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The last chapter problem
In Improving Poor People (1997), Michael Katz wrote: Historians and other social scientists who offer interpretive accounts of social issues always face a “last chapter” problem. Readers expect them to extract clear lessons from history, offer unambiguous recommendations, and foresee the future. My standard response—my role is to analyze and explain the problem; I have […]
Student suggestions on writing
This semester, I promised my masters-course students that they’d see every draft chapter of Accountability Frankenstein, and I’ve given them credit for ripping the chapters apart as they’ve come to them. It was one of the best things I’ve ever done in my career. Not only has the pressure pushed me to write faster than […]
Errata week: Primary-source misinterpretation
Sorry for the gap in writing about my mistakes: I needed access to my office for today’s entry. In my dissertation, Creating the Dropout (U. Penn, 1992), I wrote the following in a discussion on the silencing of race in the construction of dropping out in the 1960s: In 1962, Georgia’s Deaprtment of Education cosponsored […]
Errata week: acknowledgments omission
Today’s entry is the second in a week of acknowledging professional errors I have made. A few weeks ago I was looking at one of my co-edited volumes, Schools as Imagined Communities, and I noticed something about my chapter on special education and communities. Or, rather, it was what was not there: “This work was […]
Errata week: mundane typo
By Sherman Dorn on October 31, 2006
I’ll end Errata Week here on the blog by noting one embarrassing typo in Creating the Dropout (Praeger, 1996): Changes in the proportion of nineteen-year-olds dependent on relatives cannot account for the drop; a higher proportion was dependent in 1980 (86 percent) than in 1970 or 1980 (80 and 81 percent, respectively). (p. 20) This is […]
Posted in Random comments, Writing and editing