Eric Hayot > Quotes

“Active writing should not involve saying things you already understand and know, but instead let you think new things.”
― Eric Hayot, The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities

“Writing is not the memorialization of ideas. Writing distills, crafts, and pressure-tests ideas—it creates ideas.”
― Eric Hayot, The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities

“Writing a dissertation thus presents a set of very particular psychological and professional challenges.”
― Eric Hayot, The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities

“Conceiving of writing as the process whereby you put down thoughts you already have will give you a bad theory of what writing does and can do.”
― Eric Hayot, The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities

“You truly engage readers in the introduction when you convince them that it’s worth their time to keep reading, which means making a variety of credible promises (implicit and explicit) about both the value of the problem you will solve (usually explicit: “We have an inadequate or limited theory of early modern sexuality”), your professional credibility for addressing that problem (both explicit and implicit: you show the reader that you understand and know the field in which the problem takes place), and, ideally, by writing sentences or laying out ideas in ways that are rhetorically, rhythmically, or lexically appealing (always implicit). By having, in other words, some kind of style.”
― Eric Hayot, The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities

“Active writing should not involve saying things you already understand and know, but instead let you think new things. And that is why, this book will argue, you cannot know what your ideas are, mean, or do until you set them down in sentences, whether on paper or on screen. It is also why the essay or the book you write will not be, if you are open and generous and unafraid, the essay or book you started with.”
― Eric Hayot, The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities