Fall 2024 Post 08: Writing Conclusions

Josh Bernoff has a wonderful post about writing conclusions which inspires me to say something about how to conclude an academic essay or even conclude a blog post, such as this one. Let's see how I do.

But first, click the link above and read Bernoff's post. He's quite an accomplished writer, and you can learn something from reading him. After all, you have to write a conclusion for two essays and many blog posts this term. You should start practicing your conclusions.

From my experience as a writer and writing teacher, conclusions present a couple of problems for academic writers. First, too many academic writers are trapped in the 5 paragraph essay formula, as Bernoff notes in his post. I can see why. Most of us were taught that formula in high school, and it's fairly easy to do. You can bang out an essay in one sitting the night before it's due and get it off your to-do list with a minimum of involvement. If you really don't care about the topic, then getting it done quickly is the prime consideration. The form goes like this:

1. One intro paragraph to say what you're going to say (the thesis).
2. Three paragraphs to say it and support it.
3. One conclusion paragraph to say what you said (basically, restate the thesis).

You turn it in even though you know it's a vapid little essay that says damned near nothing and that you yourself wouldn't read (I'm convinced that many of my students don't actually read their own essays), but you know the teacher has to read it, and you're hoping that they, too, are busy and just want to be done with grading, so maybe they'll give you a good grade, or at least a passing grade. It's dull writing and why many English teachers drink to excess (not I, of course). You might need to repeat your thesis if you are writing a book or exceedingly long essay, but we are writing short works in this class (blog posts and two 1,000 word essays), so you can safely assume that your reader will remember the thesis that they just read less than five minutes ago — assuming that you wrote a memorable thesis.

A second problem with five-paragraph conclusions is that people tend to start writing one thing, and along the way, their essay morphs into something a little — or a lot — different. So now you have a quandary: do you conclude with the thesis you started with, the point you ended with, or just move on to something altogether different? Who knows?

Obviously, conclusions require a different way of thinking. Fortunately, Bernoff gives us some useful advice about how conclusions should work, and he provides five different ways to conclude your essay. First, he says you might tell your readers what to do with the information you've just given them. For instance, I could conclude this post by telling you to use one of his five conclusion strategies when you rewrite one of your essays for me. Now you know what to do with the information I'm giving you. That's concrete action, and now that you've read both Bernoff and me, you know how and why to conclude that way.

Second, Bernoff says you can conclude by telling your reader what will happen next, or in one year, or in five years based on what you've written. Where does your information take the reader or the nation or the world? For instance, I could conclude this post by telling you that using Bernoff's conclusion strategies will convince your readers — including your teachers — that you are a bright person who knows how to write and who deserves a good grade. This kind of conclusion helps you understand the consequences of my post for your own writing.

Third, Bernoff says to conclude with the broader significance of what you've written. I could conclude this post by saying that if all my students would write better conclusions, then the quality of academic discourse at Middle Georgia State would go way up, we would all sound smarter, and students would make better grades. This conclusion helps you see the larger implications of my post.

Fourth, Bernoff says to conclude by noting analogous, or similar, things happening elsewhere. For instance, I could conclude this post by noting that being able to write conclusions that ease the reader elegantly back into the real world with some useful knowledge is similar to a satisfying conclusion to an engaging movie. A good ending to a movie tells the viewers that the movie is over and resolves the main issues of the movie or prompts the viewers to come back for the sequel. Your conclusions can do something like that — and I may write more about this later (sequel).

Finally, Bernoff says you can conclude with a brief discussion about when your information is true or applies. This helps your reader understand the context in which your discussion makes the most sense. For instance, I could conclude this post by saying that being able to end a written document elegantly helps your academic readers, including your teachers, to understand the significance of your essay, and it convinces them that you were worth reading. That's an especially important result to get from your teacher who must assign you a grade and later from your boss who has to decide whether to keep employing you or not.

Any one of these five types of conclusion works so much better for this post than merely repeating my thesis, saying something like: So I've told you five different ways to conclude an academic essay. That is so boring, and it insults your intelligence by assuming that you can't remember what you just read. I suppose this tactic was fine for your Tenth Grade English class, but it really doesn't work in college, or in life.

So which of these five conclusions works best for this blog post and why? (Oh, yeah, you can also conclude a post with a question that suggests ways to extend the discussion, as I just did.) Now that you have six ways to end an academic essay or blog post, tell me which approach makes the most sense for this particular post. And notice how, by adding a sixth strategy, I just messed up any chance of simply repeating my original thesis which mentions only five strategies, but I am free to do this because I'm not concluding by simply retelling you what I just told you. You, too, should stop concluding your writing by simply restating the thesis. Why not ask Gemini for 10 different ways to conclude an academic essay, and leave the most interesting in a comment below. Also, leave a comment about which of these many strategies best fits your second essay for this class and why you will use it.

Fall 2024 Post 07: The Most Important Thing about Writing

Of course, writing classes have to cover lots of issues, but if I had to choose just one issue that every writing class should deal with, then I would choose conversation. I wish every writing student could see how writing is a conversation, first with ideas, then with people, and now with AI such as Gemini.

My 40-years of teaching writing in college have convinced me that too many students write poorly because they are not writing to anybody about anything — at least, not about anything important to them. Rather, they are simply filling up paper with 500 or 1,000 words to complete an assignment that they prefer not to do. They are not really engaging with ideas and people. Consequently, they say not much to nobody, which results in empty, vapid papers, which we teachers then have to read and grade. It's enough to drive a teacher to drink, or suicide.

Now, this may sound like an attack on students, but it isn't. I don't blame students – well, not completely. Students are quite willing to write, especially today. All my current students write every day in countless texts, Facebook posts, and tweets, and they write all that stuff because they instinctively like to engage in conversation. It's what humans do. Everyday, all of us engage in a few conversations intensely (say, conversations about fashion, sports, politics, romance, or religion with our friends or family), and we engage in many other conversations more casually. Today's students are already writing more than at any other time in history. According to a 2016 article on the website Text Request, "In June of 2014, 561 billion text messages were sent worldwide. That’s the most recent number we’ve got. Obviously that’s a rounded figure, but it brings us to roughly 18.7 billion texts sent every day around the world." That adds up to about 7 trillion text messages a year. That is a hell of a lot of writing about nearly everything you can imagine. This generation is producing more writing per year than in all of previous human history combined, and they are doing it because they want to. No doubt about it. All students are writers already, and they like it.

