Tag Archives: writing

Goodbyes, hellos, and an invitation: UpbeaT makes its seasonal shift

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Hello everyone: Chris Garbutt here, manager of the UpbeaT project at Student Life. You’ve probably read all the goodbye posts from this year’s bloggers. It’s been a great year at UpbeaT. Week after week, our bloggers told you about the amazing things they’ve done on campus, and some of the involved, engaged people who are also doing amazing things at U of T. Thanks to Cynthia, Danielle, Dara, Lori and Shannon for all your hard work!

Now that we’re into a new session, I hope you’ll welcome Emily, our new summer communications intern at Student Life. She’ll be your UpbeaT blogger until the end of the summer, and will pick up where the regular UpbeaT team left off.

Work for UpbeaT!

lifeatuoft is a great blog to work for, and we’re now looking for curious, creative and committed new bloggers for the 2011-2012 school year. Apply for any of these positions:

lifeatuoft Writer: Proven writer, either in print or online.

lifeatuoft Multimedia Blogger: You love to tell visual stories!

Physical Activity Blogger: Create posts about physical activity and healthy living!

Writer/Videoblogger (International): Find creative ways to capture and convey the range of international experiences and opportunities available through U of T’s Faculty of Arts & Science.

Deadline for these positions is May 31 or June 1.

Thanks to all our readers, and enjoy your summer. Keep reading!

It’s Fall Break! To write or not to write?

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It’s November! Which either means Movember, NaNoWriMo or for the rest of us, essays. Before I start on a rant about that, happy Fall Break everyone!

That’s right, no classes today or tomorrow. It’s a new change the University of Toronto implemented. Remember Wacky Wednesday last year? It’s less complicated this year; we simply get two days off. It’s only for Arts and Science students though, so if you’re an engineering student I’m sorry about your midterms. I didn’t realize and I got the most murderous glare from my engineering friends.

Back to essays. So many due and so little time. And if you’re like me, you’ve probably tried starting to write right? Here’s what my screen looked like at 8:01pm:

And a few hours later, at 12:38am:

Absolutely no change. My room is a lot cleaner though – my desk is cleared, my books are alphabetized and there are spare garbage bags folded neatly inside my garbage can. But the essay is due in two one day, and all I’ve got is a blinking cursor. It’s mesmerizing and hypnotic but oh man, how am I going to get a couple of thousand words out?

Allow me to share a little gem with you, dear readers. It’s called Write or Die:

Write or Die is a web application that encourages writing by punishing the tendency to avoid writing. Start typing in the box. As long as you keep typing, you’re fine, but once you stop typing, you have a grace period of a certain number of seconds and then there are consequences.

And the consequences depend on your mood. If I need Write or Die, I need the Kamikaze mode, which is when the words start erasing itself when you stop writing.

It’s too bad the electric shock mode is unavailable. I would be the first to try it. Dr. Wicked, the founder of Write or Die, made a pretty comprehensive of screencast of the program and shows you the different modes in action:

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdLLo08cJKY

So why is Write or Die so great?

I love it because it forces you to just type. It’s like Nike’s slogan, “Just do it!” Write or Die forces you to type continuously. You don’t have time to think about spelling or grammar (especially if you choose the Evil grace period!), and you can’t distract yourself by playing with the margins or centering the title or double spacing what you have. I know I’ve wasted so many minutes just fussing with the layout – I rationalize that I’m being productive because Word is opened to my essay, but I’m really just biding for time. On the other hand, Write or Die is threatening to delete my thoughts if I don’t keep typing, as their motto says, prodding me into productivity.

So dear readers, Danielle shared with you how she buckles down to work with the Pomodoro technique last week, and I just told you about my favourite essay helper. What do you do to get yourself studying for that midterm or to start writing that essay?

- Cynthia

What’s in your pantry? Ingredients for success in writing

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The entrance to the Woodsworth College Academic Writing Centre

The entrance to the Woodsworth College Academic Writing Centre

You enter your kitchen. You know you have to eat, but you are loathing the fact that you have to cook. You hear a rustling in the pantry. You think it might be a mouse. You are afraid of mice. You grab a broom just to be safe, so you have some protection against the little vermin. You boldly swing the door open and scream like a three year old. To your shock and awe, it isn’t a mouse that emerges. It is none other than celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. He asks in his appealing accent “So, what are we cookin’ tonight love?” Gordon Ramsay is offering to help you cook a wonderful feast. Instead of the plain pasta you were going to make, you could be having pasta primavera with market fresh veggies and extra virgin olive oil, cold pressed that morning. You consider the offer for a moment and instead of replying “Why yes Gordon Ramsay, I would love to have your help in preparing an extraordinary meal”, you casually infer that you’ve “got it under control”. Gordon Ramsay says, “Fine then, I’ve got to be in LA in an hour anyways”. You proceed, unshaken by your encounter, to cook some very average pasta. It is edible but, it’s not going to win any awards.

