A revolution is for me a special sort of change involving a certain sort of reconstruction of group commitments. But it need not be a large change, nor need it seem revolutionary to those outside a single community, consisting of perhaps fewer than twenty-five people. (Thomas Kuhn, 1970, Postscript to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions)

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about recently. Whatever paper you’re working on at the moment, can you name a dozen or two people who will find what you’re saying easy to understand? That is, are you aware of a concrete community around your research, consisting of people who are engaged in “normal” science and whose names you know. Do you feel a structure of group commitments that connects you to them? At the extremes, can you imagine a “reconstruction” of those commitments that might be considered “revolutionary”.  Within the two dozen members of this peer group, can you imagine people who might vehemently oppose your contribution? Or can you just imagine a handful of people who might easily understand what you’re trying to say but be mildly skeptical about whether it is correct? It is my advice to make a list of these names for each paper you are writing. Think of them as representatives of your readers. In your writing, address yourself to them.

I stress that the list will be particular to each paper you are writing. You might write all your papers with more or less the same readers in mind, in which case there will be little difference between the lists. But it is perfectly reasonable to have several peer groups, some of which have few members in common. I am not trying to help you manage your research relationships; I am only trying to help you imagine your reader.

I think too many academics these days are writing for a far too vaguely defined reader. They have let their editors and peer reviewers get too squarely between them and their final reader. They think writing well is mainly a matter of getting “past” the gatekeepers, not “through” to their community. This exercise of imagining the actual, living people whose feedback you are interested in, or whose minds you want to change, is intended to make the problem more present, more concrete. You can write a “normal” puzzle-solving paper that makes a limited but useful contribution to the development of your peers’ research. Or you can try to publish an “anomalous” result, another nail in the coffin of an always-already dying paradigm, due for a revolutionary change at some time or other. In both cases, you are addressing yourself to the same reader, who, no matter how shocking your results, will find your models and concepts familiar. At least familiar enough to recognize the commitments that identify you, the author, as a member of the group, the same scientific community.

See also: “Interdisciplinarity (Part 1)” and “Interdisciplinarity (Part 2)”

Read your paragraph out loud sometime in the last five minutes of each 27-minute writing moment.

A paragraph is a one-minute reading experience. The experience consists in having up to 200 hundreds words pass through the reader’s consciousness in an order determined by the writer. The “good” writer is simply the one who chooses those words well. And “well” here simply means that the words, in the order presented, are apt to convey the thought the writer intends. After the minute is up, the reader must know what the writer is trying to tell them, and should have been moved some way in the direction of believing it, understanding it, or, at least, considering the arguments for it.

This effect of the reading should take primacy. It should come before any judgment about the quality of the writing. Even a positive of judgment about the writer’s “engaging style” should come only after the meaning of the paragraph has been properly grasped. Academic writers are not trying to impress each other with their literary talents; they are trying to put ideas before each other’s careful consideration. The style of the writing, whether that be its masterful turns of phrase or its hapless fumbles with grammar, should not draw more attention to itself than the ideas that are being presented.

One very good way to test whether your paragraph meets this criterion is to read the paragraph out loud. It should not take more than two minutes (because reading out loud can be a bit slower than reading silently) and the words should come trippingly on the tongue, as the great bard said. (He did not mean that the tongue should trip over the words.) When reading out loud, you are likely to spot missing words and notice clumsy phrasings. It should be easy to read the paragraph, taking a quick breath at every period. It should be obvious where to pause and what words to emphasize. With time, reading your own paragraphs out loud should be one of life’s small pleasures, something you look forward to after writing for 22 minutes.

If the idea of reading your own prose out loud is abhorrent to you, think of what you are putting your reader through. Writers who will not read their works out loud, even to themselves, are like cooks who will not eat their own food. If you want your writing to improve you must experience how it sounds.

[Click here for all the Rules]

Permit some metaphors. I generally think of our research as being based on method and framed by theory. I have occasion to insist on this when an author I’m working with writes that their paper is “based on NN’s theory of X”. The paper isn’t based on your theory but, perhaps, “guided by” it, I suggest. Indeed, you perceptions are framed by your theory. Your concepts are observational categories. Properly speaking, your research is based on “observation”, but since we’re doing science, we call the results of your observations, “data”.

