Andy Naselli

Thoughts on Theology

writing

Omit Needless Words

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I agree with Jim.

James M. Hamilton Jr., “Appreciation, Agreement, and a Few Minor Quibbles: A Response to G. K. Beale,” Midwestern Journal of Theology 10, no. 1 (2011): 67:

I want to register a stylistic complaint. Beale is prolix. It’s as though he is exclaiming, “Why should I say in three words what I can expand to ten?!” In the “Introduction” to “the little book,” E. B. White epitomizes Professor Strunk: “‘Omit needless words!’ cries the author on page 23, and into that imperative Will Strunk really put his heart and soul.” Imagine the pleasure Strunk would take eliminating words from Beale’s oeuvre. To take one example, consider the title of his second lecture, “The Inaugurated End-Time Tribulation and Its Bearing on the Church Office of Elder and on Christian Living in General.” Edwardsian in its fullness, but would not “Elders and the End-Times” have been sufficient? I love the ideas that Beale communicates, but I wonder whether he hopes to be paid on the Dickensian wage (critics of Charles Dickens complain that his books are so long because he was paid a penny a word).

How Not to Write a Book Review

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Dan Reid explains how.

(Reid is senior editor for reference and academic books at InterVarsity Press, where he has worked since 1986.)

His first “reviewing sloth” is most significant:

The author failed to write a different sort of book, the sort of book that I prefer; and so I dislike this book.

Charlotte’s Web: A Model of Good Writing

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Last month Tony Reinke encouraged me to read E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952) to my daughter. Not only would my daughter love it, but I could learn a lot about how to write better.

That was good advice. My daughter Kara and I read it together in late April and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was her first “chapter” book without pictures on every page. I watched the 1973-film several times as a child, but I had never read the book (nor have I seen the 2006-film).

E. B. White knows how to write. Simple. Clear. Elegant. Magical.

That didn’t just happen. White worked tirelessly at it. He revised Charlotte’s Web many times until the wording was just right. (White contributes to the first of the “Six Useful Books on Writing” I list here.)

I love how the book ends. Someday I hope my friends can say this of me: “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”

Why You Should Organize Your Personal Theological Library and a Way How

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That’s the title of a 2600-word article (8-page PDF) I recently wrote for Reformation 21. (Pardon the formatting of the version on Ref21’s site; some of it didn’t transfer very cleanly in HTML.)

Here’s the outline:

  • Why You Should Organize Your Personal Theological Library
  • A Way to Organize Your Personal Theological Library
    • Enter the bibliographic information for each resource in Zotero.
    • Organize your resources in Zotero.
    • Arrange your print books on your bookshelves in alphabetical order by author.

I created this three-minute video to supplement the article:

And here’s the article: [Read more…] about Why You Should Organize Your Personal Theological Library and a Way How

Malcolm Gladwell

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I recently listened to four fascinating audiobooks by Malcolm Gladwell, and it was time well spent. Gladwell writes well and offers accessible yet penetrating insights about human nature and the world we live in.

From his bio:

Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine since 1996. His 1999 profile of Ron Popeil won a National Magazine Award, and in 2005 he was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. He is the author of four books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference (2000), Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), and Outliers: The Story of Success (2008), all of which were number one New York Times bestsellers. His latest book, What the Dog Saw (2009), is a compilation of stories published in The New Yorker.

Amazon | Summary | Wikipedia [Read more…] about Malcolm Gladwell

Six Useful Books on Writing

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Books on writing are even more common than first-year Greek grammars. (I should probably revise that sentence.)

Here are six that I’ve found especially useful. I’d suggest reading them in this order.

1. William Strunk Jr. The Elements of Style. Wth revisions, an introduction, and a chapter on writing by E. B. White. 4th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000. 105 pp.

Strunk

I’ve read this slim volume three times with great profit. It’s not perfect (see here and here), but it’s still well worth reading. [Read more…] about Six Useful Books on Writing

Don Carson’s Advice about Two Ways to Approach Writing a Dissertation

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vanlandingham.jpgDon Carson’s review of Chris VanLandingham’s Judgment and Justification in Early Judaism and the Apostle Paul includes sound advice about two ways to approach writing a dissertation (Carson’s advice also applies to writing a research paper):

I frequently tell my doctoral students as they embark on their research that dissertations in the broad field of the arts disciplines, including biblical and theological disciplines, can, at the risk of slight oversimplification, be divided into two camps.

[1. Deductive Approach] In the first camp, the student begins with an idea, a fresh insight, a thesis he or she would like to test against the evidence.

[2. Inductive Approach] In the second, the student has no thesis to begin with but would like to explore the evidence in a certain domain to see exactly what is going on in a group of texts and admits to uncertainty about what the outcome will be.

[1] The advantage of the first kind of thesis is that the work is exciting from the beginning and directed by the thesis that is being tested; the danger is that, unless the student takes extraordinary precautions and proves to be remarkably self-critical, the temptation to domesticate the evidence in order to defend the thesis becomes well-nigh irresistible.

[2] The advantage of the second kind of thesis is that it is likely to produce more even-handed results than the first, since the researcher has no axe to grind and is therefore more likely to follow the evidence wherever it leads; the danger is that there may not be much of a thesis at the end of the process, but merely a lot of well-organized data.

In reality, of course, dissertation projects regularly straddle both camps in various ways. But VanLandingham’s work neatly falls pretty exclusively into the first camp. That makes for interesting reading. Unfortunately, VanLandingham’s work also demonstrates in a superlative fashion the dangers of this sort of approach.