Some things are hard to believe. In school we sometimes mistake them for things that are hard to understand. We are, in a sense, too trusting, too humble; we imagine that the truth of these things is certain and obvious to others and that we’re just not smart enough to “get” them. But there are many truths that you are right not to believe before you are given good evidence. Your apparent difficulty in understanding is actually the dissonance you feel between your respect for your teachers–your assumption that what they are saying is true–and your entirely reasonable doubts about whether the world is really as they say it is. Consider this possibility while you are learning and while you are reading what others write.

And consider this possibility when imagining your reader as you write. Will your reader find what you are saying hard to believe? Is it reasonable for the reader to doubt that what you are saying is true? This does not mean that you have to doubt yourself. You just have to respect the reader’s doubts and the easiest way to do this to recall to yourself the process by which you came to believe what you believe. When the idea first occurred to you (perhaps by being presented to you in someone else’s writing), did you immediately believe it? Or did your belief come only after you discovered (or were shown) a body of evidence to support it? This evidence is what you, too, need to present your readers with if you want to help them overcome their difficulty here. Don’t immediately imagine that they don’t understand it (we’ll get to this difficulty next). Imagine that they just find it a little implausible.

Many things that are worth knowing can only be known after long struggle. This struggle produces the evidence to justify the belief that is a necessary condition for knowing anything. (Leaving aside some philosophical technicalities, you can’t know something you don’t believe.) If we just believed everything we were told, we could avoid this struggle, but we would also not know anything. After all, we are told things that contradict each other. We literally can’t believe everything we are told because we would end up contradicting ourselves. So we do well to maintain a particular standard. We want to see the sources that others have used to arrive their beliefs. Then we make up our minds.

Like I say, to acknowledge that the reader might find what you are saying hard to believe does not require you to be in a particular state of doubt. It does, however, require you to acknowledge that you might be wrong. There are a bunch of facts that you think obtain, but you’ll grant that if they do not this undermines your basis for believing the thing you are trying to convince your reader is true. Those are the facts you present to the reader as evidence for what you are trying to say. If they will grant you those truths they will also grant your main point. That’s how it works.

In your paragraph, then, you articulate your main point in a good, strong key sentence. It should simply declare the belief that you wanted to convey to your reader. Since you know the reader will find it hard to believe you should make it easy to understand. Make it very clear what would be the case if it were true, fully recognizing that the reader, somewhat surprised at the image, won’t immediately grant that it is.  Now, in implicit acknowledgement of the reader’s skepticism, the reader’s difficulty believing you as you imagine this difficulty in your reader’s mind, present a number of facts that are each easier to believe than your main point and together support it. By the end of the paragraph, with these facts properly organized around your main idea, the reader should find it easier to believe.

No argument is perfect, you are just trying to help. You are trying to help the reader overcome the difficulty. Good writing should always make things easier for the reader. Believing, however, is only the first difficulty. Stay tuned for Difficulty #2.

I don’t claim that writing well is easy. In fact, much of my work as a coach has to do with getting writers to notice the difficulty of what they are doing. That’s the only way they’ll be able to overcome it. But what is the difficulty that writing implies? What’s so hard about it? I suspect that many students and scholars fail to make progress because they don’t really answer this question. Or they answer it imprecisely. Or they simply get the answer wrong. However hard they struggle, therefore, they gain no ground. They’re fighting an imaginary foe.

I notice this every time I work with a writer who has not followed my very simple rules. These rules are neither hard to understand nor difficult to follow. They merely require you to do some simple things. They do not require that you be a particularly knowledgeable person, nor an especially competent writer. They just require that you write in a particular way about the things you do know.  If you follow them, the writing you produce will show how good a writer you are. It will be an example of how well you write. For reasons that I am only slowly beginning to understand, this prospect horrifies some people.

For most of their lives, I suspect, they have been able to “get around” the difficulty of writing rather than learning to write well. They have not become good at writing; they have found ways of getting their writing done without acquiring the requisite skills. The difficulty remains. So when I give someone an opportunity to demonstrate their ability to write, they feel a brief moment of terror. Their natural approach to a “writing assignment” is to try to conceal their inability to write.  Some people have become rather expert at this art. If you want to become a better writer, I’m afraid you’ll have to unlearn this. First learn to see the difficulty.

That’s why you should decide what to write the day before. The decision should not take you longer than five minutes to make. Just pick one thing you think you know well enough to write a paragraph about. Write it down in a simple declarative sentence and make an appointment with yourself for tomorrow to spend 27 minutes composing a paragraph of at least six sentences and at most 200 words. Notice that the difficulty is not, now, knowing what you’re talking about. You’ve removed this difficulty simply by choosing something you do know something about. Also, once the decision is made, the difficulty isn’t any longer what you should write about. That, too, has been dealt with. The only difficulty that remains is the writing.

