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A2

The New York Times Student Editorial Contest Winner

The Life-Changing Magic of Being Messy

You might have a “messy” friend or family member. You can’t help but sigh at the chaos of their room — clean and dirty laundry mixed together. Odds are it’ll be difficult to walk two feet without encountering an empty chip bag. Gross? Yes. Bad? Not necessarily.

As a stereotypically “messy” person myself, I’ve received my own share of scorn. Living in a boarding school, I’m obligated to keep my room nice and tidy, ready for visitors and as a model to underclassmen. Monday room inspections are the norm, and faculty members have sometimes passively, sometimes aggressively, urged my roommate and me to clean up. For these purposes, I used to harbour a 24 x 24 x 24 cardboard box in which I’d stuff everything on Monday mornings and empty it out later that evening. Now, I just throw everything downstairs into the communal storage. Out of sight, out of mind.

As much judgment as we get for our clutter, research has shown that messiness can be a sign of creativity and openness. In the NYT article “It’s Not ‘Mess.’ It’s Creativity,” Kathleen D. Vohs’ study of messiness serves as a rare champion for us less-than-neat people. In her study, she gathered a group of subjects in a tidy room and another in a messy room. When each subject had to choose between a “classic” or “new” smoothie on a fake menu, the subjects in the tidy room chose “classic” while subjects in the messy room chose the “new” smoothies. This shows that “people greatly preferred convention in the tidy room and novelty in the messy room.” In addition, Vohs revealed that messy people were more creative. So, what does this mean?

Messy people are willing to challenge the conventional norm. They aren’t confined to the status quo. In a growing age where minimalism seems to be taking on the world by storm, we must remember that there is beauty in chaos. Although a University of Michigan study warns that some people might take one look at your messy desk and view you as “lazy” or “neurotic,” we must remember the people who challenge the old ways of being are some of our greatest innovators. After all, Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg famously harboured hideously disorganized workplaces.

So, when you see a scatter of papers, laundry, and old food containers, don’t rush out to buy your child, friend, or roommate “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” Instead, appreciate that your acquaintance might be “sparking joy” by channelling their creativity differently.

Works Cited

Eichenstein, Izzy. “Albert Einstein, Mark Twain & Steve Jobs: The Messy Desk Link.” The LAX Morning Minute, Word Press, 19 Oct. 2013.

Vohs, Kathleen. “Tidy Desk or Messy Desk? Each Has Its

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A3

Could language be the key to detecting fake news?

By David Shariatmadari

Purveyors of disinformation can be caught out by the particular words they use, according to new research

The internet represents the biggest explosion of data in human history. There’s more out there, and more access to it than ever before. The information ecosystem is a bit like a tropical rainforest: luxuriant, dense and fiercely competitive. As such, it contains its fair share of predators and poisonous plants.

Deliberately misleading articles, websites and social media posts can come about for lots of different reasons: they might be trying to influence elections or policies; they might represent a form of cyberwarfare between states; they might be aimed at raising someone’s profile and influence, or discrediting their opponents. Or they might simply be about making money, relying on the attention-grabbing nature of outrageous lies to generate ad revenue, as in the case of the “digital gold rush” that saw a small Macedonian town register more than 150 pro-Trump websites during the 2016 presidential race.

One thing they may have in common, however, is the language they use.

Having a reliable way of identifying fake news is important. The whole reason it’s a problem is that it mimics reliable reporting – and people can’t always tell the difference. That’s why, for the past few years, researchers have been trying to work out what the linguistic characteristics of fake news are. Computers that are fed material already classified as misleading are able to identify patterns in the language used. They’re then able to apply that knowledge to new material, and flag it as potentially dubious.

One such project, led by Fatemeh Torabi Asr at Simon Fraser University in Canada, recently found that “on average, fake news articles use more … words related to sex, death and anxiety”. “Overly emotional” language is often deployed. In contrast, “Genuine news … contains a larger proportion of words related to work (business) and money (economy).”

Another group of researchers analysed the relationship of various grammatical categories to fake news. They concluded that words which can be used to exaggerate are all found more often in deliberately misleading sources. These included superlatives, like “most” and “worst”, and so-called subjectives, like “brilliant” and “terrible”. They noted that propaganda tends to use abstract generalities like “truth” and “freedom”, and intriguingly showed that use of the second-person pronoun “you” was closely linked to fake news.

