Your name: Benjamin Hein
Your home town: Westport, CT
Your major(s): History, Economics
Are you fluent in any language(s) other than English? German
What are your career plans? Economic consultancy.
What is your favorite book or author and why? There are no favorites for me. But here’s a recent book that I really enjoyed: The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg. Ginzburg here manages to write a historiographical analysis using the prose of a Dan Brown-style fictional thriller.
What is your most frequent grammatical error? Run-on sentences.
What is your biggest grammatical pet peeve? Forgetting a comma.
What is your favorite word? Caterpillar
What is your favorite procrastination method when you have a paper to write?Clean up my room, desk, or kitchen and work out. Also, late night tennis matches.
Describe (in a short paragraph) a significant breakthrough in your development as a writer: My breakthrough as a writer occurred when I finally was able to avoid paragraph-sized sentences. Being a native German speaker and writer, I have had a strong tendency to pack my sentences with a large number of different ideas and prepositional phrases. Breaking up these super-sentences was not as simple as placing a period instead of a comma; it required a shift in my thinking, a fundamental change in the way I articulated ideas. My writing has become far clearer ever since, even to myself!
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