At the centre of Hollinghurst’s 1988 début The Swimming-Pool Library is the grand home of Lord Charles Nantwich, which is somewhat awkwardly hanging on in the City of London as the last reminder of a very different time.  One of the most fascinating features of Charles’s house is that it is covering the remains of a Roman bath, which serves as one of the points of reference for the novel’s paradoxical title.

Hollinghurst tells us quite specifically that Charles lives on Skinner’s Lane, and not just any Skinner’s Lane, but the one off Upper Thames Street not far from St Paul’s in the City.  And as it turns out, there is a reason that Charles’s house has been located here.  In 1964, an excavation unearthed the ruins of a 1^st century CE Roman bathhouse at Skinner’s Lane. Part of a large complex of buildings that stood for perhaps as long as 200 years, the excavation site would be extended further into Queen Victoria Street through subsequent excavations in 1969 and 1987-1988, finally revealing the impressive scale of the bathhouse.  These ruins showed considerable later renovations, including a medieval cellar constructed from the fragments of Roman tiles that had once lined the baths below.  And these aggressive renovations would continue, when, in 1988, the ruins were built over and made inaccessible during the rapid development of the City.  A Scheduled Monument Consent has protected the integrity of the site but not assured its accessibility.

These most recent renovations were, therefore, underway while Hollinghurst was writing The Swimming-Pool Library, and seem to have provided at least some inspiration for this major setting within the novel.  Yesterday I went to Skinner’s Lane and found it under construction yet again.  Both ends are blocked off by barriers, and the gentle refurbishment taking place on street-level is disguising the fact that several meters beneath lies a maze of baths and tunnels that would inspire one of the most important British literary debuts of the 1980s.

Reference: John Schofield with Cath Maloney (eds.) Archaeology in the City of London, 1907-1991: a guide to records of excavations by the Museum of London and its predecessors. The Archaeological Gazetteer Series, Volume 1. (London: Museum of London, 1998).

In addition to the ‘shorter speeches disguised as questions’ there are also a number of other distinct flavours of questions–some good, some bad, but all of which we have seen before.

• The Courtesy Question: There is always someone willing to fill the awkward silence when no one has a question to ask.  The Courtesy Questions is flimsy at the best of times, and asked merely as a kindness to the presenter.  Thank you and moving on.
• The Tell-Us-What-You-Want-To-Tell-Us Question: This might be only one step above the Courtesy Question, but it is a question everyone is thrilled to receive.  The Tell-Us-What-You-Want-To-Tell-Us Question is so broad that you can say whatever you want.  It’s a great opportunity  to recite the parts of your paper you hadn’t gotten to when the moderator called time.
• The Factual Actual Question: There is no harm in wanting to know a bit more.  Sometimes an audience member actually does genuinely want to know more about something you said: a particular source, a particular concept, a particular line of reasoning.  These might sometimes look like Courtesy Questions, but when you see more than a handful of pens scribbling during your response, you know that you have probably just been hit with a Factual Actual Question.
• The Tell-Me-What-Your-Paper-Was-About Question: This question might be disguised as a Factual Actual Question, but its ultimate goal is quite different: to get a summary of what you have just said.  Usually this isn’t  because someone wants you to do all the work for them.  It’s more likely that, although your paper works fine when written, it is genuinely  too challenging to follow when read.  The lesson from this question is that reading and speaking are two very different things.

• The Developmental Question: Sometimes questions actually do offer an insightful new way to think about your topic, and it is a wonderful feeling when that happens.   The Developmental Question offers hard but appropriate feedback on your work, and often comes with a hint that your work is engaging and on the right track.
• The Wandering Statement/The Recap: Not strictly speaking a question, the Wandering Statement is an all-too-common feature of conference Q&As.  An audience member uses the opportunity to deliver a brief speech of their own, which may or may not be explicitly connected to the topic of your paper.  Once they have finished, you wonder if you should open the floor to questions on this new topic.
• The Obstinate Question: While the audience member who poses an Obstinate Question might not be hoping to completely destroy your sense of self-worth, they usually do.  This question poses a direct challenge to your research, from which can come some important feedback that can strengthen and refine your first insights.
• The Display of Superior Knowledge: By far the most obnoxious of all audience responses, the Display of Superior Knowledge is a technique whereby an audience member reminds you that: 1) they know much more than you about your research, 2) that your research methodology falls far short of their own rigorous process were they to be you and conducting the research that you do, and 3) that they have not only gained nothing from your paper but feel to have mildly assaulted by it.

