Category Archives: Media Criticism

Teaching Students How To Write

Some thoughts. I found this comment interesting, and it wouldn’t surprise me:

You guys have not read many manuscripts from academic writers, have you? As a long-time academic editor, I read hundreds–hundreds that were submitted for publication, no less.

Academics do not write well at all–most quite poorly. The three I knew who were truly gifted writers… to have lunch with them was to begin to study the wall for crack patterns, they were so introverted. Department chairs were absolutely incoherent, but there was substance there–they were simply quite used to having secretaries and copy editors do the hard work of making it readable for them. The legions of humanities and social science assistant and associate profs… one wanders across the tundra of their boggy prose delighted for even the tiniest patch of semi-solid jargon-free verbiage.

In my experience, good workman-like writing at any education level is quite rare.

I’ve often suspected that this is true of many “journalists” as well, and was one of the reasons that there was so much initial resistance to blogging — a lot of them really do need “layers of fact checkers and editors” to create their “product.”

The Higher Education Bubble

When will it pop?

He makes a point that doesn’t get made enough — that what kind of degree you get matters, but a lot of these children (and particularly the ones who are shifting back and forth between occupying Wall Street and occupying their parents’ basements) don’t get that. Nor does the student loan program.

[Update a while later]

In defense of classical studies.

More Guns Found In Arizona

And the Pinal County Sheriff isn’t happy:

While Sheriff Babeu and his deputies are doing their best to fight these cartels with limited resources, the Obama Justice Department has been arming the enemy with weapons Babeu’s deputies don’t even have.

“Outrage and betrayal. This has never happened before in the history of our country. We may have given armaments and weapons to our allies who may have later become our enemy, but we’ve never given them directly to our enemy,” Babeu said when asked about his initial reaction to Operation Fast and Furious.

“These are the most violent criminals in North America and we facilitated and gave weapons, weapons that my deputies don’t even have, to these cartels,” he said. “It’s more than insane, it is horrific to think that our own government did this.”

Elections have consequences.