreign language. This "requirement" (I prefer to think of it as a "privilege long-overdue, considering everyone in every other developed nation speaks at least two languages," but hey, semantics) can be a source of stress to many students, who either had bad experiences with a Peggy Hill type in middle/high school*, or who simply continue to believe that "everyone speaks English anyway."

*Many middle and high-school foreign-language teachers are among the most gifted I have ever known, but I do understand that sometimes there are some duds.

If you're in the first camp, well, I feel for you, and I hope you'll give your college instructor the benefit of the doubt. Here's why:

• If you go to a big state university, your instructor is a fresh-faced grad student much like me circa 2006--and don't despair about this fact. Their newness means they seriously care a lot, and that they are (usually) on top of the latest methods of SLA (that's jargon for Second Language Acquisition, something we study in very serious graduate seminars!). In other words, your graduate instructor is going to be seriously, awesomely invested in your class, and you should be happy you don't have some 90-year-old Russian lady who just does Russian grammar all day (especially in a Spanish class, har har). 
• If you go to a small liberal-arts college, your beginning-to-intermediate language teacher will be a regular-old prof--and this individual will be experienced, as well as delighted to be teaching first- or second-year classes, because (another dirty professor secret) they are really. Easy. To prepare. Especially if you have taught them before. 

So, be happy in the knowledge that college is different, and give your foreign language class a chance.

If you're in the second camp, well, replace "English" with "Mandarin" and maybe you're right. This is a blab for another time, but: really? We live in a global world! Do you know how good it looks on your resume to be "fluent" in another language? Employers love this: they see "fluent French/Spanish/Hindi/Farsi/Russian" and they think, "This individual is disciplined enough to gain fluency in another language--s/he can certainly handle the demands of this job!" 

So, adjust your attitude, Mein Herr/Meine Dame, Sr/Sra, Madame/Monsieur, etc.

However. Even the best attitude won't get rid of the stress associated with foreign-language learning. Some people have a natural gift for languages--but for everyone else, it takes a lot of hard work. 

And that's where we generally reach an impasse (that's French for "sh*t students and profs disagree on"). We want you to work hard and get better at your language; you want to not work hard and it's scheiß egal to you whether or not you get better.

So here's the secret I'd like to share today: It's actually less work to work "hard" (or hard-ish) and get better (at which point you don't have to work as hard!) than it is to cheat--especially if you get caught.

And here's the second secret: a first- or second-year foreign language student who cheats is remarkably easy to catch. So easy it boggles my mind that anyone gets away with it.

Here's how we do it. Would you like to read the first sentence of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, one of the most famous opening lines of all literature ever? Well, here it is, translated into English from the original German courtesy of an online translator:

When Gregor Samsa of one morning from uneasy dreams awoke, he was transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.

"But wait," you might be thinking. "I thought Kafka was supposed to be a good writer. That sucks!" You're right--it does suck. And that's why professional human people with advanced degrees in translation translate things, and not robots. A full Babelfish- or Google-translated edition of The Metamorphosis might be really cheap to produce, but it will be gibberish. 

As a native speaker of English, you can immediately recognize the robot-translated Kafka sentence as gobbeldygook. As a native or near-native speaker of the language you're learning, your instructor will similarly recognize everything you turn in from an online translator as gibberish--and not the gibberish a regular beginner will produce, special robot-gibberish that makes mistakes only a robot would make.

Here's another issue: the straight-up cut-and paste. This is also remarkably easy to catch. Here's how. 


Here's the English version of the kind of stuff that (unfortunately) shows up in my classroom all the time:

The Otto von Bismarck was an very good ruler. As the leader of what historians call "revolutionary conservatism." Bismarck became a hero to German nationalists; they built hundreds of monuments glorifying the symbol of powerful personal leadership. Historians praised him as a statesman of moderation and balance who was primarily responsible for the unification of the German states into a nation-state.* Bismarck was great and I would like to known him in my day today.

Notice how the first and last sentence are both short, simple and contain several small grammatical errors just like someone first learning English might make? And the middle part (which as the asterisk notes, was cut-and-pasted verbatim from Wikipedia) sounds fancypants and is full of expert jargon that only an experienced historian would know? Notice how painfully, painfully obvious that is? 

So, in order to "successfully" employ the aforementioned cheating methods (i.e. not get caught), you would have to go through each word and either make it "not as good" (in the case of the cut/paste job), or "look like a human wrote it and then make it not as good" (in the case of the online translator). This, in the end, will work against your original goal (not to work harder) in two ways:

1. It will actually take you longer to locate material to cheat with and then alter it than it would to just write the whole damn thing from scratch--which, being a first- or second-year level assignment, is rarely, if ever, going to be more than 250-500 words long (that's two pages, you lazypants).
2. You will not get any better, so things like this will continue to be "too hard" and the cycle will just repeat itself (plus you will probably fail your finals because you didn't learn anything).

