I can’t find the passage at the moment, but I vaguely recall Nabokov saying that his job as a writer was to make his readers more interesting. It seems like something he might say in an interview or foreword or in his lectures on literature. In any case, the idea is useful to academic writers, who are likely to think it’s their job is to be interesting. The truth is that many readers read in order to become more interesting themselves, and your academic readers are, presumably, already professionally interested in your work. So, don’t bother with getting them interested in you; rather, make them interesting to you. That gives you a much better handle on the problem of writing.

I was able to demonstrate this to my students last week using a simple exercise that I will be talking more about in my next post. They had recently submitted an essay and we were now workshopping it in class. We looked briefly at the introduction and conclusion, then at the body paragraphs as a line of argument, and then at one of them in isolation. I had them identify their key sentence, generate some variations, commit themselves to one of them, and then edit the paragraph around the new key sentence. After a break, I had them find a partner and exchange paragraphs so that they could do a three-minute version of the standard nine-minute “unfiltered feedback” exercise. The writer was to sit in detached silence and listen to the reader read the writer’s paragraph back to them. The reader was then to “guess” at how the writer had answered the essay question.

I’m simplifying somewhat instead of explaining the students’ full predicament to you. The point is that the reader and writer are peers — comrades in a common struggle. They had been given the same essay prompt, and the same case material, and they had been attending the same classes about the same readings for a few weeks by now. They had now spent about nine minutes reworking a single paragraph from their essays and had given a fellow student three minutes to react to it, including reading it out loud. All of this should of course have given them a great deal of information to about their own writing. The experience, I want to say, should have interested them.

Of course, not all the students were equally thrilled with the exercise. They didn’t all enjoy hearing their own words read back to them, and found it hard to sit silently by while their classmate tried to think of something interesting to say about them. Those three minutes were so intolerable to some of them that they simply began talking to their reader, discussing the text, offering excuses for its flaws, and perhaps even defending it. (I can’t be sure exactly what these conversations involved, of course; but they were not sitting in the silence I had prescribed.) Though I had told them to maintain a “poker face” so as not to reveal to the reader how they felt about the reading, looking around the room I saw much nodding and smiling and even nervous laughter. My students are kind and empathetic people. They helped each other get through it.

I reminded them that those three minutes went as well as the writer deserved. The reader’s job was just to read the writer’s words for about a minute and then react spontaneously, honestly. The writer, who is always writing for a peer, had a good sense of what the reader (a fellow student in the same class) was capable of appreciating. Indeed, the whole point of a paragraph, I had told them long ago, is to occasion and resolve a difficulty in the mind of the reader. In those three minutes, the writer should be witnessing the reader struggling to believe, understand, or agree with the reader and ultimately “getting” it. (In real life, the reader has only one minute to do this, albeit in private.) If the experience of having someone read your writing is unpleasant or uninteresting to you, that is simply on you. Next time, give them better words to read. Make your reader interesting to you, at least for the few minutes that they’re reading you.

"This is an instruction book."
- Oliver Senior
How to Draw Hands

Prose is language taken for granted. It assumes that the reader is capable of understanding what the writer has to say. It deploys concepts; it does not invent them. “Great prose,” said Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “is the art of capturing a meaning which until then had never been objectified and of rendering it accessible to everyone who speaks the same language.” But this, of course, requires the writer for the most part to use resources that are already accessible to the reader, and, in any case, most of us are not “great” prose writers. We’re just making do with what we’ve been given; we refer to familiar things in familiar ways. In our prose, we take the world of objects for granted and draw attention to the things that interest us. We expect the reader to get our meaning.

Oliver Senior takes a similar approach in his wonderful little manual, How to Draw Hands. “It assumes,” he tells us, “that the difficulty encountered by the student is that of representation by drawing of a familiar yet highly complex piece of physical mechanism.” We all know a hand when we see one — the “back of my own hand” is the epitome of familiar things — and yet drawing one is, as Senior reminds us, notoriously difficult. While a drawing takes perception, if you will, for granted, representing a three-dimensional hand on a two-dimensional surface using lines and shading is by no means easy. It can be done well and badly. And we can get better at it.