Related articles

• Academics: Why twitter should be a conversation, not a monologue (jonrainford.wordpress.com)
• 5 Quick Tips to Handle Q and A Successfully - (publicwords.typepad.com)
• The Dreaded Q & A – How to Think on your Feet (1nfinitegrowth.wordpress.com)

Looking over the roofs of Muswell Hill Place and Alexandra Gardens towards Springfield Avenue and the Alexandra Palace TV mast, from the viaduct at St James’s Lane. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

British domestic architecture is largely made up of strange angles and peculiar proportions.  Or, at least that was the case in the kinds of flats I lived in during most of my twenties, when I was, first, a student and, later, a young academic with precious little dosh for rent.  One flat had soaring double-height ceilings, impossibly narrow hallways, and, in my bedroom in the back, an overly wide Georgian door that opened to show shelves 3 inches deep.  Even my hairbrush didn’t fit.  In a later flat in Muswell Hill in London, the most exciting feature was a tiny window, three-stories up, that opened onto a massive flat roof the size of the kitchen, bathroom, hallway, and bedroom below.  It was covered in gravel, but I spent many evenings there looking up to Alexandra Palace in the distance.

Neither of these flats were being put to the use they were intended, and the proportions of living seemed charmingly off-kilter because of that.  The former had been a Victorian boarding house in Leeds, before walls were shifted and latches were added to accommodate legions of Red-Brick students.  The latter began life as a middle-class family home in a leafy suburb that was neither then nor now serviced by the Tube.  But it has lately been carved up and made home to one middle-class family downstairs and several eager young career men upstairs, nearly doubling the original number of inhabitants.  From slim crevices to capacious outdoor landings, every feature of these buildings was always too big or too small.  Or, more regularly, both too big and too small at the same time.

My student flats have been on my mind recently while reading Rowan Moore‘s outstanding new work on architectural history, Why We Build.  His criticism is remarkably admirable, in the sense that research, observation, and insight have been pasted together in a perfectly plausible narrative, with all the joints puttied up neatly and invisibly.  The structure of his argument does rather bring to mind the distorted angles and Escher-like floorplans of a German Expressionist film, but it remains engaging and bizarrely uplifting.  Simply put, it’s an ideal book for a bedside table.  And, because I am also finishing a project on architectural Gesamtkunstwerk in modern British drama at the moment, it means that I have been thinking about buildings from waking to sleep.

In Hong Kong, architectural proportions are also uncanny and unexpected, even though the flat I live in now was most definitely built with the singular purpose of housing a young, perhaps-single, perhaps-expat with a love of skyscrapers and city life.  My balcony looks over one of the most famously ginormous skylines in the world, and at 20.00 every night I can see a small slice of the Symphony of Lights–the world’s largest light and sound show–while lying on my sofa.  But inside, the space has been divided into rooms so small that there must be serious consideration of geometric tessellation in every daily task; in arranging my furniture, I have drawn on skills gained from playing hours of Tetris as a child.

In London or Hong Kong, purpose-built or re-purposed, domestic architecture very often fails to ascribe to the proportions that feel natural or ‘right’ to the inhabitants.  Which is perhaps why the often unobtainable ideal of Gesamtkunstwerk–or the ‘total art’, in which everything from wall-coverings to crockery has been designed to suit that one specific place–has been so theoretically and popularly appealing.  Like the pioneering Omega Workshops before them, Terrance Conran and Laura Ashley (cf. Peter York’s outstanding article in this weekend’s FT) promise to offer a distinctly British Gesamtkunstwerk, but more often than not it’s a dream that cannot be realized because every element of the space will be both too large and too small at the same time.

This week I reminded my students that if they are serious about getting a good job in writing or communications then they need to get serious about their media consumption.  That means: a daily newspaper with an international focus, a weekly news magazine, and two to three high-quality monthly magazines.  ‘But that doesn’t require you to read everything cover-to-cover’, I assured 22 horrified faces.  Rather, a good media consumption strategy gives you the framework to dip in and out of the most important events in the world, and allows you to feel connected to ideas bigger than yourself.  During interviews for the jobs that students with an English Studies degree will go into–marketing, journalism, PR, publishing, teaching, to name merely a few–the question of ‘how do you consume your  media?’ is becoming an increasingly common starting point.  And the response needs to be a bit more developed than ‘oh, I read Heat every Tuesday.’

