As someone who has returned to teaching college writing courses, after 25 years of doing other thngs, I enjoyed reading some blogs by other writing teachers. One, called Teacher. Wordsmith.Madman,is written by a guy who teaches at Carnegie Mellon. He does a marvelous job of poking fun at gaffes in newspaper articles, for instance. But I gave up checking out his blog because of the coarse denigration of President Bush and his policies. I wrote to him once, explaining how I liked his blog but that I also liked well-writtten conservative blogs like Powerline. He responded by jeering at Powerline for what he called its howler of blaming Democrats for a memo about the Terry Schiavo matter. I replied that the blog was speculating about the possible origin of the memo (Iwhich later turned out to be from the office of Mel Martinez), and that when the truth came out, Powerline acknowledged its error. So where was the howler? Should the blog not have engaged in self-identified speculation? That would eliminate a lot of interesting blog posts. Anyway, it wasn't the disagreement, but the overall jeering, sneering tone of the blog that finally turned me off.
Posted by FInn MacCool