Does this sound familiar? No. Alright, let’s exchange a few names. What if instead of Gordon Ramsay, it was a PHD in some field of arts and humanities, which was offering their services to you? You may be wondering what a Doctor of Philosophy is doing in your pantry? That’s understandable. Let’s make the pantry an office in your college. So, now the pasta preparation isn’t really fitting into the scenario. Let’s change the pasta into a research paper.
Are you starting to see where I’m going here? A PHD is offering to help you plan, write and edit your paper, FOR FREE, and you are casually saying, “I’ve got it under control”. Let me reiterate…help is being offered by someone who knows far more about academic writing than you, even if you are a great writer, and you are refusing said help. My question is this. Why are students not flocking to writing centres to get help? Even if you think you have a great paper, the truth is we are all in the process of acquiring knowledge. There is no perfect essay at this point or possibly at any point. The writing centres are there to help us make our papers as perfect as they can be. In some ways we are all at a disadvantage. We are writing for professors who by and large write for a living. Imagine presenting your aforementioned average pasta to Gordon Ramsay for his critique. Would you even have the nerve to do it? I would not. I would be terrified of his honest opinion. I think this is the same emotion most first year undergrads experience when handing in their very first university level paper. So why do students hand in papers that are not up to snuff? Perhaps, they are not aware of the writing aid that is available on campus. Or maybe they don’t have the time. I have a very tight schedule and I have found that if I schedule my writing centre appointments into my calendar as if they were a class, then I can make the time. I book well in advance, according to the due dates of my papers and I always schedule a minimum of two appointments per paper. Working my schedule in this way ensures that I have the time set aside well in advance.
There are very few students who are naturally gifted with the ability to write with impeccable grammar, perfect spelling, and foolproof arguments (notice the Oxford comma, knowledge gained courtesy of the Woodsworth College Academic Writing Centre pictured in the above photo!). Apart from the copious amount of help I have received from the writing centres, I have also gained a lot of really useful writing knowledge. For example, the proper usage of that and which…previously an enigma to me. There is also the Oxford comma, which I have already displayed in good form. Little things like these really improve the quality of your writing. Let me clarify one thing…the writing centres are not in the proofreading business. But they will help you to understand how and why you are erring in your grammar. They will also help you plan and implement a well structured essay.
Here’s a quick self assessment. If you fall into any of these categories you might need a writing centre.

    If you are wondering if your in class essay next week needs a thesis…you might need the writing centre.
    If you don’t know what a pattern of argument is…you might need the writing centre.
    If your 1500 word essay consists of three paragraphs…you might need the writing centre.

It’s funny but it’s true. If you have never visited your college’s writing centre, make an appointment and go experience what it is to have a professional assist you in your writing.
 
Find your college writing centre here: http://www.writing.utoronto.ca/writing-centres/centres

 -Lori

The keener’s perspective on doing stuff at U of T

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“I feel like I missed out on undergrad.”

I said it out loud to no one in particular and was overcome by a fleeting moment of emptiness before being yanked back to reality. It was Saturday night and my friend and I were seated comfortably in the Hart House Theatre, surrounded by that distinct stuffiness of old auditoriums and a shifting darkness that spoke of anticipation. The 15th Annual Hart House Festival of Dance was about to begin.

It was a night of many firsts. It was the first time since the beginning of undergrad that I had ventured into the Hart House Theatre, the first time I had seen a campus-wide performance and the first time I truly appreciated the multitude of talents possessed by the U of T student body.

After the show, I was physically tired yet I felt so alive – more alive than I have been for a long, long time. Looking at the wide display of talent from that night and knowing the students come from an equally wide variety of academic disciplines, I realized that it is possible to have a life outside of the cubicle in Robarts Reading Room. It is possible to lead a not-so-humdrum life without jeopardizing your marks or your future. It is possible for undergrads at U of T to feel joyful about life!

It feels like everything I’ve done in undergrad thus far has been for one purpose only: building my resumé. I began building in first year towards a career in medicine. The result of all this effort became somewhat irrelevant when in second year, I decided to switch from medicine to counselling. But even then I wasn’t really sure, so by my third year I told myself that I needed to try laboratory research because, after all, I am in Life Science – what do people specializing in Molecular Biology do if they don’t do laboratory research?!

So I nearly sold my soul fighting for a summer research position, but in the meantime, that summer I nearly lost my soul to a new-found love called journalism. This seemingly insignificant cognitive dissonance ultimately resulted in a mild quarter-life crisis by the start of my fourth year. The confusion (and panic) I experienced was not unlike those expressed in Cynthia’s post. Then finally, just as this past fall semester was about to end, by a stroke of luck I stumbled upon a career that even I, a self-proclaimed perfectionist, would deem to be “just right.”

Would I say that I regret having tried to build my resumé in all those different directions, for all those different career goals that never worked out in the end? Probably not. My personal philosophy is that everything happens for a reason, and a corollary to this is that everything we choose to do brings meaning into our lives. Therefore, I don’t choose to label any of my past experiences as a “waste of time.” What I do want, however, is to go back to the past and fix the attitude with which I have done all the things I did.

