Tag: writing
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Stop Writing in Microsoft Word
I recently published my first book, and at its launch I spoke about how I’d written and revised it. That talk combined with some comments I wrote for my graduate students this term on how to think about writing programs and other platforms. I’m deliberately not calling my writing program a ‘word processor’ because those…
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On Paper Journals
Nobody wants to drink alone. But sometimes you want a drink, and you happen to be alone. When this happens, I recommend you turn it into a writing exercise. Nothing gives public inebriation a more respectable veneer. Wait, hear me out. Last summer I spent a family holiday in Paris and then a few weeks…
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2019 by the Numbers
I live an unquantified life. I don’t wear a pedometer or track my sleep, and when I learned that my top three caloric sources were red wine, hummus, and Nature’s Path Heritage Flakes, I quit logging my meals. But no matter what, there are still machines tracking my activities. A rummage around my laptop and…
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How to Travel: The Oxford Edition
Last summer, after sojourns in Amsterdam and a few cities in the north of Belgium (or Flanders), I wrote some idiosyncratic observations and called it How to Travel. This week, I’m at it again. I’m now three-fourths of the way through a longer sojourn in England, spending most of my days in Oxford with forays…
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How to Travel
I’ve spent the last three weeks on three quite different trips, combined into one long European sojourn. First was a family holiday in Paris; then came a digital-humanities conference in Utrecht; and I spent the third on a solitary ramble through the Low Countries: Haarlem and Amsterdam in the Netherlands; Antwerp and Ghent in Belgium.…
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Text Accordians
I write, with my keyboard, all day. Every day. E-mails, lecture notes, grant applications, status updates, first drafts, second drafts, slideshow bullets, blog posts. To paraphrase the great Johnny Cash, I type everywhere, man. And along the way, I find I quite often need to write the same words and numbers. I close every e-mail…
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Model Close-Reading Essay
This is a Model Close-Reading Essay (~500-600 words) for students in my English 311: Shakespeare course in 2016. For details, see the course homepage. You can read the passage I’m close-reading on the Folger Shakespeare. Henry V, 1.2.260-98: A Close Reading This passage consists of thirty-eight pentameter lines, unrhymed except for two couplets (ll.288-89 and…
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On Thinking in Public
What’s a blog for? Thinking about this question on this first day of 2015, I’m also thinking about what purposes my own blog will serve in the year ahead. I mean not just the topics I plan to write about, but the purpose it serves for my public thinking.
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Byword: Writing in Isolation
Like many people, I need simplicity and focus to do things well. Despite the crowded appearance of this blog, I write most of my posts in isolation, in both senses of the term: without interruptions (usually behind a closed door, and often with earplugs) and without too much thinking about the other posts I’ve written.…
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Down with Essays!
This term I gave my students in English 410 (Elizabethan Poetry + Prose) an unconventional assignment. For their final critical papers, they had to make a compelling and effective argument about poetry’s function and purpose, and cite primary evidence from the poets and critics we read this term (Spenser, Sidney, Whitney, et al.)