Electronic Countermeasures

Gads!

For those of you wondering somewhat about the shortage of current posts here, all I can say is that last week was just about the busiest I can remember dating back to my sordid life as a college student.

In the summer of 1995 I took the rather bold approach to life that working full time in the restaurant business and attending school full time during a half-length summer semester would somehow work out OK. I was within six months of graduating and I absolutely needed to take these two classes: FIN 450 (Problems in Corporate Finance, I believe was its formal name) and POM 374 (Intro to Productions and Operations Management). These were probably the two worst classes I could have chosen for my little adventure into sleep deprivation that summer.

POM 374 I had taken twice before, struggled, and dropped just before the cutoff date both times. I hated that class and everything about it. I found the entire subject matter irritating, obsessed as it was with saving a quarter-second per assembled unit by having the worker place his parts bins on a shelf six inches above his work bench instead of hanging from a bag six inches below his work bench, then multiplying the resultant quarter-second efficiency by ten trillion parts per year, and announcing that through the miracles of POM (the instructor actually used it as a word, "pom," in discussion) she had made the company millions of dollars which the workers would otherwise have simply wasted on unneeded arm movements transferring coffee to mouth and so forth. I don't know why I hated it as much as I did, but I had kind of a visceral reaction to the whole thing and I considered the class would have been better entitled "the study of man as a machine." I'm certain there were other things discussed in the class but I can't remember what they were.

I was a Finance major, and FIN 450 was supposed to be sort of the crowning achievement of a Finance major's undergraduate career. It was the one class which could not be taken lightly or casually. I recall that I had to prepare two long case studies and five short case studies in an eight-week semester. My professor was one of those who after the fact you respect and admire greatly, but during the class he allows no slack or no shortcuts, and if he suspects a student is just phoning in his work he'll crucify him.

I had already discovered earlier in my college career that my technical writing (finance and economics, mostly) was pretty good when I was called to do it, but the process of producing a finished paper took far longer than it did for others. So on these short case studies (3,000 words or so) I would spend 20-30 hours writing. On the long ones (7,000 words or so) I would spend about 40 hours writing. On more than one occasion the 30 hours in question was entirely performed during the last 31 hours before the paper was due; in fact during that eight-week semester I somehow managed at least one and often two all-nighters during every single week.

At the time I was working as a line cook. After a few weeks of this nonsense I found I was literally falling asleep standing up at work, and that I'd suddendly snap back vaguely awake and be aware that I had no idea what I was doing or looking at. This was not popular with the other cooks, or the wait staff, or anyone else presumably; so I developed a surefire method to combat fatigue when this began to happen.

1. Fill a restaurant-size water pitcher with ice.
2. Pour an entire pot of coffee over the ice.
3. Mix in several tablespoons hershey's syrup or sugar or whatever else is handy.
4. Try to drink the resultant product in under 20 seconds.

This actually worked pretty well as far as staying awake is concerned. Now I think it would more likely kill me.

By the time it was over, my initial theory that it would all work out was rather surprisingly proven correct. I got an A- in the Finance class and a B or B- or something in the other absurd class. And I haven't tried anything so silly since then, until last week.

I am attending classes at the local college here to round out my accounting education as a complement to my finance degree. I need three more accounting classes to be able to sit for the CPA exam, which I expect will happen by this time next year. So this semester I am taking one auditing class and had a paper due analysing the accounting elements of the WorldCom scandal. Nothing big, about 2,500 words, but it hit me on a bad week when work had me travelling all over Michigan and working crazy hours (Tuesday I left at 7 AM and returned home at midnight). So at 1 AM the night before the paper is due, I discover that (ta-da) it has to be written in some formal MLA style.

Now most analytical papers are more concerned with the analysis than the presentation, since generally there's not really much in the way of outside sources to reference. And I tested out of all my composition and English classes in college (thank you, AP and CLEP) so I hadn't written a paper in a formal MLA style since I was a senior in high school lo these many years ago. And I didn't like it much then either.

