Monday’s post on how to write a paragraph was well received on Twitter. Caught up in all the excitement, I foolishly accepted Felippe Medeiros’s challenge to write the corresponding post about sentences. I must say that I did so fully aware that this will be a much, much harder post to write. Not that it’s harder to write sentences than paragraphs, of course (the one consists of several of the other), but it is substantially more difficult to explain what one does when one writes a sentence than it is to explain what one does when one composes a paragraph. To use an imperfect analogy, it’s easier to give you directions to City Hall than to explain how your legs work. Sentences, we might say, are to paragraphs as taking a step is to going somewhere. It’s only once we pay attention to it that we realize how subtle and how stylish such a simple thing can be.

Begin with a fact. Most sentences are true or false, and facts are what make them one or the other. So, when you’re writing a sentence, make sure that you have a clear idea in your mind of the fact you are trying to represent. You want that same fact to become present in the mind of your reader when they read it. What words, in what order, would make you see the fact with your mind’s eye? Sentences are marvelous things because they conjure up images, and, while those images are not, perhaps, ultimately what the sentences mean (they could mean for you to feel something, or do something, or think something — or something something else, for that matter, if you wish), it’s a good idea to be mindful of the images you evoke when you write. As George Orwell pointed out many years ago, a great deal of bad writing comes out of stringing words and phrases together that are completely unrelated to any pictures that might form in any human being’s head. That’s why I say: start with a fact. Imagine it. Then think of the sentence as an attempt to write the fact down. Make the sentence a window on your mind.

Now, think of your reader. What is your reader doing at this point in the text? What was the reader thinking of just before they got to the sentence you are about to write? Unless it’s the very first sentence, they were doing exactly what you were telling them to do: imagining the fact that your last sentence was about. Was that hard? Should you give them a simpler task this time? Or is your reader ready for something harder? Can the reader handle a lot of detail at this moment, or should you present the fact in its general outline? In what order should the elements of the picture come before the reader? Will you give your reader a thing in motion or the motion of a thing? Do you want your reader to come away with the name of a person or to be left with a clear impression of their relation to another? Remember that when you are writing a sentence you are deciding the exact order that a string of words will pass through the mind of your reader. If your reader is well-behaved (playing by the rules) you are in complete control of your reader’s mind. You must use this power only for good.

“I am a grammarian,” wrote Gertrude Stein. “We will or we will not cry together.” That was back in 1931 in a book called How to Write, which you can read for your own pleasure and at your own risk. “Do not worry,” said Hemingway to himself, probably around the same time, in his garret overlooking the rooftops of Paris. “You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” Somewhere between Miss Stein’s stream of consciousness and Papa Hemingway’s dignity of movement, may you find your style. May it become absolutely your own.

See also: Dominik Lukeš’ post “How to actually write a setence.”

pace John Warner

The five-paragraph essay isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Many writers find the form constricting and many teachers are unhappy with the results their students deliver when they try to conform to it. But suppose you absolutely did have to write one, and suppose you wanted to do more than a passable job. How would you go about it? And how would you make sure that it developed your writing chops at the same time? That’s what I’m going to try to explain in this post. Building on my previous post, I’ll show you how to use key-sentences to outline your essay. I’ll also explain how to distinguish your paragraphs from each other by means of their content and, ultimately, how to bring them together to make a single, coherent rhetorical gesture. My aim is to persuade you that, for all its artifice, the five-paragraph essay is a perfectly good occasion to work on your style.

Since every paragraph says exactly one thing, a five-paragraph essay will say five things. Each of these claims will be articulated in a simple, declarative sentence, which we call the “key sentence”. The trick to outlining your essay is to make sure that a simple list of your five key sentences immediately evokes an argument, albeit a somewhat schematic one. For example, this post can be outlined as follows:

1. This post explains how to write a five-paragraph essay.
2. Use your key-sentences as an outline.
3. Distinguish your paragraphs by means of their content.
4. Bring them together in a single, coherent rhetorical gesture.
5. In this way, the five-paragraph essay becomes a meaningful exercise in style.

This outlining exercise can bring its own rewards. It can be enjoyable to observe your argument at a certain distance — a level of abstraction, if you will — without having to decide whether it has been executed properly. Looking at the whole can give you a sense of what you might accomplish, if only you do a good enough job on the parts. Of course, if already your outline bores you, you should sharpen some of your points, or give the whole thing a larger aim. It’s good to do this before you put too much work into your prose. It’s good for your style to write with a sense of purpose.

