Bridging the gap

Here's a great example of the kind of work student's can be doing through classwork to bridge the student-community divide. Read on...

From the Chronicle Herald (http://thechronicleherald.ca/NovaScotia/1069904.html)



Students weigh in on future of famed waterfront

By BEVERLEY WARE South Shore Bureau
Sun. Jul 27 - 4:31 AM

LUNENBURG — A community theatre, sewage treatment plant and heritage resource centre. You could see all three if students asked for their ideas for the unused property on Lunenburg’s waterfront have their way.

Professor Steven Mannell said his students’ goal is to infuse life into the area while preserving the historic town’s UNESCO World Heritage Site designation.

The 10 students, taking their Masters of Architecture degrees at Dalhousie University, will be presenting their ideas at a week-long exhibition beginning Tuesday.

Mr. Mannell thought it would be a good idea to focus on Lunenburg’s past and future after speaking with friends who live in the town.

"They’ve lived there for generations and they feel some sense of ambivalence toward the future of the town," particularly in light of Clearwater walking away from eight wharves, 24 buildings and 5.7 hectares in 2003. "Suddenly there’s this big vacancy."

He said the people he’s spoken to are also ambivalent because the success of the tourist industry has been a mixed blessing. Mr. Mannell said families have told him they are worried about what’s going to be there for their children to do when they grow up.

"It seems those who are able to live there are the wonderfully wealthy who come from elsewhere. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for local people to live there."

The community-based development agency Lunenburg Water Association took responsibility for the properties in 2005 and while it has found some new owners and tenants, many buildings are still not used — or are not used to their full potential.

The work began with a group of 14 students last summer. As part of their studies of Lunenburg’s heritage, they built a dory. "Dozens of students were working on the waterfront with the Picton Castle and Bluenose II. Suddenly, there were a lot of young, energetic people and that presents a different tone," Mr. Mannell said.

A summer stroll in Lunenburg often means encounters with older tourists. Young people bring a different dynamic, Mr. Mannell said, and that’s something the community should consider when it looks at redevelopment.

This year’s class picked up on the work of last year’s students. "They spent a few weeks looking at the physical and cultural history of Lunenburg," Mr. Mannell said, studying how Lunenburg evolved from a British colonial defence town to a seafaring community and how that transformation affected culture and values.

The students also studied more recent physical changes to the town as a result of tourism, looked at the state of these buildings and considered how they could turn them into something useful and attractive to the community.

They looked at a number of sites, including the old forge, Clearwater’s former fish plant and the Bluenose 2 shed. Ideas include community theatre, a music hall, sea school, youth hostel and worship space.

"It’s unlikely you can take one idea off the wall and hand it over and start construction," Mr. Mannell said.

But he hopes the ideas will stir discussion that will get the community moving.

The students’ projects will be unveiled at 6 p.m. Tuesday at 182 Montague St. and on display until 1 p.m. Friday.

( bware@herald.ca)

God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

(This) goes for dumdums too

I came across this piece today. Even though I´m on vacation, and even though this really doesn´t have a whole lot to do with my job, and even though most students aren´t even in school right now, I felt a strong need to bloggit. That was a run-on sentence, but if you read on, you´ll see that Vonnegut says I can do that.

Call me a nerd, but writing papers is one of the most enjoyable experiences there is. Nothing beats that satisfaction of crafting (what I think is) a master essay that hits all the right buttons. Vonnegut has always been a favourite of mine, and this instructional essay written by him helps me understand why. For any first years that might be checking out this blog, I highly recommend his advice. You might not get a great grade on your essay, and your prof just might suggest you seek some sort of psychiatric counseling, but you°ll have fun writing your paper!



How to Write With Style by Kurt Vonnegut


Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.

These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful-- ? And on and on.

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you're writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead --- or, worse, they will stop reading you.

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don't you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an emptyheaded writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.

1. Find a subject you care about

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way --- although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.

2. Do not ramble, though

I won't ramble on about that.

3. Keep it simple

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. "To be or not to be?" asks Shakespeare's Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story "Eveline" is this one: "She was tired." At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."

4. Have guts to cut

It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

5. Sound like yourself

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was Conrad's third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.

All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens to not be standard English, and if it shows itself when your write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.

6. Say what you mean

I used to be exasperated by such teachers, but am no more. I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable --- and therefore understood. And there went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what any number of jazz idols did with music. If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledy-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. So you, too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing, if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood.

Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.

7. Pity the readers

They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don't really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school --- twelve long years.

So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify --- whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.

That is the bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique Constitution, which allows us to write whatever we please without fear of punishment. So the most meaningful aspect of our styles, which is what we choose to write about, is utterly unlimited.

8. For really detailed advice

For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, in a more technical sense, I recommend to your attention The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White. E.B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced.

You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. White expressed himself, if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say.

In Sum:

1. Find a subject you care about

2. Do not ramble, though

3. Keep it simple

4. Have guts to cut

5. Sound like yourself

6. Say what you mean

7. Pity the readers



From http://literature.sdsu.edu/onWRITING/vonnegutSTYLE.html

Textbooks are sexy (Part 2): Homeward Bound

I’m writing this post while sitting in the airport on my way back to Halifax, which is fitting, because everything I’ve learned this week tells me that the solution to dealing with the high costs of textbooks begins at home. As I mentioned in my last post, Dalhousie faculty and instructors are the ultimate decision makers when it comes to choosing and negotiating textbook orders for you. Alternatives, though there are few, need to be made apparent to students on campus before they’ve made their textbook purchases for the year.

Each year profs are approached by marketing representatives from the major publishing companies. Obviously, professors of larger classes are the target market, giving publishers the biggest bang for their book (Har har…). Profs can be (and usually are) offered lucrative deals from these reps. If, lets say, a prof is considering ordering “Campbell Biology” (Gazzilionth Edition) they may be offered full copyright access to countless images and diagrams for their slideshow, teaching aids, technological supplements for course websites, and more. Often times, profs aren’t even given a price for the text book until an order has been made. And, if your prof accidentally spent too much time on the beach over the summer and failed to order their course texts until August, the cost of your textbook just jumped over the moon. The list goes on.

An interesting tidbit that came out of our meeting with the publishers was the availability of digital texts for courses. James Reeves, president of Neilson Publishing’s Higher Education Division, argued that a large majority of their books were offered in digital format at roughly half the price, but, he concluded, it was pretty evident from sales that students preferred hard copy. This, of course, took us by surprise, as a straw poll quickly revealed that not a single student in the room was aware of this service. Think of the money that students could save (or better yet, the money we could curtail from the publishers) if students in our huge first year courses were able to purchase digital texts for half the cost of the hard-copy.

There is a long list of actions we can take here at Dal to mitigate the financial burden of textbook purchases on students. I’m in the process of developing an action plan for the year that consists of meetings with faculty members, student awareness initiatives and coordination with other student unions and bookstores.

In the meantime, if you’re as concerned about the costs of textbooks as I am, here are some steps you can take:

1. Talk to your prof. Ask them how they ordered your textbooks. Find out if they asked what the price of the books would be before they made an order. Ask if they inquired as to whether or not a digital version of the text was available at a cheaper cost. Make sure your prof knows you expect this of them.

2. Check tigerbooks to see if you can get a purchase a used textbook from someone who no longer needs theirs. If you can’t find the edition you’re looking for, ask your prof to see if you can get away with using a previous edition.

3. Share a book with a friend, or use a copy of the book that is on reserve in the library.

As I continue researching this issue more, I’ll keep you DSUers who are watching from blogland posted on what else we can due. So stay tuned!