[Note: this post is part of a series on the “substance of the craft” of scholarly writing. Inspired by by Wayne Booth (co-author of The Craft of Research) and Oliver Senior (author of How to Draw Hands), I argue that composition is the coordination of words and ideas, paragraphs and propositions, sentences and the state of things.]

“We picture facts to ourselves,” said Wittgenstein. And a thought, he explained, is a “logical picture of facts.”

Think for a moment of your hand. (You can take a look, of course, but the important thing for my purposes is that you think. If you have to close your eyes, that’s okay too.) The hand, Oliver Senior tells us, is “a familiar yet highly complex piece of physical mechanism which is almost infinitely adaptable in use.” Imagine your hand open, held out, perhaps, in greeting, or imagine your fist clenched in anger. Picture your hand in these positions. Now, imagine it picking up and holding a delicate instrument. Your hand, says Senior, is capable of “multitudinous individual variations of character as well as changes of appearance in its great range of different positions, actions and movements, yet always conforming to a recognisable standard pattern and subject to strict laws of its own structure.” You can picture it, right?

With a little practice you can learn to draw these pictures. When you become good at it, you can represent the hand in its full variety of positions, always in accordance with the laws of its structure. You learn to see the hand “objectively”, constrained (and enabled) in its movements by its physiology, its reality. Your drawings become increasingly “realistic” because each drawing can be traced back to a recognizable pattern, to which it conforms. Each drawing is logically compatible with the other drawings — it’s simply a transformation of the possibilities in the others. Unless you imagine that your hand is broken (which you are free to imagine if you dare), certain pictures are impossible, unimaginable, unthinkable.

“In a proposition a thought finds an expression that can be perceived by the senses,” said Wittgenstein. That is, a proposition expresses a logical picture of facts. “My hand is empty,” is a proposition. “My fist is clenched,” is another. (“My finger is broken,” is a third.) You can imagine my hand (or yours) in these situations. “Objects contain the possibility of all situations,” said Wittgenstein. “The possibility of its occurring in states of affairs is the form of an object.” We can represent these possible states of affairs (these possible facts) in pictures and in propositions. We can draw them or we can write them down.

In scholarly writing, we arrange propositions (expressions of thoughts, i.e., sentences) into paragraphs that together represent a situation, a state of affairs, a set of facts. They may be facts about a company, a country, or a current event. They may be facts about the state of the literature or the methods you have used to gather data. They may be very abstract facts about the concepts you have used to model reality. But in all cases, you are claiming that something is true and, importantly, that a great deal more is possible. A paragraph, like a picture of a hand, doesn’t just confine itself to how things look right now, right here. A paragraph conforms to a “standard pattern” of reality so that the facts that are represented also imply the possibility (and impossibility) of other facts. The paragraph presents a logical picture of the facts; it expresses a series of thoughts about them. The reader must be able to imagine it.

This underlying logic of paragraphs also has implications for their arrangement. As readers pass from paragraph to paragraph, their imaginations are exposed to pictures of various facts. But these facts must conform to the pattern that is being established in the text. It must be possible to imagine what Hemingway called the “sequence of motion and fact” that brings us from one state of affairs to another, without breaking the bones, if you will, of the structure of the argument. (Of course, you can write a paragraph where those bones are explicitly broken if you need to. Now the reader will be able to imagine the painful contortions to come. Please remember to be as kind to your reader as you can.) Your concepts and objects will often be highly complex* mechanisms, but they should be familiar to you, and they should become increasingly familiar to your reader. Every time you depict them in a paragraph, they should become easier to imagine.

Try not to make this more difficult or philosophical or even mystical than I may, unfortunately, have made it sound. A paragraph consists of at least six sentences (propositions, thoughts) and at most 200 words. Like a drawing, it usually occupies no more than a page. You can read it in about a minute, just as you can study a drawing for that long and get some useful information out of it. Just as a drawing isn’t the whole or final truth about your hand, but only your hand in a particular position in a particular situation, a paragraph asserts only particular truths about the concepts or objects it describes. The important thing is to make a definite claim (cf. “this is a fist, clenched in anger,”) and then support, elaborate, or defend this claim within the space of two-hundred words (cf., “in each purposeful line or passage of [your] drawing, achieve … an expression of form, character, action …”). Appreciate the finitude of the problem and develop your craft from a realistic point of view.

