A treasure, stumbled upon by chance: a whole series of videos illustrating the Greek myths, or some of them at least. Here’s the one of Theseus and the Minotaur, starring Michael Gambon (aka Prof. Dumbledore) and a Muppet dog but don’t let that put you off: it’s good quality and to the point.

When young Theseus learns that he is the son of King Aegeus of Athens, he goes to Athens and is warmly accepted by his father. Theseus wants to help the king so he decides to go with the yearly tribute to Crete: every year, Athens must send seven youths to be eaten by the Minotaur. If Theseus can slay the Minotaur he can save many Athenian lives. Once in Crete, the prince seduces the princess Ariadne who helps him defeat the Minotaur. But when Theseus marries her and then abandons her on the way home, Ariadne curses him to a tragic end.

via YouTube – Greeks Myths “Theseus and the Minotaur” 1of3.

This is a follow-up to my previous entry on this subject.

If you are looking for a website to help you teach academic writing to university students (whether EFL students or native-English-speaking students), I recommend those by Gavin Budge (Writing for the Reader), and by Andy Gillett: Academic Writing.

As many of my students don’t seem to be clear on what academic writing is, or what it is for, I found the following sections of Writing for the Reader particularly helpful: I paraphrased some sections or translated them into Japanese for my students. I don’t actually teach Academic Writing, but two of my courses require students to write several essays which must include references and citations in the MLA style. Judging from my experience this year (academic year 2009-2010), most students don’t really have much of a clue. Students who wrote an essay comparing a British children’s story with a Japanese children’s story, for example, often wrote more just describing the plot than actually comparing the two stories.

I found the pages below particularly useful when helping me explain the why’s and wherefore’s of academic writing to my students. If this year’s experience is any guide, I shall need to spend more time on these basics.

I discovered several problems with my students’ academic writing.

1. Problem #1: many of my students wrote lots describing the plots of the stories they were using for their comparison essay. See “writer-oriented prose” from Gavin Budge’s website.
2. Problem #2:  students were making all kinds of assumptions about who their readers would be and what they would know. Essentially, they assumed their “readers” would be Japanese college students like themselves; in other words, they had not thought about who the readers would be at all, they were still writer-oriented. In the case of my writing and blogging students, they assumed the readers would be their classmates; in the case of the more academic classes, they assumed their readers would be their classmates and/or me, their instructor, a gaijin familiar with Japan and things Japanese. (See “rhetorical situation” below.)
3. They seemed unaware of the purpose of proper referencing,  paragraphing and formatting. Gavin Budge wrote the following in an explanatory article, and it was this that first caught my attention and made me want to explore his site more:

The other fundamental problem with most existing guides to academic writing, whether in book or electronic form, seemed to me to be that they don’t explain the purpose behind the advice they presented, a purpose often clear to those who have already mastered the craft of academic prose, but whose obviousness can’t be assumed for the students the guides are supposed to be addressing. Referencing conventions, for example, are often set out in considerable detail, but the purpose of providing references is rarely discussed. And yet all studies of the learning process show that material which is assimilated superficially, without an understanding of its purpose, is quickly forgotten, so that it is little wonder that even those students who have consulted a writing guide often fail to reference effectively, by which I mean not just with mechanical correctness but with an understanding of the rhetorical purposes served by referencing in academic writing.

4. They wrote their essays as “reaction papers”, or what the Japanese call “kansou-bun” 感想文: they started off with explanations about why they had chosen the topic and added all sorts of irrelevant, personal details. They also threw in their personal opinions helter-skelter, anywhere, and failed to adhere to my rule that they at least leave out all personal opinions until the concluding paragraph: they simply could not understand why. (See “rules” below.)
5. They also did not really understand the reasons for splitting their writing up into paragraphs, or the importance of the order of the paragraphs. When they remembered to do so, they only did it (I felt) because I insisted on it. They did not understand the need for a clear, introductory paragraph, and indeed found it very difficult to write one. (See  “cues” below.)

Unfortunately, I came across this excellent website too late to make much use of it in my classes for this (Japanese) academic year, which is now drawing to a close (end of January). I plan to translate some of the key points below and make them available to my academic writing classes next year (starting in April, with the cherry blossom).

• writer-oriented prose:

Writer-orientated writing may be appropriate in a note-taking context, but should be avoided in the context of a university essay, which is expected to be reader-orientated. The requirement in university work to take account of the reader’s perspective is one of the main differences from the kind of writing you may have done at school. Typically, when revising, you can improve the effectiveness of your writing by making it more orientated towards your imagined reader.

