teaching is just like. this is my favorite thing. this class was the absolute worst. they're learning and improving. i'm making them dumber. my students are the best. my students were only brought here to make me suffer. i want to do this all the time. i would like to never be seen again.
musings on poetry
Anne Sexton, Victoria Chang, Carl Sandburg, Carl Sandburg, Richard Blanco, Henrik Edoyan, Anne Sexton, Czeslaw Milosz, Richard Blanco, Mary Oliver
swallowed my pride and applied to be adjunct faculty in addition to advising. if i get another rejection text though i will not be held accountable for my actions.
“Like, we’re being taught by mainstream culture that getting an English degree is a waste of time, and that thinking about the meaning of stories will not prepare you for life in the world. This, in turn, comes from the assumption that the purpose of a college degree is as a qualification for a middle-class career — rather than a sign that you have learned something that has value in its own right. That you have gained critical thinking skills, of exactly the sort that studying literature would give you. If I were feeling extra snarky, I might point out that critical thinking skills would indeed be a drawback if you’re trying to get a career pumping up the A.I. hype bubble, but never mind.”
— Why the Worst People Are So Keen to Wreck Art and Culture
Well, I got my rejection text (TEXT!!!!!!!!!) for that full time faculty position today. Hitting pause on the job hunt for the moment because I simply can't keep doing this cycle lmao
A Yale professor's guide to paper style and formatting -- some of my favorite advice
Excerpts from "Bill's quick guide to paper optics" by historian Bill Rankin
I prefer to use the word "optics" as a catch-all category rather than separating "formatting" and "style." The impression that your writing makes on your reader depends on many things at once, and I think it's important to treat your ideas, your words, and your page with equal care.
Headings. You don't need a heading for your introduction, and try to avoid a bland heading like "Conclusion" alone. Ideally, your headings will do analytic work and announce not just the topic of the section, but the major themes or arguments as well.
Images. You should embed images throughout your paper rather than collecting them all at the end. (This can be a pain in Word or LibreOffice, so I recommend keeping text and images in separate files until the very last step.) All images should have engaging analytic captions, but be sure to provide a full citation for the image in the caption as well. You should always make your images as large as possible without breaking your margins; enlarged details may also be necessary. (The reader shouldn't have to zoom in to the PDF to read your images.) If in doubt, err on the side of using more images rather than fewer.
Footnotes. Footnotes can be more than just bare citations; you can also provide context, additional details, or explain how you combined information from multiple sources. You can also cite more than one source in the same footnote, and footnotes do not need to come immediately after a quotation as long as the connection between quote and source is still clear. Many students use too many footnotes, each with only one citation, inserted somewhat haphazardly throughout the text. Instead, treat a footnote as a kind of punctuation mark; it slows the reader down slightly, and you can be intentional about where you insert them.
Passive Voice. Through the unrelenting tyranny of grammarians drunk on the prescriptivism of Strunk and White's Elements of Style, entire generations of students have been contorting their prose to avoid things like the passive voice and split infinitives at all costs. This is nonsense, and great writers (from Shakespeare to Dickens to Pynchon) use these constructions whenever they're needed. Often they're not the best choice, but sometimes they are.
(click "Keep reading" for more)
Numbers. Be mindful of when to use numerals and when to spell out numbers; most students use too many numerals. This is unfriendly: "There are 5 such maps from the 19th century; each is about 11.5" square." This is nicer: "There are five such maps from the nineteenth century; each is about 11.5 inches square." Always use four-digit dates, don't use apostrophes after dates, and don't use a dash between numerals in prose. Again, this is unfriendly: "Life was easy in the 1960's and '70s, since she earned $100–200 per day." This is nicer: "Life was easy in the 1960s and 1970s, since she earned between $100 and $200 per day."
First Person Voice. In high school most of us learn to avoid the first-person voice in formal writing. This is wrong. Prominent and accomplished writers commonly use the first-person voice to explain their goals and argument in clear terms. Don't go overboard, but phrases like "My goal in this essay is...," "My main argument is...," or "I want to make it clear, however, that..." can be very helpful. It's likewise fine to use "we" or "our," but use them carefully. Don't use them as rhetorical synonyms for "I" or "you the reader," in phrases like "we will begin by analyzing...," or "our main question is...." This comes off as stilted. Instead, "we" or "our" should only be used to refer to the group of people that includes you, me, and other interested readers (that is, as synonymous with "historians" or "the interested public"), in phrases like "how should we understand these documents?" or "the ubiquity of GPS in our daily lives."
Direct Quotations. Don't directly quote other scholars (that is, secondary sources) unless you want to critique or engage with the specifics of their vocabulary. Instead, you should use your own words and provide a citation. For example, there's no need for something like this: "According to the historian Mary Burton, 'There were five such museums on the island, and they attracted a large and enthusiastic audience.' " Instead you could simply say that all five museums were very popular, with a citation to Burton in a footnote. But there might be a reason to say something like this: "I disagree with Burton's claim that the audience was, in her words, 'large and enthusiastic.' "
Referring To Your Own Writing. When describing the content of your own paper, use the literary present tense, not the future tense. So you'd say "This paper explores" (not "This paper will explore") or "The second section describes" (not "will describe"). And don't foreshadow future analysis with phrases like "as will be discussed below" or "as I describe later." These mostly just direct the reader's attention away from the immediate point; they're also a bit stuffy. These phrases can almost always be omitted; if not, it's a sign that your logical flow isn't quite right. The same is true for reminders ("as discussed above"). Usually you can just briefly repeat the same information with no problem, perhaps using "again" as a simple acknowledgment: "Their goal, again, was total world domination."
Elegant Sentences and Punchy Prose. My favorite rule of thumb for writing engaging and pleasant prose is variation. Vary the length of your sentences, and vary the size of your paragraphs. If all of your sentences are four lines long, your prose will read like molasses. After several substantial paragraphs, a short paragraph that zooms out and highlights your main point can be really powerful. Inserting questions (with question marks!) can also be a nice way to add some punch. History prose isn’t casual, but you should leave the really formal writing to lawyers. Have some fun with your writing; err on the side of the conversational without becoming colloquial. Can you read your prose out loud without getting tongue-tied and running out of breath? Elegant prose is simple and clear, not complex and clever.
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