"Dare to write clearly and engagingly whatever the audience, Helen Sword urges junior and senior scholars alike in a myth-busting guide to good academic prose."

Yes, dare. Don't be a moral coward like everybody else.

My article "Marianne Moore's Precision" is in the new issue of Arizona Quarterly.

Sentimental Spaces

“And what a quantity of animal beings there are in the being of a man!”

     — Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

My essay "Sentimental Spaces: On Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's Nest" is now up at at Jacket2.

One of the many nice things about Jacket2 is that it's fully online and open access. There are some drawbacks to this, of course: in MS the article is about 27 pages, which makes the lack of pagination in the online version perhaps a little heartwrenching. But the trade-off is that you don't need a library subscription to read it. (I'd be happy to send a pdf to anyone who really feels that the pagination issue is beyond the pale.)

Many thanks to the great Julia Bloch for the opportunity, and for the patient editing.

"We need a vocabulary for," "we need terms for thinking through," "we need an ecology of," "we need an aesthetics/ethics/epistemology of."

I can see why one makes this gesture. But one is tempted to answer: If we need it, then make it. I propose this vocabulary for, I propose these terms for thinking through, etc.

It's easier said than done. But then, that's why it's more often said than done.

And if we need it, then we should get it, no?

Sigh. Away from the internets for a day and I find that my recent response to Roland was construed exactly backwards by a writer for Eyresses.

Alas, writing is an instance of partible personhood, and folks will construe it as they will. I suppose I could ask that the poster re-read, but it would be hypocritical, I think, to contest her creative reappropriation of my words!

My Macbook is in the shop after acting up in some truly annoying ways. I don't think the problem is serious (the inverter or--I hope--the inverter cable), but in the meantime I am writing things in longhand. It's very, very strange. I usually write using a combination of handwritten notes (usually involving diagrams and sketches and little arrows here and there), typed notes in TextEdit (often quotations and freewriting), and a main document in Word. Right now I'm really missing those poorly labeled .txt files sitting on my desktop.

Anyway, replying to email and such is going to be spotty for a while.

I think it needs to be said that Sady Doyle is a Writer To Watch (TM). I've been reading her since her blogspot days; she was hilarious then, and she's only gotten better--her voice more mature and confident, less prone to taking refuge in irony--though her irony has always been deftly wielded, too. Sady Doyle's pop culture and lit criticism is smart and infused with a healthy dose of nerd. For every close reading of a Kelly Clarkson song, she has a review of an epistolary novel by Chris Kraus; better yet, she has equally smart and engaging things to say about both. She is a Tolkien to so many bloggers' Lewis (or Rowling). You can tell she's got appendices squirreled away somewhere, and a hand-drawn map. She has English major chops, in the best sense. Her recent series at The Awl is great. Conclusion: if you aren't reading Sady Doyle, you should be.

Back east

I've always loved the way Californians say "back east" to refer to the east coast, as if it were not only geographically distant but also somehow in the past. As if all Californians held in common a history of having escaped to the Golden State from parts eastward.

Anyway, it really is back east for me; I'm visiting my sister in the Hudson Valley at the moment, a peaceful spot not far from where we were born. I'll be here for a few days and am hoping to get a good amount of work done while I'm here. Naturally, my epic public transit adventure (and the cold I caught on said adventure) have me just disoriented enough that I'm finding myself blogging instead. What's my article about, again?

Back to work, Cecire.

* * *

In the spirit of user-friendliness, Blogger lists some sample tags to prompt people to tag their posts:

I've always thought it would be funny to tag a post "scooters, vacation, fall" for that reason. ("Scooters" seems especially random, and therefore comical, to me.) If I were to put those tags on a post, this would be the post.

The mid-drafting overhaul

For when you're halfway through a draft, realize the architecture of your essay is absolute nonsense, draw some diagrams in a notebook, and start a new Word doc.

Sometimes it's just the only way to proceed.

Sigh.

You can't appreciate my genius

Oh, you thought I was done with the posts on revision. Nay.

Today I'd like to reflect a little on feeling misunderstood.

