Valerie

I’m also valerierose on del.icio.us. I use it in so many ways. Put the “post to delicious” bookmarklet in the bookmark bar of every browser you use and you will find yourself using it habitually.

It seems like such an overwhelming prospect, but it’s doable. The book “Writing your dissertation in 15 minutes a day” really helped! I was given the book by another student of my advisor before me, and I passed it on to another student in my department. We started a tradition of signing the inside cover.

I’m posting this as I take a break from my paper grading marathon – fifty ten-page papers in two days. Granted, I’m a science TA, and I haven’t taught a course in which the students write papers before, but I need to share some of my thoughts on paper writing. I’m sure some of my colleagues who are more experienced might have some greater insights. But I have to say, I’m amazed at what some people try to pull off these days. I also have to admit that I wrote crap papers in college. Now that I’ve had to grade them, I feel that I have a much better understanding of what makes a good paper. Everyone should have to grade their classmates’ papers as a learning exercise.

So here’s my advice:

Formulate a main argument and provide examples to justify it. This is pretty basic, but you’d be amazed how many people don’t get it! Your goal in writing a paper is to demonstrate your ability to research a topic and think critically about it. The idea is not simply to regurgitate information, to make like a monk and transcribe, or worse, to cut and paste shit from random websites!!!

Don’t cite random websites. Consider the credibility of your sources. Something that has been published in a book or journal, and chosen to be kept in a university library has been subject to at least some level of peer review. Some random fucker’s aol home page has not. Wikipedia is also written and regulated by random people. I once saw someone create an entry for their own dog. Presumably, at a university level, you should be doing research that is deeper than the encyclopedia level anyway. Don’t get me wrong, wikipedia is great for reading about the background of various topics for your own personal purposes. It may even be a good starting point to find other references. But there’s something wrong with citing a page that, in theory, you could have edited yourself! Remember that anyone can post anything on their personal webpage. On top of that, it just shows laziness to cite the pages that you found in a google search. I may be showing my age, but we didn’t do that in my day because, well, we couldn’t.

Don’t use the Helvetica, Arial, or any other sans-serif font. On a computer screen, sans-serif fonts are usually easier to read than serif fonts because the varying thicknesses and tails of serif characters can be distorted by pixelization and anti-aliasing. However, on paper, the varying widths and tails make the characters more recognizable, distinguishing lowercase ‘L’ from uppercase ‘I’ and the number 1, for instance. Though this effect is rather subtle, when you have a large amount of reading to do, the increased amount of mental effort to read sans-serif font is very noticeable. I once had a TA who docked me a point on a lab report for using Helvetica. At the time, I complained that it wasn’t fair. But now I fully understand! Consider that your poor TA has to stay up past 3 a.m. (not because she didn’t plan ahead mind you, but because there wasn’t enough time between when the papers were turned in and when the grades were due) reading over 500 pages worth of student writing. The last thing you want to do is give your TA, the person who determines your grades, a headache. Edit the paper in Helvetica, then switch it to Times New Roman before you print it out.

THOU SHALT OBEY LENGTH LIMITS. And don’t think we don’t notice that you made the font smaller and single spaced it. Enough said.

This is specific to science, but do make sure you know what you are talking about when you explain a scientific phenomenon. Make sure you are using science vocabulary properly. Hell, make sure you are using general vocabulary properly! Know the difference between “effect” and “affect”. Don’t use the generalized meaning of scientific words in a scientific paper. That is, don’t say something is “increasing exponentially” unless it is literally increasing exponentially. Don’t use the word “magnetism” to describe an attractive force unless it is actually the electro-magnetic force. These words have more specific meanings in science than in general use.

Back up each and every statement that you make. Be able to distinguish between fact and opinion. If you are making a statement that is opinionated, you had better have justification for it. If you can’t justify it, don’t say it. If you are stating a fact that is not common knowledge, cite a source. Don’t state sweeping generalizations as if they are fact.

Don’t start the paper too close to the deadline. Like I said, I wrote some crap papers in college. This was mostly due to letting it go to the last minute and it wasn’t because I was really so incredibly busy. Incidentally, I don’t buy into this idea that college students are all so overwhelmed with work that they can’t put effort into every class, even at a so-called “top” school. I seem to remember living a block from a bar at which I was a “mug member”, going out 4 or 5 nights a week, and routinely sleeping past noon on weekdays. Anyway, the reason I let my papers go to the last minute, producing crap papers, was that I dreaded the task. I dreaded the task mostly because I knew that my past papers were crap. But now that I’m working on my dissertation, I’ve got a whole new attitude towards writing which I owe in part to Joan Bolker’s Writing your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day. Basically, the idea is that you want to take the stress out of writing. Make writing a habit. Hence the blog, in my case. Then when you first sit down to write your paper, don’t worry about trying to write well. Just free write and get your ideas out on paper knowing that you can perfect it later—“make a mess, then clean it up”. This strategy works quite well for me and I’ve been suprised at how decent things are on the first try.

Don’t forget to clean up your mess. Know the six uses of a comma. Don’t leave sentences that have been partially edited so that they no longer make grammatical sense. Check spelling. And by that I mean do something more rigorous than running spell check! Proofreading is your friend. Leave yourself time to do it.

Well, back to grading.

