The Better Angels of Our Writing
I am always shocked when academics complain about being copy-edited, as if the marks that come back on their manuscripts were pesky flies that should be shooed away. My experience of receiving editing,...
View ArticleScholars Talk Writing: Sam Wineburg
Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and, by courtesy, of history at Stanford University, emailed himself into my life when he sent me a brief request: “No beating around the bush: Do you do any...
View ArticleScholars Talk Writing: Camille Paglia
Not long after she had splashed onto the scene with the publication of her first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, and followed that up with an essay in The...
View ArticleScholars Talk Writing: Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
Not long after I graduated from college as an English major with a jones for philosophy and a love of Iris Murdoch, Milan Kundera, and Robertson Davies, I found a novel called The Mind-Body Problem by...
View ArticleScholars Talk Writing: Laura Kipnis
Readers of The Chronicle will be plenty familiar with “Troublemaker” Laura Kipnis, a professor of film at Northwestern University. In February of 2015, she wrote an essay about “sexual paranoia” on...
View ArticleScholars Talk Writing: James M. McPherson
About a zillion years ago, I was an editorial assistant at Oxford University Press, apprenticed to Sheldon Meyer, one of the great editors of American history. Sheldon had exquisite taste and the...
View ArticlePersona Matters
Just as interesting as Jordan Schneider’s fine essay, “Why I Curse in the Classroom,”were the responses — the horrified reactions of those who believe the sky will fall if a professor uses a...
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Resisting the Urge to Profess
Some of my former-students-turned-academics like to explain things to me. Whether we’re talking about the dangers of political apathy or the health benefits of exercise, I am treated to mini-lectures...
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