Revision, I’ve been told again and again, is the key to effective writing. Yet sometimes I find myself making an essay or chapter worse when I revise it. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
Language is often said to be most memorable when it is aspirational and inspirational, capturing a momentous event in history. If you are asked to give an example, you may respond by quoting John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you,” Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream,” or Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” These iconic quotes are important ones for their attention to rhetorical devices and their ability to call others to action or bring calm to a crisis. I’m sure you can think of other examples.
However, I’m convinced that there is more to memorable language than inspirational speeches. I suspect that each of us has a mental list of words and phrases that have stuck in our heads and that power our own rhetoric. These are bits of language that we marveled at when we first encountered them and which pop back into our heads when we are striving for eloquence, drama, or wit. Memorable language can be a description, a clever lead-in, or an unusual word or phrase. Here are a few that are stuck in my head.
Years ago, I read a piece on the chemistry of flavors by the writer Raffi Khatchadourian in which he described a young scientist’s office by saying, “Her office resembles a walk-in high-school locker, if such a thing existed.” The first line about the walk-in locker organized all the rest of the description. By first inviting us to imagine something that doesn’t exist, he opened us up to the details that followed.
A memorable phrasing can also change the way we see a text. When I read Louis Menand’s 2002 article “Cat People,” I encountered his take that The Cat in the Hat turns on “the trope of the mater abscondita.” That phrase—the concealed mother—turned the story upside down. I could no longer think of Sally and her brother without wondering where the mother went and why.
Sometimes a memorable line can be a single non-standard usage. A mentor of mine once told me that it was important to have warmth, but that one also needed “coolth.” He didn’t explain, but it was clear to me that the expression referred to a Rudyard Kipling-like composure when things were spinning out of control. I reach for my inner coolth when things get hairy. And the originality of that expression led me to think about other word contrasts. I once described someone as not only possessing gravitas but levitas as well. It was a faux Latin word intended to capture the fact that the person in question was serious but not serious to a fault.
A description can also change the way you think of someone. Reading an obituary of the chess champion Boris Spassky, I came across just such a phrase. Spassky was known to have an imperturbable playing demeanor. The usual way to describe Spassky’s coolth under pressure would be with the term “poker face.” But chess is not poker, so something more evocative was needed. Tigran Petrosian, the player Spassky defeated in 1969, described Spassky’s demeanor as a “theatrical calm,” and Spassky himself called it his “clown’s face.” Replacing the commonplace gambling image with the operatic one created a powerful new mental image for me. I felt that I understood Spassky better.
What about you? As you think of your own reading and writing, what memorable lines have shaped your prose?
Rock ’n’ roll arrived in the early 1950s and was the sound of a new era. It was loud, brash, young, and from the beginning, it was more than just a style of music: it was a symbol of change, rebellion, and all kinds of freedom—from social conventions, from racial segregation, from traditional gender roles, and from previous standards of musical professionalism. It was often rough and amateurish, and a lot of people thought it was just a passing fad. But by 1958, when Danny and the Juniors sang “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay,” it was firmly ruling the US pop charts and traveling around the world.
The first wave of rock ’n’ roll was overwhelmingly made by Black performers—big-band shouters, smooth balladeers, gospel-trained vocal groups, and honking saxophone players. It was originally called “rhythm and blues,” but by the mid-1950s radio deejays were courting a new audience of white teenagers and gave it a new name. White singers and musicians began copying their Black peers, then developed new sounds by mixing in country and pop flavors, creating new styles like “rockabilly.”
By the 1960s, a lot of Black artists were going for a different sound, playing more complicated rhythms and singing with more gospel flavor—an evolution that would eventually be dubbed “soul.” The twist put an end to the old partner dances, and a wave of “girl groups” asserted a new kind of feminine power. By the middle of the decade, the British Invasion and Bob Dylan were adding poetic lyrics and experimenting with all kinds of instruments and fusions, turning the teen dance style into the voice of young adults. Rock ’n’ roll had evolved into rock, but the old name and music remained a touchstone of youthful, rebellious energy.
