“Scientists and scholars are not writing to delight or even to persuade,” I tweeted in reaction to Anna Clemens’s post about how to write a scientific paper as a story. “They are writing to open their ideas to the criticism of their peers.” Now, I grant that storytelling plays a role in the social sciences (Andrew Gelman and I have written a paper about this) but I worry that good stories are coming to be valued above good arguments. Anna was kind enough to respond. “When you follow the story structure,” she suggested, “it makes it easier to spot weak arguments.” There’s some truth to this, but I think we need to be careful.

Anna is right about the power stories have over human cognition. In fact, that’s exactly why I’m suspicious of storytelling as a means of conveying scientific ideas. The history of science is a history of checking our biases with logic and reason, as Francis Bacon famously suggested in his account of the “idols” of the mind. “The Idols of the Tribe have their origin in the production of false concepts due to human nature,” the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tells us, “because the structure of human understanding is like a crooked mirror, which causes distorted reflections.” Let’s put this alongside Anna’s celebration of human storytelling:

Why are stories so powerful? To answer this, we have to go back at least 100,000 years. This is when humans started to speak. For the following roughly 94,000 years, we could only use spoken words to communicate. Stories helped us survive, so our brains evolved to love them.

Paul Zak of the Claremont Graduate University in California researches what stories do to our brain. He found that once hooked by a story, our brain releases oxytocin. The hormone affects our mood and social behaviour. You could say stories are a shortcut to our emotions.

There’s more to it; stories also help us remember facts. Gordon Bower and Michal Clark from Stanford University in California let two groups of subjects remember random nouns. One group was instructed to create a narrative with the words, the other to rehearse them one by one. People in the story group recalled the nouns correctly about six to seven times more often than the other group.

Stories, it turns out, are the very medium through which the idols of the mind are propagated! Why would we encourage scientists to present their ideas in ways that key into 100,000 years of conditioned responses, hormonal stimulation, and emotional shortcuts? The Idols of the Market Place, the Stanford Encyclopedia again tells us,

are based on false conceptions which are derived from public human communication. They enter our minds quietly by a combination of words and names, so that it comes to pass that not only does reason govern words, but words react on our understanding.

And yet Anna would have us exploit precisely this weakness for narrative to implant ideas in our readers’ minds from which they will have a harder time freeing their memory.

I’m trying to present my concern as starkly as possible. It seems to me that a paper that has been written to mimic the most compelling features of Hollywood blockbusters (which Anna explicitly invokes) are also, perhaps unintentionally, written to avoid critical engagement. Indeed, when Anna talks about “characters” she does not mention the reader as a character in the story, even though the essential “drama” of any scientific paper stems from the conversation that reader and writer are implicitly engaged in. The writer is not simply trying to implant an idea in the mind of the reader. In a research paper, we are often challenging ideas already held and, crucially, opening our own thinking to those ideas and the criticism they might engender.

I have no doubt that, working as an editor, Anna is able to impose better structure and clarity on a paper she’s been given to edit by using her storytelling heuristic. I have no doubt that writers can improve a first draft by thinking along the lines she suggests. I will even grant that this might sometimes make the argument clearer and therefore its weaknesses more apparent to a trained eye. But I will insist that it is much more efficient to think of your paper as a series of claims that are supported, elaborated or defended according to the difficulty a knowledgeable reader will presumably experience when faced with them.

Anna promises that storytelling can produce papers that are “concise, compelling, and easy to understand”. But I’m not sure that a scientific paper should actually be compelling. I agree with Ezra Zuckerman that the null should be compelling, but that’s not the same thing. A scientific paper should be vulnerable to criticism; it should give its secrets away freely, unabashedly. And the best way to do that is, not to organize it with the aim of releasing oxytocin in the mind of the reader, but by clearly identifying your premises and your conclusions and the logic that connects them. You are not trying to bring your reader to a narrative climax. You are trying to be upfront about where your argument will collapse under the weight of whatever evidence the reader may bring to the conversation. Science, after all, is not so much about what Coleridge called “the suspension of disbelief” as what Merton called “organised skepticism”. Or, as Billy Bragg astutely noted many years ago, scholarship is the enemy of romance.

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This post was edited was on May 31, 2018 and retitled.

