I'm a member of a college athletics committee, and I can tell you with all confidence that while is the common perception of college and university football programs, it simply isn't true. Even in Division I institutions football teams are, as a rule, largely funded by state dollars, student fees, and creative tax exemptions rather than by ticket sales, television contracts, etc. And this has been shown in study after study -- it's even a line that the NCAA toes.
You can check NCAA financial disclosures to verify this at http://www2.indystar.com/NCAA_financial_reports/ thanks to a study completed by Mark Alesia in 2006, but a quick Google should point you to a bunch of other studies that give this position the lie. If you'd rather not click through and see the reports yourself, this is a nice summary statement:
"First off, he [Alesia] found that athletic departments at taxpayer-funded universities nationwide receive more than $1 billion in student fees and general school funds and services, and that without such outside funding, fewer than 10 percent of athletic departments would have been able to support themselves with ticket sales, television contracts and other revenue-generating sports sources. In fact, most would have lost more than $5 million."
While this is a statement about athletics programs in general rather than football programs specifically, the NCAA financial reports make it clear that even among popular sports like basketball and football, the overwhelming majority of programs are perennial money losers.
I hear this line frequently, and I never really understood it. Nobody ever got rich writing textbooks. I don't think anyone ever bought dinner at a nice restaurant by writing textbooks.
If your prof has you buying his book, it's because he thinks it's the best book for the course. He might or might not be right about that, but he's not listing his book because his seven-cents-a-copy royalties are tipping the balance (and especially since the first few hundred dollars of those royalties -- if the book actually makes that much -- go to paying indexing costs, etc.)
I know it's common practice to write "CDs" as "CD's," and even that some imbecile handbook writers allow it. That doesn't make the practice grammatically correct. Apostrophes are used only to indicate omitted letters. That's it. That's all. Possessives are a case of this: Ben Jonson's play title, Sejanus His Fall would now likely be written Sejanus's Fall for the same basic reasons I would write "that's" instead of "that is." Plurals in this case omit no letters and warrant no apostrophe.
So please, please, please, please, please do not contaminate the English-speaking world with some greater illiteracy.
Before you leave your plan, there are a few things you should know. These are based on my own experiences with private health insurance (through Continental General) last year.
1] Your wife has a pre-existing condition. You need to know what your state's laws are regarding this; companies can (and do) sell policies to people when those policies will not cover any of their medical expense, and most of the time the people who are selling you the policy (who work on commission and are generally ignorant of insurance law) will not tell you this even if you specifically ask. For instance, I last year bought private coverage the same month my previous (student) insurance expired. At the time I had a slight fever which I believed to be the flu. I asked the person who sold me the policy whether this could in any way affect my coverage and he said "no." That was a lie, and I should have had the policy reviewed by a lawyer.
2] Your private insurance, if they pay your medical expenses at all, will only pay them after repeated appeals and legal badgering. This will take at least six months and in my case took nearly a year. In the meantime you will be responsible for your medical bills, which if left unpaid will go to collections and destroy your credit rating. Private insurers will almost always deny the first claim you make for any procedure or expense, since a percentage of claimants will elect to pay out of pocket or large creditors will reduce the total medical bill in an effort to collect what payment they can. This means that, after your wife's pregnancy, you will have to individually appeal every medical expense she incurrs at least once and probably twice. This will take a phenomenal amount of time and will require the services of a lawyer (probably about ten billable hours).
3] Regardless of the laws in your state and regardless of the insurance company's conduct, you do not in most cases have the practical option of civil litigation. The insurance company will deliberately make litigation as time-consuming and expensive for you as possible even if they are clearly in the wrong. Litigating any case will cost you at least $30,000 per year and take at least eighteen months; if the judgment is in your favor, there will be at least an additional two to three years of appeals. Even if your case is clear cut, you still have perhaps $100,000 on the line, and you will still in any case have to pay some portion of your medical bills for the several years of appeals you have ahead of you. In my case, it was faster and cheaper to negotiate a reduced payment plan with the hospital than it was to get my payment from an insurance company that was clearly in the wrong and clearly broke one or more laws.
Long story short, do not think that the threat of civil or criminal litigation will get your insurer to abide by the terms of your contract when it is not in their immediate interest to do so.
