“Writing a paper is not an inconvenience to deal with but an occasion to rise to.”
Thomas Basbøll

Before Easter, I suggested a list of questions that are worth answering if you’re thinking about writing a paper. Yesterday, I was heartened by the positive reactions to the tweet I have quoted in my epigraph. Today, it occurs to me that a good way of clarifying the occasion in question is to look closely at the first two questions.

• What is going on in the world that warrants your study?
• What is the current consensus or controversy about it in your discipline?

Now, if you’re following my advice, you will not just try to think or talk your way out of them. You will sit down (or stand, if you prefer) and compose two coherent prose paragraphs that answers them, consisting of at least six sentences and at most two-hundred words each. The first will evoke the world that your research explores and the second will invoke the science that studies it. You will devote about half an hour (or, if you’re hardcore, exactly 27 minutes) to the composition of each paragraph. You will imagine these paragraphs as occupying the first two minutes of your reader’s attention. The next paragraph, which I will talk about in another post, will describe your paper, stating its conclusion, declaring its method, summarizing its analysis, and announcing its implications. That’s a lot to get done in under two-hundred words and one minute of your reader’s attention. So those first two paragraphs have to get you into a good position to pull it off.

I’m assuming we’re talking about an empirical paper. That is, you have studied an “object” of some kind and discovered some interesting “facts” about it. Now, this object is situated in a broader setting, which, at its most general, is simply “the world”. In that first paragraph, you are describing the environment in which your object lives and, importantly, in which its existence means something. You are implicitly telling your reader why your study is important; if the world that this first paragraph evokes is interesting to your reader then so, in some sense, will your object. The second paragraph will then frame this world with a scientific theory, and a theory is always a way of looking at the objects together, the way a particular community looks at things in the world “objectively,” whether they agree or disagree. Importantly, this theory is presumably familiar to the reader. Readers who do not recognize the consensus or controversy you here introduce are not the intended readers of your paper. They are not your “peers”. The paragraph should be written as a reminder to the reader of the current state of the conversation in your discipline on the state of the world described in your first paragraph.

One way to see what these paragraphs are supposed to do is to imagine stating your research question immediately afterward. That question should now make perfect sense. (Your next paragraph, like I say, will answer it.) It should ask something interesting of an object that belongs in the world, using the conceptual apparatus of your discipline. In fact, you should be able to imagine that a peer could design a study much like yours to answer it. That is, you have given yourself the occasion that writing a paper is meant to rise to.

What is going on in the world that warrants your study?

What is the current consensus or controversy about it in your discipline?

What does your paper tell us about it?

What can be known about it without collecting new data?

What would we have expected of it if we didn’t have your data?

How did you collect your data?

What did you learn from your data?

What are the consequences for theory or practice?

The answers to these simple questions can guide your writing of a paper. In fact, if you give one paragraph to each of the first three, that’s your introduction. The rest of the questions are answered by your background, theory, methods, analysis, and discussion sections, respectively. I’ll write a bit more about this after Easter. But I didn’t want to keep the idea to myself over the long weekend. Comments and questions are welcome.

“Some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
(Blanche Balait, as recorded by Albert Camus)

One of the things you’re supposed to discover about yourself at university is whether or not you’re inclined towards research and, of course, whether you have an aptitude for it. Not everyone is cut out for a professorship, and that’s no shame on anyone. People go through years and years of schooling and then, at some point, many of them leave school to go into business, or politics, or entertainment, or some other racket. It makes sense to have “elite” schools, like Harvard and Princeton, Cambridge and Oxford, where exceptionally high-achieving high-school students go to get a(n even) higher education.

But once there, it would be really surprising if all of them turn out have the intelligence and curiosity to impress “academically” — to become “scientists”. Indeed, it also makes sense to have less elite universities, where people who didn’t do quite as well in high-school can go and, again, try to impress their academic teachers. If the elite schools provide a path for straight-A high school students through an Ivy League BA, to a top law school and into the legal profession, the less elite schools provide a path for a B-student in high school, through a public university, a master’s degree somewhat higher up the ladder and, finally, a PhD at those elite institutions. That’s because what it takes to succeed in academia isn’t exactly the same thing as a what it takes to succeed in high school. Different norms apply.

