Comments on: One-A-Day: A Crack in the Edge of the World https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2008/01/03/one-a-day-a-crack-in-the-edge-of-the-world/ Culture, Politics, Academia and Other Shiny Objects Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:20:03 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.15 By: Dance https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2008/01/03/one-a-day-a-crack-in-the-edge-of-the-world/comment-page-1/#comment-4791 Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:20:03 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=482#comment-4791 Funny. I was just reading The Professor and the Madman on a plane. Not done with it yet—but I was using it in an AHA conversation to illustrate the principle that any time writing starts with a dictionary definition, it’s probably not going to be very good.

I’ll return to it with your comments in mind, however.

My approach to this, with students, is less about designing a style from the outset, and more about learning to edit their natural/trained tendencies. A potent anecdote does not signify a good paper. My students don’t know why one presentation of a potent anecdote works, and another one doesn’t, or why sometimes you can end a 3-pp essay with an anecdote but not start there.

]]> By: Doug https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2008/01/03/one-a-day-a-crack-in-the-edge-of-the-world/comment-page-1/#comment-4782 Fri, 04 Jan 2008 09:22:08 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=482#comment-4782 Couldn’t finish Crack. Couldn’t even finish two chapters. I had forgotten that the same author wrote The Professor and the Madman, so now I’m a little curious about what went wrong (or at least what went wrong from my point of view, since obviously any number of people like the earthquake book). But not curious enough to actually dig out my copy and try again.

Thinking back, I suspect that I thought the story of the earthquake was compelling enough without requiring a parallel contemporary story from and about the author. A book’s author will inevitably be present on every page, why the insertion of the author as an explicit subject in this case?

I can see teaching the outline above as a good tool for sophisticated undergraduates; I think there’s also a question beyond that of when it’s an appropriate structure and when it isn’t.

]]> By: Bill McNeill https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2008/01/03/one-a-day-a-crack-in-the-edge-of-the-world/comment-page-1/#comment-4780 Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:21:47 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=482#comment-4780 Malcolm Gladwell comes to mind as another popular non-fiction writer with a talent for unadorned clarity. Though Gladwell’s New Yorker articles get formulaic after awhile (and even follow an anecdote-to-big-picture arc similar to the one you outline above), they always remains direct, engaging, and imitable.

Over at the other end of the spectrum, I’d name Lester Bangs as contemporary English’s most perniciously distinctive stylist. At least Mailer wrote general non-fiction and novels: the din of his voice is somewhat drowned out by the size of his genre. Bangs, on the other hand, cast a huge shadow over the comparatively narrow field of rock journalism, and it makes me cringe every time I stumble across an alt-weekly record review and see yet another wheezing attempt to make run-on sentences sing.

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