It’s too easy to distinguish your paragraphs by their function (or location) in your essay. It’s much better to think of your introduction, your three body paragraphs, and your conclusion as being about different things. The introduction, for example, will be about the essay itself. Each of the body paragraphs will about different aspects or facets of your topic. The conclusion, meanwhile, will be about that topic itself and, therefore, about the intellectual context that makes it meaningful, or valuable. So, for example, my first paragraph situates my essay within a controversy about writing pedagogy. Each of the body paragraphs are about different aspects of a five-paragraph essay, which is an object that exists in the world (if not often, as some critics point out, “in the wild”). The conclusion, when we get to it, will assert the value of the object that the body paragraphs have detailed, it will go beyond the conversation about academic writing to indicate how strong prose makes the world a better place. Being clear about your content will let you bring your style more precisely to bear upon it.

Structure both separates and connects. For example, you may already have noticed that in each paragraph I make a point of mentioning “style”. This will become important in my last paragraph because I want to emphasize that even highly formalized, very artificial work can give you an occasion to develop a unique and powerful style, for use beyond the essay form, and beyond academia altogether. Whatever your subject, when writing a five-paragraph essay, you want to make sure that there’s a thread, or theme, that runs through the entire text — a line along which the reader’s attention moves towards your conclusion. Though the reader should feel like you’re touching down firmly on each separate point (one for each body paragraph), there should also be a sense of moving forward, of making progress. The points should be adding up in some register somewhere in the mind of the reader, perhaps not quite consciously, but enough that the conclusion will seem natural when you get there. This structural through-line is what lets you enjoy the play of language from sentence to sentence. Knowing it’s there, you can add some texture, some style.

The five-paragraph essay is, first and foremost, an exercise — a structured writing activity that puts your prose through its paces. It should take about three hours to write and about five minutes to read. It is often a good way to get your ideas in order, and, with the right kind of reader, it can be an efficient way of communicating those ideas. In the first paragraph the reader is told where you are and what you’ve got on your mind. In the next three paragraphs you carefully unpack your reasoning. And in the final paragraph you reassert your overall thesis and emphasize its importance. The life of the polity depends on our capacity for deliberation, our ability to consider ideas in a calm and orderly way. Writing a five-paragraph essay on a regular basis will get your prose into shape, working on your style from the center of your strength. Your community needs you to be strong.

Let’s begin with what a paragraph is. In an academic setting, a paragraph is a composition of at least six sentences and at most two-hundred words that says one thing and supports, elaborates or defends it. That’s a rule of thumb and it doesn’t mind being broken now and then. (The rule not the thumb.) And it may be adjusted for different disciplines. There are areas of scholarship where paragraphs are generally shorter than that, and even some where they are longer, but for most purposes, in most of the humanities and social sciences, approaching the paragraph on these terms will work. Certainly, if you are able to compose paragraphs like this, you are able to do a great many other things, including writing somewhat longer or shorter ones. The important thing is that each paragraph has a single, well-defined point, a deliberate rhetorical posture, and a finite volume. If you need an example, this is the last sentence of the first paragraph in this post.

The first order of business is to decide what you want your paragraph to say. This is best done by working out a “key sentence” that neatly summarizes what the paragraph is about. It doesn’t have to be the first sentence of the paragraph, though it often is; it just has to somehow stand out as the sentence that makes your point. It will usually be a simple, declarative sentence that states your meaning plainly and directly. Obviously, this sentence can be revised as you work on the paragraph, but you want to have a version of it in front of you when you begin. It should say something you know well enough to write a whole paragraph about. It should never express everything you know about the subject; it shouldn’t exhaust your knowledge. It should have the dignity of an iceberg, as Hemingway puts it. When you look at it, you should be aware of all the knowledge that you have waiting under the surface.

I recommend you decide on the key sentence the day before you write the paragraph. At the end of the day, when you have decided that you’re not going to learn anything new, that you’re not going to get any smarter, take five minutes to call to mind something you know to be true. Write it down in the form of a good, strong sentence and take a quick moment to gauge its weight. How does it feel to you? Is it a point you’d struggle to support, elaborate or defend in the company of one of your peers? Would you have a hard time providing evidence, explaining your meaning, or dealing with objections? Or is it comfortably part of what you know? If you feel confident about it then resolve to write a paragraph about it in the morning, to exercise that confidence in writing. Pick a specific time and place to do it and then — and this is very important — put it out of your mind until that moment arrives.