The big problem is that I don't much like pointless rules of formatting. Writing is supposed to be an expression or a communication, and the biggest test of it is whether the reader is able to understand and/or act upon what you've written. This kind of crap I really couldn't care less about:

Using either footnotes or endnotes, writers refer their readers to citations and reference lists by means of a number at the end of a sentence, phrase or clause containing the language or idea requiring citation. The number appears as a superscript.15 No space appears between the period and the superscript number. There should be four spaces between the last line of text and the first footnote on each page. Footnotes should be first-line indented and single-spaced with a double-space between each footnote. If necessary, a footnote can be carried into a subsequent page. In that event, on the second page, create a solid line two spaces below the last line of text, include another double-space and then finish the footnote. Double-space before the next footnote.

Ugh.

This, lest I fail to cite my sources, and it be interpreted as a vain attempt at irony, is from A Writer's Practical Guide to MLA Documentation, on the internet from the good people at Capital Community College. My first thought on this is why should I or my reader care whether my footnotes are first-line indented or not? My second thought is significant irritation at having to exert considerable effort into complying with utterly arbitrary and meaningless form guides. It's a major distraction which adds nothing whatever to my ability to communicate to the paper's audience.

I enjoy writing and I am fascinated by the English language. I expect most bloggers, for whom writing is a hobby, share these sentiments. I could never perform James Lileks' job, producing 5,000 words of pith every day. As I said, even though I think the end result of my writing efforts is usually reasonably competent, I'd go hungry if I had to write for a living and they paid me by the word. Writing for me takes some work, but since I like the end result I still find it interesting and satisfying to do. I've developed something of a style, which isn't unique by any means, but since it's fairly consistent across all the essays I write I don't think it would be inappropriate to call it a style, even though certainly not a grand style or anything. But a style is just whatever the author wants to include in his toolbox for purposes of communication.

Which means that, once a writer is sufficiently versed in the "proper" way to write and use English, he can then use his own judgment as to when to violate the guidelines if doing so will aid in communicating the message. I end sentences in prepositions all the time, especially in speaking. I split infinitives at least as often as not. And you know what? It turns out that both of those rules we all learned as kids are not so much rules but guidelines, and there's no one to apologize to when you don't comply with them.

I read a fascinating book by Bill Bryson a couple of years ago, called The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way. Bryson points out that English, unlike French, has no official usage body to determine grammatical rules, pronunciation, or even spelling. Look up the word banal in any good dictionary to get a sense of the flexibility in pronunciation allowed even among usage boards and other quasi-official bodies. English is just a beautiful cobbled-together language with nothing other than actual usage, not prescribed usage, to provide for structure.

Bryson points out two excellent examples of the triviality of some of the guidelines common in English usage, and why no writer need apologize for violating these guidelines if the essay requires it. The origins for two of the more perplexing rules—the proscriptions of the split infinitive, and the sentence-ending preposition—are illuminating.

The manner in which Latin verbs are conjugated structurally prevents any infinitive from being split in that language. The proscription of the split infinitive in English is one of many attempts to impose Latin grammatical structure onto English; in this case, it seems to be no more than a philosophical suggestion that if so pure and elegant a language as Latin has no split infinitives, then certainly English should not either. This attempt to impose Latin structure onto English was common six hundred years ago when even England used Latin as its official language for legal and government documents.

The business of the sentence-ending preposition is equally trivial, and somewhat more amusing. The rule derives from the very name preposition, itself of Latin descent, from which rule makers inferred that the preposition must be “pre positioned”—i.e., placed before—something, else it clearly would cease to be a preposition. Any word at the end of a sentence clearly fails that test. Decades of school children frustrated by the whimsical application of silly rules conjured up with a metaphorical snap of the fingers.

Which is part of why I love English--the flexibility it provides for the writer to get his point across. And in subjecting myself to the MLA's double-spaced reign of terror, I was back in high school again, wondering why I couldn't split my infinitive if I thought it was more emphatic that I ordered someone to not set fire to the trash pile, rather than simply telling him not to do it. So I stayed up till 5:00A finishing this damn fool double-spacing and footnote first line indenting and careful formatting of the works cited page instead of working on my weblog, which would have been much more enjoyable for all of us.

Someday I may even establish my links and try to spruce up the page a little bit. Tomorrow.

JKS.

Posted by JKS at May 3, 2004 04:29 AM