What I’ve learned is that our lives go far beyond the things we put on our resumé. At one point in high school, when I was still heavily involved with the music portions of my school’s annual variety shows and spent hours after school reading my poetry and short stories to people in my Writers’ Guild, I had known this. I made the distinction between my personal and then-budding professional life, and my life was completely mine. Looking back, I realize that:

  1. We are not obligated to shove everything we do into a column on our resumé. Sometimes, it’s not a crime to do things simply because it’s fun and makes us happy.
  2. We can get so much more out of a potentially resumé-worthy experience if we don’t prejudice it to a specific (career) goal straight off the bat. This allows us to be fully receptive to all aspects of the experience and prevents us from being locked into tunnel vision.

Walking out of the Festival of Dance that evening, I suddenly felt like joining some sort of performance group at U of T – just for me and my sanity. In high school, things were so simple: there were two major shows each year and one office where you signed up for everything, including auditions. But U of T is so large that not only is there an overwhelming number of groups and opportunities available for the artistically minded, it’s hard to find them, too.

So I dug around the web for a bit and stumbled across a relatively new website called ArtsZone. It’s an amazing hub for all sorts of opportunities – both academic and extracurricular - in the arts at U of T, where “arts” can be anything that fall under the category of architecture, film, music, new media, theatre, visual art and writing. There is even a page featuring the newest art-related opportunities in our school and also in the city, such as auditions, submission deadlines, jobs and workshops! How awesome is that?! I also found plenty of student organizations and groups for the arts at the good ol’ Ulife website.

All of this might take you a while to browse and digest, but I urge you to do so if you feel even a tiny itch to participate in the U of T or Toronto arts scenes. Fresh out of the dreadful womb that is Robarts, I must now go and also explore all this new-found wonder. In the meantime, let there be music.

-Lucy

Get published as an undergrad: Journal of Young Investigators

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Checking my emails over the weekend, I found one that described and linked to the Journal of Young Investigators (JYI), a peer-reviewed research journal that publishes original undergraduate research in science, math and engineering. JYI, established and still run entirely by undergraduate students, is published monthly online.

There are a number of reasons why undergraduate journals are valuable to students. As an  undergrad, I’ve often felt that I live in a parallel universe: producing papers and lab reports, writing exams and sitting through lectures with the goal of coming out on the other side with a piece of paper proclaiming my academic worth.

A degree is a great thing, but in the process of getting it, heaps of my scholastic work have invariably ended up scattered throughout various real and virtual wastelands, stored somewhere between my computer’s inexhaustible memory and the recycling bin outside my front door. A major part of feeling isolated from the real world derives from the fact that while I am constantly mimicking professionals and academics, my labours are rarely, if ever, put to any palpable or quantitative use.

I know, there are skills and knowledge gained in four years that can’t be thrown out. They’ll be forever etched into my brain. But what about the rest of my hard work, those papers so diligently written, reports completed late in the night? And most important, what about all of the truly original work I produced?

Applications:

This is where undergraduate journals can be really useful. JYI, for example, is an international publication that covers a breadth of scientific material. It accepts articles, reviews and editorials (in English). Featured articles must be written by undergraduates and have to include work that was conducted while still an undergrad student. But if you’ve already graduated – and are working or in grad school- you can still submit other types of work.

Each submission requires two forms: a submission form filled out by you (the writer), and an advisor approval form filled out by your mentor or supervisor. After applying, judging is conducted by two students and their advisors and it’s based on several criteria: presentation and quality of writing, and the originality and merit of the research. You’re informed of whether or not your work has been accepted within a couple of weeks of submitting.

Although JYI is an American publication, it also accepts (on a case-by-case basis) undergraduate students who want to get involved in working for the journal. A list of available positions can be found on the journal’s website, as can application instructions.

JYI is obviously not the only undergraduate journal around. U of T, through its multifarious departments, produces many. A short list of examples:

Journal of Undergraduate Life Sciences (JULS): an annual publication with a fall deadline, JULS publishes articles, letters and reviews written by undergraduate students.

The Future of History: another annual publication with a winter deadline, the History Students Association publishes undergraduate papers (no document-studies allowed) written both independently and for history classes.

Anthropology Tomorrow: The Undergraduate Journal of Anthropology first accepts students’ abstract submissions and later full text. Its deadline is also in the winter.

The University of Toronto Undergraduate Journal of Political Science: A journal publishing the work of political science students.

It’s great that the work that we accomplish as undergrads can be put to constructive use, accomplishing more than simply getting us a mark. Rather than only emulating the labours performed by professionals, our work can supercede the dusty backwaters of computer memories- leaving me feeling a little more in touch with the world outside of undergraduate studies.

-Mary

Writing Centres “R” Us

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Well, okay, not “Us” UpbeaTers per se, but more like the University of Toronto’s website on writing, and the many, many, many benefits that come from being well-acquainted with the site.

