I wrote this post over ten years ago for Jonathan Mayhew’s blog Stupid Motivational Tricks. I had been using a clip from Roland Emmerich’s The Patriot to introduce a talk to undergraduates about how to write a first draft, “de-allegorizing” it as being really about how to write the first draft of an academic paper. I liked it a lot back then, and rereading it now, I still do, though I don’t think I would use the same violent imagery today to talk to students. (If you’re a student, you’ve been warned!) The post is organized as a nine-step program for dealing with the predicament of “having an idea” / “getting an assignment”.

(Note: I wasn’t able to find the whole ten minute sequence in the film in a properly licensed version. But I’ve inserted two clips of the relevant scenes and below. You can of course also just find the film on a streaming service yourself and watch the whole thing. It think the post works even without the clips, but it was fun to make the allusions, so I hope you read the text at some point with an awareness of the film just to see what I was trying to do.)

Thoughts do not come to us like friends from afar, like welcome guests. Thoughts, real thoughts that is, which are always a palpable demand that we write, come into our lives like invading armies. Before we have been forced to think, our lives are quiet. Our ideas are with us in a familiar way, like beloved children or valued employees. We let them play sometimes and sometimes we try to improve them (we teach them what we know). Each of us is also ultimately an idea, an idea of ourselves, an “I”, stable and serene. It is when we start thinking that the trouble starts.

(When I told this story to students I made sure to tell them that the inconvenience of this kind of “thought” in the head of the scholar is nicely simulated by being given a school assignment. Though the pressure is internal in the case of the working scholar, the disruption is comparable.)

Step 1: Hold Back Your Ideas

A thought, when it is a serious thought, i.e., when it demands to be articulated in writing, is neither simple nor nebulous. It is a marshaling of particular forces against you (against an idea of yourself); it is itself a collection of ideas under the command of a far-off general (a much more general idea, and one that you will engage only by proxy in the particular case). The “general” has sent out a platoon of ideas, under the command of a lieutenant, to bring you into line. Their mission is to take one of your existing ideas, one of your familiar thoughts, prisoner. As this happens there is nothing you can do; the thought is simply too strong to resist.

But ideas are neither isolated from nor indifferent to each other. Nor are you (again, the idea of yourself as a scholar) indifferent to the ideas you have. Seeing one of them bound and taken away hurts you deeply. And it hurts your other ideas as well, who love the prisoner as you do. Sometimes ideas are rash and do not understand the predicament they are in. They think they are invincible (because you have held them in your arms with such conviction in the past) and they don’t know how serious the invading thought is about its business. Disappointed in your inaction (which is really hard-won composure) an idea, then, may rush at the invading thoughts. This darling is immediately killed.

It was a “stupid” idea, not in its substance but in its impatience. It did not recognize its limits. Don’t let this happen to your most cherished notions. When the thought arrives, let it take its prisoner. Stay calm. Hold your other ideas back.

Step 2: Gather Your Thoughts and Follow the Argument

It was not enough to take the prisoner. The thought now burns down your house and shoots your livestock and your pets. After it leaves, after you have said your last good-bye (to the latest but not the last darling you’ll see killed in your career as a scholar), you must run back into this burning life (of the mind) and retrieve a few things (some guns, a tomahawk, that sort of thing). Then you must select from among your ideas the ones that are relevant (the ones that can shoot) and send the others off into hiding. You give them a back-up plan, somewhere they can go if this idea of yourself (this authorial persona) fails.

Since you know where the general is, you know where the disruptive thought is going. Though strong, it is a big and cumbersome organization. It moves slowly, if resolutely. You can run through the woods and prepare an ambush. You find a good place along the road to set it up. Then you bring your trusted (if frightened) ideas close and begin to outline the paper.

Step 3: Identify the Main Ideas (Officers)

The argument that has burned down your house is not just a collection of ideas; it is organized around some central themes or principles. What are those principles? They are easy to identify (by their uniforms and their horses) and will not be hard to hit. In a piece of academic writing there will always be a substantial amount of “general” claims, i.e., claims that are shared by most readers (and the writer) and which are “responsible”, as it were, to the more specific, more empirical, claims you are making. Their “power” depends on the obedience of those lesser facts “on the ground”. Identify the officers (up on their horses) first. Once you’ve got them, the rest will be much easier.