I don't mean in a John Hughes way.

(Not this.)

I mean, of course, feeling like your writing has been misunderstood.

This post can be summarized in three words: get over it. But getting over it, as we all know, is hard to do.

Here's the thing: one way or another, your writing probably has been misunderstood. Nobody is more acutely aware of the slipperiness of language than literary critics. Reading is misreading, and writing is miswriting, and it is this inevitability against which we strive every day. I don't say this to dismiss the ideal of clarity--on the contrary. Rather, I want to emphasize just how hard we have to work to be clear, especially about difficult ideas. Being misunderstood is work. You worked hard to write something (unclearly), and a reader worked hard to misunderstand it. Rapprochement is achieved with pain.

That's okay, because that's how language works, and we like it that way. The things that make language infinitely misreadable are also the things that make it rich with possibility. Pure communication is a fantasy; an informatics model of communication doesn't apply when natural language is the medium for ideas, and no one has yet invented a philosophical language that is entirely unambiguous yet still as useful as natural language.

Moreover, the reason we have writing is that it allows us to have bigger thoughts than we can hold in our heads all at once. That means that your writing isn't just the mirror image of a clear and complete idea that once resided in your head (even if you think it did). The writing is your idea, insofar as it exists in the world.

When you craft that writing, you craft your idea. But that idea necessarily has holes--holes that you've always been filling in with the heuristics and narratives with which you've been living and thinking. When they read your work, your readers are filling those holes with other heuristics and other narratives. Enter misreading.

So now that we've been misread, in what does getting over it consist?

1. Not taking it personally. Even if your argument has been misconstrued in the dumbest possible way, it's just not going to do anything for you, your relationship with your colleague, or your writing to take it as a personal insult. It's puzzling, true, when you get a comment like "but why didn't you ever address X?" when you spent five pages teasing out the nuances of X. All you can do is revisit those five pages and see if there's some way to clarify that those five pages are, in fact, addressing X. It may just be a matter of terminology, or of where you stick a topic sentence. Either something in the writing made it possible for that misinterpretation to occur or your reader just missed something. If you determine that it's the former, fix. And if it's the latter, forgive. Even smart people space out while reading sometimes.


2. Finding ways to disallow certain misreadings, especially "near enemies" or "evil twins." Lisa Ruddick, borrowing a Buddhist term, calls the bad version of a good thing a "near enemy." Often this is a grossly dumbed-down version of a complex idea, or a loose association. For example, during the culture wars, deconstruction was often associated with "relativism," a hopelessly broad term that was usually extrapolated to mean moral relativism and The Downfall Of Civilization. It's probably not coincidental that Derrida wasn't known for his clarity, because the near enemy often has to be attacked directly. For example, a common misconception that I have to guard against in my own work is the assumption that "objective" is synonymous with "scientific," and that both are synonymous with "true." I can state explicitly in the first paragraph that scientificity and objectivity are not the same thing, and still get back comments riddled with the assumption that they are. That's totally maddening, but sometimes you have to remind readers more than once that you're using terms in a specific way. This can be a tedious task, or, alternatively, a very satisfying opportunity to rant about the distinction between objectivity and scientificity. After you've combed out the traces of anger and resentment, you'll probably have a pretty okay exposition of a premise that was underexplained in the first draft.


3. Accepting that if you're fairly junior in your field, then you do not have license to channel Donna Haraway. You want your writing to be exactly as difficult as is necessary to embody your ideas. Even Derrida was capable of being very, very crisp. Difficult, oblique, or formally unusual writing should be a strategic choice, not the only kind of writing you can produce. If you're a junior scholar, you have to establish that you can follow the rules before you break them. If you feel that that sucks, well, a lot of things suck. Here's another way of putting it: we've all had the student (hopefully rarely) who challenged a grade because we "misunderstood" an essay that lacked an argument, citations, and punctuation. "You," the student has told us, "do not appreciate my personal style. Which means you hate me, and that is not fair. Give me an A." Do not be this student.

My point, friends, is that we are all misunderstood, so we must be so with joy.


