Entries by Wayne Jones

Bulbous Writing

You could say there are four different kinds or qualities of writing: bad writing in which no care is given to the choice of words or the basics of grammar and syntax, and so it is a disorganized mess in which it is hard to figure out what the writer is trying to say good, […]

Bad Writing in Belated Support of a Good Dictionary

Samuel Johnson is a relatively obscure figure for most people, but there are a few facts about him that – if they know anything about him at all – people are likely to know. One is that he’s somehow associated with James Boswell, and that’s certainly true. A lot of readers know Johnson only through […]

The State of Sam

A lot of the people I follow on Twitter are academics, and mostly academics who specialize in 18th-century British literature. These are highly qualified and credentialed people, well educated, most of them with PhD’s, and who not only teach and research, but also do service work for their universities (serving on committees) or administrative work […]

The Real and the Unrevealed: Biography, Truth, and Sam Johnson

Sam Johnson was knowledgeable about the purpose and value of biography partly because he wrote a lot of it himself during the course of a life during which he wrote in many different genres. Perhaps his two most notable, or at least famous, biographical works provide an interesting contrast because one was about a friend […]

Academic Writing Month

Well, academic writing month came and went – AcWriMo, as folks call it – and alas I didn’t get much writing done as I was working on a freelance editing project that took a lot of time. In fact, November was even the first month during which I did not do at least one posting […]

Nabokov, Shakespeare, and Johnson

I started reading Pale Fire the other day because I was finding that for whatever reason, the time I spent reading during any day was very little. Often nothing. Part of the issue may be that we are as a planet in the as-yet uncontrolled midst of a global pandemic, and that the country that […]

Sam and Greg and September

For the past ten years or so I have been involved in two writing projects. Both are biographies. One of course is the one I am writing about Samuel Johnson and to which most of the posts on this blog are dedicated. This September 18 marks the 311th anniversary of his birth. I have the […]

Eggs and Ideas

My tastes in literature and my opinions about it developed in a series of working class houses headed by my mother, a single mom who worked as a waitress and sometimes the bakery salesperson at Woolworth’s. She exercised absolutely no checks or restrictions on what I read. This doesn’t mean that I spent my time […]

Horology and the 18th Century

One of the people I’ve interviewed for my book is Robert St-Louis, who studies horology (clock- and watch-making) and has done extensive research on the 18th-century French watch-maker, André-Charles Caron, among other topics. These are short extracts from a wide-ranging telephone interview I did with Robert on October 17, 2019. Robert St-Louis developed an interest […]