I found out about this site when I was in first year. I had just gotten back my Fine Art History term paper, and in spite of my commendable efforts to sound knowledgeable about triumphal arches in Rome, I nevertheless failed to exceed my (at the time) delusional academic expectations.

It was my first ever sub-par essay grade; the mark made me realize that I was but a very tiny fish in the big, big sea. A few days later, after returning to a somewhat more balanced psychological state, I decided to do what I did best in high school: dissect the paper’s marking scheme.

My professor told me about this marking scheme, instead. Later on, as I continued with my undergraduate education, I came to learn that although each department or course might implement its own marking scheme for a particular assignment, the meaning behind a given grade is generally based on the explanations given in this Arts and Science Grading Statement.

I also learned to use writing centres. While only students of a certain college can use its writing centre, you are also eligible to use a college’s service for any college-related program course you are taking (the ones labelled INI, NEW, SMC, TRN, UNI, or VIC).

When I was in first year, appointments had to be made by phone, but lucky for you, now everything can be done online! Appointment are 50 minutes long and you may book up to three at a time. Keep in mind that the centres will be extra busy during midterm season, so try your best to book in advance. When I spoke to one of the instructors for University College and Innis College recently about this problem, she told me that although the schedule often appears to be full, it is nevertheless constantly fluctuating: spaces open up sporadically as students cancel last minute. If you are really desperate, just keep checking! For example, although most days this week and next week are booked full at Innis College, a spot has just opened up for tomorrow, February 12th, at 3:10 pm. It is also critical that you cancel any appointments you won’t be able to make at least 24 hours in advance. If you miss two appointments, you will no longer be able to book anymore appointments at the writing centre.

If you’ve never been to a writing centre, you should know that the instructors there are absolutely amazing. It’s like they know. They’ll take one look at your work, and point out to you what’s working and what isn’t. And that’s not all!

Many students think that the job of the writing centre is to help edit your work, but in reality, the trouble with writing isn’t just about how to fix the nitty gritty details, but rather, how to get them down on paper in the first place. Therefore, by no means are you required to bring a completed draft of your work to your appointment. If your topic is so broad that you just don’t know where to start, or if you have no idea about what to include in, say, a fine art history paper (hey, I totally didn’t), book an appointment with these lovely people and unleash your worries! (Alternatively, you can also find out more about how to write specific types of essays here.)

As a final note, let the above information be a rough guide for helping you with your academic success, not another source of stress. The term has just taken a turn for the worse for everyone (how many term tests do you have this week and/or after Reading Week? Share your burden in the comments below!) So if the writing centre is not a feasible option for you time-wise, trust your writing abilities and get enough sleep instead! Good luck everyone!

–Lucy

Yes We Can – next year

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[enter extreme reminiscent mode as Liesl shows you the post she made before school began to eat her. and you as well, most likely.]

You know how the beginning of every school year brings that feeling of childish hope, that this time, things will be different, by Jove’s Juice it will be different? You’ll do all your readings, go to all your classes, have the perfect schedule, become idealistically engaged in every class argument, save money, get the perfect job, buy every textbook used, sell every textbook, woo someone of the opposite preferred gender, write a novel, sell ten paintings, study abroad in Japan or South Africa or Ireland, waste just the right amount of time on Facebook, eat regular meals, hand in essays on time, and to top it all off,

sleep?

And with this childish hope, one has the polar opposite, unrealistically negative anticipation of pure, unbridled horrors and trials lurking nearby in the shadowy depths of the registrar’s office of your soul?

That was pretty much how I felt, kids. I guess… I supposed it’s how I still feel, seeing as how it’s only been two weeks since school started.

The first week went by quietly enough; my half-summer of dabbling in/merely dreaming of DIY and Japanese punk rock fashion did not lead to my wearing something fantastic on the first day. Rather, my hair had been stripped of its painful Ghanaian extensions and I had to wear a hat to hide the large, unsightly puff that was my head. I wanted an afro, but apparently they are high maintenance.

That was okay though! I have the whole year to look nice. More important than fun clothes, I managed to have at least one friend in all of my classes. No dashing individual with purple hair has approached me and professed love yet, but I can live without that.

Highlights!

  • I have the same English professor as last year for my English Literature course, thus there was no fear of the manifestation of ‘the crazy professor’ there.
  • ‘Reading Poetry!’ This course is… a little technical, i.e., painfully mathy but… I would still say… that… it is painfully mathy. Maybe I should read more than just that one super-technical textbook, huh?
  • The ‘Politics of Development’, which deals greatly with the developing world, still holds the most practical relevance, in my opinion, and hopefully I will look past any self-absorbed hatred for myself regarding my dwindling activism as of late and actually be propelled to do something. ‘Something’.
  • Lastly, the Graphic Novel! Obviously the one I enjoy the most, not only because I am a nerd (albeit of the gaming variety), but because we have actual close discussion time, and my friends in that course are actually interested in the material! Finally, the archetypal intellectual dudes-in-robes-arguing experience is happening to me.

