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.

Do not write from your sources. Write from your notes or from your memory.

If you’re following my rules, you are always writing about something you decided yesterday that you knew last week. You should pick something that you not only think is true but understand why is true. It should require no additional research on your part to be in a position to assert it in writing–to make a claim and support, elaborate or defend it in a paragraph. All of these issues have been settled the day before, during five or ten minutes of careful reflection.

You don’t have to have the entire basis of your argument “in your head”. Knowing something does not mean memorizing every important fact about it. But you should be able to quickly and easily locate the relevant information in your notes. After formulating your key sentence, you should be able to reach for the set of notes in which the sources of your knowledge are clearly stated. This should take a few minutes at most. If it’s going to take you an hour or an afternoon to find the sources of a claim then you don’t know it well enough to write about it. Choose something else for tomorrow and resolve to understand the other thing better.

Imagine you are giving a lecture and you assert some matter of fact. A member of the audience asks you to back it up with a source. You say, “I don’t know it off the top of my head, but I can get it for you if you send me an email.” By this you don’t mean you’ll need a few weeks to discover whether or not what you were saying is actually true. What you mean is that back in your office you have easy access to the source. Maybe you’ve got some notes, indexed in a useful way. Maybe you know exactly what to type into Google to bring it up on the first page of search results. That’s fine. It’s doesn’t matter what kind of access to the source you have; it just has to be quick.

Some people don’t take very good notes but have a great memory. They might say they know roughly where in what book the information they need is to be found. Very well, as they are making their decision about what to write tomorrow, they should find that book, open it to the relevant page, confirm the accuracy of their memory, and then put a bookmark in. Now they just have to bring that book to their writing session. The danger, however, is that they will take too much of the style of their source with them. In the worst case, they inadvertently plagiarize their source. So I would recommend making a quick note of the key facts and (clearly marked!) quotes, including their page numbers, and then just bringing these notes to the writing session.

The other danger is that you will start reading when they should be writing. This is also why I recommend simply putting your source texts well out of reach as you sit there and write. You don’t need a library to compose at least 6 sentences and at most 200 words in 27 minutes. You just need a few jotted remarks to remind you facts, figures and names. As the brilliant poet Ben Lerner once said (though he was probably thinking of something else altogether):

“Gather your marginals, Mr. Specific. The end is nigh.”

A student writes me for advice about writing summaries. I thought readers of this blog might also find the answer useful. The difficulty, of course, is to provide a more concise version of something you have read without leaving anything important out. What are some strategies that might help you do this?

First, keep in mind that you always have to summarize from some perspective, and that perspective will necessarily be, in part, your own. Be aware of why you are reading this text, what is it that makes it interesting to you. And then make sure your summary includes the things that serve your interests in the text. For example, I often find myself summarizing Karl Weick’s analysis of the Mann Gulch disaster, which I think is flawed in a number of ways. So my summary always includes the things I think he gets wrong. Out of fairness, however, I also usually include the things he gets right, the things I agree with him about. You might also think about what parts of the text satisfied your curiosity. These things should also be in your summary, as should the parts that surprised or even outraged you. In other words, summarize the interesting claims in the text.

There is, of course, no “complete” summary of a text that isn’t just a perfect copy of that text. In order to make your summary useful, you will always leave something out. The trick is to leave the right things out for the right reasons, and that’s where your own interest in the text is so important. You have to have a good sense of why you are reading this text or, perhaps, what interest the reader of your summary will have in the source. Sometimes you are writing a summary just for yourself. But sometimes you are writing it to spare someone else the trouble of reading a longer document. There is no way to know how to do this without knowing something about your reader.

More practically, you might begin by making a “key sentence outline” of the paper or document you are summarizing. For each paragraph, try to find the one sentence that states its main point. That will give a list of 40-60 sentences for a standard research paper, which is probably a longer summary than you want. But one of those sentences will, ideally, state the overall conclusion of the paper. Your task now is to find the most important supporting arguments for that conclusion among the rest of the sentences in your outline.

