/stall

I'm chairing a thesis defense at 10 am tomorrow for a student over in the Communication and Rhetorical Studies department, and rather than reading back over the thesis itself, I've spent the last hour or so over at Timothy Burke's site. He's one of those academic bloggers whose name I've seen around, and I've even read a couple of entries of his here and there, but this is the first sustained read I've done of his site.

Won't be the last, either. One of the first posts I looked at was his discussion of student writing "Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay," a nice collection of some of the persistent, "perennial" problems that occur in the writing students do for him. Over the past couple of years, I've grown more and more interested in analysis as a genre/strategy, and most of what he describes are issues that I've taken up in my own classrooms as well, although perhaps not as crisply as he does here. I'll probably start linking to this entry in my online syllabi, and not just the first-year courses, either.

Okay. Back to that thesis...