nm0061: lecture might be a rather grand title for what we'll do er today this 
perhaps will be a few tips perhaps pitched somewhere between er a pep talk and 
a little bit of the reading of the riot act but it's just to give you a sense a 
kind of bit of fine tuning for how you might think about the work that you 
present for us to read er for the degree pec-, er particularly as opposed to 
what you might have been doing for A-level there are sort of significant shifts 
you see so it's no bad thing early on to start thinking about the way things 
might change and the i will be talking with reference to this i may not 
actually quote it but afterwards you will be able to read this through and see 
the connections with what i've been talking about now if you people were going 
off to study some other subjects around this institution perhaps in engineering 
or physics or somewhere someone might have the job of wising you up about 
safety rules 
if you were dealing with expensive and dangerous equipment but actually of 
course you are the people who are working with the most expensive and the most 
dangerous the most delicate piece of equipment of anyone in the university 
because you are the people who are working with language that was a very 
expensive product and it can do a great deal of harm and part of your job as 
students of English is to be aware of that to be aware of your own use of 
language and of course to be critically aware of other people's use of language 
and of course we read what has come down to us traditionally as some of the 
great texts of of literature English and European and and American partly of 
course for their er intrinsic interest that that's the main thing but also 
because they are the most complex the most concentrated uses of the language 
and so your interest in the matter doesn't stop as it were at the text that we 
bound as literary from th-, those texts you were 
learning to think about language perhaps in a much broader sense now i will be 
concerned today to think about your own use of language when you write most of 
your degree of course will be concerned with your critical and appreciative 
entry into other people's use of language but there is a an important traffic 
between them so that's really what we want to think about a little bit today 
how you yourselves use language in an academic er context now we're reading 
literature and looking at language in the latter part of the twentieth century 
and one of the things you will become increasingly aware of of course is that 
the activity of reading literature has itself been differently conceived just 
as the literature has been differently conceived at at different historical 
moments and perhaps one very broad er er sort of point of reference that we 
might put around this is that people often look back now to some period round 
the turn of the nineteenth into 
the twentieth century and er refer to something er er er called by the phrase 
linguistic turn a linguistic turn and i think what people have in mind by this 
is of course a big shift a big a big shift in the way of thinking about 
language and perhaps you might say in very crude terms that despite the 
complexity and variety of different ways in which human beings have thought 
about language right the way down till then they perhaps nonetheless stayed 
somewhat in the same view of language that we see Adam had in the garden of 
Eden it was God's job to create the world what was thought to distinguish the 
human traditionally was the possession of language and Adam in the garden gave 
the names to things okay so that is the the myth so he didn't create the world 
but he gave the world its names you see now what you might say perhaps happened 
as we entered into our phase of er of modern culture was the thought that it's 
not that the wor-, the world is out there 
and we stick the labels on it it's actually the activity of naming that creates 
the world the world is there as existence but it's not there as world or as 
meaning in other words to put it in a physical image it's sometimes said that 
if a person blind from birth is suddenly given sight they don't wake up after 
the operation or the miracle just seeing the world that we see what they see is 
just a blur of colours because they have to learn to interpret you know er er 
what is in front of them in other words there's something out there all right 
but to put it together as world to distinguish one object from another this is 
actually an activity of language so there's an important sense in which 
language is prior to world that's what that's what's being thought about there 
and so all of our activities in looking critically at at language will tend to 
have that kind of consciousness in it that the whole world we live in as human 
beings and we're not we're thinking 
even you could that is clearly true at the level of physical objects but it's 
obviously even more true at the level of cultural formations that these are 
products in some sense of language and your job is to be more and more 
critically aware er er of all this now er that's to put a very broad frame of 
reference let's sort of move in then a little bit more specifically by varying 
stages into our topic one thing that i think would be very useful for you would 
be to learn as it were to appreciate your language and the specificities 
perhaps of the English language now you're in a department of English and 
comparative literary studies some of you may be doing a purely English degree 
but there would be available to you other languages and American English there 
are other traditions other kinds of language which you could also er you you 
know you could also take as options et cetera so remember that even if you're 
doing English there is a c-, a comparative dimension 
that helps you to give a focus on your own language it's taken a lot of English 
