If you know something “for academic purposes” you are able to compose a coherent prose paragraph about it. We can even specificy ideal conditions for this “moment of composition”: give yourself five minutes at the end of one day to decide what to say, 27 minutes at the beginning of the next to write it down, and no time to learn anything in the meantime. If you can write under these conditions, you know what you’re talking about. Now consider composing five paragraphs in a row this way, again having decided the day before on a larger thesis. There is nothing unreasonable about this exercise as a test of your knowledge and it is, in fact, a great way to get two or three pages of a paper or book written on any given morning. If we replace the decision the day before with a prompt issued on the day, it is also a perfectly fair test of what your students have learned in your class. They can train for it every morning, one paragraph at a time. If they can do it, so can you.

For some time, I’ve been getting up early. (Most happy writers write in the morning; unhappy writers write whenever they feel like it.) I know this won’t make me a Proust (or a Tolstoy), but there is something satisfying about starting the day, let’s say, intentionally. “Writing,” I once said, “is one of the most deliberate things we do,” and doing it as the first intellectually demanding task of the day just somehow feels right. It makes you feel like a writer. Having written something in the morning, you can go through the rest of the day with a distinct sense of accomplishment, the feeling that you are in fact “contributing to the literature”, that you are part of the conversation. You can look your peers in the eye and tell them what you think now because you have made a serious attempt to articulate what you know. To be sure, our writing doesn’t always succeed, but you can earn even your failures — the seriousness of the writing the moment — simply by being deliberate about it. Decide the day before what you will write and when you will write it. Then give yourself a good morning.

Did you mean “this could go on forever” in a good way?
Ben Lerner

It takes a moment to write a paragraph. This one was planned yesterday and will take about half an hour to compose. If I were being absolutely rigorous, I would have spent five minutes at the end of my working day deciding what to say and then exactly 27 minutes at the start of today saying it. But I’m a bit jetlagged, which is making my evenings and mornings less reliable than I would like, so this one is being written in a stolen moment after a shift in the library. Still, the aim is to produce what I want to call “durable text”, “publishable prose,” and the “durability” of your writing can almost be quantified: it takes about one minute to read a paragraph like this, but I’m putting those 27 minutes into writing it. This means you can reread it without undermining its coherence; if you are interested, you can keep coming back for more and it will keep on giving. You should be able to read it 27 times in the time it took me to write it and still not wear it out. A paragraph, let’s say, is a moment that may last forever.

It is sometimes forgotten that Heidegger had a sense of humor. In his Basic Concepts of Aristotelean Philosophy, he at one point renders “rational animal” as “a living thing that reads the newspaper.” He was trying to emphasize that we are “discursive” beings. “When the Greeks say that the human being is a living thing that speaks,” he explains, “they do not mean, in a physiological sense, that he utters definite sounds. Rather, the human being is a living thing that has its genuine being-there in conversation and in discourse.”* You are born into your mother tongue just as you are “thrown” into existence. You have a language, we might say, before you know it. By contrast, literacy is something you accomplish. You learn to read and write, you spell your way through it. You can persuade me that you didn’t have a choice — like me, you suffered compulsory education, suffered and learned (πάθει μάθοςas, as Aeschylus put it) — but you deserve some credit for your effort nonetheless. While a language, then, is a form of life, literacy is a way of being. It is this distinct way of being human, this particular species of suffering, that I teach.

*Heidegger, Martin. Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, Indiana University Press, 2009, p. 74. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kbhnhh-ebooks/detail.action?docID=613586

To whom then am I addressed? To the imagination!
William Carlos Williams

Writing is behavior that addresses a reader. This paragraph is an act of writing because I intend for you to read it. Granted, I don’t know you as anything other than my reader; I don’t have any biographical information about you. How, then, can I address myself to you? I must, of course, imagine you as someone who is literate, as someone who is able to read, but must I imagine that you are able to read in English? Actually, no; to write is to engage in behavior that is essentially translatable. I am addressing myself to you, either directly, as the reader of the blog into the text editor of which I am literally typing this, or indirectly, as the reader of a (human or machine) translation or a (charitable or uncharitable) quotation. In fact, I am even addressing myself to you as the reader of an interpretation, a paraphrase, of this paragraph by a (friendly or unfriendly) critic. Importantly, I am addressing you as a reader who would have gotten this far in the paragraph’s original context. You are a reader who is interested in writing.

Note: for the next four weeks I’m writing one paragraph like this a day. My plan is to practice what I preach and compose them deliberately in writing moments.