By Lee Cataluna
Advertiser Columnist

It's hard to imagine how students used to do term papers without computers.

In the old days, students had to research things from books. They had to look up information in periodicals. They had to leave their homes or dorm rooms and go to a thing called a library and actually touch documents and publications and card catalogs.

If the assignment required interviews, students had to make phone calls. Imagine. Sometimes, those interviews were even conducted in person, face to face.

In the days before QuickMail and Google and Microsoft Word, writing a term paper meant coming up with a thing called an "outline" and arranging your thoughts in longhand before using a typewriter — if you owned one.

If you wanted to change the order of paragraphs, you had to retype the page. If you caught a spelling mistake after the page was typed, you had to gently paint over it with White Out, realign the page just so, and type the correct spelling in the same space. If the correct spelling contained more letters than your original attempt, you might have had to write in the correction above the line of type — a messy prospect.

But today, a term paper can be slammed together from a handful of e-mails and Web pages. "Interviews" can be done without ever having to actually speak to anyone. Just send out 50 e-mails and quote whoever writes back. Cut, paste, done.

At the newspaper, as I'm sure is true at many workplaces, we get a lot of e-mails from students fishing for long quotes to paste into their assignments. Not all of the requests for information are lazy or inappropriate; in fact, some are quite thoughtful and engaging. But some are downright cheeky.

Here's an example from a college student. The punctuation appears as it does in the unsigned e-mail:

I am doing a research paper on the "ICE EPIDEMIC" here in Hawaii. what are your thoughts on this? have any solutions or answers that we as a community can do? thanks any insight would be most helpful thanks again for your time

Some go as far as to include a sense of urgency: "My paper is due Friday so I'd really appreciate it if you'd write me back as soon as possible." Wait, when did YOUR deadline become MY problem? For that matter, when did YOUR assignment become my kuleana?

Technology in the classroom is a wonderful thing, but it should be used to elevate the quality of work, to simplify the drudgery of typing and re-ordering paragraphs and cleaning up final drafts. Technology should make things better. Easier, sure. But the effort that used to be wasted on retyping messy drafts should now go toward doing honest research.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com