Fake quotes in prize-winning essays

June 16, 2009

Rational Rant crashes into some use of faked and edited quotes in prize-winning essays and speeches.

Nothing new to careful observers.  Several of the Usual Suspects™ bad quotes turned up.

The trouble with these quotations, which are central to the theses of both pieces, is that all of them are fake. And by fake I don’t mean, please note, that they had a word off here and there, or that they were a popular misquoting of something Washington or Franklin actually said or wrote—I mean that they were out-and-out fakes, words put into their mouths by somebody else with an axe to grind. (And even worse—a number of them were actually misquotations of the original fake quotation.) Here are the seven, in all their glory:

It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians, not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ! (falsely attributed to Patrick Henry)

It cannot be emphasized too clearly and too often that this nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religion, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity and freedom of worship here. (falsely attributed to Patrick Henry)

He who shall introduce into public affairs the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world. (falsely attributed to Benjamin Franklin)

The reason that Christianity is the best friend of government is because Christianity is the only religion that changes the heart. (falsely attributed to Thomas Jefferson)

The future and success of America is not in this Constitution but in the laws of God upon which this Constitution is founded. (falsely attributed to James Madison)

It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible. (falsely attributed to George Washington)

It is impossible to rightly govern a country without God and the Bible. (falsely attributed to George Washington)

It’s difficult to get students to attribute quotes with proper citations.  Students are mightily confused by the notion of plagiarism.  We teachers need to work harder to get them to verify what they quote, and to offer appropriate citations.  Since these quotes can’t be cited, students should have discovered the errors as they wrote.

One of the offending pieces was written by a high school junior, the other by a 10-year-old.  There’s time to make them savvy (but will anyone do it?).

Do we need to give judges, of essay and speech competitions, sheets of the quotes that most frequently show up, though they are faked?

6 Comments | Bad Quotes, Bogus history, History, Voodoo history, Writing, Writing history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Typewriter of the moment: Mencken and the 1948 conventions

June 10, 2008


Mencken at 1948 Democratic Convention

Mencken at 1948 Democratic Convention

Photo from the collection of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, at the Park Library, University of North Carolina.

H. L. Mencken at one of the 1948 political conventions (Thomas Dewey was the Republican nominee, Harry S. Truman was the Democratic nominee). Obviously the photo is a copy from the National Press Club Library. The Park Library site describes the photo and Mencken:

H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) was a familiar figure at many national political conventions. This photo, taken at the one in 1948, was his last political convention. He is well known for his attacks on American taste and culture, or the lack of same. His magnum opus, The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, was first published in 1919 and remains a classic. From 1906 to 1941, he worked chiefly as a reporter, editor, and columnist for the Baltimore Sun. (Photo courtesy of the Baltimore Sun Library.)

Assuming Mencken covered both conventions, this photo was taken at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia in mid-July, 1948. We know it was taken in Philadelphia since both parties held their conventions there that year, the Republicans from June 21 to June 26, and the Democrats from July 12 to July 14.

Republicans nominated New York Gov. Thomas J. Dewey and California Gov. Earl Warren for president and vice president.

After a contentious convention that saw Minneapolis Mayor Hubert H. Humphrey propose a civil rights plank that got South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond to walk out of the convention and found his own States’ Rights (Dixiecrat) Party (with himself as the nominee for president), and former Vice President Henry Wallace walk out because the party platform was too conservative (Wallace ran on the Socialist Progressive Party ticket), Democrats nominated President Harry S Truman and Kentucky Sen. Alben W. Barkley for president and vice president. Truman narrowly defeated Georgia Sen. Richard B. Russell for the nomination. Had Thurmond not walked out, Truman may well have lost the nomination of his own party.

And the rest of the story?

