Textbooks

While we've talked at length about the decline of print and its consequences, I sincerely hope that at least one form of print dies out, and sooner rather than later at that--textbooks. I read recently that the price of textbooks is rising exponentially faster than inflation could possibly account for. According to an article in the Huffington Post: "College textbook prices are 812 percent higher than they were a little more than three decades ago, the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank, reports. Textbook costs have well outpaced the 559 percent increase in tuition and fees over roughly the same period." 812% more expensive than they were 30 years ago. 812%. How is that even legal? With "new editions" coming out every year, the addition of useless online components or CDs, and a heavy markup from school bookstores, textbooks are huge financial drains on students who are already incurring piles of debt from rising tuition costs (looking at you, TCU). Personally, my most expensive semester cost me a little over $350 in textbook costs, even with rentals and used copies. I think I've gotten off easy--I've heard of pre-med students with books costing over $700 per semester.

In my opinion, the quicker we move to online-only textbooks, the better. I'm not sure if they use the costs of publication as a justification for why they've gotten so much more expensive, but regardless, I would imagine that online copies couldn't possibly cost as much as print versions; if textbook companies tried to utilize the same predatory pricing techniques, I think it would be much more apparent if there wasn't a big, heavy, bulky book they could wave around as their rationale. 

Author Interview Synopsis & Transcript

            For my Author Interview, I decided to call my older sister, Meghan Johnson, and ask her about her recent publication. Meghan, currently pursuing a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is an aspiring school/clinical psychologist who recently wrote and defended her thesis in a conference in San Diego. The ~50 page article called, “Evaluations of a Bullying Case Involving a Student with Autism Spectrum Disorder,” was published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology (pub: 2015 vol. 45), the premier academic journal for social psychologists.

Conducted with the help of her research professor, the study evaluated responses to different bullying situations in a university setting; in the experiment, test subjects listened to a recording of a disciplinary committee deliberating over a case wherein a victim of bullying was either autistic, dyslexic, or not diagnosed with any disorders in an effort to determine how bullying of autistic students affects students. Meghan, who has worked with kids & students with various disabilities since she was 14, felt passionately about the subject and was thankful she got the opportunity to conduct this experiment with all the resources and support needed for it to be successful.

Overall, Meghan thought the process of publishing was challenging, yet rewarding. The entire process took about a year and a half from start to finish, with the majority of that time spent negotiating the peer review/revision process after the paper was already completed. Meghan found the scientific, structured nature of the writing to be relatively easy to produce—there are strict guidelines for academic papers in scholarly journals, so for her, it was more a matter of doing the necessary research and completing the different sections on time rather than perfecting her prose and creating an interesting piece of writing. In regards to the future of academic writing, Meghan feels as though not much will change in the “digital age;” new research will continue to come out, it will “just be a more streamlined process to access it.” Meghan hopes to conduct and publish one more experiment before receiving her PhD, although given how busy she is with work and school, she feels as though it will be unlikely unless she is brought on as a paid research assistant.

Below is a typed transcript of our conversation highlighting the main points of her responses to each question as the interview unfolded. Our conversation was over an hour and a half long, and admittedly, we had a tendency to stray from the interview questions from time to time, so I made a judgment call and elected to transcribe the relevant information rather than include the long recording.

1.     Who or what inspires you as an author?

- “The student populations I’ll be serving as a school psychologist. I’ve been working with kids with disabilities forever now and I’ve always wanted to work in schools, so this experiment was kind of a natural intersection of those two motivations.”

2.     Who or what motivates you as an author?

      - “I’m motivated to find answers to questions as a researcher and social psychologist; I think writing finds connections, interpretations, and evaluations that can’t be discovered just by reading other articles, so it’s important to consolidate that information in writing even if the topic itself seems super specific. All published information contributes to the overall wealth of knowledge on the subject, and I guess I wanted to give back? It's cool to be a part of this community of smart people all interested in the same subjects as me.”

3.     What author[s] or book[s] influenced you as an author the most?

- “Well, the writing I do now is different than what influenced me originally back in my ‘school-school’ days—if I was writing creatively, I’d definitely point to Master and Margerita as my biggest influence. I love the style, I love the content—the book brings me to a new place.”

4.     Most often, where, when, and how do you write?

      - “I write in my office, on the computer, or at home on the couch when the office gets too boring, although Mav (her cat) is really bad for my productivity… I tend to write in bits and pieces rather than all at once. It can be kind of draining to actually sit down and write some of this dense information, and I think my writing could be called scatterbrained. It’s just like how I tell stories.”

