Pryor's Resarch Paper on Research (MUST READ!)

But the wildly misplaced apostrophe in the title is talking to me...

You may want to check your subject title before you start ragging on other people's bad grammar/misspellings.

Please enclose the portions that are supposedly Pryor's in quotes or a source box so that we can read in proper context, then negbang you.

I don't know whether this paper will get him a passing grade at Ohio State, but I do think it would make him a moderator at Scout or Rivals.

... as shitty as this paper is, its not that far from a lot of freshman papers I've read. I've proofread and corrected a lot of papers that are worse than this that were written by non-athletes.

This doesn't sound like something TP would write. Are you sure he didn't let one of his kids use the computer while he was doing homework?

(I have no reason to believe he actually has kids.)

I can hardly wait to see what his Wunderlic score is.

There's a high probability this is fake. And if this is true I take no pleasure in knowing Pryor's school system failed him.

At least he's doing his own work. I think.

He must of had Reggie Germany write this paper.

Everyone kills people, murders people, steals from you, steals from me, researches stuff, writes about researching stuff, whatever.

Well if he does decide to go into Criminal Justice, at least he'd have a good start to a thesis:

"Everybody murders..."

EDIT: Beat me to it ^^^

That made my head hurt just trying to read it.

I believe you, though. You just can't make something like this up.

The hard part of this for me is that it actually makes me hope TP winds up being successful in football, because I can't see any other future for him with this kind of composition skill.

I've always wanted one.

--> A blue one with nice plumage, by the way.

May be it's just me, but I find that posting this is pretty classless. I understand the whole "he's an athlete that will make more money than everyone in this thread combined so let's take shots at him while we still can" mentality, but still...

I bet the average football player at Michigan probably writes at the same level.

I am still wondering what makes this a "MUST READ" - and in all caps too. No, seriously. Why do you think this is so important for us to read? So we can make fun of the culture and school system in which Pryor was raised? So we can have some reason these days, any reason for god's sake, to look down on him, and, using false logic, the rest of OSU? Does this really make you feel like you are better than him? Be classy (I wont say "stay" classy because I have no evidence yet that you have ever been classy).

the English language.

Pryor learned his grammar in a house of corrections.

The following is a true story:

An older female friend of mine was doing homework in the UGLi in the fall of 2004, when across the library she noticed none other than Braylon Edwards typing a paper. After he had been staring into space for some time, he asked her if she could help him edit his paper. As she looked at his paper she noticed the title "The Caribbean Language". Thinking this might be a typo she read and edited the entire paper. What she learned that day was that there indeed is a "Caribbean Language" and it is beautiful.

Now, do any of you know someone who can speak Caribbean?

The point of this story is that our star athletes are not necessarily the smartest people on the planet.

At least they don't go to OSU.

I lived next door to David Terrell on the second floor of Adams House my freshman year. He used my computer one day to write a paper for one of his classes. Sadly, that computer has long since bitten the dust so I no longer have the .doc file.

The paper was about Komodo Dragons and was every bit as bad as this alleged paper by Pryor. My friends and I decided that when we were in 6th grade we could have done a better job. Unfortunately, I think this is par for the course for a majority of people in the states.

TP is lucky, he won't need the writing skills. I sincerely hope DT invested his money wisely.

I mean listen, we're sitting here talking about research, not a paper, not a paper, not a paper, but we're talking about research! We're talking about research, man. Research!

Does anyone remember the Left Behind at the Fishbowl blog? There were some prominent discoveries of papers by football players not to mention the Michigan student body at large.

So yeah, glass house, etc., etc.

I agree that this is in all likelihood a fantastic fake. However, papers like this exist all over high school and at many colleges - it highlights the extreme lack of writing skills in America today. My sister was a TA for a frosh writing class when she was in grad school (at a well-regarded good undergraduate institution) and the stuff she had to grade was just laughably incompetent. It was stuff you could have literally not made up if you tried.

Our esteemed blogger and his mod buddies could correct me if I'm wrong, but the #1 for good writing is to KNOW WHAT YOU WANT TO SAY BEFORE YOU START WRITING. There's very little examination of the ideas themselves in today's education, so tons of students have no idea what their point is. If they did, they might view writing as work with a purpose instead of a painful experience of academic constipation.

Also: my high school Engrish teacher (who was from Ohio, grrrr) taught us that the "five-paragraph paper" originated at Michigan as a weed-out course, to examine if students could...deja vu...express and argue an idea clearly and succinctly.

