I am rereading Lynn Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and see that she mentions Paul Robinson’s “The Philosophy of Punctuation.” It is a thought-provoking article, more about good writing than punctuation, and perhaps useful to folks in all three of my classes. I think Robinson has an overblown taste for sequential logic when writing sentences, [...]
I have come across the following clause in a discussion about the wide distribution of scholarly works, both good and bad: “. . . we just have to take the time to read and weed out the good and the bad.” If we think about the figurative language, shouldn’t it be “weed out the bad [...]
Professor Lisa Rosner has sent notice of the following. It may be of interest. Stockton Innovations: A journal of undergraduate research and creativity Calling all original researchers! Are you working on an original research project for your capstone project or for a course assignment? Would you like the chance to tell the world about it? [...]
Finalizing details for tomorrow’s classes, I revisited my bibliographer page on the Punctuation blog. I added a picture of Lynn Truss (of Eats, Shoots and Leaves fame), and a link to her web site. She joins James Murray and Eric Partridge. And I got to thinking, these are my kind of people.
Glance at the nav bar and you’ll find a link for Stanford Library 1906 under Cool Old Libraries. It is a postcard of the ruins of the Stanford Library, badly shaken in the 1906 “San Francisco” earthquake. Google “Stanford Library Earthquake” and you’ll find that in 2006 Stanford held a centennial remembrance (not quite a [...]
We have come to that point in the semester when major assignments are coming due. This Tuesday I have papers due in two of my classes and a exam on punctuation in the third. I’ll have plenty of good reading this week. As I await this work, I have reread Pico Iyer’s now decade old [...]
This morning in Punctuation I discussed one particular exhibit at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia (it had some connection to a major point under discussion); in Research we reviewed some excellent advice on plagiarism by my wise colleague Deb Gussman; and in Medieval Irish we discussed the varied and rich productive value of cows. A [...]
Books on Higher Education are coming out fast and furious. A colleague drew my attention to another, entitled We’re Losing Our Minds, discussed in Inside Higher Education. The following paragraph caught my attention: Thinking of undergraduate degrees as commodities — tickets to a job — has led students, parents, institutions of higher education, governing boards, and [...]
I spoke to my classes today about The Chronicle piece that described recent evidence on best teaching practices in the college classroom. I poked fun at it — Harvard found that students don’t like to take quizzes, that teachers don’t like to write or grade them, but that neverthless students learn effectively when they know [...]
I was making coffee this morning, yrgacheffe, and started thinking about librarians that I know (or have known). Rolling through the list, which is a decent length, I began to realize that many of these folks kept working in libraries after retirement. It was not always the library that they retired from, though often it [...]
