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With a Ph.D. in American literature, Marc D. Baldwin has been writing, editing and teaching for 37 years. He’s published a scholarly study of Ernest Hemingway and numerous articles in various literary journals, and is president of Edit911, Inc.

Surviving Graduate School: How to Deal with Your Professors

Dr. William Says:

Don’t overlook the basics. Pay attention to what name your professor asks to be called by. If he introduces himself as Dr., then by all means call him Dr. If she asks to be called by her first name, then it is okay to take her up on that.
Professors desire students to be engaged in class. It draws other students into discussions and adds a great deal to the effectiveness of teaching.
Professors enjoy hearing how students integrate what they are learning into their lives. It does not mean you have to agree with your professor. Just grappling with issues raised brings about a new level of understanding.
Professors like to be kept in the loop about your progress. If you are at a phase when you are out of classes and writing on your own, don’t go for long periods of time without contacting your professors.
Professors don’t mind questions, especially regarding your writing, direction, and problem spots. The worst thing you can do is spend lots of time on your best educated guess when you could have asked a question and saved yourself lots of time.

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Dr. Gordon Says:

If you’re having problems in class, the most important thing to do is acknowledge the fact and seek help.

Bottling up problems does you no good, and does nothing to resolve them. It’s quite likely that if you are having difficulties, others are too. There are a number of strategies you can use.

First, talk to the professor one on one, and try to get him or her to explain things more clearly. Do this gently and tactfully, but make sure you get across that there is a problem.

You may wish to consider a follow-up a few weeks later, to acknowledge that things have improved or to indicate that the problems persist.

It may also be helpful to talk to other students to try to find out if they are also having problems. If they are, you may be able to form a group to help each other work through the problems.

If this does not work, you can try student services.

Many colleges and universities have tutoring services, and even if yours does not, they will be able to offer help, and suggest practical things you can do to help resolve the difficulties.

Another option is to talk to departmental administrators or other professors, who may also be able to suggest ways forward. Whether doing this resolves the difficulty or not, the department will then be aware that there is a problem.

The ultimate step is to go to the dean or another senior official, but this step should not be taken lightly, and should be regarded as a last resort, as it may have far-reaching consequences. Once again, it needs to be done tactfully.

Above all, be respectful and constructive at every stage. Getting angry is likely to be counterproductive.

Many universities ask students to fill out a survey at the end of the course so that the department and the professor receive feedback on how well the course went. If your problem is not resolved, you may wish to indicate this and explain why. This may lead to improvements, which may be helpful to future students.

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Dr. Dan Says:

Maintain a certain amount of distance.

No matter how much a professor sees a grad student as a fellow seeker-after-the-truth, the reality is that the terminal degree and the publications do make a difference that they don’t easily let go of.

In grad school, I worked with a professor who would play basketball with us every Friday (he was good, too) and allowed us to call him “Jake.” However, he still gave grades and supervised independent studies, and I could tell that, while he enjoyed the exercise and the bonhomie, he enjoyed the role of mentor just as much.

That’s the simple advice, of course. The “Jakes” of the department are easy. How does one deal with the prof whose academic credentials suggest that s/he can crush cars with brain power alone or the bitter prof who seeks every opportunity to take out grievances on others?

Be sure to know exactly what you want. When you approach them with a project or are looking for advice, have as much settled, decided or known as possible. Have the list of books ready. In short, this will keep personality from entering your relationship as much as possible. Professors’ time is valuable and they’ll appreciate if you respect this.
Likewise, keep appointments. If you can’t make it to a meeting, give plenty of notice. And if you skip a meeting, don’t make the mistake of being someplace where you can be seen without a good alibi.
And, for heaven’s sake, if you use electronic communication of any kind, be professional! Use a salutation (“Hey” doesn’t count; use “Dr.” or “Professor”) and a signature.

Okay, but, what if the professor wants to hijack the work, creating a kind of proxy of his/her own interests? There’s no easy way around this one.

I’d recommend appealing to the integrity of your work: your research/thesis appears to need your particular approach and anything else would fundamentally change your project into something that it’s not.

–by the Staff of Edit911, Inc. & Baldwin Book Publishing

How to be a Scholar: Second, Love the Work

Dr. Dan Says: Be a teacher.

