Todd Suomela's Library tagged writing →  View Popular, Search in Google

"The production of information is critical to a healthy information diet. It's the thing that makes it so that your information consumption has purpose. I cannot think of more important advice to give anyone: start your day with a producer mindset, not a consumer mindset. If you begin your day checking the news, checking your email, and checking your notifications, you've launched yourself into a day of grazing a mindless consumption. "

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"Since an article consists of about forty 40 paragraphs and you should be able to write a paragraph about something you know in about 30 minutes, you should be able to draft a journal article in around 20 hours."

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"The Twenty-first century is invisible. We were promised jetpacks but ended up with handlebar moustaches. The surface of things is the wrong place to find the 21st century. Instead, the unseen, the Infrathin—those tiny devices in our pockets or the thick data-haze which permeates the air we breathe — locates us in the present. And in this way, The New Aesthetic is not so much a movement as it is a marker, a moment of  observation which informs us that  culture—along with its means of production and  reception —has radically shifted beneath our feet while we were looking the other way.  As such, The New Aesthetic handily articulates the importance of the new writing, situating it and its modus operandi within broader cultural trends."

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"The people who created modern fantasy, safe to say, were not normal. They led reasonably normal lives, perhaps, but the territory inside their skulls was well off anybody’s map. Think of William Morris obsessively detailing floral wallpaper designs while his wife Jane was off boffing Dante Rossetti; James Branch Cabell spending decades writing his arch, umpty-volume saga about human futility while the twentieth century sang its song of greed, progress, and mass murder; JRR Tolkien (catholic and married in a day when Oxford dons just weren’t) doing scholarly work on the Oxford English Dictionary while secretly transforming his linguistic obsessions into the neography of Middle Earth; and Mervyn Peake— well, just look at Gormenghast, will you?"

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in list: For Teaching

"I just finished the first draft of the manuscript-- as in, sent it off to my editor and agent a couple hours ago-- and while it's all still fresh, thought I'd spend a little more time on what I've learned about writing."

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"Fifty years ago, a layer of editors stood between writers and their public. For a while there, in the heady 2000s, we believed we'd toppled the reign of editorial tastemakers and put writers directly in touch with their audiences. Increasingly, however, there are layers of reading, writing, and analysis machines standing between writers and readers on the web. Certainly this isn't true of all writing, all the time. Still, it's worth pondering the idea that we are becoming reading cyborgs. When we are online, we often cannot read without machines."

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Like Paulo Nuin said, the future of scientific blogging is what it has always been. It’s just writing. It’s always just been writing. That’s not the interesting bit. The interesting bit is that how we find what we want to read is changing radically…again. That’s where the next big thing is. If someone figures out please tell me. I promise I’ll link to you.

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"But while I certainly want academic history to continue valuing clear, non-technical prose, I also think we should try to have a more realistic sense of who we reach and how we reach them. The myth of accessible academic history has its costs as well as its benefits.

To begin with, the myth of accessibility can devalue some of what academic historians do uniquely well. We produce knowledge about the past regardless of whether there is a mass market for the knowledge we produce. And since I don't believe that the mass market does a good job of determining what's worth knowing, I think we ought to moderate our polemics against specialization. Many good ideas--even ideas that eventually have a profound impact on broad, public conversations--start in abstruse corners of academic work. Think, for example, of Kuhn and the idea of a "paradigm shift.""

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"In his article "Professional Boredom" in the March 2012 issue of Perspectives on History, AHA President William Cronon discussed what it means to be a "professional historian" and advocated for history writing that's engaging and accessible to a broad audience. His article generated numerous insightful responses and discussions online, and today we highlight a few."

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commentary by William Cronon

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"What I wrote in my appreciation of Beach was that he’d converted me to valuing this kind of fine-grained empiricism more than I previously had. I came to admire the professional craft that it took to research and relate this knowledge (and Cronon notes that he similarly values this kind of effort) but I also realized more completely how scholarship is a very old and deep practice of collaboration between thousands of people separated by time and space. The exciting, engaging, communicative work that Cronon and I esteem often relies upon scholars who do “boring” work. You can’t synthesize or generalize without specialists doing their work first. "

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Interview with Ullman, author of Close to the Machine.

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"For me, the appeal of Twitter doesn’t lie in its rapidity or its reach, with celebrities gathering thousands of followers who hang on every Tweeted word. For me, the appeal of Twitter lies in its enforced brevity: the fact that like a poet you are required to count and consider every character. There is a lot of disposable chitchat on Twitter–that is, after all, what the site is designed to cultivate. But in the hands of a writer, Twitter’s space constraints are invaluable, forcing the long-winded and prosaic among us to jettison every scrap of dead wood."

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