Economics is not a field that is known for good writing. Charts, yes. Sparkling prose, no.
 
Except, that is, when it comes to Deirdre Nansen McCloskey. Her conversational and witty yet always clear style is a hallmark of her classic works of economic history, enlivening the dismal science and engaging readers well beyond the discipline. And now she’s here to share the secrets of how it’s done.
 
Economical Writing is itself economical: a collection of thirty-five pithy rules for making your writing clear, concise, and effective. Proceeding from big-picture ideas to concrete strategies for improvement at the level of the paragraph, sentence, or word, McCloskey shows us that good writing, after all, is not just a matter of taste—it’s a product of adept intuition and a rigorous revision process. Debunking stale rules, warning us that “footnotes are nests for pedants,” and offering an arsenal of readily applicable tools and methods, she shows writers of all levels of experience how to rethink the way they approach their work, and gives them the knowledge to turn mediocre prose into magic.
 
At once efficient and digestible, hilarious and provocative, Economical Writing lives up to its promise. With McCloskey as our guide, it’s impossible not to see how any piece of writing—on economics or any other subject—can be a pleasure to read.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is universally recognized as one of America's most influential authors and thinkers.  Before achieving eminence as lecturer, essayist, and poet, though, he was a Unitaarian preacher.  Emerson in His Sermons is the first major study of the sermons since the publication of The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Susan Roberson examines Emerson's ministerial career from 1826 to 1832, shedding new light on those early, crucial years in Emerson's personal and intellectual development.

Treating the sermons extensively as an autobiographical text, Roberson establishes that Emerson's years in the pulpit were pivotal and that his sermons are key texts in revealing the essential development of his thought.  Central to Roberson's explication of the sermons is Emerson's conception of self-reliance, his invention of a new hero for a new age, and his merging of his own identity with that heroic idea.

Roberson focuses on Emerson's reaction to what was perhaps the most signifcant event in his personal life:  the death of his young wife, Ellen, of tuberculosis in 1831, after only sixteen months of marriage.  Roberson's correlation of the sermons written during that time with the complexity of Emerson's emotional and intellectual response to the tragedy of Ellen's illness and death is the most detailed and sophisticated treatment of that material to date.

Roberson understands Emerson's emergence from the ministry as his rejection of ready-made institutions and sytems of thought.  Through her careful readings of the sermons, Roberson finds that Emerson's objective was less the translation of his life into writing than the translation of his life through writing.  By considering the sermons in this way, Roberson is able to enrich our understanding of the private and passionte impulses of this seminal thinker.

Emerson in His Sermons offers the first real look at how the sermons fit into Emerson's own development and will have a far-reaching impact on Emerson scholarship.  Anyone concerned with the cultural and religious history of America will find this book invaluable.

Launched in middle schools in the fall of 2005, the "Writers Matter" approach was designed to discover ways to improve the fit between actual English curricula, district/state standards and, more recently, the Common Core Curriculum Standards for writing instruction. Adapted from Erin Gruwell's successful Freedom Writers Program, "Writers Matter" develops students' skills in the context of personal growth, understanding others, and making broader connections to the world.

 

Empowering Young Writers explains and expands on the practical aspects of the "Writers Matter" approach, emphasizing a focus on free expression and establishing connections between the curriculum and students' personal lives. Program creator Robert Vogel, and his co-authors offer proven ways to motivate adolescents to write, work diligently to improve their writing skills, and think more critically about the world. 

 

This comprehensive book will help teachers, administrators, and education students apply and reproduce the "Writers Matter" approach more broadly, which can have a profound impact on their students' lives and social development. 

 

In the wake of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke argued that civil order depended upon nurturing the sensibility of men—upon the masculine cultivation of traditionally feminine qualities such as sentiment, tenderness, veneration, awe, gratitude, and even prejudice. Writers as diverse as Sterne, Goldsmith, Burke, and Rousseau were politically motivated to represent authority figures as men of feeling, but denied women comparable authority by representing their feelings as inferior, pathological, or criminal. Focusing on Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen, whose popular works culminate and assail this tradition, Claudia L. Johnson examines the legacy male sentimentality left for women of various political persuasions.