Extracurriculars this year will include (drumroll for shameless plug) the Game Design and Development Club, tagging along to various LGBT events with my main gay, writing for various U of T… factions of publication, and I know there is a shorter word for that I just can’t think of it, and, overall, having fun while silently gaining momentum in my fervour to start a subversive art movement and take over the world.

So much potential fun to be had, its only inevitable the negativity is still… around… For various death-related reasons, I had a traumatizing summer, and any slight stressor usually sends me into a funk deeper than it need be. One comfort is remembering all the hilarious stories my Dad left me with of his university days… such as losing his ‘pet’ cobra in his dorm and thus having everyone on his floor join in the search for a thing described only as “something unusual”. So, I can only ask now:

WILL OUR HEROINE OVERCOME HER DEMONS AND ACHIEVE ALL HER DREAMS OF THE PERFECT SCHOOL EXPERIENCE AT LAST?!

And will she have such a good time that she’ll be able to stop talking about her feelings and focus on something that is not said heroine herself?!

I plan to keep this hopefulness up until my first essay is due.

__________________________________________________

About thirty minutes (read: exaggerating?) before the application for this blogging position was due, I looked at my crazy example post and cover letter (my resume being less crazy) and thought “BAAAAAHHHH HUMBUG. They’d never accept this anyway! BAAAHHHHH” Fifteen minutes before the deadline, I sent it in anyway. It wouldn’t hurt to try.

Then came the first, stiff post on that hilariously disappointing election we had, the slow gaining of the ability to be able to make jokes like that, and the eventual ‘clicking’ with the other bloggers (insert extreme sentiment).

And… yeah. I have to admit, this year probably would have been 703 times more difficult if I hadn’t. Y’know, for the standard, emo reasons… Would have been lonely, no incentive to try new things… no “better understanding of how U of T works, and how you have to make the most of your time here by yourself, and how you are fairly free to experience this place however you wish”. You just actually have to rise from your coffee-stained cave of textbooks and go find/do/start it yourself. Independence is good. Don’t be afraid to go off the path; unless of course, you are actually playing ‘The Path’. Then be as afraid as you want.

Not to mention how much I’ve learned from the other bloggers, just in terms… of how one looks at own their post-secondary stint. I think the aforementioned summertime traumas caused me to remain, as much as is possible for me, in a state of wariness and distrust, thusly… second-year was pretty much a year of absorption. The doing can come when I start trusting the world again.

Hopefully for most of you, you’ll figure out U of T’s independence factor nice and early. This place is like one super old Gothic mansion, the ones with three hundred rooms, secret passages, and attics filled with things the old owners forgot, or didn’t know what to do with, and the occasional ghost. The kind of old house you and your grandchildren couldn’t cover entirely by yourselves. So, um, cough, get started now.

This old house also has exams and a new flat fee heading our way, and if you’re like me, you await the summer with the same, crazy hope displayed in the above paragraphs. A brilliant summer job, money to spend, a portfolio to work on, Final Fantasy Tactics and Fable II to conquer, that sort of thing; all waiting for you after that long, tantalizing exam period. Perhaps your sleeping patterns have been wonky for the past week. Perhaps you’ve had one term paper due after another, totalling to seven thousand. Perhaps you already want to see the new calendar and be seduced by the short, 50 word descriptions of courses that may be far more boring than they sound. Perhaps, summer school (you poor, studious thing). A fifth perhaps; you may miss this year, just a bit.

-

Whatever you do, kids, good luck. Thanks for reading, and not bombarding us with such intarweb dialect as “lol u suck” or “dis iz gya wtf” or “I do not understand the point of this. Your take on the U of T experience lacks the–” or any such intolerance to how awesome we are. This has really helped me to peek my head from my ornate magic urn of hiding and low HP. I don’t know what else to say. I’m quite happy… I hope I’ve brightened the occasional day for you as well.

- Liesl

A Kaleidoscope of Student Experience in 3 days!

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Ah, the mutlitude of student experiences, culminated into one week to drive a person insane!

The Luncheon

I started my week on Monday with an English take home exam being slapped down on my desk, with a 48-hour deadline. “I can take it home!” I thought, happy as I reviewed over the incomprehensible Shakespeare questions. I stuffed the paper in my bag (hoping to symbolically bury the paper in my mind in order to enjoy my pre-planned luncheon, with no inhibitions).

A few friends and I had been planning to meet up for lunch in celebration of a legal competition we entered in February. We managed to meet up on Monday, a month after we initially planned it! Managing to organize the schedules between three U of T students and one York student was almost impossible!

We got the time and date down, but we still had to coordinate dietary concerns … one of us is vegetarian, one of us only eats halal meat, another can’t eat pork and the last one … well, she’s pretty easy going!

When I chose a restaurant, the criteria were based on something close to campus, decent price with lots of food, in which the atmosphere was condusive to talking.