Previous posts on responses to writing:

• 9 May 2010: "On responding to writing"


• 28 May 2010: "How to respond to others' writing"


• 31 May 2010: "Receiving feedback on writing, part the first"


• 2 June 2010: "Receiving feedback on writing, part the second"


• 4 June 2010: If wishes were hobbyhorses

If wishes were hobbyhorses

This is the fifth (good grief) post in a series on the practice of responding to others' writing, which I've come to see as a core but relatively unsung element of the academic humanities.

For some reason I've chosen to dwell at length on the art of receiving feedback, which is, I believe, not entirely obvious. We've all taught courses in which we've laboriously commented drafts, only to get the final essays back and find that a good half of the students didn't do a damn thing to their essays. I have no illusions about the rampant snowflakery in this world, but I don't think it's entirely students' fault when they don't know what to do with a response to their writing. Receiving and using feedback is a practice that's partly intellectual and partly emotional. I try to prep my students to receive feedback using a pair of articles by Nancy Sommers (one co-written with Laura Saltz), which are pedagogically great in a number of ways (they're cited below), but which unfortunately don't really address the specifics of receiving feedback.

In my last post, I outlined some general things to do with feedback. Today I'd like to discuss a specific common feature of feedback, the hobbyhorse.

We've all encountered it. In fact, we've all inflicted it. For example, I have an incurable penchant for bringing up Luigi Galvani. I try to restrain myself, but somebody that awesome just can't be kept a secret. Yes, he is relevant to your chapter on the queer temporality of lolcats! He's relevant to everything! He matters, and I highly recommend that you rethink your account of temporality in light of his work. You know, his work on trying to re-animate dead frogs.

So you see what I mean by "hobbyhorses." You get a manuscript back, you're following along in the comments, and you realize that the reader has started harping on some really unlikely point, and it's something that reader talks about a lot. What, oh what to do?

In my last post, I exhorted one and all to distinguish between what it means and what to do. So I'll sort of do that now.

1. What does it mean?

• Often, it means genuine engagement. We all have intellectual investments and influences--we wouldn't be scholars if we didn't. I was sort of kidding about Galvani earlier (only sort of kidding, as some of my less fortunate friends can attest), but I'm definitely going to think about any drafts I read in terms of ideas I know well, questions I'm interested in, whatever book I've just been reading. Always. In fact, that's why you want readers who are not you: so they will bring their investments and mental bibliographies to an encounter with your ideas. So when a reader rides a hobbyhorse, she or he is often genuinely interested in your work and is trying to relate it, in a substantial way, to ideas that she or he is actively invested in. Which is cool!


• Occasionally, it means utter laziness. It's also possible that your reader hasn't read you carefully, and substituted greatest hits from her own personal Scholarship iTunes Playlist for what you were actually saying. There are uninvested readers who will tell you, every single time, that this is a fine draft but you need to devote more space to questions of aesthetics. It's regrettable, but it happens.


• Sometimes, you asked for it. I wrote a few posts ago that responding to someone else's writing is a creative act. That's especially true when it comes to very unpolished or incipient work. Your reader is working hard to fill in conceptual gaps, detect the unstated assumptions, understand unstated implications, and generally make sense of something that's about fifty percent nonsense. The less clear and less developed a piece of writing is, the more likely hobbyhorses are. In fact, hobbyhorses are kind of necessary in those situations. If I don't know what you're saying, I have no choice but to think you are talking about some likely idea that I already know and understand.

2. What should I do?

As before, it's all about making the writing better. So you don't precisely need to know why the hobbyhorse has trotted in in order to know what to do with it. Even a hobbyhorse ridden in laziness can be useful. The question is: how much of this hobbyhorse was elicited by my writing, and how much of it is my reader's fevered obsessions? It's up to us as writers to figure out two things:

• Is there really something to this seemingly zany connection? Roughly, we're asking here whether there's really something in your ideas that's related to the hobbyhorse. Depending on where you are in the writing process, even a truly weird connection could be worth fleshing out. Try honestly to evaluate the extent to which this is the case. Just give it some thought. You can't really know how carefully your reader read your work (I mean, you can have your suspicions, but that's something else). So it's best to take suggestions seriously and try to evaluate them on the merits, even if your reader does tell you you need to say more about Luigi Galvani every time. And if the hobbyhorse turns out to be relevant, then for goodness's sake, follow the reader's suggestions!


