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Online Course Design – a bibliography

October 30, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Laurel Alexander, Education & Training on the Internet: An essential source for students, teachers and education providers, Plymouth: Internet Handbooks, 2000, pp. 192, IBSN 1840253460. Guide to online resources for students and tutors. Exstensive listings of online courses in UK and abroad.

Tom Boyle, Design for Multimedia Learning, London: Prentice Hall, 1997, pp.240, ISBN 0132422158. Software and media for creating learning programs. Slightly dated now, but sound on basic principles.

Stephanie Browner, Stephen Pulsford, and Richard Sears, Literature and the Internet: A Guide for Students, Teachers, and Scholars, London/New York: Garland, 2000, pp.191, ISBN 0815334532. Popular guide to resources, techniques, and issues for literary studies classes.

Alan Clarke, Designing Computer-Based Learning Materials, London: Gower, 2001, pp.196, ISBN 0566083205. Practical design principles – from conception to evaluation.

Jason Cole & Helen Foster, Using Moodle, Sebastopol: O’Reilly, (second edition) 2007, pp.266, ISBN 059652918X. Clear and straighforward guide to course design using the open source virtual learning environment Moodle.

Julia Duggleby, How to be an Online Tutor, Hampshire: Gower, 2000, pp.158, ISBN: 0566082470. Simple guidance notes for online tutors and course authors. Suitable for those working on community-based education.

D. R. Garrison and Terry Anderson, E-Learning in the 21st Century: A Framework for Research and Practice, London: Routledge, 2003, pp.167, ISBN 0415263468. Course design – from planning and authorship, through to evaluation and assessment. Largely theoretical.

Duncan Grey, The Internet in School, London: Cassell, 1999, pp.155, ISBN: 0304705314. Guide to equipment, policies, and resources for teachers.

Irene Hammerich and Claire Harrison, Developing Online Content: the Principles of Writing and Editing for the Web, New York: John Wiley, 2002, pp.384, ISBN 0471146110. The principles of writing and editing for the Web.

Reza Hazemi, Stephen Hailes, and Steve Wilbur (eds) The Digital University: Reinventing the Academy, London: Springer Verlag, 1998, pp.307, ISBN 1852330031. Academic essays on the e-Learning revolution.

Silvina P. Hillar, Moodle 1.9 English Teacher’s Cookbook, Birmingham: Pakt Publishing, 2010, pp.207, ISBN: 1849510881

William K. Horton, Designing Web-Based Training : How to Teach Anyone Anything Anywhere Anytime, John Wiley & Sons, 2000, pp.640, ISBN: 047135614X. Best-selling guide to all aspects of instructional design and writing for web-based training materials. Highly recommended.

Bob Hughes, Dust or Magic: Secrets of Successful Multimedia Design, London: Addison-Wesley, 2000, pp.264, ISBN 0201360713. Amusing and thought-provoking study of working on multimedia projects – from web design to CD-ROM and interactive video.

William W. Lee and Diana L. Owens, Multimedia-Based Instructional Design, San Fransisco (CA): Jossey-Bass, 2000, pp.357, ISBN 0787951595.

Roger Lewis and Quentin Whitlock, How to Plan and Manage an E-learning Programme, London: Gower,2003,pp.185,ISBN 0566084244. Practical step-by-step guide to planning, designing, and managing online learning courses – will apeal in particular to managers and administrators.

Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton, Web Style Guide, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999, pp.164, ISBN: 0300076754. Excellent web site design guide. Originally written for medical students at Yale. Concentrates on design principles and navigation.

Marguerita McVay Lynch, The Online Educator: A guide to creating the virtual classroom, New York/London: Routledge, 2002, pp.170, ISBN: 0415244226. Complete guide to designing and teaching online courses. Recommended.

Robin Mason and Frank Rennie, eLearning: the key concepts, London: Routledge, 2006, pp.158, ISBN 0415373077

Jakob Nielsen, Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, Indiananapolis (Ind): New Riders, 2000, pp.420, ISBN: 156205810X. Nielsen puts speed and simplicity of access above all else in this tutorial on Web site design which pulls no punches. Fully illustrated with good and bad examples. Recommended.

Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir, Homepage Usability: 50 websites deconstructed, Indiananapolis, (Ind): New Riders, 2002, pp.315, ISBN: 073571102X. Neilsen shows the strengths and weaknesses of famous web sites – and offers his own makeovers of their home pages.

Jonathan and Lisa Price, Hot Text: Web Writing that Works, Indianapolis (IN): New Riders, 2002, pp.507, ISBN 0735711518. Professional-level manual on how to write, structure, and edit information for the Web. Highly recommended.

Roy Rada, Understanding Virtual Universities, Bristol: Intellect, 2001, pp.122, ISBN 1841500526. Course design and construction for online learning.

William H. Rice IV, Moodle Teaching Techniques, Birmingham UK: Pakt, 2007, pp.172, ISBN 184719284X

William H. Rice, Moodle: E-Learning Course Development, Packt Publishing: Birmingham, 2006, pp.236, ISBN 1904811299.

William H. Rice, Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques, Packt Publishing: Birmingham, 2010, pp.200, ISBN 1904811657.

Karen Schriver, Dynamics in Document Design, New York (NY): John Wiley and Sons, 1997, ISBN: 0471306363. Wide-ranging academic and practical study in design theory and applications – with arguments for professionalism in design.

