Probably the most controversial thing I say in my “How to Review the Literature” talk is that you shouldn’t write a literature review. (I normally credit — or blame, if you will — Ezra Zuckerman, but for some reason I forgot this year. Sorry, Ezra.) I also understand if it comes as something of a surprise to my audience. After all, my first talk was called “How to Write a Research Project” and next week’s talk will be “How to Write the Theory Section.” It would be reasonable to assume that last week’s talk could just as well have been called “How to Write a Literature Review,” not merely “how to review the literature,” but, in fact, the difference is important. I was not talking about how to write at all; I was talking about how to review the literature, i.e., how to search for it and how to read it when you find it.

Ezra is right to say that you are looking, in part, for the limits of the existing literature. It’s often suggested that you should be looking for “gaps”, but, in so far as these exist, you should actually try to fill them in with presumptions. (This idea, that theories are presumptions, is something I learned from Steve Fuller many years ago and which I’ll unpack in tomorrow’s talk.) That is, if one glaring feature of the literature in your tradition is the lack of any work on the subject that you are interested in, then you should read the literature looking for what your reader expects in their ignorance, not simply for a basis to claim that the reader probably doesn’t expect anything at all and will therefore (presumably!) be happy to learn whatever you find out. Ezra says you’re looking for the sense in which a theory is “compelling but flawed”. We might also say you’re trying to assure your readers that you think they’re rational before you tell them they’re mistaken. They have good reasons to to expect what they expect; though you think they’re wrong, you don’t think they’re stupid. Indeed, you know the story of how they came to think that way. If you hadn’t discovered the facts you did, you’d probably think like that too.

I came up with this analogy about a week ago and tweeted it. I’ve since been thinking about it, and I think it holds up under scrutiny. So I thought I’d write a quick post.

Back in November I heard Gary Marcus describe large language models as “autocomplete on steroids” and I immediately free-associated to Terence McKenna’s “stoned ape” theory which, we might say, holds that human language is autocomplete on mushrooms. That’s a bit glib, but it suggests a more serious analogy. “PC is the LSD of the 1990s,” said the acid guru Timothy Leary once (he meant “personal computers” not “political correctness”) and today he would be even more correct to suggest that AI is our LSD. Now, I don’t actually mean that there is some interesting similarity between artificial intelligence and psychedelic experience. These are very different things. But what I’ve noticed is that my reaction to AI, and the range of reactions of my peers in academic writing instruction, is similar to the reaction to the introduction of LSD into mass culture in the 1960s.

To set the scene, let me state my reasonably educated but utterly non-expert view of LSD. (I’ve checked my facts in this post using Wikipedia.) Lysergic acid diethylamide was first synthesized by Albert Hofmann in 1938, and, in 1943, he discovered its psychedelic properties by accident. It was then used in psychiatric research and treatment in the 1950s and 1960s, while the CIA also began to weaponize it for “intelligence” purposes. (Maybe you can already see the pattern!) Its use in research made it widely available to academics and their students, and it was soon adopted by the counter-culture of the 1960s. Timothy Leary was one of its most ardent proponents, famously urging young people to “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” and was described by Richard Nixon as “the most dangerous man in America”. Despite being “non-addictive with low potential for abuse” and known to “induce transcendental experiences with lasting psychological benefit,” LSD was “scheduled” in 1968, making it illegal to use both medically and recreationally. But by this time it was, as it were, “too late”; Sgt. Pepper had already been, if you will, inspired and conceived, and, indeed, released to the public.

I’m sure you can imagine many clever ways to replace the people and events in this story to produce a pretty close approximation of the narrative around GPT. But, for me, the analogy suggests a number of important things.

1. There’s no way back. Our students will increasingly use ChatGPT (and other language models) to inspire and, no doubt, produce their written assignments at university. I’m sure they’ll also find ways to use it “recreationally”.
2. Prohibition will not work. Punishing students for using it where it seems relevant to them and is technically possible will merely undermine our authority. (I’ll leave it to you to work out the analogy to the “war on drugs” in its details.)
3. Language models are perfectly safe. They are non-addictive and, so long as students continue to read and write on their own, will not damage their minds.
4. The quality of artificially generated text will improve. As will its “potency”. That is, both the style and the content of the output of language models will become increasingly effective in all sorts of applications.
5. Language models can both motivate and inspire students to produce writing they might not otherwise have come up with.

