Something New

A great blog, Research as a Second Language, proposes the following: If you know something, you can write a coherent prose paragraph (at least 6 sentences, at most 200 words) about it in 27 minutes. It then challenges the reader to spend exactly 27-minutes every day writing one paragraph about something she knows. “Do this at least once and at most six times on any given day. Always decide what you will write about the day before, which means articulating a relatively simple declarative sentence that says something you know to be true for every paragraph you’re going to write tomorrow.”

In this collection, I’ll try to meet that challenge. As a graduate student in Government, I do a lot of reading but not enough writing, until the end of the semester comes around (as it always does) and then I scramble to write coherent final papers. Here I’ll try to write more consistently, more concisely, and more creatively. The topics will mostly center on American history and government, but will sometimes meander into unknown worlds. So, tomorrow’s topic: “The Declaration of Independence is not the Constitution.”