We chose Thai Angels, located at 285 College Street, just past Spadina. Its about a 10 minute walk from College and St. George. When we walked down there, I was suprised at how dingy it looked. Graffiti was sprayed on the walls, individuals were sleeping on the ground and garbage everywhere. As we hit Spadina and I could see the red sign of the Thai Angels, I got a bit nervous … if the restaurant inside was anything like the area around it outside, it was going to be a rather smelly experience.

Lucky for us, the restaurant was a pleasant surprise. It was small, maybe the size of a large tutorial room the in basement of Sid Smith, but with a much more cozy, modern look. The restaurant was deserted (which resulted in good service and a healthy discussion environment). The menu was broad, ranging from vegetarian and noodles, to seafood, along with chicken options and beef. I ordered a Pad Thai and the other foods on the table included mango chicken with rice, peanut cashew seafood with rice, and more noodles!

After lunch, we went to the Second Cup on Starbucks and pigged out on mocha cake and oreo cake … mmm mmm! Phew, way to kill my diet!! :)

Monday was fabulous – four good friends getting together and enjoying a wonderful meal and dessert.

The Essay

Of course, by the time I got home at 9 p.m. on Monday after class I had to start that English assignment! I started my research, and by the time I went to bed, it was 2 a.m. Typical U of T student bedtime, nothing to be too worried about…

Yeah, right.

That english assignment drove me nuts! I spent all day researching and writing on Tuesday, and then I had class at 6. When I arrived back at Res around 9pm, I hadn’t completed more than a decent outline (sound familiar?) and it took me from Tuesday night till 5AM Wednesday morning to finish writing it. Thats the thing about U of T, the assignments take FOREVER!

 Teacher/T.A. Evaluations

This week, a lot of my professors handed out course evaluations, where students could grade the teacher and the T.A., and suggest helpful comments. In one of my courses, I was graded the T.A. VERY poorly, which is the the first time I’ve ever had to do so. I’m generally a lenient marker when it comes to evaluations, simply because I know that T.A.s and Profs work hard. But this T.A.! Man, it was brutal. There is generally an overall dissatisfaction from my whole tutorial, and it was a paradoxical experience having two sheets in front of me, grading (five being the highest and 1 being the lowest) a Professor (Fives and Fours) and a T.A. low (Ones, Twos). In one section, I started my own zero column! Eek!

The Sweaty Experience of Being Lost

Today I had to stop by Bahen to check up on an LSAT Prep meeting to make sure that it was running smoothly. I was at Bahen at 4:45pm for the meeting, and wandered around for 25 minutes looking frantically for the room. By five, I was frantically sweating, wondering if the building was warping into a crazy maze to permanently scar me for life. It was such an odd experience, probably what the typical new student feels when they come to this campus.

The Cheese Explosion v. The Critters

It isn’t over! I went down to the kitchen late last night to make macaroni and cheese and I opened the macaroni packet to have cheese … explode everywhere! The packet ripped the wrong way, and the cheese powder landed all over my clothes, on the floor, in the sink! When I bent down to clean up the powers, I saw a critter. A CRITTER! Ugh! I have an irrational fear of bugs…and it didn’t help when I turned toward the sink and saw a dead spider on the side. Way to ruin an appetite!

So far, I’ve been lost in a building, covered in cheese, went out with friends, stayed up all night for an assignment and it’s only been three days!

Enjoy your week friends!

- Fariya

Assigned Readings at U of T: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

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Up to last week, I believed that the r’aison d’être behind studying English is good communication. Boy, was I proved wrong: for a fourth year seminar, I was assigned an article, Animal Nomenclature: Facing Other Animals, by Richard Nash, English academic extraordinaire. 

First sentence: 

 

“In Emmanuel Levians’ s “The Name of a Dog,” an essay that has justly received much critical attention in animal studies, “Bobby” is heroic because his “speech” conferred a recognition of humanity on those whom the deprivation of speech had rendered vulnerable; but the very account that valorizes that behavior will grant it heroic status only while policing the species border that figures non-human speech as silence.”

 

Me: “What? Maybe it will make more sense the second time around.” 

… 

“Nope. It makes no sense. Perhaps the next sentence will be better.” 

 

“This is the sentimental logic of the pet- those special “domesticated” animals who function to confer upon us a greater humanity by actions and articulations that simultaneously transcend their “animal” status and accept the logic of domination and domestication in which such transcendence is recontained.”

 

Me: “Oh no. How long is this paper?” These were not really sentences at all, but abominations moonlighting as coherent thought. The article took me forever to read, mostly because I made the foolish mistake of trying to understand it. Between the first and last sentences, my initial head-scratching turned into cold indignation, and finally into calm fury. A few mental points on writing and reading:

a) Next time I see Nash on a reading list, I’ll buy a bottle of tequila to help me with the translation. 

b) Simple wording and grammar might be lowly, but they make plain old-fashioned sense. Just because you have a Ph.D. doesn’t mean you’ll succeed in trying to make yourself sound intelligent by making up words ( “recontained?”) and using convoluted sentence structure. The words are still made up and the sentences still make no sense, Ph.D. or not. 

c) Trying to squish three papers into one is not okay. 

d) If you can say it in a paragraph, you should stick to a paragraph.