Already on the first page, Senior delivers one of my favorite long sentences in the English language. (For a long sentence to be truly good its length must not merely be handled masterfully but must itself serve a purpose. I’ll let you decide whether it’s as good as I think it is.)

If, however, the artist finds himself constrained, by any consideration of expression, treatment or style, or by his deference to the peculiar nature and limitations of his tools and materials, to adopt or invent a convention or a symbol and to substitute the semblance of a bunch of bananas or a bent fork for a representation of the human hand, then the particular problem dealt with in this book does not arise; and its author here maintains a respectful silence in the presence of matters beyond its scope. (P. 7)

If you’re an academic writer, this should immediately strike a chord. How often are we not tempted to put the literary equivalent of a bent fork or a bunch of bananas — a polysyllabic bit of jargon — in the place of clear description of the object or situation that we’re really talking about? This is rarely because the technical term is more precise; it is simply because it seems adequate, and of course easier, at the time. Sure, it looks like a bunch of badly drawn bananas, but “everyone knows” we mean it to be a hand.

This recourse to convention and symbol is, in fact, a highly “prosaic” move. It takes the imagination of the viewer for granted, as it should, and is therefore not in itself illegitimate. In our writing, we constantly have to decide whether to provide a detailed description of something or to invoke a conventional symbol for the same thing. Sometimes the details matter (the hands, even the fingers, are doing something very specific that must be shown). But do remember that, even when the details don’t matter, a good description is sometimes better than an abstract symbol. Even if you want to say only that watchmaking is intricate work, you might want describe the watchmaker actually assembling a mechanism. Your meaning may be no less accessible to the reader and the image will be clearer.

There’s no simple rule to follow here. As Senior reminds us, “the better drawing is not the more elaborated attempt to reproduce the visual appearance of the subject, but that which is better informed” (pp. 7-8). “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about,” said Hemingway, “he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them” (Death in the Afternoon, p. 183.) Good prose, let us say, takes the language for granted, not the reader’s patience. Next week, I’ll be seeing where these ideas can lead.

Image credit: Paul Cézanne, detail from Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (Source: Wikimedia.org)

What thou lovest well remains,
                              the rest is dross
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage. (Ezra Pound)

Many years ago, I was talking to a writing instructor when she suddenly confided to me that she hated writing. I was taken aback but it was an illuminating moment. It explained why we disagreed about whatever pedagogical issue we were discussing. She was trying to help students survive something she hated and I was trying to help them become good at something I love. Both of us had our students’ best interests at heart, of course, but we approached their problems in very different ways. Norman Mailer once said of Diana Trilling that she read him with her “full and specific sympathy,” which, if I recall, was a nice way of saying that he thought she had misread him. Likewise, I think writing instructors feel a great deal of sympathy, and even empathy, for their students. Let me be specific about mine.

I know that writing is hard and I, too, find it difficult at times. Most of the time, however, I have given myself a task I think I will enjoy in the moment of writing, a difficulty I can handle. Mostly, it’s not the writing that I hate; it’s the inability to decide what to say. But that inability is only something I experience for a few minutes at the end of each day; then I stop worrying and begin to relax. I try to avoid sitting in front the machine for hours on end with nothing on my mind, hoping for inspiration. Usually, I don’t even sit down if I haven’t made up my mind about what I’m writing. So though I sometimes suffer terrible bouts of indecision, I don’t experience it as part of the writing; it’s part of the thinking process, the research process, the learning process. And it doesn’t feel loathsome there, but entirely natural. I try to protect the writer in me from frustration because I know that the writer isn’t to blame for my inability to understand something. If I know something, I know also that I can write it down. If I can’t write about something, it’s because I still have something to learn. Instead of hating writing, that is, I simply resolve to do something else that I love too, namely, learning.

