Welcome to the Working Week

"I know it don't thrill you, I hope it won't kill you."
Elvis Costello

This year my activities are getting a bit more formalized. I've got a regular series of workshops to run and I have also put together a group of researchers who will be concentrating on writing this semester. There will still be all the usual editing tasks and I also want to do some writing of my own, not least on this blog. That means I'll have to develop some of the "regular work habits" that I suggest to my authors.

So here's my blogging plan for the following couple of weeks. A while back I promised to write two five paragraph essays. I will write one paragraph every morning (it should take no more than half an hour) and post it to the blog immediately. When all ten paragraphs are done, I will begin to edit them into the two essays I proposed and reflect a bit on the process of writing the draft paragraphs.

The essays will cover some basics of composition using Herbert Grierson's Rhetoric and English Composition as a source. I want first to reconstruct the classical concept of composition in terms of the "construction" of sentences, paragraphs and whole texts (with a one-paragraph introduction and a one-paragraph conclusion, that's stuff for five paragraphs). In order to prove that postmodern writing is as practical an affair as classical composition, I will then write a five-paragraph deconstruction of Grierson's view of composition, a "decomposition" if you will.

It should be a fun couple of weeks. I'll be off at a conference in Leicester on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, but I will keep to the schedule. See you tomorrow morning.