When I talk to a group of students or scholars about writing, I sometimes begin by asking how many of them want to become better academic writers, or at least think they need to improve their writing in order to succeed. Most of them of course do. But how do we know how good we are? And why is it we’d like to get better? What is it exactly that we’d like to get better at? To answer these questions, I want to suggest a simple exercise that lets you, if not measure your competence as a writer, then at least experience it.

The first thing is to take your knowledge out of the the equation. You don’t want to experience mainly your tenuous grasp of the subject matter you’re writing about. You want to make sure that knowing isn’t the problem so that the difficulty of writing can come to the fore. You do this by choosing something you’re confident you know something about. If you’re a student, pick something from a course you did well in, preferably a course you also enjoyed and, since this is unfortunately not always the case, where you feel like you deserved the decent grade you got. If you’re a working scholar, pick a theory or a practice that you are well-versed in, something that lies near the center of your expertise. Remember that no one is forcing you write about these things for this purpose of conducting this test. You are free to choose what you will write about, and the main criterion is going to be your grasp of the subject.

Now, since you want to experience your mastery of academic writing, you have to consider a very particular kind of reader: a peer. Think of someone who knows about as much as you do about the subject you just decided to write about. You can make this person up, construct a composite of individuals you know, or think of a specific person. The important thing is that you imagine a reader who is an intellectual equal. If you’re a student, think of another student who did well in the same class. If you’re a scholar, think of the people who attend the same conference sessions and research seminars that you do. You and your reader will have read roughly the same things, understand the same theories, master the same methods. To put it as starkly as possible, your reader is qualified to tell you that you are wrong. Indeed, you respect your reader’s opinion enough to listen carefully when they suggest you’ve made an error. They are not qualified to tell what to think, however, nor are you in awe of them. You’ll consider their opinion and make up your own mind.

(If you want to reconsider your choice of subject after thinking about your reader, go ahead.)

It is now time to see how good you are at writing something down for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people. First of all, relax. None of what you are about to learn about yourself is going to be very deep. (People sometimes say writing is at the core of our research, the heart of what we do, but that’s overstating it a little. It’s more like the skin of our body of knowledge, the surface of discourse.) You are going to experience your facility with words, your difficulty in putting them together. You’re going to do this under very controlled circumstances and with nothing at stake. After you’re done, you’re not even going draw any final conclusions. You’re going to do it a few more times before you know anything at all. And by then you won’t know whether you’re “good” or “bad” so much as how you’re going to get better. That said, I’m not promising that this will be an entirely pleasant experience. If you want to know how hard something is, you’re going to have to let it hit you.

Here’s how to do it. Take five minutes at the end of your working day and write down a single, simple declarative sentence that says something you know about the subject you’ve chosen. Make sure it’s a serious statement and that it’s just he tip of the iceberg of your knowledge. And make sure it’s something that demands that more be said in your discipline, something that is in need of support, elaboration or defense. In a word, make sure it’s something that’s worth writing a whole paragraph about. Resolve to write that paragraph tomorrow morning, but for now just focus on getting its key sentence down as precisely as you can. For five minutes, try to write what Hemingway called “the truest sentence that you know” about the subject. Then — and this is very important and not at all easy — stop thinking about it for the rest of the evening. (Being able to do that is part of being a good writer.) Put it out of your mind until tomorrow morning. In my next post I’ll tell you what to do then.

“You don’t like that idea? I’ve got others.”

Marshall McLuhan

Dominik Lukes raised a good point in the comments to my last post. “Your running metaphor,” he said, “is going to filter out a lot of students who do have foundational problems with the basic building blocks of writing.”

