On the Particular Difficulty of Writing Honestly About One's Own Discipline
Writing honestly about a discipline you have spent your career inside is harder than writing honestly about adjacent disciplines. The professional incentives…
Margaret taught literature and composition at university level for twenty-two years before retiring to write and to coach other writers. Her academic work was on the essay form across centuries — Bacon and Montaigne to Didion and Vivian Gornick. She writes here about essay writing as a craft and a discipline, about the work of revision, about the difficulties of academic writing, and about teaching others to write. The voice is literary by temperament. The intent is honest engagement with a craft she has spent her life inside.
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Writing honestly about a discipline you have spent your career inside is harder than writing honestly about adjacent disciplines. The professional incentives…
After twenty-two years of teaching writing at university level, the patterns I have observed about how writers actually develop are different from…
Some of the most useful writing happens when writers attempt subjects they do not yet understand. The discipline required is specific. The…
The popular critique of academic writing as obscure, jargon-laden, and inaccessible has substantial grounds. The critique also misses specific legitimate functions of…
The advice to "read like a writer" is widely repeated in writing instruction. The standard interpretation of the advice misses what actually…
Many writers use the words revision and editing interchangeably. They describe different operations that serve different purposes. Treating them as the same…
The essay form looks accessible because most readers can recognize a good essay and many readers can produce a competent one. The…