On Friday, I want to say something about how my ideas about academic writing are rooted in both Wittgenstein’s take on “propositions” and Foucault’s theory of “statements”. On Monday, I will bring this back to Crispin Sartwell’s question about knowledge, true belief, and good reasons. But, today, I want to begin with more ordinary things, namely, the sentences and paragraphs that make up the bulk of our academic writing. Briefly put, a paragraph states a belief and offers reasons for it. A belief is a “propositional attitude” and may be true or false; reasons are rhetorical postures and may be good or bad. The paragraph is to the statement as the sentence is to the proposition.

By beginning with sentences and paragraphs I hope to keep the discussion concrete and relevant to your work as a writer. Whether you’re a student or a scholar (which aren’t really so different), you read and write a lot of prose, and scholarly prose consists of paragraphs that, in turn, consist of sentences. You know what it means to write a sentence and to compose a paragraph. You understand that this sentence appears in the second of paragraph of this post. There is no mystery about what the words “sentence” and “paragraph” mean — you know one when you see one — though a formal definition may not spring immediately to mind. I want to begin with that work-a-day sense of what we’re talking about.

Now, a sentence expresses a thought. You have something on your mind and you string words together that capture it. To write a sentence, your mind doesn’t have to be made up; you don’t have to decide whether or not a sentence is true in order to write it. You might write a declarative sentence and, deciding that you don’t know whether it is true, turn it into a question. Or you might think of a question and end with a sentence that provides the answer. The important thing is that the sentence corresponds to a thought that you have had and that you want your reader to have. You want to reader to consider it, at least for an instant. A sentence is an instance of thinking.

If a sentence expresses a thought, however, a paragraph represents a belief. This distinction between expression and representation is perhaps a little subtle but it is important. To express something is to “get it out”; the important thing is that you say what you think, that it corresponds with what you have on your mind. To represent something, by contrast, is to “set if before” someone (sometimes yourself) so that they can have a good look at it. Here the important thing is not to get your idea right but to get the object right and to shed some light on it. You’re not just expressing your opinion; you’re describing what would be the case if what you believe is true. It’s in this sense that a paragraph presents itself as an instance of knowing.

This idea that a paragraph is an instance of knowing ties in nicely with the notion of a “writing moment”. When we “reengineer” our writing process, we’re trying to break it into discrete tasks that can be carried out according to a plan. Thinking of the writing process as a series of moments that each represents an instance of knowing — which is to say, moments that produce written representations of things you know — is a good way to keep your mind properly focused. We are not just expressing a series of stray thoughts, we are composing them into a picture of the facts as we see them. We are saying what we think is true, what we believe is the case. We have our reasons and we present those too.

Frege taught Wittgenstein that “only in the context of a sentence does a word have meaning.” Well, at least in the case of scholarly writing, perhaps we could say that only in the context of a paragraph does a sentence have a use. Or, more precisely, a sentence only finds its academic purpose in a paragraph. Reading a sentence out of context, we may recognize the language and understand the words. We have some sense of what the sentence means, but we don’t yet know what purpose it serves. We don’t know what the write is up to. In a well-written scholarly paragraph, this should not be a problem. By the end of the paragraph we know not just what the sentence says but what the writer wants with us. As we’ll see on Friday, a paragraph arranges sentences as propositions that together make a statement.

Happy New Year!

To get it started right, I just cleaned up the page for the Writing Process Reengineering course that I ran back in November, and which now serves as a standing resource for anyone who wants to go it alone. I’ve added a short podcast at the top to invite you to write 40 paragraphs over 4 weeks (2 paragraphs a day, 5 days a week). If you accept it, I’m ready to help.

Your commitment is about 9 hours of instruction and about 20 hours of writing. The “deal” is that you write each paragraph in a disciplined and deliberate fashion, always deciding the day before what you are going to say. To support you in this endeavor, I have provided 20 podcasts that are intended to be listened to at the end of each weekday during the four-week process. Like I usually say, if you want to work in some completely different way I will try to help if you ask, but I’m not sure how good I’ll be at it. If you are doing things my way, however, I know exactly how to help you do it better.

The course page is still a work in progress. I’m considering replacing all the seminar recordings with made-for-video (or perhaps audio) content, rather than a livestream recording. And I will add some nice drawings this month too. So if you’re on board, you can look forward to an active site for writing-related content.

My intellectual project for this year, or at least this semester, is to develop an epistemological model of the scholarly paragraph. I want to see what happens if we approach the composition of a paragraph as the performance of the competence we call being “knowledgeable”. Instead of approaching this as I usually do, as a “unit of composition”, I want to take the paragraph as an instance of knowing (which resonates nicely with what I already call “the writing moment”). A good scholarly paragraph is evidence that the scholar knows some particular thing. So we can analyse paragraphs in order to understand what knowledge (or at least academic knowledge) is.