Patti Shank (ed) the Online Learning idea book, San Francisco: John Wiley, 2007, pp.354, ISBN 0787981680

Jeff Stanford, Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching, Birmingham: Packt, 2009, pp.505, ISBN 1847196241

John Whalley, Theresa Welch, Lee Williamson, E-Learning in FE, London: Continuum, 2006, pp.118, ISBN 0826488625

Online style guides

September 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

The Writer’s Workshop
Writing skills, grammar, teaching notes, bibliographic style, tips, and plenty more.
http://www.cws.illinois.edu/workshop/

Guide to Grammar and Writing
Very good grammar guide, plus other resources.
http://www.englishgrammar.org/

Purdue On-line Writing Lab
Purdue’s famous OWL, useful for general writing concerns
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/

How to Cite Electronic Sources
Practical examples from Library of Congress.
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/start/cite/index.html

The Elements of Style
William Strunk, Jr.’s original 1918 classic. The ‘bare bones’ approach to common problems.
http://www.bartleby.com/141/

On-Line Study Resources
Style, grammar, essay-writing, citations and footnotes, plagiarism and presentation from the University of New South Wales.
http://www.lc.unsw.edu.au/olib.html

WIRED Style
Wired Magazine’s online version of their print publication Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age. A guide to writing and editing which looks at the problems thrown up by the new language of the digital age.
http://hotwired.lycos.com/hardwired/wiredstyle/

alt.usage.english – Style FAQ
Mark Israel’s Frequently Asked Questions covers common English usage questions, word etymology, online and offline references, and more.
http://www.english-usage.com/faq.html

WebGrammar
Judy Vorfeld’s excellent site covers some of the most common writing mistakes, including spelling, grammar and homonym errors.
http://www.webgrammar.com

IEEE Computer Society Style Guide
Handy if you wish to submit papers going to their journals, or do any work using their style.
Download the style guide here (PDF)

Here are some other UK journalism styleguides available online:

Financial Times Lexicon

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Planning a Dissertation

February 21, 2015 by Roy Johnson

planning, structure, headings, and creating order

Planning a dissertation – what is it?

A dissertation is a piece of academic writing normally submitted as part of a Bachelors or a Masters degree (BA or MA). In some cases the term ‘dissertation’ might be used interchangeably with thesis, which (in the UK) is normally reserved to describe work at PhD level.

A dissertation can comprise anything from 8,000-10,000 words up to as many as 20,000 words, depending on the subject, and is normally shorter than a PhD thesis. It is written to show that you can produce an original idea, engage in academic research, and follow the conventions of argument and written presentation at this level.

The main problem for most people is that they’re unlikely to have written such a long piece of work before. Dealing with large amounts of information and producing a long and coherent piece of writing isn’t an easy task. The conceptual skills required and the burden of generating so much writing can seem overwhelming. For this reason it is vital that you create a plan before you start.

The following guidance notes give an explanation of what’s required and a template to help you make that plan. The notes are a series of headings which will help you to clarify your ideas and create the outline or structure for what you have to do. They are not a timetable and they don’t cover the reading and research work involved in producing a dissertation. That part of the process is covered under Managing a dissertation.

Use these headings to generate an outline plan before you start any serious writing. The plan can be modified or enhanced as you go along – but at any given time you will have an overview of the project. This will help you to identify (name) any writing on which you’re working and decide its relevant position within the overall scheme. It will also save you from feeling ‘lost’ amongst your notes and your research materials.

It’s helpful to create your initial writing as chunks, or parts of the whole piece, rather than conceiving of the finished object at this stage. This gives you the opportunity to work on any one chunk whenever it’s convenient for you without becoming overwhelmed.

The title

You should have at least a rough idea of what you are going to write about. The provisional title does not have to be exact, and you can change it slightly as you go along. The act of creating a title forces you to clarify in your own mind the most important elements of your project.

It’s possible to start out with a long and possibly a slightly hazy title. But as you do more work generating the dissertation, the title should become shorter and more clearly expressed. [Some science subjects might require longer titles because of the complex names of chemicals or biological processes.]

The prime importance of the title is that it should specify exactly what your dissertation is about. Its secondary purpose is to act as a reminder while you’re writing that each part of the work should be directly related to its stated purpose. Your dissertation might be –

an argument
a survey
an investigation
a project
an analytic study

But the title is the most succinct expression of its subject and purpose.

The summary

Many dissertations also require an abstract or summary. This is a digest or a shorter version of the work as a whole. The abstract draws out in shortened form what’s contained in the complete thesis. It might also be known as a précis or a synopsis.

This might well be one of the last things you finalise. A summary is difficult to write before you’ve produced the work as a whole. But even a provisional summary will help you to keep the overall project in mind This too can be modified and updated as your work progresses.

The introduction

As in the case of the title and summary, the introduction might be something you only finish writing after you’ve done the main work of the dissertation. After all, it’s not easy to introduce something that’s not yet been written. However, you should have some idea of how you will introduce the main body of the work. It might be something like any of the following:

a description of what follows
the historical context to the subject
the origins of a problem to be studied
a summary of recent opinions
a digest of current research

Once again, even if you decide to change part of the dissertation as your work progresses, it’s better – at any given point – if you have a stated intention of how you propose to introduce the main body of your work. This ‘intention’ will help you to conceptualise the work as a whole and keep its structure alive in your mind.

Literature review

If the regulations call for it, you’ll need to include a section or chapter offering a literature review. This is a survey of the recent research findings on your topic or subject. You need to show not only that you have read the latest studies, but that you are able to digest their findings and arguments.

This is something that you can quite easily work on and store separately whilst you’re working on the rest of your dissertation. The exact position of the review in your plan will be determined by the conventions of your subject. It usually precedes the methodology, and will almost certainly come before any results.

Methodology

This is an optional section, depending on the subject of your dissertation. Subjects that involve any sort of scientific or quantitative investigation will require an account of the methods used. This account will include an explanation of how the research has been designed and implemented, and why the particular collection of data and the method of analysis has been chosen. The methodology might be qualitative, quantitative, or experimental, and it might involve gathering information and subjecting it to close scrutiny and analysis. Arts and humanities subjects tend not to have quasi-scientific methodologies, but rely on the close examination and analysis of materials and texts, followed by the your own persuasive arguments.

Structure

A dissertation is often organised into a number of parts or chapters. The subject under enquiry might suggest or determine what these parts or chapters could be. Splitting your work into separate parts will make the process of composition easier. It means that whilst working on one part, you can temporarily separate it from the others. The arrangement of these parts might be determined by –

chronological order
logical progression
steps in a process
narrative sequence
equal significance
category groupings

The following are three practical examples based on this notion of creating structure. One further advantage of following this procedure is that the total word-count for the dissertation can be (roughly) divided between these sections or chapters (plus the introduction and conclusion) to produce a well-balanced whole.