people a bit of a while to realize that it may not be entirely an advantage to 
have as your native language the world lingua franca very convenient for going 
everywhere and booking hotels and whatnot but it does tend to mean that the 
English are very often language blind they're not aware of language in the way 
that people learning the lingua franca from elsewhere er tend to be so 
internally to your studies in English it would be a good thing to develop 
something of that comparative awareness now even if you're doing English only 
there's another sense in which of course you acquire a comparative sense 
because you are reading the language historically so though you may not be 
reading American or German or or whatever it is you will be reading earlier 
forms of the same language and what you er would would find it very useful to 
do i think would be to always think of the language historically 
if you are looking up er a word 'cause you're not sure how to spell it you 
should be curious not about how it's spelled but why it's spelled that way you 
know because that will be part of the history of the word you see so that er er 
there are words which change their meaning over the course of of of the 
centuries take a word like complacency that's about the worst sin that a modern 
person can be accused of is complacency and yet in the eighteenth century it 
referred to something that was er er highly approved a certain sense of er s-, 
moral self-approval moral self-consciousness you see a complete change or the 
word sentimental you see which was one of the great terms of the eighteenth 
century everyone was rushing to be more sentimental than everyone else it was 
competit-, who could be most sentimental er now of course it's the very bottom 
of the pit you know to be to be sentimental and that's of course a term with a 
great importance for literary critical usage not 
just in the text but in the way we we think about the text you see these things 
are changing or think of gothic and vandal they're really the same thing 
they're just the people who came and sacked Rome you know but the vandals we 
now think of as you know the the the urban nuisance the gothic has gone off on 
some other completely different track completely different set of meanings and 
so it's not a fixed thing if you want to know what the meaning of the gothic is 
you have to think of it historically see where it's come from and h-, er er er 
and and how it's been transformed and if it er just at the humble level of 
spelling you see you may wonder why er er people like me you know get sort of 
er itchy and worked up at er s-, sort of spelling mistakes and whatnot but e-, 
so if you th-, if you get people spelling the word separate as [sep3:reIt] you 
see now what on earth is going on there [cough] it's made up of two Latin words 
there's section sec there's that bit of 
it and then there's the par the parting the part er you see er so if you spell 
it with an E you've completely lost its connection you know it's an 
etymological absurdity you've lost its connection with the the notion of 
parting you see that is that is that is built into the word so what it's 
signalling is not just a spelling mistake but it's a whole blankness as it were 
about the relation of that word to its own history and all the other words that 
it's it's moving along with and you couldn't plausibly you couldn't plausibly 
be a real reader of English poetry if you were sort of that word blind you see 
what i mean so what what i'm suggesting here is n-, that that that that 
spelling and and whatnot isn't just a matter of correctness it's a matter of 
understanding something about the nature of the language itself so if you have 
a good etymological dictionary and think of it in terms of roots and historical 
processes of of of all the words you pick up many of 
them are very interesting just as little microhistories in themselves and of 
course that begins to to bring us round to er the question then of what 
actually we mean by correctness because obviously there will be a cadre of 
people here whose job it is to correct in some sense you know your er your 
essays including your use of English er and it's as well to bring into focus a 
little bit what one might mean by correctness because i don't think that we do 
this quite in the spirit of disgusted Tunbridge Wells you know writing about 
the latest er er er linguistic solecism heard on the er er er on the B-B-C you 
know because what i've been saying about language in the past must be going on 
in the present too language isn't fixed and so correctness very often is a kind 
of er you know nervous conservative tic you know that g-, a grid that people 
want to put over language when the whole nature of language is that it changes 
you see so the the thrust of what i would want to say to you here is 
not so much that there is a kind of ideal correctness and our common job is to 
try to defend this you see against change in language what i'm saying rather is 
that the historical awareness of language that you might have reading things in 
the past should also be at work in the present you should be curious about what 
is happening to the language er in your day you see so we're not as it were 
what they call prescriptive grammarians you see we're not coming along with a 
notion derived largely from Latin grammar which of course is fixed 'cause it's 
a dead language but what people tried do and you know the grammar school and 
whatnot the whole force of this in our culture was to try to make English into 
a dead language but we're not in the business of making it into a dead language 
you know er but you can obviously all the you know all all all all the 
political trouble that in a sense that that you know that that would imply once 
you started to think about it of course in a 