“The world is everything that is case,” said Wittgenstein. “Objects contain the possibility of all situations.” And, yes, “What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence.” He said that too.

_____

*A note for Wittgensteinians: I know that Wittgenstein says that “objects are simple” (T2.02). But in ordinary language objects can be more or less complex. The early Wittgenstein would refer to what I (and I assume most of my readers) think of as “objects” as “facts” at this point and distinguish “atomic” ones from the rest. Wittgenstein of course ended up abandoning the idea of “atomic facts” composed of simple “objects”. But I have retained the idea that the difference between ordinary things and objects of inquiry is that the latter “contain the possibilities” of their combination with other objects, while “things” are just lying around, if you will, taking up space. (Objects occupy logical space, let’s say.) I know that’s not particularly rigorous and won’t satisfy all philosophers, but hope you’ll acknowledge that I’m making an effort. Even after all these years, my reading of Wittgenstein continues to evolve. May yours, also.

[Note: this post is part of a series on the “substance of the craft” of scholarly writing. Inspired by by Wayne Booth (co-author of The Craft of Research) and Oliver Senior (author of How to Draw Hands), I argue that composition is the coordination of words and ideas, paragraphs and propositions, sentences and the state of things.]

Writing trains you to see ideas just as drawing trains you to see things. “Look at your hand,” I often tell my students, “and imagine drawing it. Now, have an idea, and imagine writing it down.” I then go on (sometimes for hours) to talk about the second half of that last instruction, the problem of writing our ideas down, but I’ve noticed that I leave the first part, “have an idea,” almost entirely out of the discussion, as if it’s as obvious as looking at your hand. Rereading Oliver Senior’s How to Draw to Hands the other day, I realized that I’m actually not following his model as closely as I like to think. He does tell you to look at your hand. But he also tells you what to look for, what to notice in preparation for drawing it.

Hold up your spare hand, then, with the open front or inner surface facing you, fingers and thumb extended but held easily without strain, and look at its odd shape and remarkable system of upholstery as though you had never seen such an object before and did not want miss noting even the most obvious facts about it. (Pp. 10-1)

Senior has the distinct advantage over me that he has a pretty good idea what you’d be looking at if you followed his instructions, even though he’s never met you and never seen your hands. When I ask you to “call an idea to mind,” I have no idea what you’re going to be thinking of, nor how oddly it may be shaped or how remarkably upholstered. You might be thinking of a pricing model or an organizational culture or an aircraft manufacturer. Or you might be thinking of a historical event, a legal framework, or a comic-book villain. Or you might be thinking of an old friend, a dear colleague, or a feared enemy. Or you might… Well, you get the point, having an idea is much more general than holding up a hand, and I think that gets me some way towards recognizing my first mistake.

A while back I did actually have a better idea: think of an interesting place you know well. While I’d still be in the dark about exactly what place you now have in mind, the fact that it is a place would let me give you some meaningful instructions by which, as Senior puts it, your “vision may be directed, extended, and refreshed.” Notice, for example, how big the place is and where its boundaries are. Are those boundaries sharp, distinguishing the place clearly from its surroundings, or does it vaguely “shade off” into its environment? (Is it a room in a house or a clearing in a forest? Is it a section in a cafeteria or a building on a campus?) Is it a place in nature or is it furnished with artifacts? What sort of business is transacted there? How accessible is it? By land or sea? By plane, train, or automobile? Or can you, perhaps, only get there on foot? Is it wheelchair accessible? Do you need a key? Are there particular customs that apply there and are you expected to wear an official costume? How do you know you’ve made it when you get there? All of these questions become meaningful because I know in very general terms what you’re thinking of, namely, a place.

