The College Writing Problem: Stop the Presses for Journalism and English Majors

Philip White

In the course of the Atlantic’s recent series, The Writing Revolution, contributors have explored how to inspire struggling students, discussed the need to go beyond curriculum requirements, and delved into the disparity between how American society treats its high school athletes and their star student classmates.

Each of these pieces has merit, and yet as I read them, I was inspired to move beyond what works and what doesn’t for K-12 writing instruction and jump ahead to the problems of writing in higher education. 

In his fine essay, Arthur Applebee writes that in 2011, 40 to 41 percent of public school students at grades 8 and 12 were assigned less than a page of writing homework per week, and that 80 percent of these assignments didn’t involve composition.

You may think and hope that this dearth of practical writing is overcome once students pack their bags for college and that our higher education institutions have challenging syllabi that prepare able students to write the next great American novel, become the new David McCullough, or, heck, just eke out a living as a poet or freelance journalist.  But, in many cases, such an assumption is ill founded.  

The composition courses required at liberal arts colleges (typically Comp 1 and Comp 2) are usually a joke, covering the basics of grammar and style that previous generations mastered in high school or before. If you don’t know a verb from an adverb by the time you’re 18, what hope is there for you? Indeed, enterprising students can and should do all they can to avoid such rudimentary instruction—and the cost of six useless credit hours—by taking a CLEP testthat exempts them from Comp course requirements.

The picture is little brighter when it comes to those brave and creative souls who choose an English or journalism degree. The typical limitation of the former is a lack of practical exercises that allow students to critically evaluate a text in a way that sharpens analytical skills applicable outside academia. The length and scope of such essays have been steadily reduced, to the point where a two-page, double-spaced exercise in brevity is the norm. There’s nothing wrong with being succinct, but such an assignment is a cakewalk for most able undergraduates. Many won’t excel unless they’re pushed, and a few hundred words now and again just isn’t going to cut it.

There are many challenges for journalism degree programs, but these can be distilled into two main points. First, the newspaper game has changed so much with the closing of many dailies and weekly publications, the staff cuts at others and the rise of online-only pubs like The Huffington Post, which rely ever more on unpaid contributors from its vast blogging network.

The same is true of magazines: while there are an increasing number of specialty publications and overall reading stats are up (if you believe the claims in the 2010—2011 Power of Print campaign run by the Big Five of Time Inc., Hearst, Advance Publications' Condé Nast, Wenner Media, and Meredith), many more have folded and many of the surviving titles are run by skeleton crews. Still more titles have become online-only ventures that require Web 3.0-ready writing—complete with tags, optimized search terms and such—elements all too often ignored by behind-the-times journalism programs.

Second, there are too many schools at which the journalism professors have never actually worked as journalists. Sure, having a Master’s and Ph.D. in journalism is beneficial, but a lack of practical experience makes it nearly impossible for an instructor to prepare his or her students for the working world. I was fortunate enough to have a journalism adjunct professor whose day job was running several local newspapers. I was shocked by the red ink hemorrhage on my first few assignments, but soon realized that this detail-oriented editing from a real editor was making me a better writer. If it wasn’t good enough to be printed, it wasn’t good enough for him. His diligence and the equally severe, yet constructive, reviews from three others professors conditioned me for writing outside of academia. And when I’d finally reached his high bar, Mr. Kevin Wright put one of my feature stories on the front page of his flagship paper. So began my writing career.

For journalism professors who don’t have Wright’s practical experience, bringing in guest speakers to provide guidance on essential topics—such as how to prepare for and conduct an interview and how to establish connections with editors—can help. But this is no substitute for an instructor who can pass on lived lessons to would-be journalists. Or for one who not only has writing chops to bolster academic credentials, but also encourages students to get ahead by (heaven forbid) building a useful portfolio while still in college. There are, of course, fine journalism programs—including those at Columbia University and the University of Missouri—but too many others are letting students graduate with an all but worthless BA based on theory-heavy courses from a bygone era.  What student wants to pay 100 grand for that education?

Writing Well?

Randall Stephens

The Sokal Hoax is the stuff of academic legend. The journal Social Text published Alan Sokal's baroque send-up of po-mo, bad writing in the spring/summer 1996. Sokal gave it the absurdly pompous title: "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." Steven Weinberg wrote about it in the NYRB later that same year:

The targets of Sokal's satire occupy a broad intellectual range. There are those 'postmoderns' in the humanities who like to surf through avant garde fields like quantum mechanics or chaos theory to dress up their own arguments about the fragmentary and random nature of experience. There are those sociologists, historians, and philosophers who see the laws of nature as social constructions. There are cultural critics who find the taint of sexism, racism, colonialism, militarism, or capitalism not only in the practice of scientific research but even in its conclusions. Sokal did not satirize creationists or other religious enthusiasts who in many parts of the world are the most dangerous adversaries of science, but his targets were spread widely enough, and he was attacked or praised from all sides.
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Sokal also threw in some hairy theory and clunky sentences. For instance, he wrote seriously about the nonsensical "morphogenetic field" theory. His sophistry meant to impress. And the editors of Social Text were impressed. In a move that paralleled conceptual art, Sokal, so thought unknowing readers, was pushing the boundaries of so-called "science." 

Do academics in the humanities still prize purple prose and fantastic theories over clear writing and measured analysis? Are scholars stubbornly proud of their bad writing, as if to shout from the rooftops that their work is only to be read and understood by a cabal of fellow scribblers? Can anyone make a case for not rooting out unidentified antecedents, passive voice, misplaced modifiers, lack of agreement, or double negatives? Should there be some kind of writing standard, even for academics? 

To that last question Helen Sword says "yes." The author of Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard University Press, 2012), Sword writes about her project in the WSJ: 

Unfortunately, the myth persists, especially among junior faculty still winding their anxious way up the tenure track, that the gates of academic publishing are guarded by grumpy sentries programmed to reject everything but jargon-laden, impersonal prose. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Nearly everyone, including the editors of academic journals, would much rather read lively, well-written articles than the slow-moving sludge of the typical scholarly paper.
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Surely, scholars in the humanities should consider their audience and what kind of message they are trying to convey. Would any author happily describe his or her work as "inaccessible," "abstruse," or "turgid"? Probably not. Yet plow through many an article in an academic journal or read a random monograph from the shelves of your university library and those words will likely come to mind. 