Here's another dirty professor secret: the purpose of writing assignments in the foreign-language classroom is precisely for you to turn in a poorly-written assignment full of mistakes so that we can help you correct them--and that is how you learn to write in a foreign language. So, in a way, the worse your draft is, the better, because a) we know you actually did it yourself, and b) we can work with you so that writing in the target language will actually become easy for you.

So here, at long last, is a five-step list for how you SHOULD write a writing assignment:

1. If it's a project that requires research, do said research in whatever language you want and then simplify the facts about that research until you can think them out in your target language. Then, take a short list of notes wherein you write these facts down in the target language.
2. With these facts in hand (or with only your big smart mind if it's not a research project), think in your target language in your head. DO NOT THINK IN ENGLISH/your native language. No matter how rudimentary it is, get a target-language inner monologue going.
3. Write that inner monologue down. DO NOT worry about making mistakes. Just write.
4. If you come upon a concept you simply cannot express in your target language, FIRST try to "explain around it" the best you can using words you know. 
1. Funny example: once, when I was learning Czech, I was asked to describe a cartoon wherein a hedgehog named Krtek tried to climb up a ladder. I did not know how to say "try," "climb" or "ladder," so instead what I said was, "At first Krtek tries to go up high alone." My teacher was de-lighted. The woman next to me just said, in English: "How do you say 'tries to go up a ladder?'" That was totally useless, because you do not learn a foreign language by translating your English verbatim. That produces results you can only use once, whereas using vocabulary you know in different ways and slowly building new vocab actually helps you. Which brings me, finally, to this:
5. For a word you absolutely, positively need, look it up in a dictionary with the understanding that with your limited knowledge of the language, the version of the word you choose may be a synonym that doesn't fit (see the above post, re: MS Word Thesaurus). 
1. Another one: A student once wrote in a German essay the equivalent of, "I saw my boyfriend and I kissed his visage." The word the student used for "face," Angesicht, is the antiquated, highfalutin one, as opposed to Gesicht, the regular one. It was noticeably off, but it was a teaching moment rather than a "haul you in to the Dishonesty Dean" one.

Now you're done! If it's a first draft of many (which, in a beginning class, it should be), just turn it in. Yay. If it's for a more advanced class, MAYBE look through it once to catch some of the more obvious errors, but don't stress it too much. 

All right, that's my spiel for the foreign-language students out there! Huzzah! Now get to work.

Back-to-School Special II: Oh, how I hate MS Word Thesaurus.

Happy Wednesday, everyone--today marks about a month to the day from my own first day of school (new job! new students! pencils with my name on! etc!), but many of you are already tush-deep in Fall Semester. So in honor of you who are already back to school, I have my official First Intervention of 2011-2012, and it's one I know my fellow faculty will be cheering.

Here's the scenario: you're writing your first paper for Intro to Amazing Humanities Under Siege and you have, let's say, 53% of an idea what you're talking about. You have a reasonably interesting idea and you're on a roll writing when suddenly you're not happy with your writing. "I've used the word 'argues' seven times in this paragraph!" you realize, or, "The word 'conflict' doesn't sound fancy enough for an academic paper!" So, as you were probably (erroneously) taught to do all through school, you right-click and see what good ol' MS Word Thesaurus has to offer.

This is for your own good:
STEP AWAY FROM THE RIGHT-CLICK OR I WILL REACH OUT THROUGH THIS SCREEN AND SMASH YOUR KEYBOARD.

I mean it. Put. The robot-thesaurus. Away.

Here's the truth: 99% of the time you use a robot-thesaurus, it's going to give you a list of words that might be synonyms for your word in some context, but will definitely not be in your context. The resulting sentence is going to look straight-up bananas at best, and we might not even know what the eff you're talking about at worst.

Don't believe me?

All right. Here is an actual sentence from my actual dissertation, mangled beyond recognition by MS Word Thesaurus:

The undemanding riposte to this is that logical verbal communication and literary idiom are not the unchanged article, and the Tractatus as a exertion of analytic language theory deals with logical and not literary language.

That, people, is straight-up gibberish. Here is the actual sentence from my dissertation (which still has some lame vocab in it, in hindsight, but, as you can see, my intended meaning of most of the words I right-clicked (I've put them in bold) is much, much, much, TOTES different than the "synonym" I used:

The easy answer to this is that logical language and literary language are not the same thing, and the Tractatus as a work of analytic language theory deals with logical and not literary language.

This sentence, and 10,000 just like it, was good enough to earn this gal a PhD from an actual university, and look at all the small, unimpressive, easy-to-understand words it has! If language like this is good enough to earn someone a PhD, it is definitely beyond good enough to earn you a good grade in an undergraduate course. So step away from the Thesaurus, NOW. Here's what you should do instead:

1. For words you repeat too much, like "argues" or "says," rather than right-clicking, circumlocute a little bit. 

Example "bad" paragraph (which I still think is a ton better than some right-clicked monstrosity):

Swift argues that by eating the babies of the poor, Ireland will solve both overpopulation and hunger. Because he argues this, many of his critics jump to the conclusion that he actually advocates on behalf of this action. In reality, his argument is meant to be satirical, arguing instead that it is exactly this sort of poor-blaming attitude that is the problem.

