Friday, October 07, 2005

Friday

By the way, I intentionally left Harding out of my previous post. There aren't many Harding scholars, but they're an enthusiastic lot and rarely agree. If you really want to know more, let me know.

In the meanwhile, the presidental discussion made for a lovely distraction from the writing insanity of the week. Instead of focusing upon cranking out as much of a chapter as I could, I had to write all sorts of compressed power-word-driven summaries for the dean's office. (The dean has a very nice office and plenty of assistants - couldn't one of them read the diss and just tell the dean about it instead? I'd even buy the coffee.)

Another reason why #2 is such a great teacher: the comments on my latest introduction being with words such as "interesting" and "fascinating" before observing that page nine is "a tad dense." Whew!

Words Written: impossible to tally
Lessons Graded: twelve

3 comments:

torporindy said...

I am no presidential scholar, but whenever I hear Presidential corruption and possibly the worst President in history, the list always seems to begin with Harding. Do you disagree?

(of course, I like to think that GWB followed by Reagan are the two first in my lifetime)

lemming said...

Perhaps if Harding had served two terms I'd rank him closer to the very bottom. Serving only two years meant that his tendency to give jobs to people because they were political supporters rather than based upon experience or competance led to only a few scandals.

(delicate cough)

Joe said...

Not that I'd ever claim that a software tool can do the work of an actual author, but...

It's surprising to me how well the "Executive Summary" button works in Word 2004. I've never tried it on anything book-length, of course, but it seems to do a remarkable job of pulling out the main concepts in a moderately long document.

Assuming it's written, of course. ;-)