We all like to think of ourselves as scholars in the best tradition of those great names that dominate our respective fields.

However, we should also keep in mind that our privileged positions in higher education also give us the responsibility to share what we know and how we know it to others: students and fellow scholars alike.

In your research and in your writing, try to keep the perspective that you are trying to contribute to the scholarly conversation regarding your field.

And, keep your students in mind when doing the research and the writing, as this can help your focus.

I’m sure you’ll agree that the critics you best remember are the ones who taught you something, who inspired you to follow a particular line of thought. See yourself in that same tradition.

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Dr. Sandy Says: What does it take to be a scholar? Knowledge of your field and a passion for learning are certainly requirements. You must also be disciplined and reflective, the embodiment of “I think; therefore, I am.” But the most important attribute is the desire to understand.

Knowing facts without understanding their significance, their interconnectivity, is essentially useless. Having a plethora of facts at your command may help you become a Jeopardy champion, but it doesn’t make you a scholar.

Facts are only puzzle pieces. As a scholar, you are either fitting the pieces together to discover the picture they comprise or looking at the picture to see where the pieces you have fit.

To borrow from Stephen Covey, you must “seek first to understand.” You explore the universe through the perspective of your particular field. You question and analyze, reflect and meditate. You are the little boy on the cereal box, holding a box of the cereal. No matter how deeply you delve, there is always one more cereal box with a picture of a little boy holding a box of the cereal. Each answer leads to another question.

And that is the forte of the scholar: relentlessly searching for the next piece of the puzzle in hope of answering one more question for humankind.

–by the Staff of Edit911, Inc. & Baldwin Book Publishing

Brilliant New Music: Peter Furler’s “On Fire” CD

Check out the amazing, awesome, incredible, brilliant (I could go on) new CD by the greatest Christian rock/pop songwriter and singer of all time, Peter Furler: http://on.fb.me/bOsZ97.

Buy it on Amazon and you won’t regret it. I’ve been a fan since 98 and met Peter in 09 when my daughter Breezy (www.breezybaldwin.com) worked as Art Director at InPop records, Peter’s label at the time when he was with newsboys.

Folks, Peter is a GREAT talent and equally great man. I am so proud to know him and advocate for him and his music ministry. I cannot stop playing this CD, it is so inspiring, uplifting, catchy, fun, sing-alongable, and upbeat. Truly wonderful music by a truly wonderful guy.

Peter: I love ya, mate!

Marc

How to be a Scholar: First, Do the Work

Dr. William Says: The characteristic that most defines a scholar is perseverance.

There are going to be periods of writer’s block, of lack of motivation, of adversity and conflict with others, of life challenges, and numerous other obstacles.

It is important to keep yourself to the task and with your goal in mind.

In times when I had most trouble being consistent with my dissertation writing, I often had to jump start my writing again by taking a week off from work, sending the family to visit relatives, and devoting an entire week to writing.

I’ll never forget how one week in the middle of summer with nothing but my research, a laptop, and The Weather Channel for background noise propelled me forward to finishing my dissertation.

Don’t lose heart when you think you’ve finished writing but begin the long process of edits and rewrites that take time, attention, and yes—perseverance—to get to the finish line.

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Dr. Gordon Says: The most important attribute of a scholar is thoroughness.

If possible, it is useful to read every relevant word written on your subject, at least in languages you can understand, and to analyse and digest this material before developing a thesis or designing an experiment.

This also requires a methodical approach, so that lesser-known material is not missed. In the process, you will undoubtedly discover material that seems to be relevant, but is not, but you may also turn up some hidden gem that has been long neglected.

Whether you take this brute force approach or decide to be more selective, however, it’s important to gain mastery of your material, without which it will be difficult to persuade other scholars of your case.

When writing a dissertation, depth is essential, but breadth is also necessary to develop perspective. Developing both provides a good foundation for sound scholarship.

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Dr. Robert Advises: Write Publishable Articles and Essays!

Few, if any, graduate students in the humanities these days are unaware that the job market is “soft.” Most also realize that, in order to be competitive, their curricula vitae need to be adorned with a few publication credits beyond the completion of a doctoral dissertation. Such has been the case at least since the mid-1980s.

As a department chair at two universities for eleven years until 1998, I have read literally thousands of applications.