5.     How is technology changing print culture, specifically regarding authors and readers?

      - “For research, everything is almost entirely online these days… I mean, I could get journals in paper, but everything I researched for this paper was online in databases… I think textbooks on computers will take over paper textbooks soon too… I prefer reading on paper, but the portability and accessibility of the Internet just makes it way easier to have it all online. Do I think this is a good change? Well it definitely increases accessibility, which I suppose helps more people in the long run, but I think it takes away from the traditional aspects of reading, which I’ve always loved.

6.     When you write, who is your intended audience?

- “My audience would be readers of peer reviewed journals in psychology, other researchers, or people who like scientific literature. It’s a pretty particular topic in a pretty particular location—I wouldn’t call it light reading, that’s for sure.”

7.     How is the current technological revolution changing your audience?

- “It expands the audience by making other articles more accessible; I noticed this happen all the time during my research, where I’d find myself going on tangents and discovering new and interesting research I never planned on looking up. It’s much easier to click a link and discover this whole wealth of knowledge on a topic than it was 20 years ago when everything was in paper. I think this’ll have a big impact on my audience—unintended researchers will just happen to stop by my article like I did to theirs. I think it’s great.”

8.     What do you think reading and authorship will look like fifty years from now?

- “In terms of research-based literature, it will look pretty similar… I think it’s always pretty much been the same, it’s just more streamlined now given how accessible everything is. But for ‘normal’ authors, I think there will be much more pressure to adapt to the Internet and get the next new bestseller. There’s already a huge discrepancy between those who ‘made it’ and those who haven’t, and I think it would be a tough career path to enter that’ll only get more difficult in the future.”

9.     How did you find a publisher, and how long did that process take?

- “So generally speaking, my article went through a peer review process, and I waited about a year for it to finally be published… I submitted it in July 2014, and I had a couple journals in mind for publication, but the one that picked it was the target the whole time which was really great… You definitely don’t want to submit to more than one in case they both get accepted. I thought about that idea too but my research professor told me I’d get in HUGE trouble if that problem came up… Once it gets to the peer review process, there are a few options—it can either get accepted right away and published, it could be accepted with some minor revisions, it could get denied but given the option to fix the problems and send it back, or it could be just plain rejected… I got the 2^nd option—one reviewer told me to shorten it a bit and take out some of the research on one topic, and another reviewer told me to expand the research on a different topic. It’s pretty rare to get accepted on your first publication on your first try though, so I was really happy with how it all played out.”

10. How much did your manuscript change during your publisher’s editorial process?

- “So it was too long originally. The final paper was a bit shorter, by about 5 pages or so. Two of my peer reviewers had minimal comments, like I said—one wanted more information on one aspect of the study, and one wanted a better definition for a certain thing. I’d call it tweaking—there were no major additions or subtractions to the original manuscript.”

11. Do you have a definite and specific organization and structure in mind as you begin writing?  If so, how definite and specific is your outline?

      - “Research articles in journals, and this one in particular, have a very specific structure and organization… There’s also APA standards for writing and formatting along with the journal’s standards… Basically, everything was in a prescribed format, down to the length of paragraphs and sections… All I really had to do was make sure I met all the criteria for each of the necessary sections, which helped a lot with keeping it all focused and on topic.”

12. How would you describe your writing process? 

      - “Well because it was a thesis, there were deadlines for specific sections, so each section could get the consideration it needed from my research professor. I was always on a time crunch… It was scientific, but I mean I also had a big emotional involvement with it all because it was my thesis.”

13. Do you have any writing habits or rituals that help your wiring process?

      - “I write really well under pressure, so I would tend to procrastinate… Yeah nothing’s really changed there since high school… There was definitely a controlled chaos to the procrastination though—I didn’t let it get too out of hand, just used it to motivate me to get it all done. I don’t know why I still put myself through so much misery when I write. Also, I did a ton of research, so it helped me to begin with an organization of the relevant information… I mean I referenced over 50 articles in my paper, so organizing it all was a necessity.”

14.  Do you write in multiple genres?

      - “I’m not published in any other genre… I’ve done writing throughout my academic career, but just typical student writing. Essays and stuff. I’ve always liked [non-scientific writing], but I don’t really have time for it anymore.

