A scholarly paragraph states a claim and supports, elaborates, or defends it. The claim is expressed in the key sentence, which will often appear early in the paragraph, but may appear anywhere so long as it is clearly stating the proposition that the paragraph is trying to get across. It will usually be a short, direct, declarative sentence and use relatively simple grammar. If the reader is supposed to find the claim hard to believe, the remaining sentences will support it with evidence. If the reader is supposed to find it hard to understand, the paragraph will elaborate its meaning, defining terms or providing illustrations. If the reader is supposed to find it difficult to agree with the claim, the paragraph will mount a defense, acknowledging the reader’s objections and engaging with them. In all cases, the bulk of the paragraph will be easier (to believe, understand, or agree with) than the key sentence, which, crucially, occasions precisely the difficulty that the paragraph is supposed to resolve.

In scholarly prose, paragraphs generally consist of least six sentences and at most two-hundred words. That is, the ideas scholars express in their writing generally require at least five sentences of support, elaboration, or defense to be rendered credible, comprehensible, or contestable to a peer reader. Something that can be said in less that six sentences doesn’t require a paragraph of its own (but may of course be said in support, elaboration, or defense of another, more substantial, claim). A claim that requires more than two-hundred words before the reader will believe, understand, or agree to disagree about it should be broken into two or more simpler ideas. What this rule of thumb reminds us is that it should take about one minute to read a paragraph properly. 182 words of flowing prose or 6 tightly composed sentences of less than 100 words may take about the same time to read. The reader should feel that the effort was a reasonable one, given the claim being made.

A scholarly paper is a series of paragraphs that together argue for larger thesis. That thesis is often stated in one of the paragraphs, whose key sentence will say something like, “This paper shows that…” followed by a clear, succinct statement of the conclusion of the paper’s argument. That paragraph will describe the paper, so that the reader can understand how the paper is going to show that the thesis is true; it will elaborate what is meant by “this paper shows”. The paper itself can always be summarized simply by listing the key sentences, one for each paragraph, and these sentences can be grouped into sections and subsections, each of which can in turn be captured by a single, declarative sentence. Seven of those can usefully make up the bulk of the third paragraph of the introduction, in effect outlining the paper. Two of them might be used as key sentences for the first two paragraphs of the paper, telling us something about the world we live in and the science we study it with. That is, a well-structured paper contains its own outline in the prose of its introduction.

I’m sometimes asked for examples when I say this kind of thing. In fact, this post is occasioned by such a request from Dominik Lukes in the comments to my last post. My gut reaction is always to be a bit apologetic, like I should have led with an example and in any case owe my readers or audience one. But the truth is that I’m not sure examples are a good idea. What exactly is it, I wonder, that is hard to imagine after reading the first three paragraphs of this post? In what sense is what I’m saying too abstract to picture concretely? I mean, if you want examples of what I’m talking about in the first two paragraphs then those paragraphs, and the rest of the paragraphs in this post, are perfectly good ones. (I have of course deliberately written them to conform to my guidelines.) And what is hard to imagine about a series of paragraphs, each represented by a single sentence (the key sentence) and grouped under 7 to 10 headings? What is an example supposed to make clear?

I should admit that my worry is partly a suspicion that any example I provide will be perceived as an ideal and imitated before it is understood. To put it more starkly, I’m worried that I will be providing materials that allow students (and scholars!) to fake their paragraphs before they make them. I don’t think that’s a good way to learn how to write. I want to train students to present the ideas they have, not to pretend to have ideas they don’t. In my view, the only way to learn how to write scholarly prose it is to think of something you know and then write it down with the aim of discussing it with other knowledgeable people. You have to be able imagine facts and people who are capable of knowing those facts. My advice won’t work if instructions like “think of something you know” are completely alienating to you. If you don’t have ideas on a regular basis, you can’t write scholarly prose; you might as well tell a blind man to draw a cat.* The experience of “having an idea” should be familiar to scholars (and university students!). As a writing consultant, I shouldn’t have to provide examples of thinking.

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*I am of course aware of the ableism of this remark. I use the image advisedly, after having found this very popular YouTube video by Tommy Edison, which I think nicely makes the point I’m after in the spirit I intend it. There’s no shame in not being a strong thinker on a particular subject. But to expect to be able to write well about something you are unable to form a clear idea of in your mind is a bit silly.

On Thursday, I’m going to be holding a talk about how to structure a research paper. In preparation, I thought it would be a good idea to write a sort of prose outline of the talk, summarizing the function of each section of a paper in a few simple sentences.

In the introduction you evoke a world, invoke a science, and propose a thesis. You present a familiar but interesting context for your study, frame it with a standing consensus or ongoing controversy in your field, and state a conclusion, based on your research, with significant practical or theoretical implications.