That’s what I’m going to be talking about this year every chance I get. The prose paragraph is the essence of academic writing and academic writing is the essence of scholarly knowledge. If you can’t put it in writing — if you can’t compose a coherent prose paragraph about it — you don’t really know something “for academic purposes”. I realize that that’s a pretty hard line to take here at the start of the year. But it’s winter and it’s dark here in Denmark so please bear with me.

Spring isn’t that far away!

Alper Gürkan recently drew my attention to Crispin Sartwell‘s idea that knowledge is merely true belief, not justified true belief as is more commonly proposed, and as I usually propose, at least provisionally. I’m still trying to locate the crux of my disagreement with him, and when I do I will certainly report back, but I wanted to take a moment to note down an insight that occurred to me while reading him. Such insights are good examples of why it pays to engage with people you disagree with even if you’re pretty sure they’re not going to change your mind. You might find a new reason to believe what you already believe. And that, as I hope to show, is just another point at which to open your mind.

I normally present “justified true belief” as a three-part definition of knowledge that suggests a three-step heuristic for deciding whether or not you know something. First, ask yourself whether or not you believe it, then, whether or not it is true, and, finally, whether you have a good reason to believe it, a justification. Sartwell’s papers (1991, 1992) on this have challenged me to consider whether these are really three different issues. After all, if you already believe something you surely think it is true, right? So how does “Is it true?” move your thinking forward after you’ve decided that you believe it? Likewise, if you think something is true then, surely, you think you are justified in thinking so. As a heuristic to help you, the individual writer, decide whether or not you know something, this doesn’t seem very helpful.

But here’s the thing I realized in trying to defend my position: maybe this is a actually a two-by-two heuristic. To know something we must believe something for reasons, but what we believe must be true and our reasons must be good. Inspired by Sartwell, we can say that our epistemology has both a descriptive and a prescriptive aspect (or, if you prefer, an empirical and a normative one). If you’re knowledgeable, you must possess (as a matter of empirical fact) both beliefs and reasons. But these beliefs and reasons must be the right ones, and this “rightness” is captured by the words “true” and “good”. In holding beliefs were are striving to possess truths, to participate in “the truth”, if you will. And we want to be guided by correct thinking.

Now reasons are probably themselves just beliefs. But when we consider whether or not they are “good” we are not interested in whether they are factually true. We are more concerned about whether they relevant to the belief in question. Sometimes this means that our reasons should imply our beliefs, and sometimes they just need need to increase their likelihood of being true. But they cannot be arbitrarily related to our beliefs. That wouldn’t be good.

So far, these are just intuitions that I’m kicking around in my head. The bigger intuition that I’m trying to capture is that if someone insists that they “just believe” something and, when pressed, say simply, “Because … reasons!” they are admitting that they don’t know. They need to assert true beliefs and adduce good reasons, whatever those normative terms mean to their peers in their disciplines. In fact, understanding what counts as a “true belief” and a “good reason” in a particular research community goes a long way towards explicating what “knowledge” means in that community, delineating its epistemology.

(Part 2.)

Composition is the art of constructing texts. In his classic, if somewhat forgotten, little handbook, Rhetoric and English Composition, Herbert Grierson points out that this can be understood on three levels: the construction of sentences, the construction of paragraphs and the construction of whole texts. But he also emphasizes the relation between these levels. Not only is the “the ideal paragraph” essentially “an expanded sentence”, the work should always be guided by the same principles. At all levels, “coherence and the right distribution of the emphasis as determined by the purpose you have in view” are paramount. There is a sense in which style is just your “choice of words”. Composition demands that we put words together, in sentences, paragraphs, and texts, to achieve a well-defined goal.

In a sentence, words are put together grammatically in your attempt to mean something by them. In isolation, words don’t mean anything very specific; they do not convey a clear meaning. In fact, until a group of letters is positioned among other words, it is unclear even what language it belongs to. The word “hat”, for example, refers to something you wear on your head in English but is a form of the verb “to have” in German. A word really only finds its meaning in the context of a sentence, and here its meaning is determined by usage. Usage is the governing principle of grammatical correctness and that is why the way you construct your sentences goes such a long way towards defining your style. What is often called “accepted usage” by grammarians and editors determines the effect that particular words have in particular combinations and in particular settings. The style of your composition, as you try to get the words to mean what you want to say, is your struggle with what usage (in your particular context) would have your words mean before you started using them. This struggle takes place first and foremost within the sentences you write.

If a sentence is an arrangement of words, a paragraph is an arrangement of sentences. There is obviously no grammar of such arrangements, but there are some principles to keep in mind. First and foremost, a paragraph should have a unified purpose. This means that all the sentences that are gathered in a paragraph should, at a general level, be about the same thing. They will not, of course, say the same thing, but they will each play a specific role in supporting, elaborating, defending, or motivating a common subject matter. This, in turn, is but one part of the overall subject matter of the text. “The bearing of each sentence upon what precedes,” says Grierson, “should be explicit and unmistakable.” In an important sense, then, the text’s agenda is not advanced (moved forward) within its paragraphs but between them. A paragraph slows down and dwells, as it were, on a particular element of the larger subject covered by the text.