I could do something similar by asking you to think of something that happened to you recently, a true story with you as the protagonist. When did the event begin and end? Who was involved? Where did the events take place? What happened, i.e., what was the sequence of motion of fact, as Hemingway put it? How did it turn out and how did it make you feel? Why was it all necessary (what was the point)? These are all natural and reasonable questions that may be asked of any story. And, if I assume that you’ve followed my instructions, and thought of something that happened recently and to you, I can expect you to know the answers. Just as taking a mental look around a place you know well will prepare you to describe it in writing, so too will these basic questions (the so-called five Ws) prepare you to tell a story in writing.

And both of these skills are useful to you in your academic writing. You will often have to describe an organization or region or market in concrete terms, or just an ordinary social practice. Or you may need recount the recent (or ancient) history of the problem you’re studying, an unfolding series of current events, or the things you did to collect your data (i.e., you might be writing your methods sections). The ability to describe things and places, and to tell stories, will help you immensely in doing these perfectly “academic” things.

But I can’t just leave it there. There are more abstract entities you’ll need to be able to write about, more abstract ideas that you’ll need to be able reflect upon. With apologies to Hamlet for mixing his metaphors, you’ll need to learn to hold a mirror up to your mind’s eye and take a good close look at your concepts. (Interestingly, Senior sometimes suggests looking at your hand through a mirror too.) So I could ask you to imagine a theoretical object or a conceptual framework — an organizational hierarchy, for example, or a synthetic option, a collapse of sensemaking or a market equilibrium, a product innovation or a corporate merger. In all cases, I would ask you to pick something that you understand well if I was going to ask you to write about it. I’m not assigning reading homework, but writing homework, so we should begin with something you’re as familiar with as, yes, the back of your hand. If I’ve been invited into your classroom I can sometimes choose my examples by talking with your teacher, but if my examples turn out to be unhelpful (i.e., unfamiliar) then just ignore me and pick something that you actually have studied and do in fact understand well.

The important thing is to take this abstract object — essentially the concept without any particular thing in mind — and notice its parts. How are they related? Hierarchically, functionally, causally? Do the parts stand in relations of subordination to each other, or do they perform particular functions in concert with each other, or does one element cause effects in the other elements? Or is it a combination of these relationships? We have many different kinds of ideas about the objects that our theories are about. In fact, theories give us the conceptual resources we need to talk about those objects in very precise ways. Have a look at your resources every now and then and write about them.

I’ll write some posts next week about what I think you should be able to see. Remember Oliver Senior’s wise words: “the better drawing is not the more elaborate attempt to reproduce the visual appearance of its subject, but that which is the better informed.” That is, you’re not trying to reproduce what it says on the pages of your textbooks. You’re trying to write down what you learned from them, to write down what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people. You are writing down your ideas as straightforwardly as you might draw a picture of your hand in a particular position. In fact, I’ll give Oliver Senior the last word:

The better draughtsman has more ‘on his mind’ concerning his subject; and by embodying his knowledge and understanding in each purposeful line or passage of his drawing, achieves with apparent — even with real — ease an expression of form, character, action — whatever may be his immediate object — that the novice, lacking such equipment and relying on his vision alone, finds beyond his power. (P. 8)

[Note: this post is part of a series inspired by by Wayne Booth (co-author of The Craft of Research) and Oliver Senior (author of How to Draw Hands). I argue that composition is the coordination of words and ideas, paragraphs and propositions, sentences and the state of things.]

“…the purpose of this book is to lead the student to set about acquiring the mental equipment by which his vision may be directed, extended, and refreshed…” (Oliver Senior, How to Draw Hands, 1944)

Writing has a physical and a mental aspect. Just as artists must train both their eyes and their hands to produce pictures of what they see, so too must scholars coordinate what is going on on the page with what is going on in their minds. The substance of the craft is neither their mental state, nor the words they have written, but the coordination of these things. As a scholar (and a student is always an apprentice scholar) you must become increasingly conscious of the formation of your beliefs and the composition of your paragraphs. You must understand that the paragraph represents, not facts in the world, but your beliefs about those facts. You are using the paragraph to open your beliefs to the criticism of your peers. The paragraph tells the reader what you had on your mind when you formed your belief — indeed, what you have on your mind in so far as you still believe it.

