Since a standard journal article has 40 paragraphs I’ve long been in the habit, when talking to my authors, of referring matter-of-factly to “paragraph thirty-nine”, i.e., the penultimate paragraph of the paper. It is also the first paragraph of the conclusion. It serves a very special function in the paper and is worth giving extra consideration.

You construct the key sentence of paragraph 39 by a simple procedure. Take the key sentence of paragraph 3, the one that begins, “This paper shows that…”, and simply remove those first four words. That is, if the key sentence of paragraph 3 is “This paper shows that the financial crisis was caused by the performative effects of organization theory” then the key sentence of paragraph 39 is “The financial crisis was caused by the performative effects of organization theory.” Notice that despite their similarities, these two sentences make very different claims. The second (§39) tells us something about the financial crisis; the first (§3) tells us something about your paper. Paragraph 3 will therefore provide a description of your paper to support your claim that it will show us something. Paragraph 39, however, will provide a description of the financial crisis to support the claim that it was caused by organization theory.

Like any other paragraph in the paper, you have around six sentences and no more than 200 words at your disposal. Remember your reader. At this point your reader has listened to everything you have said (for about 38 minutes). Your reader knows what your key terms are and has read your entire analysis. Your reader knows what methods you have used to gather your data. Your reader has also been informed about relevant background details. Your reader even knows what implications you have drawn. That means you can expect a great deal of your reader in making sense of this paragraph. You can give it to the reader straight.

Paragraph 39 is not an abstract. An abstract merely describes an argument, and therefore looks more like paragraph 3 than paragraph 39. Paragraph 39 actually makes the argument. It is the part of the paper that expresses your major claim and adduces the strongest evidence you have for it. The strength of that evidence, of course, depends on the strength of the rest of your paper—mainly, the analysis section—but that’s the thing I’m trying to emphasize: Your reader has already read the rest of your paper. You are therefore entitled to presume that your argument is strong. This is the paragraph where you state your conclusion and tell the reader, without blushing, why you think it is true.

For perhaps obvious reasons you do well to rewrite this paragraph several times. It is the statement of your ideas that the rest of the paper is putting you in a position to make. Getting clear about what it will say will therefore also help you write the rest of the paper.

“It’s better to do something simple which is real … It’s something you can build on because you know what you’re doing.” (Bill Evans)

Back at the end of 2014, Jonathan Mayhew drew my attention to The Universal Mind of Bill Evans. Here’s one of the things Evans said about developing a talent:

People tend to approximate the product rather than attacking it in a realistic, true way at any elementary level — regardless of how elementary — but it must be entirely true and entirely real and entirely accurate. They would rather approximate the entire problem than to take a small part of it and be real and true about it. To approximate the whole thing in a vague way gives you a feeling that you’ve more or less touched the thing, but in this way you just lead yourself toward confusion and ultimately you’re going to get so confused that you’ll never find your way out.

When I say you should take a specific moment to write down a particular thing you know, I’m suggesting something similar. When writing, don’t try to “approximate the entire problem”; instead, “take a small part of it and be real and true about it”. A paper consists of roughly 40 paragraphs, of, roughly, eight different kinds. Each of these forty parts can be “attacked” at an “elementary level”. If you keep in mind that you are, ultimately, saying something that is true, you can set yourself the problem of representing that truth in prose.

Appreciate the finitude of the problem. You have to write at least six sentences and at most 200 words in exactly 27 minutes. Together they should support or elaborate one thing you know. That’s what you want to become good at. And if you write each of these paragraphs as simply and truly as you can, then you will have something to build on, both in terms of finishing a paper and in terms of the developing your writing skills.

Most people just don’t realize the immensity of the problem and, either because they can’t conquer it immediately, think that they haven’t got the ability, or they’re so impatient to conquer it that they never do see it through. If you do understand the problem then you can enjoy your whole trip through.

This makes an important point that struck me forcefully a few years ago. Too many people don’t realize that they have to approach the problem of writing in a way that lets them enjoy it. My goal is to help people enjoy their writing, not just “get it done”.

