This book of practical writing and publishing advice celebrates the creative, community-building pleasures of humanist expertise. Humanities experts today are embattled. In a world of crises undermining higher education at every turn, what can still motivate humanists to write? Galvanizing, imaginative, and unrepentantly nerdy, Sarah Mesle’s Reasons and Feeling offers practical writing and publishing advice alongside a forcefully affirmative account of why humanities writing matters. Mesle proposes that writing can help envision sustainable community, but only when we recognize that humanist authority comes from both our reasons and our feelings. Alongside everyday compositional advice—including strategies for addressing different audiences, pitching publications, and managing writing anxiety—readers will find an account of how such craft practices connect to both their intellectual commitments and their historical conditions. Mesle shows how university-trained writers at all levels benefit from embracing a broader range of styles and affects. Doing so helps them harness their writing’s community-building potential and makes them better able to value their own expertise, whether they write for the classroom, in public venues, or for the specialized scholarly communities that share their niche, weird, or beloved, objects of study. Reasons and Feelings draws on Mesle’s expertise as a professor of writing and her work as an editor helping academics shift between writing for scholarly venues and journalistic ones. In a voice that’s honest, warm, accessible, and bracingly funny, Reasons and Feelings gives humanists a path toward bolder fantasies of the worlds their writing can make.

Table of Contents:
Preface: Who Part One: Why 1. Reasons for Writing 2. Writing About Feelings 3. Some Feelings About Writing in Public; Some Reasons for a Counterpublic Humanities 4. “But Is It Any Good?”: Or, Some Feminist Questions About Academic Writing Part Two: How 5. You Have to Practice 6. Who Is Your Girl and Where Is She Going? 7. You Write with Your Body, Which Keeps the Score 8. Pitches and Abstracts: Or, Some Ways of Building Worlds with Words 9. Know Your Noun 10. Arguments and Other Stories 11. The Subject of the Sentence 12. Give the Pull Quote 13. Burden of Proof 14. Red Rage 15. A Short Note About When We Don’t Need Your Thoughtful Essay 16. Critical Distance 17. Elements of Teaching Style 18. Elements of Teaching Style, Redux: Against the Thesis Statement 19. Small Acts of Finishing 20. Writing in Time Coda: Hospitality Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index