Rewrite Redraft Rework Revise Reword Rephrase … Refrain

Posted on 9 November, 2018 by John Royce

My GoogleAlert has just presented me with an anonymous article (“By Guest Contributor”) posted on TechGenYZ, a media company which started just over three years ago (according to its About Us page). They claim,

Our core values are Integrity, Innovation, Quality, Honesty and Excellence.

Perhaps they need to apply these values to their guest contributors.

The article I was directed to carries the title Get unique content with the help of article rewriter. It is a review, of sorts, promoting use of Article Rewriter. This is an application developed by SmallSEOTools. As the name suggests, it rewrites text: it is a paraphrasing tool, a synonymizer. The anonymous guest contributor claims that Article Rewriter will take text and rewrite it so that the content is totally original and plagiarism-free. It is recommended for

1) “those” working in the writing field (who) are asked to write several articles on a single topic which becomes quite strenuous for some especially if you have no type of interest in that particular topic. All the articles must be different from each other because otherwise if they will not be then it will be of no use.”

2) SEOs who “must be familiar with the importance of uploading unique content on your site, as the search engines prefer the web pages with fresh and informative content that does not match with any text.”

and 3) students who “find it easier to copy the same assignment available on the internet and email it without rewriting as it also requires time.”

You simply put your text through the machine and “The material that will be delivered to you by the text rewriter is always plagiarism free.” If you are running out of ideas or hit writer’s block, “you can Google the specific topic and copy down the material you get in the box provided to you on the tool page.”

It is totally free and plagiarism-free too. It claims.

Plagiarism is, of course, not just the re-use of someone else’s exacrt words. It is also plagiarism to use someone else’s ideas without attribution or acknowledgement. Spinning someone else’s text does not make the content your own, does not mean that you created or came up with those ideas.

The article does carry a caveat: you do need to check the output to ensure it says what you (or the original writer) wanted to say: “The thing you will have to keep in mind is that your content should be of good quality as if you will insert a low-quality content in article rewriter then it will return you an even worse content.”

Oh! Does it work?

Judge for yourself. The TechGenYZ article includes a link to a version of Article Rewriter in SearchEngineReports.Net. On the page we read:

If you are someone who is trying to have a proper understanding of the functionality of an article rewriter or a paraphrasing tool then you are at the right place. An article rewriter tool is a simple tool that can work both online or offline, depending on how it functions. An instant article spinner or a paraphrasing tool is an efficient yet very easy to use tool that understand and identifies the text you give it, then rewriting it for you. It enables you to get your article rewritten with no trouble. Any quality article spinner saves your time and the trouble of sitting in front of your computer for hours in an effort to write unique and quality content. However, article rewriter is only a tool that does exactly what you asks it to do that means it only rewrites the content you give it, you still can go through the rewritten content make any changes that might be needed. At times, a paraphrasing tool ends up rewriting an article that doesn’t make much sense and that’s why it’s essential to proofread before you use the content.

I rather like that last sentence. I like it so much that I am going to repeat it:

At times, a paraphrasing tool ends up rewriting an article that doesn’t make much sense and that’s why it’s essential to proofread before you use the content.

Put that paragraph through Article Rewriter, and this is what you get:

If you’re somebody United Nations agency is making an attempt to possess a correct understanding of the practicality of a piece of writing redactor or a paraphrasing tool then you’re at the correct place. a piece of writing redactor tool may be a easy tool which will work each on-line or offline, betting on however it functions. an immediate article spinner or a paraphrasing tool is associate degree economical nevertheless terribly straightforward to use tool that perceive and identifies the text you provides it, then editing it for you. It permits you to urge your article rewritten with no hassle. Any quality article spinner saves it slow and therefore the hassle of sitting before of your laptop for hours in a trial to write down distinctive and quality content. However, article redactor solely is merely|is simply|is just|is barely} a tool that will specifically what you asks it to try and do which means it only rewrites the content you provides it, you continue to will bear the rewritten content create any changes that may be required. At times, a paraphrasing tool finishes up editing a piece of writing that doesn’t create a lot of sense and that’s why it’s essential to ascertain before you utilize the content.

It’s colourful, it’s sort of original, and it’s total (comment deleted).

