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

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.

If this is a paper actually written by Pryor, it is better than I would have expected. There is no way I would have ever expected Pryor to use a word like "entail".

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.