writing

Clarke writes the way a magpie collects sparkly objects. Images and scenes arrive, unbidden, and Clarke writes down the fragments, and later pieces them together into a narrative, or several.

I can feel jealous of David Sedaris’s fame, I can feel like I’ll never get to that point, but I should ask myself: am I doing 15 or 20 full rewrite drafts of my essays? Am I pushing myself to search for a universal feeling, for a moment of poignancy, and for a laugh, all in the same piece? Am I doing what he did, in my own way?

Walk around with a pen and a scrap of paper. Write some meaty emails. Engage more intensely with this place.

Most people “write badly because they cannot think clearly,” observed H. L. Mencken.

So perhaps our teaching (online and off) should be seen — and is generally taken — not as the passing of truths de haut en bas but as just one part of a fruitful or at least hopeful collaboration.

A larger reason is that writing — of fiction, “creative non-fiction,” and memoir — has become something like a collaborative process in this century, as have other activities once done singly and by the seat of one’s personal pants (raising children, dressing for work, liking and disliking things).

Study participants were asked to present an entrepreneurial idea. Some were told they would be competing against famous alumni or MBA graduates. And in those instances, Galinsky found the study subjects were more likely to present a pitch that contained more jargon. Similar results occurred in the study when they observed conversations between two

To test this hypothesis, the researchers examined 65,000 dissertations. They defined three types of jargon — linguistic complexity, acronyms, and legalese — and screened the titles for it, weeding out technical language and slang. The researchers then cross-referenced the students' universities with U.S. News & World Report rankings and found a