Clear, Persuasive, Successful Writing: An Editor's View

What makes for good writing? How to make an idea or argument clear? What are style, voice, point of view—and how to develop them? Writers have one view to answering these questions; but perhaps more useful is how an editor thinks and responds to them. Hugh Eakin is an experienced editor who, over a decades-long career, has worked with celebrated writers, essayists, journalists, and critics at The New York Review of Books and Foreign Affairs. In this lunchtime, student-focused discussion with Joshua Yaffa, BCB's writer-in-residence, he will share his perspective on how writing can be made better, interesting ideas sharper, and prose more engaging and pleasurable. Come to hear the view of the "other side" of the writing equation: an editor who turns rough drafts into published articles.

Hugh Eakin is Editor at Large at Foreign Affairs magazine. Previously, he served as a contributing writer and senior editor at the New York Review of Books and founded NYR Daily, the Review’s online magazine. He is the author of Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America. He is currently a fellow at The American Academy in Berlin.

Joshua Yaffa is the Writer in Residence at Bard College Berlin. He is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and the author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia, which won the Orwell Prize in 2021.

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For more information, e-mail [email protected].

Time: 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm CET/GMT+1

Location: JJK Hall Café (W15)

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