Hi there everybody

A concern I have is that pseudo-critical commentary levelled at "deconstructionists" is a broad brush and can achieve little but a wound in the foot. This is what drives talented students out of academic corridors. That is not good for a humanities school regardless how powerful a study and its application can seem to its adherents. Other departments can crunch numbers and people in those too can think through the ethical considerations of space, place and time in relation to events.

Being in a phase of concentrated focus on writing a Health Geography student paper, I was struck by reference in Peter's article to "Geography" being "a simple and straightforward study" and part of criticism of those who "deconstruct" being that their language is "largely incomprehensible to everybody else".

It so happens that yesterday evening (and I had not seen Peter's article then ) I was spending time considering the language of various articles about Empirical Bayes Estimates and their application to spatial data analysis. I continued writing with a flair of confidence I can be wrong and it can be fixed. Some things cannot be fixed and how "simple" something seems is in the eye of the beholder. I think these comments in the text of Peter's application for attention to Geography do not serve it well.

Christina Binning

With children in school myself, I have to agree that geography is a weak subject in the present curriculum. In my school days geography was left to the "brightish", but not brightest, students, with the "lower orders" studying "social studies". I missed geogrphy at school but made up for it later as a mature student majoring in physical geography. The university I gained my award through has a quite healthy geography department, combined though with a related department.

It seems the standard of English is slipping though: "most simplest" is a double superlative, beloved of pop singers, but naughty in a forum essay.