This playlist traces the evolution of rock ’n’ roll through 20 landmark recordings. Rather than simply collecting the biggest hits, it highlights songs that changed the course of popular music, whether by introducing a new sound, defining a style, launching a movement, or influencing generations of artists. From early rhythm & blues pioneers to the British Invasion and Bob Dylan’s poetic reinvention of rock, each track marks a key moment in the genre’s development. I’ve highlighted 8 specific songs that were firsts, breakthroughs, and lasting influences that became turning points in the genre’s evolution from its rhythm and blues roots to the dawn of modern rock.
1. “Sixty Minute Man” by The Dominoes
One of the first modern R&B hits to cross over to the pop top 20, “Sixty Minute Man” is a vocal group classic with a sexy theme that got it widely banned, as the bass singer promised to “rock ’em, roll ’em, all night long.” The Dominoes’ lead singer, Clyde McPhatter, went on to form the Drifters and was a key figure in bringing gospel arrangements and vocal techniques to the pop scene.
2. “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley & His Comets
Rock ’n’ roll reached much of the world in movies. “Rock Around the Clock” was a minor hit when it was first released, but when it appeared under the credits of Blackboard Jungle, it created a worldwide association of the new music with youthful rebellion. Kids danced in the aisles, rioted in the streets, and turned Bill Haley into the first international rock ’n’ roll star.
3. “Tutti Frutti” by Little Richard
Little Richard started out as a blues-singing female impersonator. He blended flamboyant costumes and a sky-high pompadour with a pounding piano and a raw gospel shout. “Tutti Frutti” started as an explicit song about gay male sex, but got cleaned up in the studio and became a national hit. Richard’s original was briefly overshadowed by a weak white cover from Pat Boone, but he followed with a string of songs that established him as the wildest rocker of them all.
4. “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley
Elvis was controversial for sounding too Black, and also for being too white—but that racial ambiguity made him the ultimate harbinger of the rock ’n’ roll trend, as well as a movie star and an enduring cultural icon. He got his first hits on the small Sun label out of Memphis, then switched to RCA, and “Heartbreak Hotel” topped the pop and country charts and made it to #3 for R&B.
5. “Mr. Lee” by The Bobbettes
Written by a group of Black teenagers about their English teacher, “Mr. Lee” was perky, rocking, and signaled a new style of female teen camaraderie. The Bobbettes never equaled its success, but they set a pattern that would be followed in the early 1960s by a wave of dynamic “girl groups.”
6. “Shout” by the Isley Brothers
Clide McPhatter and Ray Charles had brought gospel vocal styles into the pop mainstream, but “Shout” was more than just singing—it had the ferocious polyrhythmic passion of a Pentecostal service and got dancers moving in new, exciting ways. It was not a major chart hit, but became a ubiquitous teen band favorite and harbinger of the new “soul” style.
7. “Walk, Don’t Run” by the Ventures
Where earlier rock ’n’ roll had tended to give the solos to saxophones and pianos, the Ventures defined a line-up of lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass guitar, and drums, and brought the “surf” style to the world. Their instrumental hits ranged from blues to jazz, pop, Latin, and exotica, and they were imitated by young bands from Argentina to Singapore.
8. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” by The Beatles
The Beatles’ first US #1 hit combined the Ventures’ guitar-based style, girl group harmonies, professional songwriting, and British sophistication to launch the British Invasion. With their neat suits and charming accents, they made rock ’n’ roll acceptable for college students and intellectuals as well as screaming teens.
When official history falls silent, who remembers the war?
This question lies at the heart of Lebanon’s troubled relationship with the memory of its Civil War (1975–90). More than three decades after the conflict ended, the war remains a deeply contested part of Lebanon’s past. Lebanon has had no comprehensive state-led truth commission or national reconciliation process, and the Civil War remains largely absent from the official history curriculum. Memories of the conflict therefore remain fragmented across communities, families, political affiliations, and generations.
But silence does not mean that the past has disappeared. When official history falls silent, other forms of remembering emerge. Novels, poems, paintings, films, photographs, and testimonies become archives of experiences that institutions have failed—or refused—to preserve.
