Sometimes, the Providence

The more I read scholarly papers, especially those written by professors of humanities, the more I realize that people such as myself, that is, people coming from another linguistic and cultural background, will never be able to catch up, no matter what, with well-educated native English writers. It is an insurmountable handicap, no matter how hard some psychologists would try to find some sort of feel-good theoretical frame.

It looks like it paid off to spend a whole term on sweating a cultural essay about the Romanian alphabet; but the news only reopened a window through which I could see some hard work ahead: rephrasing ideas, smithing words,  giving birth to more elaborate sentences (what other metaphor can one think of when writing is such a painstaking effort?) and rechecking bibliographic references (mostly, citations).  I’ll see.

What I found scary was when a word, or group of words, was used to comprise the notion of “one year;” whoever will have read this message, and is in the business of librarianship, will understand quite well what I mean.

An imposed task

Matching up your text with theirs— the essence of an employer’s request for hiring academic librarians. It is up to the candidates to perform a close reading of a job ad, and figure out– and express that in their response– if their skills correspond to what employers are looking for. But what bothers me is that if the candidates do not have any practical experience, since they are applying for one resident program or another, they will likely have a vague idea to perform that critical close reading, a reading that allows them to include the expected tags, or rather categories within which particular examples must be given to reflect the sought-after skills.

 

So it all comes down to reading well—librarians’ fundamental skill, intimately linked to their majestic ability to put a written or an oral message into their audience’s words. Speaking of audiences, but changing gears, I had the chance to read some of my colleagues’ pieces of writing that they have posted on a sort of blog. Rather unsurprised by how well most of them write, I could not help comparing my writing skills to theirs, having realized, now more than ever, that I have to master the idioms and, constantly, absorb new words in their various contexts: a titanic work—there is little doubt here.

 

Today, 19 June 2008, I have looked for what I believe to be relevant articles about the pros and cons of the Google Scholar, which was a daunting task. Having now those articles at hand, it is imperative that I focus on a research question leading to an information literacy lecture for ESL students. The somewhat imposed question is, what are the positive and negative aspects of using Google Scholar (GS) in researching into plagiarism? ( I am being asked to subtly convey the idea that if there are any negative aspects resulting from the use of GS, then the positive ones must be in the realm of libraries, or librarians.)

A cold day on a stage

And that time came, when I had to play a role, again, on a stage. The comforting part was that I did not do it for myself, but for the ones who contributed to my long-term success.

A rather cold, windy day in Montreal.

I will get back to my readings tomorrow, even if the time will not allow me the luxury that I had in the last few weeks, when I did almost nothing but reading. One of the things that I dread the most is to finally face the reality of how much packing I have to do, and making some order in my bedroom, since the day D is getting closer and closer.

I have to find a subject to write for the next quarterly newsletter of my SLA chapter—finally, they responded to my yesterday’s email. I shall see what I can come up with. This is a good reason for me to write something of some interest, and in a frame of time that reminds me of those days at the library school when we had to come up, as fast as we could, with a reasonably well-written essay. More than that, writing forces me to associate my thoughts with words, in creative sentence patterns. Otherwise, those thoughts will never change into conceptual thinking: they will simply die, without even having the chance to meaningfully relate to other valuable written thoughts. Fainting memories.

Back to writing

These days, in addition to other books, I’m reading “Doing a literature review” by Chris Hart. Although its approach looks relatively familiar, as we were acquainted with lit reviewing at the light speed at the library school, “Doing a lit review” shows in detail how to do it properly. I wish I had this book a while ago when I really needed it. (I may need it again, though, in a few years, I suppose.) It also contains some useful information for librarians in the sense that, through performing a citation analysis of a plethora of books and scholarly articles, one can build a knowledge tree for a particular topic in a reasonable amount of time.

 

There is another book that I got my hands on, “Research strategies” by William Badke. I think that every librarian should read this book because it provides some very useful info literacy tips for those professionals who want to work in academic libraries, and likely other types of libraries.

 

I will discuss more about these two books as I am reading them.

 

Finally, I found a few books that will help me to improve my vocabulary and develop sophisticated sentence patterns—two problems that bothered me a lot, especially in the last year. I remember reading somewhere, probably quite recently, that using similar sentence patterns over an extended period of time reflects poor thinking, or rather limited, unchallenged cognition. Yes, the more I read about writing, the more humble I feel. However, there is a danger in being too humble since that may prevent me from writing any sentence, since putting thoughts into writing is such an overwhelming experience.

The final week

It feels a bit strange to say, or write, that this is the last week of school (at least for a while). I have not written a lot in this new blog as I had to work on my papers (I like to think that this is a good reason, but I will not fool myself).

The more I write and understand a little bit more about the process of writing, the scarier I find it. Actually, it is overwhelming. Still, I experience a strange, almost pleasure in the act.

Will stop here for tonight.