E. Robert Schulman

Abstract

In this paper we demonstrate that writing a Ph.D. dissertation can have many benefits. Not only do you obtain extensive typesetting experience, but afterwards you can have your frequent-flyer literature addressed to “Dr. Your Name.”

Chapter I: Introduction

Ph.D. dissertations (e.g., Schulman 1995a; Cox 1995) are commonly believed to be comprehensive compendiums of the original research done by a graduate student in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.² In reality, the Ph.D. thesis is usually a number of disparate chapters whose most important feature is not the thoroughness of the experimental description but rather the width of the margins. In this paper, the second article in a series on scientific writing that began with Schulman (1996a), we will discuss the phenomenon of the Ph.D. thesis.

Chapter II: Preparing to Write

There comes a time in the life of every graduate student when she or he realizes that another two years of graduate school cannot be endured. Even though a year spent writing your thesis will be filled with frustration and angst, it will end up being worth it in order to escape school forever.

Remember the following phrase: “No one will ever read your thesis.” You’ll hear this phrase a number of times as you finish up, and it’s vitally important that you believe it to be true. The phrase is important because without it you would be tempted to work on your thesis until everything is perfect, and you would never finish.

(Image credit: Flickr user lunita lu)

Say “It’s good enough for the thesis” to yourself several times a day. Tell yourself that you’ll correct all the mistakes when you turn the various chapters into independent scientific papers, even though this won’t happen (see Schulman 1996aand references therein).

Chapter III: Your Thesis Committee

Your thesis committee should consist of between four and nine researchers in and outside of your field. Each committee member has a specific duty.

Your thesis advisor has the most important job: to reassure you that you don’t have to do many of the things you’re positive you should do. She or he will likely say, “It’s good enough for the thesis” fairly often.

You also need one committee member who will insist on more mathematical rigor, one who will demand that the thesis be made more concise by getting rid of all that irrelevant math, and two or three to say that you should do all the things your thesis advisor told you didn’t need to be done.

There should also be at least one committee member who will never read the thesis, and who will therefore ask only general questions at your thesis defense. The other graduate students who attend your defense will often bet on which professors read your thesis. Be prepared to determine the winner (note that it is not considered sporting to participate in this game yourself).

Try to set a defense date early so as to give your committee ample time to schedule conferences, vacations, and/or elective surgery for that day.

Chapter IV: Producing the Thesis

Legend has it that doctoral students in ancient times used to produce their dissertations using a device called a “typewriter.” While there is some archeological evidence for typewriter use in the past, many researchers doubt the plausibility of such claims (e.g. Schulman 1995a).

(Image credit: Flickr user urbanmkr)

These days, dissertations are produced using word processing programs such as Word or Word Perfect, or computer typesetting systems such as TeX or LaTeX. The former will give you practice in drawing by hand all the symbols that aren’t supported, while with the latter you have the opportunity to craft new typesetting definitions to satisfy your university’s dissertation policies. For example,

\long\def\printfrontnonchapter{\vfil\eject \rightpage\null\vskip 1in \centerline{{\bf \Uppercase{\frontnonchapterheader}}}\vskip 22pt plus 73pt \relax\bigskip\setwidespacing \frontnonchaptertext\par} (Jerius 1992).

Be sure not to choose the wrong method of producing your thesis.

Chapter V: Writing the Thesis

The Ph.D. thesis usually begins with a pithy quote, after which there will sometimes be a dedication to one’s parents, life partner, and/or pet tapir.

Following this is probably the most important part of the dissertation: the acknowledgments section. This is the only section that everyone who picks up your thesis will read. They will happen upon your dissertation in the library and flip through the first few pages, looking for a juicy acknowledgments section. This is your chance to make obscure references to secret loves, damn various faculty members with faint praise, or be very mysterious by having no acknowledgments section at all so that everyone wonders what you’re hiding.

After the acknowledgments should be the various tables of contents, denoting the page numbers on which the reader may find every section, subsection, subsubsection, figure, table, appendix, footnote, and semicolon in the thesis.