• But if you've considered it carefully and determined, in a sober and fair manner, that this hobbyhorse is not helpful, you need to then ask: Have I written something that would make it likely for others to make this zany suggestion? Now we're asking if some superficial formal element of your writing is related to the hobbyhorse. It's possible that something in your writing genuinely warrants the wacky ideas your reader just brought in; it's also possible that it was something about your writing that you didn't intend. If you've considered the hobbyhorse suggestion and rejected it, then check to see if there's anything about your writing that's unclear or that wrongly gestures in the terrible, mistaken direction your reader took it. In my experience, using a specialized term to mean something unspecialized is a common culprit (e.g. using "duration" to mean "period of time," without the Bergsonian sense). Clarify the writing (which often means clarifying the argument) in a way that disallows the kinds of misunderstandings that could have led to the hobbyhorse suggestion.

It seems that responding to writing, and responding to responding to writing, is my own personal hobbyhorse these days. It's in good company with Galvani, though.


Sommers, Nancy. "Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers." College Composition and Communication 31.4 (Dec. 1980): 378-88. JSTOR. Web. 1 June 2010.

--- and Laura Saltz. "The Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshman Year." College Composition and Communication 56.1 (Sept. 2004): 124-49. JSTOR. Web. 1 June 2010.

Previous posts on responses to writing:

• 9 May 2010: "On responding to writing"


• 28 May 2010: "How to respond to others' writing"


• 31 May 2010: "Receiving feedback on writing, part the first"


• 2 June 2010: "Receiving feedback on writing, part the second"

Receiving feedback on writing, part the second

Receiving feedback on writing is a tricky skill, and one that is crucial for our profession. But by and large, it isn't taught formally. Maybe it can't be; I've learned through years of receiving feedback of better or worse quality on my writing, and also through my experiences giving feedback to composition students and to peers.

Today I'll offer four general ideas about how to receive feedback. The main idea that runs through all four of them is as follows: the point of receiving feedback is to produce a better piece of writing. This is, it would seem, obvious, but it's so easy to get caught up in some freakish sense of duty that makes the feedback seem more important than the actual writing.

• It's your writing. You do not have to take suggestions that stem from a misapprehension of what you're trying to do with the piece. (You should, of course, clarify your writing so that readers will no longer labor under the aforementioned misapprehension.) Suggestions are just that, and ultimately you're responsible for your work. Nobody understands what you're trying to accomplish the way you do. Take suggestions seriously, but in the end it's your call. That said...


• Be practical. Ideally your readers all respect your vision and are offering sincere, thoughtful suggestions. But sadly, that isn't universally the case, and the academy, like everything else, is full of power dynamics on which you'll often be on the weaker end. Sometimes you just need to recognize an unreasonable demand for what it is, bend, and save your magnum opus for another day--a day after you've received tenure. If an anonymous peer reviewer demands X, unless it morally offends you, then for Pete's sake just do it. If your advisor thinks you need to talk about Erving Goffman in your chapter on Havelok and the hagiographic tradition and won't approve your dissertation until you do, screw integrity and find a way to work poor Goffman in. (You should have enough of a relationship with your advisor to judge whether she or he is likely to insist on such things; if you're early in the dissertation-writing stage then now's the time to test those boundaries. Also, if you're at that stage and you find that your advisor isn't respectful of your project's direction, then now's also the time to think about finding another one, or at least adding some other people to the committee.) Another way of saying this is: pick your battles.


• Distinguish between what the feedback means and what you're going to do with it. Often feedback takes the form of observations: "in this section you give a review of literature"; "in this section you revise X's model of Y to account for Z." Sometimes those observations will strike you as wrong. What it means is that the reader hasn't understood what you were up to. But it won't help you or anybody to rant about the reader's failure to understand your writing. Instead, what you'll do with it is revise that section until it's clearer what you are doing. In general, it's tempting to think of feedback in terms of what it means the reader is thinking (about your writing! about you!). That's fine, but move beyond that reaction to turn what the reader is thinking into a concrete course of action.


