Ernest Hemingway concluded the preface to his First Forty-Nine Stories with a remark that I’ve always found strangely simple yet illuminating. “I would like to live long enough to write three more novels and twenty-five more stories,” he says. “I know some pretty good ones.” What strikes me about this way of putting it is that, although Hemingway is talking about fiction, he asks us to imagine these stories, not as the products of some future act of creativity, but as parts of a knowledge he already possesses. He hopes to live long enough to write them down, not long enough to make them up.

This view of writing is not universally held. Even where one would think it held most sway, in academia, I get the sense that it’s the minority view. A recent example of this was brought to my attention by Eric Hayot, who himself rejects the conception of “writing as putting down thoughts you already have.” Hayot recommends we read Jan Mieszkowski’s “In Praise of ‘Bad’ Academic Writing” in the Chronicle Review, and it is, indeed, well worth the read. Not only is it not bad; it’s not even ‘bad’. That is, it doesn’t deserve it’s own praises. It’s a perfectly good piece of writing about writing, and clearly expresses views already known to its author. Nonetheless, he argues that “a text is academic precisely when it is not informed by a dogmatic assumption about what a true statement looks like.” This certainly complements Hayot’s view (which I’ve written about before): “you cannot know what your ideas are, mean, or do until you set them down in sentences, whether on paper or on screen,” he tells us; you are always working at “the intersection of an intention and an audience.” That is, our ideas emerge in the process of writing for an imagined audience, it is not merely, say Hayot and Mieszkowksi, the presentation of ideas already held.

Mieszkowski devotes much of his piece to a critique of Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style. Pinker’s view is that good writing begins with a good, clear idea in mind, and that it presents that idea as though it’s something that is already a firmly established truth. Academic writing should present itself as knowledgeable, but not because the “truths” it expresses are beyond discussion. On the contrary, by claiming a statement is true, and by presuming the reader is capable of deciding whether it’s true, the text opens itself to critique from peers. It does not deflect such criticism by shifting the terms of discourse, imagining or inventing some entirely new reader in some future community of scholars. Pinker’s view here is very much in line with “classic style”, which he invokes explicitly. “In classic style,” Thomas and Turner tell us, “the motive is truth, the purpose is presentation, the reader and writer are intellectual equals, and the occasion is informal.” For the record, it’s the third characteristic that I would put at the center of any definition of academic writing: it is writing for peers.

Overall, and while I find the conversation important, I have to side with Pinker. In fact, I would argue that the scholarly essay, like a scientific paper, offers (for humanists and social scientists respectively) almost ideal conditions to be knowledgeable, i.e., to experience their knowledge as competence — the authority to speak. To write academically is to write down the things you have established for yourself as truths — the stories you know. You write them down along with the reasons you have for holding them true, with the implication that, given those reasons, your reader, who is that “intellectual equal” we’re talking about, a peer, will hold them true too. Though you know that you might fail, as Mieszkowski reminds us we may, you do this confidently and directly so that your reader has an occasion to critique your thinking. You try to succeed precisely in order to make any possible failure meaningful. If the text is too “experimental” in its style or too tentative in its conclusions, it’s hard to know what to do with the ideas it evokes. It becomes a sustained performance of uncertainty, and ultimately deflects criticism instead of inviting it. That’s what Pinker believes makes it “bad”.

While the reader‘s experience is important here, we should keep in mind that writing an essay is an experience too. Done right, it could be the experience of actually knowing things, not a painful struggle with your doubts about them. Since your aim is to present your ideas for criticism from your peers you should approach them as though you know them, and if this feels very uncomfortable, or otherwise “off”, you should consider whether you know what you’re talking about after all. Instead of hoping to shift the ground of the debate after your intention intersects with your audience, as Hayot suggests, why not just change your footing, shift your weight a little, and write from the center of your epistemic strength? Open your thinking to the strongest arguments that your reader may have, rather than leaving yourself an opening through which to slip away. But do note that I’m not suggesting you should do this to please Steven Pinker, or even your peers. I’m saying that you might enjoy the experience of knowing things, and the composition of a good essay affords you exactly that experience.

Note: I’ve been having an interesting exchange on Twitter with Theresa Truax-Gischler about these issues. I’ll follow up on this post with my reflections on it soon.

A tweet from Julia Molinari this morning, reflecting on one from Jo Wolff, stirs the memory of a post from my old blog, which, today, almost seems itself a “promise made and not kept.” I am grateful for the reminder.

* * *

I’ve never really taken the time to read Paul Ricoeur very carefully. But I remember a friend of mine once trying to explain his view of “the promise” and it has stuck with me ever since. A promise, says Ricoeur, is a way of transcending yourself, of becoming more than you are. When you make a promise you don’t know that you will keep it, but you commit yourself to it. Promising is an important part of our moral growth.