Step 4: Focus (i.e., Pray)

There should always be a moment of silence before you actually begin to write. “Lord make me fast and accurate,” is a great prayer if you like that sort of thing. Ideally, you’ll want to work through the 20 to 40 claims that your paper will make quite quickly but also with some precision. You should devote a half-hour to each paragraph on each run through. That is, it should take you 10 to 20 hours to hit each claim with a well-focused but roughly drafted paragraph. Then another 10 to 20 hours to work through each paragraph again. Speed and accuracy is not just for marksmen.

Step 5: Aim Small

For each major claim you need a nice, tightly-written, focused sentence that makes the claim but does not attempt to support it. Such a sentence will serve as the “key sentence” for each prose paragraph in the paper. You will be writing to such a sentence for 30 minutes at a time, producing about 6 sentences of argument (support) for it. So keep the claim small enough to make that task realistic: one claim, 6 sentences, 30 minutes.

(Step 5 and 6 restate a slogan familiar to marksmen and golfers. “Aim Small, Miss Small.” As Mark Barker, Mel Gibson’s technical advisor, told him: “If you aim at a man and miss, you miss the man, while if you aim at a button and miss, you still hit the man.”)

Step 6: Miss Small

You can never know for sure whether you have hit the idea you are writing about completely and fully, though you’ll develop a pretty good sense of whether you’ve hit it squarely by how it reacts. Be content with getting your shot off and then crouch down to reload. (If you look too long at the target to see if you really “got it”, you’ll get shot.) Aim, shoot, reload. There’ll be time (hopefully) to go back and see what you’ve accomplished. In the moment, just do the best you can. If you’re aiming small, trust also that you’re missing small. You won’t get anything out of obsessing about each paragraph as you go.

Step 7: Rescue Your Darling (or Kill It)

You can write probably about half your paragraphs very easily, from a distance as it were. (These include the officers, but also some of the easier ground troops, i.e., background claims about your topic and intellectual context.) But at some point you’re going to have to put the gun down and get into some close-quarters writing. Here you will have greater difficulty focusing on one idea at time. It’s messy at this range. But you must try to deal with each claim or idea individually. Sometimes you’ll even get lucky and take out two ideas with one argument.

But then you face the climactic moment of extricating the prisoner (your idea, which was taken away from you by the thought the paper will try to express) from the immediate hold that some part of the argument has on it. There is a risk here that you’ll kill your darling rather than the claim that holds it prisoner. Steady now.

Step 8: Deal With Objections

Even if you succeed, there’ll be some loose ends to tie up. Don’t let your success at step 7 get you to let your guard down. Here they come!

Step 9: For God’s Sake, Stop!

Once you’ve gotten the last guy, stop. Hacking one last objection to pieces is unseemly after you have won the argument. It does, to be sure, leave a certain impression on the ideas that you originally brought with you. Your rage may be quite awesome. But as you are hacking away uselessly at an already dead issue, some only half-dead counter-argument may be escaping your attention.

This is not exactly how I would put it today. I’ve mellowed a little over these past ten years and I’m not sure the analogy holds completely. There’s even some outright bad advice in this post (can you spot it?). But I remember enjoying writing this post and I hope you found it entertaining to read. Writing isn’t always like this, of course. But maybe you’ve had an experience that is similar and will find this useful. I’m happy to hear what you in the comments.

The Art of Learning series is off to a good start. My first talk, “How to Know Things,” went well, but looking at the notes from last year, I realized that I had forgotten to emphasize an elegant conceptual triad, or rhetorical triptych, so I thought I’d make up for it by writing a blogpost. The overarching message of the talk is that knowledge is a competence that supports a performance. Being knowledgeable (“for academic purposes”) about something means being able to think, talk, and write about it more effectively than someone who is not. Under the surface of these performances is a deep foundation of philosophical, rhetorical, and literary skills that allow us to make up our minds, speak them, and write them down. “The dignity of the movement of an iceberg,” Hemingway reminds us, “lies in only one eighth of it being above water.” In an academic setting, it is our knowledge that gives dignity to our propositions, our conversations, and our paragraphs, which deploy but never completely exhaust our cognitive resources.