Next comes the first thesis chapter, the introduction, which is judged on the basis of how far back in the past you start. Although the introduction is supposed to enable someone with no knowledge of your field to read and understand your thesis, this is an impossible goal. Instead, simply reference sources such as Rontgen (1896), Galileo (1610), Aristotle (-350), or other similarly ancient researchers. The idea to get across is that your work, being based on the work of great scientists of the past, must be truly worthwhile. Even though these works have little to do with your research, your committee isn’t going to look up the references.

After the introduction come chapters that describe what you did, where you did it, when you did it, why you did it, and how much more work has to be done before you can obtain definitive results. This last point is usually discussed in the concluding chapter.

Chapter VI: The Thesis Defense

Remember those dreams you used to have about going to class and finding out that there was a big test that day for which you hadn’t studied? The thesis defense is worse, because you find out that although you studied very hard, you didn’t study the right things.

Your committee members aren’t going to waste their time asking you about your research, because you know more about that than anyone else in the world. Instead, they will ask questions that are really about their research or–if they are in a particularly punchy mood–about fundamental mathematics.

The fun part is that at most universities the first part of your defense is open to the public, so that your parents will probably want to come and videotape the event.

(Image credit: Flickr user chnrdu)

Chapter VII: Rewriting

Your thesis defense was tough, but you survived. Your committee members have signed a piece of paper saying that they are satisfied with your dissertation as long as your thesis advisor is happy with the revisions you make. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to make everything perfect! Remember the phrase from Chapter II, “No one will ever read your thesis.”

Once your advisor is happy with the revisions, take one unbound, unperforated, paginated copy of your dissertation, two copies of your abstract, one extra copy of your title page, the signed evaluation forms from your committee members in a sealed, notarized envelope, the receipt proving your payment of the Thesis Publication Fee, your diploma application, and proof of your doctoral candidacy enrollment to the Bureaucratic Office of Records, Education, and Dissertations (your requirements may vary; void where prohibited).

The folks at BORED will take a ruler to every page in your thesis, making sure that all the margins are correct and insisting that you go back and redo them if even one page is wrong.

Chapter VIII: Distributing Your Thesis

You’ve passed the format check, and it’s time to make a hundred copies of your thesis and distribute them to departmental libraries all over the world so that everyone in your field can read it. Your advisor should pay for the photocopying and postage (see Schulman & Cox 1997 for a detailed justification).

Try not to think of all the errors lurking in your thesis as you address the envelopes to Professor Famous or Doctor Influential. You want to publicize your dissertation as much as possible so that prospective employers will at least have heard your name.

Some journals will publish brief summaries of your dissertation (e.g. Schulman 1995b; Schulman 1996b), but be warned that these journals may want you to format your summary quite specifically. The requirements for the mini-Annals of Improbable Research are particularly restrictive; it can be difficult to summarize five years of work in five lines of text.

Chapter IX: Conclusion

(Image credit: Flickr user Mr.Tea)

Congratulations, Doctor! You’ve escaped from graduate school and can now have your frequent-flyer literature addressed to Dr. Your Name, complain when forms only list Mr/Ms/Mrs, and smirk when surgeons whine about all the people with academic doctorates who are making the title meaningless for medical doctors. Go out and make the world a better place.

Bibliography

• Aristotle, -350, On The Heavens, Athens, Greece.
• Cox, C. V. 1995, Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan.
• Galilei, G. 1610, Sidereus Nuncius, Venice, Italy.
• Jerius, D. H. 1992, Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan.
• Kaplan, J. M. 1996, Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University.
• Rontgen, W. C. 1896, Nature, 53, 274.
• Schulman, E. R. 1995a, Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan.
• Schulman, E. 1995b, mini-Annals of Improbable Research, 1995-08, 4.
• Schulman, E. R. 1996a, Annals of Improbable Research, Vol. 2, No. 5, 8.
• Schulman, E. 1996b, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 108, 460.
• Schulman. E. R. & Cox, C. V. 1997, Annals of Improbable Research, Vol. 3, No. 5, 8.