There appear to be many sites which offer Article Rewriter (or something similar). Many boast that you can use the same content over and over, producing different versions of the same article, each “unique” and thus “publishable” as “original content.” “Original”! You can be a prolific writer, even if you have written only a few pieces. Or none.

It is worth noting (though maybe not a lot), that the original Article Writer as publsihed by SmallSeoTools does “not recommend using this tool to produce multiple versions of the same article. Not only is this penalized by search engines, but it offers nothing of value to your target audience either.” You’re right there!

It’s just as well that Article Rewriter is free. It’s worthless.

A critical criterion

Posted on 2 November, 2018 by John Royce

Over the last few weeks, The IB has been publishing Extended Essay reports for the May 2018 exams. They are available for most subjects now.

I’ve been looking through them. Some of them make sad reading, marks thrown away needlessly. Most students should score in the top mark band for Criterion D, Presentation, at least for the elements of structural presentation. And yet, and yet… too many don’t.

Are the students who don’t get maximum points here careless? Don’t they know what’s required? Are supervisors letting them down by not advising what to check? Care here with that last though, of course: supervisors are not permitted to tell students that the page number for (say) the Discussion section does not match the page number given on the Table of Contents page; they are permitted to advise students to check that numbers on the pages match those in the Table of Contents page. The first situation is being specific and amounts to proof-reading and/or editing (neither of which are permitted); the second is general and generic, and advises the student to do the work of finding errors and correcting them.

Examiner comments regarding page-numbers bother me. Not the comments themselves but the necessity for them. I wonder how many students submit their essays in MS Word or similar word-processing programme – and have their page numbers re-adjusted if they are using a different size paper to the one the IB uses? That could explain why examiners comment on graphics and images which are out-of-place in the text – these can tend to wander in Word. It could explain comments regarding section headings at the foot of one page with the text starting on the next page, a change of paper-size can do this. I suspect these are the causes of many issues. I cannot help wondering (if this is indeed the case) why these students have not been encouraged to print to or save as PDF… and then proofread the PDF files.

I might be completely wrong there, it might not be down to the vagaries of the software. That said, many of the issues raised by examiners would seem to be down to casual or no proof-reading before submission, or maybe reading on the screen rather than printing out and proof-reading from hard-copy.

Proof-reading is an essential part of the writing process. It’s a pain, especially at the end of perhaps nine months of close connection with the essay. It is difficult to gain distance, and one just wants to hit Save and submit, be done with it, get on with one’s life and all those other pressing Diploma Programme needs. But it’s worth it. It provides the polish which can distinguish a crafted piece of work from the average seemingly-not-really-caring work. It can show real engagement (worth a mention in the Reflection on Planning and Progress Form?), and it could provide the extra point or two needed to make the next higher grade (and an additional point towards the diploma).

It is difficult to gain the necessary distance, to read what is actually there as against what the writer thinks was written. In workshops, I recommend a number of ways to gain that distance, instead of or as well as printing out the PDF of the essay. These include:

using a different font
using a different size font
using a different colour for the font
using wider or narrower margins
reading aloud
viewing on a different computer or screen
and more.

I also recommend that students print and proofread their work at least three times, focusing on just one element each time:

proofreading once for meaning
proofreading once for punctuation and grammar (including agreement between subject and verb)
proofreading once for spelling (especially checking for consistency of spelling of names of people, places, organisations etc) (and not relying on spell-checking apps or auto-correction features).

If the page numbers have been added manually rather than allowing the software to do it, now is the time to produce a PDF version and proofread for those structural elements, the page numbering, the orphaned headings, and so on. Any time changes are made to the word version, the page numbers on the table of contents should be checked once again.

One last check: the student should check that the version to be submitted is the final version, not an early draft, not one of those changed-fonts-for-proofreading purposes. We want to be sure that it really is the final version which gets uploaded. So, one last check (of a PDF?), for layout and general presentation, checking that line-spacing is consistent, that the font is consistent and consistently-sized

Proof-read for all the things that examiners comment on … I don’t want to compile a checklist for anyone. That’s not my job. But checklists do help. They are nicely generic so do not constitute specific and inappropriate advice to students, they need to do the checking for themselves.