• Bracket or outright ignore any feedback that impedes your ability to work on the piece. I really mean this. Truly unserious feedback, or feedback that sends you into a paralyzing spiral of self-doubt, should be summarily chucked, or at least placed in a drawer until the wounds heal. The point of receiving feedback is to produce a better piece of writing. If a response to your writing paralyzes you or prevents you from working, then it defeats the purpose of receiving feedback in the first place. It may be that you're oversensitive, true--most people are when it comes to their writing. And certainly, you can and should try to develop some distance on your writing. But if, in this moment, the response you're looking at is making you fear to open the Word file at all, and maybe eye the Golden Gate Bridge a little too fondly, a ritual burning is not out of place. You're a writer. Do whatever it takes to improve your writing, and if that means coddling yourself emotionally just a little, then so be it. Here are some kinds of feedback I think it's okay to ignore:
  
  
  
  • Proofreading, on a draft meant for substantive revision. If you've asked for comments on a draft, a response that fixates entirely on typos and the odd awkward phrase is not a serious engagement. You will proofread your writing after you've revised it. This, you can set on fire. (Follow local safety laws!) Next time, give this reader explicit instructions for how to respond to your writing.
  
  
  • The avalanche. If there are just too many suggestions for a mortal human being to deal with, to the point that you're unable to even start in on revisions, just put the comments aside. I don't recommend setting these sorts of suggestions on fire, because they're probably substantive, if poorly organized. Just read through them once and put them away. You'll take the matter into your own hands and figure out how to revise, maybe returning to these comments when you have a better sense of where you're going to go. And next time, ask this reader to focus on one or two particular aspects of the piece.
  
  
  • Invective. Insults of any kind, whether directed at you or at your writing, are unprofessional and non-substantive. They won't help you revise. If possible, don't solicit comments from this reader again.
  
  

In a future post (oh, promises, promises!) I'll discuss some common specific elements of receiving feedback and how to deal with them: hobbyhorses; feeling misunderstood; turf-warring. I say this as if I'm some kind of expert, but really I'm just bumbling along here, so please do add suggestions in comments, fair readers.

(Special thanks to Hillary, Benjamin, and Lila for the cat photo.)

Previous posts on responses to writing:

• 9 May 2010: "On responding to writing"


• 28 May 2010: "How to respond to others' writing"


• 31 May 2010: "Receiving feedback on writing, part the first"

Receiving feedback on writing, part the first

This is the third post in what appears to be a series on responses to writing. Previously I laid out my idea of what constitutes a good response to someone else's writing. Responding to writing is a nontrivial intellectual task. But it's also not entirely obvious how to receive feedback on writing. Most people have received a laboriously marked up draft, only to find themselves at a loss as to how to use it. Don't tell anybody, but sometimes those marked-up drafts wind up in the recycling bin. What a waste of everyone's time!

Today I'll mention some ways to get the most useful possible feedback from your readers.

• Set expectations. I can't overemphasize this. A respondent will be far more helpful if she or he knows what kind of response is needed. You don't have to give a lengthy report on your expectations, but you should signal what stage you imagine the piece to be in and what kind of time frame is available. If it's a draft for a long-term book project, the reader will respond to the substance of the ideas and perhaps suggest significant rewriting, theoretical reorientation, etc. If it's a writing sample that's due in a few days, the wise reader will catch all your typos and offer suggestions to improve the clarity of the language. The wise reader in that situation will not tell you that you need to engage with Nietzsche. Note, too, that regardless of what you say, the presentation of the manuscript also sends signals about the state of the draft. A poorly formatted, typo-ridden manuscript says "drafty draft draft draft," no matter what you say about it. Conversely, a polished manuscript signals assurance and a relatively more developed argument. More to the point, a clean manuscript allows the reader to focus on language and ideas, because she isn't being distracted by your wonky footnote formatting. And if you want feedback on particular issues ("I'm not sure whether the section about how the Cheezburger Cat formally reproduces the Bergsonian durée is clear"), then by all means ask the reader to respond to them.


