Let’s begin with the immortal words of Virginia Woolf: “To know whom to write for is to know how to write.” When deciding how to write something you are deciding who to write for, and once that decision is made everything else follows. Once you have decided what you want to say, the how follows from the who, at least in principle, if not always in practice.

Now, in academic or scholarly writing, you should always be writing for a peer, so imagining your teacher or your editor (or Reviewer #2!) is simply not going to work. Examiners and gatekeepers are not, properly speaking, your readers; but both are trying to decide whether your actual reader will find your writing useful, and they will judge your work on that standard. So you have to imagine someone who is roughly as knowledgeable about the subject as you are, someone in your class or discipline that you consider an intellectual equal. As I sometimes put it, don’t look up to your reader and don’t look down on them; pick someone your own size and look them in the eye.

Consider the difficulty you are occasioning for the reader. Will your reader find what you are saying hard to believe, hard to understand, or hard to agree with? (Alternatively, is your reader bored?) This is an important decision — a fateful one, we might say — because it will determine your rhetorical posture — will you be supporting, elaborating, or defending what you decided (yesterday) to say.

Do imagine yourself adopting a kind of “stance” and imagine your reader facing you in the complementary position. If the reader is likely to doubt your claims, be ready to offer support for them. If the reader is likely to misunderstand you, be ready to elaborate on what you mean. If the reader is likely to reject your view, be ready to defend yourself. Some people imagine this as a boxing match, or at least some light sparring. But if you don’t like fighting (even figuratively), feel free to imagine you and your reader as dancers. Remember, however, that it’s not all about the knock-out punch or the big dip at the end. It’s about lasting out the round, maintaining your grace throughout the whole number, and having enough strength left over for the next.

Let’s consider your reader’s situation. In most cases, you are going to be composing a paragraph of no more than 200 words. This means you have about one minute of your reader’s attention to work with, and this minute is part of a series of minutes that you are also in complete control of. (Except for your first and last paragraphs, you have just occupied the preceding minute of their experience and you propose to occupy the one that comes after as well.) You have to respect this constraint on your reader’s time. Except under very particular circumstances, and only to accomplish a very deliberate literary effect, do not expect your reader to read your paragraph two or three times. Imagine you only have their attention for one minute and that they’ve already spent as many minutes in your company as you’ve given them paragraphs to read.

Take stock of your resources. First of all, you have much more time than the reader. An ideal writing moment lasts 27 minutes and is followed by a 3-minute break. You are 27 times stronger (or faster, if you like) than your reader. You are writing in “bullet time”. More importantly, you are writing from the center of your epistemic strength, presenting justified, true beliefs that you are able to converse intelligently about in person. The paragraph you are now writing is just the tip of the iceberg of your knowledge, and it will have the dignity of everything that lies. unseen and unsaid, below the surface. An important part of the “how” of writing is experiencing yourself as knowledgeable, as solidly grounded in the literature, your experience, and your reasoning — everything you have read, everything you have seen and done, and everything you have thought carefully about. You have chosen but one of our many ideas that are as solidly well-founded as this. Write with the confidence that this choice gives you.

At the end of the day, writing well means choosing the right words in the right order, to help the reader overcome the difficulty of what you are saying. You want to put the reader on the same solid footing you have for believing what you are saying to be true. This will also give them a way to understand you and, of course, a way to disagree with you. That’s what academic writing is for — to share our reasons for believing things, so that others may understand us or challenge us as they will. Remember to conserve your strength, which is to say, don’t try to put all your ideas in a single paragraph. This is one round of what may be many. The night is still young.

Good academic writers are people who can take a moment, or a series of moments, to write down what they think on a particular subject. Specifically, they are able to make effective use of twenty or thirty minutes to produce a paragraph of coherent prose. If they know something, they know that they know it, and also how they know it. So they can tell you what they think and why they think so. Working under a reasonable set of constraints, they can put all of this in writing. That, in any case, is the sense in which I try to help scholars and students become good (i.e., better) academic writers.