With regard to checklists, my recommendation is: read the general Extended Essay Report, May 2018 and make notes especially of the Criterion D advice; then read a selection of subject reports, especially the recommendations for future supervision, and the Criterion D comments, adding to the notes made from the general Extended Essay report. The more reports you read in the different subjects, the better the understanding of what exactly examiners are looking for under this criterion, the better the advice you can give students, the finer the checklist you present them.

A further thought: don’t leave it to almost final submission before presenting the checklist to your students; you might find it helpful to feed them sections of the list as appropriate, as they work through the process, certainly by the time they are ready to present the one completed draft that supervisors may see and discuss before submission. That completed draft will ideally be as complete as possible before the discussion (including a similarity or “plagiarism” check if you use similarity checking software or platform). It is not complete at the discussion-of-the-draft stage, of course, as the student still has the opportunity to rethink and rewrite at this stage – but supervisors will probably want to spend time discussing argument and evidence during the discussion rather than the finer details of presentation.

The better presented the essay, the more impressed examiners will be on first read, the more they can concentrate on the essay itself rather than be irritated by peripheral matters. Presentation can make that crucial difference, even for – and perhaps especially for – weaker candidates. Criterion D is subject-knowledge free, and can help towards achieving the 7 points needed for a Pass. That crucial difference could be critical. Go for it!

Out of step footnotes – 2

Posted on 19 October, 2018 by John Royce

In recent weeks, I’ve been indulging a footnote fetish – last week’s post was part 1 of a 2-post mini-critique of the Chicago/Turabian style. I am almost over my obsession, just this last blast to go. It’s a particularly pertinent piece for readers in IB schools, in that it focuses on inconsistencies in Turabian. While they do (are supposed to) accept any referencing style, IB examiners are well-concerned to have references and citations recorded completely and consistently within each individual assessment. Given that IB requirements are sometimes inconsistent with the guidance of particular style guides, confusion can be compounded when the chosen style guide is inconsistent within itself.

[All references and scans used in this piece are from Turabian, 9th edition – more properly Kate L. Turabian’s A manual for writers of research papers, theses, and dissertations: Chicago style for students and researchers 9th. ed., University of Chicago, 2017.]

First, a general note, not specific to Turabian. Turabian advises that many items should be cited in the text but not in the bibliography, for instance:

personal interviews, correspondence, blog posts and other social media, newspaper articles, reviews (of books, performances), well-known reference works, the Bible and other sacred works etc. etc.
(Turabian, section 16.2.3, lists many more…)

Turabian is not alone in suggesting that writers give details of certain types of source in the text but not in the bibliography; many style guides list exceptions to the general rule. In all instances, when writing for IB, IB requirements overrule the advice of any style guide: if you cite it in the text, be sure to give a full reference in the list at the end.

Similarly, Turabian advises that Continue reading →

Out of step footnotes – 1

Posted on 12 October, 2018 by John Royce

A couple of posts ago, I declared myself Not a friend of footnotes. I don’t like them as a reader, I don’t like them as a writer.

I appreciate that many, many people, readers and writers, do like footnotes and endnotes, and that’s fine with me. I’ll put up with them if what I read is interesting, I’ll use them as a writer if my editors demand them. I’ll agree that they may well suit particular forms of writing and different media. But I do not like them. In this post and the next, I’ll detail some of the reasons why I don’t like them, particularly as a writer.

[I’ve been told that my two-weeks-ago post was unfair. Here I described some of my problems as a reader, and I used some illustrations from Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens to make my point, illustrations I used in a workshop soon after. “But he’s not using endnotes properly!” I was told. “He shouldn’t use several authors in one endnote, they should be distinct.”

[Far be it for me to suggest that Harari is using endnotes wrongly, especially as Turabian (9th ed.) states Continue reading →

Transferable skills

Posted on 5 October, 2018 by John Royce

If you were hoping for more thoughts on footnotes and endnotes this week, my apologies. The thoughts I had in mind are still to come. This post is still about footnotes, but not quite what I thought I’d be saying.

The IB has begun posting the May 2018 DP subject reports in the Programme Resource Centre and I have spent some time this past week looking through them.

This is not something I do as a matter of course. I do look at the Extended Essay reports for all subjects – and eagerly await publication, they must surely be posted any day now. But I don’t follow the subject reports that carefully.

