George Gopen is a native of the Boston area, where he spent all but one of his first thirty years. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1945, he attended the public schools of Brookline before enrolling in the nations oldest private school, The Roxbury Latin School. After graduating from there in 1963, he studied English and American literature at Brandeis University (Waltham, Ma.). He spent his junior year abroad at the University of Reading, Berkshire, England. Graduating Phi Beta Kappa, he began his legal studies at the Harvard Law School. In his second year he made the decision to become an English professor. He pursued the two degrees simultaneously, finishing the J.D. in 1972 and the Ph.D. in 1975. In the early 1970's his mother could often be heard to say, "Most mothers pray their son gets into Harvard. Me, I'm praying my son gets out."
His first position was a three-year Visiting Assistant Professorship in the English Department of the University of Utah. There he created a course in advanced composition for pre-law students; that in turn led to publishing two articles in law reviews and signing a contract for a legal writing textbook with the West Publishing Company. Thus defined as a Composition specialist, in 1978 he became the Director of Writing Programs at Loyola University of Chicago.
Upon arriving in Chicago, he was offered his first consulting opportunity by the law firm Epton, Mullin, Miller & Druth. For over a year, he spent every other Saturday morning trying to figure out how to be of help to a succession of young lawyers mystified by the English language. (He was equally mystified.) Slowly, however, certain features of the structure of the English language started to become apparent to him.
In 1980 he collaborated with University of Chicago professors Joseph Williams, Gregory Colomb, and Frank Kinahan in a writing consultant partership they called Clearlines. Working for the legal departments of corporations like IBM and The Bank of America and major law firms like Jenner & Block and Fullbright & Jaworski, they steadily forged a radical new approach to analyzing and controlling professional English prose.
In 1985 he was appointed director of the new University Writing Program at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. In addition to teaching courses in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the rhetorical analysis of poetry and music, he directed a staff of 110 graduate students who taught the freshman writing course and freshman literature seminars.
In 1990, he went solo as a writing consultant and then expanded into scientific prose with biochemist, Judith Swan. His scientific clients have included, among others, the NIH, the FDA, Bristol-Myers Squib, and the Bayer Corporation.
Along the way, he has authored four books (three on writing and one on the fifteenth century Scottish poet Robert Henryson) and 25 articles on composition, pedagogy, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, scientific writing, legal writing, and mathematical writing. He has written a number of book reviews and delivered more than 75 conference presentations.
In 2000, he married Sarah Duncan, who was and is a judge on the Fourth Court of Appeals of the State of Texas. (She does a lot of traveling.) He has one son from a previous marriage, Xander, born in 1989, who attends the North Toronto Collegiate Institute in Canada and spends a good deal of his time playing the electric guitar. Completing the family is a pair of Tibetan Terriers, Sheana and Gibson.
He is an avid golfer, tennis player, and an amateur musician. As a pianist, he has performed regularly in lieder recitals. He sings with the Choral Society of Durham and is a past member of the Chicago Symphony Chorus. He has served on the executive boards of the choral society, the Mallarme Chamber Players, and the Chamber Arts Society of Durham. Since 1967, he has served on the Board of Directors of Bronze Memorial, Inc., a Massachusetts corporation, of which he is now President.
A picture of Sarah will appear here.
Xander
Sheana
Gibson
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