If you’re knowledgeable about something you are able to make up your mind about it. Other people can too, of course, but you are able to do it more efficiently and with greater accuracy than people who don’t know as much. Within your area of expertise, when faced with a situation, you are able to make sense of it; when faced with a set of materials, you are able to discern their meaning. You simply understand such things better than ignorant people. Your knowledge allows you to quickly and precisely form a belief. And, when pressed, you can explain how you know this. You have justified, true beliefs and an ability to acquire more of them.

But how can you develop this ability to make up your mind? Well, how did you become knowledgeable about your subject? The very general answer is experience. Experience, after all, is not just a series of things that happen to you; experience is an ongoing process that teaches you how the world works. You’re only really having an experience if you are making judgments about what is going on, forming beliefs about it. These judgments will not always be correct. The beliefs you form will not always be true. But you go on, forming beliefs and discovering them to be right or wrong, and moving on to the next thing. What matters, however, is to reach some kind of decision, some kind of conclusion.

Students are prone to getting quite philosophical when you tell them they should be forming justified, true beliefs. “True?” they balk. “There’s no such thing as truth!” This is why I like to begin with the very ordinary experience of discovering that you were wrong. You meet someone and form an opinion about their trustworthiness, favorable or unfavorable. A few week’s later you have an occasion to act on the basis of this belief. You trust them, or you don’t, and things, let us say, go badly. Your belief has been tested, and you come away from the whole experience with a little more knowledge about the person in question. You also come away a little wiser: you’ve had another experience with falsity. You know a little more about what it means for a belief to be false and, therefore, what truth is. You don’t need to be more sophisticated than this “for academic purposes”. (Unless your field requires it, of course. Philosophy is an academic discipline too!)

What is perhaps much more important is your ability to justify your belief. Why do you think it is true? Can you provide a compelling account of your reasons for believing something to be the case? Does that account jibe with what else is known on the subject? Do you appeal to hunches or prejudices or personal authority when supporting your claims? Or do you leverage evidence, explanations, counter-arguments? Do you understand what must also be the case in order for your belief to hold up? Do you understand what would have to be the case for you belief to be true? You may believe it very firmly today. But can you describe conditions under which you’d abandon the belief tomorrow?

Notice that all of this suggests something you can do several times a day. Pick a subject. Or even just read a few pages from a book. Make up your mind about what is going on there. Form a belief about it. Then go on with your day as though your belief is true. When talking to people, assert it confidently (if you’ve made up your mind then you can be confident.) Watch how people react. Notice what happens when you take actions that presume it is true. Do those actions succeed? Does your belief make your experience more predictable? Or does it cause you to be constantly surprised and frustrated? Return to the basis of your belief. Examine the sources. Does your belief need to be revised? Like the man says, it’s a process.

Update 20/10/18: I just tweeted a pretty good summary of this post: Knowledgeable people are better able to make up their minds (about the things they know something about) than ignorant ones. “Better” here means both more efficiently and more accurately. Their intuitions are sound and their reticence is necessary.

That is, knowledgeable people are able to make snap judgments in pressing situations, and these judgments will be more reliable than those of ignorant people. (Both may be right or wrong; but one of them is merely guessing.) But a knowledgeable person will also feel the pull of doubt more precisely than an ignorant person. So in situations where there is time for reflection, the knowledgeable person will suspend belief where an ignorant person may rush to judgment. Finally, the knowledgeable person will often err on the side of reason. The ignorant person is free to follow their passions. (Or perhaps more accurately: their passions are free to have their way with them.)

You can’t just believe what you are told. This used to be a truism but seems, for many, to have become an outrageous fact, indicating a, to my mind, unreasonable demand. There are increasing calls among otherwise intelligent people for institutions that pronounce reliably on the pressing questions of the day. People don’t want to think for themselves it seems.

They want their minds made up for them. They think that “fake news” violates some basic right to an epistemic authority; they want a source of ready-made beliefs that can be counted on to be true. I think this situation is the result, first and foremost, of a failure of education, but it has been sustained by media, both new and old. We have forgotten how difficult it is to know things. We no longer understand why it has to be this way.

Even to believe your own eyes in this day and age is no easy matter. And education too often simply shows us pictures of unbelievable sights, unimaginable feats, and then asserts them to be real and wonderful. What it should do is teach us to overcome the difficulty implied by our natural skepticism. If something is hard to believe, we should provide our students with the evidence we have for it. If something is hard to understand, we should not demand that they believe it before they are ready to.

