It’s highly likely you will graduate [from your PhD program] a worse writer than you started. This is because we spend a lot of time teaching you how to write in a particular ‘academic’ style that, not to put too fine a point on it: sucks. Academic writing, as a genre, is ritualised, peculiar, archaic and does almost as much to hide knowledge as it does to share it. Mastering academic writing is just as much about signalling you are the member of an ‘in-group’ as it is about conveying ideas.

Inger Mewburn, The Thesis Whisperer

This is a widely held view that is worth pushing back against. Of course, there’s a lot of bad academic writing out there, but there’s also a lot of bad writing in journalism, business, and government, not to mention the endless wealth of bad novels you can read at your leisure. There is nothing uniquely bad about academic writing and, at the end of the day, the suggestion that academics are required to write badly in order to conform to genre conventions (and that good writing must therefore be learned by way of other genres) is simply bad writing advice. There is no reason that taking a PhD should make you a worse writer. In fact, it’s an excellent opportunity to improve.

Let’s begin with that so-called “in-group” you seem to resent. They’re your peers and if you don’t like writing for them, you should find another discipline, another group of peers. Disciplines differ both in style and content and you should find one that doesn’t suck. In fact, one of the reasons to do a literature review is to find your readers and get to know them. If you can’t find a solid two dozen people whose writing you like, or can at least respect, what are you doing in this discipline? Much of your time will indeed be spent reading them and writing for them, and telling your students to read them and teaching your students to write like them. (What did you think academia would be?) Why would you teach your students to suck?

Academic writing is the art of writing down what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people. You’re not supposed to merely “convey ideas”, you’re supposed to expose them (your ideas and their ideas) to criticism. You are writing specifically for people who are qualified to tell you that you’re wrong. Pick people whose opinions you respect, people whose style resonates with yours. If you find people you like to talk to, it doesn’t even suck to be told you’re wrong. That’s when you either learn exactly how right you are (because you’ve got a good counterargument) or are relieved of an error that has been holding you back.

There’s nothing archaic or “peculiar” about writing coherent prose paragraphs that support, elaborate, or defend your knowledge claims, nor about arranging them into essays and papers and dissertations that make larger arguments. (Next, you’ll be telling me that the wheel is “archaic”!) And if you’re using your writing to conceal what you know, you’re doing it wrong. Usually, of course, bad writing will be used to to hide your ignorance, not your knowledge, but it always makes criticism less constructive than it could be. Bad writing, after all, is often simply false writing, dishonest writing, insincere writing — writing something you don’t know for someone you don’t respect. Just don’t do that. It sucks for both of you. Don’t ever explain away the badness you see in your own writing as the result of a supervisor’s or a reviewer’s or an editor’s stuffy demands. Ultimately, you’re punishing your reader, and your reader will not fail to recognize your contempt for what you think they’ve made you do.

No one is going to force you to write badly. In the long run, you won’t even be rewarded for it. But, unfortunately, it is true that they’ll often let you get away with it. The important thing is not to let yourself get away with it — that’s when the whole business really starts to suck. Please don’t let anyone convince you that you have to write badly to succeed as an academic. Don’t let them persuade you that academic writing just sucks and that it’s normal to hate it. Don’t participate in this ritualized self-flagellation. As an academic you’re going to do a lot of specifically academic writing, and a lot of academic reading. Don’t be ashamed of it and learn to love it. Understand why it matters that you do it well. If you want to write popular essays or government memos or blog posts, go and do that. We need good writers of all kinds in all genres in our culture, and in academia we need, yes, academic writers. We need people who are looking for other people to tell them they are wrong.

With summer approaching, I’ll be posting less regularly here on the blog. I’m quite happy with the three series of posts I wrote during the lockdown — on discipline, imagination, and time (I’ve linked to the first post in each series). But I fear I’ve been somewhat self-indulgent, pursuing my own obsessions and fascinations with the possibilities of scholarly prose. In August, I’ll get back to more practical matters, which will hopefully be of direct use to scholars and students. This week, I’m planning a course for doctoral students and I thought I’d spend the summer posting my thoughts on how to teach, and how to learn, writing. I’m going to think out loud about what you can do to become a better a writer and what I might do to help you. Comments and criticisms are, as always, welcome.