I would like to see a four-paragraph essay on the merits of research from Tate for comparison. Also from Cone. Cone's paper would have the option of being in rap form.

Not everybody's the perfect researcher in the world. I mean, everyone falsifies data, fabricates results, plagiarizes you, plagiarizes me, whatever.

(This one's for you, jonny_GoBlue)

This whole discussion reminds me of how much I miss watching Dhani Jones read poetry in the Arb on the U of M TV channel.

Andy Katzenmoyer is the professor.

He should co-write a book with BigKatz.

But seriously, and unfortunately, about 1/4 of the students in classes I taught at Arizona State wrote at a similar level.

I think this explains the dumbification of America:

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/2682654/idiocracy_opening_sequence/

EDIT: Wolverine, you beat me to the Big Katz reference while I was looking for the Idiocracy clip!

I don't care if this paper belonged to Pryor or not, its funny regardless. And to the people who think this is "classless" I will throw a big-fat C'MON your way. Don't think for one second that a buckeye wouldn't post something like this about a U of M student. I love it...anything to make the qb of our rival look any worse after his team has lopsided thier way to a nice winning streak against us has my approval.

By the way, the guy is pretty dumb. Watch him during the Rose Bowl...at times he'll look like tressel just asked him to recite Pie to the 34th figure.

It seems as though Pryor was failed by the teachers he had before he became a buckeye. It this is real then it is truly sad. Worst of all he will probably end up making millions of dollars even though he is probably at an 8th grade level for most things. When you put too much emphasis on sports this is what happens.

It's important to include Pryor's footnote on Page 2 regarding his reaction to the assignment

If I can't research, I can't research. It is as simple as that. It ain't about that at all. It's easy to sum it up if you're just talking about research. We're sitting here, and I'm supposed to be the fiscal saver, and we're talking about research. I mean listen, we're sitting here talking about research, not a purchase, not a purchase, not a purchase, but we're talking about research. Not the purchase that I go out there and pay for and make every purchase like it's my last but we're talking about research man. How silly is that?

My wife was a TA for an Intro to Urban Planning class with Maurice Taylor in it when we were in grad school. He maybe wrote at a 6th grade level. The prof changed the grade so he (as she did with other UM scholly athletes that were in it) would pass.

Fries are done.

I'll cut TP and OSU some slack. I'd hate to see what one of Mario Manningham's papers would have looked like. No offense to Mario.

I never thought about it that way, but I guess research is the most helpful resource to finding out things you want to buy. I'm going to go check out some research to figure out what to get my girlfriend for Christmas! Thanks TP!

I'm still trying to figure out if Sarah Palin wrote the thread or the research paper on research.

I once had a story about a football player edited by a football player.

It was for a 200-level Creative Writing class (prof: Francesca Delbanco -- loved that name).

You'd write a short story and bring it in to class, and then you had to give it to the 4 or 5 other people in your group.

DeWayne Patmon was in the class, but his attendance wasn't exactly stellar (it wasn't during the football season). When he came back after missing a couple of weeks, he got moved into my group.

Thing is, that was the day I had brought a fantastic (i.e. uses fantasy) short story (inspired by playing way too much NCAA 'XX) about an overly stereotypical black kid who was getting recruited by Michigan. My character was bright, but hid it to fit in, and was an extraordinarily good football player. The reason he was so good was that he literally could use magic to make the ball do what he wanted (a subplot was that he would get weak and ravenously hungry after using his superhuman abilities).

What made the story awful was it was full of really stupid (in retrospect) stereotypes. A beat-up Chevy LeBaron, kids drinking 40-oz. malt liquor, badly executed Ebonics, that kind of thing. I was 20 and part of being 20 for me was being really dumb about this kind of shit.

The last thing I was expecting was for a football player to read it. But I had 5 copies, and rules are rules, and Mr. Patmon got handed my shitty story.

I was kind when editing his, which wasn't great writing but had a good story about surviving an Armageddonish hurricane -- the makings of a pretty decent adventure story. Mostly I was doing the best job I could in anticipation of the ass-kicking that overweight suburban Jewish boys get when they seem to be mocking Big Ten defensive backs named DeWayne.

When we met again to discuss my paper, he didn't say anything about the racist crap -- he was more interested in allusions I made linking the main character to Jesus.

