An introductory course in mathematical writing and proofs would probably go a long way to contributing to better analytical writing. That is what mathematics education really offers to the liberal arts, even if all the more advanced concepts are of no use.

Quite a number of typos & unfinsihed changes in paragraph 2. I think the sense is understandable.

This must be my version of Hartman’s Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation: Any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror.

Even good student papers often suffer from problems (organization; s & p structure, misuse of words, erroneous presentation of some fact or consept). A decently passage with some problems permits more focus. And perhaps instuctors who post student before-and-after papers are likely to do so in WebCt or other closed forum?

I like using a blog passage for the reasons Dee find them problematic. First it is “different from the formal essay writing.” It leads to discussion of genre & disciplinary conventions. More important, the passage actually needs an edit if it is to be part of a more serious document.

As Doug says, your tentaitve language makes for immediate & lively prose. Why have you cut specific examples that give a sense of the goings-on: “some people will find this protest offensive…students and faculty and others can say whatever they like.”? These helped me understand the situation and the administrators’ positions.

I think the comments gave me more food for thought about editing than the original paragraph and edit. That would certainly be a new type of teaching tool–group discussion of editing.

I find a lot of the presentations of this material in formal compositional pedagogy a bit sterile. The advantage of taking my blog entries as an example is that they’re “writing in the wild”, not written to be pedagogical demonstrations.

Plus I can actually raise these more interesting and subtle questions that are coming up in this discussion. When does an edit for clarity and brevity actually sacrifice a sense of individual style, or miscommunicate the distinctiveness of my voice? I could work with the students on several levels of editing: the obvious no-brainer edits that anyone might suggest, the more contentious edits that substantively change the meaning and tone, the excessive edits that turn my blog writing into something it’s not (say, by adding in snark or drive-by shootings).

What would be your audience for such a series/presentation? If students, I’m not sure this is the right material to use for such illustrations, because blog writing is so different from the formal essay writing that they do for courses.

I do think the before-and-after editing approach to teaching writing is excellent, but I personally do it with student papers. (side note: I just tried to look for such material on the web, and couldn’t really find any, which seems odd, everything else is out there.)