way we'd want it to be a living language but we want to see what's going on in 
the living language so there's things like er you know people of my age are 
likely to sort of twitch you know when they hear the word hopefully used as a 
kind of throat clearer at the beginning of the sentence you know hopefully 
we'll go to-, and all it means is er well we'll probably go you know on the 
other hand if you say we will travel hopefully i mean that means w-, w-, we are 
investing a very fundamental human emotion in this travel that we're going to 
do you know in other words the objection really to this kind of hopefully we'll 
do this and that and the other is that it somehow deadened the word when it's 
used in that context you know it it it's being its meaning i-, i-, i-, i-, i-, 
is being bracketed out but you can't say that it's not correct the we've got it 
really from American usage and i take it they've got it from German the Germans 
have always said hoffentlich wir [mumble] they they use it as a sentence 
modified in that way you see so 
er you can't say it's incorrect but you could look at it and think and think 
about the nature of the usage you see or thinking about words like er 
disinterested and refute what's going on there you know there's all kinds of 
organized public debate we have about everything these days you know television 
and radio programmes and forums set up in universities and whatnot there's all 
a great er sort of you know activity of democracy but one has to at the same 
time look at the quality the nature the assumptions of it and of course what's 
happened to the word disinterested is itself of course very interesting but er 
that has come down to roughly our generation with a very important distinction 
between disinterested and uninterested disinterested as impartial and 
interested as you know taking an interest or perhaps having a certain er view 
on the outcome er we expect a judge to be disinterested we don't expect him to 
be uninterested reading his Beano or something you know while 
the er while the the the talk is going on so there's a very important 
distinction there but we notice that it's collapsed that more people than not 
will use the word disinterested to mean uninterested does that tell us anything 
about the culture we're working in that the very notion the ideal of being 
disinterested of course in all kinds of ways is i-, is worth looking at closely 
culturally but yet it might still have a certain value as an ideal but rather 
than look at it critically as an ideal it seems just to be sort of disappearing 
from the usage you see similarly with the word refute you see because that's 
also concerned with public debate er to refute means to show the other argument 
to be erroneous it's to destroy the other argument it's a term from you know 
logical debate from the the the Middle Ages but it will be used now simply to 
mean someone got up and said they don't agree suppo-, y-, she said this and 
then he got up and he refuted her 
you see or he refuted what she well it all they mean is he got up and disagreed 
with her he contested what she said that's not what refute is so refute if you 
say someone refuted something you've actually exercised a judgement about the 
force of that argument against the other one you see but again that has rather 
disappeared from use and of course if you start looking at the way these 
television debates are staged and organized and whatnot one can see well that 
makes a certain amount of sense perhaps you know that er i-, i-, in a way it's 
the theatre that's more important than the you know the programme's more 
important than than than than than the outcome so these are ways in which you 
might er er think a little bit about the language changing in your own time see 
we're not really ultimately concerned what you decide about your own usage but 
we would like you to know the consequences the meaning of er er of what you're 
doing okay so that's a little bit about the notion 
of correctness and the spirit of it okay now let's bring this home a little bit 
more to think about the practicalities of er of er of writing for academic 
purposes and this tends to fall into two broad categories doesn't it there's 
the exam answer and there's the essay and very often when you're doing A-level 
the distinction isn't perhaps too important you know the you get the chance in 
an exam to put down about three written pages and lots of people can get their 
pretty much total sum you know of knowledge and reflection on this book you 
know into that page perhaps you know er er er at A-level but what you will 
certainly find when you're working at degree level is that you would never be 
able to fit in everything you've got to say and students are often very 
frustrated in their third year they put a lot of time and thought and there's 
all kinds of exciting things going on you know in the Shakespeare course and 
and then they've got a three hour exam and they can't you 
know they they can't get it all in you see so what a little er it's worth 
thinking a little bit at what the exam is actually trying to do and to 
distinguish that from what an essay er is trying to do and i think o-, what's 
lurking here of course is the thi-, is the point that you are doing a very 
important and very real activity that many of you will go on in some form doing 
in the world afterwards but you're doing it under very artificial circumstances 
you're doing it to order on certain dates and suchlike so it's the relation 
between the reality of the activity and the artificiality which is part of the 
problem the artificiality is there for a purpose just as it there for a purpose 
in poems it produces a concentration that you wouldn't have you know without 
that as well as all the practical er reasons about you know doing something 
