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Writing Persuasively?

May 3, 2013 By admin Leave a Comment
Image Credit: Sxc.Hu

Image Credit: Sxc.Hu

Fascinating insight into writing persuasively:

I never had a single rejection as a fiction writer, but that was because I spent an eight-year apprenticeship as an advertising copywriter, learning to use words to persuade and convince (I nearly wrote corrupt), everything I wrote subjected to reading and noting tests, every word graded according to efficacy. I learned to identify with readers, the uses and abuses of typography, how one enthusiastic adjective makes three times the impression of two, how to fill a brief, how to write for the press, for the screen, for audio. I had the vague impression when I began that publishers published my early novels un-interfered with because I was a “natural” and grew very conceited, but actually it was because I was properly trained.

Read full article.

Filed Under propaganda Tagged With Persuasion, Times Higher Education, Writing

Values in Social Sciences

March 28, 2013 By admin Leave a Comment

mhcsAAKInteresting call for inter-disciplinary values:

In university teaching, he told Times Higher Education, “we need to move beyond rather insular profession-oriented courses and introduce courses that have breadth rather than depth, that deal with some of the big issues, that bring together teachers from a variety of different disciplines”.

Thus, courses on the Global South “cannot just rely on economists”, and programmes on climate change “need environmental scientists, biologists and human geographers”.

Read full article.

Filed Under History Tagged With Times Higher Education

Humanities: Key

February 21, 2013 By admin Leave a Comment
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/500790

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/500790

The importance of humanities – it’s not all about ‘science’:

Given the range and complexity of global challenges, the marginalisation of the humanities in educational systems seems perverse. After all, the humanities are devoted to the study of the human condition and the ways in which individual and collective subjectivities contribute to shaping and improving it. For centuries the humanities were at the heart of education, and the study of art, history, languages and literature played determining roles in shaping concepts of national identity. Yet in recent decades governments have shifted focus away from the humanities, slashing funding and, more importantly, diminishing their influence.

Read full article.

Filed Under History Tagged With Humanities, Times Higher Education

Spitting Blood: A History of Tuberculosis

December 15, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=422086&c=1

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=422086&c=1

Looks really interesting:

Tuberculosis has claimed many famous victims over the centuries, in fiction and in real life, from John Keats to George Orwell, from the Bronte sisters to Robert Louis Stevenson, from the heroines of Verdi’s La Traviata and Puccini’s La Bohème to the consumptives who whiled away the hours in conversation on Thomas Mann’s magic mountain. It became quite fashionable in the 19th century, seeming to lend its victims an air of noble suffering and heightened sexual allure. “I look pale,” Lord Byron is said to have remarked, gazing into the mirror during a visit by the diarist Tom Moore: “I should like to die of a consumption.” “Why?” his guest asked. “Because the ladies would all say: ‘Look at that poor Byron, how interesting he looks in dying!’”

In fact, tuberculosis was a disease of the poor, encouraged by inadequate nutrition and spread by cramped and overcrowded living conditions. As industrialisation spread across the world, packing the new working classes into damp mills, unhygienic factories and fetid slums, so TB casualties soared. In Hamburg between 1885 and 1894, death rates from the disease in the richest city precincts averaged 1.3 per 1,000 population, in the new working-class areas 2.6, in the waterfront tenements where the casual dock labourers lived, 3.4. The unlovely realities of the disease’s incidence were conveyed in a terrifying scene in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, when the consumptive, poverty-stricken widow Katerina Ivanova, thrown into destitution by the alcoholism of her irresponsible husband and even more so by his eventual death, becomes delirious and takes her small children out on to the streets to sing and dance for a few kopeks; arrested by a policeman, she runs breathlessly away, stumbles and falls dead in the street, blood gushing out of her throat. “I’ve seen it before,” says the policeman. “That’s consumption.” Her death is undignified and grotesque, the product of extreme poverty that has driven her not into an exalted, otherworldly state of mind but into madness and degradation.

Read full review.

Filed Under Book Review Tagged With History, Medicine, Times Higher Education

Book Review: Patriotism & Propaganda in First World War Britain

November 15, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment

This looks like an interesting book – not reviewed by me I hasten to add:

Gradually, much of the scaffolding of the influential, but historically inaccurate, depiction of British opinion during the First World War, reflected in countless novels as well as older historical studies, is being dismantled. The disillusionment of the war poets is no longer seen as typical of soldiers’ attitudes and the fortitude of British society is increasingly recognised. The view of public opinion in 1914 as overwhelmed by war hysteria and unthinking jingoism has been replaced by one of a reluctant but resolute nation convinced of the justice of the war. But the question remains as to how morale was maintained as the conflict dragged on and the casualties and deaths mounted. David Monger addresses this question in a detailed examination of the role of the hitherto unexplored history of the National War Aims Committee (NWAC), a semi-official parliamentary organisation set up with cross-party support in the summer of 1917.

Read full review.

