“English Academic Discourse has always presented itself as a neutral vehicle of objective fact.” (Karen Bennett)

“I have, as it happens, a strikingly intelligent cat.” (Jerry Fodor)

Julia Molinari asks an important question in a recent post at the DoctoralWriting SIG blog: “What makes our writing ‘academic’?” She serenely disdains to answer it, of course. But she does provide a list of commonly suggested answers:

When you ask anyone this question—be they initiated or not—their answers will roughly cluster around the following features: its formality, linearity, clarity, lexical density, grammatical complexity, micro-macro structure (i.e., from paragraphs to whole-text organisation), intertextuality and citation, objectivity, meta-discursivity.

One of her sources for this list is Karen Bennett, who published a useful survey of academic style manuals in 2009, following it up in 2015 with a “deconstruction” of the putative “objectivity” of academic writing. The first quote in my epigraph is the first sentence of the abstract of the latter of those papers. The second quote is from Fodor’s Psychosemantics–a sentence that, for I hope obvious reasons, has stuck in my mind since I first read it. (Okay, I confess, that’s not true. I did not first read it. It was spoken to me by a very beautiful classmate on a sunlit campus hill on a fall day when I was an undergraduate philosophy student. She was impressed with how witty a way that was to begin a book and she expressed her admiration for philosophers who write like this. I, of course, immediately resolved to develop my style accordingly.)

It came to mind after reading Bennett’s claim. Was Jerry Fodor really “presenting” his text as a “neutral vehicle of objective fact”? Should he not have said, for example, “Cats display remarkable intelligence,” if that is what he was trying to do? Fodor continues as follows:

In the morning , at his usual feeding time, Greycat prowls the area of the kitchen near his food bowl . When breakfast appears, he positions himself with respect to the bowl in a manner that facilitates ingestion.
When the house is cold, Greycat often sleeps before the fireplace. But he does this only if there’s a fire on the hearth, and he never gets close enough to singe his hair.
When his foot encounters a sharp object, Greycat withdraws it. In similar spirit , he maintains an appreciable distance between himself and the nearest aggressive dog.
He occasionally traps and disembowels small rodents.

Surely, if he is here deploying “formality”, “objectivity” and “neutrality”, he is doing so in a light-hearted, ironic way? If he were really trying to participate in English Academic Discourse, wouldn’t he, again, just talk about the observable behavior of any cat. Why implicate himself in all this? Why, we might ask, does he write so well? Isn’t he supposed to be an academic?

Just to assuage any doubt, let me say that the book was written in 1989 and published by MIT Press, so it is neither particularly recent (recall Bennett’s “has always presented itself “) nor lacking an academic imprimatur. Moreover, Fodor is by no means some postmodern deconstructionist trying to highlight “the play of the signifier” or “the death of the subject”. He’s just an ordinary “analytic” philosopher having a little fun with his style. I would argue that such writing is entirely commonplace in academia. Think of Stanley Cavell. Think of Richard Rorty. [Update: I should acknowledge that Rorty has somewhere made an argument similar to mine, in that case, as I recall, aimed at Derrida.]

Okay, you might say, but those are philosophers! Not only that, they are white males. Not only that, one of them is dead. But that’s in many ways only better for my argument. If anyone is supposed to subscribe to English Academic Discourse, surely it’s a white male philosopher writing in America at the end of the Reagan era. Surely Fodor is a licensed driver of “the hegemonic vehicle of knowledge in the modern world.” And even his style is all over the rhetorical road!

In fact, I don’t think it’s misplaced at all to use a philosopher’s style as a counterexample to Bennett’s claim that (English) academic writing is hegemonicly “neutral” and “objective” and needs to be “deconstructed”, to become more comfortable with “overt rhetoric”.  After all, Bennett’s argument is overtly philosophical and almost entirely humorless. In her conclusion she says:

Clearly, then, the empiricist principles upon which EAD is based are deeply flawed. We cannot affirm with any certainty that there exists an objective extralingual reality that appears in same way to all and is gradually revealed through linear and communal process of discovery. Objectivity is a linguistic construct, achieved largely through use of nominalizations and impersonal verbs, and reinforced by devices such as epistemic modality which carefully distinguish between what is considered to be ‘fact’ and the author’s subjective opinion.

