Look at your hand. Suppose I asked you to draw a picture of it. You would take out out a piece of paper and pencil and perhaps begin to draw its outline. Or you might have another way; you might begin with the play of light and shadow, or you might map out its surfaces. Notice that you’d be seeing the hand differently in each case and you’d be representing it according to this way of seeing. I don’t suppose you’re already doing this, so the last few sentences will have been acting mainly on your imagination. You may have actually looked at your hand but you have only imagined drawing it. Suppose I had said, “Look at your hand. Now, close your eyes. Imagine your hand.” What is the difference between drawing your hand and imagining it? What is the difference between imagining yourself drawing it and actually drawing it?

Notice that you can neither draw nor imagine your hand as such. You have to approach it as a fact first; you have to see it (imagine it) as a fact. Your hand can be open or closed, it can be relaxed or clenched, it can be palm-up or palm-down, it can be pointing or waving, it can be holding something or it can be empty. I can’t ask you to draw your whole hand in a single picture because a hand can only be seen from a certain point of view. Also, your hand consists of skin and muscle and bone and blood and nerves. You probably weren’t imagining drawing any of that when I asked to imagine drawing your hand. That is the difference between a thing and a fact. A thing (like your hand) can participate in any number of facts (like your closed fist or a wave or holding a pencil). When you imagine a fact you imagine a thing in a particular position, in a particular situation, in a particular arrangement of other things. In an important sense, facts just are the way we imagine things when they’re being something specific. Without the fact it is implicated in, your hand just “is”. Try to imagine that and you will fail. You can’t, said Kant, imagine a thing as such.

Long ago, Chester Barnard made an astute observation. If you take any particular organization, the amount of people who actively desire to be part of it is very small compared to the amount of people there are in the world. There are almost 8 billion people in the world. Only about 20,000 are students at the Copenhagen Business School. (In a strictly formal sense, Barnard would say the fact they study here proves that they are “willing” to do so.) There are probably some people in the world who would like to study here but don’t for one reason or another, but the number is a very tiny fraction of world’s population. The CBS student body is a “thing” (it would be better to call it a “population” of things, a bunch of people); all of humanity is another thing (another population). But it is a fact that there are about 20,000 students at CBS and another fact that there almost 8 billion people in the world. It’s hard to imagine “all of humanity” in any definite way. Even “CBS students” is a difficult thing to imagine. But the fact that some people are not studying at CBS, though they would if they could, is easier to get your mind around. It is a definite population with some definite characteristics. That also allows us to measure it. We can ask, How many of them are there?

One last thing about facts. We can get them wrong. If I say, “My hand!” or “CBS students!” or “Humanity!” I’m not saying anything I can be wrong about. I can form a vague picture in my mind that suggests, vaguely, what the words mean. But I’m not being specific enough to make a comparison with reality meaningful. These things merely exist … and, properly speaking, I’m not even claiming that they do. It is only by imagining something specific, about everything from my own hand, to an organization’s members, to the whole of humanity that the notion of “truth” gains any relevance. That’s what facts are for — for being right or wrong about — for knowing something about. But you really do have to imagine them first. Begin with your own hand. Imagine it. Picture it. Then move on to other people and the situations they find themselves in. Knowing something about them really just means being able to compare them to, yes, the back of your hand.

for Andrew Gelman

Simplifying somewhat, pictures represent facts, stories represent acts, and models represent concepts. Did you see what I did there? What does “simplifying” mean in that sentence? Is it a simplification to say that pictures, stories and models do these three distinct things? Or do they do these things while simplifying something? The sentence doesn’t commit itself to either reading; it is ambiguous about what is being simplified. And it turns out that I mean it in both senses. Pictures are simplified representations of facts and to use this to draw a hard and fast line between pictures and stories and models is itself a simplified picture, story or model of pictures, stories and models. Sometimes a picture tells a story. Sometimes a model represents a fact. The world is a complicated place and the mind is a complicated instrument for making sense of it. Still, simple distinctions can be useful, so I ask you to indulge my simplemindedness for a few paragraphs more.