Before you begin any course in writing, or even a program of self-study, you should decide how many hours you’re going to devote to it, and how long the course will run. How much of that time will be devoted to instruction (either from a live teacher or from reading a book, or a blog, about writing), how much should be devoted to workshopping your writing and getting feedback (either from a teacher or a peer), and, most importantly, how much will be devoted to actually writing? My minimum suggestion for anyone who wants to improve their writing (not merely keep their prose in shape) is 40 hours of writing over an eight-week period, 10 hours of instruction, and 10 hours of feedback. You can design your course or regimen differently, of course, but I suggest roughly those proportions. Spend about two thirds of your time writing, about one sixth listening to (or reading) someone else about writing in general, and another sixth letting someone tell you about your writing specifically. Also, I do suggest keeping at it for about two months.

Next, give yourself or your students some very deliberate activities to do. My approach is to divide your writing time into half-hour “writing moments”, each devoted to the composition of a single paragraph. That way, if you’ve given yourself 40 hours to write over 8 weeks, you know you’ll be writing 80 paragraphs altogether, averaging 10 paragraphs a week. Every time you compose a deliberate paragraph you’re giving yourself an occasion on which to learn, and the activity itself will train your prose, much like practicing the piano trains your fingers and going for a run trains your legs. The point of arranging a “course” is to get the most out of those 80 teachable moments.

To this end, I suggest specifying an output. A standard research paper is a good focus because writing one will require you to apply the full range of academic skills: you’ll have to introduce and conclude the paper; you’ll have to write about your theory and method; you’ll have to write a background and an analysis; and you’ll have to discuss the implications of your research. With 80 paragraphs at your disposal, you can plan to write a 40-paragraph paper twice. That’s a lot of learning-by-doing. The skills you learn that way can later be applied to writing entire chapters of theory, method, analysis, etc.

Finally, I want to say something about the spirit in which such a course should be run. Whether you’re teaching it or participating as a student, whether you’re doing it in a big group, or going at it alone, resolve not to worry about what is being accomplished, i.e., what contribution this is making to your academic career or those of your students. Don’t do this at a time when your main concern is finishing a text for publication or examination. (Make this clear to your students if you’re teaching the course.) Find eight weeks that are freed from worry about completion, and give yourself time just to learn how writing works. Every time you sit down write a paragraph, put your academic ambitions on one side and focus only on becoming a better writer. (A tip: choose to write about something you know really well. That way it’ll be the writing, not the knowing, that is the main the problem.) The important thing is to write those paragraphs, learning a little about how it’s done every time you do it. When the course is over, you can get back to work.

The fourth; the dimension of stillness.
And the power over wild beasts.

Ezra Pound, Canto 49

In physics, the fourth dimension is time. In poetry, however, and especially poetry that is inspired by Chinese literature and philosophy (as Pound’s was), the passing of time is approached in experiential terms, not simply as a measurable dimension. Since Pound tried to situate his poetry spatially “in periplum”, as if drawing a map of the coastline as it appears from a ship, not as it looks from above, it makes sense for him to describe the fourth dimension as “stillness”. Time is what happens — the only thing that happens — when we’re sitting utterly still, when we have completely suspended our motion through space. As when we’re reading a book.

It is this stillness that literature appeals to. In fact, we can say that a writer demands such stillness from the reader; the writer demands the reader’s attention. By meeting this demand, by paying attention, the reader produces the requisite stillness. Perhaps this is what Huineng was talking about in that famous koan about the two monks who are arguing about whether it is the flag or the wind that is moving. “You’re both wrong,” Huineng tells them. “It is the mind that is moving.” Most people understand (or fail to understand) that as a profound truth about reality in itself, but I sometimes think he was being ironic: “Right now, it’s your mouths that are moving. Stop arguing. Be still, and you’ll see what’s really going on.” Sit down, young grasshoppers, in other words, and shut up.

This is what every text implicitly tells you to do. Learning to read is learning to find that calm place in your mind where real insight is possible. The discipline of reading is that of letting words that someone else has chosen pass through your mind in an order that is as little under your control as the motion of a flag in the wind. The stream of words is punctuated, forming sentences that evoke images, and these, too, are not yours to determine. You let the words and the images pass through your imagination; you give yourself over to their power.

