for Susan D. Blum

I introduced my lectures earlier this year by invoking the wisdom of two favorite “how to” books: Oliver Senior’s How to Draw Hands and André Voisin’s Rational Grazing. As reading matter, both books are remarkable to me because they draw on many years of expert experience, on observation and experiment within the relevant practical art. This produces a distinctive style that I enjoy for its own sake. But, just now, while reading Friedrich Hayek’s 1974 Nobel lecture, I was reminded of an important difference between the subjects they are writing about. He ends it with the following observation:

If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.

This, in turn, reminded me of one of my favorite poets, Ezra Pound, who used the imagery of both the workshop and the garden to talk about literature.

We live in an age of science and abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to ‘the needs of society’, or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden.” (ABC of Reading, 1934, p. 1)

Some Huxley or Haldane has remarked that in inventing the telescope Galileo had to commit a definite technical victory over materials. (Guide to Kulchur, 1938, p. 50)

This tension between the sorts of “victory” or “mastery” that the craftsman accomplishes and the “cultivation” that a gardener demonstrates is useful to remember. But it must be noted that a gardener, too, has a very definite set of craft skills. Even weeding, as anyone who has tried it knows, can be done effectively or haplessly, efficiently or ineffectually, and ability here shows, not just in the results that it produces (the persistence of the garden as a garden), but in the pleasure the gardener can take in the work itself (as opposed to suffering back pain and cramped hands). But there is that important difference between standing back and being satisfied with the “work” (a teapot, or a table, or a telescope) and having to wait for the garden to grow before the effort finally bears its literal fruit.

Writing good prose seems, at first pass, to belong more to the workshop than the garden. Like Senior’s draftsman, the writer’s knowledge could make, as Hayek puts it, “mastery of events possible”. That is, the writer is in complete control of the material, enjoying full freedom to choose whatever words are needed in whatever order they are required, just as drawing a hand means arranging a set of lines into shapes on a two-dimensional surface to suggest a three dimensional object. But on closer inspection, and when working on larger texts, we see that the process must be managed to “cultivate growth”. The writer must return to the work again and again, day after day, drawing nourishment from the soil of an ongoing inquiry, and making sure not to exhaust the store of ideas before it can be replenished. To control the growth of ideas while writing, certainly a weeder is needed. Writing well requires the competence of a craftsman, but it also requires the patience of a gardener. We must both shape our ideas and let them grow.

The great learning, said Confucius, comes from “watching with affection how people grow”. I want to follow this line of argument out to a somewhat unfortunate metaphor (or at least I think my students will think it’s a little bit off). We must imagine that we are not just imparting skills to our students; rather, part of our work involves treating our students like Voisin treated his cows. He saw grazing as “the meeting of cow and grass” and it must be remembered that he took very seriously the needs of both the grass and the cow. In addition to encouraging our students to hone their craft through practice and “workshopping” their results in our master classes, we must remember to move them from one text to another, one learning experience to another, before they have exhausted completely the matter they are digesting. Let new ideas grow naturally while they are thinking about things, and then move them back to that paddock of learning later — next week, for example. Of course, we do this traditionally simply by designing a curriculum and scheduling their classes. This is not merely an “academic” affectation. It is grounded in a genuine affection for our students.

The word “writing” is famously ambiguous. It can name a product, as in “I like his writing,” or a process, as in “She likes writing.” When we speak of “good writing” or “writing well” we can likewise mean either a readable product or a bearable process. To say that someone is a “good” writer often means they have a strong prose style, but it could also mean that they have healthy work habits. It’s a difference that is worth keeping in mind when you’re thinking about your own writing.

Good writing should of course be visible on the surface of the text. If what you have written doesn’t finally get your ideas across, it’s hard to consider it a success. And whether your writing succeeds in this sense is something you really only discover when you hear from your readers. (When you do get feedback, remember to distinguish between your reader’s reaction to your ideas and their reaction to your writing. If they don’t like what you think, but it is actually what you think, then there may not be anything wrong with your style.) But even before your readers see your text, I would suggest you learn to evaluate your own product. Develop an eye for grammatical errors and stylistic gaffes. Read yourself out loud. And do please learn to see that your writing is improving. As scholars, we write a lot, and this should be as obvious in our prose as the regular practice of athletes is apparent in their moves.

But what is it that you are actually good at? What is it that you are getting better at through practice? This is where I encourage you to take a moment to observe your process, indeed, I challenge you to take a series of moments. The basic idea is to decide what you want to say at the end of one day and then sit down the next day at a particular time to write a good, clear paragraph that says it. Spend 18 or 27 minutes doing some very deliberate writing — writing that has a well-defined end and makes use of predetermined means. You are trying to support, elaborate or defend a single idea in at least six sentences and at most two-hundred words. This is as easy (and as hard) to be “good at” as running 5 kilometers over varied terrain in 25 minutes. There’s no mystery about whether you’re succeeding or how much effort it takes. Most importantly, there’s no mystery about your progress.

