“I have been, for over twenty years, entirely persuaded by Garry Wills’s argument: that the Gettysburg Address, given by Abraham Lincoln on this day, exactly 150 years ago, was the great catalyzing rhetorical act in the–probably inevitable–transformation of the United States’s imagination of itself from a localized republican culture which accepted diverse, and unequal, communities, […]
Continue reading →So this is a very minor thing, on balance, but I see it enough to think it’s worth saying. In the realm of practical advice: if you have to insert a word or phrase to indicate that something you’re writing means something dramatically different from the surface meaning, you’ve already failed and should try again. […]
Continue reading →Via this post on Splitsider, I read this interesting account of the State’s doomed move to network television. Written by David Lipsky, it’s a well-researched piece of immersive journalism, one made rather poignant with the benefit of 16 years of distance. (The State and its members have had a ton of success, and yet there’s always […]
Continue reading →This is the sort of thing that I should learn to just keep to myself, but here goes. The just-released issue of Research in the Teaching of English (46.3) has a study I really admire, “Placement of Students into First-Year Writing Courses.” (In the unfortunate custom of academic articles, the PDF is gated, though an abstract is available here.) […]
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