Dear Scholars,

We discussed the article on academic writing and plagiarism, “cyber-pseudepigraphy“. Your comments are welcome.

We discussed research papers and different approaches to them. The class is available on WiZiQ.


Many new text, video and audio resources have been posted on our site. Please do some research yourselves on worthwhile articles, lectures, debates, interviews, and post them for the rest of us.

Homework:

Writing subject: A short research paper on any subject. This is a practice paper and not expected to be original. You may use existing material and references (look through the Directory of Open Access Journals for papers on subjects that interest you), and be sure to start with the MLA template. The only thing that must be original about this paper is the writing; use your own words. If you are inspired to introduce original content that is fine (indicate those parts if you like). As always, look at what your colleagues are posting, learn from them and make suggestions to help them.

This is an easy project! If you are finding it difficult, you are probably doing too much. I have over 7000 words of scholarly paper to revise this weekend; you need only do a few paragraphs. We can all share our work next week.

This assignment is only advisory. Those of you not ready for research may write other types of papers.

Listening:

As always, the listening matter is chosen for its use of language and not for its content! This list is of course far too big. It is best to listen to one lecture or part of a lecture many times (after looking up any unfamiliar words). The language of the Eagleton lecture is superb. Please listen to at least parts of it several times:
Lecture: Terry Eagleton on Evil

These others are interesting but of lower priority:
Lecture: Psychology and climate change

Lecture: Nanotechnology, Ethics and Religion

Enjoy the process. Just listen and don’t worry about understanding everything.