In my book, a “good” writer is someone who can make effective use of 20 or 30 minutes (including a short break) to produce a “unit of composition”. A good writer is therefore someone who is able to choose what to write about; there is, after all, no skill that can be applied generally to everything. A good athlete knows what field to step onto and what ring not to get into. A good musician knows what stage to perform on. A good surgeon doesn’t make an incision into just any part of any body. Likewise, a good writer knows what subjects to write about, and who their reader is, and what subjects to leave to other writers for other readers. The standard, I suggest, is whether you’re able to produce a workable prose paragraph in under half an hour. Within your discipline, that is a skill that is very much worth having.

And that means that it is worth investing the effort it takes to develop it. I don’t need to tell you what the effort looks like. At the end of every day, five days a week, over eight weeks, let’s say, pick something you know and write a good clear sentence expressing it. The next morning, sit down to compose a paragraph in 18 or 27 minutes. Take a two or three minute break and get on with your day. Don’t think too much more about it. Just do it and then do all the other things you have to do that day. Experience yourself writing. Experience yourself getting better. In an important sense, “good writing” just is that experience.

PS. Please remember that “being good” at something means being able to enjoy it. “What thou lovest well remains. The rest is dross.”

“There are various problems as regards language.” (Bertrand Russell)

In his introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Russell distinguishes between “the problem as to what is the relation subsisting between thoughts, words, or sentences, and that which they refer to or mean” and “the question: what relation must one fact (such as a sentence) have to another in order to be capable of being a symbol for that other?” He takes the latter to be the basic problem of logic, and the subject of the Tractatus, and he counts the former under the problems of epistemology, which is the subject of this post.

Wittgenstein focused on the logic of sentences. “Only in the context of a sentence does a word have meaning,” as Frege originally put it. Well, only in the context of a paragraph, I would argue, does a sentence convey knowledge. The error of logical positivism, we might say, was to reduce the problem of epistemology to a logical problem — they read the Tractatus as a philosophy of science rather than a philosophy of language. Following Wittgenstein, they took the (true) sentence as a the unit of analysis.

When Foucault encouraged us to look not at propositions but statements he was opposing precisely this reduction. The study of “the dispersion of statements” rather than “the interrelation of true propositions” (Heidegger’s phrase) improved our understanding of science greatly. But I wonder if it was very helpful to scientists themselves. The virtue of logical positivism was that it got scientists to think seriously about the individual truths they were expressing and the relationship between them. (The narrowness of their epistemology aside, one often hears that positivists are fantastic thesis supervisors. This doesn’t surprise me.) I want to propose a unit of epistemic analysis that lies between the sentence and the statement: the claim.

A claim doesn’t have to be true in any strict sense. And it doesn’t have to be a viable element of discourse. It only has to be supported by the writer’s knowledge and this support must be articulated in a prose paragraph around it. The paragraph, on this view, offers an excellent object of study for the epistemologist. We can see what is meant by “knowledge” in a particular field of research by looking at how published paragraphs are composed. What sort of support is offered for what sort of claim? “What,” as Russell put it, “is the relation subsisting between thoughts, words, or sentences, and that which they refer to or mean?”

If I am right about paragraphs, then each paragraph is merely the tip of the iceberg of the writer’s knowledge (much of which the writer shares with the reader because they are epistemic peers). The claim (expressed in the key sentence) is the apex of the tip of the iceberg. So, knowing where the peak of the tip is, as it were, we can extrapolate beneath the surface; we can take the “dignity of movement” of the paragraph as an indication of the depth of the knowledge that supports it.

But this support will be different in different kinds of text. A research article in the Administrative Science Quarterly is composed in a different way than a feature article in The New Yorker. Both may be thoroughly researched, and both writers may know a great deal about their subject matter. Still, how they know is different, and this difference ought to be apparent in the relative composure of the paragraphs that the article is made of.

__________

*This post was originally published back in 2011 on my old blog.

Sometimes we forget what a finite thing a text is. What a simple machine. One word follows another on a line, separated by spaces and sundry punctuation. At the right margin, the line “softly” returns to the left and otherwise continues. At the end of the paragraph the line ends abruptly; there’s a tab indent or blank line and a new line, a new paragraph, begins below. That is, in a certain sense, the sentences in a paragraph are all on the same “line”, the “soft returns” at the margins are arbitrary. Only the “hard return” at the end of the paragraph is significant. The line must end there, while all the other returns depend merely on the dimensions of the page or the viewing window. You decide where the paragraph ends. Your typesetter or browser decides when the line merely “wraps”.