Demonstrating the interrelationships among politics, gender, and feeling in the fiction of this period, Johnson provides detailed readings of Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, and Burney, and treats the qualities that were once thought to mar their work—grotesqueness, strain, and excess—as indices of ideological conflict and as strategies of representation during a period of profound political conflict. She maintains that the reactionary reassertion of male sentimentality as a political duty displaced customary gender roles, rendering women, in Wollstonecraft's words, "equivocal beings."

From a buoyant introduction that provides a sweeping historical and analytic overview of essayists’ thinking about their genre—a collective poetics of the essay—to the detailed headnotes offering pointed information about both the essayists themselves and the anthologized selections, to the richly detailed bibliographic sections, Essayists on the Essay is essential to anyone who cares about the form.

This collection provides teachers, scholars, essayists, and readers with the materials they need to take a fresh look at this important but often overlooked form that has for too long been relegated to the role of service genre—used primarily to write about other more “literary” genres or to teach young people how to write. Here, in a single celebratory volume, are four centuries of commentary and theory reminding us of the essay’s storied history, its international appeal, and its relationship not just with poetry and fiction but also with radio, film, video, and new media.

The Internet allows ethnographers to deposit the textual materials on which they base their writing in virtual archives. Electronically archived fieldwork documents can be accessed at any time by the writer, his or her readers, and the people studied. Johannes Fabian, a leading theorist of anthropological practice, argues that virtual archives have the potential to shift the emphasis in ethnographic writing from the monograph to commentary. In this insightful study, he returns to the recording of a conversation he had with a ritual healer in the Congolese town of Lubumbashi more than three decades ago. Fabian’s transcript and translation of the exchange have been deposited on a website (Language and Popular Culture in Africa), and in Ethnography as Commentary he provides a model of writing in the presence of a virtual archive.

In his commentary, Fabian reconstructs his meeting with the healer Kahenga Mukonkwa Michel, in which the two discussed the ritual that Kahenga performed to protect Fabian’s home from burglary. Fabian reflects on the expectations and terminology that shape his description of Kahenga’s ritual and meditates on how ethnographic texts are made, considering the settings, the participants, the technologies, and the linguistic medium that influence the transcription and translation of a recording and thus fashion ethnographic knowledge. Turning more directly to Kahenga—as a practitioner, a person, and an ethnographic subject—and to the questions posed to him, Fabian reconsiders questions of ethnic identity, politics, and religion. While Fabian hopes that emerging anthropologists will share their fieldwork through virtual archives, he does not suggest that traditional ethnography will disappear. It will become part of a broader project facilitated by new media.

In this pathbreaking study, Micaela di Leonardo reveals the face of power within the mask of cultural difference. From the 1893 World's Fair to Body Shop advertisements, di Leonardo focuses on the intimate and shifting relations between popular portrayals of exotic Others and the practice of anthropology. In so doing, she casts new light on gender, race, and the public sphere in America's past and present.

"An impressive work of scholarship that is mordantly witty, passionately argued, and takes no prisoners."—Lesley Gill, News Politics

"[Micaela] di Leonardo eloquently argues for the importance of empirical, interdisciplinary social science in addressing the tragedy that is urban America at the end of the century."—Jonathan Spencer, Times Literary Supplement

"In her quirky new contribution to the American culture brawl, feminist anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo explains how anthropologists, 'technicians of the sacred,' have distorted American popular debate and social life."—Rachel Mattson, Voice Literary Supplement

"At the end of di Leonardo's analyses one is struck by her rare combination of rigor and passion. Simply, [she] is a marvelous iconoclast."—Matthew T. McGuire, Boston Book Review

Explanation Points is a curated collection of disciplinary knowledge and advice for publishing in rhetoric and composition. Covering a variety of topics in an approachable, conversational tone, the book demonstrates how writing faculty from diverse career trajectories and institutions produce, prepare, edit, revise, and publish scholarship.
 
