Reading, Writing, and Teaching, Oh My!!

For any historian, male or female, reading, writing and teaching make up the bulk of our day to day work responsibilities.  On my agenda today: finish reading a book on female evangelicals in the nineteenth century, write a book review about, finish reading an article, write three questions and answers about that, and prepare for my class tomorrow.  I cannot complain, however, as I am one of the lucky ones with days off in between these projects.  When I hear college history majors describe their personal loathing for writing papers (usually only 5-10 pages long) I wonder if they should consider switching professional aspirations.  After all, reading and writing is what we do for a living, and you better damn well like it or life is not going to be rosy.  I have been reading and writing since I was a small child, the only thing that has changed is specifically what I was reading or writing about.  Books have always been an important part of my life, after all, nothing relaxes me like a day wandering around the isles of Barnes and Noble and nothing frightens me like the possibility of one day having to order all my books from the internet.  Recently, my mother wrote a book and is in the process of publishing said book right now.  It's called The Gospel According to Mamma and it describes a variety of life lessons she learned from her mother.  The book is fantastic and I am so proud of my mother for achieving this personal and professional goal.  Her book will be sold at amazon, barnes and noble and apple ibooks first as an ebook and then....who knows!!  I certainly wish her the best of luck as she is a wonderful writer!

My mother and boyfriend both have one thing in common that is not my strong suite - editing.  That is not to say that I am incapable of editing papers or books, but research is my strong point and I am also all about completing projects.  I think that is why I find editing so tedious.  After all, it is incredibly time consuming and nit-picky.  However, I am incredibly grateful that two of the people closest to me are masters at editing because they are both more than happy to help me with my papers.  Recently, my boyfriend edited a paper I am presenting at a conference (another requirement of historians) and I must admit, he made it better.  Together he and I are the perfect historian: I love to research projects and have the self-discipline to finish them in a timely fashion and he has the technical skill to make them perfect.  Thus, together we kick some historical butt :)