More often than not, what persuaded our selection committees to recommend candidates for interviews at national conventions was documented evidence of professional achievement before conferral of the Ph.D.

Although this widespread expectation is lamentable, at least in some quarters, it does attest to a brutal reality of academic hiring today.

It makes sense, therefore, to be pragmatic during one’s graduate apprenticeship. Long vanished are the days when a doctorate alone guaranteed tenurable employment.

Prospective investors in your scholarly future look for proof that you are “on the make”—in other words, grasping for the brass ring of peer recognition on the carousel of “professionalism.” Refereed publication casts a long shadow in this regard.

Herewith a humble case in point. Well before the crunch in college/university hiring of aspiring faculty, I became enamored, partly through boredom with the insularity of graduate study, of the supposedly wider world of publication-worthy scholarship.

I therefore tackled seminar papers with an eye toward that end. Happily, three of such revised productions on Sir Thomas Malory, Thomas Gray, and Lord Byron were accepted for journal publication, opening the gates for initial employment as an Assistant Professor of English at Georgia Tech.

The point is to mine your graduate-school research, even when it is not congruent with your main field of specialization, in order to enhance your qualifications for employment.

Everything will probably change after that initial appointment, but at least you then will have a basis on which to start anew and reinvent your professional persona.

–by the Staff of Edit911, Inc.

William Faulkner Reviews An Uprising of Angels

The unheavenly, inexorably scorching sun beat down on a more than dusty road—a road beyond dust, connecting the past and future, beyond the irrepressible earth itself, into a throat parched dryness and heart stopping swelter of an afternoon from another era, another day, like the Los Angeles slum ridden and dark secret hidden neighborhoods in the book I was reading as I sat by the side of that dusty, dusky, infernal road to hell and back, my back against a weeping willow tree and a damp rag from mopping my brow in my hands, hands gnarled and shaking, angry hands as angrily I read about a riot and the never to be ended, never should have begun struggle of the races against each other that reaches deep into the nation’s past and soil and soul, from the South I knew to the western Pacific shores I didn’t, into a huge metropolis beyond anything I ever experienced, being from a postage stamp sized county in a state swarming with hatred and despair and immutable actions, unsilent words, unspoken deeds and bitter emotions, emotions rambling through centuries and eons of human relationships and uncivilized civilizations, only to end up carrying that weight of race and flesh and skin, those battles never unfought and never finished, into a riot of universal size with gangs of great-great grandsons of slaves and slaveowners, of sharecroppers, storekeepers, and barn burners’ descendents exploding once more, uncontrollable, irreconcilably turning streets into bloody highways saturating the dust and filling the skies with smoke and flames as if nothing has ever been learned and nothing could ever be learned, for how could it, if all that I have recorded and written about men and their hatred has never been assimilated into hearts or souls but rather turned out and ignored, my words having meant nothing to these Los Angeles men and their furious undiscriminating unassailable dispatching of death and destruction all so very many years since I myself toiled my fingers on pen and paper, ink stained to pass a message that’s been unread, unlearned, uncared for, since as Baldwin writes, this riot erupted, this cataclysmic abysmal unfathomable eruption of hell’s deep darkness onto the earth where men still walk and breathe and live yet must fight and struggle with themselves and others over what, if not their own beyond interminably terrible destinies and drives, desires and indefatigable selfishness where justice is damned and no one is safe in their homes, their skins, their lives, all lives reduced to the rubble beneath the passing years’ feet and I, myself, in my legacious state of misfortunate fame or infamy can neither affect nor change, despite all the books, all the stories, all the writing I did, so that Baldwin now must take up the pen and once again, as I and others before him have, to record the impossible, impenetrable, unending and unfailing misery befalling the never innocent at the hands of the always guilty men who fail to get along?

Kirkus Gives Uprising of Angels a Good Review

“Baldwin parlays his real-life experiences into his thorny, complicated, character-driven debut that follows a group of interconnected middle-class denizens through the urban underbelly of L.A. In [his] dark world of urban decay, Baldwin has assembled an edgy cast of characters that’s ambitiously broad and richly realized. The relentlessly grim and aggressive plot [is] worth a read for its rough, raw and luridly realistic portrayal of inner-city strife.”

