Category: Writing
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Storytelling with Data
My first-year composition students are each studying an aspect of the opioid crisis. Their research papers cover topics that benefit from exploring data. Today’s class started with students dividing in pairs to brainstorm what types of data would be useful for their topics. Then we went around the room: each student introduced her chosen topic […]
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Writing about one’s own thinking
I tend to feel an allergic reaction coming on whenever I hear the terms metacognition or metacognitive. Somewhere there’s a drinking game where one takes a chug of brew whenever a grad student says metacognitive. Take two drinks when a grad student uses foreground as a verb. Drunkenness ensues quickly. The words are jargon. But […]
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Storytelling in the mid-century
This essay was first posted on our book design blog on July 5, 2011. That site is no longer active. My daughter Mila, born on the second day of this year, will grow up in an era dominated by multi-touch tablets, with ever decreasing thickness and ever increasing capabilities. (Her adulthood likely will be spent […]
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Writing as espionage
“We remained travelers, enclosed in the self, capable, possibly, of transforming ourselves in contact with alterity, but certainly not of experiencing it profoundly. We are spies, we make the rapid, furtive contact of spies. When Chateaubriand invented travel literature with his Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem in 1811, long before Stendhal and his Memoirs of […]
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Siddhartha Mukherjee on Writing
“My single rule for writing is the same as my rule for science. You cannot know the answer if you don’t know the question. Before I write anything. I ask myself: what is the question that I am trying to answer?” Source
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The Purpose of Doing
Late afternoon, I sit at my desk, just after class. I glance up at the prints from Buenos Aires that hang on the wall in front of me. More than a decade ago I blogged so regularly. More free time in those days as I explored a premature semi-retirement in my early 40s. Yesterday, on […]