It is advice that I give to students every year, but with the recent announcement that later this summer Google will be dropping Google Reader–their pleasingly functional and well-connected RSS reading platform–I began to think once again about how I consume my media.  I will be the first to admit that my methods of media consumption have been, until recently, what might be called… shady.  I’m of the generation of Napster and torrents, after all.  I’m part of the first generation of people who had computers in their bedrooms as children, paving the way for a bit of illegal downloading beginning with the era of Sugar Ray and Savage Garden and moving onward.  When a good friend of mine introduced me to the world of illegal .epub files for my Kindle, I was hooked.  But putting aside all the economic and moral arguments against illegal file sharing–and I do have a profound respect for musicians and writers, and believe they are owed fair compensation for their work–I have my own personal reasons for recently taking my media consumption more seriously.  And by that, I mean, exchanging cold, hard (digital) cash for the pleasure of consuming.

Part of this reason is an accident of geography.  I was recently speaking to a distinguished colleague of mine, who, like me, also spent a bit of time teaching at Birkbeck, University of London.  ’8 out of 10 people on the Tube will always be reading a novel or magazine’, we fondly remembered.  The visibility of readership in London sends some important messages to students in the capital, including, most significantly: this is a place where the public display of reading is valued and accepted, nay demanded of responsible citizens.  But the famous readerly culture of London is an anomaly, not the norm.  In Hong Kong, where I currently live, there is a strong literary culture but not a readerly one.  The Man Asian Literary Prize gala was hosted at the famous Peninsula hotel this week overlooking Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, and there is an impressive tradition of novelists and poets writing within and about this most remarkable of cities.  But the fact remains that it is a place where reading for pleasure is neither a visible element of culture, nor one supported by what 8 out of 10 people will likely be doing on the MTR during their morning commute.  Students must sometimes be reminded that reading is pleasure and that it is an important thing to do even when one isn’t faced with an assignment.

And it is for this reason that this year my annual reminder of ’1 newspaper, 1 news magazine, 2-3 monthly magazines‘ seemed to take on a very different tone.  The look of horror on my students’ faces let me see the situation a little bit better from their perspective.  The consumption of media is not–as I had seen it to be for a number of years–a throw-away accepted standard, a joyless, passionless exercise in picking the brains of those more interesting than you find yourself to be.  Rather, it’s quite a remarkable and singular thing, something that everyone, from time to time, needs to be reminded to do and to enjoy.  Illegally downloading a book, an album, or a film, however, makes that media into a cheap, disposable commodity.  It doesn’t set the proper tone for the experience, nor engender the aura of authenticity (thinking back to, but also thinking beyond, Walter Benjamin’s famous 1936 essay on the mechanical reproduction of art) that is so necessary for fully appreciating the work in your hands.

On Wednesday night I spoke briefly with the Japanese novelist Hiromi Kawakami, whose book The Briefcase was shortlisted for this year’s Man Asian Literary Prize.  I was struck by her suggestion that books are like faces, and that an important part of readership is walking into a bookstore with no goal in mind and finding out which ‘face’ speaks to you most.  Finding a new book you love is like finding a new boyfriend or girlfriend she suggested, and I couldn’t agree more.  I bought The Briefcase, Kawakami signed it for me in beautiful kanji script, and I look forward to spending a leisurely Sunday morning reading it in bed with a pot of coffee and toast.  That is how I like to consume my media.

Related articles

• Malaysian novelist wins Man Asian Literary Prize (edition.cnn.com)
• Google to retire Reader service (bbc.co.uk)
• T Magazine: Subway Reads (tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Using Twitter for Curated Academic Content (blogs.lse.ac.uk)

Even the flurry of live tweeting from MLA 2013 has not been enough to distract the academic community from Susan Adams’ recent article in Forbes.  In a largely tongue-in-cheek featurette with a veneer of statistical clout and some grand proclamations, Adams declared university professors to have ‘The Least Stressful Job of 2013′.    The backlash was swift, with over 150 academics quickly pointing out precisely why and how the life of a university educator is surely not lacking in stress.

