Mark Rennella has given students and professionals helpful advice about writing throughout his career, most recently as a writing coach for MBA candidates at Harvard Business School. Mark earned a PhD in American history from Brandeis University and has taught literature and American history at Harvard University, the University of Miami, and the University of Tours (France). Mark's books, articles, business case studies, and collaborative writing endeavors have garnered him critical praise from historians, academicians, and business leaders alike. His concept of the “one-idea rule” was included among HBR.org’s ten favorite management tips for 2022 and was featured more recently in Forbes. He currently works as an editor for Harvard Business Publishing.
I wrote...
The One-Idea Rule: An Efficient Way to Improve Your Writing at School and Work
The One-Idea Rule is an answer to a question I posed to myself as a humanities instructor: “What is the best piece of writing advice I can share with students?” In the beginning of my teaching career in the 1980s, I hadn’t encountered a writing methodology that tended to the most prevalent problem I witnessed: a lack of focus. I devised the “one-idea rule” to fill that deficiency. The rule simply states that every component of a well-written document should express only one idea.
Readers respond very positively to focused arguments. We read to learn new things, but it’s hard to learn too many things at once. When writers truly understand this aspect of the one-idea rule, they can return to the rule with confidence to sustain and cultivate their own unique voices.
Joyce’s novel is the first of four literary works that helped me to envision myself as a writer. I read it in 11th grade.
The opening of the novel startles the reader because it uses language to depict the point of view of a baby’s first conscious thoughts, listening to a parent calling him by a nickname:
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face. He was baby tuckoo.
Joyce showed me that a written description like this wasn’t just trying to be a mirror of the world. A style of writing could also convey meaning and feeling. That was a revelation.
A masterpiece of modern fiction, James Joyce's semiautobiographical first novel follows Stephen Dedalus, a sensitive and creative youth who rebels against his family, his education, and his country by committing himself to the artist's life.
"I will not serve," vows Dedalus, "that in which I no longer believe...and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can." Likening himself to God, Dedalus notes that the artist "remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." Joyce's rendering of the impressions of…
I read Dickinson in high school and college. Her poetry impressed me with its unique ability to create powerful images and ideas with just a few words:
Our lives are Swiss— So still—so Cool— Till some odd afternoon The Alps neglect their Curtains And we look farther on!
Her power of imagination was astounding. For somebody who had lived most of her life in a very circumscribed context of the city limits of Amherst, Massachusetts, her poetry was expansive. She achieved amazing heights of artistry even though she was barely recognized during her time. Her poems are a monument to her belief in herself, which is the foundation of creating a compelling and persuasive voice in writing.
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), the reclusive and intensely private poet saw only a few of her poems (she wrote well over a thousand) published during her life. After discovering a trove of manuscripts left in a wooden box, Dickinson’s sister Lavinia, fortunately, chose to disobey Emily’s wishes for her work to be burned after death. With the help of Amherst professors, Lavinia brought her sister’s gifted verse into print. “The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson” brings together the first three series of her posthumous publications which debuted respectively in 1890, 1891, and 1896. It is here in this collection that we…
While writing a paper about Douglass in graduate school in the 1990s, I learned that he had to overcome two obstacles to establishing an authentic voice in his own book.
First, abolitionists argued against slavery by claiming it dehumanized the slave. While that could be true, this theory could not account for charismatic Black writers like Douglass who were anything but dehumanized. Second, slave narratives in the antebellum era often followed a certain formula that limited the narrator’s originality.
In one striking passage in the Narrative, Douglass overcomes both restrictions by evoking an image of his body that offers visual testimony to creatively push back on these limiting conventions: “My feet have been so cracked with the frost [felt during cold nights during enslavement], that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.”
Packaged in handsome and affordable trade editions, Clydesdale Classics is a new series of essential literary works. From the musings of literary geniuses like Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the striking personal narrative of Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, this new series is a comprehensive collection of our literary history through the words of the exceptional few.
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is perhaps the most widely read and well-known slave narrative. Originally published in 1845, the work was an instant success, selling more than 11,000 copies…
This long poem depicts the “prelude” – the influences from childhood – of William Wordsworth’s life as a poet. In other words, this literary biography explores the source of this poet’s unique voice. This poem was another exciting discovery made during my years as a graduate student.
There are many written works that explore the influence of a writer’s early life on the development of their unique poetic vision. A more recent example is a favorite of mine, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Living to Tell the Tale.
But, for me, Wordsworth stands out because of the incredible sustained poetic voice, vision, and rhythm of this piece, which he worked on and revised over his lifetime. I think the Two-Part Prelude of 1799 is better than the longer version of 1850. The Prelude of 1799 is long enough to take the reader to a new world, but short enough so the magic atmosphere evoked by the writing can be maintained through one sitting.
"The Prelude" is William Wordsworth's epic reflection on his lifetime journey as an artist and is widely considered to be one of his most significant works. First published in 1850 after the poet's death, Wordsworth began working on the blank verse poem in 1798 and continued modifying and expanding it for the rest of his life. Two earlier versions of the poem have been found and published, showing the evolution of this monumental work. A first version, called the "1799 Prelude", is the poem in its earliest and shortest stage. A second version, the "1805 Prelude", is much longer and…
This writing instruction book came to my aid as I began to teach writing at Harvard University in the late 1990s, when I was trying to help college students cultivate their own voice as writers.
The title was brilliant, surprising the reader that the subject was revision and not writing, per se. This focused on a fundamental truth, which is that good writing – whether it be fiction or non-fiction, artistic or professional – almost always goes through several revisions. Students often recoil at the idea of revisions because they threaten to burden them with more work.
What Murray underlined (and a point I’ve reiterated) is that revisions provide the opportunity to improve your work. The more that writers are comfortable with making revisions, the easier it will be to cultivate and improve their voices in their written work.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Donald M. Murray takes a lively and inspiring approach to writing and revision that does not condescend but invites students into the writer's studio.
When Lara was four years old, her father moved from Rochester, New York, to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of over 4,000 miles. She spent her childhood chasing after him, flying a quarter of the way around the world to tug at the hem of his jacket.
Now that he is in his eighties, she contemplates her obligation to an absentee father. The Truth About Unringing Phones is an exploration of responsibility and culpability told in experimental and fragmented essays.
When Lara was four years old, her father moved from Rochester, New York, to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of over 4,000 miles. She spent her childhood chasing after him, flying a quarter of the way around the world to tug at the hem of his jacket. Now that he is in his eighties, she contemplates her obligation to an absentee father.
The Truth About Unringing Phones: Essays on Yearning is an exploration of responsibility and culpability told in experimental and fragmented essays.
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