Brad DeLong has some advice for student writers:
| Nobody ever told them that if you are going to hand in a first draft, an easy way to significantly improve it is to, when you are finished, cut the last paragraph from the paper and paste it at the beginning. Your final sum-up paragraph–written at the end, as you have by trying to write down what you think discovered what you really do think–is almost always going to make a better first paragraph than the first paragraph that you wrote. |
Nearly 30 years ago I was given advice that is one step more radical than Brad’s. Neil Rudenstine, then provost of Princeton and an occasional English professor, told me to take a look at an essay when I had finished and then cut the first and final paragraphs. It was sage advice then and something I’ve tried to follow ever since.
From a world that seems totally alien 
“The tax cut turned out to be politically more difficult than Johnson had foreseen… Conservatives worried that higher deficits would drive up inflation.”
I’m having a wonderful time reading Judgment Days by Nick Kotz, his account of the relationship between LBJ and Martin Luther King and their role in passing historic civil rights legislation.
What’s striking is how different the country was only 40 years ago. I’m not referring to the entrenched segregation and racism. What’s remarkable instead is the courage of Johnson to defy his southern base and roots, and the determination to do the right thing, not the politically easy or advantageous thing. And political alignments in 1964, as the quote above shows, were very different to today.