![]() “The challenge,” she explained, “is that I’m trying to say so much in so few words. How do you do that?”Ī few weeks later, I met with an undergraduate student in an advanced physics course who was trying to condense the caption beneath one of the figures in her lab report. I want to write the kind of history that makes people turn pages, to write a story where the characters come alive. “My argument’s brilliant,” he told me, “but this chapter is totally dry inside. I asked if he was concerned that the intellectual contribution of this chapter wasn’t sufficiently groundbreaking, that other scholars in his discipline might not feel he was making a substantial intervention. We’d already examined his thesis and his conclusion for coherence. 1 We’d already discussed what I think of as skeletal concerns: the order of his paragraphs, the clarity of his topic sentences. Last winter, during a late afternoon appointment, a graduate student in the history department asked me how he might make the final chapter of his dissertation more compelling. Before coming to Madison, she received an MFA in poetry from New York University. candidate in literary studies at UW-Madison, and has taught at the Writing Center since 2013.
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