One of the classes I am teaching this semester is a freshmen seminar. It's designed to be both an introduction to political science, or at least my slice of the discipline, and also to serve as a companion to the required freshmen composition course. As such, I make them write a number of response papers over the course of the semester. Once a week, I will put together a short presentation on issues of content or style that have appeared over multiple papers. Yesterday's presentation included a short section on the value of reading outside of coursework: the more you read, the more resources you have at your disposal, and the stronger your writing will become. (I doubt there is anyone amongst my readers who does not already know this, but I imagine we all had some point at which someone told us this or we figured it our for ourselves.) I suggested, at the end, a number of essay collections that I have found particularly useful as guides to style:
David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster, “Roger Federer as Religious Experience”
Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind, “Fail Better”
W. Somerset Maugham, The Vagrant Mood
Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions
T.S. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam, When I Was a Child I Read Books
F. Scott Fitzgerald, My Lost City
Mark Twain, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”
And, to my surprise, they collectively expressed some interest in which one I'd recommend to them for ideal Spring Break reading. There are some moments that being an instructor really does feel completely worthwhile: that was one of them.
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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