Bill Poser approaches the Second Amendment in his blog, Language and the Law from a linguistic perspective. He focuses on whether the phrase “to bear arms” was intended to mean military use of weapons solely, or whether the Founders intended the phrase to include personal ownership of firearms.

Poser writes:

Among the numerous amicus briefs submitted is the so-called “Linguists’ Brief”, written by Dennis E. Baron, Richard W. Bailey, and Jeffrey P. Kaplan. This brief argues that the Second Amendment protects only a public right on two grounds: the afore-mentioned interpretation of the leading clause, and the argument that the expression “bear arms” refers only to the organized military use of arms, not to individual use. They claim that the term “bear arms” is “an idiomatic expression that means ‘to serve as a soldier, do military service’”.

To assess the merits of the “Linguists’ Brief,” Poser turns to the texts of the time to see what the phrase meant at the time the Bill of Rights was written. He concludes:

… while the Linguists’ Brief may well reflect the view of the meaning of “bear arms” in 1791 formed on the basis of its authors experience reading material from that period, there appear to be clear and convincing examples of the use of this term in an individual, non-military, sense. The characterization of such examples in the Brief as anomalous is not supported by any sort of scientific linguistic analysis.

Among my high school students in this part of the country, the Second Amendment is cherished. Writing research papers … not so much. I’m planning to bookmark this blog as an example of why we research and why we write. Maybe this blog post will demonstrate the value of the process in a way the textbook examples (with due respect to the writers of textbooks) just don’t.

Breaking news: Supreme Court rules against DC gun ban (@ CNN) (@ Fox)

News flash: multitasking in the workplace began in the 19th century. (Parents, of course, have always multitasked.) Researcher Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted, says, “We can’t just blame the Blackberry” for the fact that the average office worker is interrupted about every 3 minutes and then needs about 30 minutes to get back on task. The resulting cost to business has been estimated at $650 billion per year.

“You can’t produce deeply in a distractable environment — we have to stop kidding ourselves about that,” she says. “We’re existing on snippets and glimpses of each other.”

Researchers are sure people can learn to focus better. Even just talking with children about how to pay attention, Jackson says, has led to some gains.

My high school students like to say they work better when they are watching TV and doing homework at the same time. This practice does not lead to their best writing. Sadly, it probably *does* help prepare them for the work world.

Read Jackson’s article at Business Week: May We Have Your Attention, Please?

Yesterday’s post discussed how people read online. Research demonstrates that we read Web pages in a kind of F-shape, seeking specific information as quickly as possible.

“The biggest determinant for content usability is how users read online,” Jakob Nielsen writes, “and because people read differently, you have to write differently.”

Nielsen offers some specific suggestions for effective Web writing style which I have summarized below:

• Put the most important part first. People will read only 20-30 percent of the text on a screen unless they are especially interested in the topic.
• Use keywords that a search engine will target. The Web is not the place for symbolism or subtlety.
• Keep it short and sweet. Your reader isn’t sitting in a cozy armchair with feet up; your reader is looking for answers to questions.

Nielsen doubts that the Web is the best choice for education:

I continue to believe in the linear, author-driven narrative for educational purposes. I just don’t believe the Web is optimal for delivering this experience. Instead, let’s praise old narrative forms like books and sitting around a flickering campfire — or its modern day counterpart, the PowerPoint projector — which have been around for 500 and 32,000 years, respectively.

He acknowledges his bias; he writes books and presents seminars for a living. Teachers can relate to that.

Students need to be aware of their own reading strategies since, obviously, advertisers and politicians are. They need to understand why a powerful Web page is written differently from, say, an essay. Most important, they need to be aware of where the forms overlap and how the audience and purpose drive the differences.

We’ve been teaching those concepts all along, and perhaps now students will be more receptive to them.

The British Library offers Turning the Pages, an exhibit of digitized texts. Click and allow the page a few moments to load. Use your mouse to turn virtually pages of works by Jane Austen, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, and Leonardo da Vinci. Other works include religious texts, an atlas, Mozart’s Musical Diary (with audio clips), and the Diamond Sutra, the world’s oldest dated printed book.

Recently this e-mail classic hit my inbox again:

Message from John Cleese - British comedian:

To the citizens of the United States of America:

In light of your failure in recent years to nominate competent candidates for President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately.

Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths, and territories (except Kansas, which she does not fancy).

Your new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, will appoint a Governor for America without the need for further elections. Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. A questionnaire may be circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed.

To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:

1. You should look up “revocation” in the Oxford English Dictionary.

2. Then look up aluminium, and check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it.

3. The letter ‘U’ will be reinstated in words such as ‘colour’, ‘favour’ and ‘neighbour.’ Likewise, you will learn to spell ‘doughnut’ without skipping half the letters, and the suffix ‘-ize’ will be replaced by the suffix ‘-ise’. Generally, you will be expected to raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels (look up ‘vocabulary’).

4. Using the same twenty-seven words interspersed with filler noises such as “like” and “you know” is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication. There is no such thing as US English. We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be
adjusted to take account of the reinstated letter ‘u’ and the elimination of -ize.

5. July 4th will no longer be celebrated as a holiday.

The statement goes on, but you get the gist of it.

The text was too uneven to have been written by John Cleese, but parts of it were witty enough that I could hear his voice as I read it, especially the bit about Kansas. So I turned to one of my favorite resources in researching e-mail, Snopes.com.

Fortunately for me, a search using “John Cleese” came up with the right page as the first choice. What I found was great research on the origin and history of the piece:

It evidently originated on with one Alan Baxter of Rochester, U.K., who wrote and posted a much shorter, four-item version to an internal newsgroup hosted by his employer in November 2000, as a wry commentary on the recently concluded (but far from decided) U.S. presidential election:

London, 8th November 2000.
To the citizens of the United States of America,

Following your failure to elect either a half decent candidate or man-monkey as President of the USA to govern yourselves and, by extension, the free world, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence. Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume a monarch’s duties over all states, commonwealths and other territories. To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, please comply with1 the following acts:

1. Look up “revoke” in a dictionary
2. Learn at least the first 4 lines of “God save the Queen”
3. Start referring to “soccer” as football
4. Declare war on Quebec

Tax collectors from Her Majesty’s Government will be with you shortly to ensure the acquisition of all revenues due (backdated to 1776).

Thank you for your cooperation and…have a nice day!

From this first post, the piece grew to include 10 items, then 13, then more.

This would explain the unevenness I sensed as I read the version in my inbox. But it also gave me an idea — wouldn’t our students enjoy researching the history of Urban Legends and legendary e-mails like this one? And wouldn’t that kind of research go a long way toward establishing the information literacy skills they need so that they stop believing everything they find published online?

I’m sure this kind of information doesn’t turn up in a simple Google search. I have written to the Snopes people to find out what tools they use in their research. When I hear from them, I’ll let you know.

Last week the Pew Internet and American Life Project released its report, Teens and Social Media. The home page summary discusses the findings about teens and how they use Web 2.0 tools.

As a writing teacher, though, I was very surprised by the format of the complete report. I expected bullet points and graphs, but I was not prepared for the impact of design choices in the document. For example, horizontal lines rest atop large-font summaries preceding a section of information, signalling the end of one part and the beginning of another visually instead of rhetorically. I was surprised at how short the sections were, most only 2 or 3 paragraphs. If a section of text grew much longer than that, it was consistently interrupted by a visual element such as a table or text box. The longest section of text began on p. 22 and ran for all of 6 paragraphs before there was a table, followed by another paragraph, and that was the end of the section.

Most of the text summarized in words what the data revealed. There was little analysis of the implications beyond catchphrases like “super-communicator.”

I’m preparing my students to write analytically and thoughtfully, starting with an idea and following it through. I don’t incorporate design elements into my teaching beyond an insistence on 1-inch margins, black ink, and a single, standard, 12-point font. (Come to think of it, the Pew report doesn’t observe those conventions consistently, either.) I teach them to use a style guide. I teach them to develop an argument. Developing those skills takes all the instructional time I have. The format of this report, though, suggests that I’m teaching the wrong things.

If I am to prepare my students for this kind of writing — and apparently I should be — what do I leave out?

David Pogue’s column last week, “The Generational Divide in Copyright Morality,” provided some eye-popping insight into the way young adults approach Web resources.