Some years ago in grad school I worked with the labor historian Robert Zieger. Here's one bit of advice he offered undergrads and grad students: "Use vigorous, direct language. Short sentences work. Employ concrete, precise nouns and active verbs, being careful, for example, to find active substitutes for forms of the verb 'to be' and 'to go.' Inexperienced writers often erroneously think that convoluted language, long sentences, and pretentious diction impress teachers." And still . . . many academics seem to think "convoluted language, long sentences, and pretentious diction" will impress or suitably confuse readers. That would not be too far from what George Orwell described in "Politics and the English Language" (1946): “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” 

But surely one kind of writing doesn't suit all disciplines! And so Sword observes:

Stylishness is in the eye of the beholder, of course, and stylistic preferences can vary significantly across disciplines. Nevertheless, all stylish academics adhere to three key principles that any writer can master: communication, concreteness, and craft.

Rejecting those three, I penned my own bit of over-written, jargon-laden academic unprose. It's exaggerated, I know. But, not by much!

The prevailing sequence of hybridity in the post-colonised novel lends itself, interstitially, to notions of conquest, absence, and disquietude of the en-lightened Mastermind. A mind{less}ness prevails, just as order, disorder, and value-induced reasoning through a countless series of dilemmas grows. A closer look bears repeating in rough contexts unlike those aberrant occidentric diodanous boundarylands. The transformation of agency-related modes of being, working, and cleaning demarcate and imbue the singularities of eroticizational ideation. Or, in one scholar's incisive words: 

My growing conviction has been that the encounters and negotiations of differential meanings and values within 'colonial' textuality, its governmental discourses and cultural practices, have anticipated, avant la lettre, many of the problematics of signification and judgement that have become current in contemporary theory—aporia, ambivalence, indeterminacy, the question of discursive closure, the threat to agency, the status of intentionality, the challenge to 'totalizing' concepts, to name but a few.*

And still, we have to ask ourselves, if only it were so simple. . . . 

Do the dominant Deleuzeian somnambulant regimes of some prelinguistic realities reinscribe what some are now, rightly, calling Academies of Texthibitionism? Are gleeful literary curios to blame for our unctuous, precious dreamworld of the deracinated female body? All such question are implicitly, if not explicitlessly, reiterated and conformed by the worries of a market-driven, late capitalist, zero-sum hegemon—a two-term qualifier revamp if there ever was one, to paraphrase Dioxané Umbriage. 

As I have argued elsewhere, and as is made rather clearly in the notes to the notes of chapter 5, the vicissitudanal convergencies of self and the “sane” are only partially related to the singularities of a final Lacanian eroticizational ideation schema. Albeit, a brave one.

Roundup on Writing

From a cafe in Grunerløkka, Oslo

William Zinsser, "Looking for a Model," American Scholar blog, ND

Writing is learned by imitation; we all need models. “I’d like to write like that,” we think at various moments in our journey, mentioning an author whose style we want to emulate. But our best models may be men and women writing in fields different from our own. When I wrote On Writing Well, in 1974, I took as my model a book that had nothing to do with writing or the English language.>>>

PageView Editor, "My Daily Read: [an interview with] Helen Sword," Chronicle, May 2, 2012

Q: What is your greatest criticism of much academic writing?

A. In contrast to Sinclair’s lucid and engaging paper, many academic articles are quite frankly unreadable, not only by disciplinary outsiders but by close colleagues.  Often the problem is simply poor craftsmanship:  perhaps the author has tried to cram three or four major ideas into a single sentence, leaving the reader to do the hard work of disentangling all those nested subordinate clauses.  Another common issue is an excessive allegiance to the discourse of abstraction: it’s not uncommon to find nine, ten, or more spongy abstract nouns (examples: allegiance, discourse, abstraction) cohabiting in a single sentence. The human attention span has trouble coping with that much vagueness.  Stylish academic writers anchor abstract ideas in the physical world, using stories, case studies, metaphors, illustrations, concrete nouns, and vivid verbs, and lots and lots of examples.>>>

Isabel Kaplan, "Classic Literature Isn't Dead: No Ifs, Ands, or Buts," Huff Post Books, June 5, 2012

THIS JUST IN: Contemporary writers are no longer influenced by classic literature -- or so claim a team of mathematicians from Dartmouth and Wisconsin in a recently published paper entitled, "Quantitative patterns of stylistic influence in the evolution of literature.">>>

Gail Collins, "How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us," New York Review of Books, June 21, 2012

No matter where you live, if your children go to public schools, the textbooks they use were very possibly written under Texas influence. If they graduated with a reflexive suspicion of the concept of separation of church and state and an unexpected interest in the contributions of the National Rifle Association to American history, you know who to blame.>>>

Maria Popova, "Ray Bradbury on Facing Rejection ... and Being Inspired by Snoopy," Atlantic Monthly, May 21, 2012

Famous advice on writing abounds—Kurt Vonnegut's 8 tips on how to make a great story, David Ogilvy's 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller's 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac's 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck's six pointers, and various invaluable insight from other great writers. In Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life, Barnaby Conrad and Monte Schulz, son of Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz, bring a delightfully refreshing lens to the writing advice genre by asking 30 famous authors and entertainers to each respond to a favorite Snoopy comic strip with a 500-word essay on the triumphs and tribulations of the writing life.>>>

Standing Desks: Jefferson, Disraeli, Churchill and, Err, Dwight K. Schrute

Philip White

Stand up desks are becoming quite hip, even making it onto an episode of The Office. And speaking of hips (and, indeed, lower backs), I cured a persistent pain issue by standing to type for 2/3 of my day/night work hours. The evidence seems conclusive that sitting all day is terrible for your lumbar spine, increases the risk of heart disease and piles on the pounds like you’ve done on a Kansas City barbecue-only diet.  

One thing that’s also for sure, although often overlooked, is that standing to write is nothing new. Thomas Jefferson designed a six-legged standing desk, the extra pegs adding stability. The great British statesman Benjamin Disraeli, like many of his Victorian age, preferred to be on his feet when writing. And, though he far preferred dictation as his primary composition method, Disraeli’s countryman and fellow prime minister, Winston Churchill, followed suit when he picked up his fountain pen.

And elevated desks have not been confined to the offices of heads of state. Ernest Hemingway considered it soft to sit (OK, I have NO basis for that, but I can imagine him growling something similar) and, before him, Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf scrawled away at a standing desk. More recent proponents include Philip Roth.

