Readability

[TakeruK]

1 hour ago, khigh said:

I can write concisely, but I find it to be among the most boring to read.  I have no problems with writing book reviews and grants, but why does the art of writing need to be removed from the US academic field, especially in the dissertation?

Is academic writing really an art form though? Or is it a tool used to communicate with other scholars?

I view it as the latter. Academic writing is not about what the writer enjoys doing. Instead, it must conform to the norms of the field because its primary purpose is to communicate information.

[khigh]

Just now, telkanuru said:

If the above paragraphs are representative of your work (and I assume they are, because why else post them), then you have a lot of basics to get down before worrying about these sorts of esoteric differences. Your style isn't "musing". It's meandering, confused, and imprecise. My comments above illustrate some of the problems, but if this has passed muster with your professors, they're either not paying you too much attention or should not be tasked with teaching writing.

 

Funny enough, most of what you edited out was put in through edits by my advisor.  He got his PhD from the U (where I'm applying) and his advisor taught him how to write (who I'm applying to work with).  He is also a Fulbright and Rhodes scholar. 

[khigh]

1 minute ago, TakeruK said:

Is academic writing really an art form though? Or is it a tool used to communicate with other scholars?

I view it as the latter. Academic writing is not about what the writer enjoys doing. Instead, it must conform to the norms of the field because its primary purpose is to communicate information.

That seems to be the difference between the American and French schools.  The French style manual was written in the 1600s and that is what is still used there. 

[dr. t]

11 minutes ago, khigh said:

Funny enough, most of what you edited out was put in through edits by my advisor.  He got his PhD from the U (where I'm applying) and his advisor taught him how to write (who I'm applying to work with).  He is also a Fulbright and Rhodes scholar. 

Option #2, then. Being an eminent professor is not the same as being good at writing. In fact, there seems to be very little correlation at all. 

Edited December 13, 2017 by telkanuru

[khigh]

4 minutes ago, telkanuru said:

If the above paragraphs are representative of your work (and I assume they are, because why else post them), then you have a lot of basics to get down before worrying about these sorts of esoteric differences. Your style isn't "musing". It's meandering, confused, and imprecise. My comments above illustrate some of the problems, but if this has passed muster with your professors, they're either not paying you too much attention or should not be tasked with teaching writing.

EDIT: This was really harsh! Wow! Clearly quals are getting to me. I stand by what I said, but please forgive the tone.

I understand the tone.  I've had to defend my writing between the Americanists and Europeanists.  I can write concisely and had to for the Americanists, but then I would need to go "muse" with my advisor or my German history prof about the nuances of the application of the definition of humanity in the Nazi regime. Writing style is interesting.

[dr. t]

7 minutes ago, TakeruK said:

Is academic writing really an art form though? Or is it a tool used to communicate with other scholars?

When confronted with a binary, any graduate student worth their salt should reflexively deconstruct their binary. Effective, concise written communication is an art form, and precision is not incompatible with beauty. One needs only to look at scholars such as Peter Brown or Paul Fussell to see that. 

Edited December 13, 2017 by telkanuru

[ploutarchos]

Your dichotomy between "concise" writing and "academic art" is false. Good writing is not necessarily concise nor is it necessarily verbose. To a certain extent, the sort of writing you need to produce is not up to you: it is bounded by purpose, genre, and audience. Anglophone scholarship tends to value clarity, precision, and conciseness. If you think those things are inconsistent with good style, then you need to find better academic English prose to read (I don't mean that snarkily). From the snippets of writing you've posted, it seems that you need to work on these core values of Anglophone academic prose before worrying too much about literary merit.

I also wouldn't lean too much on writing advice from academics who don't usually write in English (assuming your own writing will be in English).

[khigh]

Maybe I need to read more anglo literature.  Looking at my bookshelf, I don't own anything by an American author. I have Hugo and Chaucer and Tolstoy, Mann and Hesse and Kafka, and writers from around the world, but no Americans.  Most of my academic books were published by Leiden/UCL, before the 20th century, or are philosophy.  The only truly "American" book I have is Baseball and Philosophy (well, and "How to talk Minnesotan," but I wouldn't hold that up as a good piece of literature). 