Notes

1. There is no note 1.
2. One does not actually need to include any philosophy in the thesis unless one is getting a Doctorate of Philosophy in philosophy, and even in that case the philosophical component can be minimized (e.g., Kaplan 1996).

__________________________

This article is republished with permission from the September-October 1997 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

With so many fonts out there, have you ever wanted to use something that’s just “normal?” Designer Mortiz Resl combined almost 1000 fonts on his computer and the average font is what he came up with.

This project shows what a font would look like if it consisted of all typefaces installed on my system. Every character from a to z is drawn using every single font with a low opacity. In total there are over 900 typefaces in my library. I didn’t exclude the ugly ones.

What do you think? It seems pretty average to me.

Link Via Mental Floss

TL;DR stands for “too long; didn’t read.” Redditor theshe works at a newspaper. She commissioned this cross-stitch for her boss, who is always trying to shorten wordy stories. These should be mass-produced for all bloggers to hang over their computers! Link

Storytellers drew inspiration from the people passing through Aotea Square in Auckland, New Zealand. The stories were projected on a large screen, where folks could see themselves woven into the stories. The stunt was a promotion for the BNZ Literary Awards. Link -Thanks, Jono Aidney!

My mom used to say to me, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

It used to drive me nuts. But now I know what she means.

Your job is to collect ideas. The best way to collect ideas is to read. Read, read, read, read, read. Read the newspaper. Read the weather. Read the signs on the road. Read the faces of strangers. The more you read, the more you can choose to be influenced by.

Link -via b3ta

Update: You can also hear an interview with Kleon about this essay. Link

“We submitted his entry because we felt his penmanship was amazing considering he completes most of his work without using his prostheses,” said Cheryl Hasenfus, Readfield Elementary School principal.

At those times, Nicholas writes by holding a pen or pencil between his upper arms.

On behalf of Zaner-Bloser, a publisher of educational materials, Hasenfus presented a trophy to Nicholas during a school assembly for his excellent penmanship. The school is in Readfield, Maine.

Inspired by his ability, Zaner-Bloser decided to create a new award category in his honor: Nicholas Maxim Special Award for Excellent Penmanship

Other winners of the competition will be announced in May. Link -via Arbroath

In 1984, author Georgelle Hirliman got a bad case of writer’s block and decided that she needed to shake things up, so she set up shop with her typewriter in a storefront so passer-bys can come and interact. Georgelle died in 2010, but a new writer named Lauren DeRosa has stepped up to take her place as Writer in the Window: Link – via Everything And Nothing

A Study In Scarlet

The first Sherlock Holmes story may very well be one of the weirdest. It starts out with the apprehension of a double murder suspect in London. As he explains his motives for the killings, we are told about a man named John Ferrier and a young girl named Lucy, who are the sole survivors of a group of an ill-fated wagon train and are both dying of thirst. Fortunately, a band of Mormons led by Brigham Young comes by and offers to save them, as long as they agree to convert to Mormonism and come with the group to start a new “promised land.”

John adopts Lucy and while the two have happily converted to the Mormon way of life, he has secretly sworn to never let her marry a Mormon, where she will only be one of many wives. Years later, she falls in love with a traveling man named Jefferson Hope. The two are engaged and the wedding is planned to take place in three months, when Jefferson returns from a trip he must take for his job.

After Jefferson leaves, John is approached by Brigham Young who tells him Lucy must marry a Mormon. He says she can take a month to make her choice between two eligible men in the town. John sends for Jefferson to return and save Lucy. He arrives on the last day before she must make her choice and Lucy, John and Jefferson sneak away. While on the run, Jefferson leaves one day to hunt for food and returns to the camp to find John dead and Lucy missing. He returns to the town and discovers Lucy was forced to marry one of the two Mormon men. A month later, Lucy dies. Jefferson sneaks into the house the night before the funeral and removes her wedding ring. He then swears revenge, stalking the town and almost killing the two men many times.

The men flee to London, hoping to escape certain death, but Jefferson is able to track them down and kill them, which is where the story had begun. Jefferson is already dying and the night before his trial, he passes away, with a smile on his face.

