Scholarly writing is directed at various things. We call some of them “objects” and we use the concepts of our theories to think about them. We have methods to give us data about them that we can then analyze to provide us with knowledge. A lot of our scholarship, however, is also about that knowledge itself: what is already known in our field or, in some cases, what is falsely believed by our peers. Our writing must direct itself at these ideas too, and it is very important to distinguish between statements that are about the world and statements that are about the thoughts of other knowledgeable people. To this end, we must master the art of citation, referencing. Sometimes, we will write about, not the things in the world, but our equipment for knowing about them: our concepts, our methods, our data, and our instruments for gathering it. In our more philosophical moments, we’ll write about what Kant called “the conditions of the possibility of our knowledge of objects.” In all cases, it is about the direction of our attention.

To know whom to write for is to know how to write.
Virginia Woolf

I’m trying out a joke with my students. When I talk about the adoption of a “rhetorical posture” in writing I have long said that we should here listen, not to Hemingway, but to Virginia Woolf, after which I normally quote the sentence in my epigraph. The joke I’m working on (it doesn’t yet quite land) consists of a piece of deadpan misdirection. “…Virginia Woolf,” I say, “who reminds us that, in writing, we share the loneliness that is the truth of things” (a reference to a line from To the Lighthouse that I learned from Frank Cioffi). I let the remark hang in the air for a second or two and then admit — sometimes shaking myself out of a feigned reverie — that this reminder will not be as useful to them as something else she said, and quote the correct sentence. Unlike a novel, I explain, which arguably does imagine a reader who is as profoundly lonely as the author, an academic text implies a knowledgeable reader facing a particular difficulty. Scholarly writing does not share a loneliness that is the truth of things. It asserts truths that can be talked about.

Message to the Department of the Interior

I have decided to grow a second body. This may be of some
concern to you

-Lara Glenum*

Twenty years ago, when I was finishing my PhD, many of my peers were “nomadologists”, philosophers (or anthropologists) of the “exteriority of thought”. Following Deleuze and Guattari,** they opposed a particular “image of thought”, the idea that thinking and feeling were things that happened, let’s say, “inside the body.” This image, they declared, was mainly a consequence of capitalist production, a fetishized commodity, an operation of “the State apparatus”, or, if you will, just another government program. I considered myself a fellow traveler. Soused in Wittgenstein, I rejected the notion of a private language, just as Deleuze and Guattari warned against valorizing “the private thinker.” We cannot find ourselves through introspection, I argued, “meaning is use.” Prone to melancholy, moreover, I sometimes resented the solitude of my own inwardness; I wanted to “go outside”. These days, I’m not so sure. With all the excitement out there, I worry about the future of our inner lives.

*The Hounds of No, p. 17.
**See Chapter 12, the “Treatise on Nomadology,” in A Thousand Plateaus, page 376-377.

What relation must one fact have to another
in order to be capable of being a symbol for that other?
Bertrand Russell

A paragraph is about something. It’s actually a minor wonder that we have this ability to make a fact that can so matter-of-factly be about another fact. The trick, of course, is to have something “in mind” when we write. A drawing can represent a person or thing by “looking like” it. On a good day, I can draw a picture of my face that people who know me would recognize. I can also write a paragraph about my face — the blue eyes behind the glasses, the beard, the bald head — that stands in the same relation to my face that the drawing would. That relation is “aboutness”. Importantly, the drawing or the writing can be wrong about the thing it represents. To be about something is to be comparable to it. We can set my face against a depiction of it, or a description of it, and we can, on that basis, judge the representation. This paragraph can be wrong about paragraphs, for example. And now we can discuss it.

If you know something “for academic purposes” you are able to compose a coherent prose paragraph about it. We can even specificy ideal conditions for this “moment of composition”: give yourself five minutes at the end of one day to decide what to say, 27 minutes at the beginning of the next to write it down, and no time to learn anything in the meantime. If you can write under these conditions, you know what you’re talking about. Now consider composing five paragraphs in a row this way, again having decided the day before on a larger thesis. There is nothing unreasonable about this exercise as a test of your knowledge and it is, in fact, a great way to get two or three pages of a paper or book written on any given morning. If we replace the decision the day before with a prompt issued on the day, it is also a perfectly fair test of what your students have learned in your class. They can train for it every morning, one paragraph at a time. If they can do it, so can you.