• 2 Posts
  • 272 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: September 9th, 2023
  • OrteilGenou@lemmy.worldtoFuck AI@lemmy.world•Ah, now that brings me back to my college days...
    10·
    5 days ago

    Oh I had a 1-1 presentation with the professor for a philosophy class and he wanted us to present one point from one author, capture the point in five minutes or less, and survive ten minutes of cross examination. This guy was a real shark too, not only was he known to be very sharp and super cutting with his critiques, he was the kind of guy who would force a class of forty people to sit a presentation in his office for twenty minutes each so he could avoid correcting term papers.

    I chose Marshall McLuhan and spoke for maybe three minutes and why his assertion that “the medium is the message” is true because the invention of email made it unacceptable for a company with a branch in Toronto and one in Montreal to communicate by horseback, so the expected pace of business was irrevocably changed. Email is only “amazing” for a couple of days, then it’s a fact that dictates expectations, and so, what you communicate by email is of much less consequence in the long run than the deep change in corporate culture that email causes. That was the core of McLuhan’s point.

    Got an A+ for that one, and was out of his office and on my way in less than ten minutes.

    Marshall McLuhan’s was the only work I read of all the assignments in that entire class.

  • OrteilGenou@lemmy.worldtoFuck AI@lemmy.world•Ah, now that brings me back to my college days...
    14·
    5 days ago

    When I was at a party in college a friend was bumming the vibes because he had an English paper due the following Monday and he was stressed out.

    I asked him what the topic was and it was any play studied in the course. I asked him which play he knew best and if I recall correctly it was The Importance of Being Earnest.

    I chatted with him for a bit, asked him why he liked the play, what it meant to him, what parts he thought were most important, and what he thought was the ultimate point Wilde was making.

    After about a half hour I wrote the outline on the back of a placemat.

    Intro: state what point your essay will ultimately try to make, and summarize how you’ll get there (1 page).

    For each “way” that you’ll get there, write three paragraphs: your point, what in the text supports your point, and how that point supports the thesis in the intro. (1.5-2 pages).

    Do that for each of the four “ways”. (6-8 pages total)

    Explain why those dozen paragraphs illustrate and support the claims you made in the introduction.

    Suffice it to say, the party roared on, he likely wasn’t able to think on Saturday but on Sunday I guess he did a pretty good job of bullshitting his way to nine single spaced pages, and he got a B, which was above average for him in that class.

    That structure, intro, points, references, supports statements, conclusion, can literally be blown out into a thesis or even a book, as long as you have a clear idea of what you’re trying to say and how you intend to back it up, and you can write coherent (dare to dream, interesting!) prose to explain everything in between.

    What people are missing is that that process is actually fun. Trying to figure out how you can make a point in an interesting way that is backed up by references that you can argue in support on your point is actually interesting and fun, you just have to stop thinking about why you can’t/won’t and just throw yourself at it.