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I love it. I wondered when someone was going to protest.

PLEASE--tell me your perspective!

BTW, I wouldn't judge my writing skills 100% from my FR output! Pristine grammar has never been a priority for me.

Communication is my goal and usually I manage enough of that for my purposes.

But, hey--I'm happy to learn. What do you want to teach me?

BTW, no, it was not a joke. Though this next semester I'll only be teaching psychology. Maybe others agree with you?

The English department here in the Jr College's Humanities dept is, of course, led by a number of dyed-in-the-wool English 'scholars' --I use the term loosely because I'm not impressed with their attitudes nor scholarship.

The task in English 111 is for the student to produce a final portfolio of 1 'academic' paper using 3 sources of 3-5 pages in length which also exhibits the student's own voice, perspective; 1 other unit paper which has been refined through several iterations and one IN-CLASS SUMMARY/RESPONSE to a newspaper editorial.

There are a number of professionals teaching the course who have a journalism background.

It would often seem that the English the two camps are teaching to supposedly standardized criteria--it would often seem that they are teaching different languages.

In my observation, most dyed-in-the-wool "English Professors" are entrenched in a very literary mentality. I love English, too. But I don't think I sit around fondling it, massaging it, wallowing in it in quite the same way, with quite the same narrow obsessiveness as some of them do. They remind me of the French trying, by law, to prevent other terms from other languages corrupting French. They seem to be chronically 30-40 years behind the actual English usage of the day.

For example, I tend to be more in sympathy with the journalism folks. We tend to believe in shorter paragraphs more or less strictly limited to one main idea, one main point. The more archiac "ENGLISH PROFESSORS" tend to be uncomfortable unless the paragraphs are at least half a page long and are probably happiest when paragraphs are a page and a half long (slight hyperbole, there).

Anyway--given that you are an "Old Professor," I was curious about your perspectives on such issues.

Cheers.