Suppose you are teaching a class in macroeconomics. You’ve decided you want the students to understand the differences between Keynesians and Austrians by looking at how these two schools approach the Great Depression and the 2008 Financial Crisis. Though it’s a simplification, you are trying to teach them how to make up their minds about the truth or falsity of simple propositions like this:

• The Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.
• The Financial Crisis was caused by the deregulation of the financial sector.

If you’re an economist, you can probably come up with better propositions. But notice that if these propositions are false, then the following are true:

• The Great Depression was not caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.
• The Financial Crisis was not caused by the deregulation of the financial sector.

Or you might say that it’s not as simple as that. Faced with the first two propositions, your response might be to say

• The Great Depression was not caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve alone.
• The deregulation of the financial sector was not the sole cause of the Financial Crisis.

Knowing something about economics means understanding these propositions well enough to form an opinion about their truth. This is why I say that being “knowledgeable” means having the ability to make up your mind about something. That is the ability you are trying to help your students develop. It’s an ability that you, as their economics teacher, presumably have. Indeed, I would encourage you not to teach material to students that you are not able to make up your own mind about. In whatever subject you propose to instruct them, they should be in the presence of a master.

It should be obvious that, in the scenario I’m imagining, you would assign the students readings by Keynesians and Austrians and, perhaps, some neutral or “secondary” literature that merely summarizes their disputes. No matter where you are in the syllabus, however, no matter how much reading they’ve been asked to do, you can ask them to “make up their minds”. You can, in principle, ask them to do this based on their background knowledge  on the first day of class (perhaps this is a graduate level course and you’re expecting them to know something about these topics already). And you can then tell them to write you a five paragraph essay of no more than 1000 words that states their position. The essay question might read, simply,

• “The Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.” Discuss.

Many students and teachers these days are likely to roll their eyes at this task. I understand why students don’t like to be put on the spot like this, but I don’t see why teachers can’t see the value of doing it — indeed, of doing it often. This is the most natural and ordinary sort of task to assign students of any subject: articulate a claim about which there is (or merely has been) some discussion within the discipline and ask the students to engage in that discussion, to demonstrate an awareness of what is at stake and then to state their own view on the matter. Within any discipline, after all, there are countless issues on which it is reasonable to demand that scholars take a position. (A macroeconomist who has no position on the causes of the Great Depression isn’t much of one, I would think. Or maybe the field is more specialized these days than I think?)

As I said yesterday, I want to defend not just the idea of holding ordinary opinions within a discipline but writing ordinary prose about them. My essay assignment here would require them to motivate the need to take a position and take one themselves (§1), come up with three reasons for the position they’ve taken (§§2-4), and indicate the broader consequences of the view they have defended (§5). Let me conclude this post by looking at the first of these tasks, which will correspond to writing the first paragraph of the five-paragraph essay.

Suppose the student has decided, on the advice of Milton Friedman perhaps, that the Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve. I would recommend, then, that they articulate their key sentence provisionally as “I will here argue that the Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.” In a longer essay, this might appear as the first sentence of the third paragraph, but in a five-paragraph essay I would recommend placing it roughly in the middle of the first paragraph. (For those who are already irritated by the “non-classical” self-referential “signposting” of “I will here argue…”, I’m going to offer an alternative at the the end.) The first half the paragraph will then lead up to it with one or two sentences about the Great Depression itself and another one or two about the search for causes by economists. The second half (after the key sentence asserts your major thesis) will detail the thesis in three smaller points (that add up to the major thesis) and perhaps indicate, in a single sentence, the importance of understanding monetary policy to be the cause. In any case, the paragraph will consist of at least six sentences (2-4 before the key sentence, and 2-4 afterwards) and at most 200 words.

If you don’t like the phrase “I will here argue” (or worse, “In this essay, I will show that…”), I sympathize. It violates what Thomas and Turner call “classic style”. I think it is acceptable in novice writing, and certainly in longer articles in the social sciences, but it’s true that doing without it often produces a better text, a stronger style. In this case, I would recommend trying to rewrite the paragraph so that the key sentence in the middle now becomes simply “But the Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.” Notice how much that “but” requires of the preceding three or four sentences. They must create a space in which our assertion about the Fed can establish an interesting rhetorical tension. Tomorrow I’ll construct examples of these two ways of writing the first paragraph.