• Hold up your own end of the deal. Give your reader a reason to take your argument seriously. Even if the work is incipient, give the reader enough to work with. How useful will it be to receive feedback on five introductory pages that don't actually start in on the body of the argument? The reader can't know if those pages do what they're supposed to do without the rest of the essay in hand. Similarly, meet the deadlines you set for yourself (true confession: I am entirely guilty of not following this advice on occasion). Responding to writing is a generous thing to do, and it's only right to respect your reader's time by delivering what you said you'd deliver, when you said you'd deliver it.


• Be strong. You've asked for feedback; now be willing to accept it. It's always hard to hear from someone else that your baby needs work, even when you already hold that opinion yourself. Make up your mind now that you're going to use this feedback productively.

If I don't flake out (always a possibility -- I mean, this is a blog, after all), then I'll proceed in a future post to outline how to distinguish between helpful and unhelpful feedback, and some of the ways to use feedback productively, including relatively low-quality feedback.

(A lolcat for Gladys.)

Previous posts on responses to writing:

• 9 May 2010: "On responding to writing"


• 28 May 2010: "How to respond to others' writing"

How to respond to others' writing

I recently wrote a fairly rambling post about responding to other people's writing, which was partly an appreciation of those who have done it for me and partly a reflection on how I learned to respond to writing (in short: haphazardly).

What I didn't do in that post was give a concrete account of my idea of how one should respond to writing. I'll attempt to outline it briefly below. These statements apply to writing by peers and by students alike.

• Writing is an act of creation. Properly conducted, so is responding to writing. A good response is the product of a serious intellectual engagement with a document, usually a document in an unpolished state, which takes a bit more effort to read than a fully articulated, proofread, edited document. It's your job to figure out what the document is accomplishing, what it aims to accomplish, and what it could accomplish. You're partaking of the creative act and projecting for the writer what you think the piece will be once fully realized. Consequently, a response should be positive in both senses. I don't mean this in a warm and fuzzy way. I mean that a response should offer suggestions, point out successful moves (that should be extended or repeated, perhaps), and ask questions, because these are the things that will help a writer proceed. It is easier to work from models than from interdictions. You can say what not to do, but the task of the writer is not to not do but to do -- something. The writer needs to know what you think that something ought to be, even if she or he will ultimately reject your suggestion.


• A response is not the same thing as an evaluation. When a piece of writing is truly good, it's important to say that, because handing over your work to somebody else is an act of trust. But the chief aim of a response is not to evaluate but to analyze. In particular: telling somebody that a piece of writing is bad gives the writer nothing to go on as far as revision is concerned. What should the writer do, upon being told the piece is bad? Chuck the piece and start over? Start over how? A response should reveal dimensions of the piece that the writer did not previously perceive. Honesty is necessary, of course, and on occasion a reader will be called to save a colleague from the grips of a truly terrible idea for a project. The Queer Temporality of Lolcats: A Bergsonian Analysis in Limericks was never meant to be. But these occasions are rare.


• A response should summarize what you see the writing accomplishing. Writing does not entail having an idea fully formed and then typing it out. Sophisticated writing is a recursive process of articulating, revising, and nuancing ideas that are at first only incipient. A good response summarizes what the reader has understood to be the aims and accomplishments of the piece of writing, usually with questions when unclarity arises. The reader helps the writer to identify the ideas that have developed in the writing, and the further implications that the writer may wish to draw out.


• A response should be appropriate to one's relationship with the writer and to the task at hand. A response must always be respectful, period. Apart from that, audiences vary. You can be colloquial with a friend from grad school. It's helpful to repeat composition terminology (like that old classic, "topic sentence") with a student. It's important to be gentle (not dishonest: gentle) with someone whom you know is having a mid-grad-school crisis. Likewise, comments that will prompt substantial rewriting are appropriate for an early draft of a dissertation chapter, and not appropriate for a draft of a proposal due tomorrow. Think of the person, the time frame, the situation.