So then I asked him, apologetically as I could -- what about all the stereotype stuff in there? He was like "whatever, it doesn't sound like anybody I know -- I would have had them talk like everybody else."

This conversation has been the key for me in writing characters who are profoundly different from me: make them not different. I've had main characters be Evangelical Christians, middle-aged workaday dads, teenage lesbians, pretty much everything but 20-something privileged Jewish guys. And each time, the key to getting at their narratives and making them believable has been to ignore all cultural biases and give them my own voice.

I'm sure there are plenty of stories out there about football players, ours or theirs or the other guys', who turn in half-thought-out drek like what's posted above. I just wanted to say that the most important lesson I ever learned about both Creative Writing and stereotyping in general came from a hard-hitting starting safety from San Diego.

He failed to log out of the machine when he was done.

It may not be much of a research paper, but it's pretty good for a "resarch" paper.

I made some jokes, we shared some laughs, it was fun. I'm not innocent because I took part in joking about Terrelle Pryor's paper. But I am rather bothered by someone posting TP's work online. It's kind of an invasion of TP's privacy. Say what you want about the state of college athletics and academic standards and how inappropriate this level of writing is for a college student, but at the end of the day, this is still TP's personal business and I believe that we should try to respect his privacy. Not to blame the victim, but TP should remember to log off in the future. But this also makes me wonder, what if TP had simply gotten up from his computer to go to the bathroom, for example, rather leaving and forgetting to log off? That would be more troubling.

I wouldn't post anyone else's bad schoolwork on the internet. It's unfortunate that the guy at OSU who did this to TP doesn't feel the same way when it comes to athletes.

Please understand that I am quite aware of how much of a hypocrite I sound like. My issue is mostly with the guy who posted the paper, but I feel a little guilty about giving it attention.

...especially those of us in Sports Management & Communications knew some not so bright souls. I'd feel like a hypocrite if I said something about T. Pryor.

Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

When I was at U of M back in the 80's, my roommate had Gary Grant in several of her classes. Her favorite story about him: one day he sat next her and in the middle of class, leaned over and asked, "How you spell 'bum'?" To which she replied, "Like, a hobo?" He said "yeah", and so she spelled it for him. Tyrelle Pryor is one of many, and they're everywhere, not just at OSU.

you guys think that's bad? Try being the only true bilingual guy among your group of friends.. who all happen to be taking 200-level Spanish classes. (after taking 4 years of Spanish in high school of course..)

I'm convinced high school language classes are a waste of time.. the Dept of Education should just give up on that one...

While this is funny, and I do agree with the sentiment that the kid who posted this to the web should be fitted for his own asshat, it also reminds me of those random times in Angell Hall when I had to print something and stumbled upon some rather, um, linguistically-challenged papers in the printer from other students. And if memory serves me right, at least one was a backup to the UM basketball team. Pryor is an easy target, but figuring out who is a good athlete and a good student can create a rather goofy Venn diagram.

If it was Pryor's paper it would be saying:

"I used the research process to find out what type of job specific major I wanted to major in and what type of job I wanted to do when I graduated from college. Then I remembered that I'm an unstoppable athlete and will be playing in the NFL, not making profits at business or criminal justice."

I'm all for athletes half-assing their work if they're good enough to make a career out of their ability. They don't need to learn how to write boring papers on research, unless that happens to be their hobby. I know that colleges want all their students to become well rounded individuals and I think Pryor will get that training, it'll be on the football field though. Pryor probably spends like 60-70 hours a week on football right? I wish college had taught me to work that hard. I'm sure he understands how to be a team player far better than the average college graduate too.

The thing that strikes me the most is that everything I learned getting my chemistry degree, I could have learned from Wikipedia. Working in research labs was important though. That was the best part of my education.

I DONT SEE WUTS SO BAD ABOUT HIS PAPER, I THNIK HE SEEMS SMRT AND WISH I KNEW AS MUCH ABOUT RE-SERCHING STUFF

From someone who's taught at another Big Ten university, a little inside information: by no means are athletes the only people turning in work of this quality.

I'm not going to lie, it seems to me kind of unfair to me that in order to do professionally what he is best at, Terrelle Pryor (and lots of other dudes) has to attend college for at least three years.

Wow, it almost seems like Pryor didn't enroll at OSU mainly for academics.

in a thread in existence before I became a MGoUser!

Research!! Yaaay!!