Help Needed Please

[Amy West]

Lynne,

I'm right with you, and I know that it's the policy on other academic
lists that I've been on to not respond to such queries unless there's
evidence that the student has really hit a wall in terms of
bibliographic searching. I wasn't sure what the ADS-L policy was, so
I held my tongue. Certainly, I would not encourage my  Comp. students
to post to such an academic list as an early research strategy. I
would encourage them to search the archives, sure; if they hit a
wall, I'd either forward the query myself or check to see if it was
all right with the list managers/owners if they posted. It may be
that ADS-L simply has a laissez-faire attitude, letting subscribers
decide for themselves to help out such research queries or not.

---Amy West

>Date:    Thu, 22 Feb 2007 15:23:32 +0000
>From:    Lynne Murphy <m.l.murphy at SUSSEX.AC.UK>
>Subject: Re: Help Needed Please
>
>I have a policy against answering 'fishing' e-mails from undergraduates
>like this, so was a little surprised by others' readiness to answer the
>query.
>
>I call it a 'fishing e-mail' because it had no particular specific
>question, and it is a means to not do what a student is supposed to do in
>this situation--use a bibliographic database (and/or the course reading
>list) to find previous work on the topic.
>
>I'm not trying to be a meanie, but answering such messages means that we:
>
>(a) take time away from the students at our own institutions who are
>actually paying for us to teach them (and arguably doing or undermining the
>work of that student's own instructor),
>(b) do the student's basic bibliographic research for them--which
>presumably was part of their assignment,
>(c) can never be sure that the help given to these students is properly
>acknowledged in their work, and thus could be 'colluding' with the student
>or allowing ourselves to be plagiarized.
>
>Now, if the student has  a _specific_ question/request (e.g., 'does anyone
>know where claim X has come from' or 'I'm looking for personal anecdotes
>relating to Y'), that's a different matter and asking a professional body
>like ours might well be an appropriate way of tackling that.
>
>I think this issue has come up on the list before (but can't be [BrE] arsed
>to look it up in the archives--so perhaps I'm as bad as the UG students I'm
>implicitly criticising here!).
>
>Lynne, the grumpy old instructor
>
>
>Dr M Lynne Murphy
>Senior Lecturer and Head of Department
>Linguistics and English Language
>Arts B135
>University of Sussex
>Brighton BN1 9QN
>
>phone: +44-(0)1273-678844
>http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org