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I was more than a little surprised to read the three letters (April 1) criticising Frank Furedi's column of the previous week since I had thought him spot-on.

Of course, there is a difference between possessing ideas and reading demanding texts, as well as between students who require help because they are dyslexic and those who ask for lecture notes because of false assumptions about their purpose.

Furedi, furthermore, would surely not disagree with intellectuals making their research public, but lecture notes (with their abbreviations, ellipses and stylistic idiosyncrasies) are not written for the public domain.

And let us not get so carried away with the ideal ("This six-page handout will help me better understand the text I have just read" or "This compact handout means that I know what to read up on before next week") that we fail to recognise other realities ("This long handout means I don't have to read that text now" or "Much simpler than getting up for that 9am class...").

Unless the April 1 date was more relevant than I thought.

Gillian Ania
School of Languages
Salford University