Writing

Writers who use OpenOffice.org and need to comply with Turabian’s Manual for Writers(7th ed.) may find this template helpful in cutting out some of the grunt work involved in setting up a Turabian-style paper in OpenOffice.org. Suggestions for improving this template are, of course, very welcome.

The SBLHS blog has a helpful discussion on the use of “and” or “but” at the start of a sentence. And they are permissible. But one should use them sparingly.

For the full and very helpful post, please see the SBLHS blog.

In a recent First Things essay, Peter Leithart shares a transparent and good-humored five-stage taxonomy for writing a non-fiction book. Although some elements are tongue-in-cheek, the normalcy of the kinds of feelings about the process as it progresses should be encouraging to those of us with much less writing under our belts.

HT: theLAB

According to SBL Handbook of Style, 2nd ed., §§1, 3, 4.3.6, supports the use of “ibid.” From those descriptions, conventions look to be the same as for the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed., §14.29.

As an easy (and free) reference for students, SBL also provides a Student Supplement to the SBLHS.  One of the courses I’ve been teaching has a comparatively heavier emphasis on getting to know the nuts-and-bolts of SBL style. And a keen-eyed student, pointed out that page 4 of the Student Supplement has consecutively numbered footnotes 78 and 79. Both notes are for the same source, but the second (note 79) does not use the “ibid.” notation.

There are a pair of references in Cranfield’s ( affiliate disclosure) and Moo’s ( affiliate disclosure) Romans commentaries to comments by Ambrosiaster about the origin of the Christian community in Rome, and I’ve been curious to give this reference a look. Both authors cite the reference as found in J.-P. Migne’s Patrologia latina, vol. 17, col. 46 (Cranfield, xiii, 17n2; Moo, 4n7).

My go-to index for online PDFs from Migne’s Greek or Latin patrologies is Documenta Catholica Omnia. The index for PL, vol. 17, indicates that cols. 45-184A are Ambrosiaster’s commentary on Romans. Clicking through to the archived PDF, however, I noticed the first column in the document was col. 47. The Latin quotation as excerpted by Cranfield occurs in col. 48 (not 46, per Cranfield’s and Moo’s citations).

In How to Write a Lot ( affiliate disclosure), Paul Silvia provides his own progress monitoring system as an example (39–45). Since finishing the book last month, I have been adapting Silvia’s database format to a Google Docs spreadsheet that will track some additional data in addition to the data that he finds helpful. Since it has been helpful thus far, I thought I would make it available with some sample data.

SBL Press has some helpful clarifications about citations in the footnote-bibliography, or traditional, style.

Microsoft Word ties footnote anchors in the main text and footnote numbers at the start of footnotes to the same style. Consequently, it’s difficult to get full-height footnote numbers followed by a period (cf. Chicago Manual of Style, SBL Handbook of style).

The process for getting this result discussed at Word MVPs does not seem to work in Word v16. But Word’s InsertFootnoteNow function can be intercepted to add the following macro commands to produce this result:

Similar to rollApp, which debuted earlier this year, InstallFree is offering a no-cost web-based version of LibreOffice that can be run inside a browser and that integrate with various online storage platforms like Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive. For free, users can also use InstallFree’s Microsoft Office application to view Microsoft Office file formats with full fidelity. Native editing privileges for Microsoft Office formats are available in InstallFree, after the initial 60-day trial, starting at $4.99 per month or $49.99 per year for academic users. For more information about InstallFree, please see the videos below or visit the website.

From the Document Foundation Blog:

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.5.4, the fifth version of the free office suite’s 3.5 family. LibreOffice 3.5.4 offers significant performance improvements over the previous versions of the product, which are the combined result of the many code optimizations executed during the last months and the bug and regression chasing activity performed regularly by volunteers and developers. As a result, LibreOffice 3.5.4 is the fastest version of the best free office suite ever, with up to 100% performance gains when opening large files (depending on operating system, hardware configuration and file contents).