Arab women, including the Syrian novelist Ghada al-Samman, the Lebanese-born poet, novelist, and visual artist Etel Adnan, and the Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki, have created some of the most powerful alternative archives of the Lebanese Civil War. They refuse to let the conflict disappear into historical silence. Their works expand what it means to remember war. Sometimes, remembering means recording a nightmare, preserving a fragment, painting a ruined landscape, or making people laugh in the face of sectarian violence.
When everyday life becomes an archive
Ghada al-Samman’s Beirut Nightmares, written during the Civil War, takes us away from the conventional battlefield and into the intimate space of a woman’s home. The protagonist is trapped in Beirut during the siege. Snipers, shelling, hunger and fear transform the apartment from a place of safety into a prison. Yet the novel does something more than document the violence surrounding the protagonist. It records what war feels like in the body: insomnia, terror, hunger, exhaustion, and the constant anticipation of death. Conventional histories of war tend to privilege battlefields, political negotiations, military leaders, and armed combatants. Yet Al-Samman asks us to look elsewhere. The protagonist’s manuscript, written under siege, becomes an alternative archive, preserving experiences that might otherwise disappear. The home becomes a site of resistance, while the female body becomes a record of a war that official narratives cannot fully capture.
When a broken story tells the truth
Etel Adnan approaches the problem of remembering differently. Her Sitt Marie Rose, The Arab Apocalypse, Of Cities and Women, and her visual art refuse to offer a single, coherent version of the Lebanese Civil War. Instead, Adnan gives us fragments, contradictions, symbols, and ruined, blood-red landscapes. Her work captures the experiences of living through violence when the familiar structures that make life intelligible—home, city, community, language, and identity—are themselves fractured.
In Sitt Marie Rose, Adnan recounts the story of Marie Rose Boulos, a Christian educator who worked with Palestinian refugees. Marie Rose’s commitment to crossing sectarian boundaries places her in direct conflict with the patriarchal and sectarian logic of the war. Her murder exposes how women’s bodies and choices become battlegrounds for competing ideas of community, loyalty, and nation.
In The Arab Apocalypse, Adnan takes fragmentation even further. Language itself seems to break apart. Words, images and symbols collide, while recurring suns and ruined landscapes replace the orderly historical timeline we might expect.
In Of Cities and Women, Adnan reimagines Beirut through personal memory and encounters with the city, challenging the idea that its history fits into a single narrative. Her attention to women, displacement, and place offers a gendered reimagining of the city and its histories.
Adnan’s visual art performs a similar archival function without relying on documentary representation. Landscapes and abstract forms become traces through which loss, destruction, and memory remain visible.
These works create another way of remembering. Adnan’s fragments resist the demand to make war appear coherent, reconciled, or safely contained in the past. Her art keeps the wounds visible. The result is an archive without the appearance of an archive: no official monument, no single narrative, no authorised voice. Memory survives instead through images, fragments, landscapes and voices that refuse to settle into one version of history.
Can humour remember war?
Nadine Labaki’s Where Do We Go Now? takes yet another approach. The film is set in an unnamed Lebanese village divided by sectarian tensions. Its women are determined to prevent the men from turning those divisions into violence. But they do not confront the men through conventional political power. Instead, they destroy radios, manipulate religious symbols, hire Ukrainian dancers to distract the men, and even drug their meals to keep weapons out of their hands. The scenes are absurd and often genuinely funny. But the humour conceals a serious question: who carries the responsibility for remembering what war does to a community?
Labaki’s women know what another cycle of violence will cost. While their interventions are acts of care, they are also acts of historical resistance. They try to prevent the past from becoming the future. The film therefore turns women’s everyday labour—mourning, caring, organising, persuading, protecting—into political action. Its unnamed village also transforms the story into a wider reflection on communities divided by violence: what happens when neighbours become enemies, and when the wounds of one generation become the inheritance of the next?
Beyond preserving the past
What connects Al-Samman, Adnan, and Labaki is not simply that they write about the Lebanese Civil War, but how they remember it.