Personally, I believe that beyond banishing my lower back/hip misery, standing to write has enabled me to work late into the night without feeling fatigued or needing the dubious pleasure of a late-night double espresso, a Faustian bargain if ever there was one. It is only in the past 100 years that we’ve been taught that if you’re writing, you should be sitting. Many older British and American universities still have standing desks in their libraries, and pictures of 19th century offices show sit/stand combo desks. Apparently we don’t get smarter over time, at least in this case. 

I’m interested to find out more about the sociological and workplace culture factors behind the move away from standing in the years between then and now. Why has it taken so long to rediscover the truth that hunching over at a desk for 40 hours a week (or, in the case of we few who toil into the wee hours on our books and articles, a lot more) is far from a good idea, and that standing can boost productivity and, arguably, longevity.

Brief Hiatus this Week

Randall Stephens

In the interests of getting some research and writing done, the blog will take a short break this week.

In the meantime, have a look at some of these posts on grading . . . the favorite pastime of all history profs and GTAs!

"'Will this be on the test?' Rough Seas Ahead," April 30, 2011
Randall Stephens

"Historians Teaching Grammar," February 7, 2011
Heather Cox Richardson

"Where Should the Thesis Go in a College Essay?" March 29, 2011
Jonathan Rees

"The Plagiarism Gamble and Theory of Mind," August 31, 2011
Randall Stephens

"History’s Tests," June 28, 2011
Chris Beneke

Writers and Writing Roundup

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Elise Blackwell, "Is Everyone a Writer?" Chronicle, March 3, 2012

The only aspect of my job as an MFA director and creative writing professor that I dislike—aside from those “and then I woke up” stories freshmen sometimes write—is gatekeeping.>>>

Patricia Hampl, "F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Essays From the Edge," American Scholar (Spring 2012)

The first readers to comment on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” essays made no pretense to literary criticism. They just wanted to dish—and diss. The dismay of old or former or soon-to-be-former friends came at Fitzgerald fast and furious, along with smack-downs from those critics who bothered to remark on the essays as they appeared in three successive issues of Esquire, in February, March, and April 1936.>>>

Rob Latham, "The Exegete: On the career of Philip K. Dick, up to and including The Exegesis," Los Angeles Review of Books, February 24, 2012

When Philip K. Dick died in 1982 of a series of strokes brought on by years of overwork and amphetamine abuse, he was seen within the science fiction genre as a cult author of idiosyncratic works treating themes of synthetic selfhood and near-future dystopia, an intriguing if essentially second-rank talent.>>>

"Five Female Writers Who Changed The Course Of Chicago Literary History," Chicagoist, March 8, 2012

March is Women's History Month; for 31 days we celebrate the women who have made our employment, the oration of our opinions, and our lifestyles possible. When it comes to contemporary authors, there's plenty of strong female voices in Chicago.>>>

Scott Martelle, "Book review: 'Watergate,'" Los Angeles Times, February 19, 2012

A few months ago I attended a book launch party for Adam Hochschild's World War I history, "To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918," where he offered a concise dissection of the difference between writing novels and writing history. To write history, he said, the story needs only to be true. To write a novel, the story must be plausible — an often much more difficult thing to accomplish.>>>

Notes from Grad School: Teaching Writing

Dan Allosso



As I prepared this summer to resume my role as a teaching assistant at a large, public, East-Coast research university, I’ve been reflecting on the responsibility that goes with that assignment. Most of the lower level courses offered to undergraduates by my department fill the university’s “general education” requirement, which means that in addition to the historical or diversity outcomes these classes are designed to achieve, many of them also satisfy the university’s writing requirement. So as well as leading discussions on the readings and answering questions arising from lectures, I am a writing teacher.



I happen to like writing, and I’ve had some experience with writing and teaching prior to becoming a grad student. This experience isn’t completely unique (the grad student in the next office was a journalist), but for those of us who didn’t come with these skills, the university doesn’t really do much to prepare us as writing teachers.



I don’t say this to criticize my particular school. Twenty years ago, when my father was earning his PhD in Comparative Literature at a major West-Coast university, the situation was similar. My Dad, whose main interest was teaching literature to young people, made a career there (following his earlier career as a high school English teacher) and wrote A Short Handbook for Writing Essays about Literature, which has been in constant use there ever since.



Looking at the resources available for people like me, who teach writing outside of English departments, it was clear to me that a concise, practical, nuts-and-bolts writing handbook was as needed today in History as it had been twenty years ago in Comp. Lit. So I started with my father’s manuscript, and tried to expand it for use by social science as well as humanities students. It was a fun opportunity to reflect on the thought process he had gone through in writing his handbook, and then to engage in a sort-of dialog across the years. The advantage for me was, I was also able to email my revisions and expansions to my dad in California and get his reactions.



The result of this summer project is A Short Handbook for Writing Essays in the Humanities and Social Sciences. At 80 pages, it’s about twice as long as the earlier handbook, and it includes topics and examples geared for history students as well as readers of literature (although I’m hoping that exposure to examples from outside their specific fields will help make some of these ideas clearer for readers). I hope to use this in the fall, if I can convince the professor and the other TAs I’m working with to let me test it on our students. I’m also thinking of posting some short YouTube videos covering the main ideas of each chapter. One of my Dad’s original motivations was to get all the basics down, so that he wouldn’t have to repeat himself every time a student came to his office with questions. As I’ve mentioned once or twice before, I think the web offers us an incredible opportunity to reach out to people both inside and outside our classrooms with material they can use in whatever field they pursue.

Thou Shalt Review Books Responsibly

Chris Beneke

Last week, Robert Pinsky, the former poet laureate, offered three exceedingly sensible “golden requirements for book reviews”:

1. The review must tell what the book is about.

2. The review must tell what the book's author says about that thing the book is about.

3. The review must tell what the reviewer thinks about what the book's author says about that thing the book is about.

Those who have mastered the art of reviewing books, writes Pinsky, can “then get quickly beyond them, in ways that are fun to read.” The problem is that too many reviewers fail to comply with all three. Some consider two—or even one—sufficient.

My sense is that historians are a little more solicitous than most when it comes to these matters. Maybe it’s because we’re a relatively small, incestuous community where you’re likely to run into the book’s author at the next major conference—or, heaven forbid, have your own book reviewed by the injured party three journal issues hence. Of course, most historical journals convey something along these lines in their reviewer guidelines; though they are seldom, if ever, stated with such crystalline precision.

It’s fairly obvious that historians follow one rule almost as piously as Pinsky’s Golden Three. It’s more tactic than principle, and goes something like this: In a favorable journal review, the review’s penultimate paragraph must identify the book’s minor flaws. Perhaps you object to this entrenched professional habit on aesthetic grounds, but it would be hard to make a strong ethical or professional case against it.