If you want to be a good academic writer, therefore, you have to learn how to make up your mind about what you are going to say. In fact, making up your mind is part of the much larger competence of being “knowledgeable”, and deciding what you’ll say in a particular paragraph is a way of keeping that competence in shape. This is why I recommend that you train it specifically and deliberately. The simplest way to do this is to take a very short moment, lasting no more than five minutes at the end of your working day, and write down a single true sentence that you know. A simple, declarative sentence that expresses a justified, true belief that you hold. Pick something that you already knew last week, even something you’ve known for months or years. Make sure it’s the sort of thing that you might use a paragraph to support, elaborate or defend in writing. Picking an idea with the right volume and attitude (the right message and rhetorical posture) is part of the craft. It’s something you want to be good at.

By waiting until the end of the day, you are making sure that it’s only the decision you are making. You will not write the paragraph itself; you’ll just decide what your paragraph will say. You are not yet training your ability to actually compose a paragraph; you’re training your ability to decide what to say. When the decision has been made, you’ll call it a day and begin your after-work activities. Relax. See some friends. Get something to Eat. Love. Pray. Sleep. You know the drill. The important thing is not to think about that sentence for the remains of the day. It may find its way into your dreams, but that is exactly where it belongs — in your unconscious. You’ve decided what you want to say, but you’re not yet in any position to decide whether it was a good idea, i.e., whether you made the right decision. You’ll find that out tomorrow.

Putting some conceptual space (and some actual time) between the decision and the execution, not only lets your unconscious prepare for the writing in the morning, it also sharpens your focus during the actual decision-making process. You go into it knowing you only have five minutes to think of something. So you’ll be picking ideas that are easily available to you, not ideas that you’re still struggling to understand. You’ll be calling on your clearest and most distinct ideas. (Descartes would be proud!) If you’re working on a project or paper, some ideas will be at the front of your mind, but only some of them will be clear enough to note down in a sentence given only five minutes of your attention. Those are the ones you want to choose from.

I know this all seems very artificial. But it is actually possible to develop this ability, and once you have it, you can apply it in more spontaneous ways. I will always insist that the best writing emerges from decisions that were made the day before they were executed. (In fact, most of the best actions are probably taken that way.) But those aren’t always the conditions under which real writing gets done. That’s why I’m suggesting you practice; for just a moment every day, or every other day, give your self slightly more ideal conditions than normal. Be a little more deliberate than you’re used to. Remember that athletes aren’t always competing, musicians aren’t always performing. Sometimes they’re just trying to get better. On Monday, I’ll say something about what to do with your decision when you get up the next day. Today, I just wanted to stress that making the decision is itself a valuable skill you develop through training.

Ernest Hemingway concluded the preface to his First Forty-Nine Stories with a remark that I’ve always found strangely simple yet illuminating. “I would like to live long enough to write three more novels and twenty-five more stories,” he says. “I know some pretty good ones.” What strikes me about this way of putting it is that, although Hemingway is talking about fiction, he asks us to imagine these stories, not as the products of some future act of creativity, but as parts of a knowledge he already possesses. He hopes to live long enough to write them down, not long enough to make them up.

This view of writing is not universally held. Even where one would think it held most sway, in academia, I get the sense that it’s the minority view. A recent example of this was brought to my attention by Eric Hayot, who himself rejects the conception of “writing as putting down thoughts you already have.” Hayot recommends we read Jan Mieszkowski’s “In Praise of ‘Bad’ Academic Writing” in the Chronicle Review, and it is, indeed, well worth the read. Not only is it not bad; it’s not even ‘bad’. That is, it doesn’t deserve it’s own praises. It’s a perfectly good piece of writing about writing, and clearly expresses views already known to its author. Nonetheless, he argues that “a text is academic precisely when it is not informed by a dogmatic assumption about what a true statement looks like.” This certainly complements Hayot’s view (which I’ve written about before): “you cannot know what your ideas are, mean, or do until you set them down in sentences, whether on paper or on screen,” he tells us; you are always working at “the intersection of an intention and an audience.” That is, our ideas emerge in the process of writing for an imagined audience, it is not merely, say Hayot and Mieszkowksi, the presentation of ideas already held.