The tell-tale symptoms of writer-orientated writing may be summed up as a lack of synthesis. Although it may sometimes be necessary briefly to remind your reader of the content of a text you are discussing, if you find yourself taking more than a half a page to describe the plot of a novel, for example, it indicates that you haven’t really arrived at any overall view of what the novel is about. In the same way, if you are aware that you are presenting information in a particular order simply because that is the order you came across it yourself, it shows that you haven’t really worked out what the significance of the information might be for someone else.

• rhetorical situation

It’s very easy to assume that simply by producing a piece of writing you have succeeded in communicating. Everything seems perfectly clear when you read it over, so why wouldn’t somebody else understand it? The short answer is that, if you haven’t put considerable effort into providing cues, you are expecting your reader to be a mind-reader. You have spent hours preparing and writing your essay, and as a result have formed a very detailed mental picture of the topic, which you automatically relate to the words you have put down on paper. But the reader can’t see this picture inside your head; they can only form their picture of the topic through a process of creative reading. Your job as a writer is to make it possible for your readers to reconstruct an adequate version of your mental picture, or approach.

• expectations

Unlike the essays you may have written at school, writing at university level is expected to be reader-orientated and aware of its rhetorical situation, rather than an essentially writer-orientated display of knowledge. This means that nobody can give you a simple checklist of the differing expectations that apply at university level, because what is being marked by your tutors is often the structure and the cues you provide for the reader, rather than anything which can be reduced to discrete items. You can only understand these aspects of essay-writing by actively exploring writing strategies.

One of the fundamental differences between writing and speaking is the lack of interaction with the audience when you’re writing, which makes it easy to forget to put design for a reader into your essay. The lack of audience interaction is also responsible for the feeling of not knowing what is expected which you may have. This is why it is often useful to give an oral presentation when working on an essay, since it helps you develop your sense of audience.

• rules

Impersonal forms of expression are preferred in academic writing. This does not mean that you should never use the word “I” in a university essay. The word “I” is quite acceptable in contexts where you are talking about what you are doing as a writer (e.g. in expressions such as “I am now going to discuss…”). The reason you may have been told not to use the word “I” (perhaps at school) is that you were being discouraged from taking a writer-orientated perspective in which the meaningfulness of assertions in the first person (e.g. “I think that fox-hunting is wrong.”) is assumed is to be obvious. Making this kind of claim using the word “I”, and without providing any evidence or supporting argument, is very like citing from unpublished sources, because it gives your reader no way to examine the basis of what you’re saying. Using the word “I” in this way, in order to substitute for evidence rather than to clarify your approach as a writer is fundamentally in conflict with the reader-orientated perspective that is one of the expectations attached to essay-writing at university level.

• cues

When we’re in conversation with somebody, or listening to an oral presentation, we’re provided with a running commentary on how to understand what is being said by the speaker’s tone of voice or their body language. A reader is cut off from all such signals, and unless you take care to provide plenty of explicit indications in your writing about how one part of your argument relates to another, will quickly become disorientated. One source of these cues is the structure of your writing, particularly the introduction and, to a lesser extent, the conclusion, which perform a framing function for your argument, allowing your reader to place what you’re saying in a context, and thus understand its bearing by answering the so what? question. But it’s a waste of time doing the work to provide this context and then allowing your reader to forget about it – readers have fairly short memories and will simply be puzzled if your argument refers back to something you said more than about three pages previously, so you need to keep this context in your reader’s mind by regular signposting.

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Most of my classes are of the “Oral English” type, but I also teach some classes in which students are required to produce academic writing in English. At first, I assumed that my students were getting basic instruction in academic writing in their native language (Japanese) in other classes, e.g. their seminar classes. They probably are. However, I have discovered that they don’t have much of a grasp of references, reporting and citations. Basically, they either don’t quote anybody at all, or when they do, they don’t indicate where they are quoting and where they are not (although a sudden switch from pidgin English to something perfectly comprehensible is the usual indicator).

After much ranting from me, they are now beginning to refer to other writers, and to include the references at the end of their writing. I think their problem was partly a language one, and partly cultural: they simply did not know how to refer to another writer.  So I gave them some examples (with the help of this very useful website by Andy Gillett, UK), such as “According to Krashen (2003)”, or “Krashen (2003) writes that… ” and so on. Actually giving them examples seemed to increase the frequency with which they referred to other writers in their essays.

They are still not clearly signaling when they are referring to another writer’s ideas or words: they seem to think that bunging a couple of references at the end is enough. Reading several examples of such student essays prompted the following, earth-shaking insights:

1. they may not have read any academic essays in English, which would account for a lot;
2. they may not be familiar with the English academic or formal register;
3. it might be of more help for their academic and linguistic development if they actually read (samples of) English academic essays, rather than reading a bunch of explanations about academic writing;
4. #3 above seems kinda obvious after reading Krashen on the subject of language acquisition (the only way language is acquired is by lots and lots of comprehensible input).