  • Truman had a contentious second term, and was defeated in the New Hampshire primary in 1952 by Sen. Estes Kefauver; Truman ended his campaign for a second full term shortly after.
  • Earl Warren was appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court by Truman’s successor, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in late 1953. Warren is remembered for engineering the 9-0 decision in Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education which ruled “separate but equal” school systems to violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause, and for his chairing the commission that investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
  • Hubert Humphrey moved on to the U.S. Senate, served as Vice President to Lyndon Johnson, and won the Democratic nomination for president in another contentious convention in 1968 in Chicago. Humphrey lost the election to Richard Nixon, and returned to the U.S. Senate two years later.
  • Strom Thurmond won election to the U.S. Senate in 1954, switching parties to Republican in 1964, and serving until his death in 2003.
  • Russell, who had served as Georgia’s senator since 1933, continued to serve to his death on January 21, 1971; he was a key member of the Warren Commission that investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The Russell Senate Office Building is named in his honor, the oldest of the three Senate office buildings.
  • Barkley was the oldest vice president ever inaugurated, aged 71. He remarried in his first year as vice president (his first wife died in 1947). Barkley’s nephew suggested that he should be called “the veep” because “Mr. Vice President” was too long. The title was seized up on by headline writers. Considered too old to run for the presidency in 1952, Barkley won a U.S. Senate seat from Kentucky in the 1954 elections, serving from 1955 to his death in 1956. Barkley Dam on the Cumberland River is named in his honor, as is the lake behind it, Lake Barkley.
  • Henry Wallace finished a distant fourth in the 1948 election, behind Dewey and Thurmond. His political career was essentially over due to his inability or unwillingness to disavow communist support. He achieved success as a chicken breeder. In a daramatic turnabout, he wrote a book, Where I Was Wrong, disavowing communism and critical of Joseph Stalin, and endorsed Republican candidates in 1956 and 1960. He died of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease) in 1965.
  • Dewey returned to his law practice. In 1952, Dewey helped engineer the nomination of Eisenhower over his old political nemesis Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio, pushed Richard Nixon as the Vice Presidential nominee, and in 1956 first convinced Ike to run again, and then to keep Nixon on the ticket. Dewey politely refused offers of offices, including refusing a nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, sticking to his law practice which made him very wealthy. He died suddenly of a heart attack in 1971, at age 68.
  • Mencken suffered a stroke later in 1948 that left him unable to speak, or read, or write for a time. He spent much of the rest of his life working to organize his papers, and died in 1956. His epitaph, on his tombstone and on a plaque in the lobby of the Baltimore Sun, reads: “If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner, and wink your eye at some homely girl.”

3 Comments | H. L. Mencken, History, Political conventions, Politics, Technology, Typewriters, Writing | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Designers correct: Font choice affects grades

January 12, 2008

Put your paper into Georgia, a serif font, and your grades may rise.

Some enterprising fellow at Fadtastic did the research (now available here in archives), and discovered Georgia-fonted papers tend to get A grades, Times Roman-fonted papers get A- grades, and Trebuchet-fonted papers get B grades (“The Secret Lives of Fonts).

Of course, that’s what the type designers, book designers and web designers have been telling us for 20 years — a serif font is easier to read, and makes the reader feel more at ease. When graders feel good, the paper gets a good grade. That’s logical.

Georgia Font examples, from Wikipedia

Georgia Font examples, from Wikipedia

I also discovered that when faxed to news editors, sans serif fonts get better play. If the press release is legible, it goes farther.

And, when I was taking broadcast courses, my grades rose significantly when my IBM Correcting Selectric II arrived, and I started doing all my scripts in Orator font. The teacher, an active newsman at the time, graded higher when he recognized the font more — it was roughly the same font on the teleprompter at his station.

Pick your font and your transmission method accordingly.

The author of this non-scientific study is a web designer, of course.

I’ll bet you’ll find that conclusion, backed with some sort of research, in the book design and web design texts.

Remember when we all used typewriters, and such choices were not options at all?

Tip of the old scrub brush to Graceful Flavor.

5 Comments | Business, Presentations, Student projects, Technology, Weblogs, Writing | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

More carnival: “Educational technology” is not oxymoronic

December 18, 2007

Here’s a new blog carnival you may find useful: The Educational Technology Carnival. The 6th running of that particular midway is posted at Global Citizenship in a Virtual World.

Which rather reminds me that I’ve added to my list of things I want in a technological adapted classroom: Movie lighting. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been in a different classroom, and discovered that when the projector goes on, the lights must come down in order to see the image — and then discovered that when the lights go down, there’s not enough light to see to take notes, or to see for anything else.

I was filling in for a teacher who uses a lot of video (“Great!” I thought). Students picked up on the problem right away. “Another sleep lab today?” they asked.

But I digress.

I have fought in four districts to get filters off on sites that discuss evolution for biology students. In one district, it was easier to put filters on the creationism sites, IT told me, than get the filters off the sites that discussed the material the students needed. I discovered my own district now blocks this blog, which makes it difficult to refer students to specific material, at least from school. (Time to change districts?) So the discussion on who filters, and why, caught my eye. I’m not sure there is a good result.

This edition of the carnival also points to Rebecca Wallace-Segall’s Wall Street Journal opposite-editorial page piece on student competition in intellectual areas, a hot topic for me right now as I contemplate the Federal Reserve Board’s competition for economics students, the Fed Challenge.

So as you ponder why your school doesn’t give you lighting to view your projected material, why you don’t have adequate audio reproduction, where are you going to get a projector to show the PowerPoint presentation during 4th block, why can’t anyone make a non-boring, really dynamic PowerPoint, and whether your computer lab kids are downloading racy music videos to spike your bandwidth clogging problems, think that on your lunch hour you can take a look at blog carnival that at least empathizes — if it’s not blocked in your school.

Leave a Comment » | Classroom technology, Economics, Education, Education success, Literature, Teaching, Technology, Technology in the classroom, Weblogs, Writing | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Next Entries »