So why don't most students like academic writing? I think it's mostly because they don't see academic writing as a conversation about engaging topics with interesting, engaging people. Too many students don't particularly want to  talk to their professors about anthropology, botany, or zoology given that they think their profs are old, boring people and their subjects are even more boring and irrelevant to the degree they are pursuing.

Unfortunately, too few college writing courses confront this issue. We writing teachers should teach students strategies for turning any class writing assignment (from algebra to zoology) into an interesting, worthwhile conversation. In her presentation "Writing Is a Conversation," writing instructor Johannah Rodgers says that treating writing assignments as conversation has numerous benefits for students. First, it increases student's confidence in their writing, and then it makes the connections between the written conversations student already have in their social spaces with the academic conversations they engage in college. This can make for better writing and higher grades for students and better reading for teachers. That's a win-win.

So how do you go about framing your academic documents as a conversation? I'm glad you asked.

First, it would really help if professors would make better assignments that emphasized the conversational aspect of writing academic documents. It's why professors write their own academic documents: first to engage their professional subject matter (they want to learn more about botany, for instance) and then to engage their peers (they want to show off to the scientific community what they've learned about how trees communicate). Let's break this down using this blog post that I'm writing and you are reading.

In this post, I'm writing about writing because writing is my long-time professional interest. I've been studying composition, rhetoric, and literature since graduate school back in the late 1970s and early 1980s at the University of Miami. I've put in the effort because I find this topic rich and rewarding. I've thought long and hard about rhetoric and poetic, and I have a few things to say about them. And the more I have learned, the more I learn that there is to learn. Learning begets learning.

Of course, most of you do not share my interest in and enthusiasm for writing and literature. For too many of you, courses in composition and literature are just annoying hurdles you have to jump on your way to a career in nursing, or computers, or business. 

Fair enough. 

But this attitude doesn't really help you through this class, and it ignores the reality of a college education. You have signed up for a four-year college degree, which means that you are committed to both a specific major AND a broad understanding of human knowledge. The broad understanding supports the more narrow skills and abilities you learn in your major: nursing, information technology, or business, for instance. A bachelor's degree implies that you not only have learned how to take a person's temperature and draw their blood, but you can also read a medical chart, listen and speak intelligently to scared patients, write down clear, intelligible instructions and comments for a too-busy physician, and use numbers to track the rise and fall of a critical patient's blood pressure. You will have not only the narrow skills that make you a competent nurse, but you will have the broader understanding that helps you recognize, fit into, and work with a wide range of professionals and patients in a modern, complex medical environment. You will have a broader intellectual base that will position you to learn more as you progress in your career. You don't get that broad understanding with narrow, technical training. You get that with a broader college education. Developing a deeper appreciation for that kind of broad, liberal arts education will seriously help you get through college.

So the biggest benefit of college is learning to learn — to learn anything. And you don't know what will benefit you. In his article "A Tribute to a Great Artist: Steve Jobs" in the Smithsonian Magazine, Henry Adams tells a story about how Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Computer, was greatly influenced by a class in Chinese calligraphy that he took at Reed College before he became a computer entrepreneur. His innate interests in life and his eventual career focused on technology, and perhaps no one — not even Steve Jobs himself — could see how an artsy-fartsy class in Chinese calligraphy could help him pursue a career in technology, but it did. It helped Jobs re-envision the personal computer with the graphical user interface that changed everything. Then that artistic sensibility helped him later when he founded Pixar, the animation company that he eventually sold to Disney for billions of dollars. If you want to succeed, you need an intense focus (your major) supported by a broad and insatiable curiosity about everything (your liberal education). You need both a wide view and a narrow view. As Iain McGilchrist explains in his marvelous book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009), you must use your whole brain: scan the big picture with your right brain and focus on details with your left brain. You must do both. Remember: the world is complex, and everything is connected to everything else. The details don't make sense without the big picture, and there is no big picture without the details. Both are required.

And written and spoken languages are among the most beneficial tools you have for learning most everything intellectual. Language is the tool of choice in college. If you can't read it, you probably can't learn it. If you can't write it down, you probably don't know it. If you don't know it, then you probably can't succeed in class. You must be able to read and write, listen and speak. All are necessary.

Then, you must learn to converse with people about what you know and what you want to know. I'm writing to you now because I want you to understand some things that I've learned over my 50 years of studying writing and doing writing. I think you will succeed better in my class if you understand how to engage the class, and if you succeed, then I succeed. I will have a better time, and so will you.

So learn to engage the material first so that you can learn something, and then learn to engage your audience so that you can help extend that knowledge to others. Talk to each other about something important. That's basically it, and that's basically the most important thing about writing.

So leave me a comment about writing as a conversation. Does that metaphor make sense to you? Does it change the way you think about academic writing? Ask Gemini what ancient Greek rhetoricians had to say about skillful use of language. Converse with me. Converse with your colleagues. Converse with the material you are reading.

Teaching moment:

Have you noticed how I have integrated outside, secondary sources into my own writing? You should notice. Most academic writing expects authoritative support for any claim you make, so when I claim that people today are writing more than at any other time in history, then I support it with hard research – either my own, or more often, that of other authoritative scholars. And when I claim that Steve Jobs benefitted from a college class in Chinese calligraphy, I support my claim with a superbly researched article in the Smithsonian, a recognized, authoritative journal. After all, I didn't know Steve Jobs firsthand, and I've never been to Reed College where he took that class. If I want my claims to be believable, then I should support them with authoritative evidence. You should do likewise in your own academic writing. Save your unsupported claims for arguments at your local bar. Few people there care about sources.

