“What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross.” (Ezra Pound)

Brady Haran is a masterful filmmaker. He is especially good at getting knowledgeable people to explain what they know, as I’ve now had the occasion to witness countless times, both in his Numberphile series and Sixty Symbols (about physics and astronomy). This video about pappus chains made me have an epiphany about my own craft. Indeed, Simon Pampena’s numberphilia, if you will, made me realize how much I love writing. If Brady ever makes a series of videos called Letterphile, I hope he’ll cast me.

What is great about this video is that Pampena is able to present an idea about which he is clearly enthusiastic in, essentially, its entirety. He is able to get the whole thing (at least in its essentials) onto film (and, you’ll note, down on paper). That’s quite an achievement. As long as you are interested in what he’s trying to tell you, it is a very engaging film to watch. He isn’t dumbing anything down. He is smartening you up. That’s what makes Haran’s work so brilliant.

Now, I have a set of principles for writing scholarly papers that are almost as elegant as the inverted circles we’re taught to use here. My paragraphs can be chained together in similar ways, and likewise scaled indefinitely. (That was sort of the point of my last post.) I think I’m going to try my hand at presenting these principles in a similar way, using this combination of a handheld camera with an interviewer behind it, a piece of paper (or perhaps a laptop) in front of me, and inserts of screen recordings (in the place of the animated circles and diagrams).

But I also realized something else. Something more important, almost existential. For a long time now, I’ve been beating my head against the walls of the “ideological” dimension of writing. While my understanding of this concept has of course evolved since high school, I only recently discovered the sense that Brian Street gave to it in the context of literacy. Back in 1984, he distinguished between “ideological” and “autonomous” models of literacy. The latter is what we normally think of when we think of the ability to read and write; it is an identifiable competence that can be developed in its own right, it empowers individuals and enriches cultures. What Street noticed in his ethnographic work, however, was that what counts as literacy within a culture is itself dependent on social context. Being able to read and write, that is, is also an ideological competence, which is related to one’s ability to do things within one’s society.

We see this ideological approach to literacy when we worry about how to make students better able to pass their exams rather than better able to put their ideas down on the page. And we see it in scholarship whenever an academic is more worried about getting published than about writing well. Now, passing exams and getting published are certainly important goals. But we have to remember that “good writing” isn’t just whatever helps us reach those goals. Ideally, being a good writer should be useful to you, but it is also valuable in itself–i.e., autonomously. Needless to say, a lot of bad writing is “passable” prose, a lot of published prose terribly written.

Which brings me back to my epiphany–and, indeed, my epigraph. I have been fixated too long on the ideological “dross” of examination and publication. I’ve been letting the writers I work with goad me into taking these worries seriously, indeed, more seriously than the main problem, which is simply writing well. I simply don’t love passing an exam, nor do I care very much whether the students I work with do this; I don’t love getting published or helping scholars get past their peer reviewers and editors. The competence they use to this end is only incidentally related my craft.

Please don’t think I feel superior to them. I am not putting them down for wanting to succeed. After all, in order to do so they have to know something; and on that score I am completely useless to them. I can only help them to write well. I truly love doing this. Just as I, myself, love writing. Or, rather, I love writing when it’s going well. More precisely, I love the writing that remains when the dross has been removed. Even if you sometimes have to leave it in when you submit.