Every time you make a summary, set some constraints on the task: How long should it be? How much time are you going to give yourself to do it? And make sure you have some purpose in mind, a focus: are you interested in the methods used in the study or the conclusion it reaches? Or are you interested in the recommendations the author makes for practice? Remember to summarize the paper on your terms, not necessarily those of the author you are summarizing. The summary should be useful to you and your readers, and while it should of course be “fair” to the original (i.e., it should represent the contents accurately), it doesn’t have to say everything the original says. You have to make some choices.

At the end of the day, when evaluating the summary try to identify the “trouble” it actually does spare you and/or your reader. And at what cost. A good summary will allow your reader (who may be your future self trying to remember what the document says) to make do without reading the document (at all or again). They will become more efficiently informed about certain things. But what will not reading the whole source document cost? What will the reader of your summary remain ignorant of because you left it out? Is that information important?

Always take a three-minute break after writing the paragraph. In this break you must do something that is not related to either your writing or the rest of your day’s tasks.

This is easy. You really just have to do it. After you stop writing (on time!), don’t start something else for three minutes. Don’t even prepare for what will happen next. If you’re writing another paragraph, don’t think about it for three minutes, don’t even look at the key sentence. Don’t open your emails. Don’t glance in your calendar to see what’s coming up. Relax. Get a cup of coffee. Do some push ups. Flip aimlessly through a book. Send a message to your friend or lover or spouse or child. Look out the window. Just don’t work or even think about work.

The point of this rule is to protect the end of your writing session from the anticipation of the work to come. Get yourself in the habit of thinking of the time after the writing session as pure emptiness. It is the nothingness that divides the here-and-now of your writing from the there-and-then of your next order of business. Even if the next order of business is another writing moment, it must be separate and distinct from the one that went before. What this really means is that the current writing moment is a discrete one, with its own internal boundaries, its own integrity. It is the feeling in the “now” of your writing that you are supporting by building the habit of taking a break.

You should never feel like the end of your writing moment will allow you to “get on with it”. You are already engaged in “it”. Pay attention. When your 27 minutes are up, there is nothing to do but relax. Only then should you get on with your day. Which you should then, of course, just go and do.

[Click here to see all the Rules.]

This is something I came up with a few years ago, but which I thought worth looking at again. It’s a reading of the video for Travis’s “Writing to Reach You” as an allegory of the peer review process. I’ve put in time markers in square brackets to coordinate your viewing of the video with my interpretation.  Feel free to let me know what you think in the comments.

The whole process is a “front stage” activity in Goffman’s sense. Backstage, [0:04] you touch up the manuscript fixing all the punctuating and adjusting tour references to the style guide. You put on your best face. Then you submit it [0:20] and the manuscript is now “under review”.

The reviewers examine your paper [0:37] and you eventually get the answer back from the journal editor [0:55]. The reviewers, it turns out, have some hard words to say about your work, but the criticism they hurl art your paper sort of hurts them [1:16] as much as it hurts you. After reading their report you pick yourself up. You keep going.

[1:25] Though their own projects are stuck in their own way, your colleagues are waiting and willing to help. They offer you support and you submit the paper again.

[1:55] You receive the answer from the second round of reviews. A senior editor is now taking an active interest. [2:05] You feel like you have to run for cover, but [2:35] when the dust settles and the smoke clears you can see he was only taking one of your reviewers out of the equation [2:50].

Still, you sort of like that reviewer’s style, and you try it out for few paragraphs in your next rewrite. You incorporate one of his ideas as a sort of scalp [2:53]. The other reviewer is not impressed [2:56]. Fortunately, you’ve developed a thick skin. You absorb the new criticism and cast off the more outrageous arrows [3:02]. That idea you took from the discarded reviewer’s comments wasn’t really you anyway [3:17].

You get ready to resubmit another version [3:21]. There’s a brief moment of hesitation [3:29], but you do it anyway. When you get the letter saying your paper has been accepted it’s like coming home. [3:35] Your colleagues and your peers are in the same room, so to speak. In fact, one of your anonymous reviewers reveals who she is and congratulates you [3:40]. She loves your paper now, and she’s going to run with a few of your ideas. [3:43]

You’re backstage again. [3:45] Your inside is outside.