The world is indeed wondrous and strange and it can take some time before it all makes sense, or even some part of it does. We have to let our students disbelieve us for a lot longer than any given exam period. What we have to insist on, however, is that they state their reasons to believe as they do, and that they consider ours for thinking otherwise. If disbelief and misunderstanding were normal states of the educated mind, perhaps a biased media wouldn’t be so confusing to us?

What, then, does it truly mean to know something? What is a knowledgeable person capable of? I want to go through this in a few posts, but the short answer goes something like this: Knowing is the ability to make up your mind, to speak your mind, and to write it down. It is the ability to form a justified, true belief about something, to interrogate, entertain and provoke people who are knowledgeable about it, and to compose a coherent prose paragraph that supports, elaborates or defends it.

Knowledge is maintained through the application of philosophical, rhetorical, and literary skills. Knowledgeable people don’t just hold correct opinions, they have reasons for doing so. They can distinguish good from bad questions, share a sense of humor, and passionately disagree with each other. All of these capacities require years, not just of learning, but of discipline. Knowing is a rich and complicated craft and it is not for everyone.

See also: “How to Make Up Your Mind“, “How to Speak Your Mind” and “How to Write Prose”

Try to write paragraphs, I always say, of at least six sentences and at most two-hundred words in exactly twenty-seven minutes. Please don’t feel this immediately as a constraint. Think of it like walking into a room that is just the right size for you to do a particular thing. It should feel safe and at the same time liberating. Some people, after all, set minimums only. They resolve to write at least 500 words a day, or to work for at least an hour. Others work to a “maximum” in the sense of trying merely to reach a goal. So they’ll write 1000 words or keep at it for two hours, sometimes using both goals and stopping when they reach the first. To my mind, this is a terribly imprecise way of organizing your work. My approach may seem more rigid, but is in fact very flexible. Crucially, it provides you with an ordinary, workaday sense of success and failure.

You decide in advance what you are going to say, i.e., what the key sentence of the paragraph is, and when you are going to say it, i.e., when the 27 minutes are going to start. Now, since the minimum is six sentences, your first problem is to find five things to say that support the claim in your key sentence. Once you’ve written six sentences your writing problem changes. You are now thinking more in terms of the quality of your argument than the mere quantity of your sentences. Improving the argument from here on might involve writing more sentences, but does not, formally speaking, require it. When (if) you reach 200 words the problem changes again. You now know your paragraph is probably getting too long and you have to ask yourself why. Did you subtly introduce a new topic? Are you repeating yourself? Are you just needlessly verbose?

Now, it is of course possible that you fail to keep within the minimum and maximum bounds. (Academic writing is not like one of those ridiculous businesses where, at least in the fictional universe of their advertising campaigns, “failure is not an option”.) But you only know you have failed because you have run out of time. Obviously, having written four sentences after five minutes is not failure. Nor is a 220 word chunk of prose at the 15-minute mark. And by similar logic, you haven’t succeeded when you’ve written 9 sentences using 176 words after 22 minutes. Anything could still happen! You could impulsively delete 5 sentences in the twenty-fifth minute. You could certainly find yourself writing another fifty words. You do have the option to sit still for five minutes, neither adding nor deleting, just reading the paragraph. But you have to keep at it.

The 27-minute “exactum”, which is a word I apparently have had to coin for this purpose, keeps the process centered, grounded, anchored. Pick your metaphor. (I’m not as draconian as people sometimes think. If you want, you can give yourself 18 or even 14 minutes. The point is just to be exact.) It gives the experience of writing a small sense of its Sisyphean fate. It prevents you from “just getting it over with”. You start “in the middle” with a resolve to write for exactly 27 minutes. At the lower limit you have to write six sentences. At the upper limit you must stay within 200 words. That’s the nature of the problem. Defined in its finitude.

I also recommend you do your feedback this way. Here it’s important to set a specific amount of time, like 9 minutes, that stands in some meaningful proportion to the amount of time spent writing. Stick to it exactly. That is, let the person who is giving you feedback sit and think in silence as long as they need, but if the time runs out, that’s it. The feedback was that the reader couldn’t think of anything to say. In any case, it’s much easier to experience the (mild) discomfort of criticism if you know it will stop at a certain time, rather than when the critic runs out of ammunition.