Al-Samman records the war through the female body and the domestic space. Adnan fragments its history through literature, symbols and visual art. Labaki transforms remembrance into tragicomedy, showing women attempting to interrupt the repetition of violence. Together, their different forms create what I call “alternative archives”: cultural memory that exists outside official institutions and challenges the silences surrounding the conflict. They challenge official institutions’ authority over what counts as history and reshape our understanding of feminist resistance; for these women are not simply adding women’s experiences to an established history of the Lebanese Civil War. They question how history is produced, showing that women’s fear, grief, survival, creativity, care and resistance are not secondary to the “real” history of war; rather, they are history itself. A monument can preserve a name; a textbook can preserve a date; an archive can preserve a document. But a novel can preserve a feeling; a painting can preserve a wound; a film can preserve a gesture; and a woman’s testimony can preserve what an official history leaves behind.
When official history falls silent, remembering becomes more than looking backwards. It becomes a struggle over who has the right to tell the story and, ultimately, who has the right to imagine what comes next.
Revision, I’ve been told again and again, is the key to effective writing. Yet sometimes I find myself making an essay or chapter worse when I revise it. I introduce new errors, garble sentences or paragraphs that once seemed clear, and add whole paragraphs that I later decide to cut.
Here’s what I’ve noticed myself doing:
Making new typos. When I see something that needs to be fixed, I type what I think will fix it, often glancing down at the keyboard. Then I move on to the next problem, forgetting to proof the correction and thus introducing new problems. I need to slow down.
Overlooking the obvious. Autocorrect catches the most egregious typos, like “fpor” for “for” or “teh” for “the.” But it does not correct word substitutions, for example when you type “work” for “word.” Errors may be almost too simple to notice because you are reading what you think you wrote rather than what you actually wrote. You might miss a substitution like “iconically” for “ironically” or “principle” for “principal” (or vice versa). I once mistakenly referred to The Elements of Style authors Strunk and White as Stunk and White, an error overlooked by the copyeditor and proofreader as well. We were all processing the word we predicted to be there rather than what actually was on the page.
Trying to satisfy everyone. In terms of content, I sometimes make things worse when I forget who my audience really is and try too hard to satisfy particular comments by reviewers, editors, or beta-readers. This can result in my over-explaining certain points or adding tangential asides. When I re-revise, I find myself wondering, Why did I add that? It helps to keep your eventual ideal reader in your head (or at least over your shoulder) and resist the impulse to go along with every suggestion.
Fussing too much with syntax. On more than one occasion, I’ve noticed myself revising a sentence to (try to) make it clearer but leaving in an extra word or ending from the earlier version that turns the new version into word salad. Writing about early twentieth-century scientists’ speculation about the Martian canals, I wrote that they were once believed to be “a means for transporting water.” My revision read that they were believed to be “a means for Martians to transporting water.” Oops. When I revised the phrase “the study’s aim is to clarify perceptions of dialect,” my revised version read “the aim of the study is to undercover the average person’s perception of dialect.” I had “undercover” rather than “uncover.” And when I try to resolve the reference of vague pronouns by adding in names, I sometimes forget to double-check the spelling, so Schultz becomes Shultz, and Carlsen becomes Carlson.
Understanding strengths and weaknesses. Over the course of my career, I’ve noticed that my writing gets more convoluted when I am expounding on a theoretical or technical point as opposed to when I am narrating a story. So now I pay particular attention to clarity in places where I write about abstractions rather than about people and actions. Make a list of your own strengths and weaknesses and use it to focus your revisions.
Two suggestions. The track changes feature looks messy, but I suggest leaving it on as you revise so that you can do targeted reproofing of your revisions and corrections. Or better yet, read your work aloud so you don’t fall into the trap of seeing what you think you wrote.
For many critics, the West is uniquely responsible for colonialism, racism, oppression, and exploitation. America, in particular, is portrayed as a society built upon these injustices. Many of these critics were themselves raised in the West and educated in its schools and universities.
Whatever one thinks of such critiques, there is something profoundly ironic about them: many of the moral standards used to judge Western civilization are themselves products of the Western tradition. The demand for justice and human rights, the insistence that the powerful must answer for their actions, the refusal to accept that might makes right—these ideas have a distinct history. That history is complex, drawing on classical philosophy, biblical religion, Roman law, and the Christian tradition. An important, though often overlooked, stream in this history is the Calvinist tradition—a subject explored more fully in the second edition of my Calvinism: A Very Short Introduction.