Unsurprisingly, the Mormons of the time (and, I assume, modern Mormons as well) were not happy with their portrayal as murdering kidnappers. Conan Doyle publicly defended the story claiming that his story was completely based on fact, but his daughter claimed that he said many times that the story was filled with a number of errors about the Mormons and one of Brigham Young’s descendants claimed that Doyle privately apologized to the church.

The Man With The Twisted Lip

Sherlock Holmes cases are ripe with people living double lives, but in this case, the secret identity is more strange than criminal. Holmes is hired by a woman, Mrs. St. Clair, who claims her husband has disappeared, but she swears that after his disappearance, she saw him in the second story window of an opium den. When police search the building, they cannot find the husband, but they do discover a disfigured beggar in the room beside Mr. St. Clair’s clothes. His coat is then found outside, loaded with tons of pennies and halfpennies.

The beggar is arrested for Mr. St. Clair’s murder, but a few days later, the wife receives a letter from her husband in his handwriting. Sherlock then reconsiders the case and heads to the police station, where he uses a sponge to clean the beggar’s face, revealing that he is, indeed, Mr. St. Clair. The man then confesses that he used to work as a newspaper reporter and once had to go undercover as a beggar to get a story. During that time, he made a great amount of money and he realized he could make more money begging than working as a reporter (I think that’s still the case today), so he quit his job and started living a double life. If you thought middle class people pretending to be homeless so they can earn an easy living was a modern problem, this story should be a wake up call.

Interestingly, this story not only has a weird resolution, it also stands out from the rest of Sherlock Holmes tales in that no crime actually occurred and that Sherlock never explains how he solved the mystery –although the tale does give enough clues to explain itself.

The Adventure of the Three Garridebs

Think that getting contacted by people in other countries who tell you about your recent inheritance is a modern scam? As it turns out, this scam started long before the internet allowed us to get in touch with random strangers. In fact, the so-called “Nigerian scam” was used by an American man in the 1924 Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs.”

In this tale, a man named Nathan Garrideb approaches Sherlock because he needs to find another man with the same name in order for him to obtain a $5,000,000 inheritance. He says that he has been contacted by an American man named John Garrideb who will inherit a $15,000,000 estate from Alexander Hamilton Garrideb, but in order to receive the fortune, the will stipulates that he must find two other men with the same surname and share the fortune with them equally. Because John couldn’t find anyone with that name in America, he has gone to England and has so far only found Nathan.

Sherlock soon learns that Nathan does not own anything particularly valuable. While he and Watson are visiting the house, John arrives with a newspaper advertisement that has been placed by Howard Garrideb. Notably, the ad is filled with a number of American spellings and phrases. John then insists that Nathan visit Birmingham to meet this Howard Garrideb.

The next day, Sherlock visits Scotland Yard and finds a photograph of John stating that his real name is James Winter and that he was previously charged with shooting a man in Chicago, but he was acquitted due to mitigating circumstances. The man John shot was a past occupant of Nathan Garrideb’s house. Sherlock then realizes that John was working to get John out of the house to look for something left by the previous occupant.

He and Watson return to the house where they find John breaking into a cellar. They arrest the thief, after he shoots at them, barely striking Watson, and discover the cellar housed a counterfeiting printing press. James Winter goes to jail and Nathan is so disappointed that he ends up in a nursing home shortly after the case ends.

This story is strikingly similar to another weird Sherlock Holmes tale, “The Adventure of the Red-Headed League,” where a pawn broker is hired for a job for the “Red-Headed League” based solely on how bright his hair color is. Sherlock quickly realizes the job is just a scam to get the man out of his regular office so cons can use his basement to break into the bank vault next door.

The Adventure of the Yellow Face

While Conan O’Doyle might have shown his religious bigotry in “A Study In Scarlet,” he shows a surprisingly progressive attitude towards racism in this tale. Sherlock is approached by a client named Grant Munro, who is suspicious of his wife. She was previously married in America, but the rest of her family died from yellow fever. She then moved to England and married Mr. Munro. The couple was extremely happy together until his wife asked him for a hundred pounds and begged him not to ask why. Shortly afterwards, she started sneaking away to a cottage near their home. Mr. Munro swore he saw someone with a yellow face in the window of the cottage, but after breaking in, he found the place empty. Strangely, the cottage was well-furnished and featured a portrait of his wife on the mantle.

