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Mark R. Stoneman

Historian, editor, and translator for hire (German to English). Longtime resident of Washington, DC, now in Conway, NH, as a caregiver (he/him).

  Editing & Writing

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    Ten Helpful Tweets on Revising

    William Germano on Twitter, the beginning of a thread: '1/10 Some notes on revising, especially for academics who write. @UChicagoPress Revising is figuring out what you really think, or getting as close as you can. You may do it once or a dozen times. But you do it for the reader. Always for the reader.'

    Read William Germano's full thread on the Wayback Machine.

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    Blogging before Conferencing

    We tried something new in connection with a conference called Learning by the Book. The conveners asked participants to submit a blog post to History of Knowledge in lieu of precirculated papers. One of the conveners, my colleague Kerstin von der Krone, did most of the coordinating work, prescreening posts for length, permissions issues, and content. Then I edited them, trying to ensure they spoke to a multidisciplinary audience, not just specialists in their authors' respective fields.

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    Blogging

    …The iterative practice of regular blogging has its own set of joys. For me, writing begets writing. The blog doesn’t distract from my formal academic or scholarly work. It feeds it. It becomes a form of discipline, like doing sit-ups every morning, a practice I long ago abandoned. My abdominal muscles are flabby, but when I sit down to write, whatever the context, I feel strong.

    – David Perry, “3 Rules of Academic Blogging," The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 11, 2015].

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    Academic Prose

    “Science Articles: A Guide”
    (the ratio of subject matter complexity to prose complexity) by SMBC Comics

    the more complex the language and the simpler the topic, the more likely the article is bullshit
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    Experts <—> Public

    In most of today’s university disciplines, professional training serves to distance an individual from the public, to refine them into an ‘expert’ whose speech and writing are marked by incomprehensible formulae and keywords. But history-telling came out of an age before the era of experts, and its form is inherently democratic.

    – Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (2014; Cambridge UP, 2015), 56.

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    German Scholarly Monographs

    At the end of his English-language review of Anne Sudrow’s long book (in German) about the shoe in National Socialism, Neil Gregor has some choice remarks about German academic publishing, particularly dissertations and the second advanced dissertation (Habilitation) that would-be professors in Germany have to write.1 Of course, he does not mean all or even most scholarly books in Germany, but as an editor and historian, I do have to deal with the tendency he describes rather a lot. I'm sure translators will feel Gregor's pain too.

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    Requiring Students to Use Chicago Style (or Turabian or Whatever)

    While talking in class tonight about forthcoming papers, I heard from several students that many of their professors haven't cared which system they used, as long as it was clear and they could retrace the student's steps if necessary. That's also long been my implicit attitude, even though I ask students to follow Chicago or Turabian and I correct their papers accordingly. Lately, however, I have come to think that teaching a specific style is actually important, even if I have done little more than point students in the right directions for style guidelines, much as I was told to use a given style manual back in the day.

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    Separating Writing from Formatting

    As I began writing a manuscript that I plan to submit to a specific journal, I thought it would make sense to follow that journal's style sheet, which is rather different from what I am used to. I noticed, however, that I was constantly looking things up, from the very first sentence. How do I cite that source with this particular system? How do I spell that word in British English? How do I handle quotation marks for this particular situation? It was hard to get any thinking and writing done under such circumstances.

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    Editing and Consumption History

    Since I began my editing job a little over a year ago, I have begun learning a little about a lot of history that I had previously never experienced. While my editing has included a variety of smaller projects as diverse as the interests of the institute's fellows and recent alumni, my main area of responsibility is editing a new series on consumption history. Two volumes are under contract, and a third will be very soon, but I've been forcing myself to sit on my hands and not go into details here until things are actually published.

    Meanwhile, I have begun to wonder how I might integrate what I'm learning about modern consumer societies into my teaching. Connections sometimes come up spontaneously in class, but maybe I could do something more meaningful. Well, in the past I have used Emile Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames (aka The Ladies' Paradise), which I first encountered as a teaching assistant for Sandra Horvath-Peterson. And next fall I will use Uta Poiger's Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany in a survey of modern Germany. But how could I approach the issue more systematically (when I am able to make some time for reflection)

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    Learning to Synthesize History

    When confronted with history too narrowly conceived or framed, I often think back to one graduate course I took, "Issues in British Literature," which challenged me on a number of levels. To start with, the British historiography we learned seemed to have nothing in common with what I had encountered for German, French, and Russian history. Of course, different countries and different histories were involved, but not even the language or categories of analysis employed in the British historiography were as familiar as I expected them to be. This circumstance did not stop the authors from writing history and arguing with each other as if the assumptions that informed their language were self-explanatory. Their writings offered an odd mixture of history as common sense that rejected social theory combined with the expectation that readers should not dare question how they framed and wrote about history, because, well, readers with enough uncommon intelligence and specialized training would understand. The rest should not bother trying.

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    On Writing

    Writing is hard work for almost everyone, no matter how talented or inspired. Writing is thinking. Good writers do not usually have finished ideas that they then type out. The process of writing and revision is an act of thinking and discovery. That is why writing papers can be so frustrating and rewarding at the same time. Want to improve your prose? Keep a journal, in which you produce a page of text per day. The text can be about anything, but use standard prose, not the kind of abbreviations and lack of capitalization that you might use in informal emails or IMs with friends. The text should also be honest. This exercise is akin to doing regular physical exercise, practicing music, or learning a foreign language. The more you do it, the better you get. The less you do it, the worse you get.

    I wrote the above piece for my students and posted it on a course blog called History Survey. It then migrated to Language for You, before settling here.