Anyway, to Pinsky’s Golden Requirements, we might add the following historically specific Decalogue:

1. Thou shalt not use the review to tell us about your own scholarship.

2. Thou shalt not tell readers that “the definitive history of such-and-such remains to be written” when you are the person who intends to write it.

3. Thou shalt not tell us too much—or really anything at all—about the supposed religious beliefs or political commitments of the author whose book is being reviewed.

4. Thou shalt not treat the omission of your own book from the endnotes as a personal affront, punishable by withering historiographical criticism.

5. Thou shalt not use the review to suck up to powerful and/or beloved members of the profession. (Corollary: Thou shalt honor thy dissertation advisor, but not in your review.)

6. Thou shalt not use the review as an occasion to advance a specific political agenda.

7. Thou shalt not tell readers—either explicitly or implicitly—that the book under review does not deserve serious consideration. That shalt be told to the editor, privately, before the review is written.

8. Thou shalt not submit the review six months after the due date, especially when the book was published three years ago.

9. Thou shalt not use the review to expose your utter ignorance of the topic.

10. In reviews of edited collections, thou shalt tell a little something about each contribution.

What am I missing?

Acknowledging Shortcomings as a Writer

Philip White

As a writer, you get to know pretty quickly what you’re naturally good at. My good lady wife is the best, untrained copy editor I’ve come across and, as Erik Larson says about his other half, my “secret weapon” in writing my next book. A good friend is a grammar wizard, and what’s more (unlike me) he actually enjoys wielding his Chicago Manual of Style and Gregg Reference Manual. Another longtime buddy is the master at describing people and places, and holy crap I hate him for it!

Perhaps you also, in times of honest self-appraisal, realize what your weaknesses are. I lack the skills of the three mentioned above, and wonder how on Earth they acquired such gifts. The answer is obvious – a combination of acquired knowledge and God-given talent. It’s easy to get down on your inadequacies, to despair when staring your shortcomings in the eye, and to covet your neighbor’s grasp of the past participle!

But I’ve found that embracing what I lack and seeking assistance is actually quite a formative experience. By involving the aforementioned people in my writing and editing processes I’m submitting myself to an ongoing skills development program. And if you can check your ego enough to take constructive criticism from your spouse, you can certainly take it from any editor.

Next is to seek people who are willing to provide mentoring. I’m lucky enough to be related to one such person and seek regular guidance from my former college adviser on all matters regarding the written word. Another professor (and author of 15+ books) who’s based on the West Coast has guided me through the tangled web of the publishing industry. The keys to learning from these people? Humility, receptiveness to the opinions of people who know more than me, and a willingness to share my weaknesses openly.

Another way I am constantly trying to improve is by reading the work of writers I admire. This involves poring over all forms of books – history (Rick Atkinson, David McCullough), nonfiction (Larson, John Berendt) and historical fiction (Robert Harris, Juliet Barker), as well as keeping up on the latest features from the WSJ and magazines such as The Atlantic. The third individual I mentioned is the executive editor of a prominent culture magazine, and as he’s kindly put me on the mailing list (thanks again, Luke!), I am confronted by his brilliance once a month.

The idea here is that you become what you behold. So by focusing on those who are skilled writers, I’m hoping that I assimilate some of their powers of description, mastery of pacing, and brevity (hmmm, still working on that one, for sure).

I admit to have not having arrived at a place where I can be satisfied with my writing, nor do I ever want to get to such a place. But by surrounding myself with talented people who can teach me something and reading the best work in the genres I dabble in means I’m better than I was yesterday, and tomorrow will be another step along the road to “writing well.”

Less is More in Elgin Park, and in Writing

Heather Cox Richardson

Michael Paul Smith has been described as the “Mayor of Elgin Park,” a town he has created entirely through photographs posted on the internet. Elgin Park is a town in the American Midwest, constructed as if it were the 1950s, without any inhabitants. In the photographs visible on the web, it appears to be a real town. But Elgin Park exists only in pixels.

My first reaction to the models created by Mr. Smith was to be a bit creeped out. The recreation of a “perfect” model of an imaginary idyllic past, documented in photographs, seems too close for comfort to the world of History as Fantasy that historians so abhor.

But looking at Mr. Smith as an artist rather than looking at his art as historical representation offers an interesting perspective on writing history.

Mr. Smith explains that he works hard to make sure he does not provide too much information in his images. He leaves room for the viewer to project himself or herself into the photograph, using his or her own eyes and emotions to fill in details.

“Things visually ‘read’ better when the amount of information is kept in check,” Mr. Smith notes. “The brain / eye / emotions will fill in the details, even when there is minimum amount of data available. On the other hand, there can be too much information. When that happens, you end up with a literal representation of something and very little room for personal interpretation. The more the viewer can project themselves into something, the more powerful it becomes.”

This struck a chord with me because it is precisely what my wonderful editor hammered home when we worked together on a recent project. She insisted on chopping all my sentences in half. While I worried the resulting simplicity would insult readers by suggesting I thought they were stupid, she held her ground and told me the book itself read better with very simple prose. I came—eventually—to see that long complicated sentences and drawn out paragraphs commandeer all a reader’s attention, making him or her work at deciphering the mechanics of the prose. This can be useful if the writer’s idea is to focus, as certain theoreticians do, on words and their meaning. But for historians exploring other aspects of our field, it serves no real purpose. With complicated writing, a story never comes to life. Instead, it sits stubbornly on the page, imprisoned in a tangle of words.

Simple sentences, like Mr. Smith’s uncluttered images, free a reader’s mind to fill in the ideas and the emotions of a story.

Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author of the Little House books, was a master of creating evocative scenes with very simple sentences. Here, for example, she describes a department store in Dakota Territory:

The inside of the store was all new, and still smelled of pine shavings. It had, too, the faint starchy smell of bolts of new cloth. Behind two long counters, all along both walls ran long shelves, stacked to the ceiling with bolts of muslin and calicoes and lawns, challis and cashmeres and flannels and even silks.

There were no groceries, and no hardware, no shoes or tools. In the whole store there was nothing but dry goods. Laura had never before seen a store where nothing was sold but dry goods.

At her right hand was a short counter-top of glass, and inside it were cards of all kinds of buttons, and papers of needles and pins. On the counter beside it, a rack was full of spools of thread of every color. Those colored threads were beautiful in the light from the windows. (Little Town on the Prairie, 1941, p. 48).

