A scholar knows what is known by others. Scientists make discoveries, and researchers gather information, but scholars “keep the books”; they maintain an awareness of all the research that has been and is being done on a subject. Scholars can be scientists or researchers too, of course, but we should keep their functions and responsibilities distinct. The scholar’s job is to review the literature and keep it up-to-date. On issues that are being debated, the scholar must have an understanding of both sides of the question and must be able to represent each fairly. The scholar must also have a good sense of the history of the question and the interests that drive our inquiries into them. This awareness can sometimes make it difficult for the scholar to make up their own mind. But, ideally, the scholar will also take a postion. After all, the scholar knows what is known. Scholars hold their beliefs within a totality of beliefs held by other knowledgeable people. With all that knowledge, it would be distressing if the scholar didn’t know what to believe! How would you or I decide?

In academic writing, the reader is a peer. I often say that scholarly writing is the art of writing down what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people. These people are familiar to us because we know many of the same things and share many experiences with them. I tell students to imagine the most serious fellow student in their cohort, for example, which lets them call to mind someone who has read the all required reading and attended all the course lectures. It could even be someone they have talked to outside of class about the topics they have studied. But, all this familiarity notwithstanding, it is important to remember that the reader is indeed an “other”; they are someone else who knows. They have an entire personal history that you can never know and this history has shaped the way the read your words, the way your text affects them. That is, while you are in complete control of the text (you choose which words go in which order) you are not in control of the reading. This otherness of reading must be respected.

Scholarly writing is directed at various things. We call some of them “objects” and we use the concepts of our theories to think about them. We have methods to give us data about them that we can then analyze to provide us with knowledge. A lot of our scholarship, however, is also about that knowledge itself, what is already known in our field, or, in some cases, what is falsely believed by our peers. Our writing must direct itself at these ideas too, and it is very important to distinguish between statements that are about the world and statements that are about the thoughts of other knowledgeable people. To this end, we must master the art of citation, referencing. Sometimes, we will write about, not the things in the world, but our equipment for knowing about them: our concepts, our methods, our data, and our instruments for gathering it. In our more philosophical moments, we’ll write about what Kant called “the conditions of the possibility of our knowledge of objects.” In all cases, it is about the direction of our attention.

To know whom to write for is to know how to write.
Virginia Woolf

I’m trying out a joke with my students. When I talk about the adoption of a “rhetorical posture” in writing I have long said that we should here listen, not to Hemingway, but to Virginia Woolf, after which I normally quote the sentence in my epigraph. The joke I’m working on (it doesn’t yet quite land) consists of a piece of deadpan misdirection. “…Virginia Woolf,” I say, “who reminds us that, in writing, we share the loneliness that is the truth of things” (a reference to a line from To the Lighthouse that I learned from Frank Cioffi). I let the remark hang in the air for a second or two and then admit — sometimes shaking myself out of a feigned reverie — that this reminder will not be as useful to them as something else she said, and quote the correct sentence. Unlike a novel, I explain, which arguably does imagine a reader who is as profoundly lonely as the author, an academic text implies a knowledgeable reader facing a particular difficulty. Scholarly writing does not share a loneliness that is the truth of things. It asserts truths that can be talked about.