Now just fix this up using only words you already know:

Swift argues (keep the first) that by eating the babies of the poor, Ireland will solve both overpopulation and hunger. In arguing this (changed tense=related but not repeated), he causes many of his critics to jump to the conclusion that he actually advocates on behalf of this action. In reality, his argument (keep) is meant to be satirical, pointing out (simplify even more!) that it is exactly this sort of poor-blaming attitude that is the problem.

2. For prose that doesn't seem fancy enough--leave it, it's fine. I mean it. 

For your papers, you should be writing exactly like you would write an email to the parent of a new boy/girlfriend you are trying to impress. No "like," no curse words, no stupid slang or text-message abbreviations, proper capitals and punctuation, and that. is. it.

Why? Because the most important person who absolutely must understand your paper is you. You are making an argument, you are backing it up, you are taking a position on a topic or issue, and you need to know what you're saying--because if you don't, I absolutely guarantee you nobody will.

BRASS TACKS: a paper that is written 'too casually' but has amazing insights may get an A- instead of an A, but a paper that is written with a bunch of crap you yourself don't understand will get (or at least deserves) a C.

Back-to-School Special I: You Must Chill!

Well, it's August 22, which might seem like "late summer" for you normals out there, but for many universities and colleges in Murka on the (sadistic) semester system, today is the first day of school! Welcome back! The students I know have expressed varying reactions to this auspicious occasion, ranging from reluctant industriousness ("Welp, guess it's time to get back to work, hope my classes are good!" to outright terror. Nobody seemed giddy with excitement, to my great disappointment--I guess I really am just that weird, because back in college (where I didn't even do that much work!) I really looked forward to the first day of class. Of course, back when I was in college, college was still a fun place where people went to learn and grow up, not the business transaction/pressurefest it is today. Le sigh. But look, I'm not like this guy from the Chronicle with a chip the size of the Rosetta Stone on his shoulder--I myself am so looking forward to the first day of school this year that I am jealous of my former students and partner and friends and anyone else who gets to start today! Starting school is fun! I mean it! So, I thought today to celebrate your return to school and my concurrent return to Paper Intervention (and yes, I enjoyed my vacation very, very, very much. Too much, from the pants-fitting perspective! What can I say, German Kaffee und Kuchen ist lecker), I'd give you a list of Five Reasons Going Back to School Rules, and Five Things to Take the Panic/Dread Down a Notch, in case the first Five Reasons aren't convincing enough (which of course they will be, as I am a master of written persuasion).

Five Reasons Going Back to College Rules

1. School supplies. Pencils. Pens. Notebooks. TrapperKeepers. All right, probably not TrapperKeepers anymore (NB: I believe I carried a vintage TrapperKeeper I got on eBay through half of my MFA, because my name is Rebecca and I used to be a hipster, back before being a hipster was soooo ooooover, all right now I'm just too old). But, come on, what's better than new pens? When I was a little kid my parents got me a set of pencils with my name on them every year, and it was the best. Don't tell me that you wouldn't love a pencil with your name on it. I seriously believe that anyone who doesn't love going back to school simply needs some pencils with his/her name on them.

2. New Classes=Potential New Smart Fresh Meat. Some of my students have been with their boy/girlfriends since grade school, but for the rest of you, college is a time to expand your horizons. Your DATING horizons! And what better place to meet the person of your dreams than class? (I may be biased because I may or may not have met my own partner in class).  To quote a very wise man, Sam Weir, "Just because a girl's pretty doesn't mean she's cool." And it's true! Some attractive specimen being a jackass at a party may look great through some (nonalcoholic) beer goggles, but you know what is nice? Exchanging two sentences with someone interesting. And the best way to do this in a zero-pressure environment (dating-wise)? In class, where being smart (without being a smug know-it-all) makes people admire you! (More on being a smug know-it-all in a future post).

3. Your life is better with order and a schedule. Tiny babies know this, your adorable pug dog knows this (PS: do you have a pug dog? If so, I am jealous), the six-year-old you babysit knows this: without something to count on every day, anxiety and depression happen, and they happen big time. As long as you manage not to stress out too much (and you shouldn't! See below), going back to college will actually make you happier and healthier than screwing around/working too much at a menial job you are hoping not to have anymore after you get your degree.

4. Slightly colder weather=something other than the same summer wardrobe you're now ready to burn. Even if, like me, you are just "shopping your closet" for back-to-school (I lack the funds and time even to make a new wardrobe this fall, le sniff), rediscovering clothing in which you could *not* be mistaken for a Lady of the Night and/or The Dude is fun--as is being able to stop looking at your near-bare self in the mirror every day.

5. FRIENDS! Old friends! New friends! Frenemies! Especially for you returning sophomores, you will find it amazing how much you missed your friends over the summer and how great it is to see them in person. You hear it a zillion times over, but that is because it's true: (some of) the friends you make in college will be the friends you have for the rest of your life. Though we all live in different towns, I still count many of my college classmates as my greatest friends and among the neatest people I've ever known. Unlike your high school friends, your college friends will be with you as you transition to adulthood, and as such will remember both hilarious-youth you and semi-responsible grown-up you (just ask my friend Justin about the "Chumbawamba Dance" someday if you want proof).