In ten sentences, she suggests the look and feel of a brand new store, the excitement it generates, and the isolation and poverty in which Laura has always lived. Wilder has left room for her readers to imagine the scene, rather than forcing us to use all our mental energy on her prose.

While a simple style is certainly not the only way to write evocatively, it is one that historians, especially beginning historians, should not shun in the fear that they will look stupid if they don’t write in tangles. As Mr. Smith says, less can often be more.

Jane Kamensky on Learning from Fiction

Randall Stephens

Writing history is often a topic of discussion on this blog and animates the pages of Historically Speaking. (See some recent posts on writing here, here, and here.) Have a look at the right hand column on this page. You'll see posts grouped under "How to Write," "Writing History," "Editing," and more.

In that vein, I'm happy to post below a selection from Jane Kamensky's lead essay on writing in the April issue of Historically Speaking. Kamensky provides useful advice on scene setting, prose, and style, drawing on the lessons of fiction. She brings the wisdom of experience. With Jill Lepore, she authored the novel Blindspot (Spiegel & Grau/Random House, 2008). Kamensky has also written The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse (Viking, 2008), a finalist for the 2009 George Washington Book Prize; and Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (Oxford University Press, 1997).

Jane Kamensky, "Novelties: A Historian's Field Notes from Fiction," Historically Speaking (April 2011)

Here in the twilight of the Enlightenment, academic historians have fallen in love with how little we can know. Over the last fifty years, people, events, even places in the past have grown more obscure to many of us. Compare a work of history written in 1960 to one published in 2010, and you might wonder whether the mists of time have somehow thickened.

Can aspects of the novelist’s imagination help us to cut through the fog? Two years ago, the historian Jill Lepore and I published a novel we wrote together. Set in Boston in 1764, Blindspot started out as a lark, a gift for a friend. It grew into a project that felt important, even urgent, to us as scholars: a different way of knowing and telling the past. What follows are nine lessons learned in that effort to conjure a known and knowable world: a Then as real as Now, in our minds and on our pages.

1. Face It

Most historians suffer from prosopagnosia: face blindness. My co-author and I had written a goodly number of pages when it dawned on us that we had yet to tell our readers what our two first-person narrators looked like. In a novel that is, in large measure, about seeing, such description seemed a matter of duty. Our readers, not to mention our narrators themselves, needed to know how tall Fanny and Jamie stood, the color of their hair, the cut of their proverbial jibs.

How tough could such an accounting be? This was fiction, after all; we answered only to our characters. But confronted with this delectable task, we promptly choked. Their eyes, how they twinkled; their dimples, how merry: it seemed we had naught but rank cliché at our fingertips.

How do you take stock of a human face? Every time you walk in to a bus, a bar, or a classroom, you take people’s mettle visually, instantly, almost without thinking. But the sheer narrative terror of that moment made me realize that, as historians, we seldom confront the embodied nature of past individuals. We’re capable of writing the history of the self, or the history of the body, or even the history of sexuality, without crafting characters capable of staring back at us, as a good portrait does.

Writers of fiction give their characters faces and yea, even bodies, in a variety of ways. Consider this description, so thorough and meticulous that it bends in spots toward inventory:

Thomas Cromwell is now a little over forty years old. He is a man of strong build, not tall. Various expressions are available to his face, and one is readable: an expression of stifled amusement. His hair is dark, heavy and waving, and his small eyes, which are of very strong sight, light up in conversation: so the Spanish ambassador will tell us, quite soon. It is said he knows by heart the entire New Testament in Latin, and so as a servant of the cardinal is apt—ready with a text if abbots flounder. . . . [H]e is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and he spends it. He will take a bet on anything.1

Cromwell, of course, is a character from history and from fiction, in this case Hilary Mantel’s magnificent novel, Wolf Hall. Her description begins with a physical body, and a face, courtesy of Hans Holbein’s 1533 portrait. But then she peers through the eyes to the soul, as if she knows the guy, and her reader should, too.

Can historians do anything quite so wonderful? We don’t know the inner life of our subjects the way a novelist can know her characters. After all, a writer of fiction invents the soul whose windows the eyes become. Mantel’s Cromwell isn’t, can’t, and shouldn’t be history’s Cromwell. Thomas Cromwell merely lived; Mantel’s Cromwell soars. Yet almost every line in her description can be fully sourced: to the portrait, to Cromwell’s letters, to contemporaneous descriptions of the man. At bottom, Mantel’s path to knowing Cromwell isn’t all that different from a scholar’s. The magic comes in the author’s moral confidence in what she’s got—and then, of course, in the telling. Biographers, who live a long time with their subjects, offer readers hard-won, hard-working encapsulations of character all the time. Historians, trained to concentrate on the background at the expense of the figure in the portrait, do so less often than we might.

Of course, those who study remoter pasts and less celebrated people rarely even know what their subjects looked like. Yet no matter how obscure the actors, they had eyes and mouths, expressions and gestures that quickened the pulse of loved ones and triggered the loathing of enemies. Even when we cannot see the people we write about—perhaps especially then—we’d do well to remember that they weren’t made of paper, and didn’t pass their fleeting lives in acid-free boxes within temperature-controlled archives. They lived behind faces and within bodies, in heat and in cold, pleasure and pain, experiencing the present from the inside out. Their present became our past, and we’re stuck working from the outside in, from the page to the person. That’s no excuse for confusing the journey with the destination.

2. Taste It

The challenge of “facing” our subjects represents the merest tip of a vast and complex phenomenological iceberg. As a sometime novelist, I spent a lot of time presumptuously tasting, hearing, smelling, seeing, and feeling on my characters’ behalf. Since Blindspot is set in the sweltering summer of 1764, that wasn’t always pleasant.

The novelist is not alone here. In the last two decades the “history of the senses,” pioneered by scholars including Michael Baxandall and John Berger (sight), Alain Corbin (smell), and Richard Rath and Mark Smith (sound), among others, has become a flourishing subfield.2 I admire this work a great deal. But for all its sophistication, the history of the senses is as remote from sensorily rich history as the history of the body is from embodied history.

