Category Archives: Uncategorized

“Over the years, I developed a theory about why writers are such procrastinators,” writes Megan McArdle in The Atantic, and it’s not the reason you’d think, though she’s almost certainly right, judging from my own experience. We were too good in … Continue reading →

Irving Kristol offers a sobering insight into the difficulty of changing minds. He writes: Wrong ideas, once implanted in a young person’s mind, become so plausible, so self-evident as it were, that change is hard. . . . It is a … Continue reading →

An very amusing piece from my friend Randy Boyagoda: More Soon: A Sampling of Electronic Correspondence with Magazine Editors. It’s not the kind of thing you can excerpt, so just read it.

From the the Chronicle of Higher Education, via Micah Mattix’s Prufrock mailing: Joseph Stalin “was a ruthless person and a serious editor.” The Soviet historian Mikhail Gefter has written about coming across a manuscript on the German statesman Otto von … Continue reading →

A reader of First Things‘ “While We’re At It” section when I wrote it — who liked it — said that it wasn’t “serious” in the way other parts of the magazine were serious. I knew what he meant and was … Continue reading →

Micah Mattix, author of the very, very useful daily survey of interesting writing, Prufrock (subscribe here), and generally interesting writer himself, mentioned this weblog in today’s mailing. This was unexpected but also encouraging. Here’s Micah’s Prufrock weblog from the American … Continue reading →

Continuing the discussion of the writer’s calling and vocation in Reading Good Writing and Did She Think She Could Do That?, here are some thoughts on how you can figure out what you’re called to do. Last month I spoke … Continue reading →

My friend Judy Warner sends a story that nicely illustrates the nature of vocation or calling, which came up in Reading Good Writing: Your description of what a writer does when reading made me laugh, because it made me realize … Continue reading →

My friend Richard Smith and I have been discussing academic writing, he as an academic who writes and me as someone who edits people like him. Richard teaches classics at the Franciscan University. Here’s the latest exchange. FROM RICHARD: On the subject … Continue reading →

An academic friend of some distinction responded to the comments about readers’ limitations in Vocabulary (i.e., Big) Words with a report from his university. During the past twenty years I have had to stop in the middle of lectures and ask — and … Continue reading →