The academic I worked under does write in English, but the historiography of the Dutch Republic is not a field that is typically written in English and has fallen out of favor with non-Dutch speaking audiences. The current Dutch government has some influence in that because they believe that Dutch language and culture are being absorbed by the English and lost.  They really push for Dutch history to be done in a strictly Dutch context and either written in Dutch or translated into Dutch and published first under the Dutch title. 

I really do thank y'all for the criticism and help.  I may have to rethink my approach to academia and writing or see if there is a healthy balance between how I write and what academia requires in the current era.

[psstein]

39 minutes ago, khigh said:

The academic I worked under does write in English, but the historiography of the Dutch Republic is not a field that is typically written in English and has fallen out of favor with non-Dutch speaking audiences. The current Dutch government has some influence in that because they believe that Dutch language and culture are being absorbed by the English and lost.  They really push for Dutch history to be done in a strictly Dutch context and either written in Dutch or translated into Dutch and published first under the Dutch title.

I don't know if you want an academic job, but if you do, you need to keep this kind of thing in mind. European jobs are even more competitive than American ones.

[TakeruK]

1 hour ago, telkanuru said:

When confronted with a binary, any graduate student worth their salt should reflexively deconstruct their binary. Effective, concise written communication is an art form, and precision is not incompatible with beauty. One needs only to look at scholars such as Peter Brown or Paul Fussell to see that. 

Fair enough. I meant to present it as two perspectives on what the writer believes is the primary goal when they sit down to write. I presented it in hopes that it could help a grad student struggling to come to terms with their love of writing and what the field tends to expect, so that the student does not have to feel that they are betraying or losing the art form important to them in order to deliver what others seem to want. But, also, being completely uneducated in writing (my last formal writing instruction was in 2005 as a first year university student), perhaps I am not really able to appreciate good writing?

[khigh]

I will definitely be looking more at my writing. Maybe I will write more concisely for academia and write historical fiction for fun. Giving up a writing style is like giving up part of your soul. I don’t think I am ready to sell my entire soul for a journal (though the paper the excerpt was from got good remarks at a conference and I have published), but I am willing to let a piece of my soul die to appease the modern academia gods, if that makes sense. 

[hats]

Good job hearing these comments! To some degree, I think this volume of information is necessarily overwhelming. You shouldn't expect to absorb everything in this thread immediately. At the same time, wow, you have gotten a lot of rich advice. I hope you keep taking advantage of it!

As others have said, "concise" can't and shouldn't be opposed to "good." "Concise" can't even be opposed to "musing"! It does, I think, require more effort to muse concisely, to "muse" within a scheme where each paragraph should have its own topic sentence, but I have seen it done (frequently!). What it means is that you should devote a whole section, or at the very least a whole paragraph, to each quasi-philosophical tangent you think worth raising with your readers. Sentence-level asides within paragraphs with a different point are, it's true, mostly out. But modern history articles have questioning tones or sections all the time.

Although article and dissertation word limits will come knocking in your future, if concision feels like "giving up a part of your soul," I think you should focus for now on making your writing better. Since you have been taking this all so well so far, let me be straightforward and say that this is not just an academia problem: the style in the paragraphs you posted would not work well in fiction, either. I'm not surprised that the paper was well-received at the conference! Conference attendees are well used to a little throat-clearing, especially for participants who have not yet begun graduate study. But it was throat-clearing. The problem isn't that you took too long to get to the point, though: it's that the path you took to get there wasn't particularly interesting or insightful. So why don't you work on getting better, and forget about concision. If the "better" you reach involves making each one of your sentences mean something, contribute something useful or new to the reader's life, I bet you will find yourself having fewer style difficulties. You may still prefer to submit to journals with longer rather than shorter wordcounts, but the style half of this problem should be diminished.

It sounds like your history reading has been esoteric and perhaps on the old-fashioned side. What history reading would you recommend, history posters, to help with the style question? The first thing that pops to mind in the philosophical vein, for me, is Joan Scott, especially "The Evidence of Experience." It's not my exact cup of tea, but it has that musing, fiction-and-philosophy-minded quality that might appeal to OP. Boy, are some of her sentences long (probably infinite on the readability metric, but I never found one actually unreadable)...but some of her sentences are short!

