Holy mackerel.
I gave a student a gentleman’s B on an extended definition assignment — an 80 when in fact the paper was worth at best about 75 points and in fact was eligible to have 100 points deducted, leaving the poor lad with a goose-egg.
But because it’s an online course — they do have difficulty learning this stuff on their own, without someone to draw pictures on the whiteboard and explain it over and over in every iteration the instructor can think of — I’m giving this bunch the benefit of the doubt. This has been especially so for the extended definition, which is a difficult genre even for upper-division students to get their minds around, and for MLA style, to which many of them have never been exposed in their entire lives.
So a day or two after I ship this thing off to the little twit, feeling some misgivings about the generosity of the score, he e-mails me back to complain and ask what on EARTH he did wrong, since he carefully followed the MLA style guidelines shown at Purdue (no, he didn’t) and he didn’t think the paper was unfocused, as accused.
Argh.
I just finished explaining all this to the kid, in writing. To do so entails writing MORE copy than the student had to write for the assignment itself!
Original comment, tossed off quickly but IMHO right on target:
Okay, first off you’ll need to learn how to cite a source using MLA style. Please read the chapters assigned in the textbook on this subject. If you haven’t bought the textbook or it doesn’t help, then an excellent site to learn these techniques and to see examples is the Purdue OWL. It has an entire section explaining MLA style: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/
Second, it is best to avoid the dictionary definition. With your essay, I can see why it would be useful to give comparative definitions, but it’s best to find a different way than relying on the dictionary.
And third, your body paragraphs do not tell a cohesive story. In some ways you showed what those for and against gay marriage believe. A more interesting and effective approach may have been to define gay marriage in terms of its legal, fiscal, and religious implications. It appears you have sources for this. This way your essay would be less of a “debatable” topic and more presenting some important facets of this definition.
New comments…
[Student opens essay with two insipid dictionary definitions, knocked off (one without quote marks) from Merriam-Webster Online. The subject matter is same-sex marriage, an insipid topic much favored by high-school teachers and English 101 instructors, and so the paper is probably recycled for this assignment.]
This is a direct, word-for-word quote. Even when you give the source, you STILL have to put quotation marks around strings of words that are directly quoted from the source: Marriage: “the state of being united to a person of the opposite sex as husband or wife in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law.” In writing an extended definition, it’s best to avoid using a dictionary definition, but if one feels one must, one at least ought not to start out with it.
I’d make a new paragraph here, since you’re switching subjects a bit.
Also, it is best to avoid starting with the dictionary definition.
[Student comes to the end of the introductory paragraph with no sign of a thesis statement anywhere in sight.]
Okay. Now let’s think about where we are at the end of this opening paragraph. We’ve set up a kind of contrast between two dictionary definitions (one of heterosexual and one of same-sex marriage) and we’ve said that some people resent the idea of same-sex marriage as an affront to what they believe are the moral values of the United States. But – and here’s the big but – we haven’t established our own definition of anything.
As it stands, the thesis statement says that some people are offended at the idea of same-sex marriage, and that might work for a report on the state of moralistic huffiness about this issue. However, the point of an extended definition is to present your own interpretation of what something means, an interpretation that goes beyond a mere dictionary definition. Thus, an extended definition’s thesis statement should put your definition (i.e., your interpretation, your personal spin, or your insight) in a nutshell.
One could have any number of definitions of marriage. For example, you could define it as solely a legal arrangement and argue that in a country of laws, that is all it is and the government has no business imposing religious definitions of marriage on those who do not subscribe to a specific religion – the U.S., after all, is not a theocracy. You could go the other way around and argue that marriage is more than a lowly human legal contract but instead has spiritual implications that go far beyond legalities, and so it should be a special case.
In either event (or in any other event you can dream up), your interpretation needs to appear up-front, and it needs to drive the rest of the paper’s argument. In other words, your interpretation drives the point you want to make, and so it is the thesis statement, or at least a crucial part of the thesis.
[Student inserts an in-text citation: (Peter Sprigg, 2012).]
So what we want to do here is use only the author’s last name in the in-text citation; if there’s more than one author we’d use their last names up to a point…I think in MLA style it’s six, but look it up; after six, use the lead author’s last name followed by et al.: (Sprigg, 2012); (Sprigg and Twigg, 2012); (Sprigg, Twigg, and Busch, 2012; Sprigg et al., 2012).
[Student writes, “Mr. Sprigg claims that…”]
In academic writing, just use the person’s last name for this context; no Mr. is needed.
[Student regurgitates Sprigg’s reasons for opposing same-sex marriage, one of which is mildly specious and three of which are downright silly.]
