When I talk about academic writing with students at the Danish Design School, I begin by showing them a short clip of Thomas Leslie, Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois, talking about Pier Luigi Nervi’s approach to designing structures. Before I unpack it, I encourage you to take five minutes to watch it yourself (from 27:25 to 32:12) and see if you can discern the lessons for writers that I extract from it.

First of all, it’s useful to think of your writing problem as in some way related or analogous to the problems of your academic discipline. (When I talk to students in innovation management, for example, I tell them that “Good writing is the creative destruction of bad ideas”; when I talk to project management students, I try to get them to see to that a collaborative writing project is one of the most difficult projects they may ever manage.) Getting students think of writing a paper as a “design problem” is especially apt, not least on Leslie’s definition of a “designer”: “someone who thinks things through.”

Another great point that he makes early on is that Nervi’s greatness lay in not “throwing up his arms” at “impossible constraints” but, rather, going ahead and working within them, to “hack together” a solution under the material conditions he had been given. Indeed, for Nervi, the aim was to build something “out of almost nothing” and this, of course, is the essential and difficult problem of the writer: to use the very limited materials provided by words to express what we know. Nervi, as any writer must, was also able to adapt his thinking to the time constraints he was given. He had a deadline and he made sure that his design could be realized within it.

But what I really love about Leslie’s presentation here is the way he relates the handmade components (the ferrocemento components of the roof) to the larger project. The “rigorous, algorithmic process” of producing and assembling the pieces ends up producing an impressive “architectural space”. The “structural form” is intimately related to “the pattern that comes from the human scale of the process”. Nervi’s design assumed that he would be “working with human beings” and this sensibility is then felt even in the enormous exhibition hall that results. Something important emerges from the fact that, as Leslie puts it, “people are actually making all of the things.”

This is something I latch onto, especially, as you can imagine, in this so-called “age of AI”. A larger text, like a research paper or thesis, will necessarily be a complex structure with many working parts. But it is important that the reader experience this overarching (!) “architectural form,” not as something that was “generated” by a monstrously intelligent machine on the basis of some “large” stochastic “model” but, rather, as something that was crafted by human hands, one paragraph at a time, one deliberate moment after another.