My last post presented a case study of how print news reports on plagiarism in the university. In this post, I want to reverse the poles: a student paper publishes a letter to the editor; the letter is picked up by an online scandal aggregator and turned into a news story. And the story jumps from site to site, makes its way to MSNBC and from there jumps the Atlantic and appears in the Daily Mail. What can we learn about 21st century writing...

I need a show of hands. How many of you were outraged to learn that Alan Gribben, professor of English at Auburn-Montgomery, has edited an edition of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, due out next month from NewSouth Books, that substitutes the word “slave” for the word “nigger”? This event sure has generated a lot of heat. The New York Times editorial board doesn’t mince words about this act of word mincing: “We...

The following entry is the “SFW” (i.e., PG-13) version of: This Blog Entry Has Been Rated NSFW What is “age appropriate” viewing? Who determines when you can see what? Let’s begin with some representative vignettes. The first from the print-centric paradigm of my youth. When I was a teenager in the seventies, growing up in the South, there were visible, physical boundaries marking what was fit for consumption by...

What is “age appropriate” viewing? Who determines when you can see what? Let’s begin with some representative vignettes. The first from the print-centric paradigm of my youth. When I was a teenager in the seventies, growing up in the South, there were visible, physical boundaries marking what was fit for consumption by those who were “under aged.” At the back of the local used paperback bookstore, a curtain...