When we make up our minds we form beliefs. Philosophers describe beliefs as “propositional attitudes”, which, like hopes, fears, and desires have “propositional content”. We believe that something is the case, just as we might fear, hope, or wish that it is the case. The content of our belief is what we think is true and we call this what a “proposition”. The essential thing about a proposition, however, is not that it actually is true (if it’s something we fear then we hope it isn’t!) but that it could be true or false. Unlike individual words, as well as questions and commands, propositions have a “truth value”. They’re either true or false. In academic settings, we want much of our writing to express propositions because they’re the content of our knowledge, they capture what we know, one truth at a time. If you’ll permit a pun, academics must have a propositional attitude, they must comport themselves towards the world as something that can be articulated in propositions. They must see the world largely as a collection of facts that make propositions true or false.

These propositions then come up in conversation. To be knowledgeable in an academic setting is to be able to hold your own in a conversation with other knowledgeable people. You have to understand their questions, get their jokes, and respect their boundaries. You have to say what you think in such a way that others can and will keep talking to you about it. You have to understand how to contribute to their thinking, and how to let them contribute to yours. Kleist talked about “the gradual formation of thought while speaking,” and although it has been argued that he was perhaps not being wholly serious (more on that some other time), there is no question that scholars and students can only claim to know things if they are willing to discuss them. Scholars are expected to present their work at “colloquia”, i.e., meetings where they “speak together”. Students are sometimes required to take oral exams. A knowledgeable person should be able to demonstrate that they are “conversant” in their subject matter.

Academics, after all, do not deal in isolated propositions that are simply true or false. They hold their beliefs in “webs” that sustain them holistically. We can believe any one thing only because we believe many other things; and if we change our mind about some things we usually have to change our minds about others. That’s why scholars and students should be able to compose themselves in paragraphs such that some propositions support, elaborate, or defend other propositions. That’s one way we can make the relations between our beliefs perspicuous and help to keep track of the consequences we would face if we turned out to wrong. We recognize that some propositions are more difficult than others and our paragraphs are composed to use some propositions to make other proprositions easier to believe, understand, and agree with. (Belief is not the only thing that is hard about a proposition.) Composing paragraphs and putting them together in essays and papers, is the characteristic way that scholars commit their thoughts to a logical structure. They literally put their thinking in writing.

Think, talk, write! Make up your mind, speak your mind, write it down! Propositions, conversations, and compositions. Propose, converse, compose! Some people think rhetorical triptyches like this are trite and easy.* But they can serve as both heuristics and mnemonics for university students (and faculty!) who are trying to learn difficult material in a way that they’ll retain long after they finish their studies, long after they’ve gradually perfected their thoughts and graduated (do you see what I did there?). And if you want to sketch the outlines of an 8000-word paper in, say, under 1000 words, why not write five paragraphs that “conceptualize, analyze, and discuss” your object … one, two, three. Remember that Plato’s Academy was a garden. It’s easier to imagine in panels.

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*You may have noticed that this really a nested 3 x 3 triptych. Propositions are (1) justified, (2) true (3) beliefs; conversations require (1) questions, (2) humor, and (3) boundaries; paragraphs (1) support, (2) elaborate, or (3) defend a knowledge claim. It’s all very neat and tidy.

“A writer’s problem does not change,” said Hemingway, addressing his fellow writers during the Spanish Civil War.* “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.” This really suggests two problems, of course. First, the writer must “find what is true”; next, they must make the reader “experience” it. As academics (students and scholars) we sometimes confuse the two, mistaking the difficulty of the material we are studying for the difficulty of writing about it, but it is important to keep them separate. In fact, from day to day, in an academic setting, this idea of “finding what is true” is not as important as “writing truly” what we think. Let me try to say a few words about that.

Taking Hemingway at face value, and putting it in somewhat philosophical language, we can say that he proposed that the writer must, first, form a justified, true belief about something and, then, present it in writing in such a way that the reader, too, comes to believe it. For Hemingway, it is the truth that is to be “projected” in the writing. But what if we’re not as confident about war, love, or lion hunting as Hemingway appears to have been? What if we’re writing more to try out our ideas than to persuade our readers that we’re right?

