About me
I am a writer and scholar with a longstanding interest in the English language: how it accumulated its strange, layered lexicon, how writers have used it with precision or abandon, and what prose style can tell us about writers and readers alike.
My work begins, usually, with a single word or sentence. From there it tends to move outward, into etymology, literary history, close reading, and whatever else the word or sentence happens to pull in. I have published widely in academic journals on language and rhetoric, and I have a book forthcoming on usage and style.
On this Substack I write about contemporary fiction, older works I am reading or rereading, and questions of language and usage that seem worth thinking through in public. The posts range in length and ambition, but the animating interest is consistent: I want to understand how English prose works, and why some of it works better than the rest.