My look at the subject reports was impelled by a comment made in a workshop I led last week – a history teacher insistent that the subject guide for History says that students are required to use footnotes. I was sure that the subject guide says no such thing; IB allows the use of any documentation system as long as Continue reading →

Not a friend of footnotes

Posted on 28 September, 2018 by John Royce

There – I’ve made clear my bias, I’m not a fan of footnotes. Or endnotes.

For one thing, they get in the way of my reading. That’s ironic, in that one of the claimed virtues of footnotes is that they don’t get in the way of the reader, unnecessary details such as authorship or extra detail or explanation can be relegated to the foot of the page (or the end of the paper/ book). If readers wish to follow up or find out more, the footnote is there to give the necessary information; if readers do not want to follow up, then they just carry on reading. The Center for Teaching and Learning at Yale Universtity puts it this way, in a page titled Why Are there Different Citation Styles?

When developing a historical explanation from multiple primary sources, using footnotes instead of inserting parenthetical information allows the reader to focus on the evidence instead of being distracted by the publication information about that evidence. The footnotes can be consulted if someone wants to track down your source for further research.

If the writer thinks the author or the source cited is important, then that information can still be mentioned in the narrative in the text, with full details in the footnote. When the author or source is not considered important, why intrude on the flow of the reading?

While footnotes are often used in the humanities, especially history, they are often used in the sciences as well. It could be that both disciplines deal in facts and a well-read reader in the field will know the facts, so don’t break up the reading.

Science isn’t all about facts, it’s about theories and ideas, thus the notion that knowing the team behind the research and the recency of the research makes author-date citation systems popular Continue reading →

To quote or not to quote

Posted on 21 September, 2018 by John Royce

A couple of weeks ago, Nadine wrote a comment on my post Multiple confusion in which she noted, ” Not that encouraging direct quotations is best writing form, but at that age it’s probably more common.”

That got me thinking. When teaching citation and referencing, we often start with quotations. Is this because it is easy to demonstrate, based on something that most students can and do already do? When you copy-and-paste, you are using someone else’s exact words, you are quoting someone. When you quote someone, you need quotation marks. You use quotation marks around the copy-pasted words to show you are quoting, and you also say who that someone is, whose words you have borrowed.

From there we go on to say that, when you use your own words to put over someone else’s thoughts and ideas and findings, you need also to cite them; they may be your own words but they are NOT your own thoughts. You still need to say whose thoughts or ideas or findings you are using.

It’s a common complaint, that although most students know how and when to quote someone else’s material, it is when they paraphrase or summarise someone else’s work that they often forget that they need also to cite the source of that work. It might be because they confuse using their own words with their own original words and ideas… they are using their own words so a citation is not necessary?

I won’t go too far down that track today. What I do want to do is to go back to Nadine’s comment, that “encouraging direct quotations” is not “best writing form.” My first thought was, why then do we teach how to quote and cite? But a second thought quickly followed Continue reading →

Cite check

Posted on 14 September, 2018 by John Royce

I’ve just finished an online workshop for librarians. Good fun as usual and very worthwhile. The participants made really great strides over the four weeks and they knew it, they had so much new awareness by the end of the month. it was very encouraging.

Many went beyond the bounds of the workshop readings to find information and opinion elsewhere, the spirit of inquiry was strong. Many quoted from the articles they found – great! Quite a few copied graphics and images from articles and other materials found – and most did not need to be reminded to cite the sources of those graphics as well as of the text.

But … perhaps because there were larger numbers of newcomers to librarianship on the course than usual, there seemed to be a rash of participants who would simply cite their images as “Google” or “Google Images” or present the Google image search URL.

That’s not helpful and it’s not right either. I would send a personal message Continue reading →

Multiple confusion

Posted on 7 September, 2018 by John Royce

A question came up in Programme Communities in My IB just recently:

My student is using a book and a website as her primary sources about the organisation she is researching for her extended essay. When there are several quotations or summaries from the same book or article, it is easy to show in the in-text citation from which page the quotation/ summary/ parahrase is taken. What about the website, how does she indicate the different pages used from within the same website? (This is a slightly edited version of the question as posed.)

I checked the manuals and was able to answer the question fairly quickly. But it’s been bugging me, because the approaches taken by MLA and APA are very different.