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Some of these approaches have their problems. Jack Grieve, at the University of Birmingham, cautions that scholars don’t always control for genre – so the differences in language seen above might just come down to the difference between a more formal news article, and a more casual Facebook post.

To get around this problem, Grieve’s team has compared 40 retracted and 41 non-retracted articles by Jayson Blair, who resigned from the New York Times in disgrace in 2003. These were produced in a single genre – national newspaper writing – but they still displayed subtle, probably unconscious differences in register, related, according to Grieve, to the different communicative purposes they served (on the one hand to inform, on the other to deceive). Even though he was trying to pass his work off as factual, there were subtle tells that only become evident when the data is crunched. For example, there were more emphatics like “really” and “most” in Blair’s retracted articles. He used shorter words and his language was less “informationally dense”. The present tense cropped up more often and he relied on the third-person pronouns “he” and “she” rather than full names – something that’s typical of fiction.

So what does all this tell us? Clearly, we don’t have a foolproof means of telling fact from fake yet, but there are certain features that should put us on our guard. Is the writing more informal than you’d expect? Does it contain lots of superlatives and emphatic language? Does it make subjective judgments or read more like a narrative than reportage? Ultimately, we may have to rely on artificial intelligence to do the heavy lifting for us – and it should be able to tell us whether those telltale linguistic patterns seen in large datasets of fake news, invisible to the “naked eye”, are present.

For me, there’s an interesting correspondence with certain kinds of political rhetoric here. The language of fakery, with its powerful subjective statements and focus on anxiety, has something in common with that used by populist leaders. Their style, which often involves “adversarial, emotional, patriotic and abrasive speech” should put us on our guard too. Cooler heads make for a more boring read, but they might get you a little closer to the truth.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/02/language-fake-news-linguistic-research

A4

Text A

OBJECTIVITY AND FAIRNESS

The reporter’s job is to find out the truth and tell it, regardless of who might be made uncomfortable. The reporter’s responsibility is to serve only the reader. The public needs unbiased information in order for democracy to succeed. That means that your stories must be unbiased. Most reporters believe pure objectivity is impossible. When you select one word over another, your judgments enter the story. But fairness is possible, and fairness

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should be every reporter’s goal. Fairness requires the reporter to recognise his or her own biases in the story, and then consciously include all relevant points of view -- even ones that the reporter doesn’t like, personally.

Always look for the “other side” in any story. If someone or some institution is accused of something by a source in your story, you have an absolute obligation to contact the accused party and give them the opportunity to respond. This should be done in the first story, not in some later “response” story.

Use neutral language. Avoid exclamation points. Our tone should be one of the disinterested, but honest observer. reporter’s credibility is the only guarantee the reader has of the story’s accuracy. There are no policemen in the newsroom forcing reporters to be accurate. If we write inaccurate or biased stories, the readers will stop trusting us. And if that happens, we all might as well go into some other field.

(https://www.rcfp.org/resources/first-amendment-handbook/)

Text B

HOW TO WRITE AN OPINION PIECE

Think of an opinion piece as a persuasive essay.

The writer has an opinion or a point of view on an issue and wants to convince the reader to agree. This is not as easy as it may seem:

1.You must research your topic and find out what’s happening and what went on in the past.

2.You must know the facts and be able to refer to them in your argument.

Pretend you are a lawyer and you are making a case before a jury.

You will want to convince the members of the jury to believe that your client is right. Therefore, you need to present as much evidence as you can that proves the point. You do the same when you write a column or editorial.

NOTA BENE: To be successful, your opinion article should be based on solid research. Research involves acquiring facts, quotations, citations or data from sources and personal observation. There are two basic methods of research:

•Field research: going to the scene, interviews, legwork; primary materials, observations, and knowledge.

•Library, academic, or Internet research: using secondary materials, including graphs, charts, and scholarly articles.

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A5

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Read examples of letters to the editor, published in The Times. Discuss their similarities and differences.

a) Quakers lose form

Sir,

Of the Quakers are to reduce or remove all references to God in their Book of Discipline (report, May 2) they will have to change their title from “The Religious Society of Friends” to “A Society of Friends”. I joined them in 1956 because I appreciated their silent worship, avoidance of rigid dogma and acceptance of varying opinions and beliefs. It now seems that Christianity is going to be less and less acceptable to Quakers. Their founder, George Fox (1624-91), would not recognize them.

David L Jones Worthing, W Sussex

b) Original Web

Sir, Spiders can also help control clothes from moths (letters Apr 27&May 2) if you leave the webs alone. Some moths then get caught without effort, cost or chemicals.