On fiction: it's a suggestion I'm dubious of, because I have only read half of one of his books, but what about Kazuo Ishiguro? (I stopped halfway through The Buried Giant because it was too scary! Absolutely nothing bad had happened or was imminently threatening to happen...but gah) Or The Left Hand of Darkness? (Le Guin is Our People for us anthropologists.) Nothing happens. Two people go on a walk when it's cold outside. When I read it, though, I loved it immensely. Tana French, especially the second one? I don't read a lot of long, musing fiction, so there must be more out there.

[khigh]

34 minutes ago, hats said:

Good job hearing these comments! To some degree, I think this volume of information is necessarily overwhelming. You shouldn't expect to absorb everything in this thread immediately. At the same time, wow, you have gotten a lot of rich advice. I hope you keep taking advantage of it!

As others have said, "concise" can't and shouldn't be opposed to "good." "Concise" can't even be opposed to "musing"! It does, I think, require more effort to muse concisely, to "muse" within a scheme where each paragraph should have its own topic sentence, but I have seen it done (frequently!). What it means is that you should devote a whole section, or at the very least a whole paragraph, to each quasi-philosophical tangent you think worth raising with your readers. Sentence-level asides within paragraphs with a different point are, it's true, mostly out. But modern history articles have questioning tones or sections all the time.

Although article and dissertation word limits will come knocking in your future, if concision feels like "giving up a part of your soul," I think you should focus for now on making your writing better. Since you have been taking this all so well so far, let me be straightforward and say that this is not just an academia problem: the style in the paragraphs you posted would not work well in fiction, either. I'm not surprised that the paper was well-received at the conference! Conference attendees are well used to a little throat-clearing, especially for participants who have not yet begun graduate study. But it was throat-clearing. The problem isn't that you took too long to get to the point, though: it's that the path you took to get there wasn't particularly interesting or insightful. So why don't you work on getting better, and forget about concision. If the "better" you reach involves making each one of your sentences mean something, contribute something useful or new to the reader's life, I bet you will find yourself having fewer style difficulties. You may still prefer to submit to journals with longer rather than shorter wordcounts, but the style half of this problem should be diminished.

It sounds like your history reading has been esoteric and perhaps on the old-fashioned side. What history reading would you recommend, history posters, to help with the style question? The first thing that pops to mind in the philosophical vein, for me, is Joan Scott, especially "The Evidence of Experience." It's not my exact cup of tea, but it has that musing, fiction-and-philosophy-minded quality that might appeal to OP. Boy, are some of her sentences long (probably infinite on the readability metric, but I never found one actually unreadable)...but some of her sentences are short!

On fiction: it's a suggestion I'm dubious of, because I have only read half of one of his books, but what about Kazuo Ishiguro? (I stopped halfway through The Buried Giant because it was too scary! Absolutely nothing bad had happened or was imminently threatening to happen...but gah) Or The Left Hand of Darkness? (Le Guin is Our People for us anthropologists.) Nothing happens. Two people go on a walk when it's cold outside. When I read it, though, I loved it immensely. Tana French, especially the second one? I don't read a lot of long, musing fiction, so there must be more out there.

One of the big issues is that the historiography for my subfield basically stops at Geyl, who was writing in the late 1800s in the French school. I'm having coffee this weekend with Tracy, who is among the last great Dutch historians, so I am going to bring up this exact topic. He does write tomes, though. His comprehensive history, of which I have two copies and have poured over many times, is about 1900 pages. I've published, but it was a paper on the inclusion of anarchists in the first Red Scare with emphasis on Emma Goldman and Berkman. It's probably my least favorite paper, but that is because of the subject.

I would love reading suggestions, just please, no one recommend Hemingway.  I can't get through anything he writes without wanting to dig my eyes out with a hot spoon.  I find him among the most frustrating authors I have ever read. 

[TMP]

12 hours ago, telkanuru said:

If the above paragraphs are representative of your work (and I assume they are, because why else post them), then you have a lot of basics to get down before worrying about these sorts of esoteric differences. Your style isn't "musing". It's meandering, confused, and imprecise. My comments above illustrate some of the problems, but if this has passed muster with your professors, they're either not paying you too much attention or should not be tasked with teaching writing.

