Sphinx

It’s always nice to learn that someone has found something you did a while ago useful – yes, I know there are giants in the field who get thoroughly sick of being told how they’ve transformed the understanding and indeed life philosophy of another dozen junior scholars this month, but us provincial types have more modest horizons. This month, I’ve actually had it twice. Someone liked an obscure thing I wrote on ‘historiography as trauma’ in Thucydides and has done the hard yards of a proper analysis of the theme in relation to the Sicilian Expedition rather than just tossing out a few random ideas on the topic – so, watch out for the new piece by Bernd Steinbock. And then I heard about what may prove to be my greatest, if rather unsung, contribution to the world of learning…

Some considerable time ago – twelve years? fifteen? – when I was doing the faculty UG education director role in Bristol, I oversaw the development of a web-based student resource on grammar skills, utilising the then still relatively novel power of hyperlinks, and the help of a student who wrote the draft guidance and quizzes. This was used by a reasonable number of Bristol Arts students over the years – I never gathered any evidence that it actually improved the use of apostrophes, or reduced the incidence of comma splices, but at least it gave us something to direct them towards in essay feedback – and I remember being asked once by someone from another university – Bradford, maybe – if I was happy for them to link to it.

This then just became something referred to in the long version of my cv, as evidence of concern with student skills development if that looked like something worth emphasising (I gave much more attention to my various pieces on forms of assessment, all of which now seem to have disappeared from the Internet, and in any case are long obsolete). Two years ago, however, I was contacted by the Bristol university library to ask if I was happy for them to revamp the resource as part of their student support pages, and I agreed readily with the request that I’d be really interested to hear how much use it then got. Yesterday I received a summary of the last two years: counting people who stayed on the site for more than a minute as ‘engaged users’, the figure is… 38,624.

That is a lot. I mean, this blog has had over 150,000 visitors in its lifetime, but no individual post, even the most popular, even posts retweeted by Mary Beard, has more than a few thousand views at the most, and who knows how many of these people have actually found it useful in any meaningful sense. The Bristol resource is accessible to all – it’s at https://www.ole.bris.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/courses/Study_Skills/grammar-and-punctuation/index.html#/ – and apparently a lot of the users are from overseas, as well as it being linked by other UK universities (one colleague commented on the Twitter that they knew it but had no idea I had anything to do with it).

Of course, this does then become a source of anxiety. The revamp two years ago was just of the platform and the appearance, not the contents – does the guidance still stand up? (Another colleague commented that it’s overly prescriptive on split infinitives…). It was written for Bristol Arts students – might it be in desperate need of revision to cater for a more diverse audience? Language does change, and my intention was to help people avoid the worst errors, not to impose a rigid traditional framework on their writing. Well, it’s long since beyond my control or influence; it’s just nice to know that it’s still there – and that I still have somewhere to direct students who string together multiple clauses with commas…