This civilizes us. We entrust our minds to books because we know they are not a battery of sticks and stones pointed in our direction. If they abuse our trust, if they make us imagine things we don’t want to see, then we can always close them and put them down. While we are not in control of what happens when we read, we are in control of whether to continue reading. We are perfectly safe and it is this presumption of safety that makes literature so valuable. The writer should feel free to speak from what Lisa Robertson called “the motion of her own mind.” Neither the page nor the reader’s lips move. The mind moves.

To write is to occupy your reader’s time, not to encroach on their space. The two-dimensional page and the three-dimensional book are merely instruments, incidental to the main purpose of the text, which is to get the reader into the right frame of mind. It is a way for the text to interact with the four-dimensional space-time we call reality and establish the right kind of attention. Once this has been accomplished, the materiality of the text should fade into the background, noticed (like Luzhin’s matches) only unconsciously, or when something goes wrong, such as when we accidentally flip two pages at once and nothing makes sense any longer. Normally, the text is not merely superficial but altogether tenuous; oblivious to the height and width and depth of life, it proceeds, one word after another, along a single line that the writer has drawn. The reader, sitting still, follows it.

“So we are nearing the end. The right-hand, still untasted part of the novel, which, during our delectable reading, we would lightly feel, mechanically testing whether there was still plenty left (and our fingers were always gladdened by the placid, faithful thickness) has suddenly, for no reason at all, become quite meager: a few minutes of quick reading, already downhill, and…” (Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading)

Some books are famously “thick”. In the old days, before Kindle, this was a physical fact about them. Thickness was a palpable reality, something you felt in your hands as you read the book. It also meant that you knew when the end was coming — you could feel it approaching between the index finger and thumb of your right hand. Surely, this feeling is part of the experience of reading, part of our training in books. (I know that people still read books, and even before kindle, some books were gathered together in collections and anthologies so that the end of one novel, and the beginning of the next, could occur anywhere. But I think you understand my point.) A book is not just the text that is printed on its pages; it is also a physical, three-dimensional object. Just as we can enjoy the two-dimensional surface of the page on purely aesthetic grounds, we can derive pleasure from the texture of the binding and the way pages are cut, the weight of the book and the thickness of the paper.

I don’t want to trivialize the aesthetics of reading books. But I do need to point out that, unlike the painter, who works on the canvas, or the sculptor, who works in the marble, the writer does not put a book together in the same sense as the book binder. A writer does not make a book, does not see the book emerging physically as a result of the work. A writer composes a text. The materiality of the book is not part of the writer’s experience, and not even the layout of the page is usually part of the writing process. (There are exceptions, especially in poetry.) How the book will finally look and feel is not under the control of the writer in the moment of writing. (Writers may, however, try to influence this later on.) Its contribution to the thickness of the book has little bearing on the choice of one word over another.

Today, the popularity of audio books shows how incidental the physical presence of a book is. A book can be purchased in a form that can unfold only in the single dimension of time — the time it takes someone else to read it aloud. And writers are now entitled to fetishize this performance as much as the look of bold black marks on creamy, high quality paper. I suppose they’re even entitled to imagine their favorite actor’s silky voice.

This is all obvious stuff, perhaps. But I’m leading up to something important, I hope, which I’ll get to in my next post. (Can you guess what it will be called?) I want to make it very clear what a writer of scholarly of prose is doing when writing — what the scholar makes out of words. Like a painter and a sculptor, the writer makes something that must be beheld by another human being to be meaningful. The relationship of the beholder to the beauty of the work, however, is located, not in the eye, but in the mind. The mind’s eye, if you insist, but we must, in any case, not be distracted by the visual, manual, and auditory incidentals of the presentation. Writing is not intended just to be seen. And it is meant to be read not heard, we might add. We must, to use Roland Barthes’ phrase, find pleasure in the text.