No metaphor is perfect and Dominik here catches an important imperfection in the idea that being able to write good prose is like being in good shape. Many struggling writers simply don’t see their problem in those terms. They have no analogue to “just put one foot in front of the other”; when you say “just put one word after another on the page”, they think you’re making fun of them. When you tell them to pick something they know and write a paragraph about it they literally can’t imagine what you’re talking about. They need someone to show them them the basic building blocks (often sentences) and how they go together. They don’t know, we might, say the first thing about writing. I grant Dominic’s general point. Pedagogical analogies like this are rhetorical figures and they have to be judged on their persuasiveness. If they don’t work, they aren’t good metaphors.

So one thing I would emphasize is that you really do have to be more specific about the task than “put your ass in the chair and write”. A jogging coach will give you some reasonable distance to run, tell you to take a day’s break between runs, show you how to stretch out, and even give you some advice about what shoes to wear. A coach might also anticipate problems that could come up along the way (pains, cramps, general tiredness) and what to do about that. I try to be helpful in the same way about how to manage your writing moment. I even tell you what to do if you realize that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Like a jogging coach (I imagine) I tell you not to give up. Walk the rest of the way. Then try again another day.

I sometimes say that scholarly discourse is a bit like boxing. Not everyone likes this metaphor either, so I usually offer an alternative even before being asked: it’s just as much like the tango. You have to think of your reader as an equal and you have require a measured amount of energy, of yourself and your reader, for each move in your writing. Grace emerges not just from knowing what to do, but from knowing how much you can accomplish in a single move, round by round, dance by dance.

This brings us to the part where I really agree with Dominik. Learning to write is much like learning how to play a musical instrument. Perhaps it’s not so much a matter of “training” as a matter of “practicing”. Many people face their writing difficulty much as they would face a piano they don’t know how to play. Yes, they know what the keys do. They understand that the high notes are on the right and the low notes on the left. But whenever they hear someone actually play the thing they also understand that they could never do anything like that. They lack a basic understanding of chords and melody. When they see a good piece of writing they simply don’t understand how it was made.

I’m grateful for Dominik’s prod here and I’m going to write a few posts imagining basic exercises to practice. It’s a good way to get clear about what I think those “basic building blocks of writing” are.

“Can such principles be taught? Maybe not.

But most of them can be learned.”

William Zinsser, On Writing Well

It’s rare for people to say they don’t know how to run. They may admit to being out of shape, or just lazy, but they will not say that what is getting in the way of their running is a lack of knowledge. They know how to do it and, in so far as they are not good at it, they know what to do about it. You put one foot in front of the other.

When people say they don’t know how to write I try to get them around to that way of thinking too. They may write less well than they’d like, I suggest, but they know how to do it. I tell them to pick a topic they know something about, then to pick a single thing that they know about it. (If they can’t do this then writing isn’t their problem.) I tell them to write a sentence that expresses that idea and to make a plan to spend 18 or 27 minutes the next day writing at least six sentences and at most 200 words about it. In effect, I tell them to put on their running shoes and get at it.

Once they’re doing this regularly we can talk about technique. But there’s not a whole lot to say, actually. Many writers find that simply working in discrete, focused writing moments shows them what they need to be doing better. They also feel themselves becoming stronger writers. They are getting their prose into shape. I can look at their work and suggest simple things to try, but most of their improvement is in their own hands. Every day they find a little more of their voice, they become a little more aware of their options as writers.

When people say that “writing can’t be taught but it can be learned” this is what they mean. They mean that no amount of instruction in either the rules of grammar or the rules of genre will make you a better writer if you’re not actually writing.

By “actually writing” I mean putting words on the page with the intention of communicating them to someone else, and in an academic setting this means writing down what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people. To train this ability, teachers must get their students to write for the other students in their class about what they are learning together. They must try to explain what they think about the material to their peers, i.e., people who are looking at the same material in more or less the same way. Everything the teacher is telling them about style and grammar is directed at making them better able to do this.

What the students are learning how to do is really to expose their ideas to criticism, they are making themselves corrigible. They are putting what they think in terms that other people who are thinking about the same things at the same level can understand. If there are disagreements they can now be made explicit and that’s the first step to deciding who is right. At the end of the day, we’re teaching our students to present their ideas to people who are qualified to tell them that they are wrong. This takes a very particular kind of strength and that strength is acquired through training.

