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June
23, 2006:
Funny Things Students Write
Interview
with Professor Anders Henriksson author of Non
Campus Mentis
Mike
Carruthers:
When writing term papers and taking tests, college students
write some pretty funny stuff.
Professor
Anders Henriksson:
They fall into genres and one of my favorite genres of these
is the student who mixes time frames in history. So you have
the one who wrote that the airplane was invented and first flown
by the Marx Brothers.
History
professor Anders Henriksson has been saving some of the more
unusual things students have written for over 25 years, and
put them in his book Non
Campus Mentis.
One of
the other funny things I find is when students bobbled around
with foreign words. Sometimes they put them in the paper to
sound impressive, and of course the result is they get it wrong.
It's just exactly the reverse. We have one student who thought
that Hitler's secret police was a group known as the "gazpacho."
Another favorite thing I have is when students sort of misuse
words. And you have the classic example of Stalin, who when
things didn't work out as planned, used the peasants as "escape
goats."
And a
common thing that students do says Professor Henriksson is to
state the obvious in a fancy way.
"The
ancient, Assyrian practice of exterminating various ethnic groups
generally tended not to promote ethnic diversity." One
student wrote once, "That Martin Luther, Jr.," called
that instead of Martin Luther King, "turned the U.S. Civil
Rights Movement around with his famous If I Had A Hammer speech."
For transcripts,
visit our web site somethingyoushouldknow.net.
I'm Mike Carruthers and that's "Something You Should Know."
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