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Old 07-09-2012, 06:57 PM   #27
Ellis Amdur
 
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Location: Seattle
Join Date: May 2003
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An amendation to the rules of IHTBF

Occasionally, someone will be delighted with the content of one of the essays or moved to agree with the writer. Please remember that this section of the website does not follow the conventions of the rest of the site - a usual discussion forum. Instead, it is intended to be an archive of finely-grained personal experience. Therefore, follow-up comments praising a writer or his/her article, or a brief comment such as "I took ukemi for x teacher, and his iriminage was incredible" are not germane to the purpose of the IHTBF columns. In other words, we are not trying to generate discussion in the reply section - rather, we are trying to solicit responses equally at depth to the original essay. For examples of this, please refer to the responses to the column on Shibata Ichiro, Saotome Mitsugi, and Chida Tsutomu for exemplars of what I mean.

Note, too, how the follow-up writers did not necessarily agree with the original, but had the confidence and moral courage to simply write their experience and let it stand on its own, this the epitome of the phenomenological method.

As Jun and I have discussed, usual "forum-type discussion" about one of the columns is welcome on Aikiweb. It should simply be started in it's own thread. The columns themselves, as has been discussed are not the place for either argumentation or praise, much less badinage or "likes" - rather, they are for rich descriptions of lived experience.

The new rule, posted at the end of each essay will read:

5. Follow-up posts should be substantive, striving to equal the depth of the original essay. Simply agreeing with the writer, or a brief comment that, yes, the teacher in question was really powerful or had a wonderful shihonage or the like, are not congruent with the purpose of this archive.

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