Mieszkowski devotes much of his piece to a critique of Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style. Pinker’s view is that good writing begins with a good, clear idea in mind, and that it presents that idea as though it’s something that is already a firmly established truth. Academic writing should present itself as knowledgeable, but not because the “truths” it expresses are beyond discussion. On the contrary, by claiming a statement is true, and by presuming the reader is capable of deciding whether it’s true, the text opens itself to critique from peers. It does not deflect such criticism by shifting the terms of discourse, imagining or inventing some entirely new reader in some future community of scholars. Pinker’s view here is very much in line with “classic style”, which he invokes explicitly. “In classic style,” Thomas and Turner tell us, “the motive is truth, the purpose is presentation, the reader and writer are intellectual equals, and the occasion is informal.” For the record, it’s the third characteristic that I would put at the center of any definition of academic writing: it is writing for peers.

Overall, and while I find the conversation important, I have to side with Pinker. In fact, I would argue that the scholarly essay, like a scientific paper, offers (for humanists and social scientists respectively) almost ideal conditions to be knowledgeable, i.e., to experience their knowledge as competence — the authority to speak. To write academically is to write down the things you have established for yourself as truths — the stories you know. You write them down along with the reasons you have for holding them true, with the implication that, given those reasons, your reader, who is that “intellectual equal” we’re talking about, a peer, will hold them true too. Though you know that you might fail, as Mieszkowski reminds us we may, you do this confidently and directly so that your reader has an occasion to critique your thinking. You try to succeed precisely in order to make any possible failure meaningful. If the text is too “experimental” in its style or too tentative in its conclusions, it’s hard to know what to do with the ideas it evokes. It becomes a sustained performance of uncertainty, and ultimately deflects criticism instead of inviting it. That’s what Pinker believes makes it “bad”.

While the reader‘s experience is important here, we should keep in mind that writing an essay is an experience too. Done right, it could be the experience of actually knowing things, not a painful struggle with your doubts about them. Since your aim is to present your ideas for criticism from your peers you should approach them as though you know them, and if this feels very uncomfortable, or otherwise “off”, you should consider whether you know what you’re talking about after all. Instead of hoping to shift the ground of the debate after your intention intersects with your audience, as Hayot suggests, why not just change your footing, shift your weight a little, and write from the center of your epistemic strength? Open your thinking to the strongest arguments that your reader may have, rather than leaving yourself an opening through which to slip away. But do note that I’m not suggesting you should do this to please Steven Pinker, or even your peers. I’m saying that you might enjoy the experience of knowing things, and the composition of a good essay affords you exactly that experience.

Note: I’ve been having an interesting exchange on Twitter with Theresa Truax-Gischler about these issues. I’ll follow up on this post with my reflections on it soon.

A tweet from Julia Molinari this morning, reflecting on one from Jo Wolff, stirs the memory of a post from my old blog, which, today, almost seems itself a “promise made and not kept.” I am grateful for the reminder.

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I’ve never really taken the time to read Paul Ricoeur very carefully. But I remember a friend of mine once trying to explain his view of “the promise” and it has stuck with me ever since. A promise, says Ricoeur, is a way of transcending yourself, of becoming more than you are. When you make a promise you don’t know that you will keep it, but you commit yourself to it. Promising is an important part of our moral growth.

Ricoeur cites Nietzsche (via Arendt), who described promising as “the memory of the will”. A promise does not refer to something you will necessarily do, but it does refer to something you will-to-do. The promise, then, gives your will some real content; it converts a vague desire into a precise intention. After making a promise, you are not merely hoping something will happen; you have identified your part in making it so.

Obviously, you make promises to yourself and to others. You make promises to your writing self: “Next semester, I promise, I will begin to write that book”; “Next week, I will get the analysis done and finish the discussion section of the paper.” And you can make promises to your reader: “This issue is beyond the scope of this paper, but it will be taken up in later work”; “As I will show below, however, …” Just saying these things does not get them done.