I have no other points to add these comments, but I can’t help but think of an almost identical article from August of last year.  In her popular blog ‘A Don’s Life’, Professor Mary Beard lamented the absurd job postings for university comms and PR positions.  As she sees it, the job listings were a mess of ridiculous collocations and nonsensical phraseology, a feature that she subtly suggests is indicative of confused and perhaps entirely unnecessary positions within the marketing department of the university.    Professor Beard’s article is certainly worth a read.  But in the context of the recent Forbes article, I want to reproduce here my own comment to Beard, which sparked some discussion of its own:

As a humanities academic who spent a year working in the brand/design/communications sector while writing a book on the topic, I read this post with interest. In the same way that most people will view academic job postings as completely meaningless (e.g. ‘the successful candidate will contribute to the department’s international profile for research and teaching….’), many academics lack an understanding of what it is that many professionals actually do on a day-to-day basis. It’s no one’s fault, but perhaps suggests that ideal of knowledge transfer, as an ‘activity’ rather than simply a matter of course, is still maintaining a certain uncomfortable distance between academics and those in ‘hard business’. A job listing for, let’s say, a Senior Lecturer in Art History will contain loads of discipline-specific jargon that doesn’t reveal what it actually is that the person will do with their time–instead, it gestures toward the force of personality required of the successful candidate. Precisely the same is true in the communications, PR, and brand worlds. The people who get these jobs at the OU will be undertaking challenges that not many academics could face, and to consider that the funding for these posts might be more profitably channeled toward research seems to undermine the very premise of the modern university: to begin breaking down the barriers between the ivory tower, public policy, and hard business. We as academics have heard many times the complaints that we work only a handful of weeks a year and do very little, all on a hugely inflated salary. Yet we recognize that people who make these complaints simply don’t understand what it is that we do. In turn, perhaps we should make an effort to understand what it is that other people do as well.

The comments to Adams’ Forbes article are precisely the type of response that I discussed: the academic community’s backlash against unfair portrayals of working conditions in higher education.  Adams has since issued a gracious addendum to her article which takes these responses into account.  But with the recent discussion surrounding her findings, it seems an ideal time to re-evaluate how academics view those in positions outside of academia.

I am sure that Beard’s certain distrust of professional roles in media and communications is not unique in the academy.  Indeed, the many comments to her post show that there are an awful lot of academics who fear that a Barnum-esque American business lexicon has entered the British university system.  But as my comments to Beard’s post maintain, it’s entirely unfair to take issue with charges leveled against our profession whilst still distrusting the business world to the point of repulsion.  In the twenty first century it is essential for academics to speak freely with and work well alongside their business compatriots.  And the inverse, of course, is true as well.

Does academia bring with it the sort of acute stress an account manager or marketing director might feel when faced with a project deadline, a slack team, and an impossible brief?  Perhaps not.  But academia certainly does bring stress of its own.  There is, for example, the 8-15 year period of training and apprenticeship, during which pay is negligible and prospects are slim.  There is the extraordinary student loan debt which must be addressed during this very same period of penury.   After all of that, there are the 80-hour weeks and endless nights of marking.  And there are, as a bonus, the publishing requirements that can leave even the most confident and productive writers blanching.

Of course it is unfair to call university professors the least stressed workers of 2013.  Though perhaps it is also unfair to call tailors or hairdressers–two other finalists on the list–similarly free of stress.  Every profession brings with it its own challenges, pleasures, and disappointments.  Many academics value the unique privileges of their position, while never forgetting the stress that these pleasures bring.  And in just the same way, more academics should seek to understand what it is, exactly, other professionals do that make them valuable and unique.

Related articles

• Do College Professors Have Less Stress? (forbes.com)
• Top 10 Reasons Being a University Professor is a Stressful Job (forbes.com)
• The Forbes-College Professor War Is So On (gawker.com)
• The Least Stressful Job for 2013? A Real Look at Being a Professor in the US (factsandotherfairytales.com)
• Forbes 2013 Career List Flamed By University Professors (science.slashdot.org)

I have gathered together the five most popular posts from 2012.  I know that most of these deal with technology and social media; in the coming year, I will be writing more about other sides of academia, including pedagogy, policy, and my own research.

