Scene: 1996, Tourway Pancake House, Florence, AL. ~3:00 a.m. We're having some greasy diner food after leaving some club or another. Across the aisle, one booth contains an old, grizzled, drunk man and another booth contains a young woman, also drunk, passed out with her head on the table. The man is putting on a show of griping about how long the food is taking.

MAN (to us, gesturing toward the young woman in the next booth): She ain't doin' the Texas Two-Step; she's doin' the Alabama Git-Down!

MY FRIENDS AND ME: polite laughter

MAN: DID YOU HEAR ME? I SAID, SHE AIN'T DOIN' THE TEXAS TWO-STEP; SHE'S DOIN' THE ALABAMA GIT-DOWN!

Remember our mini-conference/maxi-review of Kelly Ritter's article titled "The Economics of Authorship: Online Paper Mills, Student Writers, and First-Year Composition," from College Composition and Communication June 2005 (56.4)? I had a couple of posts: "It don't matter. None of this matters." Or, composition pedagogy and Ritter's article on plagiarism and More on Authorship, Intellectual Property, "Templates," and Student Writing. Anyway, Ritter emailed me yesterday saying that the CCC article had originally been a longer piece, but that she had split it up into two articles. The second article, "Buying In, Selling Short: A Pedagogy Against the Rhetoric of Online Paper Mills," is now available in the latest issue of Pedagogy. [Note: When I say "available," I mean it's actually available for anyone who would like to download the PDF. So lack of access shouldn't be a deterrent to discussing the article.] It coincides with an article from today's Post on college entrance essay writing services. It's by a woman who worked for one of these services, first as an editor of students' essays, then as a writer for "model essays" that were supposed to serve as "inspiration" but instead were sent right off to the schools. The correlations with Ritter's work are striking, as some see the essays not as cheating or stealing but as fairly compensated labor (my emphasis):

This form of organized, for-profit cheating was unfamiliar to me, so I decided to look into how pervasive it might be. Of the 30 online editing companies I checked, four list the mock or model essay as a service. A handful of others offer varying degrees of application assistance. The least impressive but most affordable allow students to scan thousands of sample essays from a database, arranged by category, for a mere $20 a month.

At the other end of the spectrum is the fully commissioned piece written on a student's behalf -- of course, always for "inspiration." They call it the "authentic" essay. The hypocrisy isn't subtle. On the Web site of one such service, which also offers term-paper writing, is a blinking banner proclaiming: "Worry about plagiarism? Aaaaaaaaa! We write only original papers!"

I should point out that, as far as I have been able to determine, many of these companies are legitimate. They do not offer "model essays," just proofreading and light editing. Maybe I just picked one of the bad apples. But any company that offers something like the Comprehensive Package and then turns a blind eye to the possibility of its misuse inevitably facilitates cheating.

The Internet has made it possible to cheat with unprecedented ease, speed and sophistication. "Cheating is nothing new," one college admissions officer told me, "but organized cheating in the college application process is a growing problem." Like all the admissions officers I spoke to, he was aware that, as schools become more selective and applicants come under increased pressure, there's an obvious market for companies that, however unethically, will sell students a competitive edge.

[. . .]

Having braved the application process myself six years ago, I fully sympathize with how stressful it is. But there's a significant distinction between hiring a professional editor and buying an unethical product.

Students who believe they are ready to attend college should not be searching for this form of application assistance. My clients thought they were gaining something by hiring my professional services. But in the process they were losing something far more important: an opportunity to define their own authentic voices.

Anyone game for doing a massive multi-thinker online review of this latest Ritter article? And, on a more personal note, I've recently discovered that someone is copying and pasting my blog posts onto his/her own blog and not giving me credit for them, and I must admit, it's really sticking in my craw. Any suggestions on how to handle it?

Well, I hope not, for obvious reasons. But I have to wonder when I see this:

Image in context here. I have to say that I was disappointed not to see this on The Comics Curmudgeon. Oh well.

A decade ago, a couple of friends of mine invited me to go to India with their family. I declined, both out of inertia and the fact that I wasn't sure my friends' parents and their extended family in India would be okay with having a friend tag along. Sometimes I wish I had said yes, though. I always like to read fiction that's set in India. Years ago, it was Kipling: Kim, "Without Benefit of Clergy," "The Man Who Would Be King," etc. Right now I'm a little over halfway through Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. But Margaret Cho's excellent posts about India are making me want to continue my India reading with some Rushdie. Any particular recommendations?

Do you find that it's far easier to write than it is to revise? I've been working furiously all day on chapter 5 (the final chapter! I have a conclusion planned, but it's more like an afterword), having switched gears because revising chapter 4 was taking too long, slowing me down. I'm making excellent progress on chapter 5, though, and I'm reasonably confident that I'll have a draft of it ready for my advisor and my writing group to read on the 25th. From here on out, I'm going to go with Collin's advice: You write chapters, but you revise them into a dissertation.

