It's not an essay mill, though - it's all kinds of writing (web content, journo stuff, product descriptions, and occasionally people needing some proofing etc but it could be on fiction) and other things like web design, design, virtual assistants.

"Where'd you get a job like that anyway? Sounds good."

It's a freelance site - there are many of them. People put jobs up for sale and you bid for them. It's like an employment ebay for the un-employable!

That's like trying to compare apples and oranges! Social constructionism is merely the obvious issue of most of what we learn, think and do is in response to our dealings with others, so almost everything is a social construct. I say almost because my specialist subject was autism, and that's the case that breaks some social construction rules, or appears to, as the thinking and learning and doing can be sensory in response to the physical world. Post Modernism however, is what it says on the tin. It comes after Modernism as a philosophy. Modernism was all about making meta narratives to explain human angst when the world appears chaotic - hence Neitzsche, Freud, Marx etc. Post Modernism is kind of laid back and cool about angst. It's about how "Hey buddy, everything copies everything else" (Baudrillard), "I'm copying Neitzche because he was right about power" (Foucault), "I'm copying Freud because he was right on" (Lacan), "I'm kind of copying Marx, even though I don't like him any more, because knowledge has become reduced to performativity by computers and is a saleable item," (Lyotard), "I beg to defer (differ) as meaning is always deferred if we deconstruct it. It's all text." (Derrida) That's about it - no meta narratives no more. Sad, innit?

I put semi colons in there after the pge numbers, and they came out as commas! Clearly this is not a Harvard site!:-)

Hi Everyone!

Haven't been around for AGES as I'm getting work from a freelancing site on all kinds of writing, so I'm actually getting paid real money at last! However a lot of what I earn is (inevitably) on proofing and copy-editing dissertations, and I've bumped into a problem I've never encountered before, so I'd like to know if anyone else has. A certain minor Uni, oop North, in its Health MAs is asking for page numbers for ALL in-text references!!! To my mind, the page numbers should only be there if you're quoting or very specifically paraphrasing a brief section of text. But no, this Uni wants page numbers for general refs, such as: Squirrels can be said to have sharp teeth (Hazel, 2005, p25, Brazil, 2011, p31, Pea, 2003, p78.) Have you ever seen anything so daft? Anyone who has this requirement in their regs, or has ever seen it in an academic texts, please let me know! It's to me the height of stupidity both to the writer and for the reader!

Keenbean, this is better news than my own 'tour de force' eventual evaluation. Because this is a 'kid' who could be my own granddaughter, who just did me proud, after all the messing about I had to do with her ideas and restructuring and redefining the whole thing. But, she had a great super also.

Isn't it better to guide someone than to do it yourself? I feel that, as a born teacher.

Her joy can't equal my joy. This is similar to when I got my 17-year-old son into the top Oxford college (St John's) from an inner city state comprehensive in 1991. I just tutored him myself. He ended up with a Double First. I teach therefore I am :)

Cue Beethoven's Ninth - Ode an die Fruede

x

======= Date Modified 07 Sep 2011 23:17:37 =======
======= Date Modified 07 Sep 2011 23:15:11 =======
As some of you may know, I had a bit of a blip (thank you super!) in my own PhD, but got there and more in the spring. However, today is the happiest day of my academic life.

I'm too old to get a (first) job in a UK Uni, was the Research Associate and sole writer on an important government study, am an Associate Tutor in my own Uni for MA and above, but there are no openings in my field this year. So I'm eking out a hand-to-mouth existence doing editing and proofing for PhD students.

Today, an overseas student whose PhD I relentlessly and diligently worked on (and she's one of those students who's a delight to work with because she listens and reworks and is as relentless and diligent as I am), passed her viva.

But more than that, she amazingly passed it outright. Not even minor corrections (as a writer and journo I'm eagle-eyed on typos).

She exceeded my hopes, and has given me new confidence in who I am, and what I can do with a messy PhD.

Thank you, M. I think you just gave me back my self-esteem.

All my fellow PhD/ EdD students were from overseas. They obviously needed each others' company and support, but I just wanted to finish as quickly as possible, and turned down most socialising so that I could just crack on as I was self-funding. To be honest I found it difficult to be the 'only Brit in the village', to be twice their average age, and to have no one I could talk to, but ho hum..

I thought I was coping OK, until recently I had an earful from one of them (she actually lodged with me for 6 months), who came round to my flat (I live very close to the Uni), wanted me to drink with her, was very irritated when I said I could only spare an hour, and then gave me a one hour drunken rant about how anti-social I am and how I pretend to be kind but I'm not really.

Ah well. She's off my guest list!:-)

======= Date Modified 11 Aug 2011 18:51:06 =======
Today I've been proof-reading a PhD for an overseas student - methodology introductory chapter. Something wasn't quite ringing right, although it sounded good in places. So I Googled some of the sentences. EVERY SINGLE PARAGRAPH was copied. I've so far identified, in the first 4,000 words, 20+ different internet sources, most of them other people's published papers. But what has stunned me is that many of the copied paragraphs have often been replicated several times, in other papers. All of them, as this one was, were IT papers and theses.

It was a patchwork quilt in a quilted world of imaginary scholarship and needlecraft. How do they get away with it when we have Turnitin? Doesn't Computer Science realise that this may be endemic in their departments, for obvious reasons?

Naturally, I stopped work and sent back the quilt. But I think how hard I worked on my methodology, my weakness at the time, and had to work and work and work on it, before I found my voice and confidence in it. How cynical is it to believe, possibly quite rightly, that you can get away with cheating?

We had 'riots' in Leicester on Monday night. To demonstrate the rather dense Lestuh mindset, the main shop looted was Poundland! Says it all, eh?

Thesis 376 pages 12 point double spacing. References 40 pages (21,000 words!)

Really delighted for you - but I never had any doubt Dr KB!!!

WOW!!! WOW!!! WOW!!! WOWWWWWWW!

Well done KB! Brilliant stuff!
:-)