Originally posted here

After a couple weeks of being completely nocturnal (waking up at 5 pm, going to bed at 7 am) I finally managed to stay up a whole day and since then I’ve been up by 8 every day, most days by 7, and a few days as early as 4 (central time). This is very new for me, as I’ve never been a “morning person”. I’ve kept this up for a few weeks now. This tip, which was posted a few weeks ago has helped me a lot.

I’m marking this done.

wanting to drink cold water (even room temperature water is cold because I am frugal with the heating) in the winter. So I’ve taken to having a tall mug of hot water with the juice of 1/4 of a lemon.

I think the tall mug amounts to two glasses, so once I’ve used up a lemon, I’ve had my quota of water. I got one of those 5 lb bags of lemons that comes with the free manual citrus juicer.

One of the main attractions of the Fingerlakes area. If you’re in or near New York State, check out the wineries along Seneca lake.

I set up all my “buckets” (mainly plain text files of lists) including a tickler file….

But I haven’t really been getting things done. I guess it’s early. I’ve gotten a lot of errandy type things done, including many things that have really been hanging for a while – one thing was hanging for over a year. I haven’t been getting my work related tasks done though. I guess that will just come down to discipline.

I did a major overhaul of my home office this week. Before and after pictures are coming. I still have a laundry basket of random junk to put away, and I have to do some laundry and tidy my bedroom, but once that’s done, I’m going to check this one off. :)

Now the challenge will be to stay organized.

On the “Syracuse Stage”. It was very different from the movie which had much of the original stage cast, so you can’t really compare. It was definitely interesting. The Hedwig was kind of beefy though, and kept squatting…. in his/her miniskirt…. Overall it was great and I’m really glad I saw it.

Since I don’t have cable (not that MTV and VH1 have much to offer anyways) and since I live in a small town with not much radio selection, I’ve had to seek a new source of new music. I think I found it in last.fm. What you do is download and install a plugin for whatever music player you use on your compy. The plugin then reports every song you listen to back to last.fm. Based on that, the site compiles statistics on what you listen to and finds people with similar tastes called your “neighbors”. Then there’s something called “neighbor radio” – songs that people with similar tastes have listened to that you have not listened to. I’ve discovered several very cool artists (TM Juke, Alice Russell, the Quantic Soul Orchestra, Dan the Automator, Cibo Matto) this way that I would have never heard of from MTV or something like that. If you listen to music primarily on your compy, I highly highly recommend this.

I’m back from my haircut. The salon is going to mail the ponytail out for me – they do this all the time. It was a trip to see nearly a foot of my hair, just sitting on the counter while they did the rest of my haircut.

I lost my camera last weekend, but once I get it back, I’ll post before and after pics.

I wonder what kind of wig they’ll make out of my hair!

Hey, I’m off to my hair appointment in about an hour. It’s exciting! Right now, my hair is about an inch and a half shy of my waistline. I’m planning on having it cut to my shoulders.

Thought not necessarily in a good way :(.

What I mean is, I have a long running problem with allowing myself to experience and to express my sadness and anger. Well, unfortunately, I’ve had a lot of reasons to feel those ways this week. I’m not going into detail, but my week was already bad when I had a major falling out with an old friend tonight. Maybe it’s because of the other problems I had this week, but when my friend (?) said something extremely insulting to me, I just immediately felt the anger in a way I normally do not. Normally I would just feel it deep down, for an instant, then immediately doubt my right to feel it and later only half feel it when it was too late to react in a way that made sense. This time I was able to feel it fully, right away, and react in a way that, hours later, I still believe was appropriate (I stated firmly why I was angry and then left).

I feel almost silly writing about these things because I realize it comes so naturally to some, but not to me. So it felt like a major breakthrough.

I have made at least two bags before. I’ve been working on and off on a laptop bag for months. I haven’t touched it in several weeks, actually. I’m frustrated by the lack of feminine and stylish laptop bags so I decided to make my own. My plans got kind of complicated and everytime I reach a stage that proves difficult, I abandon the project and do other things. I’ve got to get back into it though. My current bag is driving me crazy – I’m always fishing around in the bottom for the little stuff.

When I finish, I’ll post pictures on my blog (bag blog – ha ha).

It started happening to me when I was a teenager and I didn’t know what it was, so it was scary. It was only about two years ago that I found out that it has a name…. I’d like to be able to learn how to control it.

I signed up for an free online course but didn’t stick with it.

You can watch all parts on launch.com.

I heard a rumor he’s making parts 6-10 for a dvd.

It’s only worth it if you have a plan that will actually be attractive AND readable. Please, for the love of god, do not put stupid crap like videos and music on your site. I close profiles asap when I find crap like that on them.

Python is definitely my favorite scripting language. I also use the shell as a calculator.

One is for a personal site and one is for a more professional site.

I’m using dyndns to route the domain to my home computer which hosts both sites. It’s also cool to be able to ssh into my home compy from wherever I am.

Netmedia is a fork of the now defunct Netjuke project. It’s SO worth it. I have all my music on the hard drive of my computer and connected to the speakers in both the computer room and my living room. I can control it from any other computer or any device with web browsing capabilities (phone, palm pilot, etc). :) Then, I can also stream my music anywhere. I often do this when I’m on campus studying. My laptop doesn’t have much hard drive space, so I keep the music at home and just stream.

Netmedia has some cool features planned. The idea is that eventually it could be used to manage video as well. Someday, I’m also going to be building a PVR and it would be cool to use something like mythTV to record a television program at home and then use something like netmedia to stream it to yourself wherever you are.