This may seem like an endorsement, which brings me to my final reason for liking the GPT/LSD analogy. Since the Summer of Bots, I have experimented extensively with GPT-3 and ChatGPT, and I have thought a great deal about it. And, if I had been a professor of philosophy or psychology in 1963, I think I might have experimented with LSD and mushrooms and DMT and other drugs, at least until they were forbidden. But…

6. I will not encourage students to use GPT to assist them in their writing projects.

That is, like LSD, while I’m comfortable with it myself, and while I grant that it has probably helped many artists and thinkers have experiences that have helped them produce interesting work to the benefit of themselves and our culture, I am not comfortable with the idea of integrating artificial intelligence into the process of developing the natural abilities of students to make up their minds, speak their minds, and write it down. Yes, I know that many students will use it anyway, and I’m not going to warn them off it, but I will not personally advise them to see how it might help solve their writing problems. I’m simply not sure I know how to use it to help them become better writers.

If they do use it to make the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band of the college essay, that’s great! It was possible to enjoy that record without dropping acid too. But I am not going to engage explicitly with their experiments with artificial intelligence or suggest particularly effective ways of getting the most out of it. Like I say, I’m not sure I know enough about it.

Of course, if LSD had not been forced underground in 1968, there’s no telling what uses mainstream psychiatry and psychology, philosophy and poetry, would have found for it, and what place it would therefore now have in academic life. In some alternate universe, acid trips might today be familiar parts of the college (and even high school!) curriculum, as common as field trips! I truly hope that we make the best of artificial intelligence too. I hope we don’t let a moral panic awaken our prohibitionist impulses.

Let’s turn on, tune in, and stay calm.

Over the years, I’ve experimented with a variety of images, stories, and slogans to get my ideas about academic writing across to students and scholars. This year, I’m going to try to keep the decorative effects to a minimum and give myself more time to present the actual craft. “More matter, less art,” as Hamlet’s mother wishes. I’ve settled on two key insights, which are no doubt timeless, but which happen to come to us in the words of two great modernist writers, Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway.

“The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water,” Hemingway tells us in Death in the Afternoon. The dignity of a piece of writing, likewise, depends on what the writer has under the surface. This is where I will begin the Craft of Research Series this year, starting on Thursday by drawing an iceberg on the board and detailing what the writer of a research paper should have above and below the water. In fact, though it’s a rough approximation, I have found it useful to coordinate each of the sections of a paper with the sources that typically serve as their basis. So, for example, the theory section will be based on the literature and the analysis will be based on the data. Hemingway, of course, believed that a story, even a fictional one, should be based on the experience of the writer, and the reader should feel that experience even when it is not being directly reported by the writer. Last week, I wrote about how the experience of gathering data is similarly shared in our methods sections. Here, too, a great deal depends on the decisions we make about what to tell the reader and what to hold back. “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows,” says Hemingway, “and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.”

“To know whom to write for is to know how to write,” said Woolf in her essay “The Patron and the Crocus.” In one way or another, all writing instructors have this message at the core of their pedagogy. Your decisions about what to put on the surface and what to leave below will always be guided by your image of the reader. In academic writing, the important thing is to have a good sense of what the reader knows. As I never tire of saying, it is the art of writing down what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people, and those other people are your peers. For students, that means that they should not imagine writing for their teachers but for their fellow students, which is helpful because they can actually know something about them. Not only can they reach out and talk to them, they can imagine a mind shaped by roughly the same experiences, taking the same courses, reading the same readings, participating in the same discussions. Scholars at all levels conduct their research as members of a community of curious minds; they are always looking at their objects on behalf of their peers. The so-called “problem of representation” isn’t just about how to imagine objects; it’s about taking the point of view of one’s community. The scholar is a representative of the intellectual interests of that community and students struggle with their materials on behalf of each other in the same way. “The choice of a patron is of the highest importance,” Woolf tells us. “But how to choose rightly? How to write well? Those are the questions.”