Fall 2024 Post 06: Fat Outlines and Gemini

I assign outlines for my composition students. I suspect they don't like it, so why do I do it? Because outlines can help students become better readers and writers. And reading does come first.

And now that I'm using Gemini in the classroom, I find it even easier and more instructive to use outlines. Gemini is really good at generating an outline for almost any kind of writing, usually in under sixty seconds, and if you don't like the first outline Gemini generates, then you can prompt it to generate countless more until you are comfortable. I know from experience that outlines work for many people. Even experienced writers write better documents.

In his post entitled "On fat outlines and shitty first drafts," my favorite professional writer and blogger Josh Bernoff explodes the myth that professional writers (by professional he means people who get paid for their writing, including people who write emails to business customers and colleagues) can simply sit down at the computer and knock out perfect prose at will. He says pointedly: "The idea that you would just sit down and write a beautiful draft is deluded. The best writers do this on the best days; you, on the other hand, have to work even when you are not the best writer and it is not the best day."

As an example of his point, I'll share a personal anecdote. I took a graduate course at the University of Miami with Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature, and he claimed that he wrote every morning from 7:00 until lunch, and that four out of five days, he threw it in the trash. (Being a cheeky grad student, I asked him if I could take out his trash for him. He declined my offer.) So accept it: if a Nobel prize winning author seldom writes a perfect first draft, chances are that you and I never will.

Of course, all my students want to be one-draft wonders. They want to sit down and knock out a perfect A+ essay off the top of their heads on any topic on demand. In forty years of teaching writing, I have had one student who could do that: a 14-year-old Jewish teenager in Miami who was already in college. She knew more about writing than I ever will, and I taught her nothing. Sadly, students, you and I are not that gifted young Jewish woman. We have to work at writing. I know that I do, and I know that most of you do, too.

Fortunately, Bernoff suggests two main strategies for working your way through to polished writing:

• fat outlines
• shitty first drafts

Start writing by moving through your shitty first draft as quickly as possible. You can't turn that in, so get over with quickly. Gemini can help you do that, so use it.

I'll tell you a story to illustrate (teaching moment: note that I'm using another personal anecdote to illustrate a claim that I am making about first drafts being shitty. Personal anecdotes are effective in blog posts and magazine articles, but they are not often used in academic writing.): When I was earning my master's degree at Arkansas State University, I thought I was going to be a poet. One morning in 1977, I dashed off a poem, ripped it out of my typewriter (this was BPC, Before Personal Computers), and took it down to my major professor for a review. Prof Harwell looked at it cursorily, dropped it onto a stack of papers to grade, and said, "I'll get back to you." I waited expectantly for weeks for him to tell me that I was clearly a future Nobel prize winning author, but I heard nothing. About two months later, the poem was in my office mailbox, and Prof. Harwell had scrawled in angry red ink a simple message: A first draft is almost always an imposition. Don't do this again.

Harwell was right, and I have avoided ever submitting a first draft again. You shouldn't do it either. Your first draft is always an imposition. Don't submit it. Yeah, I know: you've struggled until you're sick of it to write 800 words, and you want to move on. Forget it. You've just started writing.

So if first drafts are usually no good, what works?

Fat outlines, Bernoff says. He says outlines work if they are complete, or fat. He is dismissive of the bare outline: "A regular outline includes just the heads and subheads of what you intend to write. It is useless. It is easy to create, but does not help you much when you sit down to write." I see his point, but I think he overstates it. A regular, bare outline at least gets you started, and it is easier than a fat outline — though I suspect you will agree with me that it is not always "easy to create." However, Gemini can create twenty outlines for every one outline that you can create. Use Gemini. For me, the biggest benefit of the bare outline is that it lets you see the large main ideas that you want to write about without all the details. This is especially helpful for moving those big ideas around as you try to find a suitable organizational pattern for your document. And you can use Gemini to rearrange outlines almost instantly. Try it.

So what is a fat outline? Bernoff says:

A fat outline is everything you intend to put in a chapter. It includes quotes, graphics, insights, statistics, tossed off paragraphs, and anything else you can think of. You arrange those items into a logical order and put some heads in. A fat outline takes work, although it is a different kind of work from writing. It is the work of research and organization. And it is easy to create, because there are no constraints whatsoever. (You can write the whole thing in repetitive passive jargon-filled run-on sentences and fragments if that makes it easier.) 

Unlike the traditional outline, the fat outline is very helpful when you sit down to write. With the fat outline in front of you, you have all the ingredients at hand, and the recipe is laid out in order. All that’s left is the cooking. Cooking is still hard, but if you hadn’t collected the ingredients and the recipe, it would be much harder.

I think he's nailed it as I often use both strategies for the same document.

As Singer taught me, four out of five times, your first draft is not good enough, even if you are a Nobel prize winner. It certainly is not good enough to turn in to your instructor. It is useful only for getting some ideas down so that you can keep the good ones and delete or fix the bad ones. I know – I write tons of shitty first drafts. But I don't turn them in or submit them for publication. I fix them or discard them. That's the biggest difference between experienced writers and novice writers. Novice writers think their first draft is good enough, experienced writers know that the first draft is never good enough. My job in this class is to turn you into an experienced writer – or at least, a more experienced writer.

Chances are that the writer of the essays that I ask you to read in this class used something like a fat outline. I did a fat outline for this post I'm writing, though I cheated a bit. I did write this post all in one sitting, though I have now revised it a few times for my different classes, but I can do that because I have been writing and studying writing for 50 years — I started college in 1969, and I read Bernoff's post about fat outlines a year before I wrote this post. I've read thousands of academic essays about writing and rhetoric (I had to read 200 essays just for my doctoral comprehensive examination in 1982). I've put in my 10,000 hours of gathering quotes, graphics, insights, statistics, and more so that I can write a post about writing in one sitting. Most of you will have to read and write for the next 50 years to catch up with me. You will certainly have to write more than one draft to earn a good grade in my class.