There’s a lot of talk these days about how we can better teach writing. We want our students to write better and we think there must be something wrong with the way we are teaching them. But I think the bulk of the problem lies in getting the students to actually write, to practice. If genre-based instruction gets them to write more than assigning five-paragraph essays does, for example, this will explain why students are getting more out of it. But if you can get your students to actually write those five-paragraph essays, with their fellow students in mind as they write, then you’ll accomplish much the same thing.

The important thing is that they are writing in a way that lets them experience their competence. We have to give them a way of writing that makes them better writers every time they write. They know how to do it: you put one word after another on the page. It’s regular practice that will get their prose into shape.

Suppose you are teaching a unit on the modern workplace. For the past few weeks, you’ve been talking about the gig economy, the rise of Uber and AirBnB, and the increasing pressure of automation. You’ve assigned some relevant readings, lectured engagingly about them, and led the students through classroom activities to stimulate their own thinking. Hopefully you’re not already bored with this scenario but, if you are, I invite you to re-imagine it around any other subject (take Hamlet … please). Imagine that both you and your students are interested. Even under those conditions, of course, Nigel Caplan is right to worry that examining the students might be a bit of a chore, no doubt as much for them as for you. “What jobs are safe from the gig economy?” he imagines asking the students. “Write an essay in response giving specific reasons to support your answer.” He dismisses the idea with a single word: “Yawn.” In this post, I want to consider his alternative, suggest why it is unnecessary, and propose a different attitude. There’s no reason you should fall asleep while grading school essays.

“What am I asking students to do here?” Caplan asks, and answers: “I want students to make an argument that is convincing because it uses strong appeals to logic, emotion, and authority (ethos, logos, pathos), so they need an audience in mind.” He thinks that the original assignment lacks a proper rhetorical situation, which he then provides: “Write an article for your school or university career service newsletter arguing why a particular job is a good choice in the changing workplace.” That does the trick, he says: “Now we have a genre (an opinion article), a context (career service newsletter), an audience (peers), and a purpose (defending or promoting a career choice).” Of course, the situation remains “imaginary” since the students aren’t all going to get their work published in the relevant newsletter, but it primes them to adopt a rhetorical posture, and that’s certainly a good thing.

But is Caplan right that the traditional school essay doesn’t provide the students with genre, context, audience and purpose? In his version, he says, students are given an audience of their “peers” to write for, but he means this in the broad sense of the entire student body, potential readers of the career service’s newsletter. The traditional essay, by contrast, has much a narrower and, I would argue, much more interesting audience: the community of peers who are taking the same class, have read the same readings, and have participated in the same discussions. Trying to persuade this critically equipped audience that a particular job is “safe” will be much harder and require much stronger arguments. It should also therefore be much more interesting for you, the teacher, to see what they come up with. That is, we already had a genre (the academic essay), a context (the class or discipline), and an audience (knowledgeable peers). We also have a purpose: to open your thinking to criticism from intellectual equals. That’s what we want them to be good at on the subject of the modern workplace.

Caplan begins his post by promising to make grading less boring. “No, you don’t win a house or a new wardrobe, but you might not fall asleep during your next grading session.” I know that a lot of academics dislike grading, but this is partly because we often ask too much of the exam situation. There is no way around the fact that the students are trying to demonstrate their competence to the teacher. The trick is to make sure they understand that the relevant “competence” is the ability to discourse intelligently with their peers on the subject. Next, remember that there should be a perfectly respectable “middling” performance of that competence, which will indeed be yawn-inducing but doesn’t need to put you to sleep. It shouldn’t take any effort to identify; just give it the C it deserves and move on. The student will usually feel the same way about the assignment, so everyone is happy. The interesting papers are the ones you’re going to give As and Bs to and you’ll have more interesting things to say about how they can be improved as well. You perk up and do the feedback accordingly. Ds and Fs need to be considered carefully because these are students who may not even belong in your class and would be happier elsewhere. But this can only really be determined if the student wants to talk to you about the grade. Don’t sweat over it.