Because they create rather than discover a world, writers of fiction constantly index and mobilize the senses. Think of Proust’s madeleine, surely the most famous cookie in literature, whose lime-scented crumbs set off a four-page-long reverie that begins in Swann’s aunt’s kitchen and spreads to encompass “the whole of Combray, and its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid . . . town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.”3

In nonfiction writing it can be no coincidence that some of the best sensoryladen storytelling comes from authors not burdened by Ph.D.s. Consider two examples, each describing the day-to-day operations of the print trades in the 18th century. The first comes from a superb work of academic history, Jeffrey L. Pasley’s The Tyranny of Printers:

Though printing had its cerebral and prestigious aspects, it was still a dirty, smelly, physically demanding job. One of the first chores that would be delegated to a young apprentice printer was preparing the sheepskin balls used to ink the type. The skins were soaked in urine, stamped on daily for added softness, and finally wrung out by hand. The work got harder from there, and only a little more pleasant. Supplies of ink were often scarce in America, so printers frequently had to make it on site, by boiling lampblack (soot) in varnish (linseed oil and rosin). If the printing-office staff survived the noxious fumes and fire hazards of making ink, their persons and equipment nevertheless spent much of the workday covered in the stuff.4

This is lucid, economical writing, pointed toward a set of important questions about the role of printers in the emergent public sphere of the early United States.

Now compare Pasley’s to this description, by the journalist Adam Hochschild, of James Phillips’s London print shop, hard by the Bank of England, where a crucial meeting of Granville Sharp’s antislavery society took place in May, 1787:

Type would be sitting in slanted wooden trays with compartments for the different letters; the compositors who lined it up into rows, letter by letter, would be working, as the day ended, by the light of tallow candles whose smoke, over the decades, would blacken the ceiling. . . . Around the sides of the room, stacks of dried sheets, the latest antislavery book or Quaker tract, would await folding and binding. And finally, the most distinctive thing about an eighteenth-century print shop was its smell. To ink the type as it sat on the bed of the press, printers used a wool-stuffed leather pad with a wooden handle. Because of its high ammonia content, the most convenient solvent to rinse off the ink residue that built up on these pads was printers’ urine. The pads were soaked in buckets of this, then strewn on the slightly sloping floor, where printers stepped on them as they worked, to wring them out and let the liquid drain away.5

Though the two passages rely on some of the same sources, Hochschild’s version owes as much to Dickens as to Pasley. It is specific and transporting rather than generic and distancing. Key differences reside in the sensory details: one paragraph, three senses. Sight: the blackened ceilings, the smoking tallow candles. Touch: compositors’ fingers flying over cast-iron type, the heft and texture of the wooden-handled pads, the disequilibrium of standing on that sloping floor. And of course smell: the close shop on a warm spring night reeking of piss as well as Enlightenment ideals.

These sensory details give Hochschild’s scene volume. But they do more than that. The sight, feel, and smell of the shop impart a frisson of opposites —these are “unlikely surroundings,” as Hochschild puts it, for a key moment in the transformation of humanitarian thought. Then, quickly, we’re on to the substance of that meeting, an intellectual history drawn from tract literature. Sensory does not mean sensational. read more>>>

Where Should the Thesis Go in a College Essay?

Jonathan Rees

My 11th grade English teacher was named Joan Goodman, and she was very particular about how she wanted us to write our essays. The first sentence was where the thesis went. I’m sure she didn’t put it this way, but the second sentence was where you would repeat the thesis in different words in case the person grading it was too stupid to get it the first time you wrote it. The rest of the first paragraph was for elaborating on your thesis as you began to foreshadow what would appear in the body of the essay.
Ms. Goodman told us that her method was the same method they used to teach writing to the cadets at West Point. I’ve never checked into that, but I believe it because she was equally regimented in the way she drilled her model into our heads. Ours was not to ask why. Ours was just to do or . . . Well, maybe not die, but at least get a grade too low for us to get into the Ivy League schools to which we all aspired. I internalized her methods well and it served me well for a very long time, especially in history classes by substituting facts for quotes from the novel at hand.

As I don’t write college essays anymore, this structure no longer has a great impact on my own writing. It takes pages not sentences for me to get most of my arguments out, and thankfully the blog posts that I write, which are the length of some college essays, usually have no theses in them. (Otherwise, I doubt that I’d enjoy writing them so much.)

I do, however, subject my own students to the Joan Goodman/West Point writing model even if I pride myself in being a little less martial about it than she was. If you’re writing a paper that’s longer than eight pages, there’s no reason you can’t have one of those flowery introductions that most English teachers seem to love. You’ve got a lot of space to fill. The same thing goes for people who like to put their thesis at the end of the first paragraph. If it’s going to be a long paper, there’s no reason that you can’t elaborate on what the thesis means as well as the rest of the paper in paragraph number two.

However, when it comes to the four to six page papers that are the bread and butter of the upper-level undergraduate history course, I might as well be a drill sergeant. Even though I don’t remember Ms. Goodman ever explaining it this way, I have come to see the first sentence as the prime real estate in any college essay. It is not just the only sentence where a student can be assured of their professor’s undivided attention, it is the perfect place to set up for an explanation of what the student is thinking (which has always been my main criterion for grading).

A few weeks ago in my labor history class, I got the worst pushback I’ve ever experienced on this from one of my students. “I’ll give you your first sentence thesis, but next semester I’m going back to writing it the way I like it,” she told me. While I wish I had the quick thinking skills to compliment her on her newfound flexibility, my response was slightly different. “I don’t want you to write this way because I tell you so,” I explained. “I want you to write this way because you think it’s the best way to write.”

It’s at that point when I started singing. I don’t sing well, so I don’t do it often, but I do think it illustrates my reasoning (not to mention Joan Goodman’s) here well. Imagine an opera singer doing scales. They begin low, gradually get higher and end with a note that catches your attention. The problem with that in a writing context is that every note in a first paragraph should catch your attention. That’s the only way that anyone can make a complex argument well. A good first paragraph, in other words, should be all high notes.

In my experience, students who put their thesis at the end of the first paragraph think their heavy lifting is then over. Without explanation and elaboration, the thesis falls to the wayside for the rest of the paper and I’m left reading mostly book summary. Using the end of the paragraph thesis model is too often an excuse to stop thinking. Putting the thesis at the beginning forces them to explain what they mean in some detail before they ever get to the details of the history at hand.

I teach writing not just because I have to, but because I get better papers that way. This, in turn, makes my job more fun. So thank you Joan Goodman (as well as a few other excellent English teachers from the Princeton, New Jersey public schools). You’re why I take my students’ complaints that I secretly wanted to be an English teacher as the highest form of compliment.