“The author assumes authority to propose a readily available course of study, indicated in a set of drawings by the author, together with directions, explanations and comment based upon his observation and experience.” (Oliver Senior, How to Draw Hands)

Oliver Senior’s How to Draw Hands is one of my favorite books. It has long been my hope to write a book about writing that is as clear and confident. “This is an instruction book,” he begins, and it sets the tone throughout.

It is grounded in two important assumptions that I’ve tried to adhere to also in my own work as a writing instructor and writer about writing. The first is the one quoted above: Senior assumes that his reader believes that he, Senior, knows what he’s doing when it comes to drawing hands and that the reader will therefore follow his instructions. That’s the essence of an instruction book, of course. If the writer assumed the reader was only going to the read the book for pleasure and not as a guide to action it would be written very differently.

Second, Senior believes that he is “entitled to assume that you are never at a loss for an authentic model to study; that, even when drawing, you have a hand to spare to serve in that capacity as faithfully as you choose.” In the same way, I assume that people who attend my workshops or read my posts are coming to me for “instruction”, i.e., for advice about what they can do to become better writers. I also assume that they have something on their minds — more specifically, that they know something — that can serve as a “model to study”. I’m trying to teach them how to write down what they know.

I presume to know how to do this myself. Just as Oliver Senior demonstrates his mastery in the art of drawing hands (there are very instructive pictures), and therefore the authority to propose exercises for the reader, I presume to know how to present things I know in such a way that other people, who are also knowledgeable on the subject, can correct me if I’m wrong. Of course, in both cases, we’re trying to bring our readers into that mastery too. One day, I hope, my readers will instruct their students in how to write, and use their writing effectively to open themselves to criticism. But it’s important to remember that I’m bound to my assumptions. I assume, always, that my reader thinks I know what I’m doing. And I assume also that my reader knows something worth writing about. If I can’t take this for granted, the task simply becomes too difficult.

In the closing pages of his book, Senior emphasizes three important things. The first is that the “style” or “manner” of drawing is highly personal and not something he says a great deal about. His instructions are mainly to look at your hand and draw, emphasizing different features in different exercises. But how you make your lines is up to you; you’ll find your own way of doing it and that way is more right than anything he might tell you. You have to find out how to make your hands do the work. This definitely goes for writing paragraphs. I can tell you to try to support, elaborate or defend a key sentence you know to be true, but exactly how your sentences will do this is very much up to you, as is how you spend the moment at the machine working. Senior actually makes the comparison to writing himself. As with writing, so with drawing, he says, “style makes the man”.

He also de-emphasizes materials — the sort of paper and pencils you work with. Try all sorts of different things, he says, in pursuit of a wide variety of effects. Even the materials you don’t ultimately like will teach you something about how to use the ones you do. That’s also true of writing, where, as long as you confine yourself to things you know, you can make use of all kind of materials to make your case. I won’t even mention the question of whether you should be typing on a computer or writing by hand. Whatever works for you is fine.

Finally, Senior and I both agree that you’ll learn nothing that we’re trying to teach you if you don’t practice. You have to follow our instructions, again and again and again. Eventually, we hope, you’ll write without them. We’re only trying to show you how you might get better. We assume a few things, to be sure, but I hope we’re not being presumptuous.

A university education doesn’t teach you any particular set of beliefs. What you come to believe by the time you graduate depends on the university and the program you enroll in. It will also depend on what your teachers happen to believe, what your fellow students believe, and what you believed when you started your studies. Your education will hopefully affect your beliefs, of course; you will acquire new beliefs and discard old ones in line with the knowledge you are exposed to. But no one in their right mind would judge your education against some list of “truths” you ought properly to believe in order to get your degree.

What an education should do, however, is to make you better able to support, elaborate and defend your beliefs. It does not just give you knowledge, we might say, it makes you knowledge-able — able-to-know things. Being “educated” doesn’t mean that you’ve been indoctrinated into a particular set of beliefs but that you have trained yourself to hold your beliefs in a particular way. It has improved your “epistemic posture,” if you will. Faced with skepticism about the truth of your beliefs, you know how to adduce evidence and invoke authority. Faced with incomprehension about what you mean, you know how to define your terms and clarify your concepts. Faced with a contrary opinion, you know how to hold and give ground according to the force of the arguments. Importantly, being taken to task in these ways does not surprise or offend you. It’s a familiar business. You don’t expect people to just trust you. You know that’s not how it works.