Still not convinced? All right, then, here's Five Reasons to Calm the F*ck Down:

1. Contrary to what it might look like based on that 90-page syllabus (most of which is legalese designed to protect us, and our institutions, from lawsuits--i.e. if I kick some text-messaging miscreant out of my class, I sure as Hades better have a zero-tolerance mobile device policy buried in my syllabus somewhere, lest that student sue me for Acute Feelings-Hurting, which I'm pretty sure in today's college environment is a more punishable offense than cheating--AHEM)...anyway, contrary to what it might seem like today (or tomorrow), your courses are designed for you to be able to complete them with (relative) ease. It is the rare and unforgivable sadist and/or graduate seminar instructor who comes up with 10-16 weeks of work so extensive and strictly-graded that you simply can't do it even if you're a genius/overachiever. So remember that no matter how bad it looks, it is designed specifically for you to be able to complete it. DIRTY PROFESSOR SECRET: sometimes we even overload our syllabi on purpose because we can't yet figure out what to cut, and know that come mid-semester when we do pare the syllabus down, we'll look like heroes.

2. Your professor is a human person who only has two qualities that make him/her different than you: S/he is (usually) older than you, and s/he has already read the material you've been assigned. In most cases, this human person even likes this material and has assigned it because s/he thinks you'll like it too. Instead of viewing your prof as the Ultimate Fun Killer Out To Ruin Your Life, think of us as personal trainers FOR YOUR MIND who have developed a personalized program specifically designed to get you(r brain) into the best shape of its life.

3. IF you are advanced-study bound: as long as you maintain something above a 3.0, your college grades don't really matter that much. I once had a student who was so high-strung I thought s/he was going to explode--because, in her/his words, s/he "had" to get a 4.0 or s/he would not get into grad/professional school and become a doctor/lawyer/cowboy/whatever. To which I say: all right, for a top professional school you probably need something closer to a 3.6 in order to be looked at seriously, but I'll tell you, a 3.6 student with a great set of recommendations, super GRE/LSAT/GMAT/MCATs and an "A-" average in courses that directly pertain to the advanced study is a much better candidate than a 4.0 student with a bunch of lukewarm recommendations that either euphemistically or directly refer to that student as a pushy, grade-grubbing pain in the ass.

4. If you are NOT grad-school bound: as long as you actually graduate, your college grades do not matter even one little bit. If you put your graduating GPA on a resume, potential employers are actually going to laugh at you out loud. It makes you look like a 14-year-old. The professional world doesn't give two craps about your college grades. Look at Rick Perry--that guy got Ds and Fs at Texas A&M for goodness' sake, and he's Governor of Texas and running for President of the United States! Sure, if you're on a scholarship with a minimum GPA requirement, then you need to care a little bit more--but look at it this way. If you're on a partially-academic scholarship (which all scholarships are, otherwise they'd be called f*ckingaroundships), it is specifically because the granting entity wants you to do well in school and thinks you can.

5. It helps to concentrate on the baby steps rather than the big picture. A student who does a marginal-to-good amount of work for (almost) every single class is much, much more likely to get that all-important "A" than one who just sits there like a root canal patient for 10 weeks and then aces the final. Because you know what? The involved student is going to ace the final without even really trying, because s/he will have actually become involved in and taken ownership for his/her own success throughout the semester.

All right, kids/adults--that's my seventeen cents. Welcome back to school, do your best, and have a great year--and remember, when it comes time to write those dreaded papers, you are not alone.

"The Rest is Still Unwritten": Why All the Colons? WHY?

This is a minivention--I'm still on my vacation.

Right now I'm visiting my parents, who have something very lethal that I don't: a television. A HUGE television. With a smorgasbord of channels and a DVR and I know this isn't impressive to most normal people but I am an INTELLECTUAL who doesn't own a television, all right? And what am I watching? "Intervention." Hilar.

Anyway. One of my former students, Jessica, requested some help with titling papers, and this is a worthwhile challenge. Because. I. HATE. Paper. Titles. Here is how most professional academic essays and books are titled:

"CLEVER, PROVOCATE QUOTE": Huge Jargon-Filled Run-on Hyphenate-addled "Sexy" Trend-Prostrating Stream of Horseshit and its Relation to a Very Obscure Book People Should Feel Inadequate for Not Having Ever Heard of Ever

This is more of a professional-scholar intervention at the outset, but I've started down this road and I'm like a geriatric who can't turn left and the only way off this road is a left, and so I'll say: THIS SHIT HAS GOT TO STOP, my homepeople. Nobody can understand titles like these. They are embarrassing to read. I am embarrassed on the behalf of all literate people when I read titles like these. I want to die and reincarnate myself as a self-destruct chip in all computers whose word-processing programs even START a title like this, so that any scholar who even types CLEVER QUOTE, COLON has his/her computer melt and then John Belushi's ghost comes into the room as Bluto Blutarsky going, "Sorry." And he's not really sorry. Because he saved everyone.

