What’s different about ‘Writing on Fire’?
This book focuses squarely on writing for the humanities. The topic is surprisingly understudied: composition textbooks tend to focus on writing about social issues, while literature textbooks focus on how to read literature. After years of teaching college writing, I decided to create a textbook that I wished existed, one that speaks specifically to humanistic writing
A paper that analyzes a novel, a poem, a work of art, or a set of historical documents is its own unique genre. Writing on Fire proposes that this kind of analytical writing can be both logical and, yes, beautiful. When students learn to write these kinds of essays, they have the opportunity to express themselves and gain an empowering sense of voice.
Writing on Fire is designed to be useful. It’s a short, relatively inexpensive book that can accompany any themed humanities course. It’s meant to be assigned alongside your own curated reading list.
The book offers detailed advice on the fundamentals of paper-writing, with chapters on introductions, thesis statements, conclusions, and other key basics. There are plentiful examples and fun exercises to get students practicing in each chapter.
The book also includes short chapters on how to analyze humanistic subjects like novels, poetry, works of visual art, historical documents, and film. Each discipline is quickly summed up with definitions of basic terms and (again) multiple examples and exercises. The book is pitched to beginners. It speaks in a conversational tone to those who might not be familiar with literary or visual analysis.
Beyond the mechanics, however, the book also works at a higher level to argue for the value of humanistic thinking. In my experience, students often arrive at college looking for “the right answer.” They feel insecure and anxious, unsure how to produce that single correct truth that a professor must be looking for.
Yet in humanities classes, the book tries to explain, we study subjects where there is no single right answer. We analyze artworks that are complex and inherently ambiguous. We ponder morally gray areas with no clearcut conclusions. In our classes, students have to dig deep into their own philosophical beliefs and conceptions. For our assigned papers, each student in a class could potentially write a completely different essay, depending on their own unique worldview.
This version of knowledge is very different from what students encounter in other parts of campus. When we were discussing this idea in class a few years ago, one puzzled student, a science major, asked, “Why would anyone care about my personal perspective on something?” His other classes were training him to subordinate his personal self in the face of an established world of objective knowledge. To me, this comment epitomizes some of the dehumanizing strains of modern university teaching, as students take massive introductory courses that make them into small cogs in a giant learning machine.
In humanities classes, by contrast, students have the opportunity to become individuals—as exemplified by the kinds of papers they write. As the book notes, “You are a philosopher. Trust me! You are.” Writing on Fire celebrates humanistic writing for its subjective qualities. Beyond the utilitarian, our writing teaches students to value process as well as product. It trains students as critical thinkers and budding philosophers. Ultimately, humanistic writing can empower students to create vital forms of self-expression.