Ricoeur cites Nietzsche (via Arendt), who described promising as “the memory of the will”. A promise does not refer to something you will necessarily do, but it does refer to something you will-to-do. The promise, then, gives your will some real content; it converts a vague desire into a precise intention. After making a promise, you are not merely hoping something will happen; you have identified your part in making it so.

Obviously, you make promises to yourself and to others. You make promises to your writing self: “Next semester, I promise, I will begin to write that book”; “Next week, I will get the analysis done and finish the discussion section of the paper.” And you can make promises to your reader: “This issue is beyond the scope of this paper, but it will be taken up in later work”; “As I will show below, however, …” Just saying these things does not get them done.

But here’s the important thing: even keeping your promise does not get anything done. I can promise to meet you at seven o’clock by the river. And I can do my part to make that happen. But the meeting may still not take place, for reasons that are beyond our control. I can promise to work on my book all next semester. Keeping this promise will not get it written. And yet, beyond the ultimate results, making promises and making an effort to keep them is essential to our growth as individuals, couples, families, and groups.

When I was younger, I tried not to promise anyone anything because I did not want to fail them. I had a purely negative view of promises—I thought the essential thing about promises was not to break them. As I get older, I understand that promises are valuable also in what happens when we keep them. They help us develop in an orderly way.

Skimming Ricoeur’s book this morning, I note that he connects the act of promising to the act of forgiveness. That is no doubt very important.

My beard is a bridge between my past and my face.

Tony Tost

I often have to remind myself that not at all people write as deliberately as I do. They experience the act of writing very differently, and they therefore also experience their competence as writers differently. They are sometimes surprised at what happens in my workshops when we take a close look at a single paragraph they have written, trying to discern what they were trying to say and who they’re trying to say it to. More precisely, we try to identify the one sentence in the paragraph that makes its key point, and determine what difficulty the writer thinks the reader will have with that point. This often reveals that both the writer’s intention and their image of the reader are rather vague.

People of course rarely spend a well-defined amount of time on a single paragraph. The idea of sitting down at the machine with a specific literary problem to solve is foreign to many academics, not just students. Texts are not generally written one paragraph at a time, one idea at a time, one difficulty for the reader to overcome at a time. If they were, I suspect, they would look very different, and I wonder if all these years of training myself to think in paragraphs has, in fact, produced a style that others find hard to digest, perhaps even parse. I, of course, no longer devote exactly 18 or 27 minutes to each paragraph, especially not in a blog post. And I have, admittedly, not done much “serious” writing lately (I should be writing some articles, a book). And yet the habit of thinking of each paragraph, each block of roughly 150 words, as a moment of the reader’s attention sticks with me.

I started thinking about this again when Kim Mitchell retweeted a suggestion from CBC Books to keep the “creative” and “critical” dimensions of writing separate by “writing freely” first and then polishing the text later. It occurred to me that I generally keep both my creative self and my critical self out of the writing process. I let my ideas come to me while reading, or in conversation, or while I’m out for a walk. Or I’ll improvise for a few minutes during my otherwise rather well-rehearsed lectures and seminars. Or I’ll draw pictures and diagrams. Or I’ll just lie there, on the sofa, and think. My “inner critic”, on the other hand, generally only gets to decide whether to publish a paragraph or not — whether it should be discarded or rewritten. While I’m writing, I’m not trying to be either creative or critical; I’m just trying to be clear. I’m trying to say as plainly as I can what I want to say.

I’m sure that’s not everyone’s experience of writing. My approach assumes that you have countless things to say, that you have the authority to say a great many things, and that writing, the author’s craft, is the art of constructing a highly focused experience for another human being. In the case of a paragraph, it is an experience that will last about one minute. The experience of writing is ultimately that of caring about what happens to the reader during that minute. After all, you decide exactly what does happen; one word after another will pass through the reader’s mind and you decide which ones and in which order. You choose them on the basis of the creative and critical work you have already done, well before the moment of writing. Your writing, in that sense, connects some future reader with your past. That, if you ask me, is what it should feel like to write.

It should also feel sane and strong. Not only are you the one who has decided what to say, and you can therefore make sure you know what you’re talking about, you also have much more time at your disposal than the reader. Your writing moment, ideally, will last 27 times longer than the reader’s reading moment. You are writing about something you know for reader that you know, i.e., a reader whose state of mind (the knowledge and experience they bring to your text) you understand (because they’re a peer and you have read some of their work too). Take your time. Decide carefully what you want to say. And think just as carefully about what your reader will find difficult in that message. Then relax and choose the best words you know to overcome the difficulty. Do that for a good few minutes. Let the critic evaluate the results later.