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For iOS users, rollApp has now graduated into public Beta and is offering iOS-compatible versions of OpenOffice.org (now Apache OpenOffice) and LibreOffice. The LibreOffice app seems to have a bit of difficulty opening files stored on Dropbox, but my own tests thus far with the OpenOffice.org app seem to have worked quite well. Although these apps run entirely on rollApp’s servers, and so require a fairly decent Internet connection to function, they do offer extended support for additional file formats (like ODT) not natively readable in iOS.

It seems like I’ve seen the site before, but Gideon Burton at Brigham Young University has digested a good deal of information about classical and Renaissance rhetoric at Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric. The site “is intended to help beginners, as well as experts, make sense of rhetoric, both on the small scale (definitions and examples of specific terms) and on the large scale (the purposes of rhetoric, the patterns into which it has fallen historically as it has been taught and practiced for 2000+ years).”

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Apparently, recent versions of LibreOffice have a slightly different defaults for what nonprinting characters will display in a document. Instructions for customizing these settings are available here.

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Now at number 8 on the list of Amazon’s top 100 free Kindle books is Anne Stilman’s Grammatically Correct: The Essential Guide to Spelling, Style, Usage, Grammar, and Punctuation (2nd ed.; Writers Digest, 2010). According to the publisher, “this guide covers four essential aspects of good writing:

• Individual words - spelling variations, hyphenation, frequently confused homonyms, frequently misused words and phrases, irregular plurals and negatives, and uses of miscapitalization and type style to add special meanings
• Punctuation - the role of each mark in achieving clarity and affecting tone, and demonstration of how misuses can lead to ambiguity.
• Syntax and structure - agreement of subject and verb, parallel construction, modifiers, tenses, pronouns, active versus passive voice, and more
• Style - advice on the less hard-and-fast areas of clarity and tone, including conciseness, simplification, reading level, jargon and cliches, and subtlety”

Also, now at number 12 among Amazon’s top free Kindle books is Robert Masello’s Robert’s Rules of Writing: 101 Unconventional Lessons Every Writer Needs to Know (Writers Digest, 2011). According to the publisher, Masello provides “101 pithy writing lessons that help you improve your work, save time, and increase productivity.”

Yesterday, Tyndale Tech released the following series of helpful posts:

• Writing a Book or Thesis
• Research You Can Re-search
• Surviving the Death of Your Hard Drive
• Writing Greek and Hebrew on a Computer
• Translating Online
• Finding and Reading Online Books and Periodicals

Just a bit ago, on the Document Foundation’s listserv, the following press release came out:

“The Document Foundation is about documents and the associated software is pivotal to create, exchange, modify, share and print documents”, says Thorsten Behrens, a software developer and a member of TDF Steering Committee. “LibreOffice 3.3 is the first flavour of this long term strategy, but the journey has just begun, and the enormous advantages of our developer-embracing environment are not yet fully reflected in the upcoming software release”.

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The 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style is, however, now available. Among other updates, this edition boasts Chicago’s first explicit guidelines for citing Kindle editions and publications (§§14.166; A.38). Although I have yet to be able to examine this new edition first-hand, on a cursory perusal, these guidelines appear mainly to be an additional application of the instructions for citing electronic books in Chicago’s 15th edition (§§17.142–47). More information on this new edition of Chicago is available at Chicago Manual of Style Online.

This week in the biblioblogosphere:

• Mark Goodacre finds and makes available a PDF version of Wilhelm Wrede’s Paul.
• Daniel and Tonya draw attention to Alex Andrason’s recent article on the use of yiqtol in Biblical Hebrew (via Uri Hurwitz) and Randall Buth’s response to the article.
• Via Ekaterini Tsalampouni, Holger Szesnat mentions the availability of the new Journal of Ancient Judaism.
• Christian Askeland notes the availability of a stable, Unicode-compliant Coptic font.
• At BioLogos, Peter Enns interviews N. T. Wright about Jesus’ humanity.
• Kirk Lowery ponders current developments in the peer review process for scholarly publications.
• Scot McKnight prepares his readers for a change of blogging address.
• Larry Hurtado uploads an essay on Martin Hengel’s impact on English-speaking, New Testament scholarship.
• Charles Halton considers cartographic hermeneutics and some of their implications for readers of biblical texts.

