WRT 105 October 18, 2005

1. WRT 105October 18, 2005 Finding information

2. Gladwell, Malcolm. "Getting In." New Yorker 10 Oct. 2005: 80-86. How elite institutions ignore test scores in order to ensure plenty of spaces for white Americans. Link on the class Blackboard site. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically.By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the nineteen-twenties, stated flatly that too many Jews would destroy the school. . . . The difficult part, however, was coming up with a way of keeping Jews out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone else. . . . The admissions office at Harvard became much more interested in the details of an applicant’s personal life. Lowell told his admissions officers to elicit information about the “character” of candidates from “persons who know the applicants well,” and so the letter of reference became mandatory. Harvard started asking applicants to provide a photograph. Candidates had to write personal essays, demonstrating their aptitude for leadership, and list their extracurricular activities. “Starting in the fall of 1922,” Karabel writes, “applicants were required to answer questions on ‘Race and Color,’ ‘Religious Preference,’ ‘Maiden Name of Mother,’ ‘Birthplace of Father,’ and ‘What change, if any, has been made since birth in your own name or that of your father? (Explain fully).’ ”

3. Keyword searching (Howard Ch. 16) • Library of Congress subject classifications <http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/lcco.html>, • Start with general terms, then get more specific • Use “advanced search” options or Boolean operators • Asterisk s* or question marks ? are "wild cards" that indicate possible variations in a word. Example: language* preserv* —instead of separate searches for language preservation and preserving heritage languages. Check the instructions for the database or search engine you are using to see whether it responds to asterisks or question marks as wild cards. • Quotation marks indicate a search for a specific phrase. Example: "print on demand" • AND, OR, and NOT (in capitals) specify or eliminate combinations. Example: "Herbert Spencer" AND "natural selection" • Parentheses specify combinations of terms. Example: ("Herbert Spencer" OR "Charles Darwin") AND "natural selection"—instead of separate searches for "Herbert Spencer" AND "natural selection" and "Charles Darwin" AND "natural selection"

4. Databases(Howard Ch. 16) • Google Scholar <http://scholar.google.com/> • Library databases

5. http://libwww.syr.edu/

6. Locating databases for keyword searching

7. Particularly useful databases for this class • MLA Bibliography: Indexes scholarly books and articles in the humanities • LexisNexis: Indexes newspapers and magazines • ProQuest: Indexes scholarly sources in the humanities and social sciences

8. Locating periodicals

9. Immediate acknowledgement of a source for a quotation, summary, paraphrase, idea, or information. Citations are usually made in either footnotes or parenthetical notes. In Rescuing the Subject, Susan Miller maps the project of working with a (student) writer "without necessarily surrounding that person with the now easily deniable claptrap of inspired, unitary 'authorship' that contemporary theorists in other fields have so thoroughly deconstructed" (3). James Berlin had established that current-traditionalist pedagogy was fixated on issues of clear style and correct grammar (73). Citation

10. Systematic presentation of complete publishing information for sources of quotation, summaries, paraphrases, ideas, or information. Bizzell, Patricia. "What Can We Know, What Must We Do, What May We Hope: Writing Assessment." College English 49 (1987): 575-84. Fraser, Bruce. "Some 'Unexpected' Reactions to Various American-English Dialects." Language Attitudes: Current Trends and Prospects. Eds. Roger W. Shuy and Ralph W. Fasold. Washington: Georgetown UP, 1973. 28-40. Lunsford, Andrea A. "Refiguring Classroom Authority." The Ethics of Writing Instruction: Issues in Theory and Practice. Ed. Michael A. Pemberton. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 2000. 65-78. Scollon, Ron. "Plagiarism and Ideology: Identity in Intercultural Discourse." Language in Society 24.1 (March 1995): 1-28. Documentation

11. Unit 3 The Over the Hill issue? Turnitin.com? SU plagiarism policy? Universities and their communities?