My advice right now is:
1] Talk to a lawyer to find out the prevailing laws and practices in your state so that you can make sure your wife's policy will cover her pregnancy and its aftermath. When you are reviewing policies from different companies, discuss them with with a lawyer to get an idea of how that policy's exclusions and limitations are interpreted according to your state's law. If you choose to buy a policy from a private insurer, exercise your policy in a way consistent with these exclusions and limtations. This may mean asking for specific documentation from a doctor to supplement your or your wife's medical records, for instance, or for your doctor to specifically note that a treatment was (or was not) for a specific condition (while doctors have standardized codes for these, it is important that they not be revised at a later date to fit an excluded condition; e.g. if you have any kind of pre-existing condition at all, your doctor should specifically record where possible that physicals, treatment, and so forth are not related to that condition).
Before we get started on Nancy's delightful little Master's Thesis, IAAP (a professor) and IAANBWOFFA (Nearly Bottomless Well of Free-Floating Aggression). I'm not sure where it is Nancy's from, but she's not getting her money's worth out of her student loans. As taxpayers, you should be mildly upset.
To Nancy,
Here are a few totally obvious points:
Cheating has two parts. The first part is using material from another source without giving credit. The second part is passing off said material as your own work. Just for instance, if I ask my writing class whether "'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" without citing Hamlet III.1.65, well, that's just fine and dandy like sour candy. If I tell them that I just made up that line on the spot to show them how easy it is to kick off a soliloquy then I might be in trouble [1].
Now if you're in, say, and intro physics class at and your TA is explaining Newtonian physics to you in his third language, there had better not be a brian cell in your pretty little head that thinks he's telling you about this really great inverse square relationship he just abstracted from his painstaking observations of celestial motion. This is fine, because the TA isn't taking credit for the research, its aggregation and criticism, its illustrative examples, etc., either explicitly or through the conventions of the medium (lecture, rather than research presentation).
If you're in the same intro to physics class and write a paper on Newtonian physics claiming that the orbit of Mercury is a corner case that illustrates a problem with the Newtonian model of gravity, you're not doing anything wrong. If you say that your research into the orbit of Mercury compels the conclusion that Newtonian gravity wants some extensive revision, you're cheating and should probably be eaten by wolves (also because you're wasting tax money by spending your weekends drinking out of a funnel and asking for Plan B). If you citelessly cut and paste a paragraph from Wikipedia on the subject, well, you're waking up on the same stained frathouse mattress, because by the conventions of the medium (research paper) you're passing off Wikipedia's indiscriminate aggregation of material as your own work.
Second, it's not the professor's first priority to keep people from cheating (for the same basic reasons it's not McDonald's first priority to keep you from purging in the bathroom). Multiple choice tests, which are of course easier to cheat on than essay-answer blue books, allow grading consistency even when the grading's to be split among several people, which blue book tests of course do not. They can also be quickly revised to accomodate disabled students (e.g. the ones who can't hear, can't see, have graphomotor problems, or need to have the test administered via computer/aide for whatever reason), which is of course the legal obligation of any college or university (even the private ones). You might not object to the tuition increases that would come from paying the professor to grade bluebooks instead of teaching another section of Things You Should Have Learned in High School 301, Nancy, but lots of other people do because costs are already insane.
Now I can't defend a history prof who asks for expository essays on the American Civil War, because that's not college-level work. What a history professor probably asks for is more like the effects of Confederate inflation on the war's tactical evolution, or for each student to choose a similarly narrow topic of inquiry, because papers obviously don't exist to test what students have already learned but to compel them to learn some discrete skill while researching or writing [2]. I was going to write more here, but the long story short of it is that the most effective teaching techniques (in terms of total cost or students' ability to skill retention) are not the same ones that take catching cheaters to tinfoil hat levels.
It's actually terrifying. I've worked in and run our university's writing center for five years now, and I've seen the same ten pages on the properties of elastic-brittle materials at leat fifteen times from fifteen people over the past five years. The scarier thing is that (1) I've never actually seen a student in the sciences revise out material I've told him is plagiarized and (2) neither administrators nor professors in the sciences seem to care about this in the slightest.
OU is still going through a review of their Chemical Engineering theses (prompted by Tom Matrka, a student there who went to the press with a bunch of nearly identical theses he found in the library), and I think their findings are both unsurprising and likely representative of what you'd see in most other programs. I know the Chronicle has been following this pretty closely, as has IHE, so if you google for Tom Matrka you should get some rough numbers.
