Ning no longer serves the Deep End's purpose, and soon the company will cease to provide free hosting, so I will try my best to migrate the site to a more secure, Viagara-free server. Please stay tuned, and please accept my apologies for allowing those unseemly intrusions by drug peddlers.

We often make a mistake, I think, in specifying essay length as if ordering up prose by the yard. This focuses students on the wrong kind of action and it causes--yes, I mean actively, in itself, causes--many of the worst aspects of the student writing we have come to know and dread.



It makes as much sense to worry about essay length as it does to worry about the length of an inning in baseball: let's not have it go on too long, but it naturally lasts just as long as it takes for six… Continue

I've added a new tab to this page entitled "Rationale." It will serve for the nonce as a repository for some of my writings on our topic--or maybe a mass grave, as the case may be. So far it has a short rationale essay, plus a couple of important working definitions. I'll be posting more such rants and manifestoes there forthwith.

A recurring preoccupation on this site will be Action Language as a program for reform in first-year composition pedagogy. As a gesture in that direction, I propose ditching the term pedagogy and not replacing it with androgogy nor any other such neologism. Let's more simply, more directly call it what we do: teaching.



I'll begin again, then: in this blog, I plan to harp often and loudly on Action Language, which I hope might help us do our jobs teaching freshman… Continue