Writing that Book After Work Hours: Why and How

Philip White

In a perfect world, each historian with a worthy book proposal would earn an advance large enough to enable him or her to focus solely on crafting a top notch manuscript. In reality, for those of us who write history in addition to working outside the academy, we work to convince university presses that our ideas are “academic” enough and trade presses that our book will be “marketable.” Once we get a deal it barely allows us to get enough Starbucks coffee to fuel late-night writing sessions after our “real” jobs are done for the day. After the tax collector has taken a cut and we’ve plumped down the cash for research trips, bought enough books to buckle already-burdened shelves, and purchased enough aspirin to kill a small horse, we’re typically left with a pittance. So why do we put ourselves through this?

It can’t just be because we’re suckers, or so I keep telling myself as my bloodshot eyes struggle to comprehend the horror of reading “2:00” again—and I’m not talking p.m.—on my bedside clock as I stumble into my bed, fearing the alarm that will blare in not even five hours.

Well, one reason is a cliché, but true nonetheless—love. Love of the subject matter, the new angle we’ve come up with, the historical characters we’re impatient for our potential readers to meet on the page. For me, it is all of these, plus the thrill of finding a detail that I’ve never seen before, something I’ve just discovered in a dusty archive file after a day of previously fruitless searching.

Another bonus is mastery, relative though that is, of our subject matter. Often, this involves the painful recognition that presuppositions we formed years ago are wildly inaccurate—a revelation that only comes from digesting a broad range of scholarly works to get as close to the “truth” as we can. We then do our own primary and secondary source work, which takes apart yet more generic or personal misconceptions, while supplying new facts to take their place. Supplement that with oral history, archival work and such and you can get dangerously close to (gulp!) writing a book with something new and important to say.

So now I’ve covered the “why,” at least in part, onto the “how.” Yes, the aforementioned caffeine, applied in careful doses that don’t cumulatively turn you into a jabbering, twitchy wreck that can’t sleep, is certainly needed. Beyond that there are the principles of organization and prioritization. The fact that you have might have a main job in which you must give your best effort, maybe a family and possibly, you slacker, some other, non-work interests, means you are dealing with very limited time. The first step in getting organized is working with your family to set up a realistic schedule that won’t push you over the edge or deny them the time they need. Then, you must find a suitable workspace in which distractions are minimal, a desk uncluttered and all the resources you need at your disposal. If this sounds elementary, forgive me, but it’s amazing how many wasted hours result from trying to eke out a first draft in a noisy, crowded, disorganized workspace. Next, you need to set yourself some deadlines, even if they’re “soft,” with your manuscript submission date in mind.

Once you’ve got these basics down, got all your research materials together and are ready to jump in, you need to prioritize. What are you going to tackle first, and why? List making may seem like a chore, but well ordered to-dos for each aspect of your project are useful: “Things to Ask My Advisor,” “Interviews to Conduct,” “Archives to Visit,” and so on. Then you must decide how much time to give to each list, and then each item on your list, in order to meet those established deadlines. It’s satisfying to get out the red pen and cross off items, one by one.

The third stage of getting a well-written book completed on time is execution. All the organization and prioritization in the world is useless if you’re not going to actually hunker down and get the thing written. This is tied to the umbrella over the three components—discipline. It takes discipline to clear your workspace, organize your folders so they’re easy to navigate, apportion your time adequately, and then to execute. Discipline is needed to say “no” when your buddies invite you out for a few cold ones or when you want to watch your favorite team lose again. It also takes discipline to listen to your body’s warning signals and take a night off when you need it.

If you can combine organization, prioritization, discipline, and execution you will be able to have fun with your research and writing processes, to eliminate wasted time and to create a finished product you can be proud of. And that, ultimately, makes the creeping carpal tunnel syndrome, the sleep deprivation, and the raging caffeine addiction more than worth it!

Plagiarism: Getting the Point Across

Heather Cox Richardson

Over the years, I’ve tried everything I can to warn students away from plagiarizing. I explain, cajole, and threaten. I even have a set performance attacking plagiarism in the middle of the semester (the Plagiarism Lecture ought to win me an acting award).

It appears those of us who are soldiers in the war

against plagiarism now have a new weapon in our arsenal (from the University Library at the University of Bergen, Norway):

(If captions don’t appear immediately, click the cc button on the toolbar.)

There are pieces of this video that may be dicey for a classroom, but it does offer two crucial pieces of evidence that support our cause. First, it provides obvious proof to a student that plagiarism is not just the crazy hang-up of his or her particular teacher. It’s clear that a lot of money and time went into the making of this video. And it shows that plagiarism is hated everywhere, not just at a student’s particular school.

The way the video presents plagiarism as unacceptable is not how I present it. My own main point is that it is a profound version of theft. Still, educators I respect emphasize what the video does: that a student who plagiarizes cheats him or herself.

And in the era of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, poking fun at the issue to make a serious point might just work.

Historians Teaching Grammar

Heather Cox Richardson

Over the years, I’ve experimented a lot with how to teach writing. Increasingly, I get a significant number of students who don’t even know what a sentence is. Of course this means I spend most of my time on the larger picture of writing: thesis statements, structure, supporting evidence and so on.

But at some point, I got tired of correcting the same grammatical errors for the thousandth time. That frustration made me play around with some new approaches. One of the ones that seems to work is to treat the mechanics of writing like mathematical principle. Rather than repeatedly marking certain grammatical errors that come up again and again, and reminding the students to pay attention to them, I have taught the rule AS A RULE and told the students that this is the way things are, just as 2 + 2 + 4. Always. Period. I told them I would not accept any more mistakes on that particular rule. I’m still experimenting with how frequently I can introduce a new no-break rule, but one a week seems an acceptable pace for now.

Far from resenting this rote method—which conjures for me that dreadful orange grammar text we dragged ourselves through in eighth grade—the students seem thrilled to have found something they can hang on to with certainty in their writing. Yes, they still mess the rules up, but far less frequently. And when they do, I can just mark the error without explaining the rule in my comments.

I recently put to paper my four favorite rules for high school students. These are the ones that if violated immediately marks an essay as grammatically problematic (although they are only the top four). I’d like to keep building this list, so if anyone has suggestions, let me know.

