“Both these worries aggravated my already long-standing misanthropy.” (J. L. Borges, “The Book of Sand”)

Jon Winokur runs a blog called Advice to Writers and an associated Twitter account to remind us of the “writerly wisdom of the ages”. The other day he tweeted Shannon Hale’s approach to writing a first draft, which she describes as “shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” I retweeted it with a caveat. “Please remember,” I said, “that what is good advice for writers of young adult fantasy is not necessarily good advice for early career researchers.” Novelists and literary types are not always good models for researchers and scholars. You may admire the result, but you don’t want to write like Henry “Vas-y” Miller.

Jo Van Every, an academic career guide, came to the defense of Hale’s metaphor,  however, suggesting that early career researchers, perhaps, “already have sand in a box. They are now using that sand to create different published outputs.” This was a good prod for me to clarify the issue I have with the image of writing as filling boxes with sand. I prefer to think of scholarly writing as building something out of relatively well-defined and sturdy parts, I said, not as shoveling and shaping a mass of undifferentiated particles. I could have added that I don’t think it is helpful to think of producing scholarly output on the model of weeding a garden or pruning a tree. That metaphor has other, perfectly legitimate, uses in academic writing.

The correct metaphor, if you ask me, is that of a construction. It’s not as limited as, say, Lego, but more like a constructor set that also lets you include bits and pieces of everyday reality, ordinary household objects and other toys. There are general structural elements and more specialized parts. Your paper will present a theoretical “framework”, for example, built out of concepts that your reader recognizes and it will then then put it to work by subjecting it to a “load”, i.e., by introducing data that has been gathered according to a methodology that, again, is recognizable to the reader. A paper can certainly “fall apart” on you (or in the hands of your reader) but it cannot, meaningfully, be “smashed to atoms”. Its meaning does not erode like a castle in the sand.

Maybe some novelists have a more rugged conception of their materials but, like I say, I’m not going to tell novelists how to write a first draft or how to think of their writing process. I’m just trying to help scholars avoid a less than apt metaphor with which to understand their own writing.

In any case, Jo rightly reminded me that researchers aren’t usually “starting from scratch” when they’re writing journal articles. They’ve “already got a conference paper, a working paper, pages and pages of analysis” or some basis like that to proceed from. This happens to be something I have an opinion about too., and I answered that conference papers and working papers are best seen as unfinished journal articles. They should be written in the same way. You still need to decide what to say (i.e., what you know) before you begin one. As for “pages and pages of analysis”: I would encourage researchers to think of them merely as a warmup. After they have helped you decide what to say, throw them out. Now write what you know for the purpose of discussing it with your peers.

Understandably enough, this suggestion puzzled Jo. “Isn’t that ‘warm up’ the first draft?” she asked. “I’m not sure what is gained by calling it something that isn’t writing.” And this is indeed exactly my point. The metaphor we are evaluating is one of shoveling sand into boxes and then later shaping that same sand into castles. I’m suggesting that you should not try to shape your drafts, and therefore that you should not produce them as though they are made of a “malleable” substance. Instead, write it around claims you identified through the “free-writing” process.

I realize that it is counter-intuitive to say that that process isn’t actually “writing”. But I really do believe that it stands in the same relation to your final text as drawing a mind-map, talking to a colleague about your results,  or just going for a walk and thinking things through. It’s as far from scholarly writing as that. Or as close to it, if you will. And here Hale’s image of a box of sand may have some carry after all.

Some researchers (especially ethnographers, I have found) approach the writing of their analysis as shoveling particles of experience into their paper where they will gradually be given meaning. That is, they are simply importing their data set into their word processor, which they think of as a tool to help them with their analysis. (There are much better tools for this purpose, I’m told.) In the first instance, it’s just a box to distinguish their “sample” from the “population”. If they had been working with more quantitative data, there would be no confusion here; it obviously wouldn’t be writing. But because qualitative analysis is, indeed, very much like drafting a novel–they are drawing , not just on their interview transcripts and field notes, but  also on their memory of their research experiences–it feels like they are actually in the first stages of their writing. This is the feeling I’m trying to get writers to understand better.

Just because you are putting words together, even in sentences, doesn’t mean that you are writing. You might, for example, be speaking. Even if you are typing, you might be transcribing or, to come closest to drafting a novel, thinking “out loud”, i.e., transcribing what is on your mind about something. But to be really engaged in scholarly writing is to be composing a paragraph–at least six sentences and at most two-hundred words that say one thing and support, elaborate or defend it. If you’re not doing that you may as well be talking or drawing a picture … or, of course, thinking. That’s also something you should do, of course. But it isn’t writing.

