What better way to start off the week on Easter Monday then blog on profanity and vulgarity with a sarcastic rhetorical question? Talk about blogger’s license! Instead of an Easter Egg Hunt, we’re going on an Expletive Hunt. However, before we start bleeping out bad words, there is one additional bad news thought I want to add on the previous sexually explicit topic.
SEXUAL CONTENT AND INNUENDO (Addendum)
One addition to my previous blog is sexting, a combination of “sex” and “texting,” I think. Downloading and texting sexually explicit material from the Internet at large, YouTube, and personal videos in class or in the workplace presents another new set of problems. If it’s out there to abuse, the technology enables evil minds to find it and disseminate it. Stop it before it starts if it’s within your power to do so.
PROFANITY
You hear expletives just about everywhere. What the “&!%#” is going on? It’s pervasive in our culture and workplace. There are no boundaries or profanity ceiling. In water-cooler jokes and conversations with students and colleagues, usually their first or second sentence or fragment will set the profanity tone for the dialogue, hopefully not the barrage of filthy, Tarantino-type language. (NOTE: Quinton Tarantino’s Motto—“No Profanity Left Behind.”)
EXAMPLES: This "blue material" appears in all forms of media. What used to be considered the language of police officers, soldiers, athletes, and stand-up comedians is now used regularly by most comedians, foulmouthed TV cops and perpetrators (Law & Order: SVU, CSI: NY, NCIS, The Closer, Reno 911!), lawyers (The Good Wife), doctors (House, Grey’s Anatomy), and school kids (South Park). Movies rated PG-13 and worse are larded with gratuitous profanity. YouTube videos run the gamut.
LEVEL OF DISCOURSE: This coarsening of media in our culture suggests that nothing is sacrosanct. However, despite the increasing frequency of profane language around us, its use in the classroom is unnecessary and inappropriate. It cannot be bleeped out of your lecture or conversation with students. Whenever it occurs, its crudity debases the level of discourse and the “discourser.”
Please consider what you say and how you say it. Your students are always listening. Be creative in your use of our language and stretch your vocabulary, and, maybe even, encourage your students to do the same. Consider the plethora of unusual words you can use to express your elation or discontent. Don’t stoop to the lowest common denominator.
Next up is vulgarity. We’re coming to the end of this series on offensive humor and media. WHEW!
COPYRIGHT © 2010 Ronald A. Berk, LLC
For you CSI-NCIS-Law & Order fans out there, if you autopsy a conference presentation, you will discover 2 organs: (1) the content or WHAT is presented, and (2) the method/style or HOW it is presented. Both of these organs must be fully functional for a presentation to be successful. If you find any bodily fluids, you might want to consult your nearest physician for an anti-hallucinogen.
How does this lame metaphor translate into YOUR presentation?
1. WHAT: Prepare content that is understandable, meaningful, and useful to the target audience, and
2. HOW: Adopt an empathetic mindset on how the material will be delivered—imagine yourself sitting in your audience; what would you like to see and hear?
Think of these 2 components as stages in the preparation of your presentation. Let’s start with the 1st stage.
Stage 1
A few hints on preparation of the content:
1. Prepare the content that you want to present on your slides
2. Organize the content into sections or major heads
3. Type the head slides—they provide a structure for everything else
4. Type the content on each slide (You know the PowerPoint rules)
a. Limit the amount of content per slide
b. Emphasize main points, not lots of detail
c. Use lists of up to 6 lines with numbers, letters, or bullets
d. Use the largest font possible to fill the slide
5. Insert the content slides in their respective sections in order
6. Examine each slide for content to answer:
a. What’s the point of this slide?
b. Visually, do the important words pop off the slide at a glance?
c. How quickly can you summarize the info on the slide without reading it?
d. Make believe someone keeps screaming: Get to the point! Get to the Point!
e. Will you get bogged down in details or distracted from content?
Those steps prepare you for a super-deadly presentation, but you have a draft of the substance. Now, how do you transform that boring content into something special that your audience will never forget or, at least, remember until they get in their cars?
That’s Stage 2, the fun stage that will set you apart from the rest of the pack. You don’t want to miss the next blogorino.
COPYRIGHT © 2009 Ronald A. Berk, LLC
I just finished reading an article entitled “CSI: Plagarism” by M. Garrett Bauman in the latest edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 9, 2009, D20, The Chronicle Review). It focused on plagiarism by students and its damaging consequences on the integrity of education. The author describes his classroom experiences with a couple of his students. The Internet has contributed significantly to the proliferation of plagiarism by students, regardless of their motivations and rationales.
Let's shift targets for a few paragraphs. What about faculty, administrators, and other professionals who are under the gun to produce articles, chapters, books, conference presentations, e-zines, blogs, and other written products? The same temptations available to students are also available to our unscrupulous and evil colleagues. How do you protect your intellectual property? Once our work is published, most of us assume it’s protected by copyright and that’s it. We neither have the time nor inclination to investigate CSI-style whether anybody has stolen our work.
However, the rules of the game have changed markedly with Internet access. Virtually everyone in cyberspace has access to everything we write. Google your name and you will find papers you wrote decades ago pop up. You’d be amazed.
(Personal Sidebar: Over my career, I’ve had my books stolen from university libraries, sections of articles plagiarized, punch lines in my bio appearing in other faculty bios, and, most recently, one of my blogs stolen verbatim as someone else’s blog. As a writer, my first response is usually “Hummm. It’s nice to know someone finds value in my work to risk fines, imprisonment, and an almost certain torturous and excruciatingly painful death.” Not exactly. Although swiping my work provides a sense of validation that’s more flattering than the peer review process, it's also a feeling of personal violation. That makes me angry. Seeing my blog 2 weeks ago on a blog site with someone else’s name under it made me furious. End of Bloated Sidebar.) So what’s the solution?
Please share your plagiarism experiences involving your work. What do you do to minimize violations?
My next blog will reveal how to track down the perp and prevent future violations. Don’t miss it.
COPYRIGHT © 2009 Ronald A. Berk, LLC
