JUDITH D. SINGER: Good afternoon, everybody.
I'm Judy Singer.
I'm the Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development
and Diversity and I want to welcome all of you
on behalf of the Office of the Provost
to this event on stylish academic writing.
I was describing to a colleague over the weekend
this particular event.
And he said, isn't that an oxymoron?
And unfortunately, having to read a lot of prose
across a lot of disciplines, sometimes it
does sound like it is an oxymoron.
But I think today what we're going to learn
is that it is possible to write well, write clearly, and write
for your colleagues.
I approach thinking about this event
from several different perspectives.
One is, I remember my first year of graduate school,
turning in a paper to my advisor.
My PhD is in statistics.
My advisor was Fred Mosteller.
He was known as a very good writer.
And I turned in my paper and I got
it back and there was so much red ink
on it I was just traumatized.
From the first sentence, he just circles.
My sentence began, there are.
I thought that was a perfectly fine way to begin a paper.
Never begin a paper with the words there are I
have never written a paper or a paragraph with the words
there are since.
In fact, I basically avoid it.
And then over the years, I see this
from in multiple perspectives of thinking about the problem
space, one are the arguments, sometimes heated,
that I get into with my colleagues,
both about our own writing and in collaborative work,
but also with our graduate students,
arguments about the active voice versus the passive voice.
The number of papers I read where it's not clear
that any human being was ever involved in the research,
because it either comes from God or is done by monkeys.
But there is certainly no human in the prose.
Coming up with students who say to me,
but my other reader said I had to edit all these words out.
And I'm, no, you have to put them back in.
So it's obviously an area in which
we can hold different views about what is considered
stylish academic writing.
I also have a particular perspective
of being involved in most of the appointments processes
across the university, and therefore
reading appointments dossiers and tenure
dossiers across the universities,
as well as papers from a variety of fields.
And what goes for stylish writing in one field
is very different from what happens in another field.
I also make a parenthetical note that my favorite dossiers
are written by Steve Pinker.
You should be lucky enough to have Steve
make your case for tenure.
It's really quite a statement.
The idea for this event came when Helen Sword contacted me,
said she was going to be in the States
and was interested in speaking with a group of faculty
about this topic.
And we have been running a series
on publishing more generally for the faculty
from a variety of perspectives.
And the notion of thinking about how to write well
was something that was quite appealing to us.
But we had to figure out how to time this with Helen's schedule
since she comes from the other side of the planet.
And then we wanted to have two other perspectives
on the panel, one of a faculty member
who thinks quite closely about writing and every word
and how it's presented, and Steve Pinker
was very gracious in accepting our invitation, as well
as Elizabeth Knoll from Harvard University Press, who
has done a lot of work with us on these book publishing
events.
And if you're interested in learning about the book
publishing business, I can think of no one
better than Elizabeth Knoll to be your guide.
So with those opening remarks, I'm
going to turn this over to Amy Brand, my colleague
in the Provost's office, Assistant Provost
for Faculty Appointments and Faculty Appointments,
who by the way, was an editor at MIT Press in a former lifetime,
so really comes out of the book publishing industry as well.
And thank you very much for coming.
Bye, bye.
AMY BRAND: Good afternoon and welcome.
We're delighted to see faculty from across the university
at this event.
And we're going to start the panel out
with our invited guest, Helen Sword.
Helen is the author of the book that you now have in your hands
I hope, the namesake for the panel,
Stylish Academic Writing.
Helen is originally from Southern California.
She received her PhD in comparative literature
from Princeton and now teaches at the University of Auckland
as Professor and Director for the Center
of Learning and Research in Higher Education.
Helen is an outspoken advocate for creativity
and craftsmanship in scholarship and has
offered workshops on popular academic writing
all over the world.
In fact, we are just the second stop on a 14 university tour
that she's in the middle of right now.
Helen will be followed by Elizabeth, Executive Editor
at Large at Harvard University Press.
And as Judy mentioned our offices
go to person on all matters related to book publishing.
Elizabeth holds a PhD in the history of science
and has been doing book acquisitions since 1988.
As the range of fields that she acquires and continues
to expand, she in her own words, consequently
knows less and less about more and more.
I take issue with that, actually.
Elizabeth knows a lot about a lot
and will offer an editor's perspective on Helen's remarks.
And batting clean up we have Steve Pinker.
Steve is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family
Professor in the Department of Psychology and author
of many blockbuster titles for the general reader on language
evolution, the mind, and most recently on violence,
with Better Angels of Our Nature.
Steve has received so many awards and recognitions
that I won't attempt to list them,
but most recently he was named one of Prospect Magazine's
top 10 World Thinkers for 2013.
So our plan for the panelists comments to last,
hopefully no more than an hour, leaving plenty of time
for your questions and discussion.
So Helen, start with you.