When I started writing papers at university, I fetishized the visual impression of the page. This was in the 1990s, relatively early days of word processors (I was using Word Perfect), and I spent a significant amount of time worrying about font, spacing, margins, and layout. I liked pages that included a paragraph break or two and, if possible, a block quotation. I sought to have one every other page or so, simply for the look of “scholarly” prose. I also liked footnotes, and the air of erudition they immediately suggested. Even as a PhD student, I recall writing entire papers simply to earn the right to use a clever footnote I had thought of. (These papers never amounted to much more than stylistic experiments, of course.) I don’t recommend this fetish to students starting out today, but I’m sure it’s still common, and it can be a legitimate part of what George Orwell called the “aesthetic enthusiasm” of writers. If it gives you pleasure (real pleasure), by all means, enjoy the layout of the page.

In 1879, Gottlob Frege published a peculiar book called Begriffsschrift. The title is translated variously; I settled on Conceptual Notation long ago. His aim was to present the content of our thinking in a more “perspicuous” way than words normally allow. To this end, he proposed to use “the two-dimensional extension of the writing surface” to foreground the conceptual relationship between propositions, their logical interdependence. I’ve provided a sample at the top of the post so you can see what it looks like; the idea is that truth flows through this system, somewhat like a circuit. Once you have understood his notation, you can analyze your thinking in terms of the consequences of the truth or falsity of individual propositions on other propositions. “A good notation,” said Bertrand Russell in his introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, “[is] almost like a live teacher … and a perfect notation would be a substitute for thought” (p. xviii). One can decide that it is hyperbole, or that nothing is ever perfect, but Russell’s remark definitely captures the spirit of Frege’s project. If we could write our concepts down in a perfectly “surveyable” manner, he thought, the surface of the page would do the thinking for us, like a computer circuit calculates a sum for us inside our calculators.

Orwell was right to identify the page itself as an object of desire for writers. “[They] may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc.,” he said. And he was right to describe this feeling as “aesthetic,” meaning roughly what art critics mean by that term. I’ve always felt that that beauty is an experience that improves experience. I tell myself that that this is a “pragmatic” approach to art; the purpose of visual art is to make us see better, of music, to make us hear better, of poetry, to make us feel better. A beautiful page is not only easier to read, reading it makes us read better, makes us better able to discern the texture and cadence of the words we use. A messy, ugly page (like, in my opinion, those of many textbooks) is destructive to our sense of text, just as bad architecture and industrial noise disorients the senses and wears us down. If good notation is like a live teacher, a beautiful page is like a good friend. We enjoy the company independent of what is being said. It’s like someone speaking in a pleasant, familiar tone of voice.

As far as I’m aware, Frege didn’t speak directly about the “beauty” of his notation. But he must have felt some analogue of Orwell’s “enthusiasm” for his lines and functions. Many logicians and mathematicians find their formulas and equations beautiful, which partly explains their choice of vocation, of course. Just as a good poem might help you feel better — not happier, mind you, but more precisely happy or sad — a good conceptual note will help you think more clearly about something — clarity feels good to a logician. And if it doesn’t actually manage to replace your thinking, learning a system of notation will help you organize your thinking in general. It will improve the rigor of your “scientific experience”, allowing you to pass more easily from observations to implications, from premises to conclusions. If that doesn’t give you pleasure, research may not be the right career for you.

But as I hinted in my last post, this aesthetic project, whether philosophical or poetic, may be taking a bit of license with space and time. In prose, we have only one dimension — the order of words passing forward in time. Using this highly restricted medium (and Frege, remember, said that his notation was intended to do something that was not possible with words) we can conjure up the entire four-dimensional universe of ordinary experience, not to mention the higher dimensions of the quantum multiverse. Prose is capable of representing (in its way) virtually anything. When poets space out the words on the page, or use enjambment, or even resort to calligrams, they are, like Frege, exploiting “the two-dimensional extension of the writing surface.” They are using language more freely than is allowed in prose, which moves forward only along a single line. In a sense that I will return to in another post, they are cheating. They are using tricks and devices that go beyond the resources of scholarly prose. The results are often beautiful, and even at times useful, but they are not prosaic. I will leave for later the question of whether these aesthetic concerns are ancillary to our research, or merely incidental, but they are not, I want to insist, the substance of academic writing.