I’ve been using a software program called Markin4 to correct and mark my students’ electronic files electronically. I use this because it’s quicker than doing it by hand (and when you’ve got 40 students writing assignments twice a week, you welcome anything that saves you time), and because I am teaching some students at a distance (i.e., they take the class but they don’t come to the actual classroom). It is very easy to install and use, and you can output the edited student writing as a RTF file and a html file. It is quite good, however it focuses on the sub-paragraph level of writing, and has no functions specifically for academic essays, so I started to look for academic-essay editing/evaluating software, and after ages and ages of backbreaking slog typing search items into Google and what have you, I can now announce to the world the results of my labours, thereby saving you, dear Reader, absolutely tons of man-hours of useless toil.

I came across StyleEase, and downloaded the free demo version. It works as a plugin for MSWord (or OpenOffice, I believe), and uses macros. I followed the instructions carefully about configuring MSWord to allow StyleEase macros to work, particularly as the ReadMe file states that problems with this are the most frequent problems encountered by would-be users of StyleEase. However… I was unable to get StyleEase to work, despite following all the instructions. So, too bad: out it goes. Perhaps you will have better luck (it could be that I am using a Japanese version of Windows and of MS Office, but frankly I couldn’t be bothered to spend more time tinkering to see if that was in fact the case: even if it’s free, if it don’t work first time like it should, then it gets the boot. Life is short).

Here’s another one: StyleWriter. This looks good, but the company, White Smoke, don’t offer a free trial download. I can’t tell from the brief popup video if it will do what I want. It also seems to come bundled with lots of stuff that I’m not sure I’ll need like lots of letter templates, and an “international dictionary”. (I also didn’t like the fact that I had to type in all my details before I could find out how much the damned thing cost.)

I also came across this useful list of software programs and the writing process, although it includes software designed for writing other than academic writing. In that list was a link to Merit Software and two programs called Paragraph Punch and Essay Punch. Both of these, you’ll be glad to know, have their own web pages which include a link to a price-list, for which Merit Software earns serious Brownie points. Both Paragraph and Essay Punches have online editions, and they also have free trial downloads (more Brownie points). I’ll be downloading these and test-driving them, so come back later to read my results.

Google search also brought up this interesting newsletter entry about an academic writing website by another British academic, Dr. Gavin Budge at Birmingham University. The newsletter gives the link to the actual website, a wiki called Writing for the Reader: I was not able to access the site from a university-campus computer, but from home, no problem. It’s all text-based, but it looks useful, and it seems to do what Dr Budge claims in the newsletter:

My interest in creating an essay-writing website stemmed from the perception that most books on essay-writing, while making a lot of sense to university lecturers, who already know how to write, tend not to make all that much sense to students, who typically seize on one or two pieces of essay-writing advice in a one-sided way because they have no grasp of the essay-writing process as a whole: common examples from my own experience include the student whose writing goes through incredible syntactic contortions in order to avoid using the word ‘I’ in any context whatever, and the student whose writing is unintelligible because they have replaced all key words with what they assume are more impressive ‘synonyms’ from a thesaurus. Truly understanding a book on essay writing involves appreciating that its writer has reduced the complex reflexivity of the actual writing process into an essentially linear form; but since such a representation of what is multi-dimensional by a one-dimensional line of argument is precisely what students who are learning about essay-writing have yet to learn to do, it is hardly surprising if they misinterpret essay-writing guides presented in the form of a book.

The wiki itself contains some good advice and each page is short (screen length). There’s a lot there, and I’m still exploring it. My only gripes so far are:

1. There should be more graphics (tho Budge does use the Axion mindmapping software to add a few small graphics, I’m not sure how helpful they are)
2. I’d like to see more examples of actual academic writing: I think it is reading lots of academic essays that allows people to “acquire” a good academic writing style; this, more than carefully worded examples, is what is needed, especially for students whose first language is not English
3. how about using video? Maybe not to replace the text pages but to re-inforce them and to offer a different medium, and to break up the tedium of page after page of text.

(Budge links to three different mindmapping software programs. I discovered mindmapping in my last year of grammar school (sixth-form) while preparing for university entrance exams and A-levels: my dad lent me one of Tony Buzan’s first books.

