Dear Ms. Francis:

There is a small problem with your computer: Your date is set wrong.

As you can see from your first message to ATEG, copied below, your
date registers as Saturday, May 22 2004. I believe you sent your
message on Saturday, May 1, which means that your date is set 3 weeks
ahead of the actual date. This is easy to fix, so I won't try to go
through an explanation here.

The effects (on your computer) of the date being wrong can wind up
being multitudinous; any computer consultant or tech person would
tell you it needs to be set right. On ATEG, your two messages, dated
May 22 and May 23, will appear as the newest messages for the next 3
weeks and so, as more people post, your messages will get further and
further removed from the responses you received. By the time your
messages start moving back in the queue, some list members will be
irked about their constant presence -- especially if they don't
understand why they keep coming up as the newest messages.

Here is your first post, so you can see the date in it. Fixing the
date on your computer won't change the dates on ATEG, but it will
prevent any future problems for you. Just below your message, I have
a couple of points of substance about your questions.

>Date: Sat, 22 May 2004 00:01:47 -0400
>From: Teresa M Francis <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Research papers
>Sender: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
><[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Reply-to: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
>  <[log in to unmask]>
>X-Priority: 3
>X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new at usadatanet.net
>
>Teachers,
>
>What is the most common format for high school and college research papers?
>
>Also, do you have some unique topics for my students to consider?
>
>I don't think that Johnny Depp or U.F.O.'s are worthwhile topics, and I want
>to give my classes some better alternatives.
>
>Thanks,
>
>Teresa Francis

re. common format, although I was raised with the MLA Style Sheet,
and learned Turabian (one 'r') when I worked in the UVA reference
room, there is no question that APA is the best, and most widely used
throughout both the social  and physical sciences. The APA approach
just makes more sense, which is why it has spread; the other
approaches are in the process of dying out. Since all of your
students who go on to higher ed will need to know and use APA in at
least some of their classes at that point (and most of them won't
have to use anything else), it's simply pragmatic to teach it now.

re. topics, a recitation of facts or opinions about Johnny Depp might
not be of interest to someone of a different generation, and it might
not make for a good paper either, by some objective standard. But if
students are motivated by a topic, isn't it likely that they'll work
harder on it and dig deeper? I'd be inclined to push them in the
direction, for example, of comparing the characters played by Johnny
Depp in Crybaby, Edward Scissorshands and From Hell, and trying to
decide which is the better performance. And I'd be patient with how
they discover examples and work out criteria by which to evaluate
them.

The same logic can be applied to UFOs. Why not have students look
into the history of beliefs in UFOs. When did people first start to
believe in them? How much were they influenced by H.G. Wells' The War
of the Worlds? By the Orson Welles' radio broadcast? By differences
in science fiction from different decades? I think they'd find, by
the way, that from the 1930's until now, aliens have been coming from
farther and farther away -- because there is so much more physical
data about the nearby (Venus, Mars, Jupiter, etc.) locations that
they've had to be eliminated. A touchy point would be the issues
involved in alien abductions, including sexual contact between aliens
and humans; this would obviously generate plenty of interest, and so
would require some limits.

My basic point is to channel student interests into writing tasks
that involve research and inferential thinking, and that push them to
draw new conclusions for themselves, rather than forcing them away
from the topics that motivate them the most.

All the best!

Paul Wilson
--

-----
Paul T. Wilson                                   [log in to unmask]
Professor of Reading                   Western Michigan University

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