APA style

Usually, I prefer APA to MLA. There are several reasons, one of which is that APA is nicely straightforward with its WHO-WHEN-WHAT-WHERE approach. In this instance, though, I think the APA is confusing.

The answer is not spelt out in the Publications handbook so I checked Continue reading →

Smile, please – it’s for real

Posted on 31 August, 2018 by John Royce

I came across this news item in the i newspaper (page 13 of the 29 August 2018 edition, a short article by John von Radowitz). The article reports on a study in which “Scientists showed 20 goats unfamiliar photos of the same human face looking happy or angry;” they found that “goats preferred to interact with the smiling face.”

It sounds fun, it sounds odd, it almost sounds improbable.

Two things struck me immediately. The first was that phrase, “unfamiliar photos.” When you’re a goat, who’s to say whether a photo is familiar or unfamiliar?

The second was a memory – a memory of the academic paper Feline Reactions to Bearded Men. You might remember it: the researchers claimed to have held cats in front of photos of bearded men and observed their reactions. The paper suggests that ” Cats do not like men with long beards, especially long dark beards.”

The cats “paper” was first published in 1999, maybe earlier. It is frequently used in website evaluation exercises to make students aware of web pages which look authentic but could be big hoaxes.

The name of the site – Improbable Research – is claimed as a warning signal (though as this is the site responsible for the annual Ig Nobel Prizes, a very real event, one might not be so sure). The biggest giveaway in the cats paper is probably the bibliography, which includes entries for Pat Boone, Madonna, Yul Brynner, Sinead O’Connor, Mary Quant, Arnold Schwarzenegger and the if-only Dr Seuss (responsible for the paper “Feline Responses to Hats”). How much of a giveaway, 20 years on, might be questionable; many of the names are probably unknown Continue reading →

The memory hole gets deeper

Posted on 30 July, 2018 by John Royce

The news that the respected Forbes magazine published an opinion (op-ed) article by Panos Mourdoukoutas, Chair of the Department of Economics at Long Island University, with the title “Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries to Save Taxpayers Money” a few days ago is hardly news any more. It has been shared widely and commented on in the mainstream media and in social media too. It’s old news.

Mourdoukoutas’s argument is studded with dubious and irrelevant claims and arguments such as

(“Third places” like Starbucks) provide residents with a comfortable place to read, surf the web, meet their friends and associates, and enjoy a great drink. This is why some people have started using their loyalty card at Starbucks more than they use their library card…

Then there’s the rise of digital technology. Technology has turned physical books into collector’s items, effectively eliminating the need for library borrowing services…

Amazon Books is a chain of bookstores that does what Amazon originally intended to do; replace the local bookstore. It improves on the bookstore model by adding online searches and coffee shops. Amazon Go basically combines a library with a Starbucks…

The article concludes Continue reading →

Double-dipping

Posted on 30 March, 2018 by John Royce

On 19 April 2016, Kendra Perkins wrote an article for the RefME blog with the title The CRAAP Test: An Easy & Fun Way to Evaluate Research Sources. RefME was taken over by Chegg and subsumed into the Cite This For Me service in 2017 and her original post is no longer available. Fortunately, you can still find the original post, preserved by the Wayback Machine (the Internet Archive).

Kendra had long been a fan of RefME and frequently recommended it in librarian listservs and forums such as iSkoodle. Towards the end of her RefME blog, she declared that she had compiled her list of References using the RefME referencing generator.

A year later, May 2017, Kendra posted an article in her own blog, The Inspired Librarian, a piece with the title Cite This for Me Changed my RefME Blog Post. Here she relates how her RefME post had been reposted on the Cite This For Me site. Her article now read: Continue reading →

How many…?

Posted on 19 March, 2018 by John Royce

It’s a fascinating and possibly pointless exercise, trying to work out how search engines work. Although this article was inspired by a news story on beating (so-called) plagiarism detectors, I found myself more interested in what the story told us about Google and (presumably) other search engines.

