COVID-19 in summer 2022

Despite what you might think based on the behaviour of governments and many Ontario residents, the COVID pandemic continues: ‘It’s the real deal’: Doctors warn about future wave fuelled by Omicron variants.

I am continuing much as I have for the last two years: mostly going out only for groceries and exercise walks, avoiding group events and wearing a mask when I do attend, and generally not trying to get sick at a time when illness could interrupt my dissertation completion and wedding travel plans, not to mention threaten vulnerable family members in August.

My advice: get vaccinated, keep masking, and ignore the pushy folks who will try to bully you into taking fewer precautions because they don’t want to follow them.

Readers creating writers

Readers expect to be argued with, and persuaded by. They don’t want to be told, repeatedly, what they already know, and they’re rarely tolerant of being lectured at. Writing happens among; writing is an exchange.

I’ll go further with this point, so bear with me. Readers aren’t just people out there who buy, borrow, or download your written words. Readers engage with texts, giving them a life those texts otherwise lack. Readers, we might even say, create writers. They do this by creating the books that writers make, sort of the way a musician creates a piece of music by playing the notes the composer has set down on paper.

Germano, William. On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts. University of Chicago Press, 2021. p. 30 (italics in original)

Writing for academics

Most of what academics write is intended to persuade other academics of something. That’s true for essayists, too. James Baldwin, when asked if writing an essay was easier than writing a novel, replied, “An essay is essentially an argument. The writer’s point of view in an essay is always absolutely clear. The writer is trying to make the readers see something, trying to convince them of something.” Essays, articles, monographs—the bread and butter of an academic writing life—are about persuasion. Those academic audiences are learned and demanding, and their curiosity is a learned, demanding curiosity. They’re trained to engage complexity (not just positions and speculations but also footnotes, endnotes, appendices, and bibliographic tails of all stripes). They live in expectation of argument and counterargument, of ideas in interesting shapes, laid out to pursue truths in new forms. They may read with their boxing gloves on.

Germano, William. On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts. University of Chicago Press, 2021. p. 29

Revision tools

Identifiable skills, practical techniques, working notes, instinct, gut feeling, hunches. Though they may sound like an unlikely troupe of players, when you write and revise you call on all of them. But no tool for working your way into a draft is more important than just reading it as carefully as your ears will let you and staying focused on what you intended to say. Say, not just describe or explain, even if your project requires that some things are described and some other things are explained. Revision is less a matter of fixing errors than of saying more clearly, thinking your writing through from the ground up so that you know why you’re doing something, why you’re going somewhere, why you’re taking the reader somewhere with you.

Germano, William. On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts. University of Chicago Press, 2021. p. 7 (italics in original)