And by the way, none of us will catch up with the reading that Gemini has done. Gemini has come very close to reading every text and viewing every image on the Net. How much is that? An unimaginable amount. Google Search says:

In 2023, Statista estimates that there were 120 zettabytes (ZB) of data on the internet. A zettabyte is equal to 1,000 exabytes, or 1 trillion gigabytes. 

The amount of data on the internet is constantly growing. In 2017, there were 2.7 ZB of data. In 2019, there were 4.4 ZB of data. In 2025, IDC predicts that there will be 175 ZB of data. 

The amount of data being produced every day is also growing exponentially. Estimates suggest that at least 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced every day. 

The big four online storage and service companies, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook, store at least 1,200 petabytes between them. That's 1.2 million terabytes.

If the Internet stopped today, and if everyone in the world – if everyone who ever lived – started reading today, we would never read all the stuff on the Net. We couldn't even read all the stuff that is going to be added tomorrow. Only computers come close to doing that, and that's one reason why I'm teaching you to use Gemini. Good writing starts with good reading, and you can't read enough. I'm not sure that Gemini can read it all, but I know it can read a hell of a lot more than you and I can.

So get to it. Learn to throw away your first draft and do a fat outline. Run your stuff by Gemini several times to get feedback on your first draft. And probably your second and third drafts. Though Gemini can help you to write more quickly, good writing is hard work, and I wouldn't have it any other way. If it was easy, everybody would do it. Even Gemini.

Fall 2024 Post 05: How to Do Crappy Research

As you already know, I follow a professional blog by Josh Bernoff called Josh Bernoff. Because my students are focused on doing academic research just now, I want to share a couple of posts from Bernoff's blog about research in the real world, the working world, the world that most of you hope to enter after college. Note that Bernoff's posts are pre-LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini, so I will be adding some thoughts about using AI to help you do research in college.

The first post to consider is "The Problem with 'Do Your Own Research'", in which Bernoff explores the mostly sloppy research habits of too many professional people. (By the way, Bernoff was for years an analyst for a large, American research firm, so he made his living by finding and presenting relevant, credible information and insights to help decision-makers make the best decisions they could make. I find his knowledge reliable — most of the time.) You should read his post, but I want to focus on a couple of points.

First, he clarifies the different kinds of research that a professional person can do:

1. Primary research - This research uses strict methodologies to discover new knowledge — as when an epidemiologist uses science to discover how more likely unvaccinated people are to contract Covid than are vaccinated people. Unbiased researchers will report their findings even if the findings contradict the researchers' assumptions or the researchers' funding organizations. Typically, college students don't do this kind of research until they reach graduate school. I certainly didn't.
2. Secondary research - This research uses rigorous methodologies to reveal existing knowledge — as when reporters interview scientists to learn the latest about treating Covid cases. While this kind of research can be very insightful and reliable, these researchers are sometimes biased, reporting only the primary research that supports their point of view and minimizing or ignoring research they don't like. Most undergraduate college students do secondary research, going to the library (in the best case) to learn what the primary researchers say about some issue.
3. Bullshit research - This research uses indiscriminate Google searches or scans Facebook to find out what family and friends and anonymous influencers think about an issue — often just opinion, rumor, conspiracy, and gossip, but no knowledge. This is crappy research. Unfortunately, it's what too many college students and most high school students do. I give those students bad grades to discourage them, but I'm amazed at how they persist.

As I said, most undergraduate students, at best, do secondary research. They collect existing information about an assigned topic and write it up in an academic document of some kind. This is mostly what your undergraduate instructors want you to do: learn something credible about a topic and write it up in a clean document that shows what you learned about nursing or business procedures or computer programming, for instance, and that cites the sources where you got that information. Most of your undergrad professors don't usually expect you to create some new information or new procedure never discovered before (though it does happen). If you do present some new information, then you really better have your primary research evidence at hand to show your professor — otherwise, they might not believe you.

As I also said, too many undergraduates do bullshit research. They do quick Google searches and use the first three items that Google presents, regardless of the source, which they don't pay attention to anyway. What's wrong with this? Bernoff gives us an answer: Google plays to our biases, presenting first the information that it thinks we want to see. Bernoff says, "Google is built to reflect the biases of the searcher." Google's algorithms have spent years analyzing your interests and biases, and they play to those interests in an effort to keep you online longer and on Google's preferred sites more. Google knows your interests and biases better than you do. Want to do research in your nursing class about the Covid pandemic? Google already knows whether or not you take Covid seriously, and their algorithms will present you with the information that plays to your bias. Google's algorithms don't care if the information is reliable so long as it encourages you to click. Facebook is an even worse source of reliable information. And don't believe much of anything you see on television.

I'm not knocking opinion, rumor, and gossip on Facebook or television. They are great sources of information if you want to know what movie to watch or what clothing to buy, but Facebook and Google are not reliable sources for your academic documents. You have to go beyond them. And you've known this intuitively since elementary school. If someone in the third grade told you, "Suzy is your girlfriend," then your first question is "Who says?" In other words you want to know the source of the information so that you can judge how credible and reliable it is. In the third grade, having a girlfriend or boyfriend is a serious charge, and the reliability of the source is critical. You cared about the source, then, because you cared about the issue. Too often in college, you don't care about the issues you're writing about; therefore, you don't care about the sources. Any old quote will do so long as you can get the essay written and off your desk quickly. But remember this: your teachers care about the issues and the sources, and they will give you poor grades if you don't at least fake interest in them as well. Crappy sources angered you in the third grade, and they anger your teachers today. So avoid them. How?

Well, in a second post titled "How to Cite Research that Isn't Crappy", Bernoff explains how to do a good Google search. Unfortunately, he doesn't mention using Google Scholar, but then he isn't writing for an academic audience, either. He definitely doesn't mention using AI such as Gemini or ChatGPT because those AI were not available when he wrote the post. Still, he provides four questions that can help determine if a source is worth including in your own document:

1. Who did the research? Is this a source I can trust? Is there a bias?
2. How recent is it? 
3. How many people did they survey? What kinds of people? 
4. What is their sampling method? Is it representative?