At first, Holmes thinks it must be the woman’s first husband who has returned to England to blackmail her, but when they eventually break into the cabin together, they discover the yellow-faced person is wearing a yellow mask and underneath is a little black girl. As it turns out, the woman’s husband did die in America, but her half-black daughter did not. Because the wife was terrified that her new husband would not love her if he knew she was once married to a black man, she tried to keep the child a secret. When the husband discovers the truth though, he picks up the little girl, gives her a kiss and then holds his wife’s hand as they leave the cottage.

This story is unique for Sherlock Holmes stories in that there is no actual crime, no villain and Sherlock is absolutely wrong in his assumptions. Of course, it also is notable for having such a surprisingly anti-racist message for readers of 1893.

The Adventure of The Creeping Man

While modern crime investigation methods have progressed quite a bit since the Sherlock Holmes series took place, most of the stories are still good enough to hold up in today’s society. The Adventure of The Creeping Man may be one of the only Sherlock Holmes stories of that leaves us giggling about antiquated medical ideas.

In this tale, Holmes has been approached by the secretary and the daughter of a respected sixty-one year old professor who has recently become engaged to a much younger woman. Shortly after the engagement was announced, the professor left for two weeks without telling anyone where he went. His secretary, who opens all of the professor’s mail for him, was able to discover that the professor went to Prague.

Since his return, the professor started acting rather strange. He insisted the secretary not open any letters that arrive with a certain marking on the envelope. His faithful wolfhound suddenly turned on him and had to be tied up outside. His secretary also says that he once entered the professor’s room at night and saw him crawling on his hands and feet. The professor’s daughter says that she once saw him staring through her second-story bedroom window one night although they do not own any ladders at home. Despite this all, he is still quite lucid and has been able to maintain his teaching career without any issues.

Sherlock realizes the dog attacks occurred exactly nine days apart every time. He starts to reach a conclusion when the secretary says that he once angered the professor greatly when he picked up a box that the professor had brought back from Prague.

Given all the info, Holmes realizes that the professor has been taking some kind of a drug every nine days. He then makes the connection that the professor has been behaving like a monkey. He and Watson then come to the house on the night of the next drug dose and discover the man to be scampering on all fours, climbing up the side of the house and tormenting the dog. Eventually the dog gets loose and Holmes has to intervene to save the professor. While the professor is unconscious from the attack, Sherlock enters his study and discovers the drug along with a letter from a quack physician who has advised the professor to get his hands on a substance made from a lemur extract in order to help him be younger and more virile, since he is planning to marry a much younger woman. If only he had access to quality Viagra.

The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire

This tale begins when Sherlock is contacted by a man who says his wife has been sucking the blood from their baby’s neck. She was discovered with blood on her lips and the child had a wound on its neck. The wife has made no attempt to explain herself. According to her handmaiden, it has occurred more than once now and the child has been put under the custody of a nurse.

The client also has a fifteen year-old son from his first wife. While the second wife is ordinarily a kind woman, she beats her stepson. Sherlock immediately realizes what is going on, but insists on visiting the home before he makes any announcements.

When they arrive, Sherlock notices the South American weapons on display and he takes a look at the wounds on the baby’s neck. He then announces what happened, knowing that it is going to be a terrible blow to his client. He reveals that the oldest son is very jealous of his new brother –to the point where he has taken to shooting poisoned darts at the baby. The mother was sucking the blood from the baby’s neck to remove the poison and save the child, but she could not bear to tell the truth to her husband and break his heart. Holmes then suggests the older boy be sent off to sea for a year as punishment, although doesn’t really seem like a suitable solution for such a sociopathic person.

Sources: The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Wikipedia #1, #2

Do you have any favorite, slightly offbeat Sherlock Holmes tales, or stories from other sleuths? If so, share them in the comments.

