Novelist, essayist, and literary scholar Kumar (English/Vassar Univ.; Immigrant, Montana, 2018, and so on.) affords a handbook on model and kind that’s concurrently elegant and sensible. Admiring “recent, provocative, unpredictable texts,” the writer is dismayed by what Toni Morrison known as “the proud however calcified language of the academy.” As fiction author David Means noticed, “a lot educational writing appears sealed up and airtight and uninspired, shorn away from a love of topic.” Tutorial writers, Kumar asserts, work in a “tradition of oppression,” wherein they attempt to suit into “the prevailing codes”—scholarly jargon—of their discipline to be able to publish the articles and books that may earn them tenure. As a graduate pupil, he admits that he, too, tried mightily to emulate his lecturers “and wrote sentences whose texture was inevitably thicker than cement.” Dissatisfied with the standard of his work, he despaired of ever attracting readers: “Couldn’t our analyses change into extra exuberant, imaginative, and even playful?” Kumar agrees with different writing guides—Strunk and White’s for one—that advocate readability and conciseness, however he is aware of that the admonition to “discover your voice” may be complicated. “Maybe specificity is what brings us nearer to the thought of voice, which I feel is one other phrase for distinctiveness.” Voice, in any case, “relies on the query you might be asking” and the “zones of expertise” from which a author is drawing. Kumar appends his slim handbook with 10 habits he recommends to his college students, together with setting a every day objective of no less than 150 phrases, turning off the web, ensuring to train, preserving a bookshelf of a number of volumes to show to as guides in “the important matter of technique or model,” and ending one challenge earlier than taking on one other. He shares recommendation about craft from many writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, all of whom attempt to “convey delight.” In that intention, Kumar amply succeeds.