There are some things in a paper that I simply cannot accept. I am not a die-hard student who believes that you should only focus on big “important” subjects, that topics like animal nomenclature are too superfluous to research – but if you’re going to write a paper, make it intelligible. I thought that was the point. The article was so frustrating that it got me thinking about the good, the bad, (and the ugly) readings that I’ve been assigned over my undergraduate career, and what made them good, bad, or ugly:

The Good:
1) Thomas of Monmouth: Detector of Ritual Murder by Gavin L. Langmuir: 

Murder mystery and academic paper? Be still, my beating heart. Here’s the story of the twelfth-century murder of William, a boy from Norwich last reported talking to an outcast, found dead in the woods near his home. A brief travel through time allows the reader to explore the murder, plus be privy to a persuasive argument based on the emergence and development of anti-semitism and anti-Judaism in medieval England, while casting light upon teleological methodologies prevalent in other historical works.

2) Candide, Voltaire. 

It’s three hundred years old, includes a ruthless critique of human civilizations, is full of the absurd and pitiful, yet still made me laugh. The book is accessible (no long-winded words) and human (i.e written by a human for other humans). I read it three times.

3) Safe in the Hands of Mother Suburbia: Home and Community, 1950-1965, by Doug Owram:

I could envision the world changing while reading this article: the emergence of the suburb, the privatization of public space, the ascent of the automobile as purported conduit to freedom and green space. Plus it wasn’t written by an automaton whose internal spell-check is on the fritz.

The Bad:
Isabel Robinet: Growth of a Religion.

A cosmological history of Taoism from the third century B.C.E to around 1500. If I wrote a paper in which I only included hand-picked evidence that supported nothing but my own arguments (and openly admitted to doing so), thus painting a nebulous impression of any kind of historical reality, I would not ask people to take me seriously. I would not ask to get published. And I certainly would not go on for 300 pages.

The big lesson I learned from this one: if you’re asked to read it, find a few reviews online, read them instead, and go, be content doing anything (literally anything), knowing that you’re not spending your time reading this. 

The Ugly:
Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth.

I don’t know where to start with this one. 976 pages of dime novel hell, and not only did I have to read it all, but also re-read it in order to write a stinking paper on how inaccurate it was. Of all the things one could have students read, it had to be this book? Twice? That’s 1952 pages! That’s the equivalent to a few classic novels, even a saga. I could have finished Don Quixote! Instead I was stuck with lurid love scenes, extreme violence, and a sensational portrayal of life in medieval England. The only redeeming quality about this book is that it took absolutely no brain power to get through it, and so went as quickly as 976 pages of smut will allow. 

——————————————————————————————————————–

And in the interests of proper form, below are listed my references, à la history paper style:

 

Follett, Ken. The Pillars of the Earth. New York, 1989.

Langmuir, Gavin I. Thomas of Monmouth: Detector of Ritual Murder. Speculum, Vol. 59, (October, 1984), pp. 820-46.

Nash, Richard. Animal Nomenclature: Facing Other Animals. Humans and other animals in eighteenth century British culture: representation, hybridity, and ethics. Frank Pameri, ed. (2006), pp. 101-118.

Owram, Doug. Safe in the Hands of Mother Suburbia: Home and Community, 1950-1965. Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby Boom Generation. Toronto, 1996, pp. 54-83. 

Robinet, Isabelle. Taoism: Growth of a Religion. Phyllis Brooks, tr. Stanford, 1997.

Voltaire. Candide. Burton Raffel, tr. New Haven, 2005.

 

 

- Mary

The Last Essay I Shall Ever Write

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Heather

HIS343Y1Y

Project RYAN, the Meta-Essay: It’s an Essay that Knows It’s an Essay

           

So, this is my last essay. I was going to take it REALLY seriously, you know…go out with a bang, but then it really occured to me that I can’t take the history of international relations seriously, really, it’s been a taxing effort for me to pretend all year. Enough I say! How do I define the cold war, you ask in your essay question? For about 45 years, men in suits played “chicken” with nukes. 

There.

 I did it.

But essay guidlines stipulate I go further than that…*sigh* ok…

 This essay will explore just how much grown men can be like hormone crazed little girls in grade 6, only substitute ‘ideology’ for hormones. It will also discover why spreading rumors and not talking to someone because you “can’t stand them” are bad ideas when you are past your thirties and the leader of a prominent country. It’s especially savy to avoid this when “that ass” is the leader of another country that has a lot of nuclear warheads. I will focus specifically on the great war scare of ’83 which I’m hoping against hope you didn’t already know about (I have learned NEVER to write an essay on a topic a T.A specializes in.) 

Essentially, I will use this example to show how this whole cold war thing was crazy, and by being frank about this, I am also being bold.  For this reason, you who are reading this paper shall give me an “A”. Please note how NOT vague my introductory paragraph is, how well my sentences build into my thesis and how my thesis, though not a truism, is totally arguable, sort of spot on, and frankly a little zen if you just think about it. If you do give me an A, I might even give you a hug. I will now begin my first argument by using a transitional word followed by a comma.