I’m often embarrassed about the typos in my old posts, even if there are only one or two in a post of 1000 words. Today, I’m going to be extra careful and make sure my draft is really “clean”. But do feel free to point out the error (yes, hopefully, only one!) that I missed.

The theme of your theory section is your reader’s expectations; the theme of your methods section is your own competence. In the theory section, where you conceptualize your object, you are reminding your reader what they expect of it. In your methods section, you are preparing them to accept the disappointment your analysis will (ever artfully) bring about. The trick is to preempt the reader’s rejection of your data, their attempt to maintain their theory in the face of your conclusions. You want them to trust you long enough to reflect on the significance of your results for their view of the world, forcing them to consider the possibility that their perspective needs to be changed. This is delicate work; it takes most researchers a long time to figure out how to manage the tension between theory and analysis. But some scholars are able to get around this problem, or, if you will, rise above it, on the strength of their charm, their wit, or their sheer good manners. In a word, they have style. They write their way out of the difficulty.

You don’t need to have a theory in order to have expectations. A theory is just a way of making explicit the expectations we have of the things that are lying around in our environment. When we see something, we expect certain things of it, and this makes an “object” of it all by itself. We understand, not just that it’s a thing, but that it affords a number of specific opportunities for action. It’s possible to sit in a chair, for example. It’s not possible to walk through a wall. It’s possible to lock a door. The expectations we have of things are what give them their air of “objectivity”, and our understanding of what a thing makes possible is our “concept” of that thing. When we “theorize” we take our concepts and organize them into a system, we build what is sometimes called a “conceptual frame” through which to look at things. Ultimately, this also organizes our expectations into a system, which can then guide our reasoning through a complex space of a possibilities. Quantitatively minded people might call this a “probability space” and go on to model it statistically. But none of that is, properly speaking, necessary to ensure the objectivity of things. All that is needed is a certain regularity of experience, the ability to make repeated observations.

Now, you don’t need a method in order to make observations. Here, again, what we call “method” is merely a way of making explicit why our reader should trust our data. They should do so because we collected it in a careful manner, and we can explain exactly what we did because we followed a deliberate method. But the actual doing, and the seeing that it makes possible, is of course an altogether ordinary and, in fact, rather “subjective” affair. You planned and conducted interviews, or designed and distributed surveys, or gained access to an organization and observed its members. This may result in a set of “data”, which is then “given” to you for analysis; and your reader may want to know why they should take it for granted that these are in fact the things you saw and heard; but at the end of the day, they have only your word, your words on the page. If you write about your observations in a credible and confident way, perhaps that is all your reader needs. After all, your methods section, too, is only made of words.

Scientific writing is not, as is sometimes assumed, just writing with the style stripped out of it. Indeed, the French naturalist, Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, is perhaps better known for his style than his science. “Writing well consists of thinking, feeling and expressing well, of clarity of mind, soul and taste,” he said, adding his now famous aphorism: “The style is the man himself.” Scientific writing is, we might say, a style of writing, one that befits a particular kind of person, a scientist. As I have been stressing throughout, the normal procedure is to make your theory and method explicit, to be open with the reader about how you’re playing their biases and winning their trust. If you did not signal these moves explicitly, they may suspect you of manipulating them. But every discipline is different; every discipline has its own tolerance for tricks and gimmicks. Sometimes it will be sufficient to allude to the concepts that shape the reader’s expectations; sometimes the reader will trust you on the basis of a detail they recognize from their own work. “The truth,” said Marcel Proust, “begins when the writer takes two different objects, establishes their relationship, and encloses them in the necessary rings of his style.”

You don’t have to approach all your writing this way. In fact, when you’re starting out, and especially in your academic writing, I would strongly suggest making your reader’s expectations and your own competence explicit to yourself — as theory and method, respectively. But once the probability space of your research has become familiar to you, once you know what your reader expects and is willing to believe, you might consider exploring beyond the structure of your field and into its finer texture. You may never (nor should you perhaps ever) completely transcend the problems of theory and method. But if you can bring out a sense of both the possible and the credible, presenting them with the nonchalant air of necessity, as though the reader already sees, as you so, the same ethereal rings that surround the things of experience, you will have expanded your repertoire as a writer and built your strength as a scholar. You will have become the particular kind of person we associate with that particular style. What you must think of me now!