It is my view that explicit instruction in the writing of paragraphs, and a modicum of discipline in practicing this craft, goes a long way toward training this posture. It will make you more articulate in your conversations, both with your peers and with yourself. It will make you better able to discuss your ideas in public and make up your mind in private. I know that paragraphs aren’t the be all and end all of academic life, nor even of academic writing. I know that you’ll do a lot of other things and you’ll do them well too. But it’s my sense that the craft of paragraphing is falling into desuetude. It’s my aim, over the next couple of decades, simply to insist on its importance for the life of the mind and the culture. In its conservation — its preservation and transmission — lies much of the value of the university.

This morning I’m going to be rewriting the page I’ve devoted to the introduction of a standard 8000-word paper in the social sciences. Ideally, the introduction occupies the first three minutes of the reader’s attention, during which it situates the paper’s conclusion in a shared science and a familiar world. It should draw the reader in, give the reader a place, and get the reader thinking. As a mnemonic device, one that is perhaps a bit too cute, we can say that it should evoke a world, invoke a science, and propose a thought. The easiest way to think of these tasks is to give each of them a paragraph, which is what I will be describing on the permanent page. In this blog post I want to reduce the problem a bit further, imagining how it can all be done in a single a paragraph at the beginning of a much shorter 1000-word essay.

Instead of giving yourself a whole paragraph to describe the world you share with the reader, try doing it in only two sentences. Then, as seamlessly as possible, go on to write another two sentences about the science that you and your reader apply to the problem of understanding this world a little better. Finally, write two sentences that state your conclusion and the basis on which you’ve drawn it. Let me show you what I mean.

Effective emergency response requires, not just competent team members, but strong team cohesion. Even if everyone does their job perfectly, tragedy can strike if they are not mindful of how their actions both depend upon a collective effort and make a contribution to it.

In these two sentences, a world of shared concerned is evoked in the mind of the reader. The reader is expected to care about the effectiveness of emergency response teams, and is reminded about the importance of social cohesion. While there’s nothing particularly controversial going on in these sentences (who would argue against this way of putting it?) an interest is stimulated by the dramatic possibility of a tragic outcome. Crucially, the reader (I hope) gets the sense that I know what I’m talking about, even if the space limitations (so far) haven’t allowed me to say very much.

We can now go on to the science that will frame our analysis.

Organizational sensemaking has therefore been a longstanding focus of research into high reliability organizations (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2011). In his seminal study of the Mann Gulch disaster, for example, Karl Weick (1993) found that the smokejumpers panicked as a result of a sudden loss of social structure, producing what he called a “cosmology episode” during which no one knew what was going on or what to do.

Notice here how the relatively ordinary notions of “team cohesion” and “collective” responsibilities are reframed in the strictly theoretical language of sensemaking, invoking “social structure” and “cosmology episodes” as these terms are defined in agenda-setting past research. Notice that references are here introduced to situate this paper in a larger conversation with other scholars. All that’s left to do is to introduce my contribution to the discussion:

I here want to challenge this conclusion by way of a close rereading of Weick’s sole source of data for his analysis, viz. Norman Maclean’s book Young Men and Fire (1992). It turns out that, not only did the men not panic, they responded rationally to a situation that simply got out of control because of what Maclean describes as a “conflagration” of forces.

There should be no doubt now about why I’m writing this essay. I’ve started with an important activity in the human world (emergency response) and a discipline devoted to understanding how this activity can be carried out more effectively (sensemaking scholarship). I’ve then introduced a thesis that challenges our currently held views about a particular conception of “social structure” and laid out the basis on which I’m going to make my argument. Here’s how looks when we put it all together:

Effective emergency response requires, not just competent team members, but strong team cohesion. Even if everyone does their job perfectly, tragedy can strike if they are not mindful of how their actions both depend upon a collective effort and make a contribution to it.  Organizational sensemaking has therefore been a longstanding focus of research into high reliability organizations (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2011). In his seminal study of the Mann Gulch disaster, for example, Karl Weick (1993) found that the smokejumpers panicked as a result of a sudden loss of social structure, producing what he called a “cosmology episode” during which no one knew what was going on or what to do. I here want to challenge this conclusion by way of a close rereading of Weick’s sole source of data for his analysis, viz. Norman Maclean’s book Young Men and Fire (1992). It turns out that, not only did the men not panic, they responded rationally to a situation that simply got out of control because of what Maclean describes as a “conflagration” of forces.