Academic writing is the art of writing down what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people. In order to write good academic prose, then, you have to be writing about things you know, and you have to be writing for someone who also knows something about the subject. You have to be very clear about what you believe, but you also have to have a good sense of what your reader thinks about those same issues, how the things you’re studying look from the point of view of another knowledgeable person. You then have to become good at rendering what you are thinking in words on the page.

Consider the art of drawing hands. If I ask you to look at one of your hands and draw a picture of it on a piece of paper using a pencil there is no doubt about what I’ve asked you to do. And most people know immediately how easy or difficult it will be to do well. Almost all of us can tell the difference between a good and a bad rendering (especially if we have the model right there in front of us). The substance of the craft of drawing is the relationship between the visual image of the hand and the picture that ends up on the page. If you are good at drawing, this will be immediately clear to the viewer — and to you. Oliver Senior (see epigraph) was “convinced that the better drawing is not the more elaborated attempt to reproduce the visual appearance of its subject, but that which is the better informed.” I happen to agree.

The craft that I am trying to teach, then, is the judicious use of the information you have about your subject to produce a verbal representation of it that the reader will be able to bring their own understanding to bear upon. Anyone can see that a paragraph is not “the whole picture” of your thinking on a given subject. But the 75 or 143 or 192 words you have written may be more or less well-informed by your beliefs. The surface of the page will suggest an iceberg beneath it.

Please notice that you are not just composing paragraphs. You are also forming your beliefs. It’s a gradual process that coordinates the mind with the page, just as the artist learns to coordinate the eye and the hand. You are not just filling pages with what you have learned; you are directing, extending, and refreshing what Senior calls your “mental equipment”. Today we might say that you are “updating” your “information”. It is the substance of the craft. Get comfortable with it. Learn to enjoy it.

As I hope was clear in a series of posts back in November, Wayne Booth is the presiding genius of this blog. This spring here at the CBS Library, we will once again try to channel his spirit into a series of weekly talks to help students who are working on their final research projects, whether they are nearing the end of the first year of their bachelor studies or reaching the final year of their master’s program.

I like to think of Booth as the James Jesus Angleton of academia. Angleton was a leading figure in counter-intelligence in the early days of the CIA, which today cleverly (if a bit ominously) calls itself “the center of intelligence”. (Perhaps it thinks we’re peripheral?) He served as the inspiration for Hugh “Harlot” Montague in Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost, where he nurtured and guided the protagonist during his formative years at the Agency, and seems to watch over him later in life. Though I never met Wayne Booth, I often feel as though this blog is benignly haunted by him.

When I first began teaching English, I saw myself taking up the weapons of reason against a world committed to emotionalism, illogical appeals, and rhetorical trickery—a world full of vicious advertisers and propagandists determined to corrupt the young minds I was determined to save.

University of Chicago Magazine, November and December, 1967

Like I say, it’s not too far off to think of him as the honorary chief of academic counterintelligence, the “good shepherd” of the university. And if the University of Chicago Magazine was right to call his 1967 speech to students “eerily prescient” back in 2018, things have gotten downright spooky lately. Like Booth, I hope to do my small part to save the minds of the young.

In Mailer’s novel, Harlot held weekly seminars for a select group of young agents. He held them on Thursdays, devoting some of them to the art and craft of espionage, and some of them to its science and philosophy. “Low Thursdays” dealt with what we might call method and inframethod, “High Thursdays” with theory and meta-theory.

Advanced were the High Thursdays, awfully advanced for the Lows. I would ponder some of his conclusions for many a year. If Montague’s method of discourse on such days threw the more inexperienced of us over such high hurdles as the Theater of Paranoia and the Cinema of Cynicism, he could on any Low Thursday return us to the threading of a rusty nut to a dirt-grimed bolt. Indeed, the first day of the first Low had us working for two hours to construct a scenario on the basis of a torn receipt, a bent key, a stub of pencil, a book of matches, and a dried flower pressed into a cheap unmarked envelope.