• Using Twitter for Curated Academic Content
• Making the Most Out of Experential Learning: 5 Things That Work for Me
• 4 Tags that Make Sense of It All: Best Practice for Tagging Academic Notes
• Tutorial: Getting Kindle Into Evernote
• 7 Things This Academic Learned from the World of Brand & Design

2013 is already looking like a busy year for me, not least because of an exciting move from the University of London to City University of Hong Kong.  That means new courses, new students, new administrative systems, and a lot of new projects.  Since I have set some time aside this week to take stock and review my plans for the coming year, I wanted to share one of the things that keeps my note-taking organized and ultimately helps to support my work as an academic: a clear, consistent tagging system that I use everywhere I can.

The academic life is a chaotic mixture of teaching, research, service, knowledge transfer, partnerships, publicity, and planning, so it has been important for me to find a way to seamlessly blend these strands.  To this end, every piece of information that I put into Evernote or Things immediately gets these types of tags (I use the hashtag to denote a type of tag–these don’t actually form part of the tag itself):

Context > #Output > #Topic > #X-Ref

Because I use this same tagging system in both my task manager and my note taking software, it is incredibly easy to cross-reference details or to find the information that I need.  Before I explain how these tags function within Evernote and Things, here’s a quick summary of each:

Context

You’ll notice that ‘Context’ doesn’t have a hashtag before it–that’s because this is a notebook (in Evernote) or a project (in Things).  There is a common tendency to create individual notebooks or projects for every course, meeting, idea, or brainstorm.  This is fine at first, but the number of notebooks will quickly get out of hand, relegating the most important notes to the background and making digital note taking less effective.  Instead, I have just six Contexts that I use at the moment, and which cover the full scope of my academic work:

• ‘Hollinghurst’ – Alan Hollinghurst was the topic of my doctoral thesis, a project which has led to a number of  conference papers, journal articles, and a book.  Understandably, I have quite  a few notes on this topic, and there is still some more in the coming year.
• ‘Absence’ — The key focus of my current research is the idea of negative space in twentieth-century literature. There are loads of notes for conference papers, articles, and knowledge transfer partnerships here.
• ‘eReading’ – A secondary focus in my research is the effects of digital books on comprehension and analysis.  As time progresses, this will overtake #Absence as the dominate research theme.
• ‘AcademicPractice’ –  My blog has its own notebook. (This is partly because my blog is going to be expanding dramatically in the coming year, owing to some new partnerships and developments.)
• ‘Teaching’ — All of my teaching notes, regardless of the course, fall under this Context.

#Output

Context is the primary bucket that each note or task gets sorted into.  Pretty straightforward.  But the real magic begins when the remaining tags are put into place.   The first tag category I use is #Output.  There are four tags that I use here:

• #Lecture — This includes note taking and any relevant materials for lectures.
• #Seminar — This includes note taking for seminar preparation or teaching strategies in general.
• #Conference — This includes note taking for conference papers.
• #Publication — This includes note taking for publication.

#Topic

So, there are five ‘Context’ buckets and four #Output tags.  Drawing on my rusty math, that means that these tagging conventions have already created 70 unique and meaningful locations for my information.

Only at this point do the tags become a bit more free and lose.  For the #Topic,  I include a simple tag addressing the topic of the note.  Since I work primarily on literature, the #Topic is often the author’s name (e.g. Shakespeare, James, Woolf), although sometimes it is thematic (e.g. modernism, architecture).

#X-Ref

Although my tagging conventions are set up to show key themes and trends connecting all notes, I still instinctively include at least one cross-referencing tag.  For example, my notes for a lecture on Mrs. Dalloway that goes into great detail about domestic architecture might also get the #X-Ref of ‘architecture’.

I use Evernote for all of my note taking and Things as my task manager — across both of these I use the same tagging system so I always know where to find the information I need.  In practice, this becomes an extremely helpful way to get to what I need, and to spot relationships between ideas that I hadn’t previously considered.  For example, earlier today I was writing a lecture on Shakespeare’s use of language for an introductory course on the Bard.  My notes got these tags:

Teaching > Lecture > Shakespeare > Language

Rather than being hidden away in some notebook that I might never look at after this semester, these notes now carry tags that will help me long into the future.  Because notes can only be in one notebook yet can have a wide variety of tags, it really is an invaluable investment of time to tag each note with #Output > #Topic > #X-Ref.

When these tagging conventions are used in a task manager like Things, one is able to sort tasks in a variety of ways.  Want to see what lectures you need to prepare for?  Just select ‘Lecture’.  Want to double-check the progress of a research-led course on Henry James? Just select ‘James’ to bring up all of the research and teaching tasks related to the Master.

