Garreau imparts tips for academic writers

Joel Garreau, the Lincoln Professor of Law, Culture and Values and Director of The Prevail Project at the College of Law, recently participated in a panel, "Rethinking our Writing, Rewriting our Thinking," designed to help ASU faculty members bring their work to larger audiences.

A longtime editor of the opinion section at The Washington Post, Garreau said he and his colleagues knew immediately how to edit a submission from an academic.

"Before we even read it, we would go to his last paragraph and move it up to the top, because we knew that's where he'd buried his lede," he said.

Garreau, whose books include Edge City: Life on the New Frontier and Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies - and What It Means to Be Human, said he routinely writes about subjects where there is "a tall cliff between what the academic understands and my mother."

The workshop was presented by the Initiative for Innovative Inquiry, Hugh Downs School of Communication, Institute for Social Research, Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. To read the full story, click here.

Garreau, who joined the College in 2010, is a student of culture, values and change. He is a former longtime reporter and editor at The Washington Post, and principal of The Garreau Group, a network of sources committed to understanding who we are, how we got that way, and where we're headed. Garreau is a fellow at The New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., an affiliate of The Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at Oxford, a Science Journalism Laureate at Purdue University, and a member of the Global Business Network.

Janie Magruder, Jane.Magruder@asu.edu
(480) 727-9052
Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law