When I say that a picture represents a fact I mean that it makes an arrangement of things present in your imagination. It’s true that we sometimes also try to imagine what is “going on” in, say, a painting, but we know that this is an extrapolation from the facts it represents. There’s also usually a whole atmosphere or “mood” in a picture, which is hard to reduce to a mere state of affairs. In David Hockney’s “A Bigger Splash,” for example, the fact is a splash of water in a pool with a diving board. We don’t know exactly what made the splash but we assume it is a person. There’s a feeling about the scene that I will leave it to you to experience for yourself, but we can imagine a photograph representing roughly the same facts. It could be made true or false by whether the state of things we imagine when we look at them actually existed at the time the picture was taken. Not just whether the things and people (the pool, the diver) existed, mind you, but whether they were in the state that the picture causes us to imagine. Pictures can misrepresent the facts. Even photographs can be doctored.

When I say that a story represents an act I mean that it gets us to imagine people doing things, or things happening to people. That’s a gross simplification, to be sure. It’s possible to tell a story about a pool freezing over or ducks landing in it. Things happening to things or animals happening to them. But I think we do actually always anthropomorphize these events a little bit when we tell stories, sometimes barely perceptibly. If we didn’t, I want to argue, we wouldn’t be able to tell a story. David Hockney painted “A Bigger Splash” in 1967, with no people visible in it, and then painted “Pool with Two Figures” in 1972. Jack Hazan saw a story unfolding in the intervening years and made a film about it. Like most stories, indeed, it is about what some people were doing at the time, what happened to them, how things affected them. They are true or false according to whether the acts they cause us to imagine actually took place. Was London really like that in 1970s? Did Hockney actually lose a lover? Did it actually inspire a painting? Perhaps he did, but the film is no doubt a simplification of the relationship, just as the paintings are a simplification of the scenes at the pool.

Models are simplifications in perhaps more obvious ways. They will always represent only selected aspects of the reality they are modelling. When I say that a model represents concepts, I mean that they get us to imagine what it is possible to think about a certain population of things or people. Where pictures have to be accurate, and stories have to be plausible, models must be probable. Indeed, they are models of probabilities, which we can actually understand as “pictures” of probability spaces (rather than physical spaces like swimming pools). What is probable or improbable in a model is whether one thing, for example, causes another thing. Was the splash caused by a person jumping off the diving board? That’s certainly the most likely explanation. But there are other possibilities and they are (logically) no less compatible with the concept of a “splash”. How many splashes in swimming pools are caused by something other than a person jumping into them? What percentage? What are the chances? The model lets us know, but this does not tell us what exactly caused this splash. If it was a stone, the model that said it was likely to be a person is not wrong. We would need much more data to decide. Not to mention whether the breakup was caused by the man swimming towards the artist in the pink jacket.

Just as you can look at a picture of a splash in a swimming pool and read a whole story into it, you can hear a story about two artists and extrapolate a model of human behavior, a model of human suffering. It takes imagination to do these things, of course; you don’t just see the picture, or hear the story, or think of the model. You give them a place in your imagination, where the facts (the objective arrangement of things), the acts (the subjective intervention of people), the concepts (the possible arrangements of things) and even the emotions (the possible intervention of people) can meet. You then bring this imagery back to the seeing, to the hearing and the thinking, which allows new facts and acts, as well as new concepts, to enter the picture, to shape the story, to reconstruct the model. Next week, let’s talk about how to write these images down. After all, you don’t have to paint pictures or make films or draw graphs. You can put them into words on the page — a thousand words should do.

This came up in two of my classes last week. And back in August I pushed back a little on Eric Hayot’s approach to it. But today I find myself being mainly grateful for his honesty on the subject. In his Elements of Academic Style, he writes:

Let’s start with fear. I am terrified — seriously terrified — of academic writing. Nothing that I do confronts me as strongly with a fear of total, consuming incompetency and inadequacy. The problem is that I’m trying to be great, and I am (quite reasonably, unfortunately) afraid that I am not great. (P. 17)

I think some of my students are entirely familiar with this feeling. So am I, of course. But this morning a clip of Barack Obama urging college students to “get over” their obsession with being politically “woke” sooner rather than later has inspired me to repeat what I told my students last week.