Again, keep in mind that he is not writing for an academic audience, but for working professionals. Still, the advice is worth considering for college students. You really must determine up front if you can trust a particular source. Just because something is published on the internet doesn't make it credible. In fact, most sources on the Net are NOT credible. Most web sites exist to influence you to believe something or to buy something. Can you trust someone who is trying to sell you a product, service, or idea to tell you the unbiased truth? Probably not. More importantly, your college instructor won't trust them. So don't cite them in your essays. This is one of the advantages of using sources from the library, GALILEO, or Google Scholar. Most instructors will accept information from those sources.

Definitely don't trust sources listed by a current AI such as Gemini or ChatGPT. Not only will Gemini send you to poor sources, but it will send you to sources that don't even exist. Gemini will make up sources that perfectly fit your topic. Gemini aims to please, but it makes up its own targets. I try to get around this bad tendency by asking Gemini for ten sources if I only need three. I can usually find three out of the ten that Gemini sends me.

Then is your source current? Currency is especially important for business and science oriented essays. Science, technology, and business change too quickly to use old data. How many people and what kind of people did the study you are citing? You have to know who they are and why you can trust them if you expect your instructor to trust them. And if you are using social science sources that use surveys to gather data, then what was their methodology? A sample of six of your friends might be good enough to recommend a new TV show to your mom, but it is hardly substantial enough to warrant a different medical treatment or a change in the laws of a state or the accounting procedures of a company. Fortunately, we in the humanities often rely on and find credible research from older scholarly texts — after all, we are reading stories and poems that are hundreds, even thousands, of years old. Still, literary scholarship in the 19th century is very different from that in the 21st century, so be mindful.

Currency is a particular problem with ChatGPT, which was trained on a dataset that ended at 2021, over two years ago. That is a long time for some fast-moving topics such as business, information technology, and nursing. Because it is connected to the Internet, Gemini is aware of more recent work in a range of fields. When I prompted Gemini to explain its own access to current data, it responded with:

Gemini is a large language model developed by Google AI. It was trained on a massive dataset of text and code, allowing it to generate human-quality text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content, and answer your questions in an informative way. One of Gemini's strengths is its ability to access and process real-world information, making it a valuable tool for academic research. It can provide you with information on a wide range of topics, from current events to historical facts. When you're researching for your academic papers, Gemini can help you find relevant sources and connect you to the latest information. For example, if you're writing a paper on climate change, Gemini can help you find recent studies, news articles, and government reports on the topic.

However, it's important to note that Gemini's understanding of the world is limited by the data it was trained on. While it can provide you with information on a wide range of topics, it may not always have the most up-to-date or comprehensive data. For example, if a new scientific discovery is made just after Gemini's training data is finalized, it may not be aware of it.

To overcome these limitations, students can supplement their use of Gemini with additional research. This might involve searching for articles in academic databases, consulting textbooks, or conducting experiments. By combining the information from Gemini with other sources, students can ensure that their writing is based on the most accurate and up-to-date information available.

I think Gemini gives sound advice here. Use it.

Remember, in college, you are writing for your instructors, even when they assign another audience as I do. You must gather information that will satisfy the CRAP test (Currency, Reliability, Authority, Purpose) — especially if you want a good grade from your instructor. You must learn to check with your teacher, as different teachers have different measures on the CRAP test: for some like me a Wikipedia article will pass the CRAP test, but for many other teachers, it will not. Be advised.

Fall 2024 Post 04: Complex Learning, Reading, and Writing

Many of you may find my classes different from what you are accustomed to, especially if you are just out of high school, and thus, you may be confused. In this post, then, I will try to explain to you why I conduct my classes the way I do and how they work. I assume that if you understand how and why the class works, then you will do better in the class, and I want you to succeed.

Let's pause here for a writing lesson (after all, I am supposed to be teaching writing): note that I just introduced my topic for this post (the structure of my college classes) and told you my thesis, or the main point I will make about the topic (to explain why and how my classes are structured as they are). I've also identified my audience right up front: you, a student in my class. I've also identified why I want to write to you, my purpose (to help you understand the class you're in) and what response I'm hoping to get from you (better writing and a better grade). Finally, I've identified the genre of text I'm using to communicate to you: a blog post, an informal essay. Thus, I've given you the necessary framework or context to understand my writing: you now know the writer, reader, subject, and text. All readers need that context to understand any piece of writing (and you need to learn the terms in bold as they are key concepts in this class). Now, you have it. You should do something similar in your own writing: write an introduction that quickly establishes the context for the reader: who is writing to whom about what and how and why. And finally, again, note that my introductory paragraph is concise and to the point — much shorter than this longish explanation of it. Okay, back to my post.

My approach to teaching and learning how to read and write (and that's all I teach now that I no longer work in educational technology) is based on the idea that writing is complex. In fact, I think that all of life is complex. I agree with Ton Jörg of Utrecht University that, "We need to take the complexity of reality as reflecting the real" ("Thinking in Complexity" 2). Reality is really complex, so let me explain what I mean by complexity, and then I'll explain why I think writing is a complex activity that is best taught and learned in a complex environment.

I believe that all of life and its activities are the interactions of complex systems trying to make their way through whatever environment they find themselves. As they are making their way, they are changed by their environments and, in turn, change their environments in multiple, continuous feedback loops that pull energy, matter, information, and organization from an environment into an entity that processes that stuff, and then feeds energy, matter, information, and organization back out into the environment. Both the entity (you, for instance) and the environment (a town, a pond, or a solar system, for instance) are changed by this exchange. It's why nothing remains the same forever. All things are dancing in new patterns. It's also why you can't think about the entity (yourself) without considering its environments (your family, friends, job, school, church, community, state, nation, etc).

