Before becoming the historians’ Barry Bonds, I point to how graduate students learn to read: quantity over quality, argument over style, and, assessment over enjoyment. A good writer knows her audience. Why waste time crafting a wondrous word pyramid, then, when a pile of crap will suffice?

I have simply chosen to be a historian in the academy mindful of the larger world, so I both try to read the history and nonfiction and fiction that feeds my understanding of what history is and can be, and connect the too-often-insular conversations of the professional history world with the concerns and innovations of everybody else.

So, I have chosen a professional tone and posture, but I hope it can still be an inviting one, to anyone who has the courage, verve, and insight to give history a place to sleep.

Welcome, and thanks again!

I notice that the tone of this blog, the comments, and perhaps your seminar, is very professional. Please do not take it the wrong way when I say that, despite the potential radicalism of the questions you engage in, this fact is typical of U.S. academia. People in your academia are very worried about their careers, and of course they are right.

On the first floor of my ragged apartment building there is a carpenter who assembles beds. For purely experimental reasons, last month I offered to work for him part-time. He asked if I was a carpenter and I said I was a writer. He thought for a moment, looked at my hands, and finally put the box of glue he was holding down. “Can you make things that people sleep on?”

Notice, the second question is qualitatively different from the first. Historians often think about their profession as a kind of method, a set of things people do in history departments. You want to open their eyes to the fact that what defines them as historians is not a set of practices they already do, but the final product. And this final product must constantly be interrogated: What are you, dear history? What are your components? How necessary is each of those components? Must you have four legs to be called a bed? Or are you a place in which people dream about the past?

Maybe it would be helpful, at least for the purpose of the seminar, to put departmental issues to the side for a moment; to hold these papers down, red ink and all, and dream: what could they do?

I.S.

Maybe one way of addressing the notion that this is a peripheral exercise, relegated to a panel at occasional conferences and seductive night-cap conversations, is to start real, consequential conversations about how writing features in tenure and promotion for historians with academic appointments.

If we think the profession should pay a different kind of attention to writing, then we have to link it to material conditions. If we want to keep talking among ourselves, then our writing, and our students’ writing, will improve. And we’ll keep having fun. Not a bad plan B.

In this course, I am taking most of the mechanics for granted — you should enter knowing what a book review or a review essay or a research paper is, and you have learned the “correct” way to write it.

Our primary writing assignment will be to revise that piece in a risky way — to blow a hole in the standard model, and see where it leads. I’ve encourage the students to find which paper needs rethinking without re-researching, and we’ll turn to that assignment in the second half of class.

More reports from the classroom to come…

First, thanks to you and your class for your thoughts on this essay. I’m a big believer in the idea that readers rescue writing, and I’m guessing that presidential addresses aren’t among the most frequently rescued renderings.

Second, I taught a grad seminar at UNM last fall, titled “Writing as a Historian.” I’m going to send the link to this blog to the students in that class, in the hope that they will join this conversation. I think all of us learned something about writing, and I certainly learned a lot about teaching writing.

My approach was a little different, I suspect, from yours. Rather than zeroing in on how to write history, I modeled the class on William Zinsser’s famous undergraduate seminar on nonfiction writing. I wanted students to tackle different approaches and techniques and topics, rather than simply practicing the genres we historians generally write (book reviews, review essays, research articles, eventually, books). I hope some of the students will let me and the readers of this blog know what they thought about that approach.

I will confess that I have not abandoned my propensity for lobster-picking. Too many students have learned bad writing habits. It takes time, practice, even repetition before they even see the passive, wordy sentences, the confusing, imprecise and hastily chosen words. In a seminar, students don’t risk much by presenting ragged work. They have the opportunity to revise. But once they send their pieces out to strangers (panel commentators, journal editors, prospective employers), the costs of poor prose increase.

Readers are in a hurry. Writers have to compete with “30 Rock” and “Talking Points Memo” and the first warm day of spring. Writers have to get it right, to get it read.

Looking forward to more conversation,
Gingy Scharff