Most, perhaps all, of the readers of this blog are also writers. To be sure, some of them resent this fact a little, but, whether they are students or scholars, an important part of their “job” is to commit words to the page that express what they think. So is reading. Before they are my readers, my readers are readers of each other; they are peers to the people they write for. That in any case is what I imagine, what I presume.

My concern here is with so-called “academic” writing, i.e., the kind of writing that is done by students and scholars at universities. I don’t discriminate too much between them. Whether you are writing for examination or for publication, you are writing down what you know in order to discuss it with other knowledgeable people. You are opening your ideas to criticism. But you are not interested in just anyone’s criticism; you are interested in the criticism of your peers, i.e., people who are qualified to tell you that you are wrong. We sometimes mistakenly focus on the most proximal of these people — our teachers or reviewers — but it is important to keep our actual readers in mind. If you’re a student, these are your classmates. If you are a scholar, they are the members of your discipline.

Like yours, my readers are nice people, but I sometimes worry that we read each other in the wrong spirit. Students read each other’s papers on behalf of the teacher, ready to provide helpful to suggestions to their classmates about how to improve their grade. Scholars read each other’s papers on behalf of the reviewers, eager to help their colleagues satisfy the editorial standards of a journal. Once the paper is submitted, there’s nothing left to do but offer the appropriate congratulations or commiserations when the time comes. Reading a paper in its final form, simply for the purpose of discussing the ideas it presents, seems like an unnecessary inconvenience — not least to the author, who, as I’ve heard some of them declare openly, would prefer to put the often painful struggle of getting published behind them and move on to the next project. We have a tendency to respect their wishes; to be honest, we empathize with our comrades, kindred spirits in our “publish or perish” world. In a word, we’re kind.

But we should read each other’s finished work. And we should write it with the expectation of finding sincere readers who are interested in our ideas and ready to correct us where we are wrong. After all, getting a top grade, or getting published in a top journal, does not guarantee that everything you have written in paper is correct. Indeed, even your main thesis may be wrong. Your examiner or editor has only acknowledged that you have presented your ideas in a manner that opens them to qualified criticism. You have made your ideas available for discussion in an acceptable (even admirable) way; but it is now time to have that discussion. Your readers may love your paper but still disagree with you. In some cases, your readers may be compelled to try to replicate your results. Until they do, they can’t be sure you’re right. In an important sense, neither can you.

In our effort to be kind, in our eagerness to help nice people get on with their careers, we sometimes forget that good ideas take time, and, given time, ideas change. Not only do we need time to come up with them, and then to express them; our peers need to time to understand them, and test them against their own experiences, their own experiments. The greatest respect we show to an idea is to ponder it long enough to discover that it is wrong. Students who have earned good grades on their undergraduate papers will usually discover that they were completely wrong (often on some very important point) while writing their master’s thesis. (The better the paper, the more instructive this error will be.) Not to mention how wrong they find out they’ve always been while writing their doctoral dissertation!

Let’s remember that our peers took the time to write their ideas down. We need to take the time read them and engage with them. In academia, the best way to get to know your readers is to read them.

I know that summer doesn’t officially begin until the solstice, but this is the last of week of my recommended 8-week period of discipline after Easter, and the weather in Copenhagen has been excellent these last few days, so a little nod to Lady Day seems in order.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I recommend being very deliberate about your writing 32 weeks of the year and taking it easy for the remaining 20. That doesn’t mean you’re doing a lot of writing during those 32 weeks, only that you’re writing or not writing deliberately. That is, if you’re not writing, it’s because you planned not to write, and so you are not burdened by any guilt about not getting it done. And, if you are writing, you feel like you’re proceeding measurably towards some goal, which may only be getting better at writing, or contributing any number of paragraphs to a paper. You’re doing what you can every day; you are not “finally getting it done”. Being disciplined makes you feel good about the work you are doing, even when it is hard.

But for about 5 weeks in the winter, one week during the spring and the fall, and 13 weeks over the summer, you are free to write in a more spontaneous way. Or not at all, without thinking about why you’re not writing. You might just not feel like it. Or you might write just because you do feel like it. You are gripped by inspiration or bogged down in lethargy and you simply give into these forces instead of pitting your resolve against them. This gives you some time (and some mental space) to think things through.

