And she said losing love
Is like a window in your heart
Everybody sees you’re blown apart
Everybody sees the wind blow

(Paul Simon, “Graceland”)

On Twitter recently, I was surprised to see Julia Molinari take the implication of Orwell’s trope about “prose like a window pane” to be that language can (and should) “capture reality”. Many years ago, on my other blog, I wrote a post about “Politics and the English Language”, in which I drew attention to this passage:

When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one’s words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails.

In that post, I was trying to remind us that Orwell did actually care about what the reader thinks. But the much more important thing in this passage is the role that imagination plays. When Orwell suggests that our prose should be like a window pane, he’s not suggesting that it should capture reality. He’s not saying that your writing should give the reader a clear view of the the world or the facts that constitute it. He is saying that it should present clearly what you have in mind. Language can’t be asked to “capture reality” but it can be tasked with expressing thought. Indeed, Orwell (unlike Bertrand Russell and the early Wittgenstein) isn’t even going to limit us to using language to express thought or describing facts. He’s happy to let you begin with “pictures and sensations”.

This is very important in my approach to academic writing. I do sometimes say, often invoking Wittgenstein, that a paragraph is “a picture of the facts”. But it’s not a picture of the facts themselves. It’s not so much a photograph as a drawing. It’s a picture of the facts as you imagine them, a representation, in words, of your image of the facts. When writing, you are trying to evoke the same image in the mind of the reader as you have in your own. Your prose should be like a window in your mind.

Scholarship consists of paragraphs with references. Scholars compose their thinking in statements that require several sentences of support, elaboration or defense and they cite their sources according to the conventions of their discipline. Different disciplines have different styles, which determine how long paragraphs normally are and what a reference normally looks like. Most scholars in the social sciences do well to learn to write paragraphs of at least six sentences and at most two-hundred words (Basbøll, n.d.) that cite their sources using an author-date system like that of the American Psychological Association (VandenBos, 2010). To write in this way is to play into your reader’s expectations and provides you with an efficient way to communicate your meaning. Conventions are not wholly arbitrary, but part of their utility does come simply from their familiarity. The reader simply has an easier time understanding you if you manage both your textuality and your intertextuality in recognizable ways.

References

Basbøll, T. (n.d.) The Paragraph. Retrieved from http://inframethodology.cbs.dk/?page_id=612

VandenBos, G. R. (Ed). (2010). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

“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.

____________

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.