Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now [Hardback]

"In a world of crises that today undermine the humanities, what can still motivate humanists to write? Could developing new styles of prose, forms of argument, or writing strategies enliven humanist thinking? What might those be, and how might they be learned or put into practice? Imaginative, inspiring, and unrepentantly nerdy, Sarah Mesle's Reasons and Feelings: Humanities Writing Now helps its readers navigate these questions. It is a writing guide that also makes an argument about why embattled academics should write in the first place. Alongside practical compositional advice - strategies for addressing different audiences, for pitching publications, for managing writing anxiety - readers will find an account of how such craft practices connect to both their intellectual commitments and their historical conditions. Mesle shows how university-trained writers at all levels benefit when they embrace a broader range of styles and affects. Doing so helps them harness their writing's community-building and collaborative potential. This, in turn, makes them better able to value their own expertise, whether they write for the classroom, in public venues, or for the specialized scholarly communities that share their niche, weird, or beloved objects of study.In a voice that is warm, sympathetic, and accessible, Mesle gives humanists a path toward bolder fantasies of the worlds their writing can make"--

This book of practical writing and publishing advice celebrates the creative, community-building pleasures of humanist expertise.

Humanities experts today are embattled. In a world of crises undermining higher education at every turn, what can still motivate humanists to write? Galvanizing, imaginative, and unrepentantly nerdy, Sarah Mesle’s Reasons and Feeling offers practical writing and publishing advice alongside a forcefully affirmative account of why humanities writing matters.

Mesle proposes that writing can help envision sustainable community, but only when we recognize that humanist authority comes from both our reasons and our feelings. Alongside everyday compositional advice—including strategies for addressing different audiences, pitching publications, and managing writing anxiety—readers will find an account of how such craft practices connect to both their intellectual commitments and their historical conditions. Mesle shows how university-trained writers at all levels benefit from embracing a broader range of styles and affects. Doing so helps them harness their writing’s community-building potential and makes them better able to value their own expertise, whether they write for the classroom, in public venues, or for the specialized scholarly communities that share their niche, weird, or beloved, objects of study.

Reasons and Feelings draws on Mesle’s expertise as a professor of writing and her work as an editor helping academics shift between writing for scholarly venues and journalistic ones. In a voice that’s honest, warm, accessible, and bracingly funny, Reasons and Feelings gives humanists a path toward bolder fantasies of the worlds their writing can make.