There is a lot of talk these days about Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. I have ordered it and I’m looking forward to seeing whether it lives up to its hype. Because of the highly polarized rhetoric around Peterson, this can be taken both ways: I wonder whether it’s as good as people say it is. And wonder whether it’s as bad. It may be both or neither.

The quality of an advice book is usually very much in the eye of the beholder. This shouldn’t surprise us since the book’s virtues will probably be apparent mainly to people who need the advice. Those who don’t may not understand why such “banalities” are being codified into “rules of life”. Indeed, I’ve noticed that there are people on both sides of “the Jordan Peterson moment” who seem eager to make clear that they certainly don’t need these rules. Perhaps, they’re already a matter of habit. I sometimes wonder if they understand that what is second nature to them, or what various accidents of life and work have spared them the need to think seriously about, may not be obvious or even imaginable to many others. The right book at the right time can make a great difference to someone whose life has not gone as yours has.

In this post I want to address “the very idea” of rules for living. I have my own set of rules, (though not for life but for writing and they only go to 11) so I think I understand the spirit of Peterson’s project. I also recognize the misunderstandings that it has been subject to in the discourse. I’m not thinking here of the polarized political and scientific rhetoric that has characterized the book’s reception. I’m thinking more about the ridicule Peterson has had to suffer merely for thinking he can help people get their lives together, and the resentment he has encountered because, it would seem, he actually can.

Moralists are always open to the charge of hypocrisy. If I tell you how you should live, I can expect you to notice if I don’t uphold those standards. I’ve never been quite convinced that charges of hypocrisy are a useful part of our ethical discourse — after all, can’t my morality be as aspirational for me as I’m proposing it should be for you? — but I think this line of criticism fails outright when we’re not talking about moralizing and merely about advising. If I’m only telling you how you could live, am I really implying that this is how I do it too? Does it matter whether I am successfully following my own advice? Does it even matter whether I have a successful life? I’m not sure the answers to those questions are obvious.

I’m certainly not sure that pointing out that Peterson breaks his own rules in his book is a very incisive criticism. After all, breaking rules is a sign of mastery. Only a novice worries about following rules to the letter in all things. The master knows how to do things without the rules, bending and even breaking them as needed, often without giving them a thought. Noticing that the master didn’t follow a particular rule normally means you didn’t notice the contextual factors that made it inapplicable. So “he doesn’t follow his own rules” isn’t really a stinging barb; it’s giving the game to him by saying that the only standards by which to judge him are those he gives us.

It’s also important to notice that Peterson’s “rules for life” aren’t going to be enforced by him, or any other human authority, but by, precisely, life. These are not injunctions but instructions. You are not bending to his will but to the way of the world–assuming of course that Peterson has, on the relevant point, discovered how the world works.

Finally, after over ten years of advising people about how to write, I’ve stopped being surprised to discover that the real reason my advice didn’t work for someone was that they simply didn’t follow it. Sometimes they tried to follow it but had badly misunderstood what I had suggested they do. Other times they simply decided that it wasn’t for them. It’s as if advice has to be immediately persuasive in order to be counted as “good”.

Of course, that’s a very important part of the qualification of a coach (or any other adviser). Someone who gives excellent advice that no one ever finds compelling enough to follow isn’t going to do much good. But it is important to realize that the quality of a piece of advice for dealing with your particular problem can only finally be determined by following it and seeing where that leaves you. Apparently, Peterson is having some success in reaching people and he seems to be coming by it honestly. People just like what he has to say and find it useful in their lives.

Anyway, from the advance press I’m broadly sympathetic to Peterson’s project. I think it is perfectly reasonable to talk of rules for living and it’s a perfectly legitimate aim to try to explain what you think works to others.  When the book arrives and I’ve read it, I’ll write a proper review of it from the point of view how it might help the lives of scholars.

One way to decide whether you should include an idea in a paper you’re writing is to ask yourself how willing you are to discuss it. You should, of course, also be able to discuss it; that is, you should be aware of your reasons for believing what you believe and have some sense of how someone else might think otherwise. But this issue won’t arise if you have already decided not to engage with someone who disagrees with you. My advice is to leave such ideas out of your scholarly writing.

