In pursuit of the unreadable...

[azalaisdep]

I rather enjoyed this article from today's Times Higher Ed:

"Baffled by the ease with which titles promising to turn world history on its head have won huge audiences despite defying logic and lacking proof, Daniel Melia laboured to divine the hidden secrets that allow anyone to identify truly 'bad books'"

Particularly interested, though not entirely

Comments

[azalaisdep]

A friend blames it on the literacy curriculum where there are so many bits of books rather than whole ones.

Every children's author whom I've ever heard comment on the Literacy Hour and the current GCSE English curriculum, from Philip Pullman to Michael Rosen, decries precisely that problem.

As with so many aspects of the current, over-prescriptive British curriculum, I suspect really good and confident teachers teach the way they always have, in the knowledge that a) one should read Whole Books and that b) any child who can competently read/review an entire book can do so to an extract; but it allows pressured or easily-cowed teachers to get by on "just teaching the extracts", which is completely meaningless in the context of any kind of reading for pleasure or for life :-(

My main moan was that we weren't allowed to use footnotes for references and so all the Tom, Dick & Harry (1999) stuff counted in the word count..

Oh, the joys of Harvard referencing. The hours I spend reassuring panicked students about whether or not they should have that bit in italics, or have a full stop here... I wouldn't mind if the referencing of half the lecturers wasn't so wildly inaccurate!

[curiouswombat]

Oh, the joys of Harvard referencing.

It was worse than that - it was APA which seemed to require the commas in a different place, or something. My tutor said at the final read-through, about a reference quoted in the body of the text, "You don't really need that comma there..." and I said was it a 'pass or fail' decider, because if not I really didn't care if I'd put a comma in the wrong place, or used the writers' initials the second time I'd credited them - as I didn't have to actually put the references on the prescription forms... and just handed it in.

So if I fail by 1% or so we'll know that is not the right attitude to it all!

[azalaisdep]

Oh, goodness yes, APA's even fussier from what I recall of my days working with healthcare students. Frankly as long as you've made clear when and how you're referring to other people's work, and the references themselves make it obvious what those sources are and how to find them, you've done the really important bit. It's not as though you were submitting the paper for publication, after all...