together and i think the way to think about exams is perhaps something rather 
like 
this you tend to go into the exam very often thinking there's some ideal answer 
or that somehow you've got to pack into a few pages w-, what you might have put 
into m-, m-, m-, m-, many thousands of words in an assessed essay you know 
you're trying to get everything into this little pot you see now i think the 
way to think about exam answer is perhaps something er rather like this i-, i-, 
i-, when you go out into the world afterwards let's say you're er acting for a 
union or you're a teacher you're a lawyer whatever kind of person you are who 
has a special skill a special body of knowledge enabling you to make informed 
judgements of things and people will come to you and they'll ask you questions 
and what they will want is a pretty economical but useful answer that is like a 
kind of iceberg you know there's a lot there that you know that you don't tell 
them but you organize that knowledge internally in such a way as to give them 
what they need from where they're coming from 
whether it's a child in a classroom or or whoever it may be you see and if you 
think of the exam answer as a kind of practice in doing that and if you think 
that two or three pages of writing are not too different from a few minutes of 
speech you perhaps begin to get the feel of how an exam answer works it's not a 
test of your complete knowledge by putting it all out in the shop window it's a 
test more of your implicit grasp of the subject by the way in which you angle 
your knowledge towards the particular question that's been put there see what i 
mean and when it's in the flesh many of you would do it quite naturally you 
wouldn't think about it but when you're asked to do it under artificial 
circumstances you kind of put all that ability on one side and so you you 
forget you've got it you're looking for something else you see that's as 
artificial as the situation well i think it's probably true to say that the 
best exam answers come from the people 
who deal that d-, you know answer them as it were most naturally you know who 
really do treat it as if it were a real question and get on giving it you know 
a real answer you know and that's what comes over with force and of course part 
of what you you you then register is that the thrust of your answer is should 
probably be there in the first paragraph and then there are more bits of 
possible confusions or counter-arguments or whatever that you need to unpack a 
little bit before you put it all back to bed again on the third page you know 
for your er er er for your conclusion but it's the simple thrust of an overall 
response to a complex question which communicates your awareness of the 
complexity but doesn't entirely necessarily go into it you see so that's a way 
of thinking perhaps about er er er exam answers and one of the best things you 
can do of course to practise for exams is to be as many of you will be er is to 
be active participants in seminars as 
once you get into the way of er er er of using seminars as a kind of instrument 
this will give you a lot of useful training because we all sit in our heads 
understanding certain things and it's only when you start to say it or listen 
to other people you realize that they don't understand this or they understand 
you know i-, i-, in some totally different way and you begin to get the feel of 
what it is that you'd need to do to make what you've understood actually 
available to the whole group out there to sort of you know to objectify it to 
meet the various angles from which people might be looking on on ostensibly the 
same object so i think the kind of er tuning in that you need for for for for 
good examination is very largely a viva voce one and if you communicate that 
sense in the in in the answer that a-, as it were as if you were in a kind of 
debate but giving your own intervention as they say these days that that that's 
probably the thing that will come over well 
nm0061: 
thinking about essays perhaps in some ways these are even more tricky because 
you invest more time in it and essays are just about long enough by the time 
you're doing your second and third year essays you know for things if they're 
going to go wrong you know to go more seriously wrong so let's think a little 
bit about er how you go about essays one thing of course is always the starting 
point that we've hung on to this word essay i mean we could call it something 
else but we do hang on to that word we don't call it a paper or something we 
call it an essay so it hangs on to this root meaning of an attempt having a go 
at something and of course that will be an important part of your education no 
one's expecting you to know all about you know the literatures you're reading 
you are actually in the act of discovering it and the act of discovery is not 
just the reading of the text but when you try to make sense of your response to 
that text very often it 
starts as a kind of blur or a gut feeling about this and that and the discovery 
is very often a discovery of your own response so that the process of writing 
an essay you know is a process of discovering something you know er er about 
yourself really but of course in relation to the text it's a kind of dialogue 
between yourself and the text so hanging on to that notion of an attempt the 
essay is an attempt at something o-, er you know would be quite useful for for 
for tuning into er er what we're doing here er in the sciences for example when 
people are doing a PhD they will often refer to the process of what they call 
writing up are you writing up yet you know this this phrase goes around it's 
going round and of course that no doubt makes sense they spend about you know 
three years whatever it is getting all their er information in from their 
machines and in in their laboratory and then they have this bit at the end you 