People die all the time from all kinds of different screw ups -- poorly written instruction manuals, undercooked hamburgers, prescription drug mix-ups, police beatings, medical insurance denials, and so on. Just about any professional has lives resting on his competence in whatever he does.
Of course engineers are no exception, but most engineers -- in fact the vast majority -- don't design the kinds of things that kill people when they break. You know, computer monitors, catalytic converters, pens, coffeemakers, plastic wrap and the lot of essentially not-lethal-in-failure engineered goods that make up most of people's everyday lives.
So yeah, it's arrogance. Lots of professions hold lives in the balance more frequently than engineers (think cooks, nurses and medical techs, prescription drug packagers, construction workers, and the like). But most of them don't use it as an excuse for willing ignorance of other fields.
The point is that you can't teach the basics as course material. It's not an option. Even in the event you teach students the actual difference between, say, "its" and "it's," and you can confirm their practical knowledge of the difference by testing their ability to use each one correctly, your students won't produce more grammatical writing. For a good summary of the research on this point (and a fair explanation as to why this happens), check out Patrick Hartwell's Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar.
That being said, what you can do is penalize students for making certain grammatical errors in their class writing -- if you're seeing "improvement" using this technique, you're training your writers rather than teaching them.
The big problem with this approach (and the difference between training and teaching) is recidivism -- which is, in this case, total. Students categorically revert to their old behavior once they're free of you and your course, which is one reason some departments, like History and Engineering, see grammatically terrible writing from students who do well in English (and one reason why the web's a cesspool of misplaced commas and apostrophes).
The other big problem with this kind of approach is that it generally keeps students from taking stylistic risks; while those kinds of risks almost always result in bad writing, they're essential to learning better writing. And it robs class time from more teachable topics (like how to proofread well and quickly).
The point is, using the language well isn't something that happens in a semester or any string of semesters. It's a continually adapted skill, like invention or painting, that doesn't accept large grafts of rules. So while I think you're right that the best way to become a better writer is to be a better (or at least more frequent) reader, the best tools that writing teachers have promote good lifelong (or at least career-long) reading and writing habits instead of semester-long "learning" that evaporates outside of the pressurized classroom.
Oddly enough, it illustrates a rule of writing that I've taught my students since I learned its importance myself: choose a good writing environment. While it's probably clear that I correctly use it's/its as a knee-jerk reaction and would normally catch typos, I should have chosen a better writing and proofreading environment than the index card-sized comment window like I'm typing in now.
I should also learn to touch type instead of using my turbo four-finger hunt-and-peck method. Fewer typos.
To elaborate, this mice-eating-the-bad-man-in-the-tower myth, like the myth about the Countess Margaret of Henneberg's 365 children, is a staple of continental Europe. If it doesn't predate the historical Hatto, it probably comes close.
The Hatto version probably became dominant because of its association with a the tower you mention; Henneberg is likewise remembered in a plaque in a Loosduinen church -- visited by none other than Samuel Pepys (and recorded in his diary). But even though she dates from the late 13th century, there's evidence the myth is a few hundred years older. It got sort of set-in-stone through association with a real place.
I think Jan Bondeson writes about this in The Two-Headed Boy. I'm sure someone who knows the book better could get things more right.
Man, I hope you're kidding. Violence is just as natural, and morally neutral, as sex.
Representative governments, for instance, are based on consensual violence; the necessary guarantor of political rights - freedoms of conscience, speech or trade - is authorized violence. And we can only contract with each other - to grow food or build houses - if we agree to a violent underwriting of terms, usually by a state proxy such as a civil court.
Violence, like sex, really only avoids censorship by being unrealistic - but so long as it's unrealistic, it can get as graphic as it wants. On American TV, you see plenty of fake tits and fake blood. Our being fucked-up has little to do with a Puritanical excision of sexuality from our culture, though that probably helps. We'd rather have things realistic than real.
The Jew of Malta (generally considered the first comic-book-style evil villain ever written) wasn't at all taken seriously for hundreds of years after ben jonson wrote it.
Jonson's Jew of Malta isn't taken seriously now, because it doesn't exist. Marlowe wrote The Jew of Malta.
There's a reason it's not translated: it doesn't need to be.
To paraphrase Ezra Pound, anyone unwilling to spend five minutes figuring out Chaucer's language should be shut out of reading good books forever.
Seriously, this takes a thirty word glossary and the patience to puzzle out some spelling. College graduates (even engineers) should have read -- and likely learned to pronounce -- Chaucer's midlands dialect in their English survey courses for the same reasons they should have a working knowledge of Calculus and History.