The story starts withn an article in Hoax-Alert: Forget Russian Bots: Fake Native Americans Are Using Russian Characters To Avoid Fake News and Plagiarism Detectors The story relates how a number of websites which appear to be promoted by Native Americans are in fact sites originating in Kosovo and other countries. It seems that they are stealing content, disguising it (to escape similarity detectors) and getting away with it. The way they disguise the content is to substitute Cyrillic characters which look like Latin alphabet characters in text, in order to beat text-matching software. The HoaxAlert story shows this illustration: Continue reading →

Not just CRAAP – 3

Posted on 7 February, 2018 by John Royce

[In part 1 of this 3 part article we looked at Wineburg and McGrew’s study which suggests that a fresh look at the way we evaluate web pages and sites could be valuable.]
[In part 2, we looked at a rebuttal of Wineburg and McGrew’s study – and rebutted the rebuttal.]
[In this third part, we look at reasons why we may need a compromise between the “old” and the “new” ways of evaluating pages and sites online.]

In my last two posts, I discussed a study by Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew into different methods of search-and-find as employed by three distinct groups, professional fact-checkers, professional historians and first-year undergraduates. The researchers found that the methods used and the thinking processes of the historians and the students were different to the strategies and the thinking processes of the fact-checkers – and that the methods used by these historians and the students could be among the reasons why many of them made incomplete analyses of the sites visited and made flawed conclusions.

In one particular task, a comparison and evaluation of two articles both of which dealt with bullying, the researchers found that historians and students tended to spend much time considering the actual articles before they moved elsewhere; some never left the target sites, some left them to look elsewhere. By contrast, the fact-checkers spent very little time on the target pages – sometimes just seconds; they all quickly looked elsewhere, often outside the publishing sites. That is not necessarily (at least in my eyes) a concern. What does concern is that the evaluations made by the two groups were very different. Continue reading →

Not just CRAAP – 2

Posted on 5 February, 2018 by John Royce

In part 1 of this three-part article, I discussed a study by Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew into different methods of search-and-find as employed by three distinct groups, professional fact-checkers, professional historians and first-year undergraduates. The researchers found that the methods used and the thinking processes of the historians and the students were different to the strategies and the thinking processes of the fact-checkers – and that the methods used by these historians and the students could be among the reasons why many of them made incomplete analyses of the sites visited and made flawed conclusions.

The three groups were asked to complete six tasks in timed conditions. The findings and ensuing discussion are detailed in the paper Lateral Reading: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information.

In this earlier post (Not just CRAAP – 1), I invited readers to try one of the tasks for themselves. If you haven’t already done this, it might be a good idea to try before reading on here.

The task asked participants to imagine they looking for information on bullying, and describe their thought processes as they considered two particular articles on two different websites. The articles were Bullying at School: Never Acceptable on the site of the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds – the College) and then Stigma: At the Root of Ostracism and Bullying on the site of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP – the Academy).

Participants were allowed to look elsewhere on the sites and anywhere else online that they wished. They had to decide which website was the more reliable and trustworthy.

What the researchers found was that Continue reading →

Not just CRAAP – 1

Posted on 3 February, 2018 by John Royce

Over the weekend, a newsletter item in the Chronicle of Higher Education caught my attention, One way to fight fake news by Dan Berrett and Beckie Supiano. It was originally published in November 2017; I’ve got behind in my reading.

The item reports on a study by Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew. Wineburg and McGrew compared the search habits and evaluation techniques of three different groups, professional historians, professional fact-checkers, and students at Stanford University. They found that :

the historians and the students mostly used very different techniques of search and evaluation to the techniques of the fact-checkers;
the historians and the students could not always find the information they were asked to search for;
the historians and the students took longer to decide on the validity and reliability of the sites they were asked to look at;
most disturbingly, the historians and the students came by-and-large to diametrically opposite conclusions to those of the fact-checkers as to the validity and reliability of the various sites; the two groups could not both be right.

Before reading further, you might want to try an approximation of one of the tasks undertaken by the participants (there were six tasks in all, in timed conditions). Continue reading →

Guilty by association

Posted on 5 January, 2018 by John Royce

A month or so ago, an incident at Ohio State University made headlines. One or more students had posted information on business course assignments in a GroupMe study group. The type of information shared violated the University’s code of student conduct. As a consequence, more than 80 students – all members of the GroupMe group – were charged with cheating.

GroupMe is a free group messaging app, widely used to send messages and documents simultaneously to all members of a group. Members of educational GroupMe groups often use it to share dates due and study tips and readings. When collaboration is permitted, this kind of app can be a great boon in assisting collaborative work. In this particular case, however, some users had overstepped the mark and had posted suggested answers to homework assignments. Legitimate collaboration had become illegitimate collusion.

