Caroline Meline, Ph.D.
Professor of Philosophy

Quick Facts

Favorite word?
Word.

Oxford comma or no?
Yes. The more commas, the better.

What’s a word you always misspell?
Weird. It breaks the rule of i before e.

SJU Writes: What kinds of writing are you doing right now?

CM: I have been doing op-ed writing and working on small pieces that are personal essays lately. I have a book that I have been working on for a long time called The Constant Dieter: A Philosopher’s Guide to Losing Weight. It has a lot of interesting things in it that come from both my scholarly life and my personal attempt to understand myself. And I have research articles, scholarly articles, that I have been working on for conferences.

SJU Writes: What’s your favorite piece of writing you have ever produced?

CM: The last piece I got published in The Inquirer, an op-ed which was about the death of my dog Stretch. For now, I would say that is my favorite piece because I wrote in that kind of state I don’t get into very often where I’m not really trying for it and what I’m going to say just comes out.

SJU Writes:  Have you always enjoyed the writing process?

CM: I did not develop a love of writing until I was in my thirties. I had a hatred of writing when I was an undergraduate. I was so anxiety-ridden about working on a paper that I would really work myself into a state. For me, once I get going, it is always better. I am a perfectionist. My standards are high, too high, which can cripple a person.

SJU Writes: What advice would you give to undergraduate and graduate students embarking on their own writing journeys?

CM: This is the main advice I would give, and somebody gave it to me. I was writing a master’s thesis at the time. I was so stuck and paralyzed and terrified that I thought I couldn’t finish the degree because I couldn’t write the thing. My advisor said, ‘I am going to make a contract with you and you have to agree to this. You will write a draft of each section without any revision and then tell me how it is going.’ And it worked. So my advice to students on writing is to talk on paper. Just talk, and let it happen, and don’t criticize until later.

—Gina DeRosa ’19

Elizabeth Morgan, Ph.D.
Professor of Music History

Quick Facts

What’s a word you always misspell?
Pachelbel

Pen or Pencil?
Pen

What are you reading now?
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

SJU Writes: What is the best thing you’ve ever written? 

EM: I was really proud of the introduction to my dissertation in graduate school. I was writing about women making music in homes during the time of Jane Austen. I feel like I captured a sense of the world that I was writing about in my own prose. I felt that sense of full creative spirit in everything I wanted to say. It was a really fun process, and I was really proud of it. I still feel good about that.

SJU Writes: What kinds of writing do you do right now?

EM: The main thing is academic writing, mostly for academic journals, so they’ll be read by other musicologists and historical musicologists. The thing that’s been exciting to me, as a musicologist, is that I’ve found there’s a place for creative writing in my scholarship. I study music-making in homes, which is often not well documented. And so, I read a lot of fiction to inform my understanding of what people were doing at home.

SJU Writes: What is your writing process?

EM: I will write to work through the ideas. Once I have a bunch of prose, I do something called a reverse outline. I go through it, and for each paragraph, I then write a one-sentence summary of that paragraph’s main idea. Each sentence has to make sense as a  construction of an argument, or I know I have a problem.

SJU Writes: What is your favorite aspect of the writing process?

EM: I like it when you feel like you’re solving a puzzle. It could be on the smallest level, but also on a really big level. I had a big article that I wrote and, as a process, I drew a diagram of the article because as I was writing, I realized there were really four angles that I was looking at this one body of music from. I drew up a diagram of that basic concept. At the center were the main things I really wanted to communicate about this repertoire and the people who played it and then the four different places I was coming from. That was like a solution because I couldn’t figure out how it would eventually be structured.

—Angelique Frazier ’20

Elaine Shenk, Ph.D.
Professor of Spanish and Sociolinguistics

Quick Facts

Favorite word?
Estrafalario, which means eccentric in Spanish

Favorite punctuation?
Dashes. I know that I shouldn’t, but I like dashes!

What are you reading now?
It’s called The Age of Opportunity by Laurence Steinberg, and it’s all about adolescence because I have an adolescent.  I’m trying to understand him, and it’s the best book I’ve ever read about adolescence.

SJU Writes: What is the best thing you’ve ever written?