know where they just write up you know what 
the conclusions were you see well that of course would be a deeply misleading 
way to look at research or writing in English and it would be as misleading for 
undergraduates as it would be for PhD research students because they are 
actually doing their research as it were in the writing 'cause the research is 
partly into themselves you know and into their way of thinking about the topic 
'cause i'll tell you one thing my friends in in the in the topic we work in in 
the subject of English answers are almost always banal and sort of useless and 
boring it's understanding the problem that's interesting so when you're doing 
essays don't feel driven to come up with some sort of you know a conclusion 
that puts it all to bed you know 'cause usually that that will actually be sort 
of rather tedious and was already there what actually gets the reader going is 
if you read something that opens up for you the complexity the difficulty the 
ambivalence the moving around you 
know of the of of of what's going on in the text that you're looking at so 
don't feel necessarily driven by a-, as it were a need to have a Q-E-D at the 
end much more interesting to find out what the problems are but to now 
understand clearly what they are not just to know well it's er you know it's 
difficult it's problematic but actually to be able to identify why and how it 
is so that's what will usually give the er er the life to your essay er now the 
other thing that you need to keep a er a careful eye on is the question as well 
of time management when you're writing essays we have a policy in the 
department of giving you at the beginning of your second and third year posted 
up on the board the dates for all assessed essays that come in over the year 
sometimes they may be a bit bunched together that doesn't mean that you all 
have to sit down on the same week and write those essays individually 
personally you plan your own schedule to see which essays you want to do first 
the point is they you may have three essays coming in within a week of each 
other it doesn't mean they have to be written within a week of each other now 
one of the ground rules of all this for all of us is that no one gets more time 
you know you've got your three-score years and ten as it were of your biblical 
allotment but you've got twenty-four hours a day you've got sixty er er er you 
know er er er minutes in the hour you can't change that but some people are 
better at making the time work better for them to work a bit more on their side 
er and one tip might be for example er if someone asks me to give a talk in a 
year or so's time i may not really know what i'm going to say er but i will 
have somewhere or other you know in my anatomy a kind of gut f-, feeling or 
something that that yeah i'll i'll come up you know you know i'll sort of think 
about that over the year and i may not have time to think about it but i could 
put a little file on one side and while i'm going about my other 
business whether it's teaching or watching the telly or going shopping whatever 
all kinds of thoughts flit through your mind and if you've established a 
certain theme that you've put on the back burner there it will in fact attract 
things to it so that things that would have passed through your head and out 
the other side while you were reading you know something unrelated those things 
that would have been lost can actually sort of collect gradually around this 
and your theme can sort of build up you know er and so that's why we give you 
these things at the beginning of the year er so that you can plan the timing of 
your essay but also that you can start thinking about them rather than grab at 
the last minute a topic that you've got to you know give in in two weeks' time 
or whatever it is if you try to go into each course with an author a theme a 
question something or other that you think will be your point of interest you 
know what you're really 
interested in if you identify that at the beginning of the year you'd be quite 
surprised how often the conversation in seminars and lectures and whatever 
might just sort of cross over that theme in a way as i say you wouldn't have 
noticed if you hadn't identified you know your centre of interest first and so 
even though you're not going to get more time to work on that essay you can 
give your mind more time and you can give that bit of your mind that's most 
important which is the less conscious the less willed bit of it to to to you 
know to let it get on with that job so that's just a few thoughts about time 
management you might as well er er er er er er er also think as part of time 
management that you don't really want to be doing that essay at two o'clock the 
night before you know it's given in er it's as well to try to time yourselves 
to give it a week or so beforehand so that you can reread it cold because one 
of the hardest things curiously enough to do is to 
proofread your own work and i remember a a retired professor of this department 
some years ago remarking on this fact that you work on this book k-, God knows 
how many times you know you've read this typescript you know then it goes off 
to the publisher and they have professional people who go through it you know 
line by line very carefully you know and then then comes the day when the 
postman you know drops the finished book you know through your letter box and 
you pick it up and there is it you you open it and there's this stupid typo 
waving and jeering at you and you think how did that get there it's the first 
thing that you see when you open the book you see er and then you look but yes 
it was there it was there all the way your eye passes over it because you 
you're reading what you are expecting to read not what's on the page you see so 