Here at Inframethodology, “writing a paragraph” has a very specific meaning, namely, spending 18 or 27 minutes composing at least six sentences and at most two-hundred words that say one thing you knew the day before. Not only should you have had the relevant knowledge, you should have known that you would be writing about it, at this very moment, the day before.  I am aware that paragraphs are sometimes brought about in other ways, but I am hesitant to describe these approaches as “paragraph writing”. On my approach, every time you write a paragraph–I mean really set out to write one–you are doing it in way that will not only produce a unit of scholarly writing but make you better at making such things. You are deliberately trying to support, elaborate or defend something you know in prose. This awareness will hone your craft.

Back in November I wrote a defense of the five-paragraph essay. This morning I want to say a little more about the value of conventional classroom assignments and structured exercises. One of the lines I want to push this year is that conventional writing instruction often better expresses the underlying values of scholarly work in general than more “progressive” attempts to “stimulate” the students. The classroom, I want to argue, can be a microcosm of the research community that maintains the knowledge that teachers impart. But in order to realize this potential we have to be less embarrassed about the ordinariness of much of what we know and less bashful about our orderliness.

Consider the simple case of giving students two texts to read that exemplify a “classic” disagreement within your discipline. They may engage on what is a standing dispute in your discipline, or over a question that has since been settled and on which most scholars now agree. The two texts you assign will of course clarify the point at issue and offer arguments for and against both sides. The authors may make direct reference to each other, challenging, perhaps, not just each other’s claims but their readings of each other’s arguments. The students can be asked to read these papers and to try make up their own minds — to take a position on the disputed question. They can be asked to discuss their views in small groups, not necessarily persuading each other, but at least generating a list of arguments and counter-arguments. They will get a sense of what the readings say by hearing what their fellow students make of them.

The important thing, of course, is not just to have this list of arguments. The important thing is for the students to form an opinion of their own, well aware that it is a temporary resolution based on the information they happen to have before them. The amount of information can be fixed, or at least indicated, by time constraints. The readings may be assigned with only a few days given to get them read. After that, they may have a week to make up their minds and write a short paper about it. This will limit the amount of reading they can reasonably do beyond the assigned readings, but students should be told of the value of tracking down some of the sources that the texts themselves make use of. What they find there might be of use to them.

Once they have done some work, alone and in groups, to develop a position on what is to you (the teacher, the scholar) a familiar issue, give them a simple declarative sentence that states a plausible, recognizable stance. Tell them they have to write a five-paragraph essay that either asserts or critiques this position. By convention, you are asking them to motivate the need to take a position (§1) and then to come up with three reasons to either adopt it or reject it (§§2-4). In their conclusion (§5), they must wrap things up by indicating the broader consequences of the view they have defended. Or you can suggest alternative ways of writing five paragraphs. The point is that you are asking them to read two papers, discuss them among themselves, and then write five coherent paragraphs on the basis of this experience.

In my next few posts, I’m going to look at the five paragraphs in turn. I want to show that this sort of conventional, “ordinary” writing displays skills that are essential to maintaining our academic literacy. By the same token, it displays the lack of these skills where they are absent. The question that teachers do well to ask themselves is this: At what level should this sort of exercise be “easy”–an ordinary exercise of the student’s competence in the relevant discipline. I’m not here just thinking about mastery of the essay form but also of the content that is specified by the assigned readings, invoking particular methods and theories. I think we are too quick to believe that straightforward exercises like this, which can be assigned and graded in correspondingly straightforward ways, are too “artificial” to impart learning to the students. I want to begin the year by showing that our boredom with the ordinariness of what we know well is the unnecessary source of disorder in our classrooms and, ultimately, our disciplines.

There’s is only so much that you can say in a journal article. But how much? And how do you decide what to say?