Filed Under Book Review Tagged With First World War, propaganda, Times Higher Education

Out for the count

October 7, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1395773

Having used a variety of social surveys, which would not have occurred were it not for the national census – this is concerning:

An Office for National Statistics consultation on the future of the UK census could spell the end of a 200-year-old social-science experiment. The risk is quite real: during our recent inquiry into proposed changes to the national survey, Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, wrote to the Science and Technology Committee saying that costs were a concern and implying that utilising other data might allow the census to be scrapped.

Many groups, bodies and individuals rely on the census for their work. For example, the data are invaluable for social scientists, who follow people throughout their lives to gain insight into how society is changing; for central and local governments, which have to plan for school places, hospital provision, services for the elderly, etc; for local charities, which can compile information and judge where resources might be needed to address health, social and welfare problems; and for local historians, who can trace people back through the generations.

Read full story.

Filed Under History Tagged With census, Survey, Times Higher Education

Book Review: Making History

August 10, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment

As a trained historian, although largely working in other areas these days, this caught my eye:

 Jerome de Groot, head of the graduate school and director of research training, University of Manchester, is reading Jorma Kalela’s Making History: The Historian and the Uses of the Past (Palgrave, 2012). “This interesting book asks a ‘reasonable’ question of historians: namely, why they are needed. Kalela discusses the way that historians see themselves and then argues that this is relatively unrelated to reality; to make a political difference, they will need to consider different audiences and situate their practice much more precisely outside the academy.”

From Times Higher Education. Purchase the book.

Filed Under Book Review Tagged With Historiography, Times Higher Education

Hoax History?

August 6, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment

Interesting use of digital media, including the weaknesses in Wikipedia, to set up hoax histories:

Lying About the Past course aims to teach students method and scepticism. Jon Marcus reports

It was while watching his 10-year-old son in class one day that T. Mills Kelly thought of a new way to teach history to undergraduates at George Mason University in Virginia.

Asked to answer questions about the American Civil War, the children “threw themselves down on the floor, got out their coloured pencils and formed themselves into groups”, Professor Kelly said.

He lamented that none of his students were so engaged with the subject. “They enjoy being history majors, but they’re not having fun being history majors,” he thought.

He had to find a way to make the subject more fun.

Although Professor Kelly, a former fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and associate director of George Mason’s Center for History and New Media, had long looked for “disruptive” ways to teach history, few ideas were as disruptive as the one he had that day: get his students to make things up.

In a course titled Lying About the Past, Professor Kelly encourages students to create elaborate hoaxes based on fact. He said it was an ideal way to teach historical method – and to instil the kind of scepticism historians need but undergraduates increasingly lack.

Read full story or read more (and do you approve or disapprove?)

Filed Under History Tagged With Hoax History, Internet, Times Higher Education

Cult of personalities @timeshighered

July 19, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment

http://trimediacentral.com/category/books/

This looks like an interesting article in the Times Higher Education today, re the growth of biography to respectable levels. I’m curious to see who they are biographies of, and what determines someone as a subject worthy of attention:

As the social science model of history has been overtaken by events, biography has grown as a serious discipline. This is welcome, says Jonathan Steinberg: after all, people make history (but not in the circumstances of their choosing)

When I began my career as a historian in the 1960s, biography fell into the category of “unserious” stuff written by amateurs. Not any more. Big biographies of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Winston Churchill, Lyndon B. Johnson and many others pour from the pens of the most distinguished academic historians. What has changed? Why has biography become respectable as a form of history?

In the 1960s, the discipline’s prevailing paradigms came from the social sciences. History had to build sociological models. It had to measure, count and verify. It had to study structures and functions of the social order, drawn from Marxist analysis or Weberian sociology. Anything else seemed dangerously uncertain, ill-defined and, worse, “subjective”.

The collapse of the Soviet Union brought down the whole edifice of social science. Nobody in the spectrum of social studies had a clue that the USSR and its vast empire could vaporise in two years as if it had been a mirage; anything with “social” in its terminology lost purchase along with socialism.

Read full story.

Filed Under History Tagged With Biography, Times Higher Education

Foucault-flaunting prose?

April 30, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment

I’m a keen supporter of the plain English campaign, but I also used Foucauldian discourse analysis as the basis of my PhD! In @timeshighered this week:

Dense, wordy, wooden, Foucault-flaunting prose? There is another way, scholar tells Matthew Reisz

If you have ever needlessly added the term “Foucauldian” to a journal article or bludgeoned readers by starting an epic sentence with reference to the “post-Mendel application of Lamarck’s apparently superseded scientific theory by non-empirical social scientists”, then you have followed the trend for “wordy, wooden, weak-verbed” writing that dominates academic prose.

Those are two of the examples picked out by Helen Sword, associate professor in the Centre for Academic Development, University of Auckland, who hopes to bridge the “massive gap between what most people consider good writing and what academics typically produce and publish” in her book Stylish Academic Writing, published on 26 April.

Read full story.

Filed Under PhD thesis Tagged With Foucault, Theory, Times Higher Education
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