Ahem. All right. All this is just to say that I'm hardly the right person to be suggesting titles for anyone, since my own dissertation title is this:

In der Sprachkolonie: Franz Kafka's World and the Limits of Language

Sprachkolonie is a made-up word in German, a pun (on Strafkolonie, "penal colony," that means "language-colony") in a language I don't speak natively. It is embarrassing. I am embarrassed on its behalf, and now on yours for having read it. It makes me look like a chump. I'm currently in the process of turning the dissertation into a book, and let me tell you that book will have a much less stupid title, in a much less stupid format.

The first way in which to make it less stupid is to TAKE THE BULLSHIT BEFORE THE COLON AWAY. And then, obviously, the colon, though I guess it would be super-avant garde to start a paper with a colon. ": A Paper So Awesome it Doesn't Need a Clever Quote but Still Needs a Colon."

Why get rid of the bull before the colon? Well, because 99% likely, it is an inside joke with myself that I no longer even get. It offers nothing to anyone but the makers of Times New Roman, who get to see a few more characters of their precious font in print. It must die. It's fine to think of a clever title and a colon in your rough draft, but then once you want to submit the paper (and, presumably, its title) to any respectable authority, for the love of all that is holy take the way-too-inside joke and the colon and make it go away.

If I could retitle my dissertation, I'd call it something like this: Rediscovering Austrian Language Skepticism through Kafka and Wittgenstein. Is that unsexy? Yes. So boring you would never want to read it if you saw it on a shelf? Probably, but academic books are not designed to "pop" off the shelf. They are designed to pop up in other people's academic searches, and help those people by letting them know what in the everloving world they are about. They are not designed to be clever and cool. If you want to write things that are clever and cool, go into advertising.

Your title should be no longer than one line, and should, simply put, tell people what the eff your paper is about. Is your paper about gender roles in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night? Just call it "Exploring Gender Roles in Twelfth Night." You make the title interesting by adding a cool verb that makes the paper look alive and active. That makes it look way more alive and vibrant than any ridiculous CLEVER QUOTE COLON bullcrap ever could.

So a good formula is: [VERB DENOTING EXPLORATION OR AUTHORITY] + [YOUR ANGLE in the PAPER (see "one interesting idea")] + [YOUR SUBJECT]. "Investigating Language Politics in Karl Kraus's Vienna." "An Excavation of the Hidden Socialist Agenda in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged" (heh heh). "Making Sense of the Nonsensical Structure of Lewis Carroll." I guarantee you that this will end up serving you better than a CLEVER BULLSHIT COLON combination, and--perhaps even better--it will lessen the amount of rage in the world.

Intervention IV: Outlining for Winners

I have really changed my outlining tune in the past five years or so (what does an "outlining tune" sound like? Brief and unimaginative, I guess. Anyway). If you'd asked me how I wrote a paper up until 2007, I would have given you the 1989-era version I learned in high school, which, don't get me wrong, results in a very serviceable paper that pretty much writes itself:

1. Go through primary source and copy 5-15 quotes from it out onto 3x5 index cards. (Seriously! I did this in 2005!!!).
2. Repeat for secondary sources if necessary, on different-colored index cards if possible.
3. Shuffle index cards into "paper-writing" order--i.e., arrange either the primary-source quotes according to chronology or the secondary-source quotes according to theme or thing they have in common, and then stack them like this: one quote from the primary, a group of 3-4 from secondaries that relate, repeat.
4. Copy down everything that the index cards say in the order they say it onto a Word document, and as you do so, add headings according to subject, along with a sentence or two of the beginning of an argument.
5. Ecce outline!!!

This is a terrific system, if all you have to write is an outline. In fact, I learned it in high school when all we had to do for a research project was turn in a stack of index cards and an annotated outline. However, if you actually have to write a paper, or Lord help you a dissertation, then this is actually a time-inefficient and bad system that will suck up extra days of your life and result in a really unimaginative paper where your own insights are controlled by other people's and which contains no room for crazy tangents--which, like it or not, are (in a rough draft, at least) the stuff of original argument that makes papers good.

So if you would like to write one of the following:

1. an imaginative paper
2. a paper in a big ol' hurry

Then I'd actually recommend this anti-outlining technique instead. Again, if your professor or adviser insists on an outline, you can use the method above, but you can also use the method below, which is probably faster and actually ends up with far more of your paper written. For smaller papers, I stick to my non-outlining guns: instead, just use one of the other tutorials on how to write a coherent paragraph and how to have one interesting idea, and turn in whatever you have; I guarantee it will be just as good, if not better, as someone's index-card extravaganza.