• A few targeted comments are more helpful than a comprehensive account of every possible thing upon which the writer could improve. Time is finite, and while we all cherish hopes of writing the perfect essay, it's not reasonable to suppose that anyone ever will. Far more harmful to anyone's writing life than an essay circulating with a few flaws is the awkward, insular prose of the sitter-and-polisher. Each of us has an inner sitter-and-polisher, and that's not a bad thing (it's also known as our inner critic), but there must be limits. A tragic affliction often seen among advanced graduate students is the inability to show anyone work in progress and an utter unwillingness to submit essays before they are "ready." That way lies incompletes, a fifteen-year time-to-degree, and abject misery. Meanwhile, the writing becomes more and more stilted and anxious, because it never sees the light of day or benefits from the refreshing reality-checks of scholarly communication. Inundating a writer with a flood of comments only encourages the inner sitter-and-polisher who never circulates a draft with which she is not happy--and she is never happy. If there really are a lot of problems, then at minimum impose a hierarchy on your suggestions. When you give a response, you're suggesting revisions, and those revisions should be possible and finite. The goal, after all, is to end up with a good piece of writing, and part of being good is being done.

Letters

I recently had a conversation about letters -- you know, the kind you stick in the post. Since I've actually been known to write them on occasion, here are my thoughts, briefly, on what makes a good letter.

• A good letter is affectionate. Ideally, it contains an in-joke.


• A good letter is substantive; it contains ideas, not just a narration of events.


• A good letter is crafted; it has some structure. Thought has gone into the letter. Likewise, proofreading.


• A good letter is written legibly by hand.

What else makes a good letter?

On responding to writing

Kevin Dettmar's recent lovely ode to an editor put me in mind of my own readers. Like the art of praise, the art of giving useful feedback is a delicate one.

Although I've been trying for years to cultivate a detached attitude toward my writing (as all writers do), I still find it frightening to show writing in its early stages. It is always bad. A bad version of every essay must be written, often multiple bad versions. There is no point in trying to save time by skipping the bad version; there's no skipping it, because without the bad version there can be no good version.

The bad draft is bad because we write our anxieties. If we feel hemmed in by a previous critic's argument, then we ramble on about how very wrong that critic is. If we feel insecure in our understanding of a philosophical point, we will attach multiple lengthy footnotes to the section in which we explain it. If we're not quite sure what we mean by a phrase, we will say it repeatedly. At least for me, a first draft is a record of my anxieties about the ideas about which I'm writing. Only later can the bloom of anxieties be cleared away, and the ideas themselves emerge, blinking.

A good reader helps the ideas emerge by taking for granted that they are there (somewhere). She assumes that you know what you're about, gives you the benefit of the doubt, and responds to the smartest version of what you could be saying. She tells you not only when you're being unclear but also how. Instead of naming deficiencies, she asks questions and offers suggestions. She notices patterns in your writing that you didn't see yourself. Above all, she tells you what she sees, which is usually different from what you think you said.

Like praising, giving feedback is a skill I learned informally. I had a dissertation group for a year or two, and that was crucial in helping me see how to respond to others' writing. (I was also teaching composition continuously during this period, which made for some startling revelations.)

The dissertation group made me realize that good feedback is not only a response to writing but also to a writer. Some people have particular habits that need remarking. Some people's relationships with their dissertations are so fragile that suggestions must always come in the form of praise, lest the writer despair and stop writing altogether. And often, too much feedback--high quality or otherwise--is so overwhelming that it shuts the writer down. The point of feedback is not to be exhaustive but to be useful.

I've had many good readers, and there's something exciting (also scary) about receiving feedback from someone for the first time. It's a special kind of favor that scholars do for one another, one that I've always deeply appreciated. Just as there are certain things only family and friends can do for you, there are certain things that only a scholar can do. Likewise, it's an honor to be asked to read a colleague's work in progress. (I say this with a little guilt, knowing that I still owe someone a response to an article.)