The next day, sit down at the appointed time, in the appointed place, and type out the key sentence you wrote last night. Now, think of your reader (a peer in your discipline or a student in your class). What difficulty does the key sentence pose for your reader? Will your reader find it hard to believe, hard to understand, or hard to agree with? I recommend you keep it simple; confine yourself to a single difficulty and spend the entire paragraph supporting your point (if your reader finds it hard to believe), elaborating it (if your reader finds it hard to understand) or defending it (if your reader finds it hard to agree). It is possible to shift your posture in mid-paragraph, but this is, let’s say, an “advanced” skill. Get the basics down and then move on to harder, more complex, problems, or even “the fourth difficulty”: boredom. In this post, I have limited myself entirely to explaining what I mean.* In others, you will find I engage with readers who disagree with me or find what I say hard to believe or fail to see why I’m so excited about all of this.

This is both an exercise and a practice. You can get through much of the writing you need to do for your school or research career by writing paragraphs as deliberately as I’ve here suggested. But working in this way will help especially when you’re trying to improve your writing. It will make your difficulty as a writer explicit and it will bring the resources you can bring to bear on the problem into view. Give yourself 18 or 27 minutes to write each paragraph. Notice that this gives you 18 or 27 times longer to write the paragraph than your reader is likely to have to read it. (It takes about one minute to read 200 words. It should have taken you about five minutes to read this post.) Spend the first two or three minutes on your key sentence, then spend about ten minutes composing additional sentences. Then spend five or ten minutes making the sentences as clear and concise as possible. Then read the paragraph out loud and spend the remainder of your time fixing whatever that showed you needed fixing. Then stop. Every time you compose a paragraph like this you will become just a little better at writing.

_________
*Update (25.11.21): Rereading this post, I wonder if that is entirely right. The opening paragraph for example: does it really only elaborate my meaning? Is there not something, if you will, defensive about it?

I’ve been writing a number of posts recently about students and I thought I’d better write at least one addressed to them. So … Hello, students, I hope you’ve gotten the school year off to a good start!

The other day, one of you came to see me in my office to talk about your writing. “It’s my greatest weakness,” you said. “I have no trouble speaking in front people, but…” I think I may have interrupted you. Maybe I let you finish the thought, I don’t remember, but I know I already knew what I wanted to say. Just go ahead and write from the same the confidence that you speak from. (And if the opposite is true of you, speak from the same confidence you write with.) Don’t begin with an awareness of your weaknesses; begin with a strength you can leverage into action, into exercise. Then you’ll soon feel yourself getting stronger.

Anyway, as Descartes pointed out, few of us are willing to admit that our greatest weakness is our intelligence: that our real trouble is thinking. We’ll say we’re not good at public speaking or that writing “academically” is hard. But let’s get real about this. The hardest thing about going to university isn’t talking or writing; it’s understanding the material. If that wasn’t the main challenge you were seeking, you’re wasting your time. Find a harder program.

But here it’s even more important that you don’t begin with a conception of yourself as somehow weak. Find your strength and build on it. You understand many things perfectly well and some of them are what led you to enroll at this university, at this time, in this program. You may find finance hard but you know what money is. You may not yet know much about marketing but you can tell a sales pitch from a Sunday sermon. Hamlet’s state of mind may baffle you as much as it does him, but you know a thing or two about vengeance, right? Just keep bringing your readings and lectures back to things you understand. Don’t expect your professors to do this for you, since they can’t possibly know everything you know. And even if they could, how are they supposed to know that you know it? It’s up to you see the connections between what you already know and what you need to know for a course.

Now, you’re going to have to be open to the idea that you’re wrong about a number things. Sometimes learning is unlearning. And sometimes, annoying though it may be, learning something means relearning something in your last year that you unlearned in your first. That’s because an education is not a simple matter of acquiring and discarding beliefs one at time. It’s a continuous reorganization of your system of belief. Some beliefs cannot be held at the same time and there’s no simple rule to follow when deciding which ones to keep and which ones to abandon. It’s not uncommon to come back around to an idea you had previously decided was incompatible with a theory you thought was true. Having thought some more about the theory and its own internal contradictions, you’re free to consider the idea from a new point of view. That’s all part of the process. Relax and enjoy it. Your intelligence will show, not in how often you are right about things, but in what happens when you’re wrong.

Remember that “knowledge”, especially at a university, is a competence not a possession. You are becoming a knowledge-able person, some one who is able to know things. It’s the ability to make up your mind about something, to speak your mind about it, and to write it down. You’re not interested in getting more and more of it, so much as getting better and better at it. What you know will change, and will keep changing after you graduate. But how you know things will just keep improving. It takes some discipline, of course. You have to be willing to do something badly for a while until you learn how to do it well. Writing is one part of that, and an important one, so work on it every day. But keep it balanced with everything else you have to do. And remember, finally, that being good at something really does mean being able to enjoy it. When you’re learning something, you should be looking for the joy in it. Please keep that in mind.