I know I’m being annoyingly cheerful about all of this. But I think it’s important to tell people, and especially students (who may one day become scholars), that they don’t have to be miserable when they write. Many writers leave the impression that this is necessary. Some of our greatest novelists are famous sufferers for “the craft” — Flaubert and Proust come to mind. Many academics are too ready to take precisely those authors as role models and I strongly discourage this. Even Henry Miller laughed at his younger, suffering self, who thought he was receiving dictations from the angels (or, perhaps, cosmological demons). “I was so in love with the idea of being a writer I could scarcely write,” he said. Much better, he tells us, to work like Blaise Cendrars (“Two hours a day, before dawn, and the rest of the day to oneself”) or like Rémy de Gourmont (who applied the same strategy to his reading). But sometimes, I grant, the morning is just too beautiful to surrender to the machine. So be it.

It is my philosophy that being able to do something well implies knowing how to enjoy it. If you hate writing it’s because you’re not — not yet — doing it right, and it’s probably because you’re trying to use it for a purpose it isn’t suited for. “If he’s using his mind to bend those spoons,” said James Randi of Uri Geller, “he’s doing it the hard way.” Though it sounds counter-intuitive, the same is true of writing: if you’re using your mind to write your papers you’re doing it the hard way. Use your hands. Teach them to write down whatever you’ve go on your mind, and then use your mind to satisfy your curiosity, to learn. Your mind already loves to learn. Your hands can learn to love writing, but not if you insist on learning ideas while you’re doing it. Put a weekend between the part of you that learns the truth and the part of you that writes it down, between the knowing and the writing. What thou lovest well remains.

Image credit: C. W. Eckersberg, The Vesta Temple in Rome, 1814-1816, Source: Nivaagaard Collection.

One way to distinguish between “essays” and “papers” is to say that essays present ideas and papers present results. In school, this distinction won’t always hold, and sometimes you’ll be asked to write a “paper” that is actually an essay, or vice versa. But in the journal literature, the distinction is often enforced by editors, who like to distinguish between contributions that are based on an empirical study and contributions that are based on the author’s personal experience and reflection. An essay is always implicitly asking the reader to “try to imagine” something, while a paper is less literary and more technical in its ambition. It is informing the reader about what the writer has learned, not just proposing that the reader consider a series ideas. Both forms of writing are “persuasive” in the sense that they’re attempts to get the reader to believe something. But both the writer and reader make different assumptions about the rhetorical situation they’re in in each case. Having already written a post about essays, I thought I’d write one this morning about papers.

Properly speaking, you can’t write a “paper” if you haven’t conducted a “study”. This implies that you have both a theory and a method; you have framed a research question (with theory) and you have (methodically) collected data in an attempt to answer it. Ideally, you have answered your question, and your results suggest some implications, either for theory or practice. At the end of the day, it is those implications that your reader wants to know about. But even an inconclusive result is a result; although it will be rare that we didn’t learn anything at all from a study, if the implications are simply that we’ve been right all along, the paper may be worth publishing simply to record a “null result”. In any case, if you’re writing a paper, you must have a result of some kind to present.

But this doesn’t mean that you can’t anticipate being in a position to write a paper before the result is known. And that means you can actually write a substantial portion of your paper in draft form while you’re planning and conducting your research. The background section, for example, as well as the theory section, serve mainly to frame your question, and you should have articulated that quite clearly before you started collecting your data. Everything you know about your empirical context (before you begin your data collection) and everything your literature review tells you to expect of it (before you complete your analysis of the data) serves as the basis of, respectively, your background and theory sections. Also, while you don’t know exactly what you’ll do to collect your data, you’ve got a good sense of what you probably should do, simply by knowing the methodological standards of your field. So there is plenty to work with, one paragraph at a time, one morning at a time, even while you conduct your research.

The essential thing is that you write the whole paper again once you know the results. A paper should simply and straightforwardly present results that are known to the writer. The writer of the first paragraph should have a “knowing air” about what is to come, and the result itself should be presented already in the introduction. The background and theory sections should be written so as to frame the analysis and set up the discussion in the most efficient way possible. There’s a great deal of artifice in this and the reader should feel like the whole experience has been explicitly constructed for the purpose of delivering the result along with its implications. Finally, a paper assumes a great deal of competence (knowledge and intelligence) in the reader. A research paper is always written for a peer — someone working in the same field, using the same theories and methods. It presents the results to this reader for the purpose of discussing their validity.