– Kirkus Indie Review

Ernest Hemingway Reviews An Uprising of Angels

Baldwin sent me his book and I read it. I read it sitting on a verandah with cold beer and cats on my lap. I read it in one sitting as the sun crossed the grey clouded sky and faded into the horizon. The ocean turned black as the light faded and night fell. I drank 7 or 8 beers while I read it. The beers dripped their condensation on the pages of the book and now the pages have beer stains that will remind me when I read it again where I was and how I enjoyed the crisp clear beer while reading Baldwin’s book.

His writing is clean and crisp like the beer I drank while reading it. His story goes down smoothly like the beer. I started reading with little interest because I don’t like big city people who have problems they bring on themselves because of their stupidity and laziness. But something about it kept me reading. It was the danger, I suppose. The guns and the violence and the danger are all things I like in a book and in life. I also like writing about war. It brings out a man’s true character. This book is about a war. A war in Los Angeles in 1992 between some good people and some bad people. The good people are not all good and the bad people are not all bad. That is the way with people.

I like the way Baldwin writes. He understands that life must be lived and fears faced. I have been through war and the riot of 1992 was a war. The bell tolled for many and no one came out of it without a wound. But some took the wounds and used them. They felt them and studied them and were true to them. That is life well lived. This is a book about life.

Baldwin tells me we share the same birthday. That is an interesting fact. I like facts because they are sharp and hard and cannot be denied. I don’t like it when people try to deny facts. Such people do not know themselves and do not understand life.

I would take Baldwin hunting some day if I could. I bet he’d be a good hunter because his eye is clear and sharp and his words cut fast and sharp, like hard flat stones skimmed across the surface of a calm cool lake. His characters go out too far like Jake and Santiago and me. I like that too about his book. His characters know how to live and they know how to die.

I’d like to meet Baldwin and see how he lives. But I’m dead and my verandah and beer and cats are all far from the earth that he and all the people alive now still live on. I don’t live there anymore. I put a rifle in my mouth and pulled the trigger. But I won’t talk about that. There are many things that should not be talked about. A man and a writer must understand that what is not talked about gives a story and his life even more meaning. You have to know a lot to leave a lot out. Baldwin’s book leaves a lot out. That’s what I like about it most.

So I will never meet Baldwin and drink a beer with him and take him hunting. That is too bad. We could have had a good time together. At least it’s pretty to think so.

A Brief Frictional Fictional Interview with Myselves

EGO: We’re here tonight with ourself, Marc D. Baldwin, author of An Uprising of Angels. Thanks for inviting us all to speak our mind tonight, Marc.

ID: Yeah, thanks. We’re all out of our mind, that’s for sure. That’ll be pretty clear to everyone who reads the book.

SUPEREGO: Don’t blow our cover, all right?

I: What do you care? You always were trying to take us all down with your compulsive behavior. Like the time you…

E: Zip it, Id.

The trio stare each other down. With a wry smile and ominous chuckle, Baldwin marshals his selves into one for a moment.

I: Okay, me first.

S: As always.

I: Damn straight.

E: Cut the crap, you two. Just tell the readers why we wrote the book.

I: Why else? So we can let our schizophrenia run wild. The 5 main characters are all us. We seek pleasure. We love darkness. We like to live a little. You know. It’s cool. Right?

S: Why is everything always all about you?

E: Really. Stick to the fiction: the book. It is fiction, right?

I: Oh sure…of course…definitely, right? All made up. Total fiction. You know that.

They share a big laugh, face full of memories making various micro- appearances.

E: Okay, here’s the deal: We just wanted to make sense of the senseless, right? The worst riot ever in America. Chaos, horror, anarchy. Why? Why did it happen? Because King’s attackers, the cops, were acquitted? Or was that just an excuse to riot and loot and burn and kill? Macetti, now he’s got it down. He and Gunther, they’re heroes, trying to protect the hood from the bad guys.

S: That’s absurd.

E: Me? Absurd? Id’s the absurd one, not me.

I: Got that right. But at least I know I’m absurd, pal. You don’t. You and your phony image of respectability and decency. Don’t make me laugh. You might have the world fooled, but you don’t fool me. You’re closer to being Rayhab and the gangstas than Macetti and Gunther. But they’re all messed up too. And what’s really the kicker in this book, in our whole life, really, is trying to make sense of the senseless. That’s the definition of absurdity. Right?