If you’re seriously afraid of hearing what your classmates think of your writing (or of them finding out what you think of theirs) you need to “get over that quickly” too. At a deeper level you are, of course, like Eric and I, afraid that you’re ideas aren’t so “great”. When we write for our peers we are exposing our ideas to criticism from people who are specifically qualified to tell us we are wrong. This can be a little scary, to be sure, but it is important that we face this difficulty squarely every day. It is by facing our fears that we overcome them.

To that end, make sure that you face a fear that you really can overcome. You don’t cure your fear of heights by going skydiving on the first day. (Disclaimer: I am not a psychologists or in any way an expert on phobias. I’m talking about ordinary, garden-variety fear, here.) You have to find a small manageable occasion on which to face it. You should cultivate my “little disciplines” and seek “unfiltered feedback” on the results. Write a single paragraph in a single, well-defined sitting. Then ask a peer for a few minutes of feedback on what you have made. Do the writing deliberately and listen to the feedback carefully. Relax. Don’t make it a big ordeal or a socially complicated act. When it’s done you’re a little stronger and little less afraid of exposing your ideas to criticism.

As Obama says, even the best person has flaws; your enemies love their children too. Good writers can have bad ideas and even the greatest thinkers have written some impenetrable prose. Get comfortable with the idea of not being great in every paragraph. Then just put your mind to being as a good as you can. And put yourself out there.

I’ve been talking to students lately about deciding what to say and how to say it. In this post, I want to break these competences down into seven simple exercises that can be trained deliberately. If you can make this part of your discipline as a student or a scholar, it may help you develop a workable style — a way of writing that gets the job done. The first two exercises should be carried out in sequence at the end of the day before you do the other five, which I recommend you do at the beginning of the next day. Naturally, I recommend you do this on a regular basis, either every day or every other day, for about 4 x 8 weeks of the year. Every series of exercises will take 5 + 30 minutes of your time. So you can prioritize your investment accordingly.

[Update: I ended up writing a post for each discipline. Click on the numbers to see them.]

1. At the end of the day, when you have decided you’re not going to get any smarter, spend exactly two minutes thinking of an intellectually interesting object. Remember that “intellectual interest” isn’t a merely subjective matter. It’s what connects you to your peers. It should be possible think of something that is of interest to you and to others working in your field — if you’re a student, to your classmates. In two minutes, you should only name this thing. Since you’ll probably spend the time deciding among alternatives, just keep one at the top of the list and when the two minutes are up, that’s your choice.

2. Now spend three minutes writing a sentence that conceptualizes this thing in the intellectually interesting way you had in mind. You can approach this in any number of ways: you can install it on a background of shared concern, you can make your theoretical expectations of it explicit, you can suggest a good way to study it, you can summarize an analysis of it, or you can discuss its implications for theory or practice. The important thing is to write an intellectually interesting true sentence about it. Jot down a short simple sentence right away and then spend the time refining it, making sure it’s always a grammatically correct sentence. After three minutes, stop. Your working day is now officially over. Time to relax.

Don’t think about what you’ve done until tomorrow morning, when you will sit down at a particular time to write a paragraph using it as your key sentence. You decide when, but make it the first intellectually challenging thing you do. You need to set aside exactly 30 minutes. Start on time and finish on time.

3. Spend two minutes retyping and thinking carefully about your key sentence. What difficulty does it pose for your reader? Will you need to support, elaborate or defend it? How can it most clearly occasion that difficulty, setting up your next task?

4. Spend ten minutes writing more sentences, coming up with the relevant support, elaboration or defense of your claim. The goal isn’t to write as much or as fast as you absolutely can, but you do want to write at least six sentences if possible. You want to draw out the supporting, elaborating or defending details quickly and efficiently, but also accurately.

5. Spend ten minutes clarifying what you have produced so far. This could involve adding more details to shed even greater light on what you’re saying. But it could also mean removing sentences that are taking you off topic or reordering the sentences in a more logical way. This is also where you can think about where the key sentence should end up. (It doesn’t have to be at the beginning of the paragraph.)

6. Read the paragraph out loud and polish it for five minutes. Consider the spelling and punctuation and referencing, but focus especially on the rhythm of the sentences.