A historical study of economic depression in the 1930s might be split into four main chapters covering the years 1930-1933, 1934-1936, 1937-1939, and 1939-1940
A study of Shakespeare’s tragedies might have four separate main chapters, one each on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth
A study of inner-city pollution might be structured by separate sections on traffic density, open green spaces, air pollution, and housing density

Conclusion

You might not know the final conclusion of your dissertation project until you finish writing, but you can fill in this section with what you think or hope it might be.

This is a very good case where the title of your dissertation might be of help. If your dissertation title includes ” … show the influence of X on the work of Y …” you know that your conclusion must discuss examples of the work of Y and should reveal instances of the influence of X.

Bibliography

Colleges and universities usually have their own house guidelines for the manner in which bibliographic information is presented. In addition to this, various subjects and disciplines follow their own conventions – or they might adopt internationally recognised systems such as the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA), the Harvard System, or the Modern Language Association (MLA) system for bibliographic presentation.

It’s very important that you acquaint yourself with the system used for your subject and make sure you know all the small details of referencing, citation, and the listing of sources – including references to materials on the Internet.

Fortunately, this part of the dissertation is easy to produce, because you simply add to the list of texts and secondary sources you have used as you go along. The bibliography might even be divided up into primary and secondary sources.

Planning a dissertation – related study guides

How to fail your dissertation
Comic but very useful tips on how to avoid common mistakes

How to write a thesis abstract
A tutorial on how to create a one-page summary for longer works

How to solve research problems
Study tips for recovering from common errors and bad planning

Definitions of a thesis at Wikipedia
Structure, style, and variations by country, plus web links

How to write a thesis and which software tools to use
Data management, mind maps, creating structure, and bibliographies

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Print Culture bibliography

October 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

book history, bibliographic studies, and textual culture

Abdurgham, Alison. Women in Print: Writing and Women’s Magazines from the Restoration to the Accession of Victoria. London: Allen & Unwin, 1972.

Altick, Richard Daniel. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900. 2nd ed. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1998.

Armbruster, Carol, ed. Publishing and Readership in Revolutionary France and America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993.

Anderson, Benedict R. O’Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991.

Anderson, Patricia. The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790-1860. Oxford: Clarendon P of Oxford UP, 1991.

Armstrong, Adrian. Technique and Technology: Script, Print, and Poetics in France 1470-1550. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Barker, Hannah and David Vincent. Language, Print, and Electoral Politics, 1790-1832: Newcastle-under-Lyme Broadsides. Rochester, NY: Boydell P/Parliamentary History Yearbook Trust, 2001.

Baron, Naomi S. Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It’s Heading. London: Routledge, 2000.

Barton, David and Nigel Hall, eds. Letter Writing as a Social Practice. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000.

Bazerman. Charles. The Languages of Edison’s Light. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology P, 1999.

—. Shaping Written Knowledge. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988.

Bell, William, Laurel Brake, and David Finkelstein, eds. Nineteenth-Century and the Construction of Identities. New York: St. Martin’s P, 2000.

Besnier, Niko. Literacy, Emotion, and Authority. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Winchester, MA: Faber and Faber, 1994.

Blaney, Peter W. M. The First Folio of Shakespeare. Washington, DC: Folger Library Publications, 1991.

Bobrick, Benson. Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print. 2nd ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pp.295, 1999.

Borgmann, Albert. Holding on to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

Brewer, John. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997.

Burke, Sean, ed. Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995.

Cadman, Eileen, Gail Chester, and Agnes Pivot. Rolling Our Own: Women as Printers, Publishers and Distributors. London: Minority P Group, 1981.

Carlson, David R. English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475-1525. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993.

Cavallo, Guglielmo and Roger Chartier, eds. A History of Reading in the West. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1999.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.

Chambers, Douglas. The Reinvention of the World: English Writing 1650-1750. London: Arnold/Hodder Headline Group, 1996.

Chartier, Roger. The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988.

—, ed. The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989.

—. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994.

Chaytor, H. J. From Script to Print: An Introduction to Medieval Vernacular Literature. London: W. Heffer and Sons, 1945.

Crain, Patricia A. The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.

Crosby, Alfred W. The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Cuddihy, John Murray. The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity. 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon P, 1987.

Darnton, Robert. The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. New York: Norton, 1995.

Darnton, Robert and Daniel Roche. Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775-1800. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.

Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

DeRitter, Jones. The Embodiment of Characters: The Representation of Physical Experiences on Stage and in Print, 1728-1749. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1994.

Dock, Julie Bates. The Press of Ideas: Readings for Writers on Print Culture and the Information Age. Boston: Bedford Books/St. Martin’s P, 1996.

Dolan, Frances E. Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999.

Eberly, Rosa A. Citizens Critics: Literary Public Spheres. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2000.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. Grub Street Abroad: Aspects of the French Cosmopolitan Press from the Age of Louis XIV to the French Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon P of Oxford UP, 1992.

—. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1979.

Eliot, Simon. Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing, 1800-1919. London: Bibliographical Society, 1994.

Elsky, Martin. Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Print in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

Ezell, Margaret J. M. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.

Farrell, Thomas J. Walter Ong’s Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2000.

Febvre, Lucien Paul Victor and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800. Trans. David Gerard. Ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton. London: Verso, 1997.

Ford, Worthington Chauncey. The Boston Book Market, 1679-1700. New York: Burt Franklin, 1972. Reprint of 1917 ed.

Fox, Adam. Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500-1700. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Frasca-Spada, Marina and Nicholas Jardine, eds. Books and the Sciences in History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Freedman, Joseph S. Philosophy and the Arts in Central Europe, 1500-1700: Teaching and Texts in Schools and Universities. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999.

Fuller, Mary C. Voyages in Print: English Travel to America 1576-1624. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Gilmartin, Kevin. Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.

Goggin, Maureen Daly, ed. Inventing a Discipline: Rhetoric Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Young. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000.

Goody, Jack. The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1986.

—. The Power of the Written Tradition. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution P, 2000.

Graff, Harvey J. The Labryrinths of Literacy: Reflections on Literacy Past and Present. Rev. ed. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995.

—. The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.

—. Literacy in History: An Interdisciplinary Research Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1981.

—. The Literacy Myth: Cultural Integration and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-Century City. New York: Academic P, 1979.