Ideal readers of your text understand this and let each word in the paragraph pass through their minds at roughly the same speed, not bothered by the right margin. At the end of the paragraph, however, they may take a break and reflect. They will, if perhaps barely consciously and only for a second or two, try to decide what just happened to them. What did the preceding 143 words mean? What did the author just tell me? What was this experience about?

When you’re writing a paragraph you’re stringing words together that will occupy about one minute of the reader’s attention. You are in complete control of what will happen to your reader during that minute. You can assume the reader has protected herself from distractions. You are not responsible for accommodating her habit of multitasking in front of the television. Nor do you need to engage with the extraneous input from fellow train travelers or the children in the room upstairs or even the personal memories you unwittingly stir with the mention of a bicycle built for two. The reader has given you her attention and you don’t have to work to hold it. Just as you don’t have to worry about what happens at the margin, where the line gently wraps, you don’t have to worry about what happens beyond the margin, outside the text, where the tapestry of experience wefts and warps. Let the reader worry about all of that. At this moment, the main thing is happening on the page in front of her.

Even Proust has “lost” a reader or two in the middle of a paragraph. But the serious reader does not blame the author so long as the words seem deliberately chosen and carefully arranged. She just goes back and tries again. A good paragraph makes the reader feel that her time has been respected, that any difficulty was necessary. A serious reader will not stand for willful obfuscation or obvious insouciance. If she has to look up a word or two, so be it; but if it turns out that the same meaning could have been conveyed in simpler language she will wonder what the writer is trying to hide or how much he cares.

Imagine that for each paragraph, each line of no more than 200 words, your reader gives you one minute of their attention. How many minutes of work do you have to do to rightfully earn that minute of their time? My suggestion is twenty-seven. The reader should feel as though you’ve spent at least 27 times longer constructing the line than she spent letting it pass through her mind. It is understood that writing is hard because reading should be easy and this difficulty is respected by giving you all that time to write the paragraph, not to mention as many attempts as you like. Every time you put a paragraph before a reader you are saying, “Give me a minute, I promise you won’t regret it.” Do your very best to keep that promise.

“I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space–were it not that I have bad dreams.” (Hamlet)

For some scholars, writing an abstract is a nightmare. For others, it causes nightmares later on when they try to write the paper that the abstract promised. But for you, after you have read this post, writing an abstract will be like ruling an infinite kingdom.

Let’s begin with why it is called an “abstract”. While laypeople find academic writing itself rather abstract, it’s important to keep in mind that the more words you have at your disposal the more concrete you can be. Every word you write specifies your meaning further and ties what you are saying to facts that can, hopefully, be verified or replicated by your reader. At one level you are saying that “organizational culture is supported by sensemaking”, but at another level, a much more concrete, you are describing the cognitive processes of particular managers in a particular organization. At a still more concrete level, you are describing what they said to you in an interview or what they did while you observed them. That is, you are describing an entirely finite, entirely bounded dataset that has been collected by a series of actions that you executed. These actions were as concrete as those of the people you studied.

So an abstract is “abstract” relative to the concreteness you are able to establish in the associated paper. Even a purely “theoretical” or “conceptual” paper is ultimately about the concrete sources (books and papers with authors and dates) that you draw on to frame and support your arguments. You don’t mean simply “capital” or “discourse”; you mean these words in the sense bounded by the tradition of Marxist and Foucauldian scholarship, for example. Or, alternatively, in the tradition of economic or linguistic science. And even these words — “Marxist”, “Foucauldian”, “economic”, “linguistic” — are abstract in a sense that can be made concrete by invoking particular sources, particular traditions.

Always approach your abstract as expressing something that can be made more concrete by saying more words. Remember to include a statement of your conclusion that carries both a general meaning and a specific truth. It should mean something to a reader before reading the whole paper, but its truth should be apparent only afterwards. The reader should need your paper before making up their mind about whether you are right. Remember also to include a clear statement of your methods and a summary of your data, all while accepting that this will immediately tell some readers of your abstract that they are not the intended reader of the paper. Your methods will not appeal to everyone, your data set may be too small for particular readers to take seriously. Finally, make sure there’s a sentence or two telling your reader what you believe the implications of your result are. Are they mainly theoretical or practical? How should the world or the science change in recognition of your result.

Imagine your reader. An abstract should give your reader information that will help them decide whether to read the paper or attend your conference session. Likewise, it should give your journal editor enough information to decide who should review your paper and your conference organizer enough information to decide whether and where your presentation fits into the program. Imagine a reader with these limited ambitions and don’t feel hemmed in by the space constraints. Remember that they are there precisely to save the reader time. If you respect that, you’ll be better able to decide how to spend your own time writing the abstract. Count yourself a king of infinite space even when you are bounded in a nutshell. Use your imagination.