7. React to whatever you learned about your paragraph by reading it out loud. Begin with the sound of the paragraph and improve it from there. When the five minutes are up, your 27 minute writing moment is over.

0. Do “nothing” for three minutes. This can take some practice, some discipline, to get right. Don’t keep working on your paragraph and don’t begin to do the next thing you have planned. Just relax. Put some space between the paragraph and the rest of your day. Then get on with it. (I don’t literally mean do nothing. But that is a possibility. You can do some push-ups, read a short poem, listen to a short piece of music. Just three minutes that are spent neither writing nor doing your next work-related task.)

That’s it. You don’t have to do exactly my exercises (but why not try them a few times?) and you don’t have to stick to my times. If you want compress the paragraph writing from 30 to 20 minutes, be my guest. But do try to become good at some discrete trainable activities. Become good at picking something to talk about, saying something about it, beginning a paragraph, composing one, sharpening it, and reading it out loud. Become good at stopping, at taking a break. Become good at getting down to your writing and then getting on with your day. Work on your discipline. And remember that being good at something means being able to enjoy it. Work on that too.

“Ballet and boxing require the single person to spend a lot of time with one’s self, and it’s very mental as a well as physical.” (Zoe Emilie Henrot, artistic director of the St. Paul Ballet)

“Movement is probably the biggest thing.” (Dalton Outlaw, founder of Element Boxing)

Kurt Vonnegut used to distinguish between “swoopers” and “bashers”. Some people write quick first drafts and spend a lot of time editing them into shape, while others work slowly, sentence by sentence, getting each of them right the first time around. Not only did he think that these types correlated roughly with the gender of the writer (you can guess how), he also thought they expressed different life attitudes. “Swoopers,” he suggested, “find it wonderful that people are funny or tragic or whatever, worth reporting, without wondering why or how people are alive in the first place,” while bashers are forever trying to figure out “What in heck is really going on?” (Timequake, p. 119)

In Monday’s post, I made a similar sort of distinction. I said that you’re free to think of yourself as a “boxer” or a “dancer” when deciding on a rhetorical posture for your paragraph. While I originally made the distinction in the spirit of “You don’t like that idea? I’ve got others,” as Marshall McLuhan put it, I’ve come to see that it may indicate two fundamentally different, but equally valid, attitudes to discourse. One may be more valid in some disciplines than the other, I should say, but there’s plenty of room in the academy for both kinds. There may even be plenty of room in each of us to try our hands (and feet) at both at different times. Indeed Muhammad Ali is often described as dancing in the ring. Jennifer Beals is surely a bit of a knockout.

And a little Googling brings us something rather amazing. It turns out that the St. Paul Ballet has collaborated with a boxing gym, Element Boxing, to put on a performance that reveals what dancers can learn from boxers and what boxers can learn from dancers. I sometimes argue with my fellow writing instructors about how “transferable” formal writings skills, like paragraphing and the composition of school essays, are to other contexts. Well, if boxers and dancers are able to teach each other skills across the boundary between art and sport, I’m going to remain hopeful about the the boundary between academic and professional writing, even classic and romantic style. If writing can be like an iceberg, surely a writer can be a like a dancer, or like a boxer. Indeed, as Hemingway probably understood as well as anyone ever has, whether you’re a writer or a boxer or a dancer — and even if you’re an iceberg — it’s all about the “the dignity of movement.”

As I said in my last post, remember that there is no single moment in a fight or a dance, and certainly not a in a career, that makes or breaks you. Even Jennifer Beals falls on her first attempt at the audition. Even “The Greatest” lost “The Fight of the Century”. The important thing is to work on your discipline every day (or at least every other day), building the skills that will serve you, round after round, sequence after sequence, paragraph after paragraph, moment after moment. Let the bell save you now and then. If you fall, pick yourself up and start again. Whatever you do, please remember to think kindly of the reader and make sure they’re on the same page, i.e., in the same ring or on the same floor. Don’t treat someone who came to fight as though it’s just a dance — they’ll think you’re making fun of them. And — for obvious reasons — do not punch someone who just wanted to dance.