"On Writing American Studies"
by
Richard P. Horwitz

A version of this essay originally appeared in "Writing American Studies," ed. Simon J. Bronner
 Encyclopedia of American Studies, EAS Forum 5 (American Studies Association, 2014)
 

Thousands of writers have been cranking out term papers, exams, syllabi, theses, articles, and books “in American Studies” for decades in many places.  They have produced a heap of verbiage about a staggering array of subjects.  But their way of writing American Studies - the rhetoric, principles of composition, lingo and style - has been more limited, maybe enough to peg or parody.  Even in resisting the temptation, I think it is fair to say that “American studies people” have usually addressed their subject in the manner that dominates print in the “regular discipline” that supposedly owns it (e.g., English when the subject is a novel; History when it is the causes of the Civil War, Political Science when it is an election, Sociology when it is demographics, Economics when it is money, and so on) .

In fact, such propriety is often required.  How do you expect to earn a degree, get a job, or get published if you do not write as “the experts” do?  Instructors, examiners, colleagues, deans, and editors insist that to be “publishable” or “count” our prose must dress appropriately, in thoroughly scholarly garb (harrumph!) according to conventions in one of those “regular” departments with a corner on “General Education Requirements.” 

Whatever else it does, the prose should exude enough “seriousness” to maintain distance from anything on Facebook or a conversation that might be overheard in Whole Foods or Dunkin’ Donuts.  For a half-century, for example, most of the articles published in American Quarterly could just as easily have appeared in the PMLA or Journal of American History(I’ll ever remember a rejection letter from the AQ, asserting, with undeconstructed confidence, “Scholarly articles are not written in the first person.”).

That standard has, no doubt, served a lot of people well, but I have long wished that American Studies writing were different.  Scratch that:  I mean, better.  American Studies pages could be more welcoming or stirring for people to read, even without academic articles of faith, at least closer to The New Yorker or Mother Jones than PMLA.  I have done my best (well, such as it was at the time) to write better. 

Here I just want to recommend a resource or two that I have found useful in trying to improve, if not the field, at least my own writing for it.  Some of those resources are, no doubt, common fare.  It obviously helps to read a lot of all sorts of things, and it helps to do know what you’re writing about from many angles.  In American Studies, I would hope that those angles would be distinctly varied, better outlandish than boring.  That is among the reasons that I so cheer on Americanists who flutter as far as possible from disciplinary nests.

Generally, though for me, most gains in writing have come in practicing it as a craft, more like welding or weaving than flying.  Support for this sleeves-rolled-up approach to wordsmithery (versus, say, “self-expression,” “problematizing,” or “theorizing”) came most to me in K-12 lessons that I gather are now laughably out-of-style.  Believe it or not, I still find great value in “rules” of grammar and vocabulary that I learned in foreign-language classes and in diagramming sentences back before Drivers Ed. 

The “rules” can actually be liberating, help in generating ever more varied ways of voicing a cockamamie hunch.  As in: 

*  Couldn’t that sentence be simpler?  
*  Try changing it from passive to active voice or a transitive structure; 
*  If a noun or a verb seems to need a modifier, how about finding one that doesn’t?  
*  Maybe that independent clause would work better as a sentence of its own? 

And so on.

If you can get past the old-fart scent of this advice, I’d urge you to just try it and see.  Writing can become something like doodling, cobbling words, sentences, paragraphs together to see where they lead.  It becomes not so much a way of expressing a formed thought as letting wordplay form it for you.  Splashing in the verbal stream that happens to flow by can make a hunch more buoyant, simpler or more complex, more obviously worth saying or better left unsaid. 

The greatest improvement seems to come in aiming to write as someone else, maybe best someone who is apt to disagree with “the real me” or who poses a mystery.  I benefited from a bit of early, formal training in this pursuit through studies of Observational Cinema, Literary Journalism, their analogues and its forbearers.  I well recall, too, a workshop in something like “How to Forge Historical Documents” that I took with John Caughey at Penn more than forty years ago. 

The most practical help, I think, came and still comes through routine grunt work in ethnographic fieldwork.  In particular, even when I had the help of a research assistant (thank you!), I have insisted on sitting down with a playback machine and a word processor, perfecting word-for-word full transcriptions of interviews and ordinary speech recorded in the field.  The process itself can be terribly tedious, but it forces a writer literally to write as someone else.  It is not just a matter of getting in the right frame of mind but actually committing it to writing. 

Furthermore, I have always insisted on verifying that speakers themselves approve my “direct quotations,” which are necessarily, in fact, not only brutally excerpted but also heavily edited from those raw transcripts.  I am pleased to report that, after having followed this protocol for more than thirty years with hundreds of people, not one person has ever claimed, “I didn’t” or “I wouldn’t say such a thing,” even though I know that they literally didn’t.  In other words, they successfully taught me to write in a voice that truly belonged to them.  I had to pass their test, and it is one that I urge others to take in improving the way they represent their subjects.  Among my highest hopes for better ways of writing American Studies is that other voices have a better chance of shining through.

Note:  for some background on this ethnographic approach to writing American Studies, see "Just Stories of Ethnographic Authority," in When They Read What We Write: The Politics of Ethnography, ed. Caroline B. Brettell (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1993), pp. 31-43. 

Updated: April 2026
E-mail: Richard-Horwitz@uiowa.edu