Just a quick one today. I spent the morning making sure my audio equipment was working for a lecture capture I was doing and it ended up taking up my writing time. As I said on Monday, under ordinary circumstances I would just let it go and not write at all today. But the whole point of this exercise (for me) is to loosen things up a bit. So I’m just going to jot down the little idea I had thought to write about. I may expand tomorrow.

In order to develop my empathy for people who are learning how to write effectively, I’ve given myself two things I’m not good at to do with my hands on a regular basis. I’m composing a short piece of music on the piano and practicing it, and I’m drawing a picture of my hand in various positions. I spend only a few minutes every day on each and, in addition to the little improvements I’m making, it is developing my sense of the difficulty people have when training their skills. Like I say, I’ll write some more about this later, but, today, I just want to say that it’s a good idea to work at a manual skill every day. It’s good, I think, for the brain too.

There must be some science that supports this somewhere. But for now I’m happy to assert it on the basis of a hunch.

One very popular approach to writing travels under the somewhat unattractive banner “shitty first drafts”. Jonathan Mayhew and I have tried to push back on it a little, but it has undeniable appeal for many students and scholars.

The idea is simply not to worry about quality in the early stages of a writing project. Instead, just set your mind to filling up pages with words and resolve to revise them later. Good writing, on this approach, emerges from editing bad writing. Jonathan and I object to this ethos because it doesn’t afford you the pleasure of writing a good sentence or a clear paragraph in a single moment. If you’re always writing “shitty” drafts and then editing them into shape, you never feel the joy that comes from putting a strong sentence together with your own hands, composing a solid a paragraph in your own mind. It really does mean you’ll be spending most of your time suffering through the badness of your writing as you edit it.

Anne Lamott, who is often credited with the idea, but of course did not invent it and should not be blamed for it, would probably object to my caricature of it. But it’s the caricature I’ against, not the very sensible idea of sometimes just letting your sentences flow out of you. This experiment of writing light, breezy prose every day can be taken as an example and, in fact, it could be argued that I recommend writing “shittily” for ten out the twenty-seven minutes it should ideally take you to compose a paragraph. My point, however, is that if you do this often then even your most careless sentences will feel like they mean something, like you are writing deliberately to say something you know. You’ll feel the (growing) confidence of your prose in every line.

Don’t denigrate your first efforts just to give yourself the freedom to write. Resolve to write as well as you can on a regular basis. You’ll get better at it.

I advise students and scholars to do their writing in the morning. If you can find between half an hour and three hours every weekday morning two write between one and six paragraphs, you’ve got a good basis to build a healthy writing habit. It occurred to me the other day that, by following this advice, I am these days also writing always in my fasting window. As I mentioned on Friday, I’m trying “intermittent fasting” and I now only eat between noon and eight in the evening.

This idea of limiting certain activities to particular times of day seems sound to me. For one thing, it takes a lot of the guilt out of not writing — and not fasting, i.e., eating. When you’re trying to get a piece of writing (a paper or whole dissertation) finished, you have a tendency to think of every hour that you don’t spend writing as a betrayal. Likewise, when you’re trying to lose weight, you start thinking of every bite as cheating. But this strategy of “intermittent” fasting or writing let’s you control your conscience simply by looking at the clock. Are you not writing? Did you just have a snack? Well, is it after noon? If so, don’t worry about it.

Consider writing plans that don’t quite turn out like you had hoped. If you had planned to write between, say, 8:00 and 10:00 and suddenly discover that it’s 10:20 and you have accomplished nothing, remind yourself that today’s writing window has now closed. Don’t carry the task with you for the rest of the day; don’t try squeeze a paragraph or two in between meetings. Just plan to try again tomorrow morning. Put the burden down.

You have other things things to do. Organize your life so that you only have about five hours every day when you could possibly be writing. It’s fine not to be writing outside of that window.

Nulla dies sine linea.

I want to try something this semester. I have changed my morning routine so that I’m usually in the office by 7:00 AM. (This is mainly a result of restlessness brought on by intermittent fasting. It’s not that the hunger is making me restless, on the contrary, but rather that, after getting up at 6:00, as is my wont, and not having a breakfast to eat, I feel like I may as well just get out the door and take my morning coffee at work, a short walk away.) So here’s my idea: I’m going to write a little every morning and post the result. I will not promise to take a full moment, nor to write a proper paragraph, but I will compose a few lines of prose about what I happen to have on my mind. I will try to keep things light and breezy but perhaps the paragraphs will have a cumulative effect and add up to something around the middle of October, when I will be taking a one-week break. This is something I recommended just yesterday to a student who has a report due early next year. “Don’t put off the writing hoping ‘go deep’ later,” I said. “Writing is inexorably superficial. Begin to construct the surface of your text now.” I’m going to see what happens when I take my own advice.