For my part, I’ve got a lot of thinking to do about how the philosophy of science relates to academic writing. The idea that has been brewing in my mind goes back to Bernard Bolzano, who suggested that the logic of science was really just the grammar of scientific “treatises”. Today, we’d probably focus on papers, and my approach to epistemology is rooted in Steve Fuller’s “social epistemology,” which suggests a close connection between the philosophy of science and the rhetoric of academic articles. Lately, I’ve been thinking that we’re overcomplicating both of these subjects. Academics should be able to say plainly what they think and publish these ideas without too much fuss. (I’m not a big fan of the familiar peer-review process.) It’s the knowing, not the writing, that should be the hard part.

If you know what you’re talking about, writing an academic paper should be straightforward. Just stick to what you know and write it down. Easy does it.

This post isn’t going to be very deep. I thought I would reflect a little on a theme that I find myself emphasizing more and more when I talk students and scholars about their writing: a paragraph occupies roughly half a page of standard prose.

Here at CBS, a “normal page” consists of 2275 characters (including spaces) and I find that this means about 350 words to the page. Since a paragraph consists of at most 200 words, that’s roughly two paragraphs to the page. Each paragraph says one thing and supports, elaborates, or defends it; it takes about one minute to read. There are two main truths to the page.

Try to think of your papers (or your books, theses, dissertations, treatises, etc.) as a series of pages that provide a two-minute, two-truth reading experience for a qualified peer. Make sure you know what you are trying to say on each half page and how you want to the reader to take it. Do you want them to believe, understand, or (dis)agree with you?

Arrange your paragraphs in a natural sequence. One way to do this is simply to list the key sentences in a separate document. Do they make sense out of the context of their paragraphs simply arranged in order? If not, rearrange them until they do, add a key sentence where a paragraph seems to be missing, remove one that breaks the sequence. Move it somewhere else or just park it at the end of the document until you can find place for it. At the end, you might find you don’t need it at all.

Like I say, I’m not trying to say anything deep here. The page is literally the surface of your knowledge. Try to treat it that way. Learn to trust that you have a lot under the surface to draw on. This is just about presentation, a half page at a time.

They’re alluring, they sell books, they get citations in papers, but at their core is a reduction in understanding, a learned helplessness, that I think is the opposite of what we should be striving for in academia.

CHRISTOPHER R. MATTHEWS

Much of my writing involves giving practical advice to academic writers, which puts me squarely in the field of how-to guides. I personally like the genre. A good how-to book can be a real pleasure to read because you can sense the competence under the words of the writer. Oliver Senior’s How to Draw Hands is an example I often cite, and my struggle to write a book of my own is probably made more difficult by the impossible standard it sets in my mind. So when I read Chris’s reflections I had to take a moment to think it through. Are my two series of talks, twenty talks in all, all of them titled “How to…” one thing or another, really “the opposite of what we should be striving for in academia”? Am I empowering my students to meet the challenges of scholarship or inculcating a “learned helplessness”? Am I, at best, simply using those titles to “lure” an audience, to “sell” my ideas (even to get “cited”!)? At the end of the day, do my talks actually reduce their understanding of what scholarship is?

I’m not done thinking about these questions, but I was reminded of a blogpost at my retired blog that I wrote a decade and a half ago. I repost it here in a lightly edited form.

The downside of books — and blogs — about writing is that they leave the impression that there is something important to know about writing, and that we, who know it, can tell you how to write well. People who have difficulty expressing themselves in writing come to feel, by the very existence of so much good advice about how to do it, that their problem amounts to not having been let in on the secret. Underneath their inability to write, that is, they imagine a profound ignorance.

It is therefore important to emphasize that you do not learn what you need to know about writing by reading a book or listening to a teacher explain to you how a sentence, paragraph, or journal article “works”. You learn how to write well by writing regularly, revising often, and presenting your writing to its intended audience for critique. Good writing is not something you learn but something you train; it is not so much knowledge but discipline that counts. People who “can’t write” are not primarily stupid or ignorant. (Though they may also be such things.) They are just a little weak, a little out of shape.

Please don’t understand that too quickly.

Your prose style, like your physique and your posture, emerges from your training. People notice that you “write well” much like they might notice that you walk and stand with a certain kind of dignity, or that you are able to lift and move things with ease. Grace in everyday motion depends on having much stronger muscles than one “needs” for simple tasks, i.e., from being far from the limit of one’s power when doing ordinary things, and these virtues of physical comportment (dignity, ease, grace) are of course virtues of style. Good prose, similarly, has a certain kind of strength.

