What relation must one fact have to another
in order to be capable of being a symbol for that other?
Bertrand Russell

A paragraph is about something. It’s actually a minor wonder that we have this ability to make a fact that can so matter-of-factly be about another fact. The trick, of course, is to have something “in mind” when we write. A drawing can represent a person or thing by “looking like” it. On a good day, I can draw a picture of my face that people who know me would recognize. I can also write a paragraph about my face — the blue eyes behind the glasses, the beard, the bald head — that stands in the same relation to my face that the drawing would. That relation is “aboutness”. Importantly, the drawing or the writing can be wrong about the thing it represents. To be about something is to be comparable to it. We can set my face against a depiction of it, or a description of it, and we can, on that basis, judge the representation. This paragraph can be wrong about paragraphs, for example. And now we can discuss it.

If you know something “for academic purposes” you are able to compose a coherent prose paragraph about it. We can even specificy ideal conditions for this “moment of composition”: give yourself five minutes at the end of one day to decide what to say, 27 minutes at the beginning of the next to write it down, and no time to learn anything in the meantime. If you can write under these conditions, you know what you’re talking about. Now consider composing five paragraphs in a row this way, again having decided the day before on a larger thesis. There is nothing unreasonable about this exercise as a test of your knowledge and it is, in fact, a great way to get two or three pages of a paper or book written on any given morning. If we replace the decision the day before with a prompt issued on the day, it is also a perfectly fair test of what your students have learned in your class. They can train for it every morning, one paragraph at a time. If they can do it, so can you.

For some time, I’ve been getting up early. (Most happy writers write in the morning; unhappy writers write whenever they feel like it.) I know this won’t make me a Proust (or a Tolstoy), but there is something satisfying about starting the day, let’s say, intentionally. “Writing,” I once said, “is one of the most deliberate things we do,” and doing it as the first intellectually demanding task of the day just somehow feels right. It makes you feel like a writer. Having written something in the morning, you can go through the rest of the day with a distinct sense of accomplishment, the feeling that you are in fact “contributing to the literature”, that you are part of the conversation. You can look your peers in the eye and tell them what you think now because you have made a serious attempt to articulate what you know. To be sure, our writing doesn’t always succeed, but you can earn even your failures — the seriousness of the writing the moment — simply by being deliberate about it. Decide the day before what you will write and when you will write it. Then give yourself a good morning.

Did you mean “this could go on forever” in a good way?
Ben Lerner

It takes a moment to write a paragraph. This one was planned yesterday and will take about half an hour to compose. If I were being absolutely rigorous, I would have spent five minutes at the end of my working day deciding what to say and then exactly 27 minutes at the start of today saying it. But I’m a bit jetlagged, which is making my evenings and mornings less reliable than I would like, so this one is being written in a stolen moment after a shift in the library. Still, the aim is to produce what I want to call “durable text”, “publishable prose,” and the “durability” of your writing can almost be quantified: it takes about one minute to read a paragraph like this, but I’m putting those 27 minutes into writing it. This means you can reread it without undermining its coherence; if you are interested, you can keep coming back for more and it will keep on giving. You should be able to read it 27 times in the time it took me to write it and still not wear it out. A paragraph, let’s say, is a moment that may last forever.

It is sometimes forgotten that Heidegger had a sense of humor. In his Basic Concepts of Aristotelean Philosophy, he at one point renders “rational animal” as “a living thing that reads the newspaper.” He was trying to emphasize that we are “discursive” beings. “When the Greeks say that the human being is a living thing that speaks,” he explains, “they do not mean, in a physiological sense, that he utters definite sounds. Rather, the human being is a living thing that has its genuine being-there in conversation and in discourse.”* You are born into your mother tongue just as you are “thrown” into existence. You have a language, we might say, before you know it. By contrast, literacy is something you accomplish. You learn to read and write, you spell your way through it. You can persuade me that you didn’t have a choice — like me, you suffered compulsory education, suffered and learned (πάθει μάθοςas, as Aeschylus put it) — but you deserve some credit for your effort nonetheless. While a language, then, is a form of life, literacy is a way of being. It is this distinct way of being human, this particular species of suffering, that I teach.

*Heidegger, Martin. Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, Indiana University Press, 2009, p. 74. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kbhnhh-ebooks/detail.action?docID=613586