Like I say, the distinction between papers and essays isn’t always formally applied. But it can be good to ask yourself whether you really have a result to present to your reader, or you’re just asking them to think along with you for a few paragraphs. (This is also why it can sometimes be useful to think of the parts of longer texts, like projects or dissertations, as mini-essays, even if they appear within larger paper-like texts.) While a good essay, like a good paper, is written with the end in mind from the beginning, it will often (and preferably) feel more improvised. So it’ll also often be written in closer connection with the thought process it presents. It should not feel completely “unrehearsed,” however. I will continue to recommend that you put at least a week between your thinking and your writing to make sure that you aren’t literally thinking out loud in your writing.

An essay can be both more urgent and more ephemeral than a paper. It has its moment and it passes. But a research paper goes into the literature as a record of what you have done and what you have seen. Even after the results are superseded by others, the record remains.

See also: “How to Structure a Research Paper” and “How Essays Work”

We’re here to help each other get through this thing. Whatever it is.

Mark Vonnegut

Schools serve a limited but important purpose. In addition to the knowledge they impart and the skills they inculcate, they put us in contact with our peers. In the beginning, this just means other people our own age, but, as time goes on and we begin to choose what and where we will study, our “academic” community becomes increasingly defined by shared aptitudes and attitudes, a competence in and a curiosity about similar things. We begin to study our subjects among like-minded people.

This, of course, also involves a measure of competition as we meet our equals, our betters and, unavoidably, our inferiors. Part of the function of school is to show us whether we’re likely to be among the best at what we do if we pursue a particular course. I agree strongly with Frederik deBoer that we have to stop thinking of academic success as the only thing that matters for young people, but it is very definitely one kind of success.

Because school brings a lot of people together at roughly the same stage of development it helps us decide whether we’re remarkably intelligent, or athletic, or beautiful, or ambitious. We also get some measure of our confidence and our cowardice, our love and our hate, our empathy and our contempt. Some of us find out that we’re nicer than most people, and others, that they’re cleverer. Some learn to be kind while others discover that they live among suckers.

I don’t presume to know who is right, and I don’t think it really makes sense to try. I think that both virtue and talent are distributed unevenly in the population and, importantly, that they develop differently in individuals. I don’t think schools can do much about either of these facts, except to give each cohort of students the experience needed to take their own measure. I think that is mainly what school is for.

If it was just about learning things, I think there are more efficient ways to do it. But if it’s about participating in the “ongoing conversation of mankind” (a notion, you’ll note, that is so ancient that it is gendered) we need a social context in which to learn, not just the truth, but what everyone else thinks is true. Schools provide us with this community.

While we begin as conscripts, we ideally finish our education in a school we have freely chosen. In Denmark, this ideal can be seen in the choices young people have to make already after grade nine, between “academic” and “technical” high schools. And some just go straight into apprenticeships. Most societies still presume, at least at some level, that university is a free choice. But it’s distressing how many professors now think of their students as unwilling conscripts who must be constantly “motivated” to learn what their courses offer.

I generally side with those who believe that there are too many students at university these days, too many people who don’t actually belong there but who have been coerced into it, and this also means that there are too many professors, too many academic careers. The university has simply become too big to do what it originally emerged to do. But there’s no use complaining a lot about that; after all, humanity evolved to live on the Savannah, right? Our brains are just too damned big!

Like I say, I don’t think we can turn back the process of growth, but I do think we can recenter ourselves a little by noticing what universities, understood as schools of higher learning, provide: a community of roughly like-minded peers. With my interest in academic writing, this means constantly reminding people that their readers are their intellectual equals; they are writing for their classmates (not their examiners) if they’re students, their colleagues (not their reviewers) if they’re professors. As you can imagine, I’m not always successful.

What schools still do well is to make you aware of your relative mastery of your subject. A good school will always indicate the better school you could be attending if you’re too good for this one. You may make the transition between semesters, if that’s feasible, or, more likely, when you apply for grad school. But please remember that it’s not just about talent and ability. You’re also learning what you’re interested in and who you’d like to discuss it with. If you don’t like talking to academics that may not be their fault, or even yours. It’s just that you’ve decided that this field, or even all of academia, isn’t for you. There are lots of other ways to succeed.