That's part and parcel of a liberal arts education.
Please, for the love of all things with a third-grade education, "affect" is a verb, (as in "how will this affect research"). "Effect" is a noun, (as in "the effects are as yet unknown").
Unless Eisner keeps his cash under his bed, or swims around in gold coin like Scrooge McDuck, his money is being spent, every minute of every day, by the banks he keeps it in, the companies whose stock he owns, and so on.
Instead of "vanishing," this money goes largely into companies' stocks and bonds, whether directly or by proxies, (like a bank). It doesn't disappear.
Moreover, because monied folks have a high tolerance for risk, they fund relatively high-risk, high return ventures -- small businesses, for instance -- that John and Jane Doe don't capitalize (even in the millions). John and Jane Doe go for bonds and such, and keep most of their money in savings accounts, and are conservative investors for the most part.
I'm tired of the argument ad lazarum that "too much money in too few hands" keeps capital out of the economy, and wants the passage of laws to redistribute wealth. If you're going to make that kind of argunet (there might be a place for it) at least keep from the straw men.
From the brief clips it looks like they've done a good job imitating the Matrix CGI on a low-budget."
If you're going to write, write well. Words might flirt, but they won't not up for a casual noun -- so don't use hyphens to roofie them together. So-called compound nouns are either married or celibate (e.g. bedchamber, the middle class), and hyphen hook ups should only sire adjectives (e.g. a middle-class lifestyle in a low-rent crackhouse/crack house). Please, please, please use that college copy of Strunk and White.
He should go to prison for making and selling an item that others want to buy.
Yeah, meth is bad for you. Blah blah blah. Last I heard, living in a free country means you can do as much meth as you want-- you're not hurting anyone else.
Laws like this are perversions worthy of the Old Testament.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a member of a college athletics committee, and I can tell you with all confidence that while is the common perception of college and university football programs, it simply isn't true. Even in Division I institutions football teams are, as a rule, largely funded by state dollars, student fees, and creative tax exemptions rather than by ticket sales, television contracts, etc. And this has been shown in study after study -- it's even a line that the NCAA toes.
You can check NCAA financial disclosures to verify this at http://www2.indystar.com/NCAA_financial_reports/ thanks to a study completed by Mark Alesia in 2006, but a quick Google should point you to a bunch of other studies that give this position the lie. If you'd rather not click through and see the reports yourself, this is a nice summary statement:
"First off, he [Alesia] found that athletic departments at taxpayer-funded universities nationwide receive more than $1 billion in student fees and general school funds and services, and that without such outside funding, fewer than 10 percent of athletic departments would have been able to support themselves with ticket sales, television contracts and other revenue-generating sports sources. In fact, most would have lost more than $5 million."
While this is a statement about athletics programs in general rather than football programs specifically, the NCAA financial reports make it clear that even among popular sports like basketball and football, the overwhelming majority of programs are perennial money losers.
I hear this line frequently, and I never really understood it. Nobody ever got rich writing textbooks. I don't think anyone ever bought dinner at a nice restaurant by writing textbooks.
If your prof has you buying his book, it's because he thinks it's the best book for the course. He might or might not be right about that, but he's not listing his book because his seven-cents-a-copy royalties are tipping the balance (and especially since the first few hundred dollars of those royalties -- if the book actually makes that much -- go to paying indexing costs, etc.)
No, it isn't.
I know it's common practice to write "CDs" as "CD's," and even that some imbecile handbook writers allow it. That doesn't make the practice grammatically correct. Apostrophes are used only to indicate omitted letters. That's it. That's all. Possessives are a case of this: Ben Jonson's play title, Sejanus His Fall would now likely be written Sejanus's Fall for the same basic reasons I would write "that's" instead of "that is." Plurals in this case omit no letters and warrant no apostrophe.
So please, please, please, please, please do not contaminate the English-speaking world with some greater illiteracy.
Before you leave your plan, there are a few things you should know. These are based on my own experiences with private health insurance (through Continental General) last year.
1] Your wife has a pre-existing condition. You need to know what your state's laws are regarding this; companies can (and do) sell policies to people when those policies will not cover any of their medical expense, and most of the time the people who are selling you the policy (who work on commission and are generally ignorant of insurance law) will not tell you this even if you specifically ask. For instance, I last year bought private coverage the same month my previous (student) insurance expired. At the time I had a slight fever which I believed to be the flu. I asked the person who sold me the policy whether this could in any way affect my coverage and he said "no." That was a lie, and I should have had the policy reviewed by a lawyer.
