Thursday 17 March 2016

A term paper vs. a blog

In a student’s life nothing takes up more coffee, procrastination, profanity, night’s sleep and angst as much as writing a term paper. The format of a term paper asks students to make a point, force it and keep repeating the idea over and over again throughout the paper for over 20 pages or more must drown them in depression due to the rigidity and the rather boring concept of repeating the same concept over and over again.

There may be a few legions of students who have conjured amply fact backed somewhat lucid arguments about some complex antediluvian concept. But then there are a few thinkers amongst the bow tie bound professors with bohemian unkempt hair who choose think out of the box with propositions like giving students a blog writing assignment instead of just a plain old term paper. This rather provocative idea is kindling a fond fire of intensifying debate amongst the academic elites about the methods of teaching academic or creative writing in the digital era.

Many academicians condemn the traditional old practice of mechanical academic writing that challenges to cripple the creative arms of writers with the necessary angst but with an untrained eye. Most writers suggest that this mundane practice offends them deeply. The blog on the other hand offers ethos of public interaction and reaches a greater audience. Thus, it must meet certain standards of creative writing to keep the reading eyes hooked to the argument in the research. A new practice that is slowly emerging these days in the elite colleges of UK where students are required to submit blogs of 500 to 1500 words every week about what they are reading in their class and other popular essays that may be good reading fodder for the public eyes, instead of writing long and complex academic sentences without compromising the idea behind the study.

In fact this practice is taking such an important role in the industry that it is now a mandatory task for getting admission in literary courses and even in MBA programs. An old and ineffective writing practice is best replaced with this fresh new one which allows immediacy, immediate feedback from the audience, a sense of relevancy, link to contemporary communications with a practical connectivity and moreover, a rather enjoyable prospect. The point behind such a pseudo-academic practice is to use writing assignments to teach more than just punish.

Many who oppose the idea say that the often overly personally expressive, casually written blogs fail at the teaching forefront to get the basic elements of writing and thinking through to students. These naysayers suggest that the existing format of term paper writing is not so much about the events or ideas of what is there in the text, but about the points organized by the writer, the fashion of arguments, and their expression of how much they have grasped the concept behind the text with ample proofs to back up the arguments. They believe that more than punishment this format is pedagogy. 

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