I want to suggest that good academic writing less about making the reader experience your truth and more about getting the reader to to consider whether what you’re saying is true. When we’re reading a good novel (and, arguably, a good piece of journalism) we don’t want to be constantly asking ourselves whether what is happening in the story is true. We want the events — what Hemingway called “the sequence of motion and fact” — to present themselves to our imaginations almost as if they were actually happening. We want to know what happens next, not whether it happened at all. (The so-called “unreliable narrator” poses a problem for this simplified view, but not one that, given another post, I couldn’t deal with.) But in a piece of scholarship each fact is presented, paragraph for paragraph, in such a way that we can ask the two questions in Wayne Booth’s ideal Oxford tutorial: What is the author saying? How does the author know?

That is, instead of worrying about whether you are persuading your reader that what you’re saying is true, and, indeed, instead of worrying about whether it is actually true, in the moment of writing, just project what you think in such way that the reader can carefully consider whether or not it is true. Indeed, your writing should compel your reader, not to believe it, but to think about it. The truth of the claims you are making should seem important to you. The question of their truth should impress itself on the reader as a relevant one.

Not all writing is like this. Leaving aside novels, we often read stories without caring very much whether it’s true, or simply taking for granted that it is. When reading a popul0ar science book, for example, we don’t seriously consider the possibility that the writer may be wrong. We see our job as readers to be mainly one of understanding the material that we’re presented with. In the media in general, we read many of the stories mainly as an indication of what “agenda setters” want us to think about today. We don’t expect them to have particularly good reasons for for believing its true, but some strong incentives for suggesting the idea to us. Advertising is a good example of this sort of thing, too. Like propaganda, it’s a kind of rhetoric we know how to engage with, but our main concern is not whether or not it is “true”.

Academic writing is not so much the art of writing what is true as the art of presenting something in such a way that its truth may be discussed. Once the reader understands what you’re saying, they should wonder how you know its true. Reading on, they should of course be enlightened about exactly that.

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*I originally said he was addressing journalists. But the remark was made in a speech at the American Writers’ Congress in June of 1937. Published under the title “Fascism Is a Lie” in Conversations with Ernest Hemingway, Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed. (University Press of Mississippi, 1986).

“Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain.” (Oscar Wilde)

“From the centre, the manager or staff of the institution are able to watch the inmates. [Jeremy] Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, and asylums, but he devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a panopticon prison.” (Wikipedia)

Last year, near the end of the Art of Learning Series, I hit on a useful distinction that I want to begin with and build on this year. If I am right, I have discovered three useful triads around which to organise your experience of higher education. The series is pitched to students, but I think even seasoned academics can get something out of reflecting on their goals and, when they do so, to take their happiness seriously. While the fall series is aimed broadly at the learning process, in this post I want to talk specifically about writing. I think the point generalizes to reading and speaking, but it may be easier to understand if we focus on the business of putting words to paper. I want us to consider the difference between the writing moment and the writing process.

When Oscar Wilde said that “suffering is one very long moment” he was serving two year’s of hard labor in prison. Bentham’s utilitarian archictectures nowithstanding, it’s important to keep in mind that school is, not only not prison, it is the opposite of prison. “School” comes from the Greek word for “spare time, leisure, rest, ease; idleness.” Bentham’s intuitions may be vindicated a little, however, when we realise that it also involved “a holding back, a keeping clear,” and, indeed, that school sort of clears a space in our life for learning, provides, if you will, a “clearing” where learning can take place. A “here”. I want to stress that it is nothing like a prison, except that it walls us off, for a time, from the ordinary business of living. Wilde’s suffering was unbearable because his respite from this business was not chosen freely.

This is why I remind you not to resent the academic situation. Remember that you have chosen it and that it offers you, precisely, freedom to think and feel differently about life than you might otherwise be compelled to by your life circumstances. The trick is not to see your time at university as “one very long moment” but to “divide it by seasons”, by semesters, by weeks, and days and hours. Indeed, I recommend you divide it into half-hours for good measure. It is these little moments that you must learn to master and then organize into a kind of progress.

Pleasure is of the moment, the present. When you are writing you must give yourself conditions that allow you to enjoy the activity. Don’t imagine your teachers (or, if you are a scholar, your reviewers) already looking over your shoulder ready to pounce. Don’t worry about life’s tribulations and responsibilities, to which you will return after the writing is done. “The human brain,” said Cyril Connolly, “once it is fully functioning, as in the making of a poem, is outside time and place and immune from sorrow.” The same is true (if, quite literally, more prosaically) of the making of a paragraph. Give your brain a proper moment to function fully. Release yourself from time and space.

