A Brutal Review of My First Book

I don't know about you, but I love reading brutal book reviews.  It's a lot of fun to watch a skilled writer skewer someone else's work with surgical precision (see here and here).  In the interest of balance, I thought it would be right and proper to present a review that eviscerates one of my …

The Five-Paragraph Fetish

This is a piece I published in Aeon several years ago about the persistence of the five-paragraph essay, which has evolved into the five-chapter dissertation and the five-section journal article.  Formalism reins supreme.  Here’s the link to the original. The essay is included in my new book, Being a Scholar: Reflections on Doctoral Study, Scholarly Writing, and Academic Life. …

Michael Massing: Avoid These Cliches Like the Plague

This post is a recent piece by Michael Massing from the New York Times. Here's a link to the original. The piece consists entirely of a remarkably inclusive list of common cliche's used by writers in English.  An impressive display, I think you'll agree. As all writers know, it's hard to avoid using cliches.  A cliche …

Irena Smith — The Golden Ticket

This post is a reflection on some of the insights I culled from Irena Smith's new book, The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays. The book is a memoir a Jewish immigrant from the Soviet Union, who got a PhD in comp lit, taught college, became an admissions reader at Stanford and then …

David Bentley Hart — How to Write English Prose

This post is an essay by David Bentley Hart about How to Write English Prose, which was published online at The Lamp.  Here's a link to the original.  What I like most about it is that it's so thoroughly overwrought.  In many ways, it's a diatribe against Elements of Style and Orwell's essay on writing, both …

John McWhorter — The Secret Lives of Words

This post is a piece by John McWhorter about the peculiar way in which the meaning and usage of words changes over time, which was published in the Times. Here's a link to the original. The central point is this: The fit between words and meanings is much fuzzier and unstable than we are led to …

Sarah Brownsberger — Stop the Term-Creation Meaning-Kidnap!

This post is a fun piece by Sarah Brownsberger about the dysfunction of recent shifts in the American English.  Here's a link to the original, which was published in Hedgehog. She identifies nefarious trends in the transformation of the language.  One is the loss of agency, as stuff seems to happen without people making it …

Christopher Hitchens — An Unbeliever’s Tribute to the King James Bible

This post is a lovely essay by Christopher Hitchens, "When the King Saved God," which was published in 2011 in Vanity Fair.  Here's a link to the original.   The King James Bible and Shakespeare's opus are the two foundational texts of the English language.  They are the linguistic styles that all English speakers recognize and …

Megan Daum — The Broken-In World

This post is a stunning essay by one of my favorite writers, Meghan Daum.  It's a beautifully crafted piece of prose reflecting on her life after divorce, when feeling broken evolved into feeling part of world that is broken-in.   The Broken-In World How could I have known that my most satisfying life was a …

Nabokov on Student Exam Essays

This post is a piece by Vladimir Nabokov in response to answers that students wrote for the mid-term exam in his 1957 Cornell literature class.  It appeared in Times Literary Supplement last month with an introduction by Eric Naiman.  Here's a link to the original.   It's fun to imaging the great Russian writer grading undergraduate …