—, ed. Literacy and Social Development in the West: A Reader. New York: Cambridge UP, 1981.

Grafton, Anthony, April Shelford, and Nancy G. Siraisi. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1992.

Gray, Floyd. Gender, Rhetoric, and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Green, Ian. Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England. New York: Oxford UP, 2001.

Greetham, D. C. Textual Scholarship: An Introduction. New York: Garland, 1992. Includes extensive bibliography.

Gronbeck, Bruce E., Thomas J. Farrell, and Paul A. Soukup, eds. Media, Consciousness, and Culture: Explorations of Walter Ong’s Thought. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1991.

Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology P, 1989.

Harrison, Peter. The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1998.

Hart, James David. The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste. New York: Oxford UP, 1950.

Havelock, Eric A. The Muse Learns to Write. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986.

Hayes, Kevin J. Poe and the Printed Word. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Headrick, Daniel R. When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700-1850. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Heim, Michael. Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.

Hindman, Sandra L., ed. Printing the Written Word: The Social History of Books, circa 1450-1520. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991.

Hobart, Michael E. and Zachary S. Schiffman. Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998.

Howard-Hill, T. H. British Literary Bibliography and Textual Criticism, 1890-1969. Volume 6 of and index to British Literary Bibliography. Oxford: Clarendon P of Oxford UP, 1980.

Isaac, Peter and Barry McKay, eds. The Mighty Engine: The Printing Press and Its Impact. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll P, 2000.

Ivins, William. Prints and Visual Communication. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1953.

Jagodzinski, Cecile M. Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England. Charlottesville: UP of Virgina, 1999.

Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. Nostalgic Angels: Rearticulating Hypertext Writing. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1997.

Jordan, John O. and Robert L. Patten, eds. Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Kaestle, Carl F., Helen Damon-Moore, Lawrence C. Stedman, Katherine Tinsley, and William Vance Trollinger, Jr. Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.

Kaufer, David S. and Kathleen M. Carley. Communication at a Distance: The Influence of Print on Sociocultural Organization and Change. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993.

Keller-Cohen, Deborah, ed. Literacy: Interdisciplinary Conversations. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, 1994.

Kernan, Alvin. Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989.

Kilgour, Frederick G. The Evolution of the Book. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Kintgen, Eugene R. Reading in Tudor England. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1996.

Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645-1661. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Kramnick, Jonathan Brody. Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Culture of the Past, 1700-1770. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1998.

Lanham, Richard A. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.

—. Literacy and the Survival of Humanism. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983.

Laspina, James Andrew. The Visual Turn and the Transformation of the Textbook. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998.

Leith, Philip. Formalism in AI and Computer Science. Chichester, UK: Ellis Horwood, 1990.

Logan, Robert. The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western Civilization. New York: William Morrow, 1986.

—. The Sixth Language: Learning & Living in the Internet Age. Toronto: Stoddart Publishing, 2000..

Love, Harold. The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998.

Luke, Carmen. Pedagogy, Printing, and Protestantism: The Discourse on Childhood. Albany: State U of New York P, 1989.

Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. New York: Penguin, 1996.

Marotti, Arthur F. Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995.

Marotti, Arthur F. and Michael D. Bristol, eds. Print, Manuscript, and Performance: The Changing Relationships of the Media in Early Modern England. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2000.

Martin, Henri-Jean, The History and Power of Writing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, trns. Lynda G. Cochrane, pp.591, ISBN 0226508366

—. Print, Power, and People in Seventeenth-Century France. Trans. David Gerard. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1993.

Mayer, Thomas F. and D. R. Woolf, eds. The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe: Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P,1995.

Mazzio, Carla and Douglas Trevor, eds. Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture. New York: Routledge, 2000.

McGrath, Alister. In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language and a Culture. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

McIntosh, Carey. The Evolution of English Prose: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1998.

McKenzie, D. F. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999.

—. Oral Culture, Literacy, and Print in Early New Zealand: The Treaty of Waitangi. Wellington, NZ: Victoria UP, 1985.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962.

—. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Melendez, A. Gabriel. So All Is Not Lost: The Poetics of Print in Nuevomexicano Communities, 1834-1958. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1997.

Miller, Perry. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1939.

Milton, John. ‘A Fuller Course in the Art of Logic Conformed to the Method of Peter Ramus’. Ed. and Trans. Walter J. Ong and Charles J. Ermatinger. Complete Prose Works of John Milton: Volume 8. Ed. Maurice Kelley. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982. 206-407

Mitch, David F. The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England: The Influence of Private Choice and Public Policy. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992.

Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

—. Picture Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Founding of Harvard College. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
1935.

—. Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
1936.

Moss, Ann. Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. Oxford: Clarendon P of Oxford UP, 1996. Also see Yeo; Rechtien.

Oliphant, Dave and Robin Bradford, eds. New Directions in Textual Studies. Austin: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, U of Texas.

Ong, Walter J. The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies. New York: Macmillan, 1962.

—. Faith and Contexts. 4 vols. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992-1999; now distributed by Rowman & Littlefield.

—. Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.

—. ‘Literature, Written Transmission of.’ The New Catholic Encyclopedia. Ed. William J. McDonald. 15 vols. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967. Reprinted in An Ong Reader; Challenges for Further Inquiry.

—. An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, forthcoming.

—. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.

—. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. New Haven: Yale UP, 1967.

—. Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958.

—. Review of Butler’s The Origin of Printing in Europe. The Historical Bulletin 19 (Mar. 1941): 68.

—. Review of McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy. America 107 (Sept. 15, 1962): 743, 747. Reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry.

—. Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971.

Perkinson, Henry J. How Things Got Better: Speech, Writing, Printing, and Cultural Change. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1995.

Peters, Julie Stone. Theatre of the Book 1480-1880: Print, Text and Performance in Europe. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Popkin, Jeremy D. The Press, Revolution, and Social Identities in France, 1830-1835. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2001.

—. Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789-1799. Durham: Duke UP, 1990.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985.

Price, Leah. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel from Richardson to George Eliot. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Radway, Janice A. A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997.