15. Besides teaching and authorship, have you had any other jobs in the writing field?

- “For my Masters program, I was a TA in undergrad research methods, so I had to teach students how to write research articles. You should have called me for that one you had to write!”

International News Coverage

 I am currently working on a research paper for a Political Science class called Media & Politics. The goal of the paper is to conduct original research into a topic that deals with the broad question: "How well does the media live up to its role as facilitator of democracy?" There is a huge range of potential topics, but I chose to take a look at international news coverage and biases inherent within U.S. coverage of international events, namely ethnocentrism, a tendency by journalists to compare foreign countries/issues to the U.S. For the research side of things, I randomly sampled 20 articles from U.S. news sources covering 3 different countries involved in the European Debt Crisis, the international topic I used to ground my paper. Using the LexisNexis database, I was able to find all the articles I needed, quickly peruse them for evidence of U.S. ethnocentrism, and record my results. However, throughout the whole process, I couldn't help but think about the future of international news coverage.

We've been learning throughout the semester about the decline of newspapers, and with them, a decline in the number of quality journalists contributing to the "Iron Core" of news, or the collection of pure facts from which all news (TV, radio, blogs, etc) draws its information. In 10 years from now, what will coverage of international events look like? The European Debt Crisis is a major geopolitical event with huge implications for the global (and specifically U.S.) economy, but with shrinking budgets and readership, will U.S. news sources have to limit their coverage of major overseas incidents to save costs? The Debt Crisis isn't "sexy" or dramatic, but it's still vitally important information that we should all be aware of- are we going to have to turn to European-based sources like The Guardian in the future rather than the New York Times? I'm concerned that the effect of declining news coverage will make us, as a nation, less aware and informed than we have been in the past- it may be easier to get information now than it ever was, but if the quality & amount of that information continues to shrink, global connectedness might not even matter.

Publishing and Social Media

One of the dangers of social media I think warrants more discussion is the fact that everything we do these days is being published. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn- the number of platforms we use keeps on growing, as does the amount of personal information we publish on a daily basis. Even this blog, these exact words, will be posted online for everyone to see. 100 years ago, even 50 years ago, that idea would have been absurd- no one would have guessed that an average 21-year-old student would have been able to write some words and post them somewhere so that the entire world would be able to read them. While it's exciting to be a part of this revolution and have that kind of power, I think there is definitely some danger involved with this capability.

We've all heard the horror stories from our peers and parents of not getting hired after potential employers went through social media accounts and saw something incriminating. I personally try to make sure that nothing about me pops up online that would shed me in a negative light, but it's a difficult task- everyone takes pictures, everyone makes posts, it's just not possible to maintain a completely positive and completely risk-averse presence online.

With that being said, I think social media accounts should make more of an effort to ensure that their users are protected. Viewing and deleting old posts and pictures should be easier, and there should be better methods to ensure that nothing is published that individuals wouldn't want the world to see- as we all know, once it's online, it's out there for good. Digital publishing clearly has its benefits, but the dangers are growing as well.

War Novels & Publication

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I am currently taking a class called American Fiction at War: 1960 - Present. Throughout the semester, we've so far read four complete novels, with two more on the horizon before the semester lets out. While the books have all been different in a number of ways, covering various wars from various perspectives, the guiding theme throughout the literature we have read has, obviously, been that at their core, they are "war novels." What exactly a war novel is and what defines the genre is an interesting conversation in and of itself, but regardless, each novel so far has provided a highly personal, deeply introspective, and powerful first-person perspective on the war each author lived through. From Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 to Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, authors pour their hearts out into these novels, revealing intimate details about their lives and wrestling with issues that have defined their personalities. While I understand that, in many cases, authors write war novels as a kind of public/social good (as in, providing an important perspective on a conflict that should not be overlooked or forgotten), I think a topic that warrants exploration is the actual act of writing and publishing a novel as unavoidably personal as a first-person war novel.

The process of writing a novel can take years, and requires an enormous amount of mental effort to accomplish. Publishing that novel is perhaps equally as difficult- editing the novel, getting it noticed by a publisher, and actually securing print/distribution is incredibly taxing, as well as potentially financially disastrous. What I think is interesting is the fact that authors of war novels are willing to put in an enormous amount of physical and emotional effort into writing these novels without knowing for sure whether they will be published and noticed by the public. It can't be easy to confront these issues, so what is the motivation? Is it just the potential for financial gain, or is it therapeutic in a way to actually write everything down? What happens if the novels aren't picked up- do the authors then feel as though their life stories aren't worth hearing? It seems like the potential for failure might make the war these authors live through that much more damaging if the novel isn't successful...

