Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now
This book of practical writing and publishing advice celebrates the creative, community-building pleasures of humanist expertise.

Humanities experts today are embattled. In a world of crises undermining higher education at every turn, what can still motivate humanists to write? Galvanizing, imaginative, and unrepentantly nerdy, Sarah Mesle’s Reasons and Feeling offers practical writing and publishing advice alongside a forcefully affirmative account of why humanities writing matters.

Mesle proposes that writing can help envision sustainable community, but only when we recognize that humanist authority comes from both our reasons and our feelings. Alongside everyday compositional advice—including strategies for addressing different audiences, pitching publications, and managing writing anxiety—readers will find an account of how such craft practices connect to both their intellectual commitments and their historical conditions. Mesle shows how university-trained writers at all levels benefit from embracing a broader range of styles and affects. Doing so helps them harness their writing’s community-building potential and makes them better able to value their own expertise, whether they write for the classroom, in public venues, or for the specialized scholarly communities that share their niche, weird, or beloved, objects of study.

Reasons and Feelings draws on Mesle’s expertise as a professor of writing and her work as an editor helping academics shift between writing for scholarly venues and journalistic ones. In a voice that’s honest, warm, accessible, and bracingly funny, Reasons and Feelings gives humanists a path toward bolder fantasies of the worlds their writing can make.
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Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now
This book of practical writing and publishing advice celebrates the creative, community-building pleasures of humanist expertise.

Humanities experts today are embattled. In a world of crises undermining higher education at every turn, what can still motivate humanists to write? Galvanizing, imaginative, and unrepentantly nerdy, Sarah Mesle’s Reasons and Feeling offers practical writing and publishing advice alongside a forcefully affirmative account of why humanities writing matters.

Mesle proposes that writing can help envision sustainable community, but only when we recognize that humanist authority comes from both our reasons and our feelings. Alongside everyday compositional advice—including strategies for addressing different audiences, pitching publications, and managing writing anxiety—readers will find an account of how such craft practices connect to both their intellectual commitments and their historical conditions. Mesle shows how university-trained writers at all levels benefit from embracing a broader range of styles and affects. Doing so helps them harness their writing’s community-building potential and makes them better able to value their own expertise, whether they write for the classroom, in public venues, or for the specialized scholarly communities that share their niche, weird, or beloved, objects of study.

Reasons and Feelings draws on Mesle’s expertise as a professor of writing and her work as an editor helping academics shift between writing for scholarly venues and journalistic ones. In a voice that’s honest, warm, accessible, and bracingly funny, Reasons and Feelings gives humanists a path toward bolder fantasies of the worlds their writing can make.
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Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now

Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now

by Sarah Mesle
Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now

Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now

by Sarah Mesle

Paperback(First Edition)

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Overview

This book of practical writing and publishing advice celebrates the creative, community-building pleasures of humanist expertise.

Humanities experts today are embattled. In a world of crises undermining higher education at every turn, what can still motivate humanists to write? Galvanizing, imaginative, and unrepentantly nerdy, Sarah Mesle’s Reasons and Feeling offers practical writing and publishing advice alongside a forcefully affirmative account of why humanities writing matters.

Mesle proposes that writing can help envision sustainable community, but only when we recognize that humanist authority comes from both our reasons and our feelings. Alongside everyday compositional advice—including strategies for addressing different audiences, pitching publications, and managing writing anxiety—readers will find an account of how such craft practices connect to both their intellectual commitments and their historical conditions. Mesle shows how university-trained writers at all levels benefit from embracing a broader range of styles and affects. Doing so helps them harness their writing’s community-building potential and makes them better able to value their own expertise, whether they write for the classroom, in public venues, or for the specialized scholarly communities that share their niche, weird, or beloved, objects of study.

Reasons and Feelings draws on Mesle’s expertise as a professor of writing and her work as an editor helping academics shift between writing for scholarly venues and journalistic ones. In a voice that’s honest, warm, accessible, and bracingly funny, Reasons and Feelings gives humanists a path toward bolder fantasies of the worlds their writing can make.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780226843629
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 10/20/2025
Series: Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing
Edition description: First Edition
Pages: 288
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Sarah Mesle is a professor of writing at the University of Southern California. The former senior humanities editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she  is also a regular contributor, Mesle is the founding coeditor of the LARB channel Avidly and the short-book series Avidly Reads. Mesle's writing has also appeared in venues ranging from Studies in American Fiction to InStyle to The New York Times Magazine.

Table of Contents

Preface: Who

Part One: Why
1. Reasons for Writing
2. Writing About Feelings
3. Some Feelings About Writing in Public; Some Reasons for a Counterpublic Humanities
4. “But Is It Any Good?”: Or, Some Feminist Questions About Academic Writing

Part Two: How
5. You Have to Practice
6. Who Is Your Girl and Where Is She Going?
7. You Write with Your Body, Which Keeps the Score
8. Pitches and Abstracts: Or, Some Ways of Building Worlds with Words
9. Know Your Noun
10. Arguments and Other Stories
11. The Subject of the Sentence
12. Give the Pull Quote
13. Burden of Proof
14. Red Rage
15. A Short Note About When We Don’t Need Your Thoughtful Essay
16. Critical Distance
17. Elements of Teaching Style
18. Elements of Teaching Style, Redux: Against the Thesis Statement
19. Small Acts of Finishing
20. Writing in Time
Coda: Hospitality

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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