Thursday, May 17, 2012

How twitter taught me to write better



While I slept @kgulliver @katrinagullver and @historianess had a hilarious conversation about metaphors and word choices scholars should avoid, whilst one of them reviewed a MS.  For your edification

To be avoided at all costs
  • Intervene (try participate or contribute, more collegial and collaborative)
  • shed light, fill in gaps
  • metaphors involving any use of lens, light, lacuna
  • agency – although geez when writing about gender historiography not sure this can be avoided
  • Other pet peeves: may and might not the same, nor are to think and to feel interchangeable
got some of your own? share here or on twitter

@dvhunter "rethinking" "complicating"
  
@professmoravec "problematize"





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4 comments:

  1. Ralph PooreMay 17, 2012 at 1:22 PM

    Where are the editors?

    One of my pet peeves (and I have many) is "persuaded" vs."convinced." They are not interchangeable and are often used incorrectly.

    And certainly, a "scholar" should be able to write around a term such as "agency."

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  2. Tricia MatthewMay 17, 2012 at 1:42 PM

    In general, I am tired of colons in titles. I am also tired of the practice of parenthetically "complicating" terms like (re)imagining and (re)thinking. To be sure, I'm guilty of both of these crimes. It seems I am tired of myself. The book after the next book will have a title that is short and simple and descriptive. I'm thinking I'll be promoted by then and brimming with agency.

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  3. UnknownMay 17, 2012 at 1:47 PM

    am at a loss how to convey"capacity to act without access to formal avenues of power" that agency encapsulates

    tee hee my dis advisor asked "what comes after the colon" of present book and I said "nothing' I'm just calling it The Politics of Women's Culture

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  4. Benjamin BreenMay 18, 2012 at 3:41 AM

    Was just revisiting old papers saved on my computer and wanted to share the final sentence of my grad school writing sample... sort of like the apotheosis of trying-too-hard grad student prose:

    "Yet even after living memories of contact had given way to hearsay and invention, Japan as representational construct lived on, serving as an arena for confessional conflict, as a tool for self-fashioning, and as a kind of broken mirror by which the “European gaze” saw itself in a glass, darkly – serving to reflect, in distorted guise, the preconceptions, prejudices, and fears of a civilization split in two."

    I also did the parenthetical thing with "(mis)representation" in the first paragraph, which I thought was clever at the time.

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