As Effective as Aspirin or Dark Chocolate: The Writing Center as Preventative Medicine

In the fight against heart disease, the popular media regularly report that an ounce of prevention— an aspirin a day, for example, or a piece of dark chocolate—goes a long way. The preventative approach applies equally well in the fight against underdeveloped writing skills among college students: the earlier inexperienced writers seek help, the better off they are likely to be. However, the medicinal value of a visit to the Writing Center is woefully underreported.University Writing Cente

Thea Astley’s modernism of the 'Deep North', or on (un)kindness

Although she is often perceived as a writer of the local, the rural or the regional, Thea Astley herself notes writing by American modernists as her primary literary influence, and emphasises the ethical value of transnational reading and writing. Similarly, she draws parallels between writing of the American ‘Deep South’ and her own writing of the ‘Deep North’, with a particular focus on the struggles of the racial or cultural outsider. In this article, I pursue Astley’s peculiar blend of these literary genres — modernism, the Gothic and the transnational — as a means of understanding her conceptualisation of kindness and community. Although Astley rejects the necessity of literary community, her writing emphasises instead the value of interpersonal engagement and social responsibility. With a focus on her first novel, Girl with a Monkey (1958), this article considers Astley’s representation of the distinction between community and kindness, particularly for young Catholic women in Queensland in the early twentieth century. In its simultaneous critique of the expectations placed on women and its upholding of the values of kindness and charity, Astley considers our responsibilities in our relations with the Other and with community

Arguments as abstract objects

In recent discussions concerning the definition of argument, it has been maintained that the word ‘argument’ exhibits the process-product ambiguity, or (as in Goddu forthcoming) an act/object ambi-guity. Drawing on literature on lexical ambiguity we argue that ‘argument’ is not ambiguous. The term ‘argument’ refers to an object, not to a speech act. We also examine some of the important implications of our argument by considering the question: what sort of abstract objects are arguments

Past 900 ka climate variability at the SE Tibetan Plateau – a lacustrine record

Abstract HKT-ISTP 2013 B