In the background section you inform the reader about the practical context of your research question. You provide the reader with the references to the most reliable public sources that you are aware of, so that the reader may become as knowledgeable as you are about the conditions from which your research object emerges.

In the theory section you tell the reader what you expected of your object of analysis before your did your research. Or, perhaps better, you remind the reader what the reader would have expected your analysis to show if you hadn’t already told them in the introduction. Alternatively, you shape the reader’s curiosity about your object, their curiosity about what your data will reveal, about how the data will support your thesis.

In the methods section you explain what you did to collect your data and why you did it that way. The aim is to win the reader’s trust, respecting their natural skepticism and awareness of typical sources of error.

In the analysis section, you present your data in a way that either challenges the reader’s expectations or satisfies the reader’s curiosity. You offer your interpretation of the data, supported by the observations you have made.

In the discussion section, you explicate the implications of your analysis for either theory or practice (or in some cases both). Now that we believe your results (having seen the data you gathered by a trusted method) what changes to our ways of seeing (our theories) or our ways of doing (our practices) are we rationally committed to? How ought we to proceed from here? What can reasonably be asked of us?

In the conclusion you restate your thesis plainly and simply, with all the presumptuousness your theory allows you and all the confidence your method affords you. And you return the reader to the world or the science with which you began, set in a slightly different light and given a slightly different weight.

A typical research paper in the social sciences is about 8000 words long and consists of about 40 paragraphs, each stating a single claim. Since each paragraph consists of less than 200 words and takes about a minute to read, it should be possible to read a paper reasonably carefully in about three quarters of an hour. For comparison, this post is 500 words and should take you two or three minutes to read.

Scholarly composition is the art of writing down what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people. I hit on this definition this morning after mulling over some variations on my standard definition last night. “Academic writing,” I normally say, “is the art of writing down what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people.” I’ve never liked the way I use the word “writing” in my definition of a kind of writing. It’s a minor point because its circularity isn’t very vicious. Most people will grant that I’m defining mainly the adjective “academic”, not writing itself, but I still find the repetition inelegant. This new version solves that problem nicely.

Along the way, I came up with another one that I also like: Academic writing is the art of composing and arranging paragraphs about what you know for other knowledgeable people. This one has the advantage of encapsulating in a single sentence my entire approach to writing instruction. It focuses our attention on the paragraph. There are also a couple of other nice details. By saying “about what you know” instead “writing down what you know” I’m making it clear that I think academic writing is largely representational. It is about something, namely, your knowledge of the facts, which I can then go on to discuss. I also like the way it analyses “writing” into the problems of “composition” and “arrangement”. I’ve written about this before as well.

With these two definitions in mind, I think I’m ready to return to the book I started this summer and complete my revisions. I think it’s going to be quite good.

I use the iceberg metaphor quite a bit when talking about academic writing. “The dignity of the movement of an iceberg,” said Hemingway, “lies in only one eighth of it being above water.” This is generally taken to suggest that we should leave some things unsaid in our writing, but Hemingway was quite clear that it also means we should have a great deal under the surface. The key isn’t just to write less than you know; it is to know more than you write.

For Hemingway, the essential thing was to have the relevant experiences. If you were going to write about war, bullfighting, or love, you should have some experience with war, bullfighting, or love. The dignity of your writing depends on those experiences. But in academic writing, experience is not required in the same way, or, perhaps better, experience is not enough. The essential thing in an academic context is to be knowledgeable about your subject, not merely experienced. That means that the iceberg beneath your writing is somewhat more complex.

Experience does play an important role but in a different way than Hemingway proposed. The part of a research paper or dissertation that is most directly informed by actual or “lived” experience is your methods section, which tells the story of what you did to collect your data and why you did it that way. Writing it is mostly a matter of being honest about how you converted what Thomas Kuhn (following William James) called the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of experience into “data” — how you turned the things that are just lying around casually, if you will, into serious, empirical objects ready to be analyzed. This sort of writing isn’t easy, of course, but it’s a place where you can feel your authority (your status as an “author”) most naturally. It’s a good place to find your voice. Just try really explaining how you collected your data and what problems you encountered in doing so. Why do you trust these data? Why should your reader? Tell the story in that spirit — always honestly, of course — and you will give yourself an occasion to improve your writing quite directly. There’s no knowledge problem here. You know what you did.

