Getting Dumber

I haven't been working on my chapter for a few weeks, and I feel much less intelligent. I have fewer ideas for SMT and for Bemsha Swing too. I'm mostly working on my classes and drafting some departmental by-laws. Interesting stuff. But it's making me palpably dumber as we speak.

Learning Styles (Not)

There is reason for skepticism about the idea of learning styles. What makes a style relevant is the nature of the material to be taught, not the individual differences among learners. I've always been skeptical about this, frankly.

Teaching Language

Unlike a few of my colleague, I don't think teaching language and composition is beneath me. It is true that I am a scholar of literature, and not of language, but I find advanced level language courses to be very rewarding. Not being a linguist does not hold me back. Most of the students want to improve their level of Spanish language, and this occurs both in literature classes and in those devoted to the language itself. Literature classes are also language classes, in fact.

This semester I have two advanced language courses, and it frees my literature mind entirely for my own research.

Prosody

A copy editor asked me if I wanted to change the title of my article "Was Lorca a Poetic Thinker?" to "Was García Lorca a Poetic Thinker?" or "Was Federico García Lorca a Poetic Thinker?" I said no. I didn't title my book "Apocryphal García Lorca." That would have sounded awful. My next book is not going to be "What García Lorca Knew." Rhythmically, those titles just don't sound right to me.

It's complicated, because Lorca and Galdós are unique in being known primarily by their maternal surnames. Not quite unique, because I've heard Biedma for Gil de Biedma. It is wrong to say Gassett for Ortega y Gassett, but it's fine to say Ortega. It's wrong to say Márquez for García Márquez, or Llosa for Vargas Llosa, but you can't say "García" for García Márquez or "Pérez" for "Pérez Galdós."

Anyway, I think I was right to stick to my prosodic instinct in this case.

"Classic style respects the stress position"

That sentence is on page 69 of Clear and Simple as the Truth (Turner and Thomas). The last element of a sentence is the most important, generally speaking, and so the classic writer puts something which is to be emphasized in that stress position. Often this is new information.

The initial part of the sentence, conversely, is the best place to situate the topic (what the sentence is going to be about) or to cover information already known to the reader. Frustration often ensues when the beginning of a sentence seems to offer no guidance at all as to what the sentence is going to be about.

The topic might be clearly stated, but the stress position might be wasted. "The role of violence in the novels of Ricardo Piglia..." That sound like a good topic for sentence, but too often it is followed by something vague or pointless like "is one of the defining characteristics of his work." You should say something specific and worthy of the stress position instead of a throwaway line this this. In this case, I would reverse those two elements: "One of the defining characteritics of RC's novels is the ...' i would also be more precise in my statement, trying to define a very specific treatment of violence, for example, or the narrator's implicit attitude toward it. So the topic is "novels written by Piglia" and the new information is "some specific and interesting point about these novels." That is classic recipe for a good sentence.

Can You Judge Your Own Writing?

I heard an interview with Bill Evans, given in the last year of his life. (He only lived from 1929-1980 which means I've matched Bill Evans since I turn 51 today. I have the advantage of not being a drug user.) He said he had begun to listen to his earlier records, and that he could hear his playing objectively, as though it were another player's.

So one very helpful way of judging your own writing is to look back into the past. If you aren't as old as I am, even looking back a year or two can be very illuminating. The point is to have forgotten the thought processes that went into the sentences and to really see what they are saying.

Needless to say, you need to develop the capacity to judge writing that is not your own. If you can't do that, then you are unlikely to be able to do that with your own. Inexperienced writers tend to judge writing by looking for errors or shibboleths. What I am talking about is a very advanced and nuanced analysis of writing that recognizes positive virtues as well. Elegance is not simply the absence of inelagance.

If you can judge writing, then you can judge your own writing, given enough the lapse of enough time. Now see if you can judge what you wrote yesterday or an hour ago with a little more objectivity. Shorten the length of time, in other words. Now you have that inner editor built in to in your writing itself.

Why not just write a draft and have someone else be your editor? Well, you can still do that, but the better your draft is, the more the editor can put attention into higher-level concerns. Also, suppose you give your editor a draft and it comes back with comments like "choppy," "run-on sentences,""vague" all over it. Then the next time you submit something else to this editor, you should have taken some care with the length and rhythm of the sentences already. You aren't starting from zero with every draft, but internalizing the critique into your own self-editing.

Teaching & Research

My good friend and colleague Jorge has won a big teaching award. Of course, he is also one of the most publishing scholars in my department. Good teaching and good research often go together, so I don't think Jorge is a rare case in the least. It's like hitting and fielding in baseball: some will be better offensively and some defensively, but there will be plenty of talented athletes who are good at both.

Popular views of teaching in research posit two kinds of college professor: the absent-minded researcher who can't be bothered to teach well, and the dedicated teacher who is so devoted that there is no time for publications. Nowadays, you have to have a good teaching portfolio as a grad student to even get a tenure-track job. Pedagogical training is better and more extensive than it ever was. At least in the humanities and some social sciences, many prominent scholars genuinely care about undergraduate teaching and want to do it well. (I can't speak to the sciences, because I simply do not know enough, but it wouldn't surprise me to find more dedication to teaching than we might expect based on popular stereotypes.) People who stop doing research don't automatically become better teachers either. A good balance between the two activities helps to prevent academic burnout.