Caroline Tayler

Nutley, E Sussex

c) Sir, Your transport manifesto (May 2) rightly calls for passengers to be automatically refunded for rail delays and guaranteed the cheapest ticket. This should apply to buses too and be integrated with ‘contactless’ card payment nationwide, as now on London’s tube and buses. London is far ahead of the rest of the country, indeed the world – in transport payment technology, which is a key reason why it has experienced such a massive increase in public transport usage over the past decade. London has been able to do this because Transport for London has brilliant transport technologists and is an integrated public enterprise extending across London’s entire bus and Tube network. HenceTfl has a keen interest in maximizing ‘frictionless’ travel across different services without worrying about lost revenue, and no interest in ripping passengers off. The sooner the government applies the London model to the rest of the country the better.

Lord Adonis

Former transport secretary and chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission

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HOW TO WRITE A LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Tips for writing a letter to the editor

•Keep your writing clear. Like an op-ed, you want to focus on your topic, and you have even less space. Since your letter is a response to another article, this should drive the focus of your writing.

•Make it relevant and timely. The newspaper you’re writing to isn’t interested in your response to a story published a month ago.

•Cite the article you’re referencing. If the editor or reader doesn’t know what article you’re opposing or supporting, your whole letter could fall flat.

SUPPLEMENTARY SECTION B:

WORKSHEETS AND TEMPLATES

B1

Opinion articles in newspapers

The title of the newspaper: ___________________________________________________

Reference date: ___________________________________________________________

Section and page	Headline	What the article is	Observations
		about (one sentence)

B2

BIAS

Headline: ________________________________________________________________

Author: __________________________________________________________________

Publication: ______________________________________________________________

Date: ____________________________________________________________________

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Headline

Selection

Omission

Labelling

Statistics

Sources

Quotes

Word Choice

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B2

Comparing Two or More Texts

Content: In your own words, what is each text saying?

Text 1	Text 2

Similarities: How are these texts similar, connected or related? How are they alike, whether in terms of subject matter, theme, purpose, tone, etc.? What specific lines and details echo each other or connect?

________________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________

Differences: How are the two different – again, in terms of subject matter, theme, purpose, tone or anything else? Where do they “disagree”?

________________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________

The Two Texts Together: How does reading the two together make you see or understand things you might not if you read them separately?

________________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________

Questions and Reactions: What questions do these texts and their content raise for you? What reactions do you have to them, either individually or together? Use the reverse side of this sheet to write your answers.

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B3

STRUCTURE OF AN EDITORIAL (refuting opinion)

INTRODUCTION:

Thesis

lead

Background

BODY

OPPOSITION’s arguments

Argument 1

Argument 2

Argument 3

REFUTAL OF OPPOSITION’s arguments

Argument 1

Argument 2

Argument 3

OTHER ARGUMENTS defending one’s standpoint

CONCLUSION

SOLUTIONS

CLOSING

STATEMENT

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SUPPLEMENTARY SECTION C: GRAMMAR

C1

Grammar tip 1: Gerund or infinitive?

Verbs followed by gerunds:

Verbs followed by infinitives:

acknowledge	consider	resent
admit	enjoy	recommend
advise	finish	resist
avoid	involve	risk
appreciate	justify	suggest
deny	mention	tolerate
discuss	postpone
complete	recall

afford	expect	plan
agree	fail	prepare
appear	seem	pretend
arrange	hope	promise
claim	learn	refuse
decide	manage	threaten
demand	need	volunteer
deserve	offer	want
		wish

Grammar tip 2: after some verbs (e.g. forget, remember, regret) both gerunds and infinitives can be used, but with difference in meaning.

Gerunds are used	Infinitives are used
to talk about the past from the given	to talk about the present or future from
time:	the given time:
	She forgot to tell me her plans.
She forgot telling me her plans.	(She did not tell me, although she should
(She told me, but then forgot having	have.)
done so.)
	I remembered to send the letter.
I remembered sending the letter.	(I remembered that I needed to send the
(I remembered that I sent the letter.)	letter, and so I did.)
I regret telling her about Jack’s failure.	We regret to inform you that you have
(I wish that I had not said that.)	failed the exam. (polite or formal apology)
It was nice/pleasure meeting you.	e.g.(It is) nice to meet you.
(at the end of the meeting)	(at the beginning of the meeting)

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