It’s the start of the semester, so I had a look at the advice I give to undergraduates. It’s pretty good, if I do so say so myself.

During your undergraduate studies, I strongly suggest you develop a sustainable habit of reading, writing and searching the literature. Make an effort to become academically literate by familiarizing yourself with the resources that a university provides. Set aside time on a regular basis, preferably at least half an hour every day, to read some scholarly prose, to write a paragraph or two about something you know, and to use your library’s databases to find a relevant book or article.

Learn what paragraphs and references are and how they work. A paragraph takes about one minute to read, during which it supports, elaborates or defends a single, well-defined claim. It will normally consist of no less than six sentences and no more than two-hundred words. For everything you know, you do well to learn how to write a paragraph about it in under half an hour. This includes providing the proper references, which provide information about the sources you have used. You should learn the difference between the “in-text citation”, which you provide in parentheses within the paragraph you are writing, and the “reference list”, which  goes at the end of your paper and provides all the information your reader needs to locate your source. Paragraphs and references are governed by  convention, and part of being a good scholar (and therefore a good student) is knowing what those conventions are.

As a general rule, every paragraph has a “key sentence”. This means that every paper you write can be summarized simply by listing your key sentences. If you’ve written an eleven-paragraph paper, you should have made eleven key claims, each of which can be stated in a simple declarative sentence, and supported, elaborated, or defended by five or more further sentences. If you copy just your key sentences (one for each paragraph) into a separate document, and list them in order, they should make sense, separate from the paragraphs you have written. This “after-the-fact outline” is a good way to see whether you have produced a coherent line of argument in your essay. It’s also obviously a good way of keeping track of what you’ve learned.

One of the most important things to learn as an undergraduate is that “knowing” something in an academic setting is the ability to discuss it reasonably with other knowledgeable people. Your authority to claim that something is true stems from the reasons you are able to provide for believing it. In your studies, then, you are not just acquiring a new set of “truths”, you are learning how to support your beliefs with reasons, and how to discard them in the face of better reasons. All of this happens within a “conversation” among scholars we call discourse. It consists of everything that can be reasonably said (and written) about a subject, and since there are always arguments and disagreements among scholars, the discourse doesn’t just consist of true statements. That’s important to keep in mind. You will have to get used to being told that something you believe is wrong, and to telling others that they are wrong. One of the most essential functions of scholarship in an academic setting is to correct our errors in thinking.

In academia, we call people are who qualified to tell us we are wrong “peers”. You do well to keep a clear image of these people in your mind as you proceed. Think of them as the best and the brightest in your class, the most serious students in your cohort. Don’t always imagine yourself conversing with your teachers and examiners or their peers. One day, of course, you will begin to do so. In fact, your teachers are trying to make you into their peers — they are trying to qualify you to one day tell them that they’re wrong. It’s fine to experiment with this possibility, both in your thoughts and in your conversations, but don’t think that your teacher’s judgment is the only thing that matters. In your assignments, your teacher is testing your ability to converse with your intellectual equals, not with people who have read and thought much more about the subject than you have. Focus on the conversation you could reasonably have with students in your class, then, not the conversation you may one day have with a Nobel Prize winner in your area of expertise.

It’s not just about what you know but how you know it. Your discipline is defined by a set of theories and methods as well as a vast body of accepted facts. In every class you take, you will improve your understanding of them. But you will also improve your ability to discuss them, to participate in the discourse in your area of expertise. Your awareness of “the literature” will improve through your reading, and your literacy skills will improve through your writing. Keep track of your references — the ever-expanding store of sources you draw on to support your reasoning about the questions that you and your peers are trying to answer. Your theories and methods, too, have a history; and your sources — all those names and dates you invoke in your in-text citations — tell the story of the struggle of the people who came before you to make sense of the world in which we live. Using a theory and a method doesn’t give you any simple answers, nor any final authority. Rather, they frame your questions and ground your answers in a conversation with your peers, who know the same theories and methods on the basis of the same sources. Having that conversation is what a university education is all about.