How We Write (Well)

Edited by Sarah Wasserman

Introduction

It's become something of a platitude to say that scholarly writing is currently undergoing dramatic change. Diminishing university press budgets and the pressures of the academic job market have pushed a number of scholars into freelance writing positions, where new forms of cultural criticism are beginning to flourish. At the same time, new online platforms and the desire of both readers and writers for more accessible texts have changed the texture of academic writing. Those of us fortunate enough to occupy conventional positions in universities must write, and must write for a variety of audiences. And while we often hear opaque mentions of "different voices" and "varied writing practices," there's a shocking lack of specificity in these discussions about writing.

Everyone in this forum has written in multiple voices, for very different kinds of audiences. From Public Books and The Atlantic to Hollywood Reporter and fashion magazines, we tune our scholarly instruments differently for each piece we play. Moreover, we work, for the most part, in different fields and with different methodologies. But HOW DO WE WRITE? is a question that unites scholars as the boundaries of disciplines and our objects of study continue to shift. A more important question, and one asked even less often is HOW DO WE WRITE WELL? We teach the craft of writing to our students, we've all read a book or two about good academic writing, and yet we seldom see academic writers pull apart their own prose. Sometimes we talk about practice: when do you write, where do you write, what kind of props do you need, what kind of snacks do you eat, and so on. But with this forum, we wanted to talk less about practice and more about craft—to initiate a conversation about the conceptual scaffolding and theoretical underpinnings of the writing we do. Beyond the false dichotomy between scholarly and public writing, what makes good writing good?

The task then, that all of these writers have been given, is an awkward one: it's to identify a passage of their own that they consider to be some of their best writing. This may be writing from a piece of conventional scholarship, from something more public, something creative, even a blog or a tweet. In their short pieces below, they discuss this example, what it illuminates about their thinking, and about our scholarly notions of writing. The goal of this forum is to disclose practices and preferences in order to demystify the writing process and also to ground conceptual and political debates about scholarly writing in concrete examples. Next week, we'll share our responses to each other's posts—because what else is good writing but an invitation to conversation?

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Sarah Wasserman is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Delaware, where she teaches course on 20th and 21st century American literature, material culture studies, literary theory, and media studies. She is currently finishing her first book, The Death of Things: Ephemera in America, which examines literary representations of ephemeral objects in American culture from the beginning of the twentieth century until today. Her work appears in Contemporary Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, The Journal of American Studies, and Literature Compass. She co-edited Cultures of Obsolescence: History, Materiality, and the Digital Age (2015) and curates the “Thing Theory and Literary Studies" colloquy on the Stanford Arcade website.

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