(Come back later for my explanations of why thesis writing is like the high-jump and what F1 racing can teach you about how fast you should go in your writing.)
03.03.2026 16:28
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(Come back later for my explanations of why thesis writing is like the high-jump and what F1 racing can teach you about how fast you should go in your writing.)
Real argumentation might analyze a couple of pieces of evidence in a paragraph, but that argumentation should be supported by quotation throughout.
This is 'incidental' or 'textural' quotation which anchors description to the text, gives a sense of the author's style, and builds basic evidence into description of the topic.
Students need to learn the difference, but the problem is that this translates into 'paraphrase doesn't involve quotation.' This combines with the instruction that when you quote you need to analyze to drive out a specific kind of quotation from students' writing.
This is something students have always struggled with, not a new phenomenon. But my current explanation for how it comes about is that something gets lost in teaching about the relationship between quotation and paraphrase.
Writing about texts is like rock-climbing, when you let go of a hand-hold it is to reach for a new one and you better be holding onto something else while you do so. If you don't, you might think you're flying, but you're actually starting to fall.
bsky.app/profile/astr...
Les Trentes Glorieuses
I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs
By the known rules of ancient liberty,
When straight a barbarous noise environs me
Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes and dogs...
As an aside, if you want to read this book, I'd recommend Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman's A Fall of Kings.
That this is happening as an end-run around the restrictions on electronic texts or an attempt at plausible deniability, just makes the waste more dispiriting. But you can't inject this sort of money into a marginal market without having an outside effect.
Most of the remaining stock of those stores has been transferred into the hands of big resellers who price algorithmically. The excess stock is disappearing and prices are rising and the viability of any but the best-run and best-curated second-hand stores disappearing.
In the last 20 years, we've been living in a golden age of availability for books, as internet internet booksellers made the stock of second-hand bookshops widely available in a way they never were before. But it's pretty clear that age is coming to an end.
I do! On the one hand, I don't want to be sentimental about the destruction of books--it's just paper. But, this sort of hoovering-up operation has almost certainly pressure on the second-hand book market, including gathering and destroying some genuinely rare books.
Most scholars would date his conversion to sometime before his employment with Sir Thomas Egerton in 1599, though I'd say there is some evidence of backsliding until the Gunpowder Plot.
Very nice, Adam. A small correction: the motto in the youthful portrait suggests death before conversion _from_ Catholicism, as Donne and his whole family are notable recusants.
Eg: good summaries of texts should always quote liberally, but when you try to teach the difference between paraphrase and quotation by having students practice each separately, you get a whole bunch of students who think that paraphrasing should include no quotation.
I also think that some of the instructional strategies we use in college, when simplified and reapplied at high-school level, create exactly the problems that drive us mad instructing new college students.
Make a Bond movie medieval academic:
Dr. Sic et Non
Bring back Aristotle's four causes!
modern emotions in the 18th C., seems important, especially when it is linked to new theories about how the mind and feelings work.
History of Emotions isn't so interested in single watersheds so much as the complex historicity of particular feelings across periods, where and how they are different, and the implications of those changes, such as the shift from the discourse of the passions (classical, medieval and EM), to
Very sympathetic to your complaint about the tendentiousness of claiming that, eg subjectivity, started in a particular period. We do have to get away from the privileging of our own periods and admit that sometimes things changed before them and something afterwards. But...
British rather than continental, but Raven's The Business of Books. I also rather like The Oral History of the British Book Trade.
"I began with the desire to speak to dead technologies..."
She wrote so many books that there are both plenty of books where this is true and plenty where it isn't. Some safe(-ish) choices: The Winter Players, Companions on the Road, East of Midnight, Don't Bit the Sun (and Drinking Sapphire Wine),
Silver Metal Lover.
*assets
Seconding a bunch of things that other people have said:
McKillip, Garner, Nix, Pierce, Aiken.
Adding: Tanith Lee's Flat Earth books; Jane Yolen's Pit Dragon; Robin McKinley, Blue Sword & Hero and the Crown; John Christopher's Tripods; Peter Dickinson's Time of Changes.
Water Knife definitely not one of the YA novels. Easy to get mixed up.
✍ Introducing ✍
Sharpie, a letterform recognition game for beginner #EarlyModern #palaeography
gjhilton.github.io/Sharpie/
AKA What I Did Over Reading Week.
#skystorians I’d be so grateful if you had time to share or take a look and tell me what sucks and needs fixing.
Love g 🗃️