You’ve never heard of me, but there’s a good chance that you’ve read some of my work. I’m a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists.

I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I’ve worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic year, I am working on upward of 20 assignments.

In the midst of this great recession, business is booming. At busy times, during midterms and finals, my company’s staff of roughly 50 writers is not large enough to satisfy the demands of students who will pay for our work and claim it as their own.

It’s not plagiarism, as each paper is paid for and written to specifications with the understanding that the author will receive no writing credit. But the student does none of the work to produce the paper. There’s a serious discussion at Metafilter on whether this activity is wrong or not. I was surprised that there was any question as to the ethics of hiring someone to do your college work, but I graduated over 30 years ago, and the world has changed a lot since then. What you do think? Is this cheating or just another path to your goal? Link -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Jonathan Barkat for The Chronicle Review)

Cake Wrecks has a roundup of cakes in which words just don’t fit. This one made me laugh -the line break would have been just fine if they had spelled it correctly! Link

I Write Like is a generator that proposes to analyze your writing and compare it to published authors. The above is the result I got when I entered some text from an article I wrote for mental_floss. However, the results do not tell me why my writing resembles James Joyce’s prose. Then I entered another sample, this time from an article I wrote for Neatorama.

Again, no explanation for why the results are different. They might even be random. Grab a few paragraphs of your writing and try it out for yourself! Link -via The Daily What

It’s time to celebrate the not-so-scary Mr. Scarry in honor of what would have been his ninety-first birthday this June 5.

Image via Amazon

The Great Teacher Was A Horrible Student

While most Richard Scarry books are incredibly educational for kids, he was a terrible student and hated school. He excelled at scaring the girls in his school in Boston and was permanently banned from the library after bringing in too many snakes to slither along the tables and bookshelves.

He received so many poor grades that he almost dropped out of school in junior high and ended up taking five years to finish high school after being held back due to excessive absences. During this period, many other children were dropping out of school to help keep their families afloat during the Depression, but Richard’s family owned a successful shop that helped keep them living comfortably despite the economic downturn.

Around this time, his artistic talents began blooming and on top of practicing his mother’s handwriting for excuse notes to get out of class, he also started finding himself quite able when it came to drawing the human form.

Unfortunately, his parents were far from excited when they learned about his new talents –as they made the discovery by finding his stack of charcoal drawings depicting nude girls. His dad asked him, after discovering an image of a beautiful woman with tassels on her breasts, “What’s going to become of you, Richard?” A born artist and trouble-maker, he already had a response ready, “if I’m going to be an artist, sir, I have to learn how to draw the human form.”

While his father desperately wanted him to go to an Ivy League school like Harvard, Richard’s terrible grades and bad attitude ensured that was little more than a pipe dream and he instead was sent off to a local business school where he again did miserably and he dropped out within his first year.

After long last, his father gave up hopes of having a child do anything more than be an artist and he finally sent the boy to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he flourished until he joined the army to fight in World War II. Scarry never did obtain a college diploma.

Image via Gwen [Flickr]

Artistic Advances In The Army

When Richard first joined the army, he listed his occupation as artist, which caused them to put him in radio repair school. Angered at the prospect of more schooling, he bombed the entry test and earned the esteemed reputation of having the lowest score ever recorded on the test –a negative 13. He later joked, “My exam mark was minus 13, so they decided to make me a corporal.”

Because he did so badly, he was instead assigned to be a military art director and was instructed to tell the troops why they were fighting and to share news from home. To do this job, he paraphrased clips from Time magazine and illustrated them and then sent them off as fliers.

He impressed his superiors enough that they soon promoted him to be the editor and writer of Publications for the Information and Morale Services section of the Allied Force Headquarters. With his new position, he was given enough leisure time to visit Africa, Algiers, Italy and France, an experience that left him with a lifelong drive to travel.

When the war ended, Scarry’s job had provided him enough experience developing content for a publication with over one million readers every week and he was able to get great positions in the New York art world without ever having to work his way up.