Okay, it’s all very nice that Sprigg makes these claims, but how is it related to the definition of straight or gay marriage? And why should we buy these claims, which on their face are pretty silly? The Social Security issue could be a valid concern; the others, not so much, since people who are unhappy in marriages usually leave, whether or not they can settle down in wedded bliss with their same-sex partners; same-sex partners regularly adopt or obtain custody of children and raise them, and the fact that those partners’ relationship is legally recognized is unlikely to change that. So…what do Sprigg’s points have to do with anything? Especially with how marriage (straight or gay or both) is defined?
[Student rehashes the arguments of someone taking the pro-gay marriage stance; in doing so he mentions the claim that legalizing gay marriage is an attack on the institution of marriage itself.]
Ah hah! Here’s something we could use as a thesis for an extended definition. We could make the claim that the institution of marriage itself has a specific set of criteria that exclude same-sex unions. Note, though, that making that claim, while it would give us a definition to work with in this essay, would not of itself lead to the conclusion that legalizing same-sex unions and calling them “marriage” will result in the end of civilization as we know it. To do that, we would have to define marriage as the basis of and the bulwark of the entire moral and ethical construct of Western culture. That could be done…but to do so, we would have to say it in so many words.
[Student brings up recent cases in Arizona and New Mexico.]
Okay, we’ve got some good research here. But for the paper per se, we’re still in a kind of debate mode: yea or nay on gay marriage. We haven’t come up with an original point of view on marriage in general, on heterosexual unions, or on gay unions; we’ve only stated that people have differing opinions about the legitimacy of same-sex marriage. Note, here, that you only need the authors’ last names. BTW, I seem to have had my brain stuck in APA style here; MLA style spells out “and” while APA style uses the ampersand.
[In a muddled concluding paragraph, Student brings up the issue of religious beliefs, says Americans are not required to buy into but are supposed to respect others’ religious beliefs, and ends by deciding marriage is not just a word; it’s about love.]
Yes. This is an important point. But don’t lose sight of the fact that the US Constitution not only guarantees that Americans can worship God in any way we choose, but also that we are not forced to worship God at all. The government makes no establishment of religion. And there’s an incontrovertible fact that can bring us around to a way to use extended definition to argue one way or the other on this point. Here it is: we could build a definition of marriage as either a religious arrangement or as a legal arrangement – in this country, it happens to be both. Because Americans have conflated those two issues – i.e., a member of the clergy can legally marry a couple, and the couple does not have to go to a justice of the peace to make that church-based, church-sanctified union legal – we end up with a loud, contentious, and unpleasant argument over who can live together in a de facto state of marriage.
If we defined marriage as solely a religious arrangement, then we could argue that churches should have some say over what legal rights a couple may have. Using this to claim same-sex marriage should be disallowed would be difficult, because some established main-line churches are tolerant of gay marriage (just a few months ago, I was present at a marriage between two men performed by clergy of my church…one of the oldest Episcopal churches in the state). But it could be done.
If we defined it as solely a legal arrangement, then we could argue that clerics have no say about who may or may not be married in someone else’s church or down at the county courthouse – that they may say who may or may not be regarded as married in their church, but they may not dictate what people who are not members of their religion believe or practice.
You can make these arguments, obviously…but the idea with an extended definition essay is to make the arguments based on how a term is defined. What is marriage? Is it a legal arrangement? Is it a church institution? Is it merely a social recognition of a long-term (hopefully a life-long) commitment between a man and a woman, or between any two people? Is it the consecration of a sexual union intended to produce and protect children (and not primarily for pleasure or love)? Is it the consecration of two people’s love for each other? Is it the legal recognition and framework of a financial and parenting contract between two adults? Whatever definition you select and develop, that is what drives the essay…it’s what forms the argument (the point) you want to make. That’s not what’s happening in this essay.
[In his Works Cited, Student lists two essays from Gale’s Opposing Viewpoints in Context, a library database designed to make it easy for students to find sources espousing different arguments about commonly assigned subjects. He gets the documentation style wrong.]
Italicize names of websites, book titles, movie titles, TV series, and other “long” things; put short things such as articles, poems, and short stories in quotation marks. Did you find these in an electronic source? If so:
Kellard, James. “Gay Marriage Should Be Legal.” Gale Opposing Viewpoints in Context, 2012. Web. 1 April 2014.
[Student cites a website sponsored by the Pew Research Organization. He gets that wrong, too.]
