1st Edition
Loving Writing Techniques for the University and Beyond
This writing textbook bridges factual, critical, and expressive modes of writing to help students develop a reflective sense of why and how to write for university, professional, and public audiences.
Exploring the ways in which writing builds tools for argument both in and beyond the university, it enables students to break out of the dusty and formulaic patterns of writing that too often threaten to render academic studies irrelevant. In a playful, personal, essayistic style, it examines existing academic writing methods and develops new modes of narrative-based expression rooted in the humanities. Reflective analysis invites emerging writers to self-consciously craft convincing and impassioned writing practices using an expanded methodological toolbox. It aims to imbue academic writing with the expressive potential of artistic research by transforming existing methods of articulating analysis within a broader expressive system, developing skills more typical of creative writing, such as providing a setting, considering frame, engaging emotions, expansion, and concision. If we believe in the value of our thoughts, discoveries, and arguments, we must enable them to sing.
Loving Writing can be used as a textbook for advanced or introductory college writing courses and provides innovative guidance to liberal arts students seeking to develop their writing abilities.
Introduction: Philosophizing the Craft of Writing
I. Why We Write
1. Writing is a River: Reasoning and Methods in the Craft of Writing
2. Writing and Democratic Expression: Rhetoric, Authority, and Authorization
II. How We Write
3. Where are You Coming From and Where are You Going? Structuring Arguments
4. Passion and Experimentation: From Everyday Experience to Critical Expression
5. The Pharmacy: Developing a Critical Writing Practice
III. What We Write
6. Inventing the River: Prewriting, Research, and Organization
7. Writing the River: Structuring the Essay
8. Between the Riverbanks: Quantitative and Qualitative Evidence
9. Rivers Flow in Many Forms: Using Multi-media Qualitative Evidence
IV. Where We Write
10. Writing on the Embankment: Practical Tips for Common Formats
11. Writing on the Untamed Shores: Factual Invention
12. Against the Current: The Dangers of Writing...are also its Promises
Biography
Wendy M. K. Shaw is Professor of the Art History of Islamic cultures at the Free University Berlin. Her work focuses on postcolonial art historiography and decolonial art history of the Islamic world and the modern Middle East. She is author of Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire, Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, and What Is “Islamic” Art?: Between Religion and Perception, which has received Honorable Mention for the 2020 Albert Hourani Book Prize of the Middle East Studies Association and the 2021 World Book Award of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