But here’s the important thing: even keeping your promise does not get anything done. I can promise to meet you at seven o’clock by the river. And I can do my part to make that happen. But the meeting may still not take place, for reasons that are beyond our control. I can promise to work on my book all next semester. Keeping this promise will not get it written. And yet, beyond the ultimate results, making promises and making an effort to keep them is essential to our growth as individuals, couples, families, and groups.

When I was younger, I tried not to promise anyone anything because I did not want to fail them. I had a purely negative view of promises—I thought the essential thing about promises was not to break them. As I get older, I understand that promises are valuable also in what happens when we keep them. They help us develop in an orderly way.

Skimming Ricoeur’s book this morning, I note that he connects the act of promising to the act of forgiveness. That is no doubt very important.

My beard is a bridge between my past and my face.

Tony Tost

I often have to remind myself that not at all people write as deliberately as I do. They experience the act of writing very differently, and they therefore also experience their competence as writers differently. They are sometimes surprised at what happens in my workshops when we take a close look at a single paragraph they have written, trying to discern what they were trying to say and who they’re trying to say it to. More precisely, we try to identify the one sentence in the paragraph that makes its key point, and determine what difficulty the writer thinks the reader will have with that point. This often reveals that both the writer’s intention and their image of the reader are rather vague.

People of course rarely spend a well-defined amount of time on a single paragraph. The idea of sitting down at the machine with a specific literary problem to solve is foreign to many academics, not just students. Texts are not generally written one paragraph at a time, one idea at a time, one difficulty for the reader to overcome at a time. If they were, I suspect, they would look very different, and I wonder if all these years of training myself to think in paragraphs has, in fact, produced a style that others find hard to digest, perhaps even parse. I, of course, no longer devote exactly 18 or 27 minutes to each paragraph, especially not in a blog post. And I have, admittedly, not done much “serious” writing lately (I should be writing some articles, a book). And yet the habit of thinking of each paragraph, each block of roughly 150 words, as a moment of the reader’s attention sticks with me.

I started thinking about this again when Kim Mitchell retweeted a suggestion from CBC Books to keep the “creative” and “critical” dimensions of writing separate by “writing freely” first and then polishing the text later. It occurred to me that I generally keep both my creative self and my critical self out of the writing process. I let my ideas come to me while reading, or in conversation, or while I’m out for a walk. Or I’ll improvise for a few minutes during my otherwise rather well-rehearsed lectures and seminars. Or I’ll draw pictures and diagrams. Or I’ll just lie there, on the sofa, and think. My “inner critic”, on the other hand, generally only gets to decide whether to publish a paragraph or not — whether it should be discarded or rewritten. While I’m writing, I’m not trying to be either creative or critical; I’m just trying to be clear. I’m trying to say as plainly as I can what I want to say.

I’m sure that’s not everyone’s experience of writing. My approach assumes that you have countless things to say, that you have the authority to say a great many things, and that writing, the author’s craft, is the art of constructing a highly focused experience for another human being. In the case of a paragraph, it is an experience that will last about one minute. The experience of writing is ultimately that of caring about what happens to the reader during that minute. After all, you decide exactly what does happen; one word after another will pass through the reader’s mind and you decide which ones and in which order. You choose them on the basis of the creative and critical work you have already done, well before the moment of writing. Your writing, in that sense, connects some future reader with your past. That, if you ask me, is what it should feel like to write.

It should also feel sane and strong. Not only are you the one who has decided what to say, and you can therefore make sure you know what you’re talking about, you also have much more time at your disposal than the reader. Your writing moment, ideally, will last 27 times longer than the reader’s reading moment. You are writing about something you know for reader that you know, i.e., a reader whose state of mind (the knowledge and experience they bring to your text) you understand (because they’re a peer and you have read some of their work too). Take your time. Decide carefully what you want to say. And think just as carefully about what your reader will find difficult in that message. Then relax and choose the best words you know to overcome the difficulty. Do that for a good few minutes. Let the critic evaluate the results later.

I’m often embarrassed about the typos in my old posts, even if there are only one or two in a post of 1000 words. Today, I’m going to be extra careful and make sure my draft is really “clean”. But do feel free to point out the error (yes, hopefully, only one!) that I missed.