In addition to these, I have two truly exceptional regular interlocutors, one an advisor, one a peer. Both of them are exceptional first of all because I trust in their scholarship. Both do me the honor of engaging deeply and frequently with my work, even in its bad phases. Of the two, the more senior is perhaps the better respondent to my writing; he's a master of the distilling phrase. It's my peer, however, who's the better respondent to me as a writer; she knows my work in all its forms and can detect latent concerns before I do. Because of these two readers, writing is never not collaborative to me. Even when I reject all of their suggestions, my thinking changes, and therefore so does the writing.

There is also an art of taking feedback. But that's another topic.

Building

There comes a point in every academic's life, sooner or later, when various professional bitternesses set in, and one's private self rails against the injustices of the world. The world is in fact unjust, so it's a thing that has to be done, but it's not a way to work.

Someone recently said to me that literary critics are either builders or cutters: they extend others' ideas or cut others' ideas down. As far as I can tell, this is more a matter of framing than of substance; any building necessarily cuts against whatever else might have once occupied that space; any cutting implicitly rests on certain strongly held, if unavowed, beliefs. The framing can be powerful, though; I'm currently reading a book, for instance, that largely stages itself as cutting, and, halfway through, I'm still unclear on the book's actual argument.

In my writing I try as much as possible to be a builder. To my mind, building is more difficult, and therefore more rewarding, than cutting. Building is, as much as possible, an act of creation. But the commitment to building is also part of my research interests; despite their sometimes oppositional language ("I, too, dislike it"), the authors I study are interested in bringing something forth that was once concealed, or insubstantial, or inaccessible.

In the midst of various pressures, it is good to be able to bring something forth, and so in what (wrongly, of course) feels like my old age I find myself renewing my commitment to building. I find myself interested in the craft of critical writing, in the presence of the voice, in the modalities of affection, in what it means to praise. (This last, admittedly, in the context of needing to write a letter of recommendation for something unusually important.) That doesn't mean I've gone all hippie: I'm also interested in invective, in aporia, in travesty, in the poetics of mockery. But I'm interested in them as things that exist rather than as negations of something else.

In other words, I suppose, I'm feeling productive. Which is a good way to be in April, allegedly the cruellest month.

'Again the sun!
     anew each
     day; and new and new and new,
     that comes into and steadies my soul.' (ll. 142-5)

Moore, Marianne. "The Pangolin." A-Quiver with Significance: Marianne Moore, 1932-1936. Ed. Heather Cass White. Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2008. Print.

I've just had an article accepted for publication, with minor revisions. It's very exciting.

Writing as flesh

I've long been fascinated by the bodily connection that we often feel that we have with our writing. This is as true of writing done on a computer as of manuscript or print. Aaron just wrote a thoughtful post describing pieces of writing as his children (although, come on Aaron, the whole Abraham/Ishmael thing is kind of creepy). It's a common enough metaphor. And of course, there is the proverbial "bleeding on" a draft, as if to suggest corrections were tantamount to taking a pen and slicing open the text's flesh.

In Of Grammatology, Derrida puts his finger on a value judgment that runs through discourses on writing:

There is therefore a good and a bad writing: the good and natural is the divine inscription in the heart and the soul; the perverse and artful is technique, exiled in the exteriority of the body. [...] The good writing has therefore always been comprehended.

The kind of writing that gets the same ontological status as speech, Derrida suggests, is the kind that is not really writing at all, but rather a metaphorical "inscription" defined by interiority and presence. The writing that is writing per se, the kind defined by its portability, its capacity to circulate alienated from the body, is the kind that is considered fallen, a mere sorry simulacrum of speech.

But the writing that I encounter in my workaday life, both as a critic and as a teacher, doesn't quite fit into this schema. Our writing really is alienable, but the process of alienation is painful. You can "develop a thick skin" when it comes to criticism (of your writing, not of you personally!), but it's still never easy to "take." That's why Aaron's metaphor of children feels so apt (even as it feels excessive): flesh of your flesh, it eventually leaves you to circulate in the world on its own. You can't control it, you can't protect it, and it sometimes sends you resentful text messages about how you always liked that other essay better.