ES: In college, we had this little booklet that was creative writing . I’m not a creative writer at all really, but I got the idea that I felt like writing a fictionalized account of something that had happened in my family. It was about my dad. He had a pretty bad farm accident and was sort of close to death, so I wrote it, and it was this ethereal ending where you couldn’t really tell if he died or not.  It’s bizarre, but I remember being really caught up. I don’t know if it’s just because I was a young child when it happened, or it was my brain’s way of processing that that happened to my family and the crazy impact that it had on us for the rest of my life.  So, I found myself just riveted to writing it, and I’ve never felt since or before like that.  I will never forget how I felt writing it. I was so in the flow.

SJU Writes: What is your least favorite aspect of the writing process?

ES: Trying to go back to a piece of writing that I feel is unwieldy and making it work.  Especially in my academic papers, I tend to put it all on the page and get it out there so that I end up with a twenty-page, single-space document when I actually need about a ten-page, single-spaced document.  I hate having to take sections out that I feel I worked really hard on and realizing they aren’t crucial.  

SJU Writes: What advice do you have for students learning to write in your discipline?

ES: Revise, revise, revise. Before that, think in Spanish, not English. Then if you feel like your structures are really simple based on what you can produce in Spanish, you can always expand on that. You can put linking words to connect sentences.  But don’t take from English and try to translate into Spanish because that will never work. And then, revise, revise, revise.  It gets down to just little tiddly grammar, little pieces that aren’t that important, but they do make an impression with the overall result. I think sometimes students in my discipline feel like, “It’s just a couple accent marks or agreement.  Why does it matter if it’s really ‘o’ or ‘a’?”  But, if you work on that at the very end of your writing, you will come across as a much stronger writer.

—Hayley Burns ’20

Henry Bender, Ph.D.
Professor of Modern and Classical Languages

Quick Facts

Do you prefer pen or pencil?
Pen

Do you have a favorite place to write?
Yes, I like to write in my study

What are you reading now?
A book on the history of Christianity, and a book on monuments in Rome.

SJU Writes: What kinds of writing do you do?

HB: Most of my writing is comments updating things I have been studying literally all my life. I have travelled to Europe, specifically Italy, over 130 times as the topography of Rome is changing all the time. So, I spend a lot of time reading up on these things. I do rewritings of some of my own publications, and I am hoping to publish another book before the end of my life.

SJU Writes: What is your favorite aspect of the writing process?

HB: Of the writing process, I think getting your ideas and formulating your ideas from mind to word is the challenge. I mean, even the ancients speak about that. When you get an insight into something, for example, when you read a poet in Latin and you get ideas or interpretations, you want to write them down. You may see that they’ve been cited already by commentators, b. But it helps to solidify impressions on the meaning of a poem if you write down your impressions and try to make them coherent. Then they can be shared in the context of the classroom. So that kind of writing is frustrating, but it’s good.

SJU Writes: What is the best thing you’ve ever written in your life?

HB: I think one of the books that I have written, the book I wrote on Catullus, a Roman poet, is probably one of the best things that I’ve done as far as facilitating for students the opportunity to engage a Roman writer.

SJU Writes: When you are confronted with a writing task, how do you approach it? Do you spend days fretting about it or do you immediately start jotting down ideas?

HB: I think with writing, you do the thinking and reading first—that is, like tilling the soil. You can’t grow the crops unless you have soil and moisture to make things grow. And then you write. But to rush into writing is not a good academic thing to do. On the other hand, to put it off is avoiding the challenge of dealing with your interpretations with the thoughts that have to be weighed. But with the different types of papers you have there is nothing wrong with jotting down your ideas as they come and then leaving them alone for a while, and then go back and re-organizing them.

SJU Writes: What advice do you have for students learning to write in the discipline of classics?

HB: I would say: 1) think, 2) jot down your thoughts. I had a teacher once who told me whenever you get an idea, put it on an index card. You might not come back to it for a while, but in classics, which is Latin and Greek literature that has been poured over for centuries now, it’s pretty hard to find something new. But your interpretation of a poem is like an interpretation of a painting. When you look at a painting or you hear music, and you look at literature, there is a common denominator in there. You could say that there are certain aesthetics that you pull together. Those are things that are important to pay attention to. How do you do that? You organize your reactions and jot them down and then come back to them and see if you can tie them together into some coherent whole.

—Mary McDermott ’17, M.A. ‘19

Peter Graham, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Chemistry

Quick Facts

What are you reading now?
American War

Favorite word?
Penultimate

Favorite place to write?
Office on campus

Favorite punctuation mark?
Semi-colon

SJU Writes: What kind of writing do you currently do?