Norman Mailer, Harlot’s Ghost, p. 410

Academics perhaps understand the Theater of Paranoia and the Cinema of Cynicism just a little too well. (I don’t really have to explain them, do I?) Already as students they got a sense of what it might feel like to be an agent working undercover as a diplomat. (Maybe I’m being overly dramatic for the sake of a literary allusion, but let’s say we’re learning how to balance “theoretical rigor” with “lived experience” as we try to thread our rusty concepts onto dirt-grimed facts.) Near the novel’s end — five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall — when Harlot has gone missing in Moscow and Harry doesn’t know what to believe about the true nature of the Cold War, he recalls those meetings in Washington, twenty years before:

What was it Harlot had said once on a Low Thursday? “The aim of these gatherings is to acquaint you with the factology of facts. One has to know whether one is dealing with the essential or the circumferential fact. Historical data, after all, tend to be not particularly factual and subject to revision by later researchers. You must look to start, therefore, with the fact that cannot be smashed into subparticles of fact.”

Norman Mailer, Harlot’s Ghost, p. 1281

Mailer wrote that in 1991. Almost forty years earlier, he had another of his protagonists recognize that “nothing is harder to discover than a simple fact.” Students know this too, as do their teachers. It’s not easy to know things.

I’m going to try to help. Over twelve weeks I will hold eleven talks, sometimes high, sometimes low, about the craft of research. Every week I’ll no doubt write a blog post as I’m working out what to say in the talk. Last year I found it to be invigorating work and I’m looking forward to seeing what I come up with this time around. I will try to reign in my natural paranoia and acquired cynicism, but I will not sugarcoat the nuts and bolts of scholarship, the difficulty they imply. There’s a reason they call it an an academic discipline.

“The ideal text would be infinitely long?” (Thomas Basbøll)

Sometimes authors complain about space limitations. They feel constrained by the four or eight or even twelve thousand words they’ve been given to express their ideas. This complaint contains an implicit assumption that I want to argue doesn’t really hold up under scrutiny. The assumption is this: for any object (or idea) there is some ideal number of words that can adequately capture it in writing. Any “arbitrarily” imposed length constraint (or requirement) is therefore an affront to the writer’s pursuit of the perfect expression. What is missing here is nothing less than a (and perhaps the) theory of relativity: a recognition that a text is a coordination of time and space to solve the problem of representation.

Consider a slightly different problem — that of drawing a picture of the tree outside my window. At first pass, we think of resources and constraints in terms of our materials: the size and quality of paper, the amount of colors, the grade of pencils. But we should also ask, How long do I get to work on the drawing? And once we have introduced the dimension of time (or stillness) we can apply it also to our viewer: How long will they look at the drawing? This is where things get really interesting. What is the best possible representation of the visual appearance of the tree for someone who will look at the drawing for a few seconds, a minute, five minutes, half an hour? What kind of attention will my drawing be given? Until I know that, I have no way to decide what to put on the page.

And there is no answer to be found in my own heart. I suppose there is a kind of artist who can look at a thing and let it dictate how many resources must go into its representation and then produce a work that will hold the viewer’s attention as long as it takes to communicate the relevant vision. I suppose there are even artists that have looked at particular trees and despaired, knowing they will never capture what they see, knowing they will never get their viewer to see it. They feel in an instant that only God, looking at the tree forever, really sees its beauty. I don’t have anything useful to say to them, of course.

But I think that at the end of the day most artists are pragmatists about their materials and their audience. They imagine a work they can complete within a reasonable time frame and, more importantly, they think of the work as something that can be “taken in” with a reasonable investment of time — for “entertainment purposes,” let’s say. (Remember that even Shakespeare understood that art must have an entertainment value.) The question is whether they can produce a representation that can be consumed in a timely fashion, in a coherent moment of appreciative attention.

At this point in an analogy I always wonder whether I should just stop. A word limit on a text is nothing more than a time-limit on the reading experience. A 40-paragraph paper is 40 minutes of your reader’s attention. Instead of resenting that constraint, just accept it, and construct a representation of your object that can be experienced in under an hour by a sincere reader. Don’t measure your text against the object in absolute terms. Keep the standard of representation relative to the attention your reader is able to pay to your work. The whole point is to spare your readers the time and trouble of having to experience the object for themselves. Of course, a good painting rewards repeated visits to the museum. A good paper rewards rereading.