Rechtien, John G. Thought Patterns: The Commonplace Book as Literary Form in Theological Controversy during the English Renaissance. Diss. St. Louis U, 1975. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1975.

Rhodes, Neil and Jonathan Sawday, eds. The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print. London: Routledge, 2000.

Richardson, Brian. Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1999.

Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993.

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000.

Schulte, Henry F. The Spanish Press, 1470-1966: Print, Power, and Politics. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1968.

Secord, James A. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.

Sharpe, Kevin. Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.

Sharratt, Peter. ‘The Present State of Studies on Ramus.’ Studi francesi 47-48 (1972): 201-13.

—. ‘Ramus 2000.’ Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 18 (2000): 399-455.

—. ‘Recent Work on Peter Ramus (1970-1986).’ Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 5 (1987): 7-58.

Solomon, Harry M. The Rise of Robert Dodsley: Creating the New Age of Print. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996.

Spufford, Margaret. Small Books and Pleasant Histories. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1982.

Stephens, Mitchell. The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Street, Brian V. Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1984.

Sutherland, John A. Fiction and the Fiction Industry. London: Athlone, 1978.

—. Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1995.

Taylor, Mark C. and Esa Saarinen. Imagologies: Media Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1994.

Tebeaux, Elizabeth. The Emergence of a Tradition of Technical Writing in the English Renaissance, 1475-1640. Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing, 1997.

Topham, Jonathan R. ‘Scientific Publishing and the Reading of Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain: A Historiographical Survey and Guide to Sources.’ Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 31 (2000): 559-612. Includes extensive bibliography.

Treglown, Jeremy and Bridget Bennett, eds. Grub Street and the Ivory Tower: Literary Journalism and Literary Scholarship from Fielding to the Internet. New York: Clarendon P of Oxford UP, 1998.

Ulmer, Gregory. Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video. New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1989.

Tyson, Gerald P. and Sylvia S. Wagonheim, eds. Print and Culture in the Renaissance: Essays on the Advent of Printing in Europe. Newark: U of Delaware P/Associated U Presses, 1986.

Warner, Michael. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: U of California P, 1957.

Watt, Tessa. Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1991.

Weber, Harold M. Paper Bullets: Print and Kingship under Charles II. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1996.

Welch, Kathleen E. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology P, 1999.

Wheale, Nigel. Writing and Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain, 1590-1660. London: Routledge, 1999.

Williams, Gordon. Shakespeare, Sex and the Print Revolution. London: Athlone, 1996.

Woolf, Daniel. Reading History in Early Modern England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Wyss, Hilary E. Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America. Boston: U of Massachusetts P, 2000.

Yeo, Richard. Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2001. Includes commonplace books.

Zaret, David. Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.

Ziff, Larzer. Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics in the Early United States. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.

Zboray, Ronald J. and Mary Saracino Zboray. A Handbook for the Study of Book History in the United States. Washington, DC: Center for the Book, Library of Congress, 2000; available from Oak Knoll Books. Includes extensive bibliography.

Reproduced with the permission of the author –

Thomas J. Farrell, Associate Professor, Department of Composition, University of Minnesota at Duluth; Duluth, MN

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Proofreading your writing

March 2, 2013 by Roy Johnson

how to check your work for publication

Proofreading and making corrections is the very last stage of preparing a document for publication. At this point the main content of what you have written should already be finalised – checked for accuracy of content, grammar, spelling, completeness, and layout.

Proofreading looks at the presentation of the text in great detail – mainly for matters of bibliographic and typographic consistency. You will be checking on features in the document such as the following, checking for regularity and consistency.

Capitalization of headings
Font size and style
Spacing between paragraphs
Regularity of indentation
Use of italics and bold
Page numbering
Hierarchy of headings

Word-processors

Word-processors take a lot of the strain out of proofreading. Spell-checking will be easy, and matters such as letter-spacing and line-spacing are automatically regularised.

The basic appearance of writing on the page (or screen) is also controlled automatically.

For instance, text justification can be set as left-aligned or fully-justified. Left-aligned text creates regular spaces between words, but the right-hand edge of the text will be uneven – which is called ‘ragged right’ or ‘unjustified’. Choice of justification will be determined by the document type.

Fully-justified text creates an even left and right-hand margin – but there may be uneven spaces between words. These gaps can cause what are called ‘rivers’ of white space to appear in the text. These are created by irregular spaces between words.

Word-processors can usually give you control of a number of features in a document. These can be set automatically, and therefore eliminated from the number of tasks involved in proofreading.

Hyphenation on and off
Picture captions
Headers and footers
Size of titles and sub-titles
Treatment of numbers
Use of quotation marks
Bibliographic citations
Punctuation of lists
Page numbering
Hierarchy of headings

Proofreading example

The following extract contains several elements that require an editorial decision. That is, where choices of house style must be made about the use of capitals, quotations, commas, numbers, and so on. The passage does not contain any mistakes.

In 1539 the monastery was ‘dissolved’, and the Abbot, in distress of mind—recognising that there was no alternative but to co-operate with the King’s officers—blessed the monks (they numbered fifty-seven), prayed with them, and sent them out from the abbey gates to follow their vocation in the world.

There are eight issues here that call for editorial decisions on the styles used in presentation of text.

Dates are shown using numbers [1539]
Quotations are shown using single quote marks [‘dissolved’]
Capitals used for titles of specific office holders [Abbot, King]
No capitals for informal references to institutions [monastery]
Em-dash used for parenthetical remarks [—]
Use of -ise not -ize for endings [recognising]
Numbers up to 100 shown in words [fifty-seven]
Use of the serial comma

These details make all the difference between an amateur attempt at document production, and a successful and professional piece of work.

Inconsistencies in any of these style issues will cause problems for the reader: For instance, Abbot is an official title, whereas abbot is merely a term to describe the type of clergyman.

House style

House style is the term given to a set of conventions for the presentation of printed documents in an organisation.

The conventions might be formalised as a printed style guide [The Economist Style Guide, New Hart’s Rules] or they might be an informal set of guidelines governed by tradition and convenience.

Any company that wishes to appear professional will have its own house style. It can decide on its own protocols, some of which might contravene traditional practices.