PG: I do academic writing. I also write some for fun, some poetry, not really for general consumption, just for myself and sometimes my wife.

SJU Writes: When you’re tasked with a writing assignment, how do you approach it?

PG: If I need to think something through, I will just start writing stream of consciousness. That’s probably how I write anything. I just get my ideas into text. It’s probably unusable, but it makes sure I get my ideas out and that I’m thinking straight.

SJU Writes: Do you ever find that you write with the advice of a particular person echoing in your head?

PG: One of my friends who I went to graduate school with is a professor at Muhlenberg. We always help each other out, reading each other’s papers. He’s a really good writer and a really good editor. So, I’m always thinking, “Joe’s going to be mad if I leave this in here,” because he’s always going to read anything I publish.

SJU Writes: Do you find it more useful to go about peer revision through a more collaborative or directive approach?

PG: My Ph.D. advisor didn’t give a lot of feedback. He would just change it. So, it would come back, and you would kind of figure out what you did wrong. My post-doc advisor was really good for that stage in my career. He basically left my work untouched unless it was wrong. Then he would be like, “that’s not the best way to say that” or “can we rephrase that,” and it was a little bit more collaborative. I think it’s better to say, “I think this could use fewer words” instead of just correcting it.

I see this when I revise lab reports for students in Inorganic Lab. The first lab report, a lot of times, I just rewrite sentences or cross out three sentences and write one sentence to show them, this one sentence can say everything you said in three sentences. I’ll stop doing that, certainly, later in the semester. 

SJU Writes: What advice do you have for students trying to write in your discipline?

PG: I think it’s always good to learn the correct terminology and use it. When editing, be as concise as possible. You have to go back and cut it down. What distinguishes scientific writing is being very clear. When you can summarize a big idea in very few words, it’s like saying “E=mc2.” You have all of that information packed into a tiny little package. It makes it seem very powerful.

—Leslie Briggs ’17, M.A. ‘18

Ann E. Green, Ph.D.
English Professor

Quick Facts:

Pen or pencil?
Straight on the computer or pen

Favorite word?
Yes

Favorite music to write to?
Beyoncé when writing comments

Favorite punctuation mark?
Semicolon

SJU Writes: What kinds of writing do you do right now?
AG: At the moment, because I am president of the Faculty Senate, I write a lot of memos and emails so I would say my work writing is instrumental. For my creative writing, I took a spiritual writing course over the summer and I try to write 3 pages every day, but I’m not always successful.

SJU Writes: What is your favorite aspect of the writing process?
AG: I really love revision. I really love structural revision. I really love, after I’ve written a good chunk, or writing and looking over it, or having someone else look over it with me and I find a new structure for it because it often takes me a long time to figure out what I need to say. So if I write something long, I may figure out that I’m really supposed to start in the middle and I cut a lot and write more.

SJU Writes: When you are confronted with a writing task, how do you approach it?
AG: The way my life works right now, I always have to find time to write as soon as I can even if it’s bad. And if I know I have a deadline, I block out time to write.

SJU Writes: What’s the best or most difficult thing you’ve ever written in your life?
AG: I wrote my dad’s eulogy and that was in December and I wrote it really quickly. I wrote it in one draft and I think I was able to do that because I had written a lot about my dad when he was alive so, in that moment I was proud to write that eulogy. To try and capture what Dad was for eighty-two years was also really challenging. And to try to speak to an audience of people who knew him but knew him in different contexts, like people that knew him since he was a little kid, people he worked with at different times and then my sister and my mother—it was difficult.

SJU Writes: Who’s the best or most influential writing teacher you have ever had?
AG:I had freshman studies in fiction writing and it was a year-long course with a woman named Myra Goldberg. She was my advisor, so I met with her every week to talk about writing and about college and she really appreciated what I was trying to do and that I didn’t really fit in at my college because it was an elite place, and I didn’t have parents that went to college. She was the best listener as a writing teacher; She is a great writing teacher.

SJU Writes: What advice do you have for students learning to write in your discipline?
AG: Read a lot. Read everything—the good and the bad. Get to know what other people are writing about. Find certain writers that you love and read everything by them…and also, just write. You can talk a lot about writing, but if you want to be good at it, then just do it. You have to learn by doing it. And you also have to learn by screwing it up. You’re going to write and you’re going to fail. It’s not going to be the best American novel or an “A” paper all the time, but you just have to keep doing it.

—Dominique Rolle ’18