Use caps & lower-case for all titles. Note the format for dates used by MLA. Add whether this appeared in print or online; if it’s a Web source, add the date of access. Use hanging indent (in Word: Format > Paragraph > Special > hanging). Separate the names of two authors with “and.” Pew Research Center is the sponsor of the Fact Tank website, so that’s set up like this:
Lipka, Michael and David Masci. “Arizona Bill Sparks Debate about Religious Objections to Gay Marriage.” Fact Tank. Pew Research Center. 25 February 2014. Web. 1 April 2014.
[Instructor reviews rubrics/score sheet, wondering if the paper was graded unfairly. She thinks not…]
I understand that these are headache-inducing, ditzy details – that’s why scholars hire people like me to edit their research for publication and to get the citation and documentation correct according to whatever style manual the publisher happens to use. The trick is, whichever style manual you end up using in your academic career or in the world of work (if you’re in business, the health sciences, the social sciences, or education, you’ll use APA style), pay excruciatingly close attention to these annoying details. What capitalization conventions does the manual use (APA uses sentence style for article titles and books but caps & lower-case for magazines and journals; MLA uses caps & lower-case for all titles)? Where do the standard elements like author, title of article, title of journal or website, date of publication, and date of access go? What parts of the thing are set in italic? Even though the details differ from style manual to style manual, the overall principles are the same.
The score on this paper actually is generous – I only marked down 5 points for incorrect use of MLA style, and because the paper is not really an extended definition, had I been feeling particularly dyspeptic I could have marked it down 100 points. (What a harpy!!!!)
Try to get that MLA style down. It’s a real PITA, but you can do it, given some patience and time.
Herein lies a problem: To explain this stuff face-to-face would have taken…what? 10 minutes? It probably wouldn’t have been necessary, because I would have gone over it all in the classroom, where I could draw pictures on the whiteboard, ask the students to figure out how sample citations should look, and give them an opportunity to bring up their own questions. This would have occupied an hour or two of class time.
It’s to my advantage not to have to diddle away my hours standing in front of a classroom, partly because the more hours I stand in front of a classroom, the lower my hourly wage works out to be. In fact, it can work out to less than minimum wage, depending on the amount of course prep and grading time I put in.
However, mounting an online course is time-intensive, and the time used to create it and put it online is unpaid, as a practical matter. It all has to be done before one goes on the payroll.
Thus, the more time I put in on grading, the lower my pay. That means I tend to compile succinct summary comments like the one shown at the top of this series of rants, especially for papers that are not failing. When a student with a “B” demands that I explain myself in detail, then my hourly rate goes down because I have to spend some unholy amount of time figuring out how to explain what the student should have learned on his own — assuming he is competent to learn on his own.
What we have here are students who probably are competent but — get this — have never been asked to write a research-based paper in their ENTIRE thirteen and a half years of education. The kid hasn’t a clue.
Most of them have never been asked to write an extended definition, either. It’s not a genre that’s commonly taught in high schools.
By and large, they do not understand why they should have to take freshman comp. They don’t understand why the skills that they should have learned over the prior thirteen-plus years have value in the real world, nor, for that matter, do they have any idea what skills they’re missing. Consequently, because they think their time is being wasted (and are oblivious to the amount of their instructor’s time they waste), they feel entitled to turn in papers that they’ve already submitted for other courses — often for high-school classes.
When an instructor decides, as I did this semester, not to force students to write on subjects of her or his choosing but to let them select their own essay topics, what they invariably will do is recycle old papers. Few to none will write a new, original paper that actually fits the assignment.
Yes, I could combat that by indeed deducting 100 points from a paper that does not fulfill the assignment — in this case, a paper that’s not really an extended definition but just a review of opposing viewpoints on a controversial subject. But…ever hear of Rate Your Professor?
I have a friend who was short-listed for a job at a much better university in a part of the country where she dearly wanted to live. After she didn’t get hired, she learned she was eliminated because a student had posted an anonymous and, IMHO, libelous review of her teaching practices at Rate Your Professor. Anyone who is not tenured — as adjuncts by definition are not — is crazy to fail a student for not turning in a paper that exactly matches the assignment.
People who are underpaid and whose job evaluation depends on anonymous popularity contests are put in a position of simply not being able to teach adequately. They are not able to deliver an honest assessment of a paper — or, if they do so, they do it at considerable risk.
I have given up the elaborate project of inventing original study topics and assigning specific paper themes that are difficult to self-plagiarize. It’s too much work; it takes way, way too many hours, leaving me earning less than minimum wage. Out of self-defense, our underpaid and overworked teachers, from K-12 all the way through the BA, are forced to let things go that should not get past them, to deliver substandard guidance, and to leave students pretty much in the dark.