Big Success In New York, New York

Immediately upon moving to New York he was given an illustrator job at Vogue, but he was fired three weeks later, when they claimed he just wasn’t right for the position. He was soon able to get a few positions at other magazines but really made a name for himself doing freelance children’s illustrations.

It wasn’t long before he submitted his impressive portfolio to the Artist and Writers Guild, a subsidiary in New York that was just about to start mass-producing a new line of children’s books that would sell for 25 cents each. He was immediately hired and started out doing artwork for other writers, including his future wife, Patricia Murphy, who he married in 1949.

By the early fifties, Scarry was inspired and experienced enough in children’s books that he decided to start writing his own titles. His first book, The Great Big Car and Truck Book, was published in 1951. It did moderately well and featured many of his interests, such as travel and technology, but it was most notable for being his only title to use humans instead of athropomorphized animals. His second book, Rabbit and His Friends, introduced his use of talking animals, but his true success didn’t take place until the 1963 title The Best Word Book Ever.

This groundbreaking work served as a sort of picture dictionary that was broken up by word type, rather than being organized alphabetically. This was also the first place he featured many of his famous anthropomorphic characters that would later be the backbone of his Big Busy World and Busytown.

Image via Senor Ryan [Flickr]

The Secret Behind Scarry Success

The reason the classic Scarry books have done so well to this day is because they are so complex, yet so easy to follow. Children love that they can flip through the pages before they can even read and make up stories about the characters. At the same time, there is so much going on in his pictures that they often re-read the books over and over to make sure they catch all the action on every page.

This seems to be what Scarry was going for. He once said, “I’m not interested in creating a book that is read once and then placed on the shelf and forgotten. I am very happy when people write that they have worn out my books, or that they are held together by Scotch tape. I consider that the ultimate compliment.”

That’s not all there is to like. When parents read the books to kids, they enjoy the fact that the questions proposed throughout the pages start getting the children thinking and talking, meaning Scarry’s books help educate youngsters on an array of levels that go far deeper than most children’s books.

Another positive aspect of the titles is his use of animals. While they are certainly cute, they also serve to be much more enjoyable and identifiable to children. One of the reasons his books have done so well throughout the world is the fact that animals do not have racial characteristics, which allow all children to connect with the little girl bunny or little boy cat. He explained “children can identify more closely with pictures of animals than they can with pictures of another child. They see an illustration of a blond girl or a dark-haired boy, who they know is somebody other than themselves, and competition creeps in. With imagination — and children all have marvelous imagination — they can easily identify with an anteater who is a painter or a goat who is an Indian.”

Images via Pinot & Dita and beccaplusmolly [Flickr]

Controversy Quickly Corrected

Of course, that’s not to say Richard’s work was always free from issues revolving around political correctness. While his Big, Busy World books were based around real observations he noticed while traveling, the post seventies world was far less accepting of a near-sighted panda from Hong Kong or Manuel of Mexico with a pot of beans on his head. As a result, he largely stopped writing these titles and Random House stopped distributing the titles.

As if that weren’t enough controversy, mothers soon started being offended by Scarry’s decidedly fifties roles of housewives taking care of the children while the husbands go off to work. Really though, Richard wasn’t sexist, he was just not with the times. As soon as he heard the complaints, he happily revised his images to show female farmers and police officers and men pushing strollers and cooking in the kitchen. If you’re interested, the differences between the versions are well documented in this Flickr set by user Kokogiak.

The Patented Scarry Work Process

While the artist originally started painting his works in full-color watercolors, his signature books are all done using a work process he perfected throughout the years. First he would sketch out his panels with pencil, then he would re-draw the finalized versions with blue pencil. Then he would color in all the red areas on every page, then blue, then yellow, etc. and at the end, he would draw in all the detail lines with a pen.

After he finished the works, he would tape on his narrative texts that quickly pecked out on a typewriter. Many of these contained spelling errors and other typos, but he left that to the editors to worry about. Despite his popularity, Richard was always an artist first and a writer a distant second.