For larger papers (graduate seminar papers, undergraduate lengthy research papers for upper-level classes, theses and dissertations):

The annotated bibliography and close reading. This two-pronged attack method is particularly effective if you must write multiple drafts as it produces an incredibly imaginative first draft that can then be polished later--or, if you're an undergraduate, a "final" draft with a really interesting angle rather than well-organized but dead piece of rehashed garbage. But, let me warn you, it does take actual work and results in possibly the best and deepest understanding of your sources you're able to have. Here's how you do it:

1. Get your primary source in front of you and go through it excruciatingly slowly (preferably more than once, but if you're an undergrad, once is fine). Limit yourself to the quotes you take down, but every time something strikes you in the text as especially interesting, even if you have no idea why, copy it down onto a Word document (with citation, OF COURSE). 
2. Then, the second you copy the quote down, directly after it, do a 100-200 word freewrite of exactly what you find interesting about it, whether that seems relevant or not. ANYTHING that comes to your mind. Do not stop typing until you reach 100 words, no matter what they say.
3. Repeat until you get all the way through the book or to the amount of quotes you need if you're an undergrad or a grad student still in coursework. If you're writing a diss, suffer through the whole damn thing. Three times, preferably--but ONCE IS ENOUGH if you are really pressed for time, no overwhelmsies!
4. Now, take your secondaries and go through them one by one, making an annotated bibliography. Take the title and author down (flesh it out later, don't disrupt your momentum, this is CRUCIAL!), and then read through until you get the gist of their argument. Then write yourself an abstract of their gist. Then read through the rest of it, taking down 1-10 quotes, depending on how important they are (10 quotes for "marquis" names that could be primaries themselves: Adorno, Benjamin, etc., 5 for big-name working scholars like Gail Hart (shout-out!!!), 1-3 for randos like me. After you take down each quote, react to it in 1-2 sentences.
5. Repeat until you get the necessary number of sources (5 for a minor undergrad paper, 10 for an undergrad term paper, 10-15 for a graduate seminar paper depending on whether you're on quarters or semesters, 30-40 for a dissertation chapter or professional essay). THEN STOP.
6. Congratulations. You will notice you've done most of your research, and actually written more than enough words to cover the length of your paper! Now all you have to do is shuffle the order, string them together and clean it up, and that you can do by...
7. Creating a VERY ROUGH outline that is more of a list, where you group your imaginative research into things it has in common (rather than creating an outline FIRST that you can't possibly conform to once you really start going), and then create one- or two-sentence headings.
8. If you must turn in a clean outline, summarize each section's rough-writing by explaining whom you've used and what you've talked about (make sure to drop a few names, leave one quote in), and then, saving your document as a DIFFERENT document, delete all your roughwriting. These summaries will actually turn into your topic paragraph for each section, so you still haven't wasted any time.

The Key to (Academic and All) Success: Manipulation and Lies

I often find that the hardest part of writing a paper isn't actually writing it--once you get going, especially if you get one interesting idea, it kind of takes care of itself (so long as you know some tricks). Instead, the hardest part of writing a paper is actually sitting down to start it. So this Intervention will be about ways to trick yourself into sitting down to start it. Not tricking yourself into writing the whole thing, just tricking yourself into starting it at all. This past year I had a few students who just had tragic procrastination problems, and the issue was just getting them over that mental hump to START it, at which point it pretty much wrote itself.

So the larger picture is that for any paper shorter than 7 pages, you can write a passable (though not necessarily good) version in 2-3 hours provided that you type fast. BUT, you can't tell yourself this when you start, or else you will never start. Because for most of us, 2-3 hours of writing a paper sounds about as inviting as 2-3 hours of getting tased in the butt. Why start at all, if it's just going to be prolonged agony???

So here are some things to tell yourself instead. You'd think that it'd be hard to lie to yourself, but in my extensive experience with self-deception I find that oneself is actually the easiest person to lie to: "These pants just shrunk in the wash...5 years after I bought them." Or, "I'll do a full set of bench presses NEXT time I'm at the gym." Or, "I can make one paycheck stretch for five months." Ahem. Anyway, what I always tell my students is, "Academic success is the result of an intricate web of self-manipulation and self-deception," and I mean it. Do you think I finished my PhD in 5 years (that, tragically, is extremely fast) by sitting down every day and saying, "All right, well, time to work on this 248-page paper that has to incorporate every important piece of recent scholarship on my subject and also contain a fully original argument that pushes the field but stays within disciplinary convention, now GO!!"? No! That kind of thinking is what gets you stuck in grad school for 17 years! I'm telling you, the following snippets of self-deception work, from the high-school essay all the way up to the doctoral thesis.

1. "I will just read this source for long enough to get two good quotes from it." The problem with densely-written academic prose, which most of us are forced to use for secondary sources, is that it is written so densely that every single sentence seems vitally, tragically important. Multiply that by a stack of 10 equally-dense books on your desk, many of them written in a non-English language, and you have a recipe for permanent deferral of research, which for many of us also means permanent deferral of work (though it shouldn't, see below). Though of course I hope you treat my work like that, don't. What you need to do for secondary sources is be able to paraphrase the author's main thesis, and react appropriately (i.e. with full knowledge of their context) to two good quotes. As soon as you can do this, proceed to skim the rest of the article unless it is so fascinating and entrancing it might change your life (Henry Sussman, I'm talking about you!), and before you know it you're through another source. And if you're a good quote-extractor and note-taker and summarizer, the notes you make about this sources should be able to be incorporated directly into your paper.