Grading, like writing, is a difficult business. You should always design your assignments so that they give you an insight into whether the students have learned what you have tried to teach them. You should of course be interested in whether your students are learning what you are trying to teach them, so grading should be an interesting part of your teaching experience. But we should never overthink it. The students can’t be wholly and truly themselves during an exam because they are inexorably trying to show you they’ve learned the big words you’ve tried to teach them. Remind them that you are really more interested in making them able to talk precisely and critically to each other and that you have an ideal vantage point on the minds of their peers, whose papers you’re also grading. Education requires us to watch with affection how people grow, as Confucius said. Grading is a good place to see this happening.

In preparation for a series of posts on Nigel Caplan’s “genre makeovers”, I had a look at John Swales and Christine Feak’s very influential Academic Writing for Graduate Students. (Caplan mentions it in this makeover.) I think I now understand why I feel myself somewhat at odds with the English for Academic Purposes field and its “anti-five paragraph essay campaign.” Caplan’s main objection to these exercises is that “they lack situation, audience, purpose, and meaning.” And I have been arguing that this isn’t as obviously true as he thinks: the situation is the classroom, the audience is a classmate, the purpose is to expose your ideas to criticism, and the meaning is the content of the course.

But then I read the opening pages of Swales and Feak’s book and realized what I’m up against:

Even before you write, you need to consider your audience. The audience for most graduate students will be an instructor, who is presumably quite knowledgeable about the assigned writing topic and will have expectations with which you need to be familiar. Other possible audiences include advisors, thesis committees, and those who will review research you may want to present at a conference or publish in a paper. Your understanding of your audience will affect the content of your writing. (p. 4)

This understanding of the audience will indeed affect the content of our students’ writing and it is precisely this, not the five-paragraph form, that makes Caplan yawn at the prospect of reading another set of student essays. While the actual reader of a school assignment is, of course, usually the instructor, and while a paper does need to satisfy its reviewers before it is published, the implied reader is always an intellectual equal, a knowledgeable peer. The instructor is not expecting to be impressed with the depth of the student’s understanding of the material (but is, of course, happy to be surprised); the grade is given on the basis of how well the student engages with the material at the level set by the class. The peer reviewer, likewise, is always reading the paper on behalf of the disciplinary community that the writer is presumably a part of. In other words, Swales and Feak simply get the audience of academic writing wrong.

This has far-reaching consequences.

Audience, purpose, and strategy are typically interconnected. If the audience knows less than the writer, the writer’s purpose is often instructional (as in a textbook). If the audience knows more than the writer, the writer’s purpose is usually to display familiarity, expertise, and intelligence. The latter is a common situation for the graduate student writer. (p. 6)

In actual fact, the latter is a common misconception about academic writing, one that is perhaps understandable among undergraduates (though still wrong) but absolutely in need of being abandoned by graduate students. They must feel like their purpose is, not to show the teacher that they are smart, but to open their thinking to criticism from people who are qualified to tell them they are wrong. If they are to “display” anything it is their awareness of possible sources of error in their thinking and their willingness to stand corrected if they’ve made a mistake. The common situation of the scholar (and that is what a student is trying to become) is where the audience knows about as much as the writer on the subject at hand. The business of scholarship is to expose ideas to criticism.

I can see that I have my work cut out for me. But I think my plan still holds: I’m going to work through each of Caplan’s “makeovers” and show that the introduction of “genre” considerations really just affords us an opportunity to return what a rather reductive understanding of “essay” removed from the more familiar school assignment, namely, the situation, audience, purpose, and meaning of traditional scholarship, ordinary academic work. With those things firmly in mind, the five-paragraph essay offers a rich, if of course limited, opportunity for experimentation.