This week in the blogosphere:

• James McGrath helpfully notes that John Byron, Associate Professor of New Testament at Ashland Theological Seminary, is now blogging at The Biblical World.
• Sadly, Gerald Hawthorne passes away (HT: John Byron).
• Helen Bond discusses the composition of the Sanhedrin in first-century Palestine.
• Trevor provides a good summary of a variety of different ways to add records to Zotero.
• Happy Dissertating suggests priming the writing pump as necessary via 750 Words. Based on what the site provides, it looks like a fully private blog could also be used in much the same way, but particularly for those who would prefer not to need to ensure for themselves that all their privacy settings are correct or who might enjoy some of the other features that 750 Words offers, the site may be worth a look.
• Pat McCullough begins a bibliography of resources about the application of Social Identity Theory to biblical studies and invites suggestions for additions.

This week in the blogosphere:

• Baker acquires Hendrickson’s academic arm (HT: Nijay Gupta and Rod Decker).
• Larry Hurtado rightfully lauds and recommends careful attention to Harry Gable’s Books and Readers in the Early Church.
• Cynthia Nielsen continues her discussion of interconnections between Joerg Rieger and Frederick Douglass with a post about duality in identity construction.
• Michael Halcomb has a new website specifically dedicated to Getting (Theological) Languages.
• Kirk Lowery returns to the biblioblogosphere after a hiatus for the development of the Groves Center as an independent research unit. I had the privilege of doing an Aramaic and a Hebrew Bible text-linguistics seminar under Kirk and am again looking forward to seeing what shows up on his “scratchpad.”
• Happy Dissertating suggests PhD2Published as a potentially valuable resource for new PhD graduates in humanities disciplines.
• James McGrath spots several video recordings of presentations at this past year’s annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion.
• Michael Bird starts reading a recent biography of Ernst Käsemann and reproduces several, brief quotations from Käsemann that are, as one might expect, particularly insightful.
• Todd Bolen reports a recent spectrometric analysis that suggests a Jerusalem origin for a newly discovered cuneiform tablet.
• Ken Schenck discusses the reading of biblical literature as Christian scripture.
• Brian LePort discusses the relationship between scripture and tradition in view of the Trinitarian-Oneness debate. On this relationship, our Writing Center director at Southeastern recently brought to my attention F. F. Bruce’s edited volume, Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition. I have yet really to peruse it, and the book is scarcely findable in print at this point. Still, it does look like a very interesting volume, and much of it is available through Google Books.
• Google and Verizon propose, regarding Net Neutrality,“that ‘wireline broadband providers [sh]ould not be able to discriminate against or prioritize lawful Internet content, applications or services in a way that causes harm to users or competition’, but broadband providers [sh]ould be able to offer ‘additional, differentiated online services’.”
• Chris Brady shares some of his conclusions from his recent International Organization for Targumic Studies presentation about Boaz in Targum Ruth.

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Over at To Do: Dissertation, one of the authors provides a list of aids that dissertation writers may find helpful. Second on this list is Paul Silvia’s book How to Write a Lot, which has proven particularly helpful to me as well. The book really is worth its purchase price for the number of practical thoughts that it includes that may help the writing process go more smoothly.

Presuppositions that remain unacknowledged at least to oneself can still exercise strong influence. Indeed,

[a] person who believes he is free of prejudices, relying on the objectivity of his procedures and denying that he is himself conditioned by historical circumstances, experiences the power of the prejudices that unconsciously dominate him as a vis a tergo. A person who does not admit that he is dominated by prejudices will fail to see what manifests itself by their light [because it will not be foregrounded from them] (Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2006, 354 and Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2013, 369).

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The Theological Writing Handout has been updated. For the minor changes since the previously announced update, please see the 0.8.1 to 0.8.2, 0.8.2 to 0.8.3, and 0.8.3 to 0.8.4 change logs. The current version can be viewed and downloaded below or from Scribd.