Ultimately, a composition consists of a series of paragraphs. If you looked only at the topic (or “key”) sentences of these paragraphs, you should get a good sense of how the text is organized and what it wants to accomplish. When writing a text, it can therefore be useful to generate an outline simply by listing these key sentences and perhaps to organize them further using what will turn out to be section headings. You will here need to decide what the organizing principle of the text as a whole will be: a narrative plot, a logical argument, a call to arms, a set of impressions, etc. “It is,” says Grierson, “an additional satisfaction if in an essay or a book you can feel at the end not only that you have derived pleasure from this or that part of the work, or this or that special feature—the language, the character drawing, the thoughts, the descriptions—but that as you lay it down you have the impression of a single directing purpose throughout”. The reader should feel, as Aristotle also said, that there was a reason to begin exactly where you began and end exactly where you ended. The composition of the whole text depends on the way the paragraphs are strung together to achieve this single purpose.

Texts are constructed out of words, not ideas, as Mallarmé might say. Words are arranged into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into essays. The correctness or rightness of these arrangements depend on their overall effect, that is, their aptness to a single purpose. This purpose, which gives the composition its coherence, makes demands of the text as a whole, and the demands of the text will make demands of the individual paragraphs, which will then pass further demands onto the sentences. It’s really like any other construction project: the smaller parts must contribute to the larger whole; they must make themselves useful. It is often in working with the sentences that one discovers the style that is best suited to accomplishing the overall goal, always working under the general constraints of usage. It is also here that you might find a truly creative solution to the problem of writing, which can be a very complex problem because there are so many different reasons to write. Composition, in any case, is the simple art of solving it.

__________

*This post was originally half of a post I published on my old blog back in 2014, based on earlier draft I wrote as an experiment in 2008. I have edited it slightly to bring its terminology into line with what readers of this blog will be familiar with. The second half was an attempt to say something of a more “deconstructive” nature. These elementary (and entirely orthodox) remarks about composing paragraphs and essays are hopefully useful and, in any case, perfectly harmless.

We’re approaching the end of the Art of Learning series. Over the past eight weeks, I’ve been listening to myself talk about various aspects of higher education, always with an eye to what makes it worthwhile and enjoyable — something to be good at and something to take pleasure in. I know that I sometimes sound like a bit of an idealist, maybe even a romantic, but I do really believe that it is possible to get great value out of attending a modern university, even one that is as big as the Copenhagen Business School. It is all about appreciating your finitude.

A few years ago, Jonathan Mayhew drew my attention to a documentary called The Universal Mind of Bill Evans, which I strongly recommend you watch. I take his main point (for our purposes) to be that your learning has to build confidently on what you understand, not grasp desperately at the edge of your ignorance. While you are learning new things you should be in close contact with what you already know. You should feel like you’re adding to your strength, not just overcoming your weaknesses. Keep your learning “simple and real”, focusing on accomplishing precise goals, rather than trying to approximate a theory, or method, or analysis in a vague way. As Evans puts it, “take a small part of it and be real and true about it.” That’s how you’ll achieve mastery.

Also, don’t struggle at something endlessly, indefinitely. Give yourself a certain amount of hours every day to learn. (I recommend around six hours on average.) Know when you are going to start, what you are going to do, when you will take breaks, and, importantly, when you are going to stop. I call the last thing “discipline zero” and it is absolutely crucial to maintaining a satisfying learning process, organized into pleasant learning moments. This distinction between the moment and the process is one that I came up with while thinking about last week’s talk and, truth be told, while talking.

Pleasure is of the moment. You want to give yourself an orderly situation during which to learn something because that affords you pleasure. Don’t feel like you’re pressed for time, and don’t sit in an uncomfortable space under bad light trying to read, write, or think. Learn what your body needs in order to do these things effectively and find simple ways of providing it. Insist on passing every half hour or so of your school day as pleasurably as possible, and this includes the way you attend lectures (live or online). Prepare for them, not just with an eye to learning, but with an interest in your own enjoyment. Experiment with it. Arrive at something that works for you.

Satisfaction is of the process. Even if they are altogether pleasant, you can’t count on every moment (of about thirty minutes) satisfying your curiosity. “Whatever satisfies the soul is truth,” said Walt Whitman, but truth is rarer than pleasure. It’s the result of many hours struggling to learn difficult material. Remember to appreciate it when it happens, and remember to organize your moments into a process that makes it likely. Alternate between reading, thinking, writing, listening, and talking. Let each of these activities support the others. Remember that ultimately you are the same person when you participate in them, but each of them also changes you. Let the variety itself be a source of enjoyment and seek to satisfy your curiosity. Long term, that is what will make your time at school a good experience.

If you cannot find pleasure from moment to moment, or satisfaction in the process over time, you may be in the wrong program or you may simply be approaching it with the wrong attitude. You’ll be doing it for three, or four, or five years — or more! — so you do well to pay attention to these questions. Experiment. Experience. Eventually you’ll either figure it out or find something more worthwhile (for you) to do. As a student, that’s very much what you’re looking for — something worthwhile to spend your time doing.