There are six sentences here and 174 words. This gives me room for a sentence more if I want, and it can certainly be rewritten to make the transitions — from evocation, to invocation, to proposition — more subtle. But I hope this can serve as a sort of a “proof of concept”.

I continued to use the form of the prose poem which for me has come to fit Pound’s postulate of “a center around which, not a box within which.” (Rosmarie Waldrop)

Steven Pinker and Iain McGee seem to think of the paragraph as a kind of punctuation mark.  “Sometimes a writer should cleave an intimidating block of print with a paragraph break just to give the reader’s eyes a place to alight and rest,” says Pinker (p. 145). “Academic writers often neglect to do this and trowel out massive slabs of visually monotonous text.” I’m struck here by the words “just” and “visually”; it seems to me that a writer should never use a paragraph break just to rest, nor think that the monotony of a slab of prose is merely visual. McGee also thinks of the paragraph is as point of rest, but now for the writer.  “Writers often pause before starting a new paragraph,” he explains; “indeed, the paragraph is a key … extended pause position in most writing” (p. 239). Both seem to think of prose as a sort of continuous flow that needs to be modulated somehow, given rhythm or a beat, made to oscillate between activity and rest, lest it just go on and on and on. Paragraphs, they seem to think, must be imposed on discourse, not, as I want to argue, composed into them.

Taken together, Pinker and McGee make us think of the paragraph according to its entirely practical, essentially physical, aspect. This approach has much to recommend it. After all, a paragraph is, first and foremost, something we make with our hands to be viewed with the eyes. But this, I want to argue, should not obscure the intellectual structure of paragraphs. A writer’s problem is not merely to put words on a page in a visually pleasing manner; it is to express an idea. Prose is supposed to facilitate the communion of minds, i.e., communication between knowledgeable people. Here, I think, the paragraph plays more than an incidental role.

But to begin with the physical facts: a paragraph ideally consists of at least six sentences and at most 200 words and can be read in about one minute. In that minute, a discrete idea (usually one that can be summarized in a single declarative sentence) is delivered into the mind of the reader along with the writer’s reasons to think it. Those reasons may support the idea in the reader’s mind or open the idea to the reader’s criticism, but the basic structure remains the same. The paragraph says one thing and supports, elaborates or defends it. Paragraphs can be distinguished by their propositional content (the things they say) and their rhetorical posture (they way they say them). The break between paragraphs, then, is either a change of content or a shift of posture (or both). The practiced reader gets used to this and the experience, therefore, is more interesting than merely taking a rest.

It gets even more interesting from the point of view of the writer. Here, again ideally, the paragraph is composed during a single, well-defined “writing moment” lasting 27 minutes. During that time the writer is engaged deliberately in supporting, elaborating, or supporting a single claim that has been decided upon the day before. McGee is certainly right that, working in this way, the writer will experience the paragraph break as a key moment of rest. Indeed, I would recommend taking a three-minute break and then moving on to the next paragraph.

These conditions are admittedly “idealized”. Most writers will balk at working in such an orderly way. I recommend it for anyone who experiences writing as a difficulty they want to become better at overcoming. Approaching your writing one moment at a time during an eight-week period, devoting, say, 80 hours to the composition of 160 paragraphs will teach you something about your style and build your strength as a writer (just as certainly as devoting 20 hours over those same eight weeks to running 120 kilometers will get you into better shape.) Afterwards, you may choose to write in a less disciplined manner, but your sense of the of paragraph will have changed because you have been paying attention to what happens between the breaks, to the internal structure of the paragraph, not its external limitations. Indeed, as I’ve argued before, you may come to appreciate the texture of time in your prose, not merely the structure of its space.

Ezra Pound taught Rosemarie Waldrop to think of form not as a “box within which” but as a “center around which”. I fear Pinker and McGee are teaching the opposite lesson. They are encouraging us to “break” up our stream of consciousness according to intellectually arbitrary principles. While my 27 minutes are certainly “intellectually arbitrary”, I am encouraging writers to establish these moments precisely to let them compose their thoughts, to generously spend significantly more time doing this than the reader (who spends only one minute) trying to understand them. Pinker says that “detailed instructions on how to build a paragraph … are misguided”; but I want to counter that paragraphs are precisely best understood as something we build. A paragraph is constructed during an extended moment to present a thought to the reader. It not is not merely a break during which our thoughts are momentarily interrupted by a visual “bookmark”. The paragraph truly is the unit of prose style. It is not just a piece of punctuation.