Moreover, ‘facts’ as such have no independent existence…. (Bennett, 2015, p. 15)

“Clearly”? Bennett here states as a categorical fact the non-existence of independent facts! It is true that philosophers have been arguing since the time of Socrates that we cannot be completely certain that reality exists as presented to our senses. Perhaps we are dreaming, or perhaps we are disembodied brains stimulated by electrodes, or perhaps we are simply simulations in a computer program, digital identities inhabiting digital worlds. But we can’t have “any certainty” that there are facts of the matter? Can we seriously doubt that Jerry Fodor ever had a cat named Greycat? (I admit the name stretches credulity.) Do we have to abandon our belief that he sometimes killed? I would argue that we can’t “with any certainty” deny the existence of facts that might be interesting to discover, discuss and write about. Nor that these facts might, in fact (!), settle some interesting disputes.

I hope Bennett doesn’t mind a little ribbing, but surely, linguistic constructivism, as it is presented in her text, is itself a linguistic construct, achieved largely through the use of nominalizations and impersonal verbs. Indeed, her deconstruction of objectivity leaves us with the impression that she thinks linguistic constructs are objective facts, and she achieves this through the deft deployment of an objective, neutral, “academic” discourse. I’m sure the irony is deliberate. But the point is that her own text is a much better example of the style she is suggesting we abandon than a great deal of perfectly mainstream academic writing.

I’m not just doing this to poke fun. Jerry Fodor’s psychosemantics was an attempt to overcome precisely something like the skepticism that seems to underpin Bennett’s deconstruction. He argued for a “folk psychology” to understand behavior. He suggested we should happily attribute beliefs and desires to people (and cats, of course) to explain why they do the things they do. Likewise, I think we should happily attribute facts and events to our experiences to explain why things appear to us as they do, largely stable, dependably “real” constituents of our life world.  They don’t have to “appear in the same way to all” but I do have some hope (if not “any certainty”) that they are “gradually revealed [to us] through linear and communal process of discovery.”

We call that process research. It’s a bit “academic” sometimes, perhaps, but it does get us a little closer to the truth. Without it, we’d probably just be circulating pictures of cats doing strikingly intelligent things on the Internet. Someone has to take those behaviors a bit more seriously. But that doesn’t mean they can’t write well and engagingly. It never has. English Academic Discourse is largely a linguistic construct achieved by writing instructors through a peculiar kind of “empirical research” (about which more later). It doesn’t actually govern academic writing; it holds no objective hegemonic power over us. That is, I don’t think we need to deconstruct our discourse as much Bennett thinks we do. I think we can begin (and let our students begin) with a sanguine common sense realism about, say, the existence of the works of Shakespeare and the reality of the industrial revolution. Then let’s discourse about them with all the sophistication (and wit) we can muster.

Always write a single paragraph of at least six sentences and at most 200 words in support, elaboration or defense of a single well-defined claim expressed in the key sentence.

You have decided when you will write and what you will say. This rule now tells you what you should do. Or, better, what you should make. The paragraph is the unit of scholarly prose composition; you are not writing scholarly prose if you are not writing paragraphs.* The paragraph will express a justified, true belief you hold and then, depending on the needs of your reader, provide support for it, elaboration of it or a defense of it against the reader’s objections. The problem of writing a paragraph can really only be solved with a reader in mind. That’s important to remember.

The rule here may seem a bit rigid but notice that it defines a minimum and a maximum. You can write eight sentences and 187 words and still be following this rule. Ezra Pound had a good way of thinking about form: think of it as a center “around which”, not a box “within which”. The key sentence provides you with a focus, the six sentences mark out a minimum level of complexity, and the 200 words sets an outer boundary. This tells you what you are heading for, but gives you a lot of leeway about where exactly you end up. If you experience it as a constraint, you are approaching the problem with the wrong attitude. Having 27 minutes to write at least six sentences and at most 200 words should feel liberating, not oppressive.

I am suggesting you make writing paragraphs the rule rather than the exception. Don’t think that paragraphs are easy or boring to write. Don’t think they have to be boring to read either. Asking you to write at least six sentences and at most 200 words about a single thing doesn’t tell you very specifically what you should be doing. It merely rules out a lot of things you shouldn’t be doing. There is a great range of freedom for creativity within that form, arguably greater than if I asked you to write a sonnet.