The organisation could be any form of business or official body:

Publishing company [a newspaper or magazine]
Government body [Department of Education]
Legal institution [Courts of Justice]
Commercial enterprise [IBM, Amazon]

These organisations have a house style so that there will be consistency and uniformity in the way they present themselves visually to the world.

They might wish to specify the size and font style of their titles, headings, and sub-headings. They are likely to specify how graphics are to be displayed, and they might have policies regarding the use of foreign or emotionally loaded terms.

For instance, newspapers have to make policy decisions on how to describe a dictator’s staff – as a ‘government’ or a ‘regime’.

Proofreading method

The first choice you will need to make is between proofreading on screen or on paper. Many people find it easier to spot mistakes if they print out a document and do the editing and proofreading by hand.

The advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches are essentially as follows.

Editing directly on screen has the advantage that you do not have to transfer corrections from paper to screen. The disadvantages are that any changes you make will over-write the original text. It is also harder to see small details on screen than on paper.

It is true that you can save each separate version of an edited text. This means you have a record of your earlier versions. But each new version leads deeper and deeper into a labyrinth of complexities when making comparisons to select the best.

Editing by hand on a printed document has the disadvantage that all corrections will need to be re-typed, The main advantage is that the original text will still be visible if second thoughts arise.

For details of the advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches, see Editing documents on screen and paper.

You might find it difficult to concentrate on all the small details of proofreading. This is because it is very tiring to hold a number of issues in your head at the same time.

If this is the case, try this tip to make things easier. Split the task into a number of separate stages. Proofread for just one feature at a time. Go through the work checking only on your use of capitals in headings; then go back again to check only on your use of italics, and so on. Use the list of features below as a guide.

Abbreviations	Full stops
Apostrophes	Hyphens
Bold	Italics
Brackets	Numbers
Capital letters	Quotation marks
Colons	Semicolons
Commas	Spelling
Dates	Titles

Further detailed guidelines on

Editing your writing

Proofreading marks

There is also an elaborate system of marks used in professional proofreading for correcting the proofs of printed documents. These are for the specialist, and it is unlikely that the average writer would need to use them. But they might be of interest.

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Publish your academic writing

October 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

getting your academic work into print – and on line

If you want to get ahead in the world of colleges and universities, there are no two ways about it – you will have to face the challenges of academic publishing. It might be articles, reports, or the results of a research project. It could be chapters from a thesis, or the whole work itself – re-drafted into book form.

Quite apart from your subject, there are two important things to keep in mind. The first is that your work will be scrutinised not only by the publisher, but by specialist reader(s) who are experts in your subject. They will be looking at the quality of your work in terms of commonly accepted academic standards; and they will checking to see that you have demonstrated that you are up to date with the latest research in your field of study.

If they give your work the thumbs up, the publisher will them be making sure that you have presented your work in compliance with their own house style guides. Publishers are increasingly demanding these days : they use economic arguments to transfer a lot of the work of compositors and editors back onto authors.

Writing for Academic Journals
Rowena Murray is an experienced writer on the subject of academic writing. She is author of How to Write a Thesis and How to Survive Your Viva. What she says in this guide should be encouraging for people in ‘new’ universities, people in disciplines which have only recently been considered academic, and those in professions such as the NHS which are under pressure to become more academic.

She deals with the important issue of getting to know your target publications. There’s really no way round this: you need to know what they’re looking for, and how they want it presented. For those who might not have written a scholarly paper before, she shows you how to analyse one and uncover its basic structure and arguments – with a view of course to constructing your own.

The next part of the book deals with how to find a topic and develop an argument. You can do this by mining your reading notes, expanding a brief presentation, or maybe adapting a chapter from your dissertation or thesis.

There’s also lots of sound advice on planning, outlining, and the art of writing abstracts. She also shows you how to draft your text and create the appropriate style. This is followed by the process of revision and editing,

Although it is aimed at those writing for publication, this book will in fact be useful for anyone who wishes to sharpen their academic writing skills and understand something about the process of preparing a text for its public launching.

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Getting Published
Jerry Wellington starts by looking at the variety of positive reasons why people write and publish – as well as the numerous fears which might prevent others from doing so. He argues largely in favour of publishing in established, printed journals on the grounds that they offer the author more credence and protection. Next comes advice in taking account of the publication in which your writing will appear. You need to take into account its readership, and most crucially the type of article or review and how it will best fit the editor’s requirements.

He then goes through the process of submitting an article for publication – both from the writer’s and publisher’s point of view. Much of this is taken up with the pros and cons of the peer review process. Then comes the case of publishing in book form. After warning quite rightly that you shouldn’t write a word until you have a contract, he then shows you how to prepare a publication proposal in great detail. Finally he looks at future possible trends in publishing – which focus largely on electronic journals and what’s called ‘self-archiving’ – which is covered next.

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Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads
This is a review of the arguments for and against electronic publishing of academic writing – largely the work of Stephen Harnad. His argument is that scholars working in what he calls the ‘esoteric’ fields of narrow specialisms (particularly the sciences) do not need to publish on paper; they merely wish to be read by their peers.

And since they don’t expect to be paid for what they make public, why shouldn’t they put their work straight onto the Net in preprint form. Once their work is on the Web, they can invite comment, make whatever revisions they feel warranted, then archive the finished article in digital form. By following this procedure, peer review is maintained, but the system works more rapidly and less expensively. Most importantly, they can avoid the dinosaur procedures and high costs of traditional print journals. As he puts it himself (in characteristically succinct form):

“What scholars…need is electronic journals that provide (1) rapid, expert peer-review, (2) rapid copy-editing, proofing and publication of accepted articles, (3) rapid, interactive, peer commentary, and (4) a permanent, universally accessible, searchable and retrievable electronic archive.”

The more books one reads on electronic publication, Hypertext, and digital technology, the more one realises how convenient, comfortable, portable, and aesthetically pleasing the printed book remains – produced by what Nicholas Negroponte describes as “squeezing ink onto dead trees”. But this does not invalidate Harnad’s proposal: if a text is urgent, hot, and written for a minority – we’ll read it on-screen, add comments, and send it back within the hour, rather than wait for the Dinosaur Publishing methods (and timescale) of ‘getting it onto paper’.