EDIT: This was really harsh! Wow! Clearly quals are getting to me. I stand by what I said, but please forgive the tone.

@telkanuru hit the nail in the head.  The harsh truth is teaching writing is very difficult and most professors don't always want to do it with their undergrads, even their best ones.  When they do, they actually have to go back to the basics such as tenses, word choices, and parallelism before teaching concise writing, which arguably is more difficult to do.  I once looked over a paper written by a former advisee of my adviser (who was a stickler for writing with me as her PhD advisee). I marked it up as my adviser would.  This said student was so shocked; she thought our adviser prepared her well for graduate school writing (I was in my second year of PhD program, she in her 1st year of a MA program).  She never talked to me again.  I also realized as I progressed from my BA to my MA to my PhD that my undergrad adviser, a grammarian, and my MA adviser, an excellent editor, could only do so much to help me learn to become a better writer. Learning to write well is not something, as I tell my undergrads, that can be done overnight, let alone a semester with me, but years.  As my PhD adviser said to me my first year, "Your writing can always be improved.  I'm glad that you can read.  If you didn't know how to read, then we would have a big program." 

If you like the idea of writing "long" dissertations, then why not apply to European schools?  I will agree that European dissertations tend to be longer and those are of different standard.  If anything, the world outside of the US are jealous of those earning a PhD in the US because dissertation length and defense are shorter.  At least that's my encounter with Israeli, French, German and UK universities. 

Where is @Sigaba???

[khigh]

18 minutes ago, TMP said:

@telkanuru hit the nail in the head.  The harsh truth is teaching writing is very difficult and most professors don't always want to do it with their undergrads, even their best ones.  When they do, they actually have to go back to the basics such as tenses, word choices, and parallelism before teaching concise writing, which arguably is more difficult to do.  I once looked over a paper written by a former advisee of my adviser (who was a stickler for writing with me as her PhD advisee). I marked it up as my adviser would.  This said student was so shocked; she thought our adviser prepared her well for graduate school writing (I was in my second year of PhD program, she in her 1st year of a MA program).  She never talked to me again.  I also realized as I progressed from my BA to my MA to my PhD that my undergrad adviser, a grammarian, and my MA adviser, an excellent editor, could only do so much to help me learn to become a better writer. Learning to write well is not something, as I tell my undergrads, that can be done overnight, let alone a semester with me, but years.  As my PhD adviser said to me my first year, "Your writing can always be improved.  I'm glad that you can read.  If you didn't know how to read, then we would have a big program." 

If you like the idea of writing "long" dissertations, then why not apply to European schools?  I will agree that European dissertations tend to be longer and those are of different standard.  If anything, the world outside of the US are jealous of those earning a PhD in the US because dissertation length and defense are shorter.  At least that's my encounter with Israeli, French, German and UK universities. 

Where is @Sigaba???

There's always room to improve, and I guess the important thing is I am always wanting to better my writing and I have no problems taking criticism. I did, however, call my undergrad advisor to vent, but he's used to that. I did so many directed readings and independent study projects with him that we were basically working together 5-6 hours a day, five days a week, for three years. I started rereading his dissertation today and it seems like his writing style has highly influenced mine over the past few years. His dissertation is only 698 pages with the bib. 

I've looked at a few European programs and visited Nijmegen (Radboud), Groningen, and Amsterdam last summer for their open houses. It was something my boyfriend and I talked about extensively, but he's just now coming back to the states after a year of research in Berlin, so it's not a move we want to make right now, especially because he would be unemployed in the Netherlands (he's a German historian). Groningen would be my second choice school if we were both willing to make the move. If I don't get in this year, their applications are not due until June, so there is still a possibility. Italy would be the third choice because I want to focus on Dutch foreign policy with regards to the Papal State in the early modern period, focusing on their interactions in the Mediterranean in the Anglo-Dutch Wars. Italian isn't my first or second language, though, so that may pose an issue.  I just started Italian this year (Dutch, German, French, Frisian, Afrikaans, Italian are my languages/dialects in that order of fluency). I can read Latin for the most part, but that doesn't help with seminars.

