Bingo. Words cannot express how bored I am of various clerisies (the religious first, with academics blisteringly hot on their heels) assuming that whatever goes on in their heads is ‘deep’ just because. This line about stripping away magical adjacencies is brilliant.
Corey Robin March 22, 2017
What Laura Marsh said: “The hardest words for me to let go of were ‘context’ and ‘in terms of.’ Once you stripped those away, you had to think about how one thing related to another (sometimes, you discovered, it didn’t), and struggle to articulate it in more concrete language.”
This is one of the reasons why I’m dubious of the claim that writing for newspapers and magazines is somehow dumbing things down, less scholarly or less serious. In my experience, there is no one more exacting about what your words mean—is there truly a thought behind them, are the mechanics of the claims and arguments you’re making plainly understood to you, the writer, much less the reader—than a good editor at a newspaper or magazine. I’ve had some stringent reader reports from academics, but with one exception, they don’t come close to the demands various editors have made on me.
(TNR)