This is a book for specialists, but it encompasses issues which are part of the profound effect of the forces of digitisation and the Internet. The vested interests of commercial publishers and academic institutions may take some time to shift, but their fault lines are remorselessly exposed here. Harnad’s vision and his debate with contemporaries gives us a view of a world which is breaking apart, in the very process of being overtaken by the forces of New Technology.

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Towards Electronic Journals
Carol Tenopir takes a similar view and considers it more-or-less inevitable that print production costs will push academic writing towards digitised publication. The Web was actually created so that academic researchers could share their findings across the Internet – doing so quickly and free from any commercial restrictions.

If you write a paper on rocket science, you can put the results directly onto a web site and announce the fact to special interest groups. That way, you can invite feedback, critical comment, and peer review – and receive it fairly quickly, instead of having to wait up to two years as you would if the paper was put into the slow-moving production methods of commercial publishers.

Scholarly journals take a long time to produce; they are very expensive; and very few people read them. Why bother then, when the same results can be made available fast, free of charge, and to a much wider audience? How much does it cost? What are the trends in scholarly article authorship and readership? What are the overall implications of electronic journals to publishers, libraries, scientists, and their funders? These are some of the fundamental issues underpinning this book.

The argument on costs is overwhelming. Electronic publishing saves on printing costs, re-printing costs, storage costs, archiving, and inter-library loan costs. And all the other arguments return again and again to the obvious advantages of electronic publication.

They point out that readers both inside and outside universities will continue to demand materials in printed form. Which is true. It’s amazing how many people continue to print out documents – for the sake of convenience, and habit. But to quote Nicholas Negroponte again, the future is digital.

This is a study which is aimed at researchers, librarians, publishers, and anyone interested in electronic publication, and they go out of their way to provide hard evidence for decision-makers.

If you are interested in one of the lesser-known but burgeoning forms of electronic publishing – then you should find this a rich source of hard facts for the debate.

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Publishing on the Internet

October 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a selection of resources

What if your ambitions are for publishing on the Internet? After all, many writers now launch their work in writers forums, creative writing groups, and even in personal weblogs. The Internet has made it possible to reach a worldwide audience with just a few IT skills – and it’s all for free!

You have the chance to place your work in writers’ groups, you might create your own web site, or you could start blogging. In addition, you could promote your work via a personal website and an email newsletter. Whichever route you choose, you should be aware of the difference between writing for the screen and the printed page.

What follows is guidance and resources covering all these new possibilities. You need to know what is available for writers on the Internet, and where to find it. eBooks and email publishing are a very attractive and cost-effective option you can learn about easily. Blogging is cost-free and currently very hip. And knowing the difference between writing for the screen or for print will show that you know what you are doing.

The Internet: A Writer’s Guide
The main strength of Jane Dorner’s book is that she is a professional writer who practices what she writes about. She writes for both print and screen, and promotes her work via a personal web site. This book explores both the new opportunities for writers created by the Internet and the practicalities of publishing on your own site.

She touches on writing groups which exist in the form of mailing lists, websites, newsletters, chat groups, and conferences, and she also deals with eBooks plus annotated lists of all the sources a writer could possibly wish for – from libraries to bookshops, dictionaries to writing circles, newspapers to writing style guides, electronic publishers to free Internet service providers.
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Creative Web Writing
If you are mainly interested in traditional creative writing Jane Dorner has another book which shows you the skills you need if you want to put your writing onto the Internet. She is speaking to those people who have been creating poems and stories in their back rooms and getting nowhere. This guide covers collaborative story-telling, research online, interactivity and flexible text, as well as the nuts and bolts of styling for screen reading. Most importantly, she explains the range of new markets, new technologies, and how to apply them.

Creative genres are covered, including autobiography, poetry, broadcasting, screen-writing and writing for children. She also describes how to look carefully at contracts, how to submit your writing to an electronic publisher, and how to deal with Print on demand (POD) outlets. There’s a very useful survey of the various delivery methods and payments for eBooks. This is one of the most popular methods for aspiring authors to reach new readers. This section will be required reading if you are thinking of venturing into this world.

The central part of the book deals with new forms of writing using Web technologies. This is one field in which she has clearly done her homework. She shows examples of writing in the form of Blogs (Web-logs) email (epistolary) narratives, fictions illuminated by graphics, the weird world of MUDs and MOOs, Flash-animated writing, and phonetic poetry.
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The Internet Writer’s Handbook
Karen Scott’s book is a detailed guide to publishers of the two formats which are most digital – e-zines and e-books. It’s in the form of an international A-Z of the best websites for writers to target, with full contact details for all websites listed. She offers plenty of detail on how to submit your work , how much publishers will pay, and even how they are most likely to respond. The topics these eBook publishers cover range from poetry and fiction, through non-fiction feature writing, to specialist technical and hobbyist publications.
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Self-plagiarism – how to avoid it

July 3, 2011 by Roy Johnson

how to understand and avoid self-plagiarism

What is self-plagiarism?

Self-plagiarism is literally copying your own work. It can occur when quoting your own work without acknowledgement, or when you use the same piece of work for two different purposes.

Plagiarism is commonly defined as “taking someone else’s ideas or words and trying to pass them off as your own original work”. Most people understand the rules. If you quote from somebody else’s work, you put the words in quote marks and acknowledge the source, either as part of your text or in an endnote or footnote. Details of how to use quotations accurately are a separate issue. These conventions allow a reader to check the validity of the claims being made, the accuracy of the quotation, and to see (if necessary) how the quotation was used in its original context.

However, what if the words quoted were written by the same author of the text in question? Does this constitute plagiarism? If plagiarism is thought of as an issue of ‘ownership’, it would seem that it’s impossible to steal from yourself. But a number of cases exist where the re-use of your own work can easily become self-plagiarism.

Self-plagiarism in academic writing

It’s not normally permitted to submit a piece of work witten for one course and award as a submission for part of another. That is, a dissertation on The Poetry of Thomas Hardy written for a BA in English Literature cannot be re-submitted as part of the requirements for a separate MA course in’ Landscape and Literature’.

