Excuse me.

I never said that historians had a corner or a monoploy on writing skills.
I just said that its been my personal experince that they are drilled on it
more than some other disciplines.

And accuracy in citation, well never mind...

Carl Barna
Someone from "the limited realm"




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                      ARCHAEOLOGY              Subject:  Good writing is good writing
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                      12/08/2003 11:12
                      AM
                      Please respond to
                      HISTORICAL
                      ARCHAEOLOGY






In a message dated 12/8/2003 10:33:48 AM Mountain Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

 They (historians) do, however,  write good readable -- for the most part
 --
 "narrative" history.  Their professional training demands it. My grad
 school papers were littered with red ink as profs attempted to drill good
 writing practices into us.  The writing business is the business that
 historians are in, and someone in the profession needs some mastery of it.
 I can't say that I absorbed all that my profs labored at, but, like I
 said,
 historians are expected to write for a living, so I'd say that the
 expectations are different than those in a profession where good writing
 is
 not seen as crucial.  I did not see this writing issue stressed in the
 Hist. Arch. courses that I took.

 We were always told that to write well, you need to read the works of good
 writiers, historians or otherwise, and then just write and write and ....
 until it becomes second nature.  It is often said that the best writing is
 re-writing.


I beg your pardon...historians do not have some kind of corner on good
writing.  Why are CRM owners so concerned about the lack of good writing
skills among some of the people that they look to hire?  Because it is such
an important part of our profession.  We too find the need to write
narratives and stories.  How else are readers to understand what is being
said... through uninterpretable statistical tables?  I know some historians
believe archaeologists can't write anyway, so maybe that is their
conception.  And, to answer some previous posts on this topic, I believe
that even the greenest field tech needs to have good writing skills.  Too
often I have had to try to interpret field notes which don't even begin to
make sense.

I would say that CRM professionals, whether archaeologists or those in
other more narrow professional niches, often find the need to write far
broader contextual works than pure? historians are often required or are
even interested in doing.  Generalists have always been and always will be
the most important component within the CRM profession simply because, by
the very nature of the profession, they must have knowledge and skills in a
wide variety of areas.  Often, however, their knowledge is not detailed in
any one area.  Writing is the primary tool for those people to communicate,
as it is for archaeologists, historians, even architectural historians and
others in our wide spread field.

Within their limited realm, historians do very well, exceptionally well,
when they know how to write.  Just as in the archaeological field, I have
had to deal with bad and very bad writing from historians, just as from
archaeologists.  I have also had to deal with very narrow minded historians
who wouldn't consider even taking the time to read good narrative history
done by anyone other than a PhD degreed historian (maybe an MA would be
tolorable). There is no corner on the good writing market.  I too had my
papers running with red in graduate school and, I believe, finally learned
from it.

Mike Polk