Being an academic doesn’t mean that everyone thinks you’re smart, I like to say; it means that a few smart people think you’re wrong. Addressing yourself to those people is the primary purpose of academic writing. That is, the purpose of academic writing is not to impress your peers (and certainly not your teachers) but to open your thinking to their criticism. This is why it is so important to do your own writing. By articulating your thoughts in prose — by “prosing your world” — you prepare yourself to learn what you are wrong about.

This isn’t as dramatic as it sounds. We expect academics not only to be knowledgeable but to be corrigible. They maintain what is known in an explicitly “logical” form, so that the consequences of changing our minds become conspicuous. It’s not that we’re perfectly deductive in our thinking, but if we’re wrong about one thing, we’re probably wrong about others, and “knowledgeable” people are able to more quickly and easily discover those other errors and carry out the necessary repairs. That is, a knowledge-able person isn’t someone who holds (and professes) a bunch of true beliefs. It is someone who knows how to be wrong — how to admit it and move forward.

What consequences does this have for our style of writing? Well, first of all, we must be clear about what we actually think. The writing must clearly assert facts, i.e., claim that things stand in one way and not in another. It must also clearly state our reasons for believing those facts. These reasons are individual points on which the reader may disagree with the writer, potential errors that, by being made explicit, are now easy (for another knowledgeable person) to identify. In other words, academic writing must be clear about what we think the facts are and why we think they’re that way.

That is one of the reasons we should carefully cite our sources. Much of what we believe we believe because we have read (and believed) someone else. Our reader, however, may have read the same source and had their doubts. By declaring whose authority we’re invoking, we open ourselves to criticism of that authority. More subtly, but just as importantly, we open our reading of the source to such criticism. That is, our reader may have read and believed the same source but understood it differently. We write in order to expose our interpretations of each other’s work to criticism too.

Like I say, I want this to be an argument for doing your own writing. It is possible that a language model can predict exactly what you would say about certain subject, and therefore, in principle, expose the ideas those words would express to the criticism of your peers. But that criticism won’t touch you in the same if the ideas were never form, in those exact words, in your own mind. You will be unprepared to listen to the critique. If you find the criticism persuasive you will now have to reconstruct the argument the machine generated for you in your own mind before you can adjust your thinking.

Now, it’s possible that Calvino’s fantasy (horror?) of a “writing machine surrounded by the hidden ghosts of the individual and of his society” can serve this same purpose. But we must keep in mind that this would mean generating a series of variations and testing each one by reading it until we achieve a “particular effect of one of the permutations on a man endowed with a consciousness and an unconscious, that is, an empirical and historical man,” i.e., the academic whose writing we’re proposing to replace. This effort of internalizing artificially generated prose is surely more demanding (and more risky) than articulating what you really think yourself.

There’s been a lot of concern about the effect of generative AI on higher education lately.* I share most of these concerns, though I don’t like to frame the problem in terms of student “cheating”. To be sure, many students are using AI in ways that allow them to earn better grades than they deserve — their exam performance overestimates their actual competence — and in that sense they are cheating, often quite deliberately (in knowing violation of rules). But, as I’ve long argued, it’s almost impossible to design an exam or assignment that doesn’t encourage students to pretend to be a little more knowledgeable, a little more intelligent, a little more competent, than they actually are. They may write as though they have read an entire book that they may only briefly have skimmed. They may write as though they’ve read a play when they’ve only read the Coles Notes or the Wikipedia article. Ideally, this would be detectable in the superficiality of their treatment, but surely you’ll admit that we often let them get away with it.

Indeed, as scholars, we often let each other get away with superficial readings of the literature — with prose like a context widow, i.e., prose that might as well have been generated by a large language model. Let’s admit that many of us think of scholarly discourse as an “attention space” and that it is our job mainly to make a “contribution” to it. We’re always looking for a “gap” and fit words to fill it with. Research is less the art of satisfying our curiosity than the business of coming up with something to say. George Orwell, of course, suggested quite a different image: our prose should be like a window pane through which we provide a clear view on what we are thinking. Writing is not merely the act of stringing together a “predictable” sequence of words in order to bring about a series of conventional effects in the mind of the reader. If, as Wittgenstein suggested, “we make ourselves pictures of the facts,” our writing presents those pictures to our peers for their careful consideration and critique. As I had occasion to explain a few years ago, the conceit of the scholar is not that their writing represents the facts but that we have a number of thoughts about those facts.

Norman Mailer once described “ego” as the “state of our psyche that gives us the authority to tell us we are sure of ourselves when we are not.” It is relatively easy to be brave in writing (which no doubt explains the famously toxic environment of social media. Would that conscience more often made cowards of us, let’s say!) Today, armed with a chatbot, students have it very easy indeed. They can write confidently of many things they know nothing of, indeed, things they have no real opinions about. So can we. But, now more than ever, we must write with the intention of exposing our thoughts to the criticism of our peers, and we must encourage our students to do the same. Only by telling each other what we actually think, not what it would be (statistically) “normal” to say, can we learn whether what we believe is true or false. We must be sure of ourselves long enough to find out whether our confidence is warranted.