Too Dumb For Complex Texts? Not Necessarily...

Earlier in the year, we read an article called "Too Dumb for Complex Texts?" which essentially argued that the current (and future) generations of high school students do not have the ability nor attention capacity to read scholarly texts required in college courses. The article raises some interesting points- I agree that we are shifting more as a society towards "skimming" while in-depth reading is falling by the wayside. We (as in students) are taking in a far greater quantity of information at a far more rapid pace than in generations past, and consequently, we quickly lose interest or simply skim for important points in longer, more complicated texts. Is this attributable to social media? Are we all just Twitter junkies who can't stay focused for more than a few seconds? Personally, I don't think so- in my opinion, it's a simple matter of cost/benefit analysis; why invest a large amount of attention and energy learning about one particular topic when that energy could be spent learning about 10 different things in the same time span? There's so much interesting and engaging information on the Internet, and I don't think our generation is any "dumber" than those in the past, we are simply curious individuals, and would much rather get the main idea of something and move on rather than become experts on a topic we don't particularly care for.

Unless you are extremely interested in a given topic, complex scholarly texts like those mentioned in the article are inherently boring, no matter how old you are. I wrote a research paper my sophomore year at TCU on England's economy during the Hundred Years' War- I poured over old books and research on the subject, spending hours in the library trying to find the information I needed. It was a challenge for me to stay focused while doing all the reading I did, and while the article would suggest it's because my brain functions differently than my parents' do, I think the real reason is that I just didn't care about the topic and I didn't find it relevant at all to what I want to learn in college and pursue in my post-grad career. I had to do the reading, and I did, but in the back of my mind was the constant question: "Why?"

What I'm getting at here is that there's no going back to the old ways now- whether or not students are getting "dumber" because they can't read complex texts is irrelevant, because that trend is not going to revert back any time soon. If anything, what I think needs to change is the organization of college courses. Unless the student is in a major-specific course they are actually interested in pursing, I think it's inadvisable for professors to assign complex texts that the student will inevitably just skim for key points. English majors don't sign up for upper-division Engineering classes, Biology majors don't sign up for upper-division Economics classes, so why should incoming students be expected to read complex texts if they are not necessarily interested/skilled in the subject in question?

Reader Interview Synopsis

There were some interesting similarities, but more importantly, some interesting differences between the responses on my reader surveys. Reading habits are a fascinating topic, and from my experience, I think that all ends of the spectrum are represented in my age group. I have friends and family that read almost every day, and can burn through books in as quickly as a week. I also have friends that probably haven’t picked up a book since they had to read “The Great Gatsby” in our senior year of high school. While that degree of difference wasn’t necessarily reflected in the 4 surveys I conducted over the course of the past week, I think that the reading habits of college students in general are widely varied.

                First and foremost, all four of my respondents stated that they considered themselves as someone who likes to read. However, all four had different genres of literature that they preferred to read for pleasure; nonfiction, historical fiction, fantasy, magazines, fiction, comedy and war novels, were all mentioned once throughout the surveys. There was also a wide range of responses for the number of hardbound books my respondents had, ranging from 4 to 60+. What this seems to suggest is that the number of physical books an individual has does not necessarily reflect reading habits. Whether or not this can be attributed to increasing usage of technology or simply due to the fact that they are all college students I can’t confidently say one way or the other, but interestingly enough, the individual who only had “3-4” books spent the least amount of time on social media, the least amount of time watching TV, listed reading as one of his favorite forms of relaxation/entertainment, and stated that he/she normally reads “until I fall asleep.”

                It was a commonly-held opinion among my respondents that reading is an important societal endeavor, with ¾ suggesting that reading has major educational or developmental implications. What that specific benefit is, however, is another story; my respondents seemed to have a difficult time with the question: “The word literary refers to . . .” giving responses that ranged simply from “books” to “teaching/emphasizing proper punctuation and grammar.” The responses to the question about poetry were also varied, and no clear consensus was evident between the responses. My take on these two findings is that reading is a personal characteristic with personal implications. It means something different to each individual depending on their experiences and their personality. However, while it may be a confusing or difficult topic to eloquently describe and discuss, the findings here are clear—reading is important to the respondents in my survey, and in my opinion, that sentiment is fairly commonly held amongst college students.