S: Yeah, but you have to try. That’s what Anwar did. He tried hard to help Ishmael avoid getting into gangs. And he tried hard to live a good, straight life.

I: Gimme a break. He just wanted to screw Sonja. You know that. You set the poor sap up for a big fall….

S: I totally disagree!

Superego flips off Id and looks for support to Ego, who just shrugs. What can you do with a runaway Id?

I: Yeah? Whatta you know about racism, bro? That’s the ultimate absurdity and evil. I’m just part of a white guy, doing my own thing and trying to keep out of my own way. Like most people in L.A. before, during and after the riot. Just trying to get along, man. Live free or die. Don’t screw with me and I won’t screw with you. Screw with me and look out.

E: Big tough guy.

I: You got it, bro.

S: You make no sense, as usual. I mean, yes, racism is a big part of the book, of course. As it was a major cause of the riot. But really it’s about all people. All colors and ethnicities of real people caught in hell. Trying to survive. It’s good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, love vs. hate, legality vs. criminality. In a word, life.

I: You just love dichotomies, that’s your problem. The world ain’t all black and white, pal. It’s all shades of grey.

S: Like a Motown winter’s day….

I: Ya know, I could live without you just fine, ya know that? Do whatever I want…

S: Put ketchup on your beans?

I: Yeah. That’s right.

E: Okay, okay. You guys are killing me. Literally. I’m the one who wrote the damn book. It took all my strength to suppress you two long enough to get the words down in some kindof order. And I say Uprising’s about everything we’ve ever known. We’re all in this book, right? All of us, all of everybody. Everything we know, right? Am I right? Everything?

S: Or nothing at all, maybe. Kinda like the whiteness of the whale. The big Moby.

I: Or the blackness of the universe.

E: That’s what I’m saying: it’s about all or nothing. You in or you out? Hold em or fold em. Kill or be killed.

S: There ya go. That’s what it’s about. For real.

The trio nod and bump fists. At peace with one another. For the moment, anyway. Just trying to get along, like Rodney King wanted.

Approaching Reality, Encroaching on Truth

One of the biggest problems most people have is they think they know what’s real and true. Their reality is the reality; their truth the truth.

Wonderful, Awful Words

A dog is a dog. A house is a house. A job is a job. We can all agree on those words representing the things to which they refer. Right? Common realities and truths. Right?

Wrong.

What specific dog are you talking about when you say “dog”? I hear “dog” and I may picture a kennel full of mutts about to be euthanized, while you may be thinking about Fido who slobbers on your face and makes your heart race with joy.

A house may be your house, a dozen houses, a row of them on skid street. My house may be a home, full of warm memories, making me cry about my little gone girls all grown up and living far away.

Your job might be a dream or a nightmare, what you’ve always wanted or never wanted. I think of “job” and there’s a dozen car lots and a few teaching positions, but mainly now sitting at the computer writing emails and processing editing work.

Writing my novels and these blog essays isn’t a job for me. It’s a pure kick of joy.

The Words Mean What They Don’t

Point? Our realities and truths are definitionally dependent. Words denote and connote. They try to refer to specific things—a dog, a house, a job—but they always refer to very different actualities in our individual brains.

So what you think of one way (cool dog, a house is a house, rotten job), I think of another (dumb animal, my house as my home, my job ain’t my life).

Everybody attaches different denotations to every word. So every reality is different; every truth contingent. (No, I am not a radical relativist. I’ll discuss the distinction another time.)

And connotations? Holy cow, Harry Carey. Just as every word evokes its own specific representation (your word “dog” means something different to you than my word “dog”), every word triggers emotions, feelings, memories, associations.

Take the Rodney King L.A. riot of 1992. It may mean nothing to you: no emotions, no memories, no feelings whatsoever. You can bet it means more than just about anything in their lives to thousands of people who lived through it. The emotions run strong; the memories are seared in their soul’s flesh.

The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round, Round and Round….

So your reality and truth is not my reality and truth. But neither of us is necessarily living in a false world or delusional mindset.

We’re just figures of speech, really. Humans as metaphors, with lives like words—open to interpretation, closed to conformity. Gliding and sliding down an endless slope of signification, where one thing leads to another—eternally.

