“The fecundity and the importance of a literary form are often measured by the trash it contains.” (Albert Camus)

Literacy is the ability to read and write. Academic literacy is the ability to read and write at a university level. We expect academics to be not just literate but outright scholarly, which implies a particular kind of competence with language, or “facility with words” as Orwell once put it. They are not merely entertained by the things they read, nor do they provide their readers with diversions from their everyday lives. They are engaged in the communication of knowledge.

Importantly, however, they are not just communicating what they know to people who don’t know. They are sharing what they know with other knowledgeable people. Often these people know as much about the subject as they do themselves. This is what gives academic writing its “critical” edge. In an important sense, academic writers are not just telling their readers what they know, they are opening their knowledge to criticism from their peers. Likewise, academic readers are not just learning when they read, they are engaging in a critical practice. Academic discourse is an ongoing comparison of the various things different scholars know, or at least think they know. In the confrontation of what I know with what my reader knows we offer each other an opportunity to correct our errors. That opportunity for criticism is what academic writing has evolved to occasion.

So being academically “literate” requires more than merely grammatical mastery. It means understanding that a text always stands in a particular relation to its sources, and that those sources can be located and compared with the text we’re reading. That is, being “able to read” at a university means being able to use a library, which is an increasingly “advanced” technology. Meanwhile, “being able to write” also means being able to present ideas in stable prose paragraphs that commits the writer to ideas that are meaningful objects of criticism. Even errors should be instructive when they are uncovered. They should move the whole knowledge enterprise forward.

As if to repeat the history of literacy in general, i.e., the history of written communication, academic literacy is spreading. Writing academically was once a very rare skill, reserved for a small segment of the population. As more and more people seek university degrees, more and more people will likewise also require academic literacy. Of course, this will also increase the number of “bad” academic writers. The history of our progress from orality to literacy necessarily turned a great many non-writers into merely passable writers. As more and more people become academics, we’ll have to accept the conversion of people who wouldn’t previously have considered themselves academic writers at all into academic writers who just aren’t very good at it. That can’t be helped.

Hopefully, however, we can maintain a certain standard. It is important that the prose that carries the knowledge we share as a culture be well-written. Otherwise it will not be properly open to criticism, it will not afford us opportunities to learn from our mistakes. The pursuit of truth will be greatly hindered.

I want to begin thinking about the nature of prose again. Actually, I’ve been thinking about it a great deal for a long time, of course. I want to think out loud about it, I guess. I want to write about it. I want write prose about it, in fact.

I guess it’s almost a joke to say that prose is an ordinary thing. When we say something is “prosaic” we mean that it is ordinary. But it’s actually both the ordinariness and the orderliness of prose that I want to consider. Prose not only uses words in their ordinary senses, it tries to present ideas in an orderly way. It is, to be sure, able to say some entirely extraordinary things when it needs to, but its means are largely unremarkable.

In his preface to The Unending Rose, Borges said that “the mission of the poet should be to restore to the word, at least in a partial way, its primitive and now secret force.” We might say that the prose writer takes that secret force for granted. A truly “great” prose writer, we might even say, is trying to keep the secret. They leverage the force of language by a kind of a sleight of hand. We think we’re just seeing one word after another, just as we think the card magician is shuffling an ordinary deck of cards. But then, suddenly, the hair on the back of your neck stands up.

I have a worry about prose. I worry that prose is going out of style. (I guess that’s almost a joke too.) It is being replaced with a strange sort of jargon, in which a number of “big words” end up doing all the work. Writers have stopped producing effects by a combination of small, familiar words, a series of ordinary rhetorical “moves”. Instead, they invoke big and cumbersome concepts that the reader is asked to swallow without question. Indeed, these concepts are often combined in stock phrases that operate almost like words in their own right.

What I want to do over a few posts is to get back to the basic operations that make prose what it is. Of course, I want to think about this mainly at the level of the paragraph, which is the unit of scholarly composition. I want to look at a how a standard, academic prose paragraph works. Or, rather, how it should work.

I think I have a way to fix impostor syndrome. Rachael Cayley tells us that it is “a failure to internalize success”. I like that way of putting it.  Obviously, the individual solution is to, well, internalize your successes. But how do we make that happen more generally in the student population, so that those who get good grades and, therefore, might go on to pursue advanced degrees, not only are in fact successful, but also feel entitled to the grants and the tenure we give them?

First, I think there should be more on-site written exams with a fixed time limit and no materials (no books, notes, phones, laptops, etc.) Don’t tell me that this tests an “irrelevant” skill, since in “real life” students will always have access to “the internet”. Don’t tell me it just demands memorization, not learning. What it demands is internalization of learning. Getting a good grade on such an exam requires not just that they have successfully understood the material, it requires that the students make that success, i.e., that understanding, their own, rather than feeling forever dependent on whatever source happened to teach it to them. When they then successfully “regurgitate” it, they show themselves that they really did appropriate the material.