Along those same lines, I submit my mental and emotional state as expressed by Jerri Blank's face (more under the fold):

Pi tagged me.

Four Jobs You’ve Had In Your Life:

1. Concession stand/ticket booth cashier at a movie theater
2. Hostess at Logan's Roadhouse
3. Model for figure drawing/painting classes
4. Comic book store employee (I filed Magic cards and bagged, boarded, and filed comic books)

Four Movies You Could Watch Over And Over:

1. Clueless
2. Rushmore
3. Star Trek: First Contact
4. The Bourne Identity

Four Places You’ve Lived:

1. My parents' house in Florence, AL
2. My apartment in Knoxville
3. That horrible apartment
4. The efficiency I live in now

Four TV Shows You Love To Watch:

1. Lost
2. The Sopranos
3. Alias
4. The Simpsons

Four Places You’ve Been On Vacation:

1. Myrtle Beach, SC
2. Destin, FL
3. Las Vegas
4. New York City

Four Blogs You Visit Daily:

1. The Valve
2. Prof. B.
3. New Kid
4. Girl Genius

Four Of Your Favorite Foods:

1. Chocolate mousse
2. Pizza with chicken, sun-dried tomatoes, and jalapeno peppers
3. Collard greens with cornbread
4. Potatoes, skin on, cut in the style of home fries, roasted in the oven with bacon, salt, pepper, leeks, and cloves of garlic

Four Places You’d Rather Be:

1. Atlanta, GA
2. The Tenure Track
3. On the porch at F.A. eating oysters on the half shell
4. Asheville, NC (everyone says it's nice; I'd love to find out)

Four Albums You Can’t Live Without:

1. Appetite for Destruction, Guns'n'Roses
2. Made in USA, Pizzicato Five
3. Miles of Aisles, Joni Mitchell
4. Easy Rider, Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack

(so many runners-up: Diana Krall's Love Scenes and The Girl in the Other Room, Sade's Lovers Rock, Diamond Life, Promise, Love Deluxe, various albums from Lucinda Williams and Kasey Chambers, etc.)

Four Vehicles I’ve Owned:

1. A white 1990 Nissan 240SX
2. A black 1990 Buick Reatta
3. The car I drive now, a red 1998 Honda Civic
4. I had a go-cart; does that count...?

Four People To Be Tagged: If you haven't done it yet, you're one of the four!

Edited to add links to those who have heeded the call: GXX, bdegenaro, and John.

Has anyone else been reading those scary stories about diabetes in the Times (it's a series)? If not, do so now. The gist of the stories is that diabetes has become a serious threat to public health, especially among the poor and predominately Latino and African American. This brings up a lot of issues related to public policy, the economy, government funding for health care, and race-based medicine, and it serves as a cautionary tale about diet and exercise for everyone, especially for those of us who have a family history of diabetes. I've already decided that the next first-year or advanced composition course I teach is going to have a public health theme.*

On a related note, a few weeks ago I read that if you run or walk eleven miles a week, you won't gain any visceral fat. That's the kind I always gain, so I'm implementing this advice: I've been doing one mile on the treadmill three days a week, two miles the other four days. I didn't run at all yesterday, so today I did three miles.

* Edited to add that I've been thinking more about this as the day has progressed. I'm seeing this course as having five units:

1. Complications related to obesity
2. HIV/AIDS and safer sex campaigns
3. Anti-smoking campaigns and smoking ban legislation
4. Infectious disease (in this case, I'm thinking about using bird flu as a case)
5. Environmentalism and public health (I'm thinking along the lines of environmental racism)

Any other suggestions, like for assigned reading? A good friend of mine has already recommended assigning Super Size Me.

Here's the second installment of my MLA session-blogging. Two down, two three to go. This is from "English Studies and Political Literacy," a forum which has already been covered at Tech Central Station, the Chronicle, and Acephalous, but I'll throw my notes in there too; why not? As with all my conference-blogging of years past, these are simply notes I took. They're probably direct quotations, but I don't use quotation marks because I don't want to have them in every sentence, and I'm not sure enough of the exact words to use quotation marks. You'll find very little commentary here, because, well, it would take even longer for me to post these if I also offered commentary. Notes are in order of speaker:

Donald P. Lazere, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

In his introduction to the forum, Lazere said that students are caught in a double bind: They need a degree for a job, but they can't afford college. Students are pressured to major in areas that are expedient to getting a good job, not allowed to take a variety of humanities courses. They're also having to work while going to school.

Lazere cited the NEA "Reading at Risk" study and the "literacy crisis": only 21% of students read newspapers. (Note: What counts as a newspaper? In my three years of teaching at the University of Minnesota, when I walk into the classroom each day, nearly all the students are sitting in their desks engrossed in The Minnesota Daily. Some of them read City Pages too, which admittedly is mostly an entertainment guide but also contains some very smart articles about social and political issues.)