Research Paper Foibles

I've had this blog now for a while, but I never can think of anything original and clever to post on it. Today, though, I decided I'm just gonna start throwing stuff out there and see how it goes.

For instance, I have shared with a few others some of the flawed writings and conversations of my students, but here are some recent favorites:

Some kid just wrote in their research paper that the author Michael Hague (a children’s author) “published The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe in 1980 because he always believed in his imagination that there was a world where animals knew how to talk” and also that “in 1991 he made up a story for his daughter called Peter Pan”. Can you smell the Wikipedia?

Another one answered, when I asked the significance of the tapestry of David & Bathsheba in The Scarlet Letter, "Isn't Bathsheba the vampire in the Bible?" When I prompted her to explain (to see if maybe she was misquoting or misunderstanding), she proceded to tell me all she had learned about the vampires mentioned in the Bible. Niiiice.

One that I use as a lesson every year is how a former student included information in a research paper once about how Mark Twain & Edgar Allan Poe were friends and inspired each other in their letter writing. When prompted for her source, she told me found it on Wikipedia. Together, we looked it up in a *real book* and found that EAP died when MT was about 9 years old.