This dynamism works at the macro level of stars and galaxies down through the micro level of quarks and protons. It certainly works through you and me. I, for instance, started as a complex system some 73 years ago as the union of a particular egg and particular sperm, and I've been unfolding in particular environments ever since: a certain family, schools, churches, states, nation, socio-economic class, gender, race — you name it. I had to find my way through all these different environments, and the interactions between me and and my various environments are unbelievably complex and have made me who I am in large part and have made my environments what they are in small part. (As an aside, because environments are bigger than we are, they tend to affect us more than we affect them, but we still affect them.) I'm now in a class with you, and again I have to find my way through all these new relationships just as you do. Our interactions through the term will change me and change you and change the class as a whole. I hope we'll all change for the better, but we'll see.

Now to the point: reading and writing are also complex systems that we use to cope with our interactions with our social, political, economic, religious, and educational environments. Reading and writing concern the flows of information in and out of us, how those flows of information shape us and how they modify our environments in return. 

You already know this intuitively because all of you use reading and writing to connect to and interact with your social networks: you text. And you text all day, every day. You text to connect to and interact with people who are important to you — mostly friends, family, and lovers, but also coworkers and big organizations such as your cell carrier or your university. You read to bring all that information in and to clarify or modify what you know about your world. Then you process all that information — you think about it. Sometimes you are rational in your thinking, sometimes emotional, usually a bit of both, but either way, you think about the text messages you receive. 

Why do you do this much writing, this much texting and thinking? You do it to influence your people and your worlds. You are working hard to cultivate relationships, to prune relationships (your exes), and to make other interactions work to your benefit or at least not harm you. You are keeping your feedback loops humming with information that flows into you, gets processed, and then flows back out to your various environments. This is a hell of a lot of work, and most of you are very diligent about it, texting (and talking) hundreds of times a day.

My point? You are already writers and readers, and you intuitively understand why you do it: to connect to and learn about your world and to influence your world in return. You write to perturb in some way the behavior and beliefs of others, and you read to be perturbed by them in turn. You know this intuitively, but what you may not know is that academic writing is just a variation of texting to your peeps.

Now you've joined a new, more academic network: a university and this class, and you have to find your way through it. You have to learn how to keep the feedback loops humming as you let the information flow into you, process it, and then let it flow back out filtered through your own understanding. Does this sound a lot like conversation? Good. It should. Conversation is a loop, back and forth. A conversation is never one way. A one way conversation is basically just shouting, a lecture, a sermon, a performance. Most of us don't tolerate that sort of thing for very long. Even the most die-hard Swifty wants the concert to end sooner or later.

Unfortunately, many of your classes have been organized old school: you show up at a certain place and time, you keep quiet while a teacher dumps some new information into your head through lectures, you demonstrate on a test that you remember some of the teacher's information, and if you remember enough, you leave the class with a good enough grade to take one more step toward your degree. The only connections that matter in those kinds of classes are between you and the teacher, and the flow is one way: from teacher to you. You bring little to no value to the class conversation, and the other students don't matter either. In fact, often, they are just in your way. (Yes, I'm being extreme here, but to clarify my point.)

This class doesn't work that way. Please read that sentence again, and believe it. I don't do old school.

This class asks you to cultivate connections and relationships with the course content, the teacher, your colleagues in the class and even outside your class, and starting with this class, an online AI called Gemini. You learn to read and write only in the context of reading and writing with others, including Gemini. As famous sociologist and philosopher Niklas Luhmann says in his book Problems of Reflection in the System of Education, "Learning learns itself" (98). In this class, you learn to read and write by reading and writing with others. I will ask you to read academic essayists in 1101 or literary poets and playwrights in 1102, but you will also read me and your colleagues. You can begin to think of Gemini as one of your colleagues. I will ask you to write academic essays for your academic community, but I'll also ask you to write blog posts and comments in your extended class community. I'll ask you to write comments in the essays of your colleagues to help them improve their writing. You will learn to read and write by reading and writing, the same way you learned to text by texting. None of you took a Texting 101 course; rather, you learned wazzup, ur, LOL, and WTF by texting with others. And most of you are pretty good at it. If you practice, then you can be pretty good at academic writing, but practice is the ONLY way forward.

I learned this educational principle by coaching soccer for my sons' recreational teams back when they were young (they are both middle-aged men now). I learned that old school teaching doesn't work very well. It doesn't work at all in soccer. Imagine if I showed up at practice with a team of eight year olds, held up a soccer ball, and lectured them on its circumference, diameter, weight, and material composition, explained the rules of soccer, and the dimensions of the field, and then gave them a paper test. I would congratulate those who passed the test with a C or better and put them on the team. Those who failed the test would not be allowed to move forward with playing soccer. Silly, right? Yes, but that's about what we have done in traditional education where I might lecture you on the rules of writing, grammar, punctuation, formatting, spelling, and so forth, you take tests, and I congratulate those who pass and forget those who don't pass. Likely, some of my best, most promising soccer players and writers would be left off the team.

I don't do that, so don't expect any tests other than the weekly assessment, and you will get a 100 on those if you just show up and do them — on time. Eight year olds don't learn to play soccer by listening to me talk about soccer, and you don't learn academic writing by listening to me talk about it. You learn soccer by playing soccer, and you learn to write by writing. The job of the coach/teacher is to watch and to offer praise when he sees good soccer or good writing and to offer corrections when he sees weak soccer or weak writing. And he always offers his players and students the opportunity to improve a weak performance. Always.

So show up and connect (another way of saying do the work). Engage the content, me, and your colleagues, including Gemini, through reading and writing, and you will sharpen your abilities to read and write. Guaranteed.

If you don't show up and engage, then I can't help you. I cannot teach you to play soccer if you ain't on the field playing. I can't teach you to read and write if you ain't reading and writing. That's impossible, and both you and I will waste our time and become frustrated. I'm too old to waste time with people who don't show up.

