Tag Archives: academic writing

Good scholarly habits

Posted on May 16, 2018 by Robert Basil

My dear friend Tierney Wisniewski, this website’s cofounder and coeditor, has started up a new blog devoted to her scholarly work and how she gets it done. I love her inaugural piece, “Good Scholarly Habits.” Tierney writes with great clarity and … Continue reading →

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Peers

Posted on April 18, 2018 by Robert Basil

Clarissa has a couple of words: In a way, the censorship in US academia is worse than the Soviet kind. The Soviet censors were mostly dumb, uneducated people, and it wasn’t all that hard to pull wool over their eyes … Continue reading →

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Transformative learning and student autonomy

Posted on November 3, 2017 by Robert Basil

No Contest co-founder Tierney Wisniewski has written a beautifully conceived and composed Master’s Thesis. Here’s the abstract. [I’ve added some paragraphing for ease of online reading, because abstracts by requirement are very, very fat.] Self-determination theory (SDT) is a well-established theory … Continue reading →

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No plagiarism foul

Posted on October 31, 2017 by Robert Basil

A super-smart student in my Advanced Professional Communications class asked me whether using an app that generates a citation for you in proper APA, MLA, Chicago style was plagiarism. My first thought was “I doubt it,” but in my line … Continue reading →

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Writing in the Sciences

Posted on September 25, 2017 by Robert Basil

“The more that you take care with your writing, the more you might explore uncertainties in your thinking,” suggests Stanford University Environmental Earth System Science Professor Julie Kennedy in this excellent Writing Matters video. Kennedy helpfully stresses the primacy of … Continue reading →

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The ‘Fuzzy Logic’ Man

Posted on September 12, 2017 by Robert Basil

“He always took criticism as a compliment,” said Stuart Russell, a Berkeley professor who worked next door to Mr. Zadeh for many years. “It meant that people were considering what he had to say.”

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Elitism in the classroom

Posted on November 9, 2016 by Robert Basil

Professor Mayhew’s recent take on the topic: Teaching is transactional. The instructor is not feeding information to the students, teaching them that information, but interacting with them. A third element is the text in the class. The text is not … Continue reading →

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Battle

Posted on October 16, 2016 by Robert Basil

In the New York Times obituary section recently I came upon one for Jacob Neusner, a scholar (and polemicist) who published more than 900 books in his lifetime. I calculated – on the back of a napkin, as it were – … Continue reading →

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More on Clichés …

Posted on November 29, 2015 by Robert Basil

From professor Jonathan Mayhew: One of Orwell’s sillier pieces of writing advice is “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” Orwell advises “scrapping of every word or idiom which … Continue reading →

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On Poetry

Posted on October 10, 2015 by Robert Basil

My friend Jonathan Mayhew has been on a tear of late, publishing a series of manifestos on poetry in his wonderful blog, Stupid Motivational Tricks. Some snippets (but read the whole thing): Manifesto (1) Nobody knows what poetry is for. … Continue reading →

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