The purpose of a sentence and a paragraph is to affect the reader’s mind in some way, to “move” it. The writer pushes against the mental comportment of the reader, and the reader pushes back. While there are a lot “tricks” and “moves” you might learn in order to “handle yourself” in this situation (to “write with power”, as Peter Elbow famously put it) there is simply no substitute for the strength you develop by training, i.e., by practicing this ability to push against the mind of another. A strong prose style develops by repeatedly writing with a relevant audience “in mind”, imagining how it will push back, and by presenting it to that audience often, i.e., letting it actually push back.

You will not become a better writer by believing what I tell you. You will become a better writer by doing as I say. As often as you can, take a moment a to compose yourself. Work from the center of your strength. “The only truly comprehensive answer to any enquiry as to ‘How to…’,” as Oliver Senior reminds us, “is the simple instruction

“Get on with it.”

The third question on the list is probably the most important.

• What does your paper tell us about the world?

The way I normally raise this issue with students and scholars is to ask them to complete the sentence, “This paper shows that…,” reminding them that this will require them to compose a grammatically complete and presumably true sentence. Indeed, the sentence will ideally be theoretically significant and empirically true; it will make sense only to your peers in your discipline and it can be believed only because you have data to support it. Writing this sentence is an art worth mastering because it brings the subjective and objective moments of your research together in a flash. It shows us how the world looks from your perspective.

Here’s an example of such a sentence:

• This paper shows that the marketing team at Xompany made effective use of prospective sensemaking in planning the launch of ProDuck.

Notice that this sentence does just not say

• This paper shows that prospective sensemaking can be used effectively in planning processes,

which is a purely theoretical statement that makes no reference to an empirical object that was studied. Nor does it say

• This paper shows that Xompany’s marketing team planned a successful launch of ProDuck.

which is a purely empirical statement, making no reference to any particular theory of planning. Rather, the sentence mentions both

• a specific team in a specified company, which we can only make statements about if we have gained observational access to it, and
• a concept of planning that belongs to a named discipline, which will only be properly understood by the members of a specific research community.

As I hinted in my last post, this is precisely why this is the third question on the list. Its answer can only be understood by properly prepared reader; in this case, the reader must know something about

• Xompany
• ProDuck
• Planning
• Sensemaking

In my ideal introduction, all this must be accomplished within the first two paragraphs, which is to say, within the preceding 400 words. Here, at least four questions must be answered:

• What sort of company is Xompany?
• What sort of product is ProDuck?
• How does marketing research understand planning?
• How does sensemaking inform marketing research?

It will be natural to say something about the industry that Xompany operates in and the market for ProDuck. What has happened recently that made the launch of a new product significant? Likewise, it will be important to say something about the literature on marketing plans and its intersection with sensemaking scholarship, perhaps focusing on the difference between retrospective and prospective sensemaking.

But this, like I say, will all have happened before we get the sentence that begins “This paper shows that…” so that what follows easily makes sense to the reader. The names “Xompany” and “ProDuck” are meaningful to the reader by now, as are the concepts of planning and sensemaking. I should add that, if the company and product are sufficiently famous, this may be the first mention of them. The first paragraph may have talked only about the industry and market, but reader is nonetheless ready to interpret this sentence, as would be the case if we were talking about Apple and the iPhone, for example.

I’m calling this the “key question” and I hope you can see why that is a fitting label. It unlocks the rest of paper by setting you up for a paragraph that outlines the study you did, framed, like I say, by the preceding two paragraphs, which evoked a world (of consumption) and invoked a science (of marketing). It could sound something like this:

This paper shows that the marketing team at Xompany made effective use of prospective sensemaking in planning the launch of ProDuck. It is based on twelve semi-structured interviews with members of the marketing team that had been assigned to the launch, as well as observational data gathered at the launch itself. We interviewed each member twice: once at the beginning of the process, when the team was formed, and then again a month before the launch, which we finally attended. The interviews revealed a consistent focus on the future, both in terms of threats and opportunities, and very little concern with past launches, whether successful or unsuccessful. Also, at the time of the launch, the team had clearly put the past behind them and were not hung up on the struggles and conflicts of the months and weeks they had just been through. Everyone was looking ahead and moving forward. This has important implications for how we think about sensemaking in marketing contexts. In particular, the longstanding orthodoxy that sensemaking is primarily a retrospective process needs to be reconsidered, and the concept of prospective sensemaking needs to be developed further.

Obviously, this is an entirely made up paragraph. It’s interesting only for its form, not its content. I hope it is useful.