Et al., et cet.

One of the great pleasures of working in the Writing Center is having the opportunity to experience how students approach academic writing for the first time. Watching talented students stumble over comparatively easy rules—et al for et al., “Quotatation”. for “Quotation.”—reminds me every day how arbitrarily academics have settled questions of style.
Incidentally, why do we [...]

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How rules about indentation have ruined (my) literary analysis

Here’s what the sixth MLA Handbook for Writers of Whatnot (2003) says about blocking quotes:
If a quotation runs to more than four lines in your paper, set it off from your text by beginning a new line, indenting on inch (or ten spaces if you are using a typewriter) [ . . . ] (3.7.2, [...]

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Speed writing

If you’re reading my blog, I trust you feel insecure about something. Blogs exist in this ironic space whereby they can somehow shore up your insecurities and mine at the same time: yours because you see how much worse off I am; mine because I know you rely on my abjection to feel (momentarily) secure.
But [...]

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Dissertation-writing as apprenticeship

In his Goals of a Liberal Education (PDF), William Cronon argues that a liberal education seeks to teach a certain worldview—a preference for curiosity, for empathy, for clarity of language, and so on. An illiberal education, by implication, teaches professional skills but leaves students’ worldviews untouched.
Cronon also has a thorough study of the purpose of [...]

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Presentation writing (before the panic sets in)

MSA X will be my first national conference, so I find myself devoting the depth of attention to a 20-minute presentation that a freshman devotes to his first response paper—I’ve spent as many hours writing the context paragraph of my presentation as I spent writing the three-page critical background for my last chapter. I should [...]

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The personal may be political, but is it academic?

For the last few semesters I’ve taught a 90-minute course on academic blogging for my Writing Center—it was as a result of having taught the course a few times that climbed out of pseudonymity and began to tilt my writing slightly more towards the profession.
The course is really just a blog zoo: we introduce attendees [...]

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Is genre competence a kind of fluency?

In filing an application for a travel grant, I have been drafting a statement of the significance of MSA X for 1) my field of study, and 2) my career. I spend 40% of my workweek in the Writing Center engaging with student writing from a huge range of disciplines, but the moment I have [...]

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Canons and Kureishi

A Grinnellian friend who blogs at Less Than a Shoestring pointed me to Ryan Williams’s response to the Guardian’s synopsis of Hanif Kureishi’s critique of creative writing courses at the Hay festival.
(I’ve not heard audio from Kureishi’s talk, so though I hesitate to read Charlotte Higgins’s description as wholly representative of what Kureishi said it’s [...]

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Announcing: Podcasts from my Writing Center!

It has been a few semesters in the making, but UW–Madison’s Writing Center has begun releasing podcasts! You can subscribe to our feed and everything.
I’m a total podcast junkie: between bus-riding and chore-doing I probably listen to an hour of podcasts a day. Obviously I’ve followed this project with great interest and was ecstatic to [...]

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Should critics be willing to offend?

I was astonished, reading Imaginary Homelands, at the tone of some of Rushdie’s book reviews:

Umberto Eco (Foucault’s Pendulum): “Unfortunately, the journey to this truth is so turgid that it’s impossible to care about reaching the goal. This is Spielbergery without the action or bullwhips, and if, as Anthony Burgess threatens on the jacket, ‘this is [...]

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