Tag Archives: academic writing

The scale of a work

Posted on July 25, 2022 by nc

Our friend Jonathan Mayhew, on finding the right size (for a book): I like saying that [my upcoming book on Lorca and music] is a medium sized book on a vast subject.  So it is with scholarship. You are rarely … Continue reading →

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Not included.

Posted on March 9, 2022 by nc

Sometimes you have to read a story two or three times to make sure you’re reading it right. As in: A PhD candidate is hoping the University of Alberta changes its practice on publishing theses after hers was rejected for spelling her [Urdu] … Continue reading →

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How to write

Posted on May 18, 2021 by nc

I love my old friend Jonathan Mayhew’s prose. His blog, Stupid Motivational Tricks (Scholarly Writing and How to Get it Done), is often very charming (and it is always illuminating). Read this bit on the use of “scare quotes.” The … Continue reading →

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J. Hillis Miller

Posted on February 14, 2021 by nc

Professor Miller was a genial man whose ardent advocacy of the “deconstruction” movement in literary and cultural criticism was notable for his uncommonly graceful prose style. His early book “Poets of Reality” was a revelation to me my first year … Continue reading →

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Free at Last

Posted on January 2, 2019 by nc

United States copyright law was changed repeatedly in the last century to grant copyright extensions to entire classes of works of literature and entertainment. This meant that such work could not be referenced at length in works of scholarship without … Continue reading →

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10% and “the crisis in knowledge”

Posted on October 12, 2018 by nc

Writes Jonathan Mayhew: Knowledge is under attack from several fronts at once. In science itself, it is due to corporate corruption and the inherent bias toward interesting but possibly false results. There was that paper about how most scientific findings are false.  … Continue reading →

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Good scholarly habits

Posted on May 16, 2018 by nc

My dear friend Tierney Wisniewski, this website’s cofounder and coeditor, has started up a new blog devoted to her scholarly work and how she gets it done. I love her inaugural piece, “Good Scholarly Habits.” Tierney writes with great clarity and … Continue reading →

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Peers

Posted on April 18, 2018 by nc

Clarissa has a couple of words: In a way, the censorship in US academia is worse than the Soviet kind. The Soviet censors were mostly dumb, uneducated people, and it wasn’t all that hard to pull wool over their eyes … Continue reading →

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Transformative learning and student autonomy

Posted on November 3, 2017 by nc

No Contest co-founder Tierney Wisniewski has written a beautifully conceived and composed Master’s Thesis. Here’s the abstract. [I’ve added some paragraphing for ease of online reading, because abstracts by requirement are very, very fat.] Self-determination theory (SDT) is a well-established theory … Continue reading →

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No plagiarism foul

Posted on October 31, 2017 by nc

A super-smart student in my Advanced Professional Communications class asked me whether using an app that generates a citation for you in proper APA, MLA, Chicago style was plagiarism. My first thought was “I doubt it,” but in my line … Continue reading →

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