I have decided to return to blogging because I need a space to work out what I think the future of academic writing can and should be. I agree with those who think that much of the crisis of AI is a result of our prose being out of shape, weakened by too many decades of “publish or perish” and “advanced placement,” unprepared to compete with the machines. But I don’t think all is lost yet. Mailer’s remark about the “ego” was inspired by Mohammad Ali’s “Fight of the Century” with Joe Frazier. I feel like it’s time to step back into the ring.

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*See Megan Fritts’ “A Matter of Words” (The Point Magazine); Zwi Mowshowitz’s “Cheaters Gonna Cheat Cheat Cheat Cheat Cheat” (Don’t Worry About the Vase); D. Graham Burnett “Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?” (The New Yorker); James Marsh’s “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College” (New York Magazine); and Phil Christman’s “Of Course Some Will Cheat” (Slate).

for students | for scholars | for pleasure

This blog is no longer being updated regularly with fresh content. Here are some self-study resources (including text and video) for those who would like to improve their academic skills, whether they are students or scholars (or dilletantes like me).

For Students

I have written a short paper that explains my approach here: “How to Write at University” (PDF). It is also available in Danish: “Bliv bedre til at skrive” (PDF).

The Art of Learning

A series of eight talks about how to get the most out of a university education. We cover what it means to know something, how to improve your reading and writing skills, the arts of listening and talking, and even how to derive some pleasure from the process.

The Craft of Research

A series of twelve talks about research projects, mainly focused on the problem of writing a paper or thesis. We cover each major section of a research paper: introduction, background, theory, methods, analysis, discussion, and conclusion, and offer advice about how to conduct your literature review and how to approach the philosophy of science.

The Writing Workshop

This one hour and forty minute workshop takes you through “the writing moment” from idea generation, over writing and editing, to peer feedback. It will help you understand the practical implications of thinking of your writing process as the composition of series of paragraphs that each supports, elaborates, or defends something you know.

For Scholars

This collection of pages covers the major components of the approach to academic writing that I have developed over the years. I approach the writing process as the composition of series of paragraphs, which each supports, elaborates, or defends something you know, during prepared moments lasting twenty or thirty minutes. It organizes these moments into four eight-week periods covering 20 to 120 hours each to get you through the year.

The Course

This is a four-week self-study course that you can take at any time. It consists of 6 hours of video, 20 ten-minute podcasts, and proposes 20 hours of writing during that time. If you follow the regimen to the letter, you will produce a complete 40-paragraph (up to 8000-word) draft of a research paper.

For Pleasure

This blog has given me an opportunity to write down my ideas as inspiration or circumstance seemed to require. In the nature of the genre, these are somewhat tentative ideas, expressed in an often improvised form, and should be considered works in progress, unfinished thoughts. In many cases, I wrote them in series, but I will link here only to a key post, from which it should be easy to navigate.

To crib a line from Wittgenstein’s preface to his Tractatus: I will be satisfied if these posts give some pleasure to people who read them with understanding. Or even with puzzlement. Pleasure is the main thing.

What Is Inframethodology? (2018)

Saying, Doing, Meaning (2019)

Academic Knowing (2019)

Five Easy Paragraphs (2023)

Methodology and Experience (2021)

Robots, Rights, and Writers (2022)

Composing the Moment (2022)

How They Must Write (2023)

A Place to Care About (2019)

For Normal Writing (2018)

The Substance of the Craft (2021)

Hamlet for Academic Purposes (2019)

Place of Forms, Forms of Life (2021)

From the Ideal Paper to the Just Word (2022)

The Rhetorical Stance (2020)

Good Writing is the Creative Destruction of Bad Ideas (2019)

Craft Skills and Guild Privileges (2021)

One Paragraph a Day for Four Weeks (2023)

How to Imagine Dragons (2019)

From Construction to Imagination (2020)

Writing in 4D (2020)

A Bigger Iceberg (2019)

The Patron and the Iceberg (2023)

Seven Little Disciplines (2020)

Between  Writing Instructors and Content Teachers (2019)

Literacy for Academic Purposes (2018-19)

De/composition (2021 [2014])

Formation (2015)

The birds chirped away. Fweet, Fweet, Bootchee-Fweet. Doing all the things naturalists say they do. Expressing abysmal depths of aggression, which only Man—Stupid Man—heard as innocence. We feel everything is so innocent—because our wickedness is so fearful.

Saul Bellow, Mosby’s memoirs

I have decided to stop blogging. And tweeting too, for that matter. In fact, I wish I had stopped while it was still uncomplicated to call it Twitter and to liken the medium to the chirping of birds. This morning, when I read Bellow’s reflections on “the abysmal depths of aggression” in birdsong that we mistake for innocence, the association was fearful indeed!

