More than a decade ago, I developed a graduate course on academic writing. I had grown tired of saying the same thing over and over on most of the student papers in my theory and research classes, and I had discovered, much to my naive dismay, that assigning Strunk and White's The Elements of Style as a required text did nothing to improve the quality of my students' written work.

I wanted to give not-yet-competent writers fresh access not only to their process of composing, but also to the results. Too many didn't know how to read, never mind improve, something they'd written, and traditional methods of teaching them had failed. I worked hard to engage them with humor, stories, and weird analogies, and they, also working hard, figured out how to write coherent, properly punctuated sentences and engaging narratives.

Every semester, my students encouraged me to write down what I was telling them in class. I listened to their advice, and a few years later I had completed Writing Between the Lines. Although it uses social science examples, in-jokes, and gossip to illustrate the ideas, there's nothing about the book's user-friendly approach that can't easily be adapted to other disciplines, and it can be used with undergraduates and even high school students.

I help students and potential authors realize that they already know more than they think they know about how to write. For example, if they are able to speak without making grammatical errors (and/or if they can tell when others slip up), they can let their ear help out their eye as they edit their work. Still, they usually need to replace at least some of the rules they currently use for constructing and punctuating sentences, and they benefit from learning a new way to read sentences and paragraphs. I thus help them write by teaching them how to read.

Writing Between the Lines offers what I call a "relational" understanding of sentence structure, punctuation, tenses, idea development, and aesthetic refinement. This is a different way of characterizing the logic of written language, so it takes a little getting used to. But it allows me to offer clear guidance for writing well-composed work, and I'm able to do so without having to speak in grammarianese. Appealing to people's aesthetic sensibility, I use their understandings of stories as a means to describe and illustrate pattern-informed principles of good writing.

I teach workshops on how to write in academic settings and for publication; I also consult on writing projects.