By and large, the headlines (of which this is just a small selection) seemed to get more dramatic Continue reading →

WHYs before the event

Posted on 6 November, 2017 by John Royce

I have long suggested that students will more readily understand the conventions of citing and referencing if they understand WHY we do it, WHY they are asked, expected and required to do it. HOW to do it is necessary, but knowing WHY we do it gives purpose, can even make it fun.

When I “crowd-source” the reasons WHY we cite and reference, in classrooms and in workshops, the group usually comes up with the main reasons between them. That is good. But there is no guarantee that any one individual in the room appreciates all of those reasons – as evidenced perhaps by my questioner in Qatar, a story I relate in Lighten the load, “Is referencing taken as seriously at university as it is in this school?”

Trouble is, for many students, the notions of building on what has gone before, showing the trail which has led to our present thinking or contributing to an academic conversation are just too abstract to appreciate. This is so, even at university level, as suggested by Continue reading →

We value our libraries – shout it loud!

Posted on 26 October, 2017 by John Royce

I mused on coincidences in my last post but one, APA mythtakes. Here’s another one!

Over lunch today, I read a piece in my library magazine, CILIP Update, a story about Bury Council in England. The Council had closed a public library, and some bright spark sent out a tweet, asking the community to advise on what could be done to “turn a former library into a valued community asset.”

And guess what the community replied?

If you’re not sure (I’m sure you are, really), try the Manchester Evening News item Bury council tweeted about making closed libraries into ‘valued assets’ and everyone said the same thing

Everyone saying the same thing, that’s not the coincidence. The coincidence is courtesy friend Christina who just an hour or so later sent me a link to a story in Huffington Post, ‘The Angriest Librarian’ Schools Columnist Over Anti-Library Tweets. This is one person’s response – multiple responses – to a New York journalist’s tweet suggesting “Nobody goes to libraries anymore. Close the public ones and put the books in schools.”

The Angriest Librarian wasn’t the only person who responded. Within hours, more than 110,000 people had responded. Andre Walker, the journalist, had to admit that libraries weren’t as unpopular as he had thought.

We value our libraries – shout it loud!

It takes time

Posted on 25 October, 2017 by John Royce

One of the basic tenets of this blog is that we do students a disservice when we give them the impression that the main purpose of citing and referencing is to “avoid plagiarism.”

The way I see it, “avoiding plagiarism” is at best a by-product of citation and referencing. It is a long way from being the main or the only reason for the practice. It makes for angst (“what if I get it wrong?”) and it leads to confusion. Because of the nit-picking demands of getting one’s references absolutely perfect, it can lead to boredom. It leads to taking short-cuts, to avoidance of using other people’s work in support of one’s own ideas and statements, to a loss of the writer’s own voice and ideas.

At the same time, as demonstrated by repeated uses of Jude Carroll’s Where do you draw the line? exercise, there are wide differences between what different teachers class as plagiarism. This serves further to confuse, as when a student who has had work long accepted finds her standard practice is suddenly condemned Continue reading →

APA mythtakes

Posted on 14 October, 2017 by John Royce

We don’t take note of non-coincidences, do we? It’s different when two similar events happen close to each other. Wow! we say, what are the chances of that happening twice in the same day? Coincidences stick in the mind, single events do not stick so readily. (This one stuck so solidly that it pushed me into blogging again.)

A recent EasyBib blog post was one half of such a coincidence. Michele Kirschenbaum’s blog post Video Lesson: In-Text Citations had upset me on two counts. Although published on 29 September 2017, my Google Alert did not pick it up until last week.

Count #1: the video gives the impression that in-text citations and parenthetical citations are one and the same

This impression is confirmed in the text of the blog where we read “We think this video, which provides an introduction to in-text, or parenthetical citations, is a great addition to your classroom resources.”

Me, I don’t think it such a great addition, not least because parenthetical citations are one kind of in-text citation, but not the only kind.

Other kinds are available, not least when the citation starts the sentence Continue reading →

By any other brand-name, not so sweet?

Posted on 28 January, 2017 by John Royce

Something is afoot in the world of reference generators. The American company Chegg, which claims to be “all about removing the obstacles that stand in the way of the education YOU want and deserve” [Chegg: What we’re about], seems to be buying up service after service.