I have, of course, been thinking about this for some time. In fact, since I have been an active blogger for 20 years, I can date the feeling back to at least December 18, 2012. There is something peculiar about the way we have come to “think out loud” about everything. I think Bellow is on to something when he reminds us of the veneer of innocence we use to mask our aggression. We say we’re just speaking our minds, but at some level, sometimes altogether overtly, we’re demanding that everyone else make up their own — right now — and declare what side they’re on. People who don’t spend a lot of time online, people who don’t share their thoughts with us in so-called “real time”, are somehow suspect, vaguely criminal, like Winston Smith sitting in his corner, out of view of the telescreen, writing in his notebook. (They probably have sticky notes covering the lenses of their webcams too!) “If you want your privacy,” I once said, “you had better keep it like a secret.” Well, I haven’t been very good at keeping mine.

Late last year, I took up another idea that has been with me for almost as long. Are blogging and tweeting even writing, a form of literacy? Would it not be more appropriate, as Carlo Scannella has suggested, to think of them as oral media? I don’t think we are very good at “reading” (i.e,. hearing) each other this way. We hold each other to our words as if tweeting something is the same as “putting it in writing.” But we often don’t think carefully enough about the writing we do online to warrant such scrutiny. Mistakes are easily retracted (and even deleted) and, though sometimes regretted, we are happy to forget we ever wrote (i.e., said) the words. Like I say, we’re not correspondingly forgiving enough. If we were, social media would be a very different place. Though we’d still, I suspect, be up a tree.

Lately, I have been taking some strong stances against the use of AI writing assistants. It occurs to me that my avid use of social media makes me a bit of a hypocrite. It’s true that ChatGPT can’t write; but perhaps WordPress likewise can’t really publish. Being an author requires us to put a public face on our private thoughts. But the thoughts that I have been developing online are, in an important sense, born public. I haven’t been composing posts so much as a channeling ideas. “Entwittering,” I once called it. Maybe I haven’t been expressing myself, just internalizing the Internet? And the Internet, we must remember, is not an adequate representation of human civilization. I am going to have to go back to the library stacks and the drawing board. I’m going to have to recover my literacy, my culture, my humanity.

What will become of Inframethodology? I’m going to reorganize it into a website, rather than a blog. At some point, the front page will offer a point of entry to all the same resources that are here now, including Writing Process Reengineering and the two series of talks that I do every school year. As it will be less “current,” less topical (more “timeless”?), some things will be emphasized and others will be pushed into the background, but I will keep the archive of all the pasts posts. And the whole place will be searchable as usual. I’m not going to erase myself from the Internet. I’m just going to stop exposing myself to it continuously. I hope it will make me less aggressive, maybe a little kinder.

There are too many people that I should thank, and apologize to, for all they have done for me, and all I have done to them. I hope you know who you are. As for my offline activities … well, hopefully, I will see you around!

To have gathered from the air a live tradition…
this is not vanity.

Ezra Pound

This weekend I had one of those moments of clarity that changes nothing. It was merely (and literally) just another case of a middle-aged man discovering that he had been speaking prose all his life. Or, in my case, teaching prose for the past twenty years.

When I was younger, I thought I was a philosopher, first of mind, then of language, finally of science. But at some point I realized that if I had a contribution to make to modern scholarship it lay in helping people master the art of academic writing. More precisely, I could help people write down what they know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people. There are times when I think this still makes me a philosopher, working in a tradition that can be traced back, through Bolzano and Kierkegaard, to Kant, and then forward to Wittgenstein and Heidegger, through Feyerabend and Kuhn, Foucault and Derrida, back up to the present day. But it is unlikely that I will ever make a serious contribution to those traditions. I am a writing consultant, not a scholar.

But even in that humble role, I fear, I sometimes cut a disappointing figure. After all, I am strangely aloof to style manuals and author guidelines; I eschew any authority to tell you how to get published or succeed as a scholar. (I don’t even like to tell students how to pass their exams.) I’m happy to talk about it, but I don’t have the one simple trick to how to “get things done in academia.” After all, I am not a successful writer myself. I defer to those who do publish in the so-called “top journals” for advice on how to satisfy your reviewers. My goal is to help you become a better writer.

What use is that? you may ask. This is the substance of my little epiphany this weekend. Over the years, I have increasingly focused on the paragraph as the unit of composition for scholarly prose. I have defined this unit as (1) at least six sentences and at most two-hundred words that say one thing and support, elaborate, or defend it, which constitutes (2) about half a page of prose and (3) one minute of a reader’s attention. I strongly believe that any scholar worth their tenure is able to compose a coherent prose paragraph, thus defined, about anything they know, and feel entitled to assume that they know a great many things. Writing papers and chapters and monographs is really just a matter of arranging a series of such paragraphs in a plausible order. If you can write a good paragraph, you have the writing skills you need to succeed in scholarship.

I emphasize writing skills, but that isn’t the whole of it, of course. I don’t know if you have the knowledge or the intelligence, the cunning, the courage, or the compassion that is required to survive (i.e., not “perish”) in the modern university. (I do have some sense of how hard it is.) Just because you can write a paragraph doesn’t mean you should; and just because you can’t doesn’t mean you’ll never pretend to. Careers are complicated, and nobody is perfect. But you will never regret the effort you made to develop the ability to compose a coherent prose paragraph about something you know in twenty or thirty minutes. This ability is the foundation of your confidence as a scholar among your peers. It is the basis of your discipline.