No to term papers

“I’ve got a week to cram for my BME 83 final,” Pratt says to Trinity over burgers at the Loop, “When’s your paper due?” 

“Next Monday,” replies Trinity. Thank God it’s a term paper and not a final exam, thinks Trinity. Or at least, should think. 

After finals are over, Pratt and Trinity are likely to share a similar bewilderment of not having retained much from their courses. Only for Pratt, it’s cramming for an exam. For Trinity, it’s a protracted term paper completed not by deep sea diving, but by spurts of hydroplaning across the material’s surface.

Writing a term paper today could hardly be called advanced learning. But it’s not really our fault either. What denigrates the intellectual rigor of the undergraduate academic paper is the ubiquity of analyzed information available online and the revisions-for-dummies built into today’s word processors. 

In “Phaedrus,” Plato recounted Socrates’s fear that writing would rob men of their memory. By transferring knowledge in their minds onto paper, men would adopt “the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom,” and “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction.” 

Although we now know Socrates’s concern is unfounded, there is something to be said about the erosion of our memory. Retaining facts is something of a lost art now, easily substituted by the Internet, with its remarkable capacity to capture some twenty centuries of advanced thought at the click of a mouse. 

Playwright Richard Foreman laments the loss of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance” in a recent web publication of the British science and technology think tank Edge Foundation, Inc. Alluding to Socrates, he imagines “pancake people,” stretched thin by too much information too readily available in his play “The Gods are Pounding My Head!” Foreman’s “pancake people” may too well refer to the 21st-century man, or college student, as the case may be. One wonders if the process of building a “complex, dense and ‘cathedral-like’ structure” of a self-made liberal arts education has become replaced by the convenience of the Internet.     

 We can still construct the cathedral-like structure that Foreman refers to with universally-accessible information on the Web if we are forced to interpret it in new forms. The Internet gives us knowledge—fast. And to quote Sir Francis Bacon via the paraphrased Latin truism, scientia potential est, “knowledge is power.”

How we use that knowledge, however, is a different notion altogether. Knowledge, as organic matter, nourishes new growth of something more synthesized, something more commonly known under the Genus Analysis in the college context. 

Microsoft Word subverts the natural conversion process of that readily available knowledge into new growth. Just imagine how much one can revise information into new shapes, like gluing together pieces into a convincing model of time-earned ideas. 

The power of word processing is rather astounding when one thinks about how writing used to be done—yes, by hand, in notebooks (gasp!). On the increasingly rare occasion that we encounter such a writer today, like the Turkish Pulitzer Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk, the idea astounds us by its novelty. 

To be clear, I’m not harboring some archaic nostalgia for hand-written term papers. Typing is good if not for its speed, then undoubtedly for its cleanliness and ability to help us streamline our thoughts. After Friedrich Nietzsche bought a Malling-Hansen Writing ball, his first typewriter, a friend commented that his writing had become tighter. 

When we begin to think of ourselves typewriting, the way, say, Cormac McCarthy wrote “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men” exclusively on a 1958 Olivetti, it seems laughable to imagine ourselves clacking away in Perkins elbows deep in globs of white-out. That McCarthy could write great American novels without Shift+F7 is enough to make us shake our heads at the whimsy of a world before MS Word’s thesaurus.

With SparkNotes and time to revise, students in courses with term papers are less likely to invest in gaining knowledge from the classroom. Seduced by Web shortcuts, they are more likely to stave off readings until days before a paper deadline. In that brief window, they have the luxury to play around with words until information takes the shape of something original.

There may be an easy solution: If professors really want to make their students think and cultivate analysis throughout the semester instead of in the last two weeks of finals, they should enforce timed paper exams or hold written exams in class, and increase the importance of class participation during the semester.

That would not only save students the agony of learning the history of political thought from 1700 to 1875 in the span of two weeks, it might motivate them to invest more in helping to preserve and contribute to the “dense cultural heritage” we’ve been handed down over the years. Not to mention make us more interesting and insightful. 

Courtney Han is a Trinity senior. This is her final column of the semester.