But you don’t make methodological decisions in a vacuum. You don’t just do whatever you feel like doing. You try to do things in ways your reader will respect, and you get a sense of what your reader demands by reading other writers. This gets us to another portion of the iceberg under the surface of your writing: the scientific literature. This literature doesn’t inform your methods section directly but it does shape the experiences (and decisions) you write about in your methods section. So you will of course cite it as needed even there. The bulk of your references to “the literature”, however, will be found in your theory section (and sometimes an actual literature review) which is where you provide a framework within which the reader is to make sense of your analysis (and, indeed, your methodological decisions). You are setting up your readers’ expectations.

Hopefully, you can sense the balance that I’m trying to suggest here. The mass of your iceberg is centered, under the surface, on the experiences you had collecting your data, which are shaped by your reading of the scientific literature. These three components (literature, experience, data) in turn support, above the surface, your theory, methods, and analysis sections (respectively). Much of the “scientific” or “academic” content of your paper or dissertation is determined by how you do this work and how you write this prose. But that is not all.

You will often have to give your reader background information about the company, country, region, product, industry, or practice that you are studying. Though your reader is a “peer”, and therefore familiar with your theories and methods, there is much about your empirical object that will be new to them. You must tell them what you know and you must do so on the basis of publicly available documents (newspapers and magazines, company reports and press releases, government reports and official statistics) that confirm what you are saying. You want to put your reader in the same confident position to assert these facts that you enjoy.

But scholarly writing, finally, isn’t just based on reading and experience. You have to do a great deal of thinking, reasoning. So does your reader. And this will become apparent especially in the discussion section of your paper, where you make the implications of your results explicit. Here you are not (usually) introducing new sources or new information (and certainly not new data points) to your reader, you are merely noting the (logical) consequences of granting the correctness of what you’ve been arguing so far. These consequences may be practical or theoretical — they may propose changes to the way we do things or the way we see them — but they should always be reasonable. Ideally, the reader should have been able to think of them themselves. You’re just saving them the trouble.

“A writer’s problem does not change,” said Hemingway. “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.” Like I say, in academic or scholarly writing the problem is slightly different, but the idea of “projection” is an apt one. The reader of a short story has to square the events with their experience of living in the world. The reader of a research paper has to square the results with their knowledge of the facts as they are. The paper has to make the result (a “truth” of sorts) part of the reader’s knowledge by the end of the reading. In your writing, you can only ever show your readers the surface of what you know; it’s what they imagine you have beneath the surface that counts.

The Craft of Research Series starts this week, as many students are beginning to think about their final projects, due this summer. Some are doing their first-year projects; some are doing their master’s theses. Some are already well on their way, and some still need to get properly started. I thought I’d say a few words about that this morning.

It is common to suggest you begin with a question. But another way, which amounts to the same thing, is to begin with what you know and what you don’t know. A question always presumes a great deal of prior knowledge and some limit to it, or gap in it. You can’t wonder what caused the failure of Lehman Brothers without knowing that it failed and, usually, a little something about what kind of failure it was. The meaning of the question simply depends on the knowledge you already have about the firm and, no doubt, the global financial crisis it was embroiled in. You should begin with this meaning, this understanding that suggests an inquiry. Maybe a better word for this is curiosity. That’s as good a place to begin as any.

You should also take stock of your resources. Begin with how much time you have. Don’t think in terms of months or even days or weeks. Try to get a realistic sense of how many hours you’re going to put into this project. Include the theories and methods you’ve already learned among your resources, along with some sense of your own intellectual abilities. How much can you expect to learn in the hours you’ve given yourself? Will you need to develop new (qualitative or quantitative) analytical skills? How much reading will you have to do? How long will it take to collect the data you need? Go back to your question and make sure that you will be able to answer it in time.

Also, and I can’t stress this enough. Find an opportunity for pleasure in doing your project; once you have found it, don’t be ashamed of it. Much of this has to do with being genuinely curious about the answer, not just vaguely anxious about your grade. But it also has to do with appreciating the aesthetic dimension of research. Maybe you like reading. Make sure there is time for that. Maybe you like writing. Definitely, make sure there is time for that. But you might also enjoy conducting interviews or observerving people or drawing graphs or doing calculations or running simulations or writing code. Make sure you approach your question in terms that afford you opportunities for such pleasure.

About a year ago I had an epiphany that, I think, can bring all this together. Our methodologies are always rooted in personal, lived experience. At the end of the day, the methods section of our paper simply describes, as honestly as we can, what we did and why we did it. In an important sense, it is a story told from experience. So begin where you are, with the questions and skills and resources that you have, and then embark on investigation — an adventure, if you will — that will become the story you will tell in your paper or thesis. Try to imagine the journey and set yourself some goals along the way — some experiences you want to have. Like any journey, it’s not going to turn out exactly as you imagine. But you have to begin somewhere and your own imagination isn’t a bad place to start.