“Jose Medina is correct in his disdain,” says my favorite poet, Tony Tost, in Invisible Bride; “the doctors are absolutely modern.” I don’t know if he meant the Walter Dill Scott Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern. (I have a feeling that he serves mainly as an allusion to “pale” Ramon Fernandez, in Wallace Stevens’ “Idea of Order at Key West”. Stevens himself has said he did not mean it as a reference to the literary critic of the same name, but merely chose two common Spanish names for a fictional presence he needed in the poem.) I mention the line here only to acknowledge your possible disdain for “modernist” approaches to writing. It is true that there are other ways to compose your research papers — less classic and more romantic, even absolutely post-modern. I guess I’m suggesting that you begin by learning how to be modern, to become your own contemporary, as I think Kierkegaard once put it. Let Hemingway’s iceberg and Woolf’s patron inspire you to clarify your sources and your purpose as you go.

Like many writing instructors, I teach Hemingway’s “iceberg method” to students. I make sure to remind them that Hemingway was not an “academic” writer but a novelist and writer of short stories but, still, I tell them, he was adamant that writers must know what they’re talking about. If you’re going to write a novel about war, or bullfighting, or love, you better have some knowledge of the subject to start with. Indeed, he would argue, you should have some experience with these things. And, while academic knowledge is not always based on direct, personal experience, there is one section of a typical research paper that can apply Hemingway’s method almost directly. This, it turns out, is the methods section.

Let’s quickly recap what Hemingway meant. In fact, let us let Papa himself explain it.

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

Ernest hemingway, death in the afternoon

How does this apply to writing your methods section? Well, imagine writing the full story, in every detail, of how you gathered your data and analyzed it. This would be more Proust than Hemingway, I guess, and it’s not something you’d ever actually hand in for a grade or submit for publication. But imagine making it so complete that the reader could, not only replicate something like your study, but would in effect be doing the very same study if they did everything you tell them. In fact, imagine giving them instructions for having the very same experience that you did. Imagine putting in physical descriptions of the locations in which you interviewed your subjects or the office where you came up with your survey questions. Describe the bus ride to the field location where you carried out your observations, even what you had for lunch. Put in all your subjective judgments and perceptions, everything you thought and felt. Tell the reader where you are in doubt that you did it right, and which parts you thought at the time were just brilliant. Tell them what your enjoyed and what you suffered through, what gave you pleasure and what gave you pain. Capture every nuance of the process.

Now, think of your reader as someone who has done a similar study. What can you leave out of your account and let this reader fill in with their own experience? What do you have to keep in your account so that the reader can feel that you actually did all the things you leave out, because that’s what the reader would have done to have the experiences you describe. What parts are irrelevant to whether or not your data is of high quality because the reader assumes that you did them in the proper way (and you did them in that proper way, of course). What lengthy descriptions in our imaginary first draft can be summarized in a single bit of jargon (“semi-structured interview”, “control group”, “coding scheme”)? What is the simplest possible statement of your method to a reader who understands your methodology?

We can easily imagine that this version would be (less than) one-eight as long as the “Proustian” draft. That is, you can leave a great deal under the surface and the reader will still know everything they need to know to replicate your study, or at least enough to trust your data. “A writer’s problem does not change,” Hemingway said. “He himself changes, but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.” In research writing, this art of writing “truly enough” begins with an honest statement of your method that your reader understands. Face that problem squarely and you are well on your way.

This post is about how to write the ideal introduction and conclusion of a paper or, perhaps more precisely, the ideal paper‘s introduction and conclusion. I know that no paper, introduction, or conclusion is ideal, but it can be a good exercise to give yourself conditions that let you approximate an ideal. I will assume that you can take five deliberate moments to compose the first three and the last two paragraphs of a (real or imagined) paper that presents one of your research results. Since I’m assuming you have such a result, the hard part (doing the actual research) is presumably behind you. We will even leave the struggle of writing the whole paper on the side; it is only the introduction and conclusion that will interest us here. We will focus on five easy paragraphs that can be written in two and a half hours, or five half-hour writing moments at the start of the day for a week.