I’ve used these conventions for some time, and have rarely needed to include more than these tags to bring some sense and order to my research and teaching. These few extra seconds it takes to throw in specific, contextual tags really is worth it in the long run.  What kind of tagging conventions do you use in your note taking?  What other tips do you have for combining the various strands of the academic profession?  I’d love to hear!

With all of this semester’s exam scripts marked and off my desk, I have finally begun to read the books that have been piling up in my Kindle over the past semester.  (On second thought, can eBooks ‘pile up’?  Surely we need a new metaphor in the digital age.)  One that I have particularly enjoyed is Helen Sword‘s Stylish Academic Writing.  Far from an abstracted treatise on writing (as so many advanced academic writing texts are), Sword’s work highlights both the finest and guiltiest features of contemporary academic prose and uses these examples to demonstrate practical techniques for better writing.

The companion website to Sword’s earlier book The Writer’s Diet (unfortunately not available on Amazon.co.uk) offers a diagnostic tool to check the ‘flabbiness’ of prose.  The diagnosis of several pages from a recent article of mine was not entirely positive.  My writing, it seems, is a bit overwhelmed by adjectives and abstract nouns, but, then, so is a great deal of recent academic writing (see below). So my resolution for 2013 is to make my concrete nouns work harder, because up until this point they have been getting a free ride from my favourite adjectives.

Related articles

• Is there an epidemic of plural abstract nouns? (languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu)
• Seven secrets of stylish academic writing (frugalfashionistachic.wordpress.com)
• Website helps writers determine the ‘fitness’ of their prose (prdaily.com)

Congratulations to the winners of the contest:

• Cindy Yen
  • First Prize:  One Year of Evernote Premium (value $45)
• Sherman “Jeff” Cold
  • Second Prize: 3 Months of Evernote Premium (value $15)
• ruskeakarhu
  • Third Prize: Evernote Sticker Pack (value $5) + Evernote Sticky Screen Wipes (value $5)

In the coming year, I will be writing more about Evernote and how it can be used for teaching and research in higher education.  Many thanks for all of the entries, and I look forward to sharing more ideas as Evernote Higher Education Ambassador.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Research” in the early days—and by that I mean in the days of elementary school—was a straightforward affair.  Or it was until the revolution of the parenthetical citation marked a turning point in the yearly convention of the spring research paper.  In those early days, “research” also looked quite  different, in that it was largely done by looking books up in a card catalogue and then writing notes on index cards.

If a “research paper” was simply an organizational task, a test of paper control and shuffling cards, then I was quite well suited for the mission. To me, writing a research paper simply meant the power to quietly talk with friends in the school library and, most significantly for me, the literal physical freedom of being able to stand up and sit down at will (that’s a big deal when you’re 11).  But I had the extraordinary misfortune of being drawn last to choose my research topic that year.  By the time I got to write my name on the sheet, “Dolphins,” “Killer Whales,” “Jelly Fish,” and “Coral” had all been taken.  What I was left with was the most inauspicious of topics: “The Barnacle.”

Buoyed by an embarrassment with my topic, I staged a rebellion.  Questions were asked: In what ways where the facts written on my index cards different from the source material itself?  Who was I learning for, and what was I learning? At what point do influence, innovation, and index cards meet?

Fast-forward to 2012.  Innovation in the arts and humanities might not create multi-million pound spinout companies or accrue dozens of patents, but to what extent is the model of innovation and enterprise an effective framework for approaching research in these fields?  How must research students in the arts and humanities learn to think in order to operate in a global society increasingly concerned with the valuation of ideas?

Since I have yet to find answers to these questions, I have started the mission with my own students.  In my both my composition and literature courses, I have begun teaching argumentation using what seems, at first, a somewhat reductive enterprise model.  “What do you think the innovation of your argument is?” I ask students in the classroom. “Good.  But be sure to communicate the value of the argument you pose,” I note on student essays.  But such a vocabulary, perhaps more at home in a business department than an English department, is not entirely divorced from the principal assumptions of what literary analysis is meant to be.  It simply forces students to appreciate that research, whether in 5^th grade or in an undergraduate seminar, isn’t simply paper pushing—it’s a formula for stating the original and for innovating, on whatever scale.  For me, trying to articulate the value, in real terms, of my fifth grade work on “The Barnacle” could have been a challenge, but if I had been lucky enough to get “Killer Whale,” things would have been quite a bit different.

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