Getting started is not hard. If you’re following my rules, you just sit down at the time you decided you would and begin typing. You type the sentence you wrote the day before. You then look at the sentence and try to feel again like you felt yesterday. “I know this!” Now … what’s the difficulty? Well, first of all, remember it’s not really your difficulty. The sentence is true and you already know this. The real difficulty can only be appreciated by thinking about what your reader will feel when seeing this sentence.

Will your reader find it hard to believe, hard to understand, or hard to agree with? Your problem, which you have 27 minutes to solve in the space of a paragraph, is to help the reader believe, understand or agree with your claim. You already do all these things, so there’s no difficulty in your own mind. But your reader will need you to provide evidence, or explain your terms, or tackle their objections. Writing well means helping your reader deal with the difficulty of believing or understanding or assenting to your claims. You are trying to give your reader the advantage you have on the claim in question.

Next week, I will look at the three difficulties one at a time, and try to say something entirely useful about how to face them. Throughout, however, I will assume that they pose no difficulties for you: you believe what you say, you understand your words, and you agree with yourself. That’s not the hard part. The hard part is the writing.

(Because, yes, my rules go to eleven. Don’t yours?)

Do not render any absolute judgment on your paragraphs. At most once a week, simply rank them from best to worst.

In the moment, while writing, simply do your best. Do your best, given the difficulty of the subject and the state of your game. Don’t try to be a better writer than you are capable of being, but do try to be the best writer you can be today. Since you are in fact writing, it is nonsense to say you can’t write. It’s also nonsense to say you can’t write well. (“The cat is on the mat,” is a perfectly well-written sentence. Don’t tell me you are incapable of composing it or any number of sentences like it.) What you are experiencing is a particular difficulty in writing about some particular thing. Face it squarely. Bring your ability to write to bear on it. Don’t indulge your feeling of incompetence.

When the 27 minutes are up, take your three-minute break. Do not read over what you have done. Put it behind you and move on to the next paragraph or the next thing on your list of things to do. Don’t even ask yourself whether what you have done is any good. Why think your judgment now will be any better than your writing just was? (How often have you reread something you thought was brilliant a few days later, only to discover it is rambling nonsense? How often have you been pleasantly surprised by the result of what, at the time, seemed like a futile struggle to be precise?) Your feelings about what sort of quality you produced is biased by your immediate subjective experience–by how you felt today, by how hard it seemed–and you don’t have time to be objective about it any longer. Forget about this paragraph. You did the best you could. The paragraph will not improve because you are thinking about it. It will improve the next time you write it. And before you get back to this one you’ve got other paragraphs to write.

At most once week, take some time to read over what you have done. Gather up ten or twenty paragraphs and read them, one minute at a time. Don’t read them out loud this time, just read like you would ordinarily read the work of someone else. Give the first paragraph a score of 50. Not a score out of 50. Just give it 50 points for being what it is. After reading the next paragraph (taking no more than a minute, remember) give it a score relative to that. Keep going for the 15 or 20 twenty minutes it takes to read your paragraphs. You’ve now got a sample of your work rated from best to worst. Spend another 30 minutes or so thinking about what it was that made some of the paragraphs better than the others. What caused you to give them more points than the first one? What caused you to give them less? What are you doing right? What mistakes do you seem to keep making?

Other than typos and minor corrections, do not get bogged down in editing your text. You are trying to experience your own standards. The only way to actually live up to those standards is to do the work in a properly planned writing moment. Contrary to myth, good writing is not produced by editing. It is produced by rewriting. The difference is important.

During the eight weeks you are training, don’t try to decide whether any particular paragraph is “good” or “bad”. It is always merely and inexorably an example of something you can do better. Bad writing is not something you avoid, it’s something you try not to do. Your writing isn’t bad when you’re not doing it. It’s not lying there on your hard drive being bad. If you want good writing go and do some. Don’t try to “fix” some piece of poor writing from the past.

[Click here for all 11 Rules.]

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. (Kenneth Burke)

This is an oft-invoked image of the academic conversation. It is often invoked as a metaphor for understanding academic writing. But how often do we actually, literally experience it at university?

Lectures and seminars and conferences have stopped offering us opportunities for parlor talk of this kind. Instead, people are allotted so many minutes to present their views, and a generally passive audience is then given time for a “Q&A”, moderated to the point that nothing but polite questions, familiar obsequities, and witty barbs can get through. Is there a way of fostering an actual conversation?

I think I may just have hit on something. I present it here for your careful consideration and considered critique.