“Aim small, miss small,” sharpshooters say. What they mean is that if you aim for the man and miss, you miss the man. But if you aim for a button on his shirt and miss, you may still hit the man. That is the virtue of having a focus. And a limit. It lets you find your composure. It lets you compose your paragraph.

[Click here for all the Rules.]

________

*I don’t have to imagine readers that would object to this generalization. I have respect for these conscientious objectors; I know where they’re coming from. (I’ve been there.) I want to meet them halfway by granting that not everything in a piece of academic writing needs to be strictly “scholarly”. These rules, I should repeat, are here for those who are making a deliberate effort to improve their scholarly prose style. These people should be writing paragraphs.

In a 1971 interview, Roland Barthes was asked to reflect on the use of traditional literary criticism, reading a text “for its own truth, its final meaning”. He answered that he did, of course, have a preference for what he called a “non-alethic” criticism, a semiotic criticism rather than a hermeneutics, which is to say,  a way of reading that did not look for the one true meaning of a text but, rather, a “polysemic” reading “just this side of criticism” (as the interviewer puts it). But he also offered a neat defense of traditional criticism:

It’s always possible to imagine critical roles and their continuation, even the continuation of traditional roles, which will not necessarily be useless; Schönberg said that even after the eventual triumph of avant-garde music–and that was the music for which one ought to fight–it would still be possible to make beautiful music in C major. I would say that it will always be possible to write good criticism in C major. (The Grain of the Voice, pp. 147-8)

I like this way of putting it a great deal. When I was a PhD student, we eschewed traditional criticism in the name of a “minor literature” (a concept we drew from the work of Deleuze). We were a bit too willing, perhaps, to declare the “death of the author” and the “end of the book”. Indeed, Barthes even goes on to say that

one could very well imagine a time when ‘works’ in the traditional sense of the word would no longer be written, and the works of the past would rewritten endlessly, “endlessly” in the sense of “perpetually”: there would be an activity of proliferating commentary, branching out, recurrent which would be the true writing activity of our time.

We liked this way of talking. We were ready to produce those “writerly” texts. We were ready to believe that there was no such thing as a final interpretation of a text, only its proliferation in other texts. We were happy to concede that there was no authority (no author) to decide whether a text, even our own, was true or false, well or badly written. There was just the question of what you could do with a text, what “effects” it could have, what connections could be established between one text and another, through the “intertext”, which, of course, was often the writing we did ourselves. It was invigorating and heady stuff.

But something was also lost: the beautiful music in C major that Schönberg was talking about. We said it bored us. More often, I must now concede, we found it daunting. The beauty of “major” writing was obvious (many of our heroes, we had to admit, wrote beautifully in a major key) and its absence, in any of our attempts to produce it, would be correspondingly glaring. We were afraid to mean something in a straightforward and traditional way because we might say something that was incorrect, and our errors would be as plain as day. So we learned always to defer our “true” meaning to the “proliferation” of the reader’s critical activity. We did not assign a role to the serious critic, from whom we might learn how to write more effectively or to analyze the world more accurately.

I think it’s time to return to the fundamentals of criticism. It is time to ask, again, whether our texts are clear, coherent and conventional expressions of justified, true beliefs. They don’t always have to be this, nor even mostly. It is possible that the “avant-garde”, i.e., postmodernism, has triumphed and there are no longer meanings to speak of, only signs to play with. Indeed, its not incidental that Barthes imagined the disappearance of “works” of literature “in the traditional sense”. But traditions have a way of staying around.

The end of work is the beginning of play. But someone has to do the work of writing down what we know — just as surely as someone has to do the work of advancing our knowledge itself — and their readers must do the traditional work of criticism in a major key. They must look earnestly for the meaning of what we write. We must write in way that respects their sincere desire to understand what we are talking about. This is the major C. It’s not as much fun, perhaps. But there is some beauty in it.

Never write about something you just learned this week. Always write about something you knew last week at the latest.

This rule tries to undermine even more radically the habit of trying to discover what you know in the act of writing. If you follow my rules, not only have you decided the day before what you will write, you have chosen to write something you knew already before the weekend.

