ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on the author’s years of experience as both a university-based professor of cinema studies and a film critic and journalist for popular publications. It argues that skills developed in each of these arenas – often presented as irreconcilable in goals, expression, and audience – can enrich one’s work in the other and create professional opportunities in both. The chapter presents a handful of sample assignments that can cultivate the abilities in students and help them acquire useful professional skills. Thesis- or dissertation-writing often compels a performance of intensely specialized diction for fellow experts, but a hairpin turn follows whereby employers, colleagues, students, and presses beg for simpler articulation. Public writing and mass-market editors are great helps in instilling this knack. Todd Haynes and Barry Jenkins are two among innumerable directors who were themselves ardent film students and globally-oriented cinephiles, frames of reference that many magazine writers cannot summon in spontaneous conversation.