A piece of writing is meant as an experience: a reading experience. The writer arranges a string of words with the goal of occasioning a series of thoughts or feelings, or simply images, in the mind of the reader. The writing succeeds if it occasions the right thoughts, feelings or images, and fails if the wrong ones, or none at all, come to mind as the reader reads the text. Notice that the writer does not succeed just because the reader likes the writing. That’s all well and good, but the writer was trying to get a particular idea across to the reader and will not be satisfied merely with praise. Nor is criticism necessarily a bad thing. As long as the reader “gets” the meaning that the writer intended, the writer will be satisfied at the level of writing. Of course, the writer may have ambitions and vanities that lie beyond the writing. But a writer who is praised without being understood should feel a little uneasy about the situation. Likewise, if you are vilified for the views you are actually trying to express, you can rightly take some pride in your work. Your reader may be altogether right that you should be ashamed of yourself. But your writing seems to be working.

But how can you know how well your writing works? The standard solution for most people is to ask someone for their opinion. They give them a text they’ve been working on for weeks or months and anxiously await the reader’s judgment. The reader, in turn, tries to be both “constructive” and “critical”, looking for strengths to praise and weaknesses to improve. They will also, usually, end up saying something about the ideas being expressed, and even, whether deliberately or inadvertently, about the intelligence or character of the writer. “This is really interesting stuff,” “there’s a lot going on here,” and “maybe you’ve got too much say,” are almost stock responses these days in academic feedback. “I really like this part…but I’m a bit unclear about…” is common fare. Importantly, the writer has spent uncountable hours on the text by now and the reader has probably spent a few hours more reading and making notes. They’re now spending time (sometimes another hour or two) talking about the text, and when it’s over there’s an enormous amount of information, allusion, and insinuation for the writer to “process”. What, at the end of the day, did the reader think? Did the text work? Sometimes there are more questions than answers.

As an alternative (or at least as a supplement) to this sort of feedback, I’ve long defended a more direct approach. It has the added benefit of laying claim to less than one hour of the writer’s and reader’s combined time. It is an utterly unsentimental form of feedback, which, once you get used to it, should occasion no anxiety at all, while giving you an information-rich experience you can use to improve your writing in countless ways.

You begin by preparing a single paragraph for feedback during a deliberately planned writing moment: the day before, you decide what you want to say (what the key sentence is) and the next day, at a predetermined time, you sit down to compose at least six sentences and at most two-hundred words that support, elaborate, or defend that claim. After 27 minutes, take a three-minute break, print it out, and go meet your reader. Your reader will have agreed to give you exactly 10 minutes of their time, no more and no less. They will have done no preparation (you did that by writing the paragraph) and there will no debriefing or social commitment afterwards. When the ten minutes are up, you each go back to your busy days. If you want to socialize, meet up after work or school and talk about unrelated things.

Here’s how those ten minutes will go. You, the writer, will say nothing at all. You will, as much as possible, not even communicate with nonverbal grunts, nods of the head, or facial gestures. You’ll sit silently and receive the gift of feedback, which is not a conversation. Start a 9-minute timer. First, the reader will read your paragraph out loud; second, the reader will tell you what they think your key sentence is; third, they’ll tell you whether you are trying to support, elaborate or defend it. (They are telling you what they think you’re trying to say and whether you think the reader is having a hard time believing, understanding or agreeing with you.) This may take no more than three minutes. But it may take longer as the reader tries to figure out what you mean or what you are trying to do. Don’t help. Let the reader struggle in their loneliness to make sense of your words.

It is a loneliness you now share and, as Virginia Woolf suggested, it is the truth of things. Let your reader sit in silence or puzzle out loud. All of this is information that you are receiving about your text. After the first three tasks are completed, you will continue to say nothing until the timer ends, listening to whatever the reader thinks to tell you. This could be about your language or your knowledge, your style or your ideas. The important thing is that it is the reader’s honest reaction to reading your paragraph. Here, too, silence is information, a gift. Receive it. Don’t break it.

When the timer rings, the reader must stop, mid-sentence if necessary. It is an effort to reflect and an effort to listen and you must keep your promise to each other that the exertions are over at an arbitrary point. You will now sit silently for a minute, thinking about what has happened with a look of profound gratitude on your face for the time your reader has just given you. They have shown you what it is like to read your text. You have shared the literary (not literal) loneliness that is the truth of things. They have let you into their experience of your text as a reader. This experience was not a judgment on you or even your text. It just was whatever it was, their honest attempt to think, feel, or see what you wanted them to.

The experience will be useful to you in so far as you were deliberate and honest about your intentions when you were writing. Notice that “What is the key sentence?” and “Am I supporting, elaborating, or defending it?” are questions that have right or wrong answers. Your idea either came across or it didn’t. Your posture was either appropriate or not. Make of your reader’s feedback what you will but do not take it as a judgment of any kind. You didn’t give your reader conditions under which a judgment could be seriously rendered. It would be unfair of you, ungrateful even, to take their reading as an assessement of either you mind or your words. But your reader did show you whether you have work to and what that work might involve. And you can give yourself any amount of moments to do it. But that is for tomorrow.