I Rot a Buk

Shortly after I was inducted in the Order of the Golden Boot (early retirement), I earned a Ph.D. in sociology. I hoped for a second career teaching college. 

I got the degree in short order, but things didn’t work out quite as planned. I did teach for about six years, primarily as an adjunct, which meant I did the same things as a real professor for a tenth the pay.

Most of that time, I taught social theory and research methods to upper division students. Since those courses were both required for admission to the master’s program, I frequently got graduate students trying to backfill their prerequisites.

Writing is an important part of graduate study. I felt an obligation to include critical evaluations of student writing as part of my syllabus, even though it wasn’t strictly part of the curriculum. I was regularly astonished by the material that crossed my desk. I wasn’t laboring at some backwater online diploma mill. My employer was a Carnegie research university. 

Some of my students’ writing would have received failing grades from my seventh grade English teacher. Admittedly, standards have declined since the golden age before pot reigned. Even so, a sentence fragment will never be acceptable in academic writing. Some of my students didn’t seem to know the difference between a noun and a verb.

The situation was so bad that whenever I encountered fluency, I became suspicious, especially when the fluency emerged halfway through a paper. Plagiarism is a perpetual problem in academia. It is so easy to cut and paste from the internet that students think there can’t possibly be anything wrong with it. 

I once had a student cut an entire essay from Karl Marx and present it as her own work. I suppose she didn’t think I’d notice. 

Any time I came across something that appeared too good or out of character, I would search the internet for the source. Generally, I found the original within a few minutes. Once in a while, I was wrong. I received a brilliant piece from one student, but when I searched, I could find nothing similar from any public or academic sources. When I talked to the student, he turned out to be a sophomore member of the university debate team. 

All I could do was bask in the glory of his work.

While I was teaching introductory sociology, I used different standards. I wanted them to express their ideas freely, without any grammatical constraints. Your second grader writes to the same standard. My minimal requirement was that I had to be able to parse their meaning, even through the fog of improperly selected words and bad constructs.

Even setting the bar that low, I occasionally got a piece that was completely incomprehensible. I received strings of letters that had never been combined into a word. I saw strings of words that couldn’t possibly be interpreted as a sentence. I saw sentences that made absolutely no sense. I got text message constructs presented as serious academic contributions.

From college students. All I could do was shake my head.

All this has little significance for serious writers. A writer must order her thoughts into a structure that extends past the first period.

When a friend introduced me to post-modern art, she told me something that Wassily Kandinsky (Der blaue Reiter. I had to slip that in!) said. There can be no universal communication between the artist and the viewer. The artist expresses him/herself in the work, and the viewer sees her/himself.

I’m more of a fan of Juergen Habermas. He argues that communication between people (writer and reader in this case) depends on a common frame of reference, a shared world view. We have to know some of the same things to see the same things. 

I write to share some of what I feel in my imagination, so that you may feel some of those things, too. To me, that implies a recognizable sentence structure, meaningful paragraphs, a plot and human-seeming characters.

If no one understands what I’m trying to say, I’m no different than an infant clattering randomly at the keyboard.