John Calvin is not who most people think of when they think about ideas of justice, equality, and human dignity. He is more commonly associated with predestination, austerity, and the execution of Michael Servetus. Yet the Reformed tradition Calvin helped shape contributed ideas whose consequences reached far beyond anything he could have anticipated—and perhaps beyond some things he would have welcomed. Those ideas helped nurture forms of political liberty and moral accountability that many of his modern critics now exercise, whether they recognize their origins or not.
Consider first the profound equality Calvin placed at the center of his understanding of humanity. Because all people are created in God’s image and belong uniquely to him, Calvin insisted that no human being could ultimately be reduced to a mere possession of another. His discussions of slavery and servitude in his expositions of Exodus and Deuteronomy are among the clearest expressions of this conviction. While later generations would identify tensions between Calvin’s theological convictions and the institution of slavery as it existed in his own age, his writings nevertheless rejected the reduction of human beings to property and emphasized the obligations owed by those who exercised authority. Before God, the nobleman and the beggar stand on identical ground. Human dignity does not depend upon wealth, status, or power. These were not merely theological abstractions; they were principles whose implications later generations would develop in ways Calvin himself could scarcely have imagined.
Second, Calvin helped reshape political thought by reinforcing the conviction that rulers themselves are subject to moral judgment. He did not invent resistance theory—medieval thinkers had long wrestled with tyranny—but the Reformed tradition became one of its most influential vehicles. In the final (1559) edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin argued that rulers who command what is contrary to God relinquish their authority. French Huguenots, Dutch rebels, Scottish Protestants, English parliamentarians, and American revolutionaries all drew, in varying degrees, upon political arguments developed within the Calvinist tradition. The enduring principle was simple: power is never its own justification.
Third, Calvin revived a prophetic tradition of moral criticism. The biblical prophets denounced corruption, exploitation, and injustice among the powerful. Calvin adopted their posture with striking boldness. At a time when monarchs increasingly claimed sacred authority, he did not hesitate to rebuke rulers for their corruption. In a lecture on Jeremiah, he lamented that “kings are ashamed to appear humane and turn all their labors towards exercising tyranny.” In another, he complained “great kings draw human blood and do not care at all when many people perish because of them.” Such criticisms expressed Calvin’s conviction that no ruler stands above moral scrutiny. Calvin repeatedly lamented the suffering of the poor and condemned those who exploited them. Through generations of Reformed preaching and political thought, this prophetic impulse was carried far beyond sixteenth-century Geneva. It would echo through later movements that challenged entrenched authority, from campaigns against slavery to the civil rights movement and beyond.
The irony, then, becomes clearer. The critics are, of course, right to point to injustices like inequality, racism, and exploitation. These are enduring features of human societies, and the West has hardly been immune to them. Yet many of the moral concepts used to expose these failures were themselves nurtured within the Western tradition. Indeed, one of the West’s distinguishing characteristics has been its extraordinary capacity for self-criticism. America and the broader Western tradition have produced intellectual, religious, legal, and political traditions that have repeatedly exposed, criticized, and sought to reform the very injustices that exist within their own societies.
Part of that capacity arose from Calvin’s realistic assessment of human nature, his conviction that people are prone to sin and self-interest. Influenced in part by this conviction, Western political institutions increasingly sought to restrain power rather than trust it. Constitutional limits, divided authority, the rule of law, and institutional accountability were not designed to eliminate injustice altogether. They endeavored to create durable mechanisms through which injustice could be challenged and corrected. In so doing, these institutions have helped many Western societies become among the freest, most prosperous, and most legally protective in history.
None of this is evidence of either the West’s perfection or its unique immorality. It is, rather, evidence that the Western tradition has bequeathed to the modern world a moral imagination capable not only of exposing injustice but also of imagining and pursuing reform. Many of the West’s fiercest critics remain heirs to the very moral tradition that furnished them with the language through which they now judge it. That, perhaps, is one of the Western tradition’s most remarkable legacies.
Feature image: Palestine solidarity protest in Berlin. Photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy. CC-BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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