There is also the issue with getting a job in the USA with a European PhD.  I know a lot of uni's around here frown on a European degree.  We've talked about making a permanent move to Europe, but cannot decide where we would end up.  German bureaucracy is not fun to deal with and the boyfriend would have a hard time finding a job in the Netherlands unless he went the public history route.  

[Averroes MD]

Am I the only one who thinks khigh comes across as pretentious?

The initial post seemed like a humble brag, and then when teknaru pointed out the errors or what could be improved, khigh responds by laying the blame on someone else, who BTW is a Rhodes scholar.

 

Edited December 14, 2017 by Averroes MD

[khigh]

29 minutes ago, Averroes MD said:

Am I the only one who thinks khigh comes across as pretentious?

The initial post seemed like a humble brag, and then when teknaru pointed out the errors or what could be improved, khigh responds by laying the blame on someone else, who BTW is a Rhodes scholar.

 

I usually come off as pretentious even when I don’t mean to be, as in this conversation. I’ve been called pretentious, arrogant, and a raging bitch by a professor, but I am not any of that. I am taking all of the critique and have not been defensive. Do I like how I write? Yes, I do, but that also doesn’t mean that there isn’t room to improve. 

Call me what you will. I’ve heard it all. I earned every line on my CV so far and I didn’t get there by being the nice quiet girl that sits in the back. Again, may sound pretentious, but tone through text on a forum such as this is difficult. 

[Calgacus]

23 hours ago, khigh said:

Maybe I need to read more anglo literature.  Looking at my bookshelf, I don't own anything by an American author. I have Hugo and Chaucer and Tolstoy, Mann and Hesse and Kafka, and writers from around the world, but no Americans.  Most of my academic books were published by Leiden/UCL, before the 20th century, or are philosophy.  The only truly "American" book I have is Baseball and Philosophy (well, and "How to talk Minnesotan," but I wouldn't hold that up as a good piece of literature).

I agree with everything @telkanuru, @TMP, and others have said here, and the edits they have generously taken the time to provide. Writing is extremely hard to do, and it is a skill that can always be honed no matter what stage of you're at in your career. It takes an immense amount of patience and practice, whether you're learning it or teaching it. And @TMP is correct that a lot of college faculty simply do not invest the time it would take to make students truly strong writers. This is largely because the American K-12 system places very little emphasis on writing and grammar, so faculty are presented with the task of having to break bad habits and re-teach very basic aspects of writing, which most are unwilling to do. 

@khigh It's good that you are questioning this issue now, and that you seem to be open to feedback on it. I would urge you to push past your desire to place your writing "style" within any kind of foreign "school." At this point, if you are applying to American phd programs you need to be able to communicate with academic peers writing in English. If you decide to start publishing in Dutch or German then you can look more into how they write. I'm startled by your claim that you need to change the way you write for Americanists vs Europeanists. Europeanists do not prioritize "complex" writing, at least not in English publications. The goal of any writing is to get the point across, and the trend in academia for the last several decades is that's best accomplished with more direct, succinct phrasing. The biggest danger "complex" writing styles is that it's actually just flowery words being crammed together to cover up for a weak (or absent) argument. Your comments about writing being "musings" supports this concern. Academic writing in history should always present an argument, rather than simply a collection of thoughts.

The fact that the majority of academic books you own are either philosophy or were published more than a hundred years ago is a huge red flag, for a couple of reasons. It suggests that you are not exposing yourself to the ways contemporary historians are writing about history. This would obviously make a difference in the way you write, especially given many of the fiction books you're reading. It would also mean that you are missing out on the historiographical debates and trends in your fields, which are crucial to anyone interested in pursuing a phd in history. You are placing a lot of emphasis on your undergrad and prospective graduate advisor, but if you choose to pursue a phd in history you will need to communicate with MANY other people. Telling grant committees or publishers that this is how your advisors write will make zero difference in their eyes. Plus, you presumably want people to want to read your work, and making it "complex" just for the sake of style is not the ideal way to spark readers' attention.

Edited December 14, 2017 by Calgacus

[dr. t]

1 hour ago, Averroes MD said:

The initial post seemed like a humble brag, and then when teknaru pointed out the errors or what could be improved, khigh responds by laying the blame on someone else, who BTW is a Rhodes scholar.