While he always hated leaving white space and loved complicated machineries and cut-away diagrams, his early titles aren’t as loaded with these aspects. When things progressed on though, his titles were increasingly complex. By the time he completed his final work, Richard Scarry’s Biggest Word Book Ever, the sixty-six year old Scarry’s eyesight was failing miserably, but that didn’t stop him from finishing the artwork for the monstrous 15 3/4 x 24 inches book. It was so large that Random House had to charge $29 per copy, but it was so popular that the first printing sold out in no time despite the price.

Image via Rotten

A Family Affair

In their later years, Richard and his wife bought a chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland. Here he worked diligently on his books, sitting at his desk every day between 8 A.M. and 4 P.M. After his eyesight failed, he stopped working on his books, but he still lived happily with his wife until he passed away from a fatal heart attack on April 30, 1994.

These days, his son Richard Scarry Jr. carries on the tradition, writing and illustrating books under his father’s name and periodically under the name “Huck Scarry,” which he adapted from Huckle Cat, one of the most common characters in the Busytown world.

Image via JB Publishing

Sources: Ciao UK, Wikipedia, Barnes & Noble, Carnegie Museums, Kirjasto and Rotten

The four different patterns and markings are repeated and believed to convey ownership or purpose and to differentiate the eggs from each other.

The researchers led by Pierre-Jean Texier, of the University of Bordeaux, said that before this discovery, the first signs of art, writing or ‘culture’ was thought to have been first shown in the late Stone Age between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago.

It included cave paintings dating back to 30,000 years BC, thought to be some of the earliest examples of decorative art or written communication.

But this latest discovery, which is much older, showed “collective identities and individual expressions” that were the beginning of modern civilised behaviour, they said.

In other words, writing. Or at least a form or communication that led to writing. The researchers examined 270 fragments of ostrich eggs found in South Africa. Link -via Scribal Terror

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

On the one hand, you may look at YouTube comments and chat rooms and think literacy is going into the dumpster. On the other hand, those are millions of people who would otherwise never communicate a thought in public if the internet were not available to them. Writer Clive Thompson says the new technology has changed the meaning of writing for younger people.

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see.

Of course, not every young internet commenter will go on to be a Stanford student. Do you see the internet as an aid or a hindrance to literacy? Link -via Metafilter

(image credit: Mads Berg)

Text messaging, e-mail, and word processing have replaced handwriting outside the classroom, said Cheryl Jeffers, a professor at Marshall University’s College of Education and Human Services, and she worries they’ll replace it entirely before long.

“I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds.”

For Jeffers, cursive writing is a lifelong skill, one she fears could become lost to the culture, making many historic records hard to decipher and robbing people of “a gift.”

What do you think? Is it important for children to learn cursive, or should it go the way of the dinosaur? Link -via Digg

(image credit: AP/Bob Bird)

“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”

That gem was written by 55-year-old David McKenzie of Federal Way, Washington. Honors also go to runner-up Warren Blair of Ashburn, Virginia and winners in various fiction categories. Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Allivymar.

Ever since the dawn of civilization, men have demonstrated their cultural sophistication, scientific knowledge and philosophical aptitude in written word kept in libraries for peers and, less often, the public, to access and review.

We have a tendency to assume that knowledge and the availability thereof is a modern concept, but in actuality the huge Great Library of Alexandria and the Celsus library in Ephesus prove that the concept of libraries is an ancient one.

We tend to take for granted the notion that the people of the world can or should be taught to read. The ability to read is even used as an indicator of poverty and development. In 1998, the UN defined 80% of the world population as literate, defined as the ability to read and write a simple sentence in a language. It was not always thus. In ancient times, literacy was the trade secret of professional scribes.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Arby.

I won! 50,039 words with three hours to spare. How did the rest of you NaNo participants do? Will you do it again next year? Are you celebrating? I am, although it’s a pretty meager celebration: a beer and some guilt-free Internet surfing. Leave a comment and let us know how you ended up!

And, previously on Neatorama:
NaNoWrimo is Upon Us
NaNoWriMo Progress
The Ravings of a Mad (almost) Novelist