It’s the mutually supporting structure of theory and method, frame and basis, that allow us to make “objective” assertions about the real world, or to discover “the truth”. Having a frame and a basis gives our observations the stability they need to inform our statements about reality. And those statements carry this stability with them into the discourse, where our peers can give the matter their own careful consideration. But what puts the “care” into “careful” here? That’s what I wanted to say a few words about.

A theory frames the way we see the world. Since our peers see the world (more or less) as we do (that’s what makes them “peers”) our theories also frame the way we present our research to them. By assuming our readers are our peers, we assume that a particular set of concepts and assumptions is available to them.  It’s the same set of concepts and assumptions that guided the design of our study. The theory, we might say, “prepares” us to see the world in a particular way. But the world itself must be “prepared” to be seen that way. It must be “set up” or “readied” for us to see it as the theory demands. That’s where method comes in, telling us how to generate data that can be “given” to the theory. It’s only when the world is given to our experience as specially prepared data that our theory knows what to do with it. And if our theory knows what to do with it, so, presumably, does our reader.

So we carefully prepare the world to be observed within the framework of the theory. And the reader then carefully imagines what we have done to see the world in this way. To guide them in their interpretation of our theory–to help them see that our theory is also their theory–our readers might make use of a “meta-theory”. It will contain some overarching principles that govern, for example, theory selection and theory development in our discipline. We might have a choice between two or three theories in designing our study. Our meta-theory helps us decide which is most appropriate. Sometimes we need to be explicit about how we have used these principles; other times it will be completely obvious. The point is just that a theory is a frame within a frame. Our care shows in the way we situate one within the other.

Likewise, underneath our methodologies, there is an area of concern that comes before our collection of data. Here too, things may happen without thinking too much about it. Much of this concern is dealt with by developing good habits of seeing and listening, noticing and note-taking. It hardly matters how sound your methods of analysis are if you don’t keep your test tubes clean, after all. Your methods tell you what to measure; your theories tell you what your measurements mean. But you must yourself take the measurement  accurately. And once you have taken it, you must make sure you write it down in the correct column.

After a life in research, these habits become second nature. (As do the bad habits that can emerge if you’re not paying attention.) But, just as we will sometimes make use of a meta-theory to make explicit the principles that guide our choice of theory and the changes we make to it, so too can an inframethodology sometimes help to remind us what to be careful about in the everyday conduct of research. This care is the underlying basis of the craft of research.

Do not leave “chores” like proofreading and referencing “for later”. They are part of the activity of writing.

Over time, the writing moment should unfold in a familiar way. It will be different for different people, but it should always begin with the typing of the key sentence and end with a two-minute proofread. After about twenty minutes of writing, you should read the paragraph out loud. It should come off the page comfortably. You have the rest of the time to make it so.

Now, about those references.  You have chosen something you know well to write about, and knowing something means understanding your basis for believing it. That means that you know also the references that are required to support your claims. Suppose you type out the key sentence and then give some thought to the difficulty it poses for your reader. Your reader, you decide, will find what you are saying hard to believe. So you offer a few sentences of supporting evidence. But where did you get that evidence? Perhaps from a book written by an authority on the subject. Well, that authority, i.e., the reference to that book, is simply part your knowledge of the subject. If you don’t know the reference you don’t really know the fact. Force yourself to work to that standard.

Remember that this does not require you remember everything you cite. It just means that the decision to write something has to include digging the relevant page out of your notes. You may not know in your head exactly what it says; but you should know how to easily find it. It will contain the information you need to cite the source in question.

At the end of your writing moment you should always have a well-formed paragraph of at least six sentences and at most two-hundred words. The sentences should be as grammatically correct as you know how to make them and should be, to the best of your ability, free of typos and misspellings. They should be properly sourced to references that you yourself find reliable. You want to have the ability to produce a chunk of good scholarly writing in 27 minutes, so you have to give yourself the task of doing everything within the time allotted. Don’t rely on some additional process to make your prose even just adequate, passable. Aim to write well every time.

