The park is better than dinner, almost. Human says she has to clear her head — that it’s not procrastination, not at all, just part of the writing process. Trouble doesn’t care what Human says, as long as she has the car keys in one hand and the collar in the other.

You might think that the park gets to be boring after a while, but Point Pleasant Park is 75 hectares of woods and walkways, mostly off-leash. At the very tip of a peninsula, its rocky shores are refreshed daily with flotsam and good smelly things. In the fall a clever dog can eat blackberries right off the brambles. There’s always something to notice, and even the most unpromising things deserve to be investigated in case they turn out to be Good Things in Trouble’s Life (GTTL). Whether ducks, squirrels, or recently vacated mussel shells, there’s something of interest…

It’s 2014, and after a much needed break we are back and work and back on the blog. I want to start off this year with a short think-piece about something I have been wondering about for a while. Unthinking the way we think about writing, or aspects of how we teach students to write in academia. This post will be part one.

By unthinking what I am trying to get at is questioning our assumptions about what makes academic writing generally good, or worthy of praise or recognition – some of the ways in which we write and think in academia are so for good reasons and don’t necessarily warrant changes; but not all of them are so helpful and may even be making it harder for students to succeed. Perhaps, then, the start of a new academic year (for us in the Southern hemisphere at least) is a…