Of course, you can’t keep that up for long, as Wilde reminds us. Let every moment come to an end. Now look back at your process and find some satisfaction in the past, a series of deliberate moments that lie behind you. Remember what you accomplished there, not just how you suffered. If you have opened yourself to pleasure, you have, willy-nilly, opened yourself to pain, so don’t be surprised that not every moment was passed in pure bliss. You will have struggled and you will have learned. If you followed my rules, you will have a number of more or less coherent, indeed, increasingly coherent prose paragraphs to show for it. Look them over. Read them through, and out loud. Admire your handiwork. Take some satisfaction in it.

Pleasure in the present moment, satisfaction with the process that is past. What shall we say about the future? You want to face the future with confidence, and confidence somes from the progress you are making. Through a series of effective writing moments, organised into a reliable process, your prose is becoming stronger. Keep working from the centre of your strength, always seeking pleasure in the now and satisfaction in the then. This will give you confidence in what is to come. These three triads (moment/pleasure/present, process/satisfaction/past, progress/confidence/future) are what I want to explore this fall. You’re welcome to join me. Your comments along the way are more than welcome.

First you must lay aside your sophomoric resentment of the task. I know you came by it honestly, no doubt as a sophomore, but your contempt for your reader will not make your paper easier to write. Writing a paper is a serious activity. It is the art of writing down what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people. A paper exposes your ideas to the criticism of people who are qualified to tell you that you are wrong; and, if that is what you are, you want to know. You respect your reader’s knowledge and intelligence because it is like your own. If you are an undergraduate, your reader is a serious student in your cohort; if you are a professor, your reader is a fellow scholar in your discipline. Whatever your station in life, when you are writing an academic paper, your reader is a peer.

A paper always presents the result of study. Sometimes the study is so well-defined that it deserves an article, sometimes it is merely the learning you did in the weeks or months before you wrote the paper. You may be reporting the results of years of fieldwork or weeks of classwork; the point is that the paper presents something you have learned deliberately. You may have formulated and answered an explicit research question, or you may merely have followed a reading list and attended classes. In any case, you set out to discover a set of truths and, after some definite effort, perhaps some actual suffering, you reached your goal, or at least got measurably closer to it. You are now in a position to tell the reader, not just what you think, but how you know. You can even tell the reader how well you know it, how certain you are. The paper is simply the most efficient possible way of doing this.

A paper is a series of paragraphs that each supports, elaborates, or defends one thing you know. Since a paragraph normally consists of at least six sentences and at most two-hundred words, there are about two of them to the page. Some of them will introduce the paper, some will establish a backgound, some will theorize your object, some will present your methods, some will offer an analysis, some will discuss your results, some will conclude the paper. A five-page paper will have nine to eleven paragraphs. A ten-page paper will have about twenty, a twenty-page paper, about forty. You have to know one thing well to write each paragraph. The sooner you decide what the ten, twenty, or forty things you will claim to know in this paper are, the happier you will be as a writer.

Each paragraph occupies roughly one minute of your reader’s attention. You are arranging a series of one-minute experiences in the mind of your reader. Tell them about the world your research bears upon. Tell them about the science you have brought to bear upon it. Tell them what your research shows. Tell them how their minds should change in the clear light of what you’ve found. In an important sense, a paper always seeks the artful dissappointment of the reader’s expecations of your object. You are showing them something new and this will have consequences for what they thought was true. Should they rethink their expectations, their theories? Or should they now make some practical intervention in the world we share? Spend a few minutes of your readers’ time working through these issues.

Your kindness to your reader is measurable in your discipline. How much time did you spend on each paragraph? Did you demand, say, 27 minutes of yourself before you asked your reader to give you one? Did you spend some of that time making sure that the key sentence presented a discrete difficulty for the reader to consider? Did you compose further sentences with the explicit aim of making the key sentence easier to believe, understand, or agree with? Did you devote some time to arranging the sentences in an order that yielded a maximum of clarity and a minimun of boredom? Did you take the time to read your own paragraph out loud to make sure it works as it should? Did you seek some feedback on it? Your prose should be like a window on your mind. You are writing down what you know so that your peers can engage you in conversation about what you think is true. That is the substance of the craft.