Of course, there will always be a need for a final proofreading of the whole document and for you to meticulously check each individual reference for accuracy. But you will find that these final tasks are much less of a chore if you did the actual work of writing carefully and conscientiously in the first place.

[Click here for all the Rules.]

In our discussion about the nature of “academic” writing, Julia Molinari introduced the very useful notion of “affordances”. I remember Manuel DeLanda once explaining affordances by noting the difference between a mosquito stepping onto the surface of a lake and, say, a bear doing the same. While the bear’s foot goes right through the water to the lakebed, the lake “affords” the mosquito a surface on which to land. It reminded me of my old philosophy professor, Charlie Martin, and his “mutually instantiated dispositions”. The surface of the lake and the tarsus of the mosquito are so “disposed” that the former offers the later a surface tense enough on which to walk. The lake does not afford the bear’s paw the same thing, though the its same lake, of course.

I won’t develop the point in this post, but it’s interesting to consider that Foucault developed his “discursive formations”, which he used as units of analysis for scientific knowledge, into the more general notion of a dispositif, sometimes translated as an “apparatus”, a structured “readiness” for particular manifestations of human agency. What I want to do here is simply play a little on the notion of “affordances” in the interest of what I saw as the crux of our discussion, namely, the readiness to be proven wrong in our discussion with our peers. This, I believe, is what academia–and therefore academic writing–should be all about.

Basically, an academic is someone who can afford to be wrong. The academic does not “bet the farm” on any particular claim, or even an entire theory. Ideally, the academic, through the institution of tenure, has a protected livelihood that will persist even after repeated falsifications, and this should show in the style of our writing as academics. We should assert our claims boldly and transparently, tying what we believe to be true explicitly to our basis for thinking so. If we believe something because we read it in a book, we provide the source so that someone who knows that the book we’re citing is wrong can point our mistake out to us. If we believe something because we gathered data and analysed it in a way that suggested a conclusion, we provide enough information about our methods that a qualified peer can tell us where we went astray if we did.

It is easier to listen to–indeed, to talk to–someone who we think can afford to be wrong. If our interlocutor doesn’t seem capable of recognizing a mistake because their livelihood depends on their being right, or everyone thinking that they’re right, then our criticism will be colored by a certain embarrassment. It’s not that we ourselves are necessarily right, of course. The imbalance exists as long we are arguing a point we can afford to be wrong about and our interlocutor cannot. In academic discourse, then, one must choose one’s themes and one’s conversation partners carefully. The aim is to afford ourselves and each other an occasion for criticism.

Notice that this works both ways. You shouldn’t say something you can’t afford to be wrong about. But you also shouldn’t engage with someone who is making a claim they can’t afford to admit they’ve gotten wrong. If you do, the conversation will not be academic. That’s one reason that scholarship engages with the thoughts of very senior, very established, and sometimes altogether dead authors of so-called “classics”. These are people whose position is so firmly established that we don’t have to worry about harming them with our criticism.

Perhaps this will show that I’m an idealist, but I firmly believe that the value of the academic literature is that it affords anyone at any stage of their career a stage on which to present their thoughts, no matter how mistaken they may be. When you say something “for academic purposes”, whether in a school assignment, a doctoral dissertation, or a journal article, you are protected by “the right to be wrong”. Or at least you should be. These days, it seems, there are various movements, both on the left and on the right, that would have academics seriously consider the consequences of stating their beliefs, whether in front of their students or their teachers or their peers. Holding unorthodox views (or at least expressing them too clearly) sometimes seems to be a dangerous business.

I think this is why I’m so strident about keeping the notion of “criticism” in our definition of academic writing. In academia, mistakes should in a sense be so “cheap” that everyone can afford to make them. Conversely, we should invest very little of our total wealth of knowledge in each of our disciplinary engagements. If we do make mistakes, they have to be honest mistakes, of course. And they should not reveal an important area of ignorance or incompetence in our thinking. But we should be writing, for the most part, without fear of being shown to be wrong by other knowledgeable people. We should be ready for that possibility.

Our doctoral studies should prepare us for this. It should endow us with the necessary wealth, and inculcate the necessary frugality, to make each possible mistake affordable to us.