So here's your chance to engage, to get on the field and play. We use blog posts to connect with each other in my classes. Blog posts are more involved and sophisticated than text messages but not so formal as academic essays. Most of my students find them a more comfortable space for writing: not as trivial and silly as cat memes, LOL, and WTF, but not as stuffy as essays, either. I hope I've given you something to think about in this post, so leave a comment below. Did you have a new thought? What? Did you already know life was complex? How? Are you more confused about the class now? Why? If this post didn't make you think at all, then tell us why. Are you still confused about the concept of complexity? Ask Gemini to help you explain it with a good analogy suitable for college students, and then share that in a comment below. However you can, engage the class and this content, and write something worth reading. Also read the comments of your colleagues and comment on their comments. Remember, you learn to read and write by reading and writing with others, just like you learn to play soccer, and like learning to play soccer, others will see you trip over your own feet. They'll also see you get back up and score the winning goal. So take the ball and run. Now.

By the way, I could have written a better post, probably a shorter one. I've tweaked and cut it a bit, but my standards for blog posts aren't quite so high as my standards for my academic essays, so I'm stopping here. As the French poet Paul Valéry said, "A poem is never finished, only abandoned." This is enough writing for one sitting.

Fall 2024 Post 03: Writing with AI

I am introducing artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of large language models (LLM) into my writing classes. We will use several Google AI tools in our writing this term.

Unless you have been living under a rock in Mongolia, you've heard of the LLM ChatGPT by OpenAI, the fastest growing app in the history of the Net. It is fair to say that this app exploded onto the scene – a cliche, but true. So what is an LLM?

For the general user such as you and me, an LLM is an online tool that uses natural language such as English to interact with users and to help them work or play. In more technical terms, the online information company Elastic NV defines large language models this way:

A large language model (LLM) is a deep learning algorithm that can perform a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Large language models use transformer models and are trained using massive datasets — hence, large. This enables them to recognize, translate, predict, or generate text or other content.

Though ChatGPT is the most famous LLM, others exist, and many more are being created every week. As Wikipedia says:

Notable examples include OpenAI's GPT models (e.g., GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, used in ChatGPT), Google's PaLM (used in Bard), and Meta's LLaMa, as well as BLOOM, Ernie 3.0 Titan, and Anthropic's Claude 2.

NOTE: Yes, I use Wikipedia. Though many teachers don't trust it, I do. You may use it in this class. However, before you use Wikipedia in your other classes, always ask your teachers if they allow it. If they don't like it, then don't use it.

In this class, we will use Google's Gemini to help us write the best documents that we can. We could use the others, and I invite you to try them all as they each have some capability that the others don't, but we are already using lots of Google tools, so Gemini keeps our work in the family, so to speak.

You've likely heard that LLMs such as Gemini and ChatGPT can write your papers for you. They can. So why am I using Gemini in a writing class? Because LLMs are here to stay, and I think we need to learn how to use them to get our academic work done. For instance, I have used Gemini to generate ideas about how to teach college students to use Gemini for academic writing. I have used many of the ideas Gemini generated. You can do the same in your essays.

Not everyone in academia is resistant to AI. In his blog post "On holding back the strange AI tide," Professor Ethan Mollick of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania defends the use of AI in education this way:

AI is far from a negative in education. We are very close to the long-term dream of tutoring at scale, and many other advances promise to make the lives of teachers easier, while improving outcomes for students and parents. Next, we need to articulate a vision for what radically changed education could look like. We need to think about how to incorporate AI into how we teach, and how our students learn. There is tremendous opportunity here to democratize access to education and reach out to all students, of all ability levels, but we can’t just keep doing what we always did and hope things won’t change. 

The only bad way to react to AI is to pretend it doesn’t change anything.

I agree that AI such as Gemini will change everything. I must tell you, however, that using an LLM is still highly controversial in higher education. Many of your professors will resist LLMs, and they may refuse to grade any of your work that is generated with the assistance of an LLM. They may accuse you of plagiarism, with dire consequences for your grades or even your academic career. So please don't take use of Gemini lightly. It is a powerful tool that can lead to powerful good – and powerful bad. Be careful.

Fortunately, I am teaching you how to use an LLM to help you write your own essays. I am not teaching you how to use an LLM to write an essay for you. I do not accept any essay that has been written solely by Gemini, and if you persist with using Gemini to write your essays in this class, then you will not pass. Please keep that in mind.

You can guard yourself by recognizing that you may be your own worst enemy. You are all busy adults with many obligations other than your school work. Despite your best planning and efforts, you may find yourself pinched for time and up against a deadline. You will be highly tempted to ask Gemini to write your essay for you, especially when you realize that it can spit out 800 words in beautiful, grammatically correct prose in under 60 seconds. Don't do it. I will likely find out, and I will not accept work from Gemini for a grade for you.

So what's the benefit of using Gemini? There are many, but a few include:

• Brainstorming: Gemini can help you generate more ideas than you will use about almost any topic.
• Concept clarification: Gemini can simplify complex academic concepts or terms.
• Summarization: Gemini can generate concise summaries of articles, books, and research papers.
• Draft creation: Gemini can help in creating initial outlines or drafts for essays, reports, or presentations.
• Source identification: Gemini can assist in finding relevant sources, citations, and references. 
• Quality assurance: Gemini can check for accuracy, consistency, and potential plagiarism in your work. Gemini can also help you edit your writing to ensure academic level grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

These are very powerful capabilities that Gemini can bring to your writing, and it can do so at the push of a button. Because you are busy adults, you can benefit greatly from that kind of power at that kind of speed. In this class, you will use Gemini to become a better writer. Mostly, you will learn to use Gemini as an assistant, or a tutor. You will use Gemini to help you learn, not to do your work for you. If Gemini does the work for you, then you don't learn anything. Why waste all this money and effort not to learn?

By now, you've had some experience with using Gemini and perhaps ChatGPT, so leave a comment about using AI in the college classroom. Say something worth reading. You might even use Gemini to help you compose an intelligent response to some issue raised in this post. See my comment for an example.

Fall 2024: Post 02 - Academic Writing

I teach academic writing at college. This is the style of writing that students have to do to earn good grades in their various college courses and to eventually earn their degree. Unfortunately, too many of my students don't seem to understand what academic writing is, so I want to provide my definition. However, sometimes it's easier to explain what something isn't rather than what it is.