2. "100 words and I'm done for the day." It doesn't matter how much you hate writing--anyone, with ten minutes and a remotely interesting idea and equally remote grasp of the English language, can write 100 words. Just take one quote from your text and spend three sentences talking about it--one sentence that SUCCINCTLY rephrases what has happened in context, one sentence that highlights something interesting about that quote, and one that relates it back to whatever brilliant idea you are currently rocking in the paper. Guess what? I just wrote (approximately) 100 words just now, in this entry. YOU CAN DO THIS, no matter how little you want to work, no matter how little you have read, no matter how drunk/high/tired/harried you might be. The worst-case scenario is that you eke your paper out 100 words at a time over the course of a few days. What will probably happen is that once you get going, 100 will become 200, 300 and then 500 as you get into the rhythm of writing. The secret is to start with no pressure on yourself, with the understanding that papers do sometimes get written 100 words at a time, and that on a bad day (especially for you dissertaters out there!!!), 100 words can be the biggest victory in the world. At my worst and most depressed I eked out 50, 100 words at a time, and called it a "full work day" and resumed moping, and you know what? Not a good way to spend your life long-term, but those mothertruckers added up and soon enough I was Dr. Me.

3. "I'm just going to open this document up and LOOK at it." I'd like to amend my previous explanation that the hardest part of writing a paper (from a 2-pager to a dissertation) is starting to work. The hardest part is actually opening the document up on your computer and looking at it (if you still write longhand, you perplex me, but just think of the luddite equivalent of this). So if you tell yourself you're just going to open the piece UP to read through a few paragraphs for spelling and grammar, that is often sufficient to get you working. The important part of this, however, is to not beat yourself up if for a few times you do just open it up and proofread a few paragraphs and tweak a word here and there (ESPECIALLY you dissertation writers!). That is still keeping the work in sight and therefore in mind, and infinitely better than keeping it hidden in a faraway folder like I currently have the pigsty of a draft of a conference paper I'm due to give in less than three months (in professional-scholar time that is both forever and hopelessly insufficient). In a few days I'll be bringing it up "just to look at it," and then slowly employing the other two methods of deception and manipulation to get myself back on track to finish it.

Well, I hope this suggestion has been helpful, whether you're writing a one-page response paper due tomorrow or a 500-page dissertation due in three years. As always, email me or comment below if you have any questions, comments or funny procrastination stories to share.

Armchair Psychologist with Dr. Me: What's Your Motivation?

Although I am a doctor (not that kind of doctor), I am not a practicing therapist of any sort (though try telling that to the students who unload WTFTMI in their emails where all they really want is an extension). So the following attempts to plumb the depths of the student psyche are a mixture of anecdotal evidence, cursory research on the internet (thanks to the retro-fabulous academic dishonesty 1997-style HTML site at Old Dominion University), and my personal favorite, rampant unchecked speculation.

I think the latter quality is actually an excellent skill for early draft-writing in academic work, and definitely provided me with all of my weirdest ideas (some of which, funnily enough, are after extensive revision and despeculifying, being committed to scholarly-journal print as I type this!), but it often gets me into trouble at home ("I think I know why our neighbor plays his video games so loudly! It's because he's ENORMOUS, so because he's so Shaq-uesque, he must do everything loudly!"). Actual recent conversation.

Ahem. Anyway, rampant speculation is a "skill" I've had since I learned to talk: my earliest preschool teachers explained to my parents that, at 2.5, I already had "an explanation for everything." 31.85 years later, this holds true, and so now I am going to try to explain why, to the best of my untrained ability, students turn in work they didn't do and claim it as their own. Then, because this is Paper Intervention and not Paper Shame on You Plagiarists, I'll suggest viable, easy alternatives that appeal to exactly this kind of motivation/personality type.

TYPE 1. "I am a college 'customer,' here to pay to get a piece of paper that will get me a job." This is the #1 plagiarism cause on Old Dominion's site for a reason--with the current wisdom being that all good jobs need a college degree, and thus all high-school graduates need to have a college degree, even (and especially) if they hate (or think they hate) learning more than anything in the world. This is actually the reasoning my ex-husband used to justify embezzling money from his college engineering club, so it "excuses" all sorts of fraud, not just the academic kind. I can't believe I'm not married anymore, right? 