I usually answer the first question with a simple “back of the envelope” calculation. How many words do you have available? This will often be determined by the journal you are planning to submit to, but it is useful for you to have your own sense of how long the various kinds of papers you are writing will be. (You can then choose the right journal based on the sort of paper you want to publish, rather than the other way around.) Whatever number of words you settle on, divide it by 200 to get a lower bound on the amount of paragraphs you will be writing. Since paragraphs can be as short as 100 words, the upper bound will be roughly twice that. An 8000-word paper will consists of at least (I would actually say ideally) 40 paragraphs and at most 80.

The paragraph, however, is not just an arbitrary way of carving a larger text into 1-200-word units. The paragraph is the “unit of composition”, delivering a single point that it supports, elaborates or defends. That is, each paragraph says one thing you know and then tells us how you know it. When you are trying to decide what your paper will say, you are ultimately trying to decide what each paragraph will say. And after you have done your back-of-the-envelope calculation you know roughly how many decisions you have to make. Let each decision produce a “key sentence” that belongs somewhere in the outline of your paper.

I often suggest that people make these decisions in four stages. First, decide what you will say in paragraph 1, 2, 3 (the introduction) and “39” (the first paragraph of the conclusion). Then spend two hours writing those paragraphs, one moment at a time. Next, decide what you’ll say say in two paragraphs of each of the background, theory, methods and discussion sections, as well six things you’ll say in your analysis. Spend seven hours writing those 14 paragraphs, again taking a well-defined writing moment to produce each one. You know what you are trying to say; think carefully about how you’re going to say it. Craft the paragraph so that it tells your reader how you know and, ideally, imparts that knowledge to the reader. That is, at the end of the paragraph the reader, too, knows what you know about some particular thing.

You now have 18 paragraphs written and, if you’re writing a 40 paragraph paper, 22 paragraphs to go. In the third stage, read through what you have written, mindful of what you have not yet said but would like to say to your reader. Write down the key sentences of these paragraphs as you think of them. The  reading itself should take 18 minutes. (A paragraph should take about a minute to read. It should be possible to “get it” in that time; that is, after a minute the reader should understand what you are trying to say and why you think it is true.) If you add in the time to write down the “missing” ideas, the whole exercise should take no more than an hour. After that hour is over, take a look at what you’ve got. Put the key sentences in the right sections and in the most logical position relative to the 18 paragraphs you’ve already written.

Now take 11 hours to write those remaining 22 paragraphs. (Don’t work more than three hours per day on this, please. Two is plenty.) When you’re done, take a one or two day break from this paper. Now, give yourself an hour to read the whole text through, slowly and out loud. For each paragraph, identify the key sentence and put it in a separate document, numbering the paragraphs as you go. Don’t “construct” these sentences. Just pick the one sentence in each paragraph that expresses its point and put this in your after-the-fact outline. Don’t use any headings in this document. It should just be a list of 40 sentences, numbered to correspond to each paragraph in the paper.

Take a break. Go for a walk. Clear your head. You might even want to call it a day.

The fourth stage begins by looking at your after-the-fact outline. Read each key sentence out loud. Feel free to polish it and sharpen it so that it makes the strongest possible impression. Get it to say exactly what you think about the matter. (Remember that it appears in a paragraph that supports and qualifies it. Trust in that as you sharpen its edge.) Now look at the sentences in sequence. Do they make sense as assertions made one after the other? Remember that you’ve left out all the relevant arguments and evidence. The question, in a sense, is “If I persuade you of this, will the next claim make sense too?” Do your key sentences indicate the “line” of your argument? Move them around until they do. Add key sentences as needed. You might also have to remove some points that interfere with your purpose in this paper.

You now have a list of crisp, declarative sentences that say the roughly forty things that you want to get across to the reader in this paper in an order that makes logical and rhetorical sense. You have finally decided what you want to say. Now, take 20 hours to rewrite the paragraphs that support, elaborate or defend each of those 40 claims as best as you know how. When you’re done, the entire process will have taken about 50 hours: five five-day weeks working on average 2 hours per day on this paper. (Including reading and deciding, stage one took about five hours. Stage two 2 took about eight. Stage three took about 13 hours and stage four took about 24.) Whether or not it was worth it depends on what you’ve got to say, of course. I’ll leave that judgment entirely up to you.