Not buying it? Then let’s hear another theory for how 10,000 years of human “communication” has led to this current state of global uber-miscommunication that has us all teetering on the brink of total annihilation. How else to explain it but to blame it on the words themselves? And our failure to compose them into compatible realities and cooperative truths.

10 Academic Writing Tips from PhDs

DR. JOHN Ke SAYS: I think almost everyone would agree that a lot of academic writing leaves a lot to be desired. It can be dry and tedious, aimed only at the two or three other scholars who do similar work, rather than trying to reach a broader audience. At its best, academic writing should avoid this. It should be interesting and accessible to the interested layperson, and help make readers more interested, rather than less, in the topic under discussion.

As with any other writing, I think the key to good academic writing is to find a voice that is genuine and personal. Writing can only have an effect when it seems to come from a real person. Of course, in academic writing one also has to cultivate an “academic” voice – one that is informed and authoritative and conversant with the other literature in the topic. But that voice ought to also seem like it’s coming from a real person, and it ought to show why you are excited about the topic you are writing about.

If you can’t convey to your readers why you think a topic is interesting and worthy of study, you can’t expect your reader to be interested in it. Any really good academic writing, like all good writing of any sort, needs to draw the reader in, to make the reader care about the work and understand why it is important and worth doing.

Obviously, there’s much more to successful writing than this – conveying often complicated information clearly and elegantly; finding the structure that works best to present your argument; and finding the tone that shows you are a competent, professional scholar. But more than any of this, good academic writing must meet the most basic goal of any piece of writing – making a connection to its readers.

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DR. WILLIAM SAYS: Here’s my personal “recipe” for good, academic writing:

The professor who served as my primary advisor for my major and dissertation writing advised me to post a visual reminder to guide my writing: to tape my primary hypothesis on my computer screen so that I never sat down to write without keeping the main thing the main thing.

Nothing’s worse than getting off track in your writing and having to hit that dreaded delete button.

You must be willing to edit your own writing at a very basic level. At least read over your work for missing thoughts, run spell and grammar check, and read your writing out loud.

You also must be willing to let others read your work. They will see things you do not. They will point our areas of confusion that may have made perfect sense in your own mind in the middle of the night. Your team of helpers will fine tune your writing and take it to a higher level.

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DR. JOHN Ku SAYS: Don’t Start with the Introduction!

Unless this is your strength, don’t start with introductory paragraphs or even your introductory chapter. Most of us are pretty sequential in our thinking. We do this first, then this, and then that.

With academic papers, this order generally manifests with trying to write our introductions first, then the literature review, followed by the study design, etc.

However, the most effective and efficient approach is to start with sections that you are the most comfortable with, and then move around from section to section.

At some point you’ll begin to organize your logic, and eventually your sections will follow suit.

Another piece of advice, particularly if you are planning on writing a thesis or dissertation, is to first conduct and write-up your literature review.

During my dissertation proposal, when I was wrestling with a topic, I was advised to complete and write a literature review around issues I found interesting.

This was perhaps the best piece of academic advice ever given to me.

After the literature review (or chapter 2 in standard dissertations), I knew my problem statement, the gaps in the research, how similar studies have been conducted, what data collection instruments prior researchers have used, and how my study would contribute to the field.

As a result, the preceding (introduction) and following (proposed method) chapters pretty much wrote themselves after this literature review was complete.

Not bad, for a graduate student who couldn’t narrow down a topic six months before.

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DR. JOHN Ku’s “Six Rules for Good Writing”

In 1946, George Orwell presented an essay critiquing the often vague and boring manner of written English. Perhaps a similar argument can be made today with academic writing.

When I was a first-year graduate student, I sat next to a dictionary and a pitcher of coffee trying to read long and mundane peer-reviewed scholarly articles. When it was my turn to produce such content, I caught myself falling into a similar trap.

After years of reading and writing academic material, I now try creating content that can read by non-academics and academics alike.

To prevent you from falling into the vague and boring style of academic writing, Orwell recommends the following six strategies:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech, which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I’ll add a few recommendations to Orwell’s list:

Get to the point
Don’t repeat yourself (unless you’re writing to politicians)
And usually, the more succinct a manuscript, the better (you can’t hide behind a stick, as my former advisor would say).

–by the Staff of Edit911, Inc. and Baldwin Book Publishing