Fortunately, I have a fine example of poor academic writing from one of my favorite bloggers: Josh Bernoff, who writes the blog Josh Bernoff, based on his book Writing Without Bullshit: Boost Your Career by Saying What You Mean. Mr. Bernoff is a professional writer and editor, and his blog talks about how to be a better writer than you already are.

In a recent blog post "This impenetrable opening paragraph violates every writing principle simultaneously", Bernoff gives an example of the kind of prose that good writers avoid, and as it happens, his example was written by two university academics: Michael M. Crow, president of Arizona State University, and William B. Dabars, an ASU professor and administrator. Bernoff quotes the entire opening paragraph from their recently published book The Fifth Wave: The Evolution of American Higher Education:

Building on the arguments of our previous foray into this topic, this book envisions the emergence of the Fifth Wave in American higher education—a league of colleges and universities, spearheaded initially by a subset of large-scale public research universities, unified in their resolve to accelerate positive social outcomes through the seamless integration of world-class knowledge production with cutting-edge technological innovation and institutional cultures dedicated to the advancement of accessibility to the broadest possible demographic representative of the socioeconomic and intellectual diversity of our nation. The Fifth Wave primarily augments and complements the set of American research universities, which, for reasons that will readily become apparent, we term the Fourth Wave, but will also comprise networks of heterogeneous colleges and universities whose frameworks are underpinned by discovery and knowledge production, and institutional actors from business and industry, government agencies and laboratories, and organizations in civil society.

This is not the kind of writing I will teach students this term; yet, this is what many of my students think academic writing is all about: dense, jargon-laden prose that only book nerds and specialists can plow through. Sadly, too many academicians write like this. I suppose they think it makes them sound smarter and more educated, or perhaps that's the style they learned from their professors and mentors. Whatever the case, this is NOT the style of writing that I teach. Rather, I teach that the best academic writing is clear, engaging, and difficult only when the material is difficult — and as it happens, the material Crow and Dabars are discussing is not really that difficult. I teach writing in the style of Bernoff's revision of the above paragraph. Bernoff says it this way:

American universities have reinvented themselves four times. It’s time to do it again. 

We propose a league of educational institutions, led by a few visionary public research universities. They will adopt a set of core principles: the pursuit of positive social outcomes, continued excellence in research, and adoption of videoconferencing and other technological classroom and networking tools. And they must have as their overarching goal the desire to empower and expand opportunities for students of all races and classes. This is only possible when educational institutions of all kinds work together with leaders from industry, government, and other institutions.

Isn't that better? I think so, and I'll bet you do, too. This sounds as if real people wrote it — not a couple of robots from the basement of the university library. Bernoff sounds more real because he uses real language. For instance, he avoids puffed-up jargon when simpler language says it just as well. He uses first person we (the book has two authors, so plural) instead of this book as in the original version. Many academicians tell students not to use first person — I or we — in academic writing, but that's the first step towards stilted, turgid prose (you're reading this on a computer, so google turgid if you don't know what it means, and make it a habit to learn new words). I will teach you how to use first-person in your academic writing. It really does make for more readable prose.

However, I also remind my students that some of their college professors don't like first-person in academic writing. For those professors, students should write uglier prose like the above, and those teachers will have to read it. That seems fair punishment.

Academic writing is a mainstay of Western intellectual culture, especially academic culture and conversation. In their book Clear and Simple as the Truth (2011), authors Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner call this kind of writing the Classic style, and their title pretty much captures their point about this style of writing: it is as clear and simple as the truth. As they say it, "a natural language is sufficient to express truth; and the writer knows the truth before he puts it into language" (3). 

(Teaching moment: note that I just used an outside resource to support my point about academic writing. First, I paraphrased Thomas and Turner's definition of the Classic style, and then I used a quote from their book to further support, amplify, explain, and expand the point I just made. In both cases, I documented my source. Of course, I told you the source of my quote, but even when I paraphrased in my own words, I told you the source of my idea. Note also that I made my point in my words first (academic writing is a mainstay …), and then I supported my point with outside sources. If you read carefully, you'll see that this is the main pattern in the academic essays we will read this term: make your point in your words and then support it with outside authority using their words. You should use this pattern. Also note that I did not use strict MLA style to document my source. This is a blog post, so I used hyperlinks to point you to my sources. MLA does not yet use hyperlinks, though it does use URLs on the Works Cited page, so I reserve MLA style for academic essays.) 

So here is the lesson about academic writing: learn something worth someone else knowing, and then share that knowledge in language that makes it as easy as possible for your reader to understand. That's academic writing as I teach it. It's what I try to do in my blog posts and academic essays. The writer should always work harder than the reader.

I have written this post for two main reasons: first, to explain what we're studying this term, and second, to introduce you to blogging in the college classroom. I use blogging as a space for writing that is less formal than most academic writing while still trying to be learned and intelligent. Blogging is a step up — or two steps up — from most social media such as texting but more casual than academic papers. It's a good middle ground where we can discuss academic issues without dressing up, but without dumbing down, either. Note that I cited my sources above and even provided a link so that you can access the original documents that I used. I expect the same of your posts.

I also expect you to leave comments on your colleagues' posts, so learn how by leaving a comment for me in this post. Make a substantive comment. "This is so true" and "I agree" are not substantive comments, unless you clarify why this post is true or false or why you agree or disagree with it. Expand the conversation. Be intelligent and thoughtful. As a writer, your job is to bring value to the reader. If you don't do that, then you wasted the reader's time, and you will earn a failing grade from me.

If you can't figure out how to leave a comment, google "post comments on blogger". Google knows the answer and explains things in language that makes it easy to understand. Google Help is actually a pretty good model for academic prose, or in Thomas and Turner's words, the Classic style. Pay attention to how Google does it: they have the knowledge, and they share it in easy to understand language. You should strive to do that: learn something valuable and share it with others. That's what writers do. Anything else is bullshit.