That’s obviously not a very good question. When professors complain that their students “can’t write”, what they usually mean is that they’re getting worse, usually to some distressing degree. But they don’t mean that all the students are getting worse, of course; there will always be students in our classes who write clearly and lucidly, even when they are struggling with difficult material. And the mere fact that some students “can’t write a sentence to save their lives” is also entirely normal — the other end of the same, normal distribution. What they are worried about is the bulge in the middle, which they feel is moving in the wrong direction. As I argued in my last post, this feeling might not be grounded in rigorous scientific research, but it is usually not unfounded. It’s based on what is often decades of experience with the writing of cohort after cohort of undergraduates (and even graduate students), often at the same institution in the same program, and often taking the same classes covering the same content. Every now and then, someone sounds the alarm. They are, inevitably, called “alarmists”.

They aren’t always professors, however. Consider another group of stakeholders in student writing who can also boast of decades of experience judging the writing abilities of cohort after student cohort — the employers of university graduates. Leaving aside the employers of graduate students, i.e., dissertation supervisors, consider a complaint we sometimes hear from industry representatives. “Ten years ago, if we hired someone with decent grades from one of your top programs, we could be sure they could write with clarity and confidence. These days, we have to test their writing ability before we hire them. What gives?” Notice, again, that they’re not making an absolute judgment about all students. They’re registering a trend — though in this case one that affects the top end of the grade distribution, which, they note with consternation, doesn’t overlap neatly with the distribution of writing ability. They wish it would. Like it did in the old days. (Update: To get a measure of this problem, see John Almy’s piece in IHE, where he cites an Inc. article that says that US companies spend over 3 billion dollars annually on remedial writing instruction.)

Because we’re talking about a trend in the distribution of an ability (writing) that can be leveraged (whether by educators or employers) in other pursuits (like knowing, creating, and selling things), this discussion can’t be approached as an attack on, or defense of, students as a whole. And this is why I don’t find the dismissal of “critics of student writing” as “alarmists” convincing. Not only does a general defense of the whole population of students not actually address the problem that the critics are interested in, it is completely implausible to me that the student population, in its entirety, has been subject to no change in writing ability over the past, say, three decades. Given the profound changes in the composition of the student body, the changes in university culture and pedagogy, and the rapid technological transformation of media, it would be very surprising if student abilities hadn’t adapted. Some of the changes speak to improvements (presumably the goal of pedagogical innovation) others suggest the opposite (here we have the old chestnut about the effect of social media on attention and literacy). But, surely, given all of the change we see around us, we wouldn’t expect the students’ writing skills alone to remain static. Surely, we would expect some change here too.

In her response to Robert Zaretsky (and his ilk), Elizabeth Wardle deftly sidesteps this issue by asserting, on the basis of “decades [of] resarch about student writing”, that “students are what they’ve always been: learners. There is no evidence that student writing over all is any better or worse than it has ever been. What is true is that faculty members have been complaining about student writing for as long as students have been writing.” The only studies I know of that somewhat support the claim that students are “no better or worse” than they’ve ever been show that they make about the same amount of language errors, while the kinds of errors have been changing. But until someone shows me some medical-grade randomized control trials of student writing, I’m not really buying that we’ve adequately studied the problem. In fact, the “evidence” for the perennial nature of faculty complaints is probably more rigorous than then evidence we have to base our judgments of student writing on. To say that there is “no evidence” for a decline is merely to say the problem is very difficult to study, and we’re probably going to have to rely on the expert testimony of, you guessed it, faculty.

I think there’s good reason to think that the quality of student writing is declining. I also think that experienced faculty members are qualified, by precisely that experience, not just to render a judgment, but to sound the alarm when they feel the need. And when they do sound the alarm, I think it is utterly counterproductive for composition teachers, and directors of writing centers, to tell them that they are simply wrong, “plug ignorant about how writing works,” and that they should let up on their students. When they do this, they only confirm what Robert Zaretsky suspects. “We might urge the student to pay a visit to the writing center. Such centers, however, are as easily abused as used, often reduced to the pedagogical equivalent of the confessional, a place where students are absolved, not cured, of their writing sins.” Academic writing instruction should address the concerns of faculty, not dismiss them. The truth is that many students need to work harder at their writing if they are to reach a level that will impress both their current professors and their future employers. The amount of students who need to do this work, and who don’t do enough of it, is, I suspect, growing in some programs of some institutions, while, in others, the trend is more promising. It depends, in part, on the students themselves, but also on their teachers, both of content and of writing. And it depends especially, I want to say, on the coordination that is achieved between content teachers and writing teachers. This rhetoric that pits us against each other is simply not helping matters.