Most writing in schools and colleges is a perversion of practical style: the student pretends that he is writing a memorandum. He pretends that he knows more than the reader, that the reader needs this information, and that his job is to impart that information in a way that is easy for the reader to parse. The pretense is supposed to be practice for the real thing. Actually, the reader (the teacher) probably knows much more about the subject than the writer; the reader (the teacher) has no need whatever for the information; and the job of the writer is to cover himself from attack by his superior (the teacher). The actual scene interferes so much with the fantasy scene that the result is almost inevitably compromised, if not fraudulent. (Francis-Nöel Thomas and Mark Turner, Clear and Simple as the Truth, p. 77-8)

Scholars write for their peers. They present their ideas to a readership of people who are roughly as knowledgeable about their subject as they are. They write for readers who are qualified, not just to learn from their discoveries, but to point out their mistakes. Shakespeare scholars write about his plays and sonnets for people who are familiar with them. They imagine a reader who knows the text as well they do and has easy access to it. Sociologists write about society on the presumption that their readers, too, have thought a great deal about, say, the causes of crime or poverty. They assume that their readers also have data to inform these thoughts. Writing instructors, finally, when writing in their journals, are addressing other writing instructors, with a rich understanding of the problems of writing and many years of experience trying to solve them. Their readers already know what student writing looks like.

But who are those students writing for? Sometimes we will give students a kind of “simulation”; we ask them to write a text with an imaginary audience of magazine readers, policy makers, or business leaders. We place them in the role of journalist, or expert, or consultant. Sometimes we will ask them to imagine writing an article in one of the major academic journals of their discipline. But we are, indeed, asking them to imagine these readers–they are not yet journalists, experts, consultants, or scholars–and they are, by no means, our students’ peers. Is there a way of getting the students to really simulate the experience of writing for a peer readership, of getting them to engage directly with the problem of writing down what they know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people? I believe that there is, and it’s quite straightforward. I think we should, in most cases, for the majority of their assignments, ask students to imagine their fellow students as their readers. They should explain what they have learned to each other.

This community can be defined quite precisely. Their readers will, first and foremost, have participated in the course. They will have read the required reading and attended the lectures and workshops. The teacher, who has also read the readings and attended the classes, and has even read all the students’ work during the term, is in a good position to judge whether any given student is effectively addressing the others. The imagined or “ideal” reader is, of course, a good student — one of the most intelligent and serious among them — but even this reader must be addressed with an awareness of the difficulty of the texts discussed and the disagreements about them that came up in class. The students are pitching their claims to each other. They are trying to get each other to believe, understand or agree with them about what the learning experience means, what the course has taught them.

Knowing how to write, said Virginia Woolf, is knowing who you’re writing for. We can say that it means knowing what difficulty your reader faces when you make your claims. If the reader finds them hard to believe you must provide evidence. If the reader finds them hard to understand you must explain your meaning. If the reader finds them hard to agree with you must engage with the known objections. Your writing helps the reader overcome the difficulty of the claim you are making. But when students imagine not each other but their teacher as their reader, they can’t feel the difficulty very easily. Indeed, they probably imagine a reader who already knows what they are trying to say, or, anxiously, that what they are trying to say is wrong. They let the reader contribute too much to the reading. In an important sense, they are making their own task too easy by expecting the reader already to understand the ideas they are presenting.

I don’t know how often university students are asked to imagine each other as their readers. I don’t know how widespread the practice of evaluating them on their ability to address the difficulties of their (most intelligent, most serious) peers is. In my view, it should be the standard approach to university-level writing. It would incentivize the students, not merely to read the course material, but to attend class and engage their fellow students in conversation, both inside and outside of class. They would be tasked with learning, not just about Elizabethan tragedy or inner city poverty or the elements of style, but also with what is on a “like mind” working on the same problem at the same level. This awareness is fundamentally “academic” and we spare our students the experience — the very instructive trouble — at their peril. In fact, the ability to address yourself effectively to your peers is not just a useful skill for you to have as a person, it is useful to all of us as a culture that you possess it. It takes a village to know anything of value; we build the community of scholars in the university classroom.

Further reading: “Some Thoughts on Peer Grading” and “Peer Grading and Peer Review”