Lawrence McEnerney

Lawrence McEnerney is director emeritus of the University of Chicago Writing Program. For four decades, he was part of the "Little Red Schoolhouse" program, a ten-week course in academic and professional writing originally developed by Joseph M. Williams and Gregory G. Colomb. McEnerney received the Quantrell Award in 1997 for his excellence in teaching.

Early life and education Lawrence "Larry" McEnerney was born to John and Ellen (née Bakke) McEnerney, both United States Army veterans of World War II. His father was a lieutenant in the Army during the war, while his mother served in the Allied Force Headquarters in Africa and Italy. He was raised with one brother and a sister. After the war, his father was a civic leader in Chicago and served as president of Pioneer Electric & Research Corp. (Perco) a small specialty electronics firm McEnerney arrived at the University of Chicago in 1978 and enrolled in a PhD program for English. He worked as a teaching assistant under Joseph M. Williams and received his AM in 1980. "I discovered that I was bad at scholarship because I didn't like literature", he recalled. "By sheer luck, I had met Joe [Joseph M. Williams] because he was one of the examiners on my preliminary oral exam as a doctoral student. He was sadly disappointed by my grasp of writing. So I went to talk to him about it, and he got me fascinated with what he was doing." McEnerney joined the University of Chicago writing program in 1987, helping Williams divide up lecturing duties training graduate students. He became director of the writing program in 1992. The course is taught as ENGL 13000/33000, "Academic and professional writing: Little Red Schoolhouse (LRS)". McEnerney also taught introductory courses in the Humanities and Social Sciences Core, a liberal arts program that teaches several thousand students per year and provides tutoring. In the 2010s, he taught courses on the speeches of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.

Approach McEnerney is known for his reader-focused approach, encouraging students to improve their writing by tailoring it to the needs of their audience and de-emphasizing the rules and notions of writing as a "standardized skill". McEnerney dismisses any strict rule against passive verbs. "A lot of bad stuff comes out of that rule", he told an interviewer.

McEnerney is a fan of Abraham Lincoln and cites the Gettysburg Address and Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address as the two texts he studied the most. He has also spoken and written about the address in university literature and community events, and taught the address in courses to students.

Awards Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (1997) With Joseph M. Williams. Writing in College (2007) With Joseph M. Williams. Writing in the Humanities (1997) Hard Copy (1994)