1. FreeMind
2. CmapTools
3. Axon Idea Processor (the one he ended up actually using in the wiki)

Another couple of interesting, academic-writing-related websites were these two online essay-evaluating services:

• EssayRater, and
• Criterion Online Writing Service (read an assessment of it here)

To be continued…

Today, I also found Engrade Online Gradebook but did not sign up for the free account after the guided tour balked at the first fence. I also found Excelsior’s Gradebook which is not an online app but a program you download (also free). I clicked around on Excelsior’s site and read a bit about Marzano. Anyone know of him or read his stuff? He’s photogenic, that’s for sure. His products must be good, then, eh?

Do you use online gradebooks? If so, which one? Any recommendations?

Humour is an element common to all those I saw at a quick glance, and I think they would be great for teaching English, e.g. as prompts for a writing assignment (write the story you saw, create your own ad), or a speaking task (tell your partner what you saw; what is the ad for? Do you think it’s an effective ad? Why/why not?), or a multimedia project (create your own ad, video it, upload to Internet).

My favourite is the Deutsche Postbank one.

1. Wikipedia:ウイキぺディアへようこそ　a general introductory page to the concept and purpose of Wikipedia, including guidelines for contributors, and containing links to more specific pages on point of view, checking sources, copyright, etc.
2. Wikipedia:記事を執筆する　(kiji wo shippitsu suru) guidelines for contributors, including a brief mention (with links) to the neutral point of view (chuuritsu na kanten 中立的な観点)
   and to using reliable sources (shinrai dekiru jouhougen 信頼できる情報源)
3. Wikipedia:五本の柱 (go-hon no hashira – the 5 pillars or key principles of Wikipedia)
4. Wikipedia:基本方針とガイドライン (kihon houshin to gaidorainu – basic policies and guidelines), a long and detailed page which my students may not have the patience or motivation to read, nor me!
5. Wikipedia:信頼できる情報源 (shinrai dekiru jouhougen – reliable sources of information), referred to above. This looks very promising as it alone of the pages I’ve seen and referred to above is bilingual, with the English on the left and the Japanese on the right.
   In particular, I think I’ll use the some definitions (fact, opinion, primary source, etc), and
   beware false authority.

One of the links was to Dandelife “a social biography network”.

One of the stories I clicked on at random referred to sleep apnea and a successful treatment this guy found called Continuous Positive Airway Pressure, which I wasn’t particularly interested in until I read this: The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view of the subject.

The Wikipedia article on this topic and a related one on the Neutral Point of View, are both fascinating, revealing a global awareness and how this affects point of view, bias and accuracy in writing, something I blogged about a few months ago: blogging to broaden your perspective. If you’re writing on the Internet, you can assume you’ll get readers from all over the world, and you can’t assume, as so many writers do, that your readers are like you, or have the same point of view.

On the Wikipedia page on countering systemic bias, I found these points to be particularly interesting:

• The origins of bias
  The average Wikipedian on English Wikipedia is (1) male, (2) technically inclined, (3) formally educated, (4) a native or non-native English-speaker, (5) white, (6) aged 15–49, (7) from a nominally Christian country, (8) from an industrialized nation, (9) from the Northern Hemisphere, and (10) likely to be employed in intellectual rather than practical or physical jobs (see Wikipedia:User survey and Wikipedia:University of Würzburg survey, 2005).
• Why [bias] matters and what to do
  Many editors contribute to Wikipedia because they see Wikipedia as progressing towards, though never reaching, an ideal state as a repository of human knowledge. The more idealistic may see Wikipedia as a vast discussion on what is true and what is not from a “neutral point of view” or “God’s Eye View”. The idea of a systemic bias is thus far more troubling than even widespread intentional vandalism. Vandalism can be readily identified and corrected. The existence of systemic bias means that not only are large segments of the world not participating in the discussion, but that there is a deep-rooted problem in the relationship of Wikipedia, its contributors and the world at large.

  The systemic bias of the English Wikipedia is permanent. As long as the demographic of English speaking Wikipedians is not exactly identical to the world demographic, the vision of the world presented on the English Wikipedia will always be askew. Thus the only way systemic bias would disappear would be if the population of the world all spoke English at the same level of fluency and had equal access and inclination to use the English Wikipedia. However, the effects of systemic bias may be mitigated through conscious effort. This is the goal of the Countering systemic bias project.

  There are many things you may do, listed roughly from least to most intensive:
  * See if there are web pages on a particular subject which were written by people from other countries or cultures. It may provide you other places to look or other points of view to consider.
  * Be more conscious of your own biases in the course of normal editing. Look at the articles you work on usually and think about whether they are written from an international perspective. If not, you might be able to learn a lot about a subject you thought you knew by adding content with a different perspective.
  * Occasionally edit a subject that is systemically biased against the pages of your natural interests. The net effect of consciously changing one out of every twenty of your edits to something outside your “comfort zone” would be substantial.