Second, grade the students on a curve. Getting an A should not tell students that they have reached some arbitrary level of understanding as defined by an institution. It should tell them plainly that they are the smartest in their class. Graduating with straight As should not make you unsure of whether you can impress some future teacher or other authority. It should make you confident that you’re better able to impress such authorities than most others.

It’s that simple. The reason impostor syndrome has become, as Rachael put is, a general “academic condition” rather than a rare disorder is that we’ve stopped grading students on their abilities. If we started doing that again, this problem would go away in about a generation. But we’d also have a generation of horrifyingly competent young people. Maybe that fear is part of what’s holding us back?

Make them big enough.

A paragraph consists of at least six sentences and at most 200 words that say one thing and support, elaborate or defend it.

(This post offers instructions, not demonstrations.)

The key sentence says that “one thing”. It is one among several (usually around 40) things your paper says. Each paragraph should make a claim that is proportionate to the others,

as the hand should be proportionate to the head in a drawing. Also, a balanced drawing renders each part of the figure with the same amount of detail. Don’t write a tight, rigorous theory section and a breezy analysis.

My theory of the social world conditions the way I see it for analytical purposes. My theory helps me to see certain things and prevents other things, not relevant, from distracting me.

Try yours.

In your theory section you tell your reader what you are able to see and what you are unable to see. In your analysis you tell your reader what you actually saw in your data.

Keep your writing back. Don’t finish your theory section before you have written your analysis. Let the whole paper emerge gradually.

Don’t stick your “limitations” on at the end. Let them emerge in your methods section as determined by your theory, and let them guide the presentation of your data, collected according to your limited methods. Let the analysis run into its limits squarely as you proceed. Don’t instill a false sense of generality in your reader’s mind and then retract it at the end.

Think of the key sentences as the bones in the skeleton of the figure. Remove the prose around them and you expose this structure. It is okay that the bones are not “touching” in the outline; cartilage and muscle are presumed to keep them in the right relative position in the actual paper. The important thing is that the toe bone be connected to the foot bone, the foot bone connected to the heel bone. Etc.

The introduction is connected to the background, the background connected to the theory, the theory connected to the method, the method connected to analysis, th’analysis connected to d’iscussion, and now hear the author out (that’s the conclusion, of course.)

You write the paragraphs to “flesh it out”. You keep the key sentences short and simple. They simply state your claims.

“I began to think, at least I learned how to try to think, for to do that, one must be ready to live in a hunt for the most elusive game–our real motive or motives and not the ostensible reason.” (Norman Mailer)

I’ve been away for a while. On returning, I find I owe Randy an apology for leaving his comment in my spam filter for so long. He brings up a good point. Often our excuses for not writing are not the real reason we aren’t writing. I sometimes sharpen this point by noting that people have no difficulty being hard on themselves as long as they know it isn’t true. They’ll call themselves stupid when they know they are lazy, or lazy when they know they’ve been stupid. It’s not the insult that stings; it’s the truth that hurts.

As Randy rightly points out, once a disciplined, orderly process has become second nature, not only are you more productive, you are better able to consider more precisely what is holding you back, and what might be really be keeping you from speaking your mind. Some of the truth you discover there is hard, but it’s healthy to come to the realization of your real limitations. You can then take deliberate action to overcome them.

He also raises a more technical question. Do these difficulties arise differently in the writing of books and the writing of journal articles? My sense, from talking to my authors, is that books are experienced as “freer” platforms for expression. The rhetorical and editorial demands seem kinder and more human. I would also argue that an article is written somehow “closer” to the act of publishing. It feels, in the writing moment, more public, while a book, as it’s being written, remains a private experiment. I think this feeling comes through in the finished products. Articles seem much more, shall we say, “politic” in their expression, while books seem much more frank, more candid.

For this reason it can be a great idea to always be working on a book. Alongside your daily efforts to present ideas for public scrutiny on a running basis in article form, take a moment (27 minutes) to find out what your real motives are by putting similar ideas the way you might in the “privacy” of a book. The reason it feels different is, in part, that you don’t expect quick reactions to a book-length argument. It’s not a simple transaction.

Borges once encouraged us to remember that a book isn’t just a linguistic structure; it is the lasting effect it has on our imaginations. In that sense, perhaps, an article is much “structuralist”. An article isn’t so much the experience we have while reading it as the “impact” it has on our “citation network”. Each paragraph is written to achieve this effect. A book is different. It is truly a conversation with the reader. I like the idea that it’s more “private”. I’ll think more about this.