Four crucial rules for ratcheting up your writing:

1. Make sure your subject and verb agree. For example: "Bats in the tent behind the tree were (not was) black."

2. Get your verb tenses correct. (This one is the hardest one on the list. Let me give you some tricks to get it right. First of all, put everything in past tense. English teachers sometimes get upset at that advice because they argue that literature is alive, and thus should be discussed in present tense. Yep. Okay. Got it. Now ignore that instruction unless you have a teacher that absolutely insists on it. Most readers are quite content to have everything in a single tense, and the past is a zillion times easier to manage in an essay than the present. Second, everyone—absolutely everyone—screws up the past and the past perfect. Don’t worry about the names of the tenses. Figure it out this way: imagine your action on a timeline. The majority of what’s happening in your essay will be in past tense. IF SOMETHING HAPPENS BEFORE THE MAJORITY OF THE ACTION, slip in a verb that indicates an earlier time. Usually, this will be the word “had.” For example: “He hoped that the ship would arrive that day, but he HAD heard the day before that it would be late.” This won’t always work, but it will work often enough that it’s worth doing. Just as if you were speaking, by the way.

3. An introductory clause always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always, (get the picture?) always, always, always, ALWAYS modifies the noun that comes immediately after it. ALWAYS. So:

“Running down the alley, he dropped the knife,” is correct.

“Running down the alley, the knife dropped from his hand,” is wrong, wrong, wrong, because the knife is not running down the alley.

4. Keep your writing in active voice. Avoid passives whenever possible (which is about 98.5% of the time). This is a very hard thing for students to manage, for two reasons. First of all, for some reason we have this weird idea that it sounds smart to write prose that has no action, as if somehow it makes us sound learned and above the fray to write as if events just occur. Second, using passive voice makes it possible to refrain from taking any sort of position on your topic. In passive voice, things just happen; you don’t have to explain why or how they happened. Passive voice is disastrous for both writers and thinkers. Take a look at this example: Here are two ways to write about a horrific massacre of more than 250 people, shot and knifed as they surrendered to soldiers. So which is more honest? “Two hundred and fifty people were shot,” or “Angry soldiers murdered two hundred and fifty women and children”? In the first, the deaths just happen; no one is at fault. In the second, I have squarely blamed the murders on the people who committed them. In the second version I’ve tried to explain an event, the actors, and the action. I’ve had to figure out exactly what happened, I’ve thought about the action, and I’ve taken a stand. And that’s why we write, isn’t it? To tell someone about the world. Active voice makes you stick your neck out, and it will make people angry at times. But it enables you to contribute your own ideas and vision to the world. Plus it’s a zillion times more fun to read than passive voice!

Bad Company and Good Prose

Heather Cox Richardson

Once again, I have been keeping bad company. This time my unsavory companion is Thurlow Weed, master wire-puller of nineteenth-century New York politics, and the mastermind of much that I find troubling in the deeply troubled years of the Civil War era.

Fortunately, Weed kept quite good company himself. . . at least after he died. Historian Glyndon Van Deusen produced a biography of Weed in 1947 from which I have learned more than I wanted to know about New York politics, but from which I have also gotten new ideas about the importance of engaging prose. Van Deusen’s book is remarkably readable. Here he is, for example, on the industrial world of the late nineteenth century:

The Civil War and the ensuing years saw the opening of a new era in American life. In the North, a great migration of farmers swept into the lands west of the Mississippi, transforming that region into the granary of the world. Industry assumed gigantic proportions. The smoke that belched from thousands of chimney stacks, the fires that glowed at night in the steel towns, symbolized opportunities that drew a motley crowd of dreamers and spoilers, builders and wreckers, into the industrial cockpit. Chambers of commerce increased and multiplied, side by side with Murderers’ Alleys and Poverty Lanes. Sleek dwellers in brownstone fronts and gimcrack chateaux looked down their noses at their country cousins, and shuddered with distaste as they saw trade-unions take root and grow in the darkness and squalor of the tenement districts. The age of Big Business had arrived, with all its glory and all its shame. (317)

This paragraph carries the weight of setting up the postwar world in which Weed operated, and it does so pretty thoroughly, it seems to me. Van Deusen creates a memorable paragraph primarily through his use of striking nouns—granary, dreamers, spoilers, builders, wreckers, cockpit, Murderers’ Alleys, and so on—an unusual technique compared to the more common reliance on strong verbs. He uses strong verbs, too, of course. The sentence: “Sleek dwellers in brownstone fronts and gimcrack chateaux looked down their noses at their country cousins, and shuddered with distaste as they saw trade-unions take root and grow in the darkness and squalor of the tenement districts” uses both nouns and verbs effectively to create a portrait of the era.

Surprisingly, Van Deusen does not use color, smell, or specific images to convey his point. Perhaps those are techniques of a later generation of writers, but color, at least, would have fit well here.

This sort of sweeping paragraph is less popular nowadays than it was in 1947. Today’s editors seem to prefer an individual point of view rather than the sort of omniscience Van Deusen uses. Today’s cry is for “boots on the ground,” an individual set of eyes through which a reader can see.

While I’m all for the idea of carefully constructed individual points of view, abandoning this older style entirely seems to me a loss. For me, these bird’s-eye snapshots provide the backdrop in front of which the action takes place, kind of a scan of the area before focusing on the figures in the foreground.

Am I the only one who likes these old-fashioned broad-brush descriptions?

On Writing and Editing

Randall Stephens

I took some time out of my large lecture course this week to talk to students about writing. Fresh on my mind was Rachel Toor's essay.

I always enjoy reading Toor "on writing" in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. This week's piece was especially interesting. Toor muses on the question: "So how do you learn to edit yourself?" True enough, seeing faults in your own work is sometimes harder than seeing them in the work of others. It's the splinter in his/her eye vs. the plank in yours.

Rachel Toor, "How Do You Learn to Edit Yourself?" Chronicle of Higher Education, September 27, 2010.

"Where do you go for help? The obvious first step is, of course, to acknowledge that you need help. Then go buy one of the zillions of books on writing well. They all say basically the same things. Find one that speaks to you in a way that you can hear.

Call me fusty and old-fashioned, but I heart Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, now in its 956th edition. My students receive it like a gift and tend to have two reactions: "How come no one ever told me to read this book?" And "OMG, I'm so embarrassed—I'm a terrible writer and make tons of mistakes." As Dorothy Parker said, "If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy.">>>

See also,

Lewis Thomas, "Notes on Punctuation."

William Zinsser, "Writing English as a Second Language," American Scholar (Winter 2010).

Michael C. Munger, "10 Tips on How to Write Less Badly," Chronicle of Higher Education, September 6, 2010.

Heather Cox Richardson, "Richardson's Rules of Order, Part VId: Tips for Writing Research Papers for a College History Course," THS Blog, July 27, 2009.