Even though the writing is an original piece of work by the author, academic rules forbid the re-use of material in this way. Dissertation and thesis rules normally stipulate that the material submitted for the award of a degree must not have appeared anywhere else before. Attempts to use the same material for two different purposes is sometimes known as ‘double-dipping’.

Academic authors are under a great deal of pressure to publish more and more of their research findings. This sometimes leads to the practice of publishing the same research data, with a slightly different analytic commentary. This is classed as duplicate or redundant publishing, and is severely frowned on by publishers. It is sometimes know as ‘Salami-slicing’.

The converse of this practice is known as ‘data augmentation’. This occurs when an already-published piece of work is re-published with new data, as if it were a new piece of work. This too is frowned on by the academic community and is regarded as a form of self-plagiarism.

Self-plagiarism and copyright

When a piece of work is published, copyright is automatically established, and rests with the original author. In contracts between publishers and authors, the author normally agrees to share copyright with the publisher. This means that the publisher is free to publish and re-use the author’s material (usually to the author’s benefit) and the author is normally allowed to maintain ownership of the work.

But if the author then re-cycles the work in question and publishes it elsewhere, this creates a case of both self-plagiarism and breach of copyright – since the original publisher may share copyright to the material.

Text recycling

Some parts of an academic paper may relate to research methods and procedures. The researcher describes accurately the sequence of events, the materials used, and the procedures of the research project. It’s quite likely that these will be the same in another experiment or piece of research of a similar kind.

There is therefore a great temptation to use templates of ‘boilerplate’ descriptions which can be re-used from one piece of research to the next. This is currently a contentious area of self-plagiarism, but it is worth noting that is is very easy to detect.

Citation stuffing

Academic authors are often rated according to how many times their work is quoted in academic papers and journals. Authors therefore have an built-in temptation to quote from their own work as much as possible – no matter how relevant it might be to the subject under discussion. In its worst cases, when authors articifically quote themselves for the sake of increasing the number of their own citations, this is therefore regarded as a form of self-plagiarism.

Fortunately, this is reasonably easy to detect, but it is a practice which is likely to continue so long as it is encouraged by publishers – who themselves also have an interest in their papers and journals being cited, thus enhancing their reputation.

You can perhaps see that there are very subtle links between academic honesty, accuracy of quotation, referencing, and the economics of both publishing and academic career structures. It is not the polite gentleman’s club that many people might imagine.

Internet publishing

Self-plagiarism is a very easy trap to fall into on the Internet. It’s possible to write an article, then publish it to a web site or a personal blog. Having done that, there is nothing to stop you posting the same article on another web site which aggregates similar materials. The article appears twice – with or without acknowledgement. This creates what in academic publishing is known as duplicate or redundant publication.

Unless you are a well-known author, few people are likely to complain, but it is worth noting that since Google will index the same article twice, the web page will immediately be given a lower ranking by Google, because it contains ‘duplicate material’. In terms of search engine rankings, the second instance of the article is competing against the first.

Newspaper journalists are faced with this problem all the time. But many of them now make a clear distinction between the articles they write as part of their contract with the newspaper, and the occasional smaller pieces they post onto personal blogs.

Re-cycling

Some people argue that if a piece of writing is published in a different context, for a different audience, then there can be little possibility of offence. The text may be re-edited to suit the new audience. But strictly speaking, this would still be plagiarism, unless the original source was acknowledged with a note such as: “This article first appeared as ‘Travels through Norther Italy’ in Atlantic Monthly Vol XII, number 28.”

Commercial publishing

One newspaper or magazine will occasionally reprint and article which has already been published elsewhere. The publisher usually does this fully conscious of the fact – and the article is likely to be followed by a note to its original source: “This article first appeared in Weekend magazine July 2010. The author may even be paid twice, but would not be accused of plagiarism, because no attempt to conceal the original source is being made.

Books which go out of print are occasionally re-printed by a separate publisher who see further commercial potential in the work. In such cases there will be an acknowledgement on the page listing publishing details – such as ‘First published by Acorn Books 1992’.

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Spelling reform

October 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling

Spelling Reform was a much debated issue in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. Various schemes were put forward for simplifying English spelling, which was thought to be difficult and obscure. These schemes often involved phonetic spelling, and some even went so far as proposing the creation of new alphabets. George Bernard Shaw funded one such scheme. A more recent example is Sayspel, devised by hydraulic engineer Roy Blain. None of these ideas came to anything – for very good reasons. This is also the period which gave rise to Esperanto, a totally artificial, invented language which nobody except enthusiasts actually speaks.

The famous short passage that follows is a satirical response to this idea attributed to the American humorist Mark Twain.

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter c would be dropped to be replased either by k or s, and likewise x would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which c would be retained would be the ch formation, which will be dealt with later.

Year 2 might reform w spelling, so that which and one would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish y replasing it with i and Iear 4 might fiks the g/j anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.

Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez c, y and x — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais ch, sh, and th rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

Mark Twain

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Textual Bibliography – selected reading

October 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

recommended fundamental studies in textual scholarship

This is a short but highly selective list of studies in textual bibliography. That is, the classic theories and approaches related to the establishment of authoritative texts. These theories take into account multiple versions and editions of a single work; the ‘intentions’ of the author; printed variants in the text; and the issues arising from authorial revisions.

Jaques Barzun, On Writing, Editing and Publishing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

George Bornstein (ed), Representing Modernist Texts: Editing as Interpretation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991.

Fredson Bowers, Textual and Literary Criticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959.

Fredson Bowers, Bibliography and Textual Criticism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.

Fredson Bowers, Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975.

Peter Davison, The Book Encompased: Studies in Twentieth Century Bibliography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Philip Gaskell, From Writer to Reader: Studies in Editorial Method, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.

Ronald Gottesman and Scott Bennett, Art and Error: Modern textual editing, London: Methuen, 1970.

D.C. Greetham, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction, New York: Garland, 1994.

John Lennard, But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

G. Thomas Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.

G. Thomas Tanselle, Textual Criticism since Greg: A Chronicle, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1987.

[NB! Greetham’s excellent book Textual Scholarship contains a 106 page bibliography covering all aspects of the subject.]

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A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling

recommended fundamental studies in textual scholarship

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