What this rule is trying most of all to shatter is the illusion that your text exists “in real time”. It is trying to remind you that you don’t have to tell the reader what you know right now, in this moment. After all, your reader won’t be reading what you have written for several weeks, months or even years. There is no point in writing a text, at least not a text for publication, at the “cutting edge” of your knowledge because it won’t be published until well after you have learned so much more anyway.

Choosing to write something that you learned was true already last week will affect your style. You will write about it in a more permanent, less ephemeral tone. You are not running up to your reader and breathlessly communicating an “insight” that just occurred to you. You are simply writing down something you know in a form that will allow someone else, sometime later, to make use of it, or to offer some critical insights of their own that will improve your understanding of the subject.

Your style reveals the posture of your writing and it is your posture, in the moment of writing, that interest me. How are you comporting yourself toward the reader? What stance are you taking? You want to position yourself solidly between your own knowledge and that of your reader. You want much of the early excitement of your own discovery to have dissipated, so you can pitch claims coolly and calmly at your reader’s ignorance, fully conscious of everything your reader presumably knows. You use your awareness of what the reader knows to better bring your own knowledge to bear. You can anticipate their objections and you can build on the understanding that is already shared between you. You stand comfortably here, on two feet, solidly planted.

You can therefore write from the center of your strength. It’s a phrase I use often to try to remind people of the feeling of a comfortable run at a steady pace over varied terrain. Or the feeling of playing a piece of music you know well with others you have played with before. Or, if pugilism is your thing, the feeling of sparring intelligently over a few rounds with a well-matched partner in the boxing ring. Not all of your writing can be done in this way, from this center, but the great bulk of it should be. Rule #2 is intended to get you to that place, a place where you feel strong and comfortable as a writer, for at least 27 minutes every day.

Scholarship is not made of ideas we came up with in the shower this morning. It is grounded in a long tradition of thinking things through in a careful and orderly manner. Our writing is about that long, slow process of thought, not the momentary feeling of “getting it”. In an ideal world (perhaps I should say, in my ideal world) everyone would write about things they knew already eight weeks ago. But from the point of view training your style to bear the weight of, perhaps not timeless truths, but at least durable ones, it is sufficient that you separate your decision about what to write tomorrow from the research you have done this week. Put a weekend, I am trying to say, between your genius and your style.

[Click here for all the Rules.]

“After teaching for twenty years, I had come to suspect that my own training as an academic had made me a member of what is almost an entirely foreign culture in contrast to that in which our students live.” (Susan D. Blum)

“Learning the language of research requires students not only to perform the action of research, but also to synthesize the learned information and be able to explain it to others. This, we suggest, is much like learning a foreign language.” (Paula McMillen and Eric Hill)

It’s a compelling metaphor. I have conducted my own work as a language editor and writing coach under the heading “Research as a Second Language” since I started over ten years ago. But recently the thought occurred to me that this way of looking at things has led me astray. By extension, it has led my students and clients astray. That’s a pretty big idea to get my mind around. But the possibility is definitely worth taking seriously and this post is a first attempt to do it.

Susan Blum’s suspicion (in my epigraph) is understandable, but her very next sentence is more instructive still. She quotes Clifford Geertz: “Foreignness does not start at the water’s edge but at the skin’s.” It gives us a clue, I would argue, to why we shouldn’t think of our students as members of a foreign culture, nor teach academic literacy on the model of a second language. It suggest that it’s only if we are always foreign to everyone that the metaphor holds. Research is a second language only in a very peculiar sense: the sense in which it has no native speakers. Indeed, we are foreigners here only if there are no natives anywhere.

On this view, there is no authoritative way of speaking and writing the language of research. And that implies that people constantly speak with the foreigner’s innocence of the “true meaning” of their words. Worse, it implies a constant state of moral relativism. Academics are forever in Rome doing as the Romans do, never at home doing what is right and good, never where the heart is. When at school we do as scholars do, but our hearts, perhaps, aren’t in it. It is no wonder we are in the midst of a crisis.

I say it’s a compelling metaphor and a misleading one. But it’s also obviously a shoe that often fits. And I have played my part in selling it. It’s going to take me a little while to think my way out of this again.

