John Tresch

About the Professor

Dr. Tresch earned his PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University. He is now the Undergraduate Chair for Science, Technology, and Society, a branch of HSS. He teaches in the fields of History of Physical Science, History of Technology, History of Social Sciences, and Intellectual History.

Important Criteria for Student Writing

Dr. Tresch places great importance on organization. He also feels that style is a significant factor in forming a stance on a topic and making it clear. In his view, style can go a long way to enhancing any argument, but significant evidence is still very necessary to a piece of writing. He is forgiving of citational style and expects students to be familiar with mechanics.

WRITING PROCESS

"I’m always pre-writing. I’ll do many, many drafts of outlines, or mind maps, where you have a concept in the middle and it branches out to others, and I redraw those a lot. And when I’m doing the right thing, I’ll go try to do another map just to see how things look. But I always go from that then to an outline to try to get the structure."

"Structure is really important to me," notes Dr. Tresch. He likes every part of a paper to be organized and to refer back to the proposition. He continues, "I try to picture the whole thing – that’s the biggest challenge. Just see [a paper] as a thing with a lot of moving parts all functioning towards one end. So, if you’ve got something in there that isn’t pointing towards that end, get rid of it. And if you don’t know what that end is, that’s an interesting point. I don’t always know what the end is, but it’s in the process of kind of getting things out there when I realize the point I want to get to. But everything has to line up towards that. You need to have that sense of movement and purpose to define that you’re going somewhere."

WRITING TIPS

“[Students] should take more risks stylistically. They think there’s a format, and they don’t leave that format and get an A- and they’re happy with that. But if they just tried something new, something different and creative, just tried something for fun, I would be so glad to read that.”

LINKS

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