although it sounds a very simple thing proofread proofreading is actually er 
something you really have to concentrate on and 
do cold rather than doing it while you're still warm with the subject because 
the subject will otherwise just read over er er er what's you know on on the 
text on the page so give yourself some time to to make sure you're coming in 
properly dressed with your essay okay so that it makes the right impact on the 
er er er on the reader well the other i mean that's essay writing er the other 
thing that we're thinking about this morning is the question of scholarly 
practice and here what i particularly want to talk about is the your relation 
to things that you read while you're getting your thoughts together for your 
essay you will be reading the primary text but you'll also be trying to get 
other kinds of historical and scholarly information you'll be trying to read 
around to see what kind of critical debates you know there have been about this 
question et cetera and that's quite right you should be bringing er a sense of 
of 
that informed background to the text that you're reading that that is part of 
the skill but it's quite a dangerous area it's quite a slippery area and what 
i'm advising you to do is to take very careful notes of what you read because 
what's important is to be able to distinguish what you're saying from what 
other people have said if you want to agree with them that's okay but you still 
have to indicate that that is what you're doing you know of course very often 
if you're very clear about what other people are saying it will become clearer 
to you how you've got your own slightly different take on it you know and that 
there would be a perfectly legitimate a perfectly good kind of undergraduate 
essay that might have no very personal original er slant to it but which is a 
very lucid a very just you know very helpful summary of the debate that's been 
going on out there that would be a perfectly reasonable kind of undergraduate 
essay that would demonstrate a real kind of 
understanding you see and to write that kind of essay of course you have to be 
very clear about what all these different people have said and that's why it 
it's a perfectly legitimate kind of essay to do but you can see that there is 
the danger of reading things or taking notes and they all go into a kind of 
soup you know er in your mind and then later when it comes to er er writing 
your essay you're really sort of taking ladlefuls of this soup out not quite 
sure where it all came from you know what the er what the ingredients were you 
see now at this point you begin to get into the danger of course of what we 
call plagiarism which is really passing off other people's work as your own you 
see and of course i do have to say stern words about the possibility of 
plagiarism it is my belief that we don't have with you as groups of students 
going through a kind of serious problem about real plagiarism er er i think 
that is er that's probably the case but it is a 
matter that we have to take seriously for everyone's sake and you will find 
that the university takes a very serious view of it so that if someone has 
plagiarized an essay you know they will be treated quite severely and it it 
will be zero for the work et cetera okay and they they do take quite a stern 
view of that and it's not left really to our judgement there are university er 
rules about that so that's the little bit of the riot act you see that i need 
to make sure that you've er er that you've heard but what i'm really interested 
in is that most cases of what might come under the heading of plagiarism will 
probably not be absolutely deliberate cheating but may be bad practice in terms 
of presenting your work and getting lost as to what you scribbled out as your 
own notes as a kind of draft and something that you scribbled out from a book 
er you know and then didn't er er er and then lost the reference or you know it 
just got assimilated to your own and you 
you forgot that it it was someone else's et cetera there's this whole sort of 
grey area that you have to keep a have to keep an eye on you see so do keep 
very careful notes on that and indicate w-, w-, what you've taken and what 
you're what you're using you know of course as far as straight plagiarism goes 
i mean one thing about it is that's it's a it's a folly because as strange as 
it may seem to you and incredible though it may seem to you most of the people 
who work in education do actually rather like students and they're rather 
interested in the subjects that they they do and so actually they're not you 
know they can't be made happier than by you know giving you know er er giving 
you the subject teaching you getting you to understand it you see but if you 
put yourself in a position where you isolate yourself from that process there's 
nothing they can do about it and they don't know about it so the person who 
does as it were build these defensive bulwarks by you 
know er plagiarizing essays or whatnot has only in a sense damaged themselves 
in the first instance you know they've lost the possibility of er er er er of 
the tutor being able to help them and like most things in life then of course 
it becomes a a reinforcing cycle they would get more and more nervous about 
really putting them selves in the hands of the tutor whereas if they'd done 
that right at the beginning they might have found that it was quite a fruitful 
relation they develop more confidence and of course it's becomes a virtual 
cycle you know so it is a folly because it it it it hurts you first but o-, but 
of course it is something more than a folly because it's a crime you know as i 
said we have regulations and rules and if you break them you know you you you 
have to be punished but er more than a crime of course it's a sin er er because 