Rhetoric and composition is a uniquely democratic field, made of a group of scholars who, rather than competing with one another, lift each other up and work together to move the field forward. This lively, engaging, story-anchored book offers advice from a range of authors—including emeritus faculty, prolific authors, and early career researchers. Organized by various stages in the writing and publishing process, Explanation Points presents the advice shared between colleagues, passed along from professor to student, or offered online in abbreviated tweets and updates.
 
The best advice book on writing and publishing in the field, Explanation Points is a useful resource for rhetoric and composition scholars including faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students; writing center administrators, staff, and consultants; graduate pratica and seminars; writing workshop classes; and editors, associate editors, assistant editors, and other academic journal staff.
 
Contributors:
Tim Amidon, Chris Anson, Nancy G. Barron, Ellen Barton, Michael Baumann, Steve Bernhardt, Kristine L. Blair, David Blakesley, Lynn Z. Bloom, Marcia Bost, James Brown, Amber Buck, Rebecca Burnett, Joyce Carter, Kate Comer, Janice Cools, Marilyn Cooper, Craig Cotich, Ellen Cushman, Gabriel Cutrufello, Courtney Danforth, Sid Dobrin, William Duffy, Norbert Elliot, Jessica Enoch, Doug Eyman, Michael Faris, Jenn Fishman, Linda Flower, Brenda Glasscot, Laura Gonzales, Jeffrey T. Grabill, Laurie Gries, Bump Halbritter, Joseph Harris, Byron Hawk, Douglas Hesse, Troy Hicks, Bruce Horner, Asao Inoue, Darin L. Jensen, Erin Jensen, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Gesa E. Kirsch, Sarah Kornfield, Ashanka Kumari, Christina M. LaVecchia, Donna LeCourt, Barbara L’Eplattenier, Heather Lettner-Rust, Justin Lewis, Julie Lindquist, Tara Lockhart, Andrea Abernethy Lunsford, Katie Manthey, Lisa Mastrangelo, Ben McCorkle, Heidi McKee, Cruz Medina, Laura R. Micciche, Holly Middleton, Lilian Mina, Janine Morris, Joan Mullin, Kim Hensley Owens, Jason Palmeri, Mike Palmquist, Steve Parks, Juli Parrish, Staci Perryman-Clark, Mya Poe, Jacqueline Rhodes, Jeff Rice, Jim Ridolfo, Shirley K Rose, Stuart A. Selber, Jody Shipka, Naomi Silver, Ryan Skinnell, Trixie Long Smith, Kyle Stedman, Patrick Sullivan, Carrie Strand Tebeau, Christie Toth, John Trimbur, Chris Warnick, Kathleen Blake Yancey

Exciting and beautifully crafted, The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing provides an entirely new way of viewing “ordinary writing,” the everyday writing we typically ignore or dismiss. It takes as its center the diary of Jennifer Sinor's great-great-great-aunt Annie Ray, a woman who homesteaded in the Dakotas in the late nineteenth century. Diaries such as this have long been ignored by scholars, who prefer instead to focus on diaries with literary features. Reading diaries through this lens gives privileged status to those that are coherently crafted and ignores the very diaries that define the form through their relentless inscription of dailiness.

Annie Ray’s diary is not literary. By considering her ordinary writing as a site of complex and strategic negotiations among the writer, the form of writing, and dominant cultural scripts, Sinor makes visible the extraordinary work of the ordinary writer and the sophistication of these texts. In providing a way to read diaries outside the limits and conventions of literature, she challenges our approaches to other texts as well. Furthermore, because ordinary writing is not crafted for aesthetic reception (in contrast to autobiography proper, memoirs, and literary diaries), it is a productive site for investigating how both writing and culture get made every day.

The book is truly original in its form: nontraditional, storied, creative. Sinor, an accomplished creative writer, includes her own memories as extended metaphors in partnership with critical texts along with excerpts from her aunt's diary. The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing will be a fascinating text for students of creative writing as well as of women's studies and diaries.