 

Indeed, the year was 1980 when the Russians became sure they were going to be nuked by the U.S.A. This was because President Reagan said he might do it on national television.

 

“I don’t like Russians. They are evil,” said Reagan on TV several times while also cutting back on communications between the two countries, building up American military spending and watching several James Bond films.

 

In June 1983, Yuri Andropov, chairman of the KGB (and future General Secretary of the Soviet Union) met with American diplomat W. Averell Harriman.

 

“For f***’s sakes! Tell Reagan to stop threatening to nuke us! We might take him seriously and try to nuke him first. Is he being serious? Is he? AUGHHH! I JUST CAN’T TELL!”

 

Upon hearing about this conversation, Acting Director of Central Intelligence, John N. MacMahon pretty much said “Pshaw,” and later came to a brilliant conclusion. “Andropov’s just trying to use nuclear blackmail against us. He said, ‘we might get scared and nuke you first’ that means he’s aggressive. What a dangerous man! Let’s encourage even less communication between our two states!”

 

And so it was. Yes, I started a sentence with a conjunction back there, but I think you’ll agree it just made sense that way.

 

So at this point in history we have the Russians certain of being nuked, we have the CIA thinking the Russians might nuke America, and we have an American president who doesn’t like to talk to Russian leaders, but who does like being on TV and who also likes buying nukes. Oh, it also turns out we also have a huge Russian spy network working on something called Project RYAN where they all run around NATO countries trying to find out when Russia might get blown up so that they can blow up America first.

Clearly humans don’t deserve to live.  I’m getting sort of overwhelmed and this paper is due tomorrow, so I think I’m going to take a break to paint my nails, eat some popcorn, and maybe have a glass of gin or two in a bid to clear my mind.

 

I’m back now and in good spirits (heh heh, because good spirits are in ME! Yay gin!) The early 1980s are getting kind of crazy at this point because we have all these Russian spies in NATO countries reporting signs that NATO might nuke Russia, even though these spies don’t really think Russia will get nuked, but they report back all sorts of threatening things anyways because they want to keep their jobs as spies. It’s all so psychological and complex. So Russia’s getting pretty paranoid and when this South Korean Jumbo Jet goes over their territory, they get all “oh no! This might be an American spy plane! Look! It even went over a secret base!” and then they shoot it down and kill all 300 people on board. This is a bad situation. It gets slightly more traumatic for everyone when Reagan goes on national television again and says, “this is a soviet attack on the entire free world!”  

 

Essentially, everything gets worse and worse and each country nearly nukes the other about 6264769327403284863275421943208483274 times in 1983 before MI6 in England is like “STOP! WE HAVE A RUSSIAN SPY WORKING FOR US AND BETRAYING HIS RUSSIAN HANDLERS FOR OUR SAKE! HE SAYS THE RUSSIANS REALLY DO THINK WE’LL NUKE THEM FIRST! THEY ARE SCARED OF US! THIS IS ALL A LITTLE BIT SILLY! LOOK! KGB DOCUMENTS THAT PROVE IT!”

 

Anyways, then Reagan’s foreign policy changed a lot; he goes on TV (again) and says that Russians aren’t so bad and that peace is ok.

 

In conclusion, I would like so say that I have SO NOT used commas incorrectly, nor have I chosen a topic that is too broad to be explored within the confines of a 4 page essay. I know you were going to write that in your comments, so I thought I’d beat you to it. Also, I think we both know that my contractions didn’t really bother you or take away from the sheer academic force of this essay. My citation style has been b****’n, mostly because I stayed up till 3:00am this morning on the U of T writing website to get it this way. Finally, my sentences are clear, and I am RIGHT, the cold war was STUPID. Oh, and if you photocopied any pages from my essay and used my better ideas in your master’s thesis, you sneaky T.A you, well, I’ll probably not call you on it, unless you stick with the idea and get famous somehow some day, but frankly my dear let us not get too optimistic.

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

Andrew, Christopher and Oleg Gordievsky. Comrade Kyruchkov’s Instructions: Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations, 1975-1985. Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 1991.                                                                                             

 

Arbel, David and Ran Edelist. Western Intelligence and the Collapse of the Soviet Union 1980-1990. London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003.

 

Jones, Nathan Bennett. Operation RYAN, Able Archer 83, and Miscalculation: The War Scare of 1983. University of California, 2008.

 

Hyland, William G. The Reagan Foreign Policy. New York: Nal Penguin Inc, 1987.

 

Richelson, Jeffrey T. A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

 

Wark, Wesley. The Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962. University of Toronto Lecture For HIS343Y1Y, Feb. 23 2009.

 

Wark, Wesley. World War Two: Operation Barbarossa and Intelligence Failure. Toronto Lecture For HIS343Y1Y, Nov. 10, 2009.