It took all my willpower not to drop an H-bomb. Also, everyone has a Fulbright these days; us good scholars get Mellon grants.

But seriously, I didn't quite see that. I see an enthusiastic intellectual who thinks they have it more figured than they actually do, which is pretty much the definition of an undergraduate. This is kind of the other half of the phenomenon @TMP described, though. If professors are disinclined to re-teach writing, they are even more hesitant to challenge trite ideas proposed by an enthusiastic student out of fear of crushing them.

Thankfully (???) my undergraduate advisers were a bit more brutal. When I turned in a 20-page seminar paper which was written like the paragraphs given above, my professor told me that he "would usually not recommend someone with this level of writing ability continue on to graduate education." He knew, of course, that I'm a stubborn asshole and that this would simply make me work twice as hard to prove him wrong. It also came with 4,000 words of commentary and suggestions on a 5,000 word paper.

27 minutes ago, Calgacus said:

The biggest danger "complex" writing styles is that it's actually just flowery words being crammed together to cover up for a weak (or absent) argument.

To drive the point home, this is the problem with the paragraphs given above. However, I wouldn't put intent (i.e. "to cover up") behind it - I'm a big believer in a close relationship between form and understanding. That is, the confusion exhibited by the sample paragraphs are not hiding an absence of insight. Rather the "musings" are being confused with insight. 

 

Again, I want to reiterate that, while my comments are harsh, I don't think the OP is a "bad writer," because, as Adventure Time tells us, "being shitty at something is the first step to being kinda good at something," and I think that they're a typical writer for where they are in their academic life. And OP is certainly brave to put their writing up for comment on a public forum populated with jerks like myself - a bravery which, when coupled with a receptive attitude towards the feedback they receive, will certainly pay good dividends. 

[khigh]

3 minutes ago, telkanuru said:

It took all my willpower not to drop an H-bomb. Also, everyone has a Fulbright these days; us good scholars get Mellon grants.

But seriously, I didn't quite see that. I see an enthusiastic intellectual who thinks they have it more figured than they actually do, which is pretty much the definition of an undergraduate. This is kind of the other half of the phenomenon @TMP described, though. If professors are disinclined to re-teach writing, they are even more hesitant to challenge trite ideas proposed by an enthusiastic student out of fear of crushing them.

Thankfully (???) my undergraduate advisers were a bit more brutal. When I turned in a 20-page seminar paper which was written like the paragraphs given above, my professor told me that he "would usually not recommend someone with this level of writing ability continue on to graduate education." He knew, of course, that I'm a stubborn asshole and that this would simply make me work twice as hard to prove him wrong. It also came with 4,000 words of commentary and suggestions on a 5,000 word paper.

To drive the point home, this is the problem with the paragraphs given above. However, I wouldn't put intent (i.e. "to cover up") behind it - I'm a big believer in a close relationship between form and understanding. That is, the confusion exhibited by the sample paragraphs are not hiding an absence of insight. Rather the "musings" are being confused with insight. 

 

Again, I want to reiterate that, while my comments are harsh, I don't think the OP is a "bad writer," because, as Adventure Time tells us, "being shitty at something is the first step to being kinda good at something," and I think that they're a typical writer for where they are in their academic life. And OP is certainly brave to put their writing up for comment on a public forum populated with jerks like myself - a bravery which, when coupled with a receptive attitude towards the feedback they receive, will certainly pay good dividends. 

It did take a lot to put that out there.  I don't let many people read what I write. I'm trying to be as receptive as I can be without sounding like I am arrogant.  I've actually been writing down everything y'all have said in a writing journal. I'm now wondering if the "meat" of the paper would have been better to include.  It's quite a bit more concise, I think, but I know that I have a hard time judging my own writing.  I want to get better and I know I can.

"The first article of the Pacification of Ghent begins the larger conversation of the document with a resetting of previous troubles and actions, thus resetting the game. This reconciliation shows that each of the provinces must concede wrongdoings to be able to work together. The troubles of the provinces “will be forgiven, forgotten, and considered as not having occurred”9 and it would be as if the provinces that caused the problems between themselves and the rest of the union had never occurred. The negation of previous wrongdoings that is shown in the first article leads one to conclude that for the treaty to be implemented, each province would need to concede to a portion of the debate; this article would be a concession to Holland and Zeeland." 