2] Your private insurance, if they pay your medical expenses at all, will only pay them after repeated appeals and legal badgering. This will take at least six months and in my case took nearly a year. In the meantime you will be responsible for your medical bills, which if left unpaid will go to collections and destroy your credit rating. Private insurers will almost always deny the first claim you make for any procedure or expense, since a percentage of claimants will elect to pay out of pocket or large creditors will reduce the total medical bill in an effort to collect what payment they can. This means that, after your wife's pregnancy, you will have to individually appeal every medical expense she incurrs at least once and probably twice. This will take a phenomenal amount of time and will require the services of a lawyer (probably about ten billable hours).
3] Regardless of the laws in your state and regardless of the insurance company's conduct, you do not in most cases have the practical option of civil litigation. The insurance company will deliberately make litigation as time-consuming and expensive for you as possible even if they are clearly in the wrong. Litigating any case will cost you at least $30,000 per year and take at least eighteen months; if the judgment is in your favor, there will be at least an additional two to three years of appeals. Even if your case is clear cut, you still have perhaps $100,000 on the line, and you will still in any case have to pay some portion of your medical bills for the several years of appeals you have ahead of you. In my case, it was faster and cheaper to negotiate a reduced payment plan with the hospital than it was to get my payment from an insurance company that was clearly in the wrong and clearly broke one or more laws.
Long story short, do not think that the threat of civil or criminal litigation will get your insurer to abide by the terms of your contract when it is not in their immediate interest to do so.
My advice right now is:
1] Talk to a lawyer to find out the prevailing laws and practices in your state so that you can make sure your wife's policy will cover her pregnancy and its aftermath. When you are reviewing policies from different companies, discuss them with with a lawyer to get an idea of how that policy's exclusions and limitations are interpreted according to your state's law. If you choose to buy a policy from a private insurer, exercise your policy in a way consistent with these exclusions and limtations. This may mean asking for specific documentation from a doctor to supplement your or your wife's medical records, for instance, or for your doctor to specifically note that a treatment was (or was not) for a specific condition (while doctors have standardized codes for these, it is important that they not be revised at a later date to fit an excluded condition; e.g. if you have any kind of pre-existing condition at all, your doctor should specifically record where possible that physicals, treatment, and so forth are not related to that condition).
2] Expect stick
To everyone:
Before we get started on Nancy's delightful little Master's Thesis, IAAP (a professor) and IAANBWOFFA (Nearly Bottomless Well of Free-Floating Aggression). I'm not sure where it is Nancy's from, but she's not getting her money's worth out of her student loans. As taxpayers, you should be mildly upset.
To Nancy,
Here are a few totally obvious points:
Cheating has two parts. The first part is using material from another source without giving credit. The second part is passing off said material as your own work. Just for instance, if I ask my writing class whether "'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" without citing Hamlet III.1.65, well, that's just fine and dandy like sour candy. If I tell them that I just made up that line on the spot to show them how easy it is to kick off a soliloquy then I might be in trouble [1].
Now if you're in, say, and intro physics class at and your TA is explaining Newtonian physics to you in his third language, there had better not be a brian cell in your pretty little head that thinks he's telling you about this really great inverse square relationship he just abstracted from his painstaking observations of celestial motion. This is fine, because the TA isn't taking credit for the research, its aggregation and criticism, its illustrative examples, etc., either explicitly or through the conventions of the medium (lecture, rather than research presentation).
If you're in the same intro to physics class and write a paper on Newtonian physics claiming that the orbit of Mercury is a corner case that illustrates a problem with the Newtonian model of gravity, you're not doing anything wrong. If you say that your research into the orbit of Mercury compels the conclusion that Newtonian gravity wants some extensive revision, you're cheating and should probably be eaten by wolves (also because you're wasting tax money by spending your weekends drinking out of a funnel and asking for Plan B). If you citelessly cut and paste a paragraph from Wikipedia on the subject, well, you're waking up on the same stained frathouse mattress, because by the conventions of the medium (research paper) you're passing off Wikipedia's indiscriminate aggregation of material as your own work.
