What really tires us is reading the exact same thing over and over and over again. Often it's our own lectures, or the same single book, but most of the time, it's paraphrases or cut-and-pastes from the same limited set of useless websites.
Try this: ask yourself what the theme and argument of your essay is. Go to the module reading list and have a look at the books. Look at what the authors have been reading. Think of an example from your own experience and talk about it in the light of what you've read. Tweaking (or not even bothering to tweak) somebody else's thoughts doesn't gain you any grades. Taking risks and trying to say something distinctive (it doesn't have to be innovative at this stage) will definitely get you credit. I've far more respect for risk-takers than for recyclers.
John Adams, the brilliant composer, has a very stylishly-written blog. In this entry, he's plagued by people who think that, because they can operate music composition software, they're composers. His words resonate for me too: don't rush to a computer. Take some time to think things through first, and you'll produce something personal, rather than an institutionalised piece of boiler-plate.
Haven’t you noticed that everything you do is so tediously predictable? I know these programs can be useful—I have one on my hard drive as well, but I try not to be a slave to its built-in stupidities. Why don’t you go back to square one, get some old-fashioned manuscript paper, maybe a pencil—that’s a wooden tubular object with lead at one end and an eraser on the other—and try writing your stuff without being hog-tied by this inflexible piece of software…
2 comments:
You should give this to first year students.
Perhaps so. I don't have anything against using the web for research, though it's trickier than most people think to find decent, academic sources.
The problem is the intellectual model. If you go straight to the web (most students Google the question, such as "what is representation", then they develop the sense that academic work is simply hunting out other peoples' ideas and presenting them: data mining rather than reading, learning, processing then applying ideas, perhaps rejecting some along the way, and explaining why.
You can pass courses by recycling my ideas, or stuff you've found, but you won't be educated. Being educated isn't 'knowing stuff': it's the process of learning and thinking about that stuff. Not facts - but intellectual skills.
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