a thing may or not be illegal under any kind of jurisdiction but a sin is 
something that runs right against and damages the values of 
everything we're here for you know in fact it's more than a sin it's a 
dishonour er because not just our subject but the whole scholarly community in 
a certain sense works on a measure of trust even in the sciences which you 
think of as hard bench you know information no one actually can go around and 
actually test out all of the things that they have to take in when they're you 
know developing new theories they work in their own patch and they have in a 
certain sense to trust what the larger scholarly community you know in their er 
er in their area is doing so it's er it it it it's because of that trust that 
we are in a certain sense on our honour to behave properly in these things and 
the of course the positive way to look at this to put a positive spin on it is 
rather to think what is the state of the person who you know who who who who 
who gets into this frame of mind i think we're all rather overcome you know by 
the massive amount there is to know to understand 
we're all like er you know Isaac Newton on the on the beach there thinking of 
what there was to know this infinite ocean and he was just picking up the odd 
stone the odd pebble from the beach you know this is Isaac Newton you know who 
was a great figure of the eighteenth century knowledge that's how he saw it you 
know let alone any of us coming along you see so we're it's very easy to feel 
psychologically overwhelmed you know by what you're doing and maybe a kind of 
fruitful image to have er er in relation to the scholarly practice is that 
maybe you know we're all there to put the odd little brick in the odd little 
stone in the pyramid and we can sort of see the whole pyramid in very rough 
terms but none of us really can build the whole pyramid by ourselves but what 
we can do is make sure that that particular stone was laid properly now what 
that means in scholarly terms is that if you are making a claim based on 
something else or passing on a judgement from somewhere 
else whatever it is that you're putting into the debate or the pyramid you 
always indicate who your source is where you got it from and then you leave 
that for the next stone to sit on as it were now if someone comes along at a 
later point and says hang on there's something fishy here because that's how m-,
knowledge moves on you realize that a mistake has been made way down there 
somewhere er and so you go back to try to rethink that but you need the chain 
you need to be able to get back so what you leave in place is not that you are 
responsible for the whole pyramid but you're responsible for your brick your 
stone you've indicated where your sources were and the next person who comes 
along who wants to check that out can get back to that level and then that 
level and that level you see what i mean you see and these things y-, y-, er 
you know are just a matter of as it were getting the right disciplinary 
practice but of course big things can hang on them you know there was the 
case of a man called er Sir Cyril Burt who was a kind of educational 
psychologist sort of in the period after the war used to study twins and things 
and and and and looking at the question of intelligence and development and of 
course there's been a big argument through the century about to what extent 
intelligence is genetically given to what extent what we measure as 
intelligence is in fact a fact er er er er a response to culture and 
circumstance er and of course this man was working at a time when the 
government was setting up in this country you know that tripartite level if you 
thought that pe-, kids were born already intelligent then it made sense to 
scoop them out and stick them in special schools you know twenty per cent or so 
or whatever it was you know er er that that would make a certain amount of 
sense if you didn't think that what you measured as intelligence was quite so 
clearly genetic as that then 
you might hesitate about that sort of thing you see so the the the conclusions 
about this would be quite important but you see there was a big scandal about 
this man i mean it's argued both ways i wouldn't take a position on that but 
you see people found when they started looking into the research that you 
couldn't actually get back to the sources the statistics were quoted about 
research on kids you see and whatnot but when you actually tried to get back 
well who was this researcher who who who who did this and where is the evidence 
they found that it it tended to sort of run into the sand you see so all kinds 
of questions were then thrown up about the whole edifice of knowledge and and 
judgement that was built up there you see and none of us know none of us know 
really what kind of things at some later point are going to prove to be 
important but one thing you can do is to go out in the world properly trained 
in that kind of internal discipline so that 
you're responsible for your own patch okay that's really what er er er we're 
after er because in a way you see although intellectual life is often a matter 
of a debate and opponents and arguing with other people the most dangerous 
person around is always yourself of course er as Cicero said in one of his er 
er legal orations men will readily believe what they wish to be true and that's 
what we all do you know we're inclined you know to see much more force in the 
evidence that supports us you know than the evidence that doesn't et cetera so 
we need these kind of externally acquired disciplines to protect us not just 
from the subject and from others but most importantly er from ourselves okay 
but other than that despite all my er you know er er admonitory tones there of 
course i i wish you every success in what you're doing over over the next three 
years okay thank you