Second, it's not the professor's first priority to keep people from cheating (for the same basic reasons it's not McDonald's first priority to keep you from purging in the bathroom). Multiple choice tests, which are of course easier to cheat on than essay-answer blue books, allow grading consistency even when the grading's to be split among several people, which blue book tests of course do not. They can also be quickly revised to accomodate disabled students (e.g. the ones who can't hear, can't see, have graphomotor problems, or need to have the test administered via computer/aide for whatever reason), which is of course the legal obligation of any college or university (even the private ones). You might not object to the tuition increases that would come from paying the professor to grade bluebooks instead of teaching another section of Things You Should Have Learned in High School 301, Nancy, but lots of other people do because costs are already insane.
Now I can't defend a history prof who asks for expository essays on the American Civil War, because that's not college-level work. What a history professor probably asks for is more like the effects of Confederate inflation on the war's tactical evolution, or for each student to choose a similarly narrow topic of inquiry, because papers obviously don't exist to test what students have already learned but to compel them to learn some discrete skill while researching or writing [2]. I was going to write more here, but the long story short of it is that the most effective teaching techniques (in terms of total cost or students' ability to skill retention) are not the same ones that take catching cheaters to tinfoil hat levels.
Again, long story short, the str
It's actually terrifying. I've worked in and run our university's writing center for five years now, and I've seen the same ten pages on the properties of elastic-brittle materials at leat fifteen times from fifteen people over the past five years. The scarier thing is that (1) I've never actually seen a student in the sciences revise out material I've told him is plagiarized and (2) neither administrators nor professors in the sciences seem to care about this in the slightest.
OU is still going through a review of their Chemical Engineering theses (prompted by Tom Matrka, a student there who went to the press with a bunch of nearly identical theses he found in the library), and I think their findings are both unsurprising and likely representative of what you'd see in most other programs. I know the Chronicle has been following this pretty closely, as has IHE, so if you google for Tom Matrka you should get some rough numbers.
Nate
But I've switched to Ubuntu.
Really now.
People die all the time from all kinds of different screw ups -- poorly written instruction manuals, undercooked hamburgers, prescription drug mix-ups, police beatings, medical insurance denials, and so on. Just about any professional has lives resting on his competence in whatever he does.
Of course engineers are no exception, but most engineers -- in fact the vast majority -- don't design the kinds of things that kill people when they break. You know, computer monitors, catalytic converters, pens, coffeemakers, plastic wrap and the lot of essentially not-lethal-in-failure engineered goods that make up most of people's everyday lives.
So yeah, it's arrogance. Lots of professions hold lives in the balance more frequently than engineers (think cooks, nurses and medical techs, prescription drug packagers, construction workers, and the like). But most of them don't use it as an excuse for willing ignorance of other fields.
I should have explained this point more clearly.
The point is that you can't teach the basics as course material. It's not an option. Even in the event you teach students the actual difference between, say, "its" and "it's," and you can confirm their practical knowledge of the difference by testing their ability to use each one correctly, your students won't produce more grammatical writing. For a good summary of the research on this point (and a fair explanation as to why this happens), check out Patrick Hartwell's Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar.
That being said, what you can do is penalize students for making certain grammatical errors in their class writing -- if you're seeing "improvement" using this technique, you're training your writers rather than teaching them.
The big problem with this approach (and the difference between training and teaching) is recidivism -- which is, in this case, total. Students categorically revert to their old behavior once they're free of you and your course, which is one reason some departments, like History and Engineering, see grammatically terrible writing from students who do well in English (and one reason why the web's a cesspool of misplaced commas and apostrophes).
The other big problem with this kind of approach is that it generally keeps students from taking stylistic risks; while those kinds of risks almost always result in bad writing, they're essential to learning better writing. And it robs class time from more teachable topics (like how to proofread well and quickly).
The point is, using the language well isn't something that happens in a semester or any string of semesters. It's a continually adapted skill, like invention or painting, that doesn't accept large grafts of rules. So while I think you're right that the best way to become a better writer is to be a better (or at least more frequent) reader, the best tools that writing teachers have promote good lifelong (or at least career-long) reading and writing habits instead of semester-long "learning" that evaporates outside of the pressurized classroom.
Nate
You're right, of course.
Oddly enough, it illustrates a rule of writing that I've taught my students since I learned its importance myself: choose a good writing environment. While it's probably clear that I correctly use it's/its as a knee-jerk reaction and would normally catch typos, I should have chosen a better writing and proofreading environment than the index card-sized comment window like I'm typing in now.