Pogue describes an activity he has used with audiences, providing scenarios like, “I own a certain CD, but it got scratched. So I borrow the same CD from the library and rip it to my computer” and asking whether they think that is wrong. The scenarios progress into increasingly complex situations, all involving copying DVDs and music.

“The exercise is intended, of course, to illustrate how many shades of wrongness there are, and how many different opinions,” he writes. “Almost always, there’s a lot of murmuring, raised eyebrows and chuckling.”

Pogue says that he recently spoke to about 500 college students and used the same activity, but the students didn’t think the scenarios described anything wrong. “No matter how far my questions went down that garden path, maybe two hands went up. I just could not find a spot on the spectrum that would trigger these kids’ morality alarm. They listened to each example, looking at me like I was nuts.”

Some peer pressure may have affected the results, he acknowledges, adding, “Nobody wants to look like a goody-goody.” But even with his most blatant example of obtaining media without paying for it, only 2 students indicated they saw anything wrong.

Pogue’s focus was on file sharing, but I couldn’t help thinking that students probably feel the same way about text they find online as they write research papers. “Copy and paste” doesn’t seem at all wrong to them. They changed the font — isn’t that value added?

I gave up trying to explain plagiarism as “stealing” a long time ago. After all, the original writer of the copyrighted material still has it. I have had better luck with the line “give credit where credit is due,” appealing to their sense of justice. Still, with every batch of papers I grade, I have one or two students who seem to think it’s not wrong unless they get caught.

As teachers we may need to spend more time helping kids understand understand the concept of intellectual property. In fact, it might make a good focus for a research paper.

Research at the University of Liverpool has found that Shakespearean language excites positive brain activity, adding further drama to the bard’s plays and poetry.

Shakespeare uses a linguistic technique known as functional shift that involves, for example using a noun to serve as a verb. Researchers found that this technique allows the brain to understand what a word means before it understands the function of the word within a sentence. This process causes a sudden peak in brain activity and forces the brain to work backwards in order to fully understand what Shakespeare is trying to say.

Professor Philip Davis, from the University’s School of English, said: “The brain reacts to reading a phrase such as ‘he godded me’ from the tragedy of Coriolanus, in a similar way to putting a jigsaw puzzle together. If it is easy to see which pieces slot together you become bored of the game, but if the pieces don’t appear to fit, when we know they should, the brain becomes excited. By throwing odd words into seemingly normal sentences, Shakespeare surprises the brain and catches it off guard in a manner that produces a sudden burst of activity - a sense of drama created out of the simplest of things.”

Experts believe that this heightened brain activity may be one of the reasons why Shakespeare’s plays have such a dramatic impact on their readers.

Professor Neil Roberts, from the University’s Magnetic Resonance and Image Analysis Research Centre, (MARIARC), explains: “The effect on the brain is a bit like a magic trick; we know what the trick means but not how it happened. Instead of being confused by this in a negative sense, the brain is positively excited. The brain signature is relatively uneventful when we understand the meaning of a word but when the word changes the grammar of the whole sentence, brain readings suddenly peak. The brain is then forced to retrace its thinking process in order to understand what it is supposed to make of this unusual word.”

Read the entire article.

Special thanks to Sue on the Net-Gold list!

The Roman Empire may have collapsed, but Latin didn’t die. It morphed into Italian and had a profound influence on French, Spanish, and Portuguese. It also contributed heavily to the vocabulary of English.

Latin isn’t completely dead. But Kitsai, a Native American tongue, is. And National Geographic reports that we lose another language about every two weeks as the last surviving speaker dies. Many of these languages don’t contribute substantially to others, as Latin did. They just disappear, and with them, a way of seeing the world and expressing that vision.

Five “language hotspots” have emerged, places where languages are dying at the greatest rate. This map depicts them:

Source: http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/langhotspots/

National Geographic’s Enduring Voices program attempts to preserve languages that are threatened with extinction. Linguists seek out the surviving speakers of a language to record their speech and memories. In Australia they discovered the last speaker of a language previously thought to be extinct. Communities are also establishing programs to pass to a new generation the languages no longer spoken at home.

Linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf once observed, “Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.” If this is true, then the death of a language is as significant as the loss of a species in an ecosystem.