“You should write a book about how to write,” my wife said in June of 1974 when I was complaining to her, as I often did, that I had run out of things to write about. At that time our family lived at Yale, where I taught writing and was master of Branford College. When the academic year ended, we would move to our summer house in Niantic, Connecticut, and there I would hole up for three months doing writing projects of my own. I worked in a shed (below) at the rear of the property, next to some woods, my Underwood typewriter perched on a green metal typing table under a light bulb suspended from the ceiling.

Caroline’s suggestion came from out of nowhere—I had never thought of writing a textbook—but it felt right. I had then been teaching my course at Yale for four years, and I liked the idea of trying to capture it in a book. Many questions, however, occurred to me. Who would I be writing for? What tone should I adopt? How would my book differ from all the other books on writing?

Read the rest via Visions and Revisions| The American Scholar.

A new feature at the New York Times:

Schott’s Vocab is a repository of unconsidered lexicographical trifles — some serious, others frivolous, some neologized, others newly newsworthy. Each day, Schott’s Vocab explores news sites around the world to find words and phrases that encapsulate the times in which we live or shed light on a story of note. If language is the archives of history, as Emerson believed, then Schott’s Vocab is an attempt to index those archives on the fly.

Ben Schott is the author of “Schott’s Original Miscellany,” its two sequels, and the yearbook “Schott’s Almanac.” He is a contributing columnist to The Times’s Op-Ed page.

see  Schott’s Vocab – Schott’s Vocab Blog – NYTimes.com.