I should also learn to touch type instead of using my turbo four-finger hunt-and-peck method. Fewer typos.
Nate
To elaborate, this mice-eating-the-bad-man-in-the-tower myth, like the myth about the Countess Margaret of Henneberg's 365 children, is a staple of continental Europe. If it doesn't predate the historical Hatto, it probably comes close.
The Hatto version probably became dominant because of its association with a the tower you mention; Henneberg is likewise remembered in a plaque in a Loosduinen church -- visited by none other than Samuel Pepys (and recorded in his diary). But even though she dates from the late 13th century, there's evidence the myth is a few hundred years older. It got sort of set-in-stone through association with a real place.
I think Jan Bondeson writes about this in The Two-Headed Boy. I'm sure someone who knows the book better could get things more right.
Nate
Representative governments, for instance, are based on consensual violence; the necessary guarantor of political rights - freedoms of conscience, speech or trade - is authorized violence. And we can only contract with each other - to grow food or build houses - if we agree to a violent underwriting of terms, usually by a state proxy such as a civil court.
Violence, like sex, really only avoids censorship by being unrealistic - but so long as it's unrealistic, it can get as graphic as it wants. On American TV, you see plenty of fake tits and fake blood. Our being fucked-up has little to do with a Puritanical excision of sexuality from our culture, though that probably helps. We'd rather have things realistic than real.
Jonson's Jew of Malta isn't taken seriously now, because it doesn't exist. Marlowe wrote The Jew of Malta.
Unbelieveable.
There's a reason it's not translated: it doesn't need to be.
To paraphrase Ezra Pound, anyone unwilling to spend five minutes figuring out Chaucer's language should be shut out of reading good books forever.
Seriously, this takes a thirty word glossary and the patience to puzzle out some spelling. College graduates (even engineers) should have read -- and likely learned to pronounce -- Chaucer's midlands dialect in their English survey courses for the same reasons they should have a working knowledge of Calculus and History.
That's part and parcel of a liberal arts education.
Except, of course, when "effect" is used as a verb meaning "to bring about," (as in "how will we effect greater funding").
Please, for the love of all things with a third-grade education, "affect" is a verb, (as in "how will this affect research"). "Effect" is a noun, (as in "the effects are as yet unknown").
More gold, coal, natural gas, nickle, iron, etc. etc. than has ever been mined in the history of mankind.
Coal and natural gas? In space? Did I miss something about the moon having lush vegitation during the Jurassic period?
Um. Yes. For the same reasons you take a gun to a shootout.
You, sir, are talking out of your ass.
Unless Eisner keeps his cash under his bed, or swims around in gold coin like Scrooge McDuck, his money is being spent, every minute of every day, by the banks he keeps it in, the companies whose stock he owns, and so on.
Instead of "vanishing," this money goes largely into companies' stocks and bonds, whether directly or by proxies, (like a bank). It doesn't disappear.
Moreover, because monied folks have a high tolerance for risk, they fund relatively high-risk, high return ventures -- small businesses, for instance -- that John and Jane Doe don't capitalize (even in the millions). John and Jane Doe go for bonds and such, and keep most of their money in savings accounts, and are conservative investors for the most part.
I'm tired of the argument ad lazarum that "too much money in too few hands" keeps capital out of the economy, and wants the passage of laws to redistribute wealth. If you're going to make that kind of argunet (there might be a place for it) at least keep from the straw men.
If you're going to write, write well. Words might flirt, but they won't not up for a casual noun -- so don't use hyphens to roofie them together. So-called compound nouns are either married or celibate (e.g. bedchamber, the middle class), and hyphen hook ups should only sire adjectives (e.g. a middle-class lifestyle in a low-rent crackhouse/crack house). Please, please, please use that college copy of Strunk and White.
You do know their computer is broken, right? What are they supposed to do, dial in with a phone and yell "10010101?"
Slackware has hardware detection via the hotplug subsystem. Works fine over here.
As Heraclitus would have said, "you can't boot into the same Knoppix twice."
*ducks*
You're right.
He should go to prison for making and selling an item that others want to buy.
Yeah, meth is bad for you. Blah blah blah. Last I heard, living in a free country means you can do as much meth as you want-- you're not hurting anyone else.
Laws like this are perversions worthy of the Old Testament.
Good day to you, sir.
I, for one, welcome our new Republican over--
Wait a second. No I don't.