Just found this wonderfully lucid article on this false dichotomy and the fallacy of "they can just look it up."

Article by E.D. Hirsch

Only one of the very salient points:

For instance, there is a domain of cognitive science called "expert-novice studies." Two of its leading figures are Herbert A. Simon, the Nobel prize winner, and Jill Larkin, who has co-authored articles on this subject with Simon. Their studies provide an insight into the paradox that you can successfully look something up only if you already know quite a lot about the subject. In these studies, an expert is characteristically a specialist who knows a lot about a field — say a chess master or a physicist, whereas a novice knows very little. Since the expert already knows a great deal, you might suppose that she would learn very little when she looked something up. By contrast, you might think that the novice, who has so much to learn, ought to gain a still greater quantity of new information from consulting a dictionary or encyclopedia or the internet. But, on the contrary, it’s the expert who learns more that is new, and learns it much faster than the novice. It’s extremely hard for a novice to learn very much in a reasonable time by looking things up.

Interesting article about the American people’s lack of grammatical skills
thanks to Nicole at A Capital Idea.

Blame
the Linguists!

Not really sure the blame should be placed on the linguists though. Seems
more like it should be placed on the departments of Education that
misappropriated the theory in the first place.

And yes, I know my grammar is not perfect. I fall right into the early group
screwed up by the scenario described in the article. My sister who is less than
2 years older than me parsed many a sentence in elementary school while I parsed
nary a one.

Since I graduated (undergrad) in 2001, I’ve been putting/bringing myself into my
writing in the classes that I’ve been taking as a graduate student at large…

First, a matter of scope. By "one’s writing" I am referring to non-fictional,
academic writing. I believe that is as broad as I want to construe it. Of
course, my writings have been even further restricted as I have only written in
a few disciplines since graduation. (Silly boy, that’s still more disciplines
than most people encounter in an entire college career today.)

By this I mean situating oneself and more particularly placing one’s
experiences into the project by engaging the material in view of one’s own
experiences. We can never truly know anyone else, and while we are unable to
fully and truly know ourselves, in the end ‘we,’ that is our own personal ‘we,’
is all we can ever know. This bit of trivia is based on over 40 years of
personal experience and in particular on the last few years of my education.
These brief sentences are the shorthand of the shorthand of the arguments that
get us here. Yes, I am greatly oversimplifying (that essay is for another day).

My college experience, and a lifetime of reading, have impressed upon me a
certain style of writing that is analytic and synthetic, but dispassionate, and
completely divested of one’s person, and particularly of one’s being. My
education brought these two together and to a head for me. This detached style
of writing, at which I am pretty good, was bothering me before my undergraduate
graduation in May 2001. Maybe this is in part due to how much of me was being
found or rediscovered over the last few years. Either way or another, I have
read a few passionate things, or pieces where an author’s true self shines
forth, or heaven forbid she places herself in the narrative. Just as in any
style of writing, there are bad examples, but there are also excellent examples.

And since we can only know ourselves, and it is ourselves that we know best,
why is it that we leave ourselves out?

Originally written 31 Dec 2003