Dan D'Amico has blogged his recommended books for learning to write well. I want to give him props for even paying attention to the issue. Academic writing can be the worst — a lesson I learned the hard way, but was lucky enough to learn relatively early.

My last semester of college I had to take Latin in order to graduate. I hated the professor. Awful, awful man. I was far from alone in this assessment, but that's tenure for you. He still did me a big favor, right before giving me my lowest grade on my college transcript — which I never protested b/c I wasn't applying to grad schools and had no real reason to care about grades. He asked his students to hand in samples of our writing from other classes, whatever we were most proud of. I handed in something very finely crafted from an advanced philosophy class (the postmodernism course I've described here).

The Latin professor whose name I can't remember said it was the worst thing any student had handed in … and I got the impression he wasn't just talking about that particular class during that particular semester. He added, however, that it did seem like the kind of writing that was "very popular among academics these days."

That was excellent feedback. Here I'd shown him something that had gotten a 4.0 from an ungenerous grader, something that fellow students had praised for sounding polished enough for publication, and an educated man outside the tradition was telling me it was … well, he used the Anglo-Saxon version of the term excrement. (See George Orwell, below, on Anglo-Saxon versus Latinate words.) However much I disliked the man, I'm still grateful to him for his nasty warning to me about how narrowly I had been trained, and I immediately determined to shed myself of all those pomo affectations.

I hope to homeschool my son in such a way that he never needs to unlearn those habits.

Several of the documents Dan D'Amico points to should be helpful.

To correct typos, change formatting, and add internal links for better navigation, I've "cached" these pages on my website:

1. "How to Write with Style" by Kurt Vonnegut

2. The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr.

3. "12 Writing Tips" by George Orwell, which is excerpted from his famous essay,

4. "Politics and the English Language."