You’ll never be able to do that completely, but it is worth trying. It is a companion rule to Oliver Smithies’ suggestion to “never write something you don’t understand”. You will find, I suspect, that your unwillingness to discuss something is often grounded in not quite understanding it. You may be quite certain that it is true, but on closer inspection you realize that this is just because so many people you respect are saying it. Worse, you may remember that the only reason you think what you think is that it sounded good in the “hot take” you read a few months ago. Better go back to the source and do a little fact checking. Once you’ve got your facts in order, you may still believe it–after all, it may still be true–but now you also know why. And this, you will sometimes find, has the added benefit of giving you the will to talk to other people about it. It’s at this point that it should go into your paper.

Now, since you originally didn’t find them worth discussing, these ideas often go unnoticed in your writing. The issue will only really come up when you run into difficulties with a sentence, or when one of your readers does. If the paper is already published, it’s of course too late, and you will just have to step up and admit that you hadn’t thought that point through well enough. (There should be no shame in this.) But you might also notice it during the writing and revision process, when you are struggling with how to express a particular thought. That’s when you should take a step back and ask yourself whether you’re actually willing to discuss it. How would you react if someone tells you you are wrong. And if your answer is that you’d just stop talking to that person then I strongly advise you just to delete it. The implicit subtext of all scholarly writing is (or, rather, should be) “Here are few things I’m happy to discuss.”

Please note that I’m not saying you should not hold beliefs you don’t want to discuss. Nor even that your published work be entirely insulated from those beliefs. It can certainly be useful to put some distance between, say, your scientific investigations and your religious convictions, so that your results can stand or fall independent of your faith, but, through a long and varied life, most of your beliefs will come into contact with each other at some point and, when they do, they will demand a modicum of consistency. So you will sometimes find that the discussion you are willing to have leads (sometimes surprisingly quickly) to one you don’t want to have. That possibility should not prevent you from writing things down either.

I am suggesting mainly that you let ideas you don’t want to discuss go without saying. If you hold beliefs that you really think can be held without question, then you should give your reader the credit of presumably holding them too. You should write some sentences about ideas you do want to discuss in such a way that they sometimes, and sometimes shamelessly, presume things you don’t want to discuss. A reader who would question those things should get the sense, even before raising the question, that doing so will not begin a conversation, but rather end it. You are, in a sense, granting that if you are wrong about this then your point will fall. But your interlocutor will have to wait until you discover your error for yourself before a retraction is forthcoming. That’s a limiting case, however. Your paper should not consist solely of such sentences. Your readers should not be only those that take your hints about what you don’t want to discuss.

Scholarly writing, I always say, is the art of writing down what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people. It presumes a will to discuss things. This will, I would add, is grounded in a commitment to what Foucault called “the law of coherence”:

a procedural obligation, almost a moral constraint of research: not to multiply contradictions uselessly; not to be taken in by small differences; not to give too much weight to changes, disavowals, returns to the past, and polemics; not to suppose that men’s discourse is perpetually undermined from within by the contradiction of their desires, the influences that they have been subjected to, or the conditions in which they live. (Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 149)

Of course, he talked about this law with some irony. He was not proposing that we do or should at all times obey it, only that it is presumed in discourse and, especially, in our history of ideas. I think this obligation is worth considering from time to time in your own procedures. When you feel undermined by your desires, the influences that you have been subjected to, or the conditions under which you live, ask yourself whether or not you are open to discussing them. If not, leave the idea out of your writing for now. Come back to it when you’re feeling stronger.

This is a question that has occupied me all my professional life. How, in fact, do we know what is true and what is false? I have at times thought about this question in metaphysical terms and at times in sociological terms, at times as a problem of phenomenology and at times as a problem of psychology. I believe, quite generally, that knowing is something we do with our bodies, which is to say with our minds and our hearts, and that we do it together. We can’t know anything by ourselves. But we do have to do something. We can’t leave it altogether to others to know things for us.

All of this is quite trivial, perhaps. But I think our epistemological situation today has a certain urgency. Sometimes it feels like an outright emergency. Once we have raised the question of how we know things, and looked at the chaos of our means to do it, we can easily find ourselves wondering whether it is possible to know anything at all. For my part, I am optimistic. I not only believe that we can know a great many things, but that we in fact do know a great many things. And I’m confident that we will learn a great many more. When I say “we” I mean us as a culture, of course, but also you and me. I am entirely hopeful that I’m going to learn something in the years to come.

How, then, do I propose we do this? My epistemology these days is built out of three basic competences. To know something we have to be able to (1) make up our minds, (2) say what’s on them and, (3) write it down. More specifically, we have to be able to (1) form justified, true beliefs, (2) discuss them with other knowledgeable people, and (3) compose coherent prose paragraphs about them. While I’m happy discuss the standards against which we might evaluate these competencies, and while I of course grant that mastery is always relative, I will not consider someone knowledgeable (not even you, dear reader) if they declare that they lack these abilities. If you haven’t made up your mind about something, are unwilling to discuss it, and/or refuse to put it in writing, I will not grant that you know it. I think it would be great if we approached all claims to know things in this way.

Remember that every time someone expects you to believe them they are claiming to have knowledge. If not — if, when you scratch them, they say that they don’t actually know — then you have no reason to believe what they are telling you. The reason for this isn’t really philosophical but rhetorical: when someone claims to know something and asks you to believe them there is a conversation you can have to help you make up your mind. You can ask how they know. What tools and materials did they use to attain this knowledge? What theories framed their inquiries, what methods guided their investigations? What concepts did they use to grasp the data they were given? And their stories here will be plausible to you or not. You may find the stories so convincing that you simply believe them then and there. Or you may choose to retrace some of their steps, to try to replicate their findings. You may suspend belief as long as you like. As some point, however, if you want to know this thing, you will have to make up your mind.

Again, trivial notions that, to me, have some urgency in these times. I sometimes sense an indignation in my fellow human beings that it should be this hard to know things. Why can’t we just believe what we are told? people seem to say. They seem disappointed in their “post truth” politicians and “fake news” journalists. They seem to feel entitled to being told the truth at all times. They won’t accept the burden of checking the facts for themselves. We seem to have lost our sense of charity about the “honest error”, both in the thought and the speech of our interlocutors and in our own hearing and thinking. We imagine everyone is always either speaking their minds plainly or deliberately concealing what they think. We imagine that what we hear is always what was said, and what we understand by it is always what was meant. We have lost our taste for the difficult work of believing things.

The knowledge of a culture is the product of countless well-meaning, but often misguided, people trying to figure out what the facts are, working among countless more who are trying to accomplish their goals, with or without our knowledge. The facts, of course, don’t make themselves known, even under the best of conditions. We must do it for them. But at some point, it sometimes seems to  me, a generation decided that the work was more or less finished and there was nothing left for us but to believe. I think we’re beginning to see that this won’t work. I’m hopeful we’ll soon learn how to know again.

There’s a lot of talk about “blended learning” and “flipped classrooms” these days, also here at CBS. I, too, deliver much of my writing instruction using a combination of online and in-person interaction. But I sometimes wonder if we’re not a little too excited about all this. I mean, hasn’t education always involved a “blend” of media, hasn’t the classroom always been “flipped”?

Consider the most traditional of classrooms. The students have been given an assigned reading and are told to show up to class prepared to discuss it. How is this less “flipped” than asking the students to watch a lecture or documentary at home and having them show up for class prepared to engage in some “interactive” task based on it? Likewise, isn’t traditional education already a “blending” of reading assignments, writing assignments, group work, classroom discussion and lecturing? The real issue, it seems to me, is not whether we are using multiple modalities to educate the students, but whether we can get them to do the activities we assign, show up for the encounters we have planned.

The introduction of IT has, indeed, changed this game somewhat. There is, especially, a tendency to immerse students in one or another form of “social media”, through which their learning process is continuously in contact with that of their peers and, at least as sometimes experienced, their teachers. Such contact is important, but I think we do well to reflect on whether it really does have to be continuous. I don’t want to get into the very deepest layers of this thorny issue, but we do have to be mindful of the difference between the slogan “Social media means you never have to be alone” and “Social media means you can never be alone.” One problem with our online lives is that they don’t really know when to leave us alone. Students participating in a course cannot be expected to react to updates at all hours, nor can they expect to receive information that is given out in a particular time and place that they were prevented from attending. We need to maintain a certain amount of order.

I think this is an important challenge for education in the future. While I am embracing the new technologies in my own practice (I’ve been blogging since before it was mainstream), I still defend a lot of “old school” sensibilities–brick and mortar, chalk and talk. I don’t, in particular, like the anti-lecturing rhetoric of those who are promoting the new pedagogies, just as I’m wary of the anti-prose rhetoric of the promulgators of “new literacies”. If we really did train the ability of students to read treatises, write essays, and attend lectures, I think our culture would be stronger as a result of it. The ability to read a 25-page chapter, write a 5-paragraph essay, or listen to a 45-minute lecture is not trivial. Training these abilities shapes minds of a particular kind. I believe those minds have a value.