The first paragraph of your introduction should evoke a world. This is the first minute of your reader’s attention and it should set the scene for the result you will present in the third. It is the world you share with your reader, so it should be familiar but also interesting. This is not where you tell your reader that the UFOs are real and the Andromedans walk among us. That would be “out there”. But, if your analysis does indeed suggest that we are being visited by beings from other planets, then this opening paragraph may be where you say that the Pentagon has acknowledged that they have some video that is very difficult to explain. That, after all, has been reported in the New York Times. That is, while your description of the world in this paragraph should be uncontroversial, you should use what you know about the subject to make it interesting.

The second paragraph should invoke a science. Please remember that this is your science and the science of your reader. It is not “their” science, i.e., that of a community that is foreign to you and unfamiliar to your reader. You are not introducing your reader to a new body of knowledge, you are reminding your reader of the state of the conversation in their own discipline, which is also yours. As a rule, I suggest you characterize it either as a consensus or a controversy; your field may be founded on a broad agreement or, at the moment, engaged in a foundational dispute. It may be a bit of both, but you should write this paragraph with a focus on one or the other. Describe your field as a conversation between named scholars who are aware of each other’s work. Keep this paragraph human and concrete, not conceptual and abstract. You are describing a community of people who are brought together by a shared interest in a set of ideas.

The last paragraph of your introduction should now propose a thesis of your own. We could also say that it should state your conclusion. “This paper shows that…” is a great way to start this paragraph, followed by a straightforward statement of your results. That statement should be theoretically significant and empirically true. That is, its meaning should depend on your theory but its truth should depend on the analysis of your data. Importantly, this paragraph does not claim that your result is correct, only that your paper will show that it is. That means you will elaborate on exactly how it will show it, and the ideal way to do this is to write two sentences about your methods (“It is based on…”), three sentences about your analysis (“The findings indicate…”), and two sentences about your discussion (“This has implications for…”). Including the first sentence about the paper, that’s eight sentences in all. They are doing a lot of work, but they get it done in under a minute of the reader’s attention.

These first three paragraphs can be imagined as three concentric circles. In the middle, there is your object; around this, there is your paper, then your science, and then the world. “The world,” said Wittgenstein, “is everything that is the case,” but you are interested in some particular set of facts, and you have constructed these facts using the theories and methods of your science. You live in a society, done a scientific study, and gotten a result that you are presenting in a paper — the paper you are here introducing to a reader who also does science and lives in the world.

The first paragraph of your conclusion should restate your thesis. Remember that it’s been about thirty-five paragraphs (a good half hour of reading time) since we last read it in its plainly stated form. Your key sentence for this paragraph could simply be whatever you wrote after “This paper shows that” in paragraph three. But, to keep this interesting also for you, I recommend that you find a way of rephrasing it so that it says the same thing but, this time, for a reader who has just read your whole argument (background, theory, method, analysis, discussion, and all). The rest of the paragraph should support the conclusion. Write the strongest, least apologetic statement of the reasons you think your conclusion is true. Assume the reader is familiar with your methods and with your data and already understands the limitations of your study. Say it the way you say it to yourself, fully understanding what you mean. Your reader is ready and deserves to be addressed seriously.

The last paragraph should reimagine your world or your science in the light of your results. Keep in mind that there will ideally be some interesting tension between your theory and your analysis, which your discussion has dealt with the implications of. The first two paragraphs of your introduction evoked a world and invoked a science that were both innocent of your results. Now that we know what your study shows, how should we either either see the world or do our science going forward? Maybe we should prepare for one or another crisis waiting us in the future; maybe we should stop being worried about one. Maybe we should resolve the standing controversy in our field and replace it with a consensus of a kind you specify; maybe the years of peaceful consensus are over and it is time to debate the issues vigorously in our discipline. Maybe we need some specific new policy; maybe we need to conduct more research. Whatever you do, try to leave the reader with a clear view from exactly the point that you now yourself proceed.

These five paragraphs are of course easier to write about than to actually write. But I do want to insist that they are easier to write than what they are about is to know. Writing them is therefore a good test of whether you’re ready to write a paper. Take 5 x 30 minutes to find out whether you have something to say.