[scribd id=15866483 key=key-20poma272lcpzlvx7mlj]

The Theological Writing Handout has been updated. The major change from 0.7 (beta) to 0.8 (beta) is the addition of example insets for each type of source that the handout mentions (see §32.11). The most recent version, 0.8.1 (beta), contains some minor, pagination changes in comparison with version 0.8. For fuller details on the changes made since version 0.7, please see the 0.7 to 0.8 and the 0.8 to 0.8.1 change logs.

Steve Runge has posted a fantastic essay on “The Bane of Dismissive Scholarship.” Among his most poignant statements are the following:

[T]he literature review and preparation for writing the paper. . . . is where I should be adding to my already profound arsenal of Knowledge, filling my cup til it runneth over. Realistically, I feel like many use this stage to fill their quiver with barbs that they will launch at other scholars. Why? Because some folks seem more interested in being right than in getting it right. . . . The specific issue that has got me in a tizzy is folks getting it mostly right, but being dismissed because of the portion that is lacking. To put it another way, instead of remodeling the missing element of the structure, they demo the whole thing so that THEY can be the builder, THEY can save the day. . . . It behooves me in writing my paper to stop and ask what my objective is: to be right or to get it right? If I am claiming something that no one else has ever claimed before, I have good reason to fear. If I am claiming something that represents the core idea the grammarians have expressed for over a century and I can build on or clarify that argument, there is a far greater chance of getting things right. It is a win-win: in getting it right, I get to be right (Runge, “Dismissive Scholarship”; italics and capitalization original).

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Although it certainly can be used otherwise, a progress tracking system like the one Paul Silvia suggests in his book How to Write a Lot seems to work best for writing that can be open ended: by following a regular writing schedule, projects can regularly and reliably come to completion. What happens, however, if one is working under a deadline (be it self-imposed or not) and, therefore, needs to develop a writing schedule backwards from this due date?

Paul J. Silvia teaches psychology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. In
How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing, Silvia chiefly pleads with his readers to set aside specific, regular blocks of time for writing and to adhere steadfastly to this schedule ( 16–17). “The secret,” he says, “is the regularity, not the number of days or the number of hours [allotted for writing]” ( 13). Silvia argues that observing such a regular writing schedule will allow an author to produce better material more efficiently ( 1). “More efficiently” does not, of course, necessarily indicate that all academics should publish a large quantity of material; those whose interests lie elsewhere can still use a regular writing schedule to produce the quantity of literature that they wish. Thus, Silvia suggests that a more accurate title for the volume would be How to Write More Productively During the Normal Work Week with Less Anxiety and Guilt, but he humorously recognizes that such a title may well have inhibited book sales ( 130).

In preparing for another revision of the Theological Writing Handout, I am rereading William Strunk and E. B. White’s little classic, The Elements of Style. The fourth edition contains a forward by Roger Angell, White’s stepson, where Angell recalls the following pattern of behavior from his stepfather:

Each Tuesday morning, he would close his study door and sit down to write the “Notes and Comment” page for The New Yorker. The task was familiar to him—he was required to file a few hundred words of editorial or personal commentary on some topic in or out of the news that week—but the sounds of his typewriter from his room came in hesitant bursts, with long silences in between. Hours went by. . . . When the copy went off at last, in the afternoon RFD [Rural Free Delivery] pouch—we were in Main, a day’s mail away from New York—he rarely seemed satisfied. “It isn’t good enough,” he said sometimes. “I wish it were better” ( ix).

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The next revision of the Theological Writing Handout is now available, and it can be previewed and downloaded below. As always, comments identifying errors or suggesting improvements are welcome. For anyone who may be interested, a change log from the previous version (0.4.1) is also available.

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Scott Crider teaches in the English Department at the University of Dallas. His book, The Office of Assertion: An Art of Rhetoric for the Academic Essay ( affiliate disclosure), is intended to provide an introduction to “the classical art of rhetoric and composition” (xi). While providing this introduction, Crider specifically seeks to argue that rhetoric is, as a liberal art, a noble pursuit and to improve the readers ability to write academic prose (2).