They already own CitationMachine, BibMe, EasyBib, and CiteThisForMe. None of them is particularly good at what they claim to do, and (in their free versions and since being taken over by Chegg) they are bedevilled by splash and flash advertising (as with Citation Machine, illustrated on the right).

Several of my earlier posts point directly or indirectly to shortcomings in these services. Their auto-citation generators leave much to be desired. They also leave much to be edited or added after the reference is auto-generated. A common plaint is that students don’t do this – they unthinkingly and uncritically accept auto-generated output no matter how many errors or omissions. Alas, the manual form-filling modes are often not much better. Too often Continue reading →

A gift that kept on giving…

Posted on 28 December, 2016 by John Royce

Regular readers will know my opinion of the (so-called) Harvard referencing, but in case you don’t, it is low. (If you don’t, then see, as instance, the three-part post which starts at Harvard on my mind 1.)

So there was some delight and much sinking feeling when my daily GoogleAlert for [plagiarism] today brought up the hit How to Reference Your Sources Using Harvard Referencing.

The first line or so of the alerted post by someone signing in as techfeatured reads:

An article in the Sunday Times (Jones, 2006) claims that up to 10% of all degree level submissions commit some form of plagiarism – the act of …

It wasn’t just the mention of Harvard that set the alarm bells ringing and the red flags flying. It was the statistic itself, that 10%, and the ten-year old source. Surely there is more recent research, surely the rate is higher? What is meant by “degree level submissions”?

Today (as I start drafting this post) is Christmas Day Continue reading →

Of honesty and integrity

Posted on 17 December, 2016 by John Royce

One of my favourite classroom and workshop activities is a “Do I need to cite this?” quiz. Those taking the test are presented with a number of situations and asked to choose between “Cite the source/s” and “No need to cite the source/s.” *

I like to do this using Survey Monkey – other polling applications will do just as well. It means that I can home in on any situation in which there is divided opinion, or which many respondents are getting wrong. There is no need to go through each situation one at a time if there are just two or three situations which need to be discussed.

Much of the time, the answers are clear: the situation is academic (a piece of work submitted for assessment) so should demand academic honesty, and most students and other participants get it right.

Some of the situations are less clear and lend themselves to discussion, considerations of common knowledge, learned expertise, copyright, credibility and reputation, honesty (as against academic honesty) and integrity.

One situation, for instance, presents Continue reading →

Knowing how to write is not knowing how to write

Posted on 10 October, 2016 by John Royce

A month or two ago, but within the space of two weeks, three very different, very similar, situations:

Situation 1 : a student in a school in Asia wrote a comment on an earlier blog post, How Much Plagiarism? asking for advice. She had misunderstood the instructions; she “forgot to include in-text citations” in the draft of her IB extended essay. All her citations were at the end of the essay. There was no intention to plagiarise. Since this was a draft, the IB is not involved; there was still the opportunity to put things right. But she was worried about her school’s reaction which could include note of her transgression on future university recommendations. Her question was, is this excessive?

Situation 2 : an inquiry on an OCC forum: it was the school’s deadline day for submitting final copies of extended essays. One student, known for his dilatory habits, managed to submit his essay on time. Reading through before authenticating it, the supervisor realised that in the first half of the essay the student had included footnote references for each superscript number in the text. Then the student seemed to have run out of time or stamina, for in the second half of the essay the superscript numbers were there but with no footnoted references to support them. Would it be ethical Continue reading →

Honesty, honestly…

Workshops, Advice & Consultancy – for teachers, librarians, students…

Rewrite Redraft Rework Revise Reword Rephrase … Refrain

A critical criterion

Out of step footnotes – 2

Out of step footnotes – 1

Transferable skills

Not a friend of footnotes

To quote or not to quote

Cite check

Multiple confusion

Smile, please – it’s for real

The memory hole gets deeper

Double-dipping

How many…?

Not just CRAAP – 3

Not just CRAAP – 2

Not just CRAAP – 1

Guilty by association

WHYs before the event

We value our libraries – shout it loud!

It takes time

APA mythtakes

By any other brand-name, not so sweet?

A gift that kept on giving…

Of honesty and integrity

Knowing how to write is not knowing how to write