You are warmly invited to attend a working and planning meeting for the Writing is Thinking Working Group on Wednesday, September 4that 6pm in Allen 314. (Food will be served.)
We will be joined by our new colleagues in the English department’s writing program: JP Gritton and Mesha Maren. This is a chance to meet them, to hear some of their thoughts about writing and research, and to add your voice to this coming year’s annual project.
For the past three years, Sarah Beckwith, Toril Moi, and Cathy Shuman have convened a Writing is Thinking Working Group. Please come to this first meeting to meet JP Gritton and Mesha Maren, and to help plan the activities of the working group for this year. We need your input to make it a group that will support and benefit you in your own writing!
The goal of the Working Group on Writing and Academic Work is to help make academic writing more enjoyable both for its readers and for its writers. This project builds on several related convictions. Good writing is good thinking. As such it is integral to intellectual work. The words we use express our knowledge. In the eyes of others, our knowledge is never better than the words we use to express them. Conversely by learning to pay attention to the work of words, we also learn to pay renewed attention to our ideas. The result is a wish to reformulate, rewrite, not for the sake of external stylistic norms but for the sake of the power of thought.
We think of writing as a craft. It is at once a central topic in literary studies and its essential medium. Strong writing will make others take notice of our work. Paying attention to the craft of writing helps improve our own academic writing, and also helps those who wish to do so to communicate to non-academic audiences who care about literature and culture.
English Department