Anyway, it makes a lot of sense in today's overconsumerized environs that if a college education is just something you pay for like a triple-decaf mocha-coconut Frappucino with extra whip (BUT SKIM MILK, I'm watching my weight, obvz!), and you think of your prof like a barista whose job it is to take your money and turn it into a Frappucino while you text your friends ("Frappucino" here meaning "piece of paper claiming you are now the owner of a certain and specific body of knowledge"), then obviously asking you to get behind the counter and put all that crap into the blender yourself is going to make you all like wtf? So it's almost like you paid to turn in the paper, and it doesn't matter how you got it, right? I feel you, as nobody says anymore, and I'm not here to try to change your mind about how you feel about college. However:

• REBUTTAL. A potential one, at least. So, back to the Starbucks analogy. When you pay $7 for that glorified milkshake, you are entering into a miniature contract with the barista and with Starbucks as an institution: you are paying for a certain mixture of ingredients (or, as RHONJ Teresa would say, "ingrediences") to be added to their proprietary SuperBlender with ice, etc etc. If they took your money and then served you a festering pile of dog doo instead, you'd be all like, DOUBLE WTF? This isn't what I paid for. And that's what you might want to remember in college. Just like it's not Starbucks' purview to serve festering piles of dog doo, it is not our purview to "sell degrees." If we "sell" you a degree, that degree becomes nothing more than a faceless coin masquerading as professional "currency" (that's a reference to NIETZSCHE, bitches, "On Truth and Lying in an Extramoral Sense," various editions, I use the GERMAN six-volume Werke, so booya). If we can give you anything--a festering pile of dog doo, for example--and call it a "degree," then, just like at Starbucks, you are not getting your money's worth.
• EASY SOLUTION. Instead of wasting your money on a paper you didn't write that will thus garner you a degree that is worth as much as a festering pile of dog doo, spend that money on more coffee and an industrial-strength pair of earplugs or noise-canceling headphones. Then put those babies on and promise yourself to devote 15 minutes more a day to studying than you now do--then once you've done 15, do 30, 45, and an hour (incrementally). Each time you do, think about it this way: "I owe it to myself to get my money's worth out of my college education. I owe it to myself to be the person that diploma says I will be. I am WORTH working on, to get smarter and better." All right, I have to stop before I barf.

TYPE 2. "This class isn't in my major, and therefore it is a serious grade-A waste of my time." This is, more or less, a variation on Type 1, with the difference that while Type-1 students believe ALL college is a waste of their time, Type-2 students believe anything outside their course of study is a waste of time. After all, if you are going to college to study Animal Husbandry and they're forcing you to take a year of French, it's almost like they deserve to get a year's worth of bad Google translations for making you do something so stupid.

• REBUTTAL: Remember that unless you go to one of those loosey-goosey colleges with no requirements (in which case: enjoy Hampshire and please don't drop out), when your college or university plans courses of study, they spend just as much time planning what to require EVERYONE to take, or what to require certain majors to take as breadth requirements. They are not making you take French because they want to keep the French department in business (in fact, universities seem to enjoy closing foreign-language departments these days), and enjoy torturing you. They are making you take French (or any foreign language) because they know that knowing more than one language does the following: 1) makes you better at English and thus a better communicator 2) makes you more competitive on the global marketplace, which, guess what, is THE marketplace now, 3) makes your brain better at learning all sorts of stuff (there have been studies). The same can be said for "forcing" foreign-language majors to take math (I wish they'd made me take more math in retrospect!), "forcing" business majors to take literature (EGAD, being well-read and great at formulating arguments will never make you a better business negotiator!!!), etc. 
• SOLUTION. One day when you're bored, Google all the people in the world who got their bazillion-dollar idea or life's passion or met their spouse in a class they didn't think they "had" to take. Then throw yourself into yours and think about how making yourself a dynamic, multifaceted person can allow you to put "dynamic, multifaceted person" on your future resume--and start scouring your classroom for hotties. Nobody says "hottie" anymore, do they? Well, that's 90s slang for "attractive person," so do that.

TYPE 3. "I'm overworked/desperate/prone to mental blocks and I waited until the last minute and NOW IT'S TOO LATE and I HAVE TO." This is by far the most common reason students commit fraud (buying a "custom essay") or plagiarism. As someone who unsuccessfully employed the "I'll wake up early before class and do the reading" ruse 900 times in college (THAT NEVER WORKS, does it? I never learned!), I am a bona fide expert on this. And yet, all anyone ever seems to do to "remedy" this situation is tell you to start earlier next time. That causes despondency and a vicious cycle of more dishonesty in my experience. What I wish more profs or teachers would tell their desperate students instead is:

• "Yes, you may have an extension...for a slight deduction that will not, I repeat, will not, be a big deal in the long run."
• "Just scrawl something out and turn it in--it will probably be better than 60% of what I get anyway." Sad, but true.
• "You're an undergraduate for crying out loud--nobody expects Harold Bloom. And, actually, nobody even likes Harold Bloom." 

• "You would actually be better off not turning in anything than turning in something you didn't write yourself." This one is super-true. A no-show may get you a zero, but it will never get you expelled.

Of course, my "easy solutions" to Type-3 appear on this very blog as all the Interventions I've done so far (go to the link bar on your right and take your pick based on how desperate you are!).

Well, I hope you've enjoyed your time on the couch and I'm sorry you can't get extra credit for doing all this reading that isn't even for your major. I mean, you're overscheduled and paying my salary, so it's the least I can do for you, right?