What we have forgotten in our adoption of this metaphor is that research and schooling are integral parts of our culture. We use our first language in school and in our research. (Except, of course, in the cases where we are literally using a second language, as when I, a Dane, moved to Canada when I was 9 years old and learned English and also attended school. Or when a Chinese student enrolls at an American university.) More importantly, research and learning are not primarily about acquiring language skills. It is about acquiring knowledge.

Consider the implications of academic literacy as a second-language competence. We learn how to read and write academically from other academics, as students from our teachers. But how did they learn to do it? From their teachers, of course.

“Watt had watched people smile,” writes Beckett in his famous novel, “and thought he understood how it was done.” There’s something unsettling about this way of describing a smile. Indeed, there is something unsettling about Watt’s smile, as we read a bit later on:

My name is Spiro, said the gentleman.
Watt smiled.
No offence meant, said Mr Spiro.

Stanley Cavell has linked Beckett’s masterful sense of the uncanny with Wittgenstein’s decision to open his Philosophical Investigations with a quote from Augustine’s Confessions about how he learned his first language.

“When they (my elders),” [writes Augustine,] “named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shown by their bodily movements … and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.” (To glimpse the oddness, [notes Cavell], imagine the final sentence as from Samuel Beckett.) (In Quest of the Ordinary, p. 166)

In another place, Cavell (or perhaps it is Marjorie Perloff) notes the Beckettesque quality of Wittgenstein’s question, “What gives us so much as the idea that living beings, things, can feel?” (PI§286, cf. Beckett’s How It Is). The idea that we “train” our mouths to form words (or smiles), or that we need an “idea” of the feelings of other people, is uncanny because we don’t actually acquire our first language as consciously as Augustine makes it sound. There is something suspect about being conscious, something too “calculating,” we might say.

Geertz picks on Wittgenstein a little after his remark about the foreignness of everything beyond the shores of our skins.

The sort of idea that both anthropologists since Malinowski and philosophers since Wittgenstein are likely to entertain that, say, Shi’is, being other, present a problem, but, say, soccer fans, being part of us, do not, or at least not of the same sort, is merely wrong. The social world does not divide at its joints into perspicuous we’s with whom we can empathize, however much we differ with them, and enigmatical they’s, with whom we cannot, however much we defend to the death their right to differ from us. The wogs begin long before Calais.

But is that actually true? Is Geertz right about this? Are we really “foreign” before we are “home”?  Do we have to “train our mouths” to form words in our mother(‘s !) tongue? Do we learn how to smile from watching others do it?

I believe that Beckett and Wittgenstein were dealing with a distinctly modern experience, namely, “alienation”–our estrangement from our immediate experience. And I believe that we have, with perfectly good intentions, reproduced this estrangement within our universities by thinking of our community as “problematic” from the skin outwards. The most important parts — the most natural, the least uncanny parts — of Augustine’s description are the phrases “I saw this and grasped” and “their intention was shown”. Augustine understood immediately, intuitively, what they meant. He recognized his elders as the masters of the world into which he was born as an apprentice.

This notion, that teachers are “elders” in the youthful experience of students, that they are masters to the students’ apprenticeship, is being lost by construing our students as members of a foreign tribe with elders of their own (on TV, presumably, or online). We have abandoned our positions of authority in precisely the context where that authority should be taken for granted, given willingly by the students who are there, explicitly, to learn from us. We are not teaching them a second language because we did not come to the university as we come to a foreign culture. We, too, were raised within it, by the elders, not of some exotic culture, but of a general culture (“European”, “Western”, “modern”, “civilized”, call it what you will) that values learning. We were part of the culture before we enrolled, and our students remain part of it after they graduate.

There is no such thing as “academic culture”.*  Academia is an institution within our culture. The university is an institution in a culture to which the students already belong and it is, properly speaking, merely a passage in their total acculturation, replete with all the rites that such a passage implies. Research is not a second language. It is a refinement of our first language. An academic, a scholar, a student is not an exotic kind of human being, not an abstract subject engaged in an isolated “language game” or “form of life”. Scholarship is merely a deliberate, communal way of knowing things. You come to master it like you learn anything else. By respecting the elders who already know and submitting to their discipline.

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*Update: This is an overstatement. I’m not going to argue that universities don’t have an identifiable culture. I’m trying to push against the idea that it might be “foreign” to the students of a university. They are simply a part of it. And going to university is already a part of their culture, long before they get there.