Imagine a research group or university class that meets once a week. The meeting lasts two hours and has between 10 and 20 participants, most of which are regulars. There are no one-time guests. New members are invited to join the group and attend as often as they like thereafter. Only breaking the rules of decorum can get you thrown out, always at the sole discretion of the moderator, which is  a function that is taken in turn by each member of the group.

The first hour is devoted to “opening statements”. Each participant is given an equal share of the hour. If there are 20 participants, each speaks for three minutes in an order that is determined randomly every week, with newcomers always speaking last. The important thing is this: they may speak either on a topic of their own choosing or in response to something previously said by someone else. They may respond to a preceding opening statement or to something that was said in a previous meeting. Their speech is entirely free. They can small talk about the weather or present an important new research result.

The important constraint is this: if they respond to someone else, that person will have an exactly equal amount of time to respond in the second hour. If they simply have a question, they can state it, and yield their time to the respondent, who may choose to answer right then, or accumulate the minutes for later.

It will be immediately understood that the second half of the meeting may simply not happen. If every opening statement is sui generis it will generate no response time. The meeting will be adjourned after, say, 20 three-minute or 12 five-minute opening statements. Participants will now have a week to prepare for a more, let’s say, “engaging” conversation next week.

At the other other extreme, suppose the first opening statement attracted responses from every other participant. Suppose there are 12 participants. This would allot 55 minutes to the first speaker to develop what was, apparently a very interesting line of thought. In the middle range, the second hour might end up as dialogue between two or three people. In so far as they do keep going back and forth,  given the rules, they will give each other as much time to respond as they take to speak. The conversation ends when the last person on the speaker list disdains to continue, perhaps using the time to make a general closing statement that is not a response to any particular participant. Or when the hour runs out, of course.

Notice that there is no agenda for this meeting and the moderator’s only job is to keep time and to allot response time as needed. There are no “rules of order”, except the expedient of yielding one’s time and the option for immediate response. The conversation would proceed from week to week in a completely organic way.

Notice that it would be possible to actually teach a whole class for a whole semester this way. The teacher might have three minutes (in a class of 19 students) to get the students’ attention (already fixed somewhat by the pressure of the exam, of course). The students now have the option of saying something themselves, giving time to the teacher (either by asking and yielding or by using three minutes to critique the teacher’s point), or to engage with a classmate who would get time to respond.

At first pass, this seems like an excellent idea. Something definitely worth trying. But I feel like I might be missing some obvious reason that this could never work. Have at it!

Do not write more than six paragraphs per day. That is, do not write for more than three hours each day.

This rule should govern not just your practice but your planning. The point is not simply that you shouldn’t write for more than three hours a day. Since you should not write when you haven’t planned to, you should also not plan to write more than three hours a day. I recommend planning between one and six 27-minute writing moments in a continuous series, separated by three-minute breaks.

It is very rare that the seventh paragraph will be satisfying to write. It also usually difficult to think of more than six discrete truths to write about the day before. This is not a physical limit on what you can do in a day. Most of us have the experience of writing five or six or more hours and producing 2000 words or more in a day. This rule is restricting you to work in an orderly, comfortable manner. Working in this way will have positive effects on your style. And it will also be more enjoyable than trying to power through a whole a day of writing. If you start at 8:00 or 9:00 you can be done comfortably before lunch. Relax, enjoy the success, and get on with the other things in your day that need doing.

People rarely think of the cost of writing. When you are writing you are spending time that could be spent doing something else. For the first three hours, you can be pretty sure that it’s a good investment. The prose you are producing will, with reasonable certainty, make a contribution to reaching your overall writing goals. After that, you are probably producing prose that you’re likely to discard or completely rework.

More importantly, after three hours of writing, the act of writing itself is not making your prose stronger. It’s not improving your style. On the contrary, it is during this time that you are getting worn out and building your animosity to the craft of writing. This is when writing becomes a chore, even if you feel like you’re “in a flow”. It’s often an illusion and you’ll regret falling for it later. Don’t push yourself beyond the limit where writing is both enjoyable and deliberate. Don’t do so much that you lose track of what you are actually doing. Don’t get caught up in it.

Hemingway used to advise writers to stop when they “had some juice left”. He meant that they should stop at a point where they know how the story would continue, not when they had run completely out of ideas. That way it’s easy to start up again the next day. My tenth rule is also intended to conserve your “juice”, albeit in a slightly different sense. Don’t use yourself up in one day so that you can’t work at all then next. Working an extra hour today can cost you the ability to work several hours the next day.

Finally, like the 200 word limit per paragraph, remember that 6 paragraphs per day is also maximum. There is absolutely no shame in writing “only” two, three or four paragraphs on most days. Slow and steady wins the race. Don’t try to get anything done in a whole day of writing. Teach yourself to make use of half days for writing. You won’t regret having that ability.

[Click here for all the Rules.]