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When Marmalade was Medicinal.

If you’re looking for a reason to have more marmalade on your toast, look no further. This post details the history of marmalade–it was once seen as a medicine. Finds like this are why I love researching the history of medicine!

Dr Alun Withey

I must admit to a guilty pleasure – hot buttered toast with a (very!) thick covering of marmalade. Worse than that, I’m even fussy; it absolutely has to be a certain brand, and a particular type…none of your weedy shredless stuff for me!

But it seems that I’m not alone. Marmalade has recently made something of a comeback. It’s now become a serious foodie’s ingredient with all sorts of artisan flavours and combinations.

Now admittedly marmalade might not leap to mind for its potential health benefits. But in the early 1800s, it was nothing less than a revolutionary health food. In fact, marmalade was originally created as a medicinal substance.

To discover the origins of marmalade we need to go back to the eighteenth century and the increasing problem of scurvy in the British Navy. Scurvy, caused by a lack of Vitamin C, was a major killer in the period…

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Persuasive Writing

This post explores the benefits of imagining your reader. It’s a good way to find out how your students think about their audience. For writers, it’s a good way to focus on your reader. What does your reader say when reading your text?

Hook & Eye

One of my colleagues, in a workshop for new graduate student teachers, suggested an in class exercise that I’d never heard of. Get your students to draw a picture of their ideal reader, he said, then get them to draw a speech bubble on that reader: ask them what the reader is saying to them about their writing.

Students have so much trouble imagining a real writer, particularly in an academic context where producing an essay often feels like a performance in showing the teacher you read the right number of books and journal articles, and hit the right word count, and used X number of transition words, and underlined your thesis statement. This exercise concretizes the idea of a real reader, and asks students, as well, to think about what they want that reader to come away with after.

I tried it with my first years. They’re writing a…

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