[ploutarchos]

2 hours ago, Averroes MD said:

Am I the only one who thinks khigh comes across as pretentious?

The initial post seemed like a humble brag, and then when teknaru pointed out the errors or what could be improved, khigh responds by laying the blame on someone else, who BTW is a Rhodes scholar.

 

I think this is a really valuable thread, in large part because khigh is able to take detailed criticism and respond to it productively (an important skill for graduate work). I don't see blame-shifting as much as explanation. Maybe there's some pretentiousness in the first post, but I don't detect arrogance. I think the way khigh has interacted with posters in this thread bodes well for his/her success in graduate school. 

Since you've asked for recommendations, @khigh, I'll throw out Samuel Johnson (the prose works) and Edward Gibbon. Reading a bit of Johnson and Gibbon -- two of the best prose stylists in the language -- will give you a sense of what more complex prose looks like in English, which will be more to your taste than Hemingway. They should not replace, however, extensive reading in contemporary scholarship that is both (a) in your area of interest and (b) written in English. And it's the writing of these contemporary academics that you should attempt to imitate directly, not Johnson and Gibbon. As others have said, that is what will teach you to write in the way that other academics expect.

[khigh]

8 minutes ago, ploutarchos said:

I think this is a really valuable thread, in large part because khigh is able to take detailed criticism and respond to it productively (an important skill for graduate work). I don't see blame-shifting as much as explanation. Maybe there's some pretentiousness in the first post, but I don't detect arrogance. I think the way khigh has interacted with posters in this thread bodes well for his/her success in graduate school. 

Since you've asked for recommendations, @khigh, I'll throw out Samuel Johnson (the prose works) and Edward Gibbon. Reading a bit of Johnson and Gibbon -- two of the best prose stylists in the language -- will give you a sense of what more complex prose looks like in English, which will be more to your taste than Hemingway. They should not replace, however, extensive reading in contemporary scholarship that is both (a) in your area of interest and (b) written in English. And it's the writing of these contemporary academics that you should attempt to imitate directly, not Johnson and Gibbon. As others have said, that is what will teach you to write in the way that other academics expect.

I will definitely look into them. I've read a lot of articles in English in my field written in recent years, but books are lacking since Tracy's retirement from the U. Dutch history is not the most popular field at this time, though I find it fascinating and would love to promote it more as an important region in early modern history (what's not to like about tulip markets and cannibalizing your political leaders?).  I may branch out and see what there is in other related fields.  I do need to do more reading on the Mediterranean and the papal states in the early modern period, so I will probably spend some time looking at that for the next few weeks.  

[dr. t]

2 hours ago, khigh said:

Tracy's retirement from the U. Dutch history is not the most popular field at this time, though I find it fascinating and would love to promote it more as an important region in early modern history (what's not to like about tulip markets and cannibalizing your political leaders?).

Really? Hal Cook's Matters of Exchange and Mary Lindemann's The Merchant Republics seem to me to be pretty recent (and important, and popular) works of Dutch history.

[khigh]

14 minutes ago, telkanuru said:

Really? Hal Cook's Matters of Exchange and Mary Lindemann's The Merchant Republics seem to me to be pretty recent (and important, and popular) works of Dutch history.

I said books are lacking, not that they are gone. It's definitely not modern Germany or British history. I have read both of those, but they are typical of the field- economic histories.  

[Calgacus]

21 hours ago, khigh said:

I will definitely look into them. I've read a lot of articles in English in my field written in recent years, but books are lacking since Tracy's retirement from the U. Dutch history is not the most popular field at this time, though I find it fascinating and would love to promote it more as an important region in early modern history (what's not to like about tulip markets and cannibalizing your political leaders?).  I may branch out and see what there is in other related fields.  I do need to do more reading on the Mediterranean and the papal states in the early modern period, so I will probably spend some time looking at that for the next few weeks.  

Just know that while you may want to specialize in early modern Dutch history, you will need to be well-versed in all aspects of early modern Europe in a doctoral program. And you may even want to be aware of what the early modern era looked like in other parts of the world if you want to get an academic job.