I’m focusing on academic outcomes here, but they are of course affected by extracurricular distractions. The important thing is to have a system that actually registers the students’ relative success at meeting the specifically academic standard at a particular point of their life path. At some point, the student runs into a limitation. Having received easy As in math all her life, she suddenly finds herself getting Bs in advanced statistics. This should not be a tragedy for her; she’s just learning what she’s good at. Having struggled for his Cs in high school English, he suddenly discovers he’s able to earn As in philosophy. This isn’t an indictment of high-school English. It’s just, again, an exposure to a different set of norms.

What about the curve? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the idea of meaningfully graduating at the “top of your class”, i.e., of letting academic achievement be relative to your cohort, not some Platonic ideal grasp of a subject matter. And most people in most classes really should be satisfied with the Bs and Cs that are available to them after all the well-deserved As have been given out to people with abnormal intelligence or curiosity, and the well-deserved Ds and Fs have been assigned to those who need to find other things to do (or learn to show up to the courses they have enrolled in).

My point is that there are enough different kinds of “normal” out there for everyone to be normal in some ways, exceptional in others. Grading gives students an opportunity to find out exactly where and how they are normal. Sure, some will still make the tragic effort to be normal (or brilliant) in an area they are simply not normal (or brilliant) in. They may be trying to impress their parents, for example, or embarrass them. The truly sad cases, I guess, are those who pretend to be average where they are really brilliant.

We should remember that any effort we make risks being wasted. There should be vast regions of normalcy out there that most people, in most of their activities, can enjoy effortlessly. Being yourself should by and large be easy. Our opposition to “normal distribution” is really a demand for uniqueness. We are asking everyone to be unique in every way. And we then ask our already beleaguered faculty to grade these singularities by way of an assessment of the “whole person”. Can’t we see how impossible we’re making things for ourselves? Just assign those damn 5-paragraph essays, I say. Tell the students there are such things as good and bad writing, greater or lesser ignorance. Then spend the ten or fifteen minutes per paper it will take to distribute their efforts under a normal curve. These “whole people” will be fine knowing only how well they did relative to each other in the art of composing themselves into five, more or less coherent, more or less intelligent, more or less knowledgeable, paragraphs. If they seek you out for more detailed feedback, go ahead; give it to them.

Even the most brilliant people are, for the most part, normal. We have to make that part easy for them so that they can devote their exceptional energies to making the occasional scientific discovery. These days, I fear, our scientists are working way too hard just to be normal — writing grant applications and journal articles, not to mention teaching and examining their students in ever more “progressive” ways. They’re going at it all wrong, in my opinion. It probably started when they were undergraduates.

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*This is an edited version of a post I wrote ten years ago at my old blog inspired by a post by Andrew Gelman on grade inflation.

In the rare moments when I suggest that students think of their readers as examiners (rather than peers), I try to provide them with some quantities to help them reflect on the quality of their prose. A paragraph consists of at least six sentences and at most two-hundred words and should take about one minute to read. It occupies roughly half a page and, if you know what you’re talking about, takes about half an hour to write well. When reading over their work, students should therefore ask themselves whether any given page looks and feels like the author devoted about an hour of their best attention to it. If not, there is a very easy fix: take a moment to rewrite each of the paragraphs on the page. The more deliberately you do this, trying your very best to get your ideas across to intelligent, knowledgeable reader, the better the reading experience will be.

I said that the page should “look and feel” like you’ve given it your best attention. That is, I’m thinking of the aesthetic impression your writing makes on your reader. A well-written page should look solid and confident to the eye and should then feel pleasant and generous when being read. Here it may be worth remembering that reading isn’t something you do only with your eyes and your brain. Even when we’re reading silently, we “sound out” the words in our vocal chords. Reading, friends, is something that happens also in the throat. That is why I tell writers to read every paragraph they write out loud as part of the writing moment. It is a way of practicing kindness to your reader, a form of empathy. You’ve have chosen these words explicitly to pass through the mind and body of another human being. Try them out on yours first.

The point I’m trying to make is that reading is not primarily an act of judgment. It is an experience. In school (and in scholarship more generally) we tend to think of our writing as mainly an occasion for criticism. We submit our work and we brace ourselves for the reader’s verdict (whether that is a grade or an editorial decision). But before any critical judgment can be made the text must be read. It must be experienced by another human being who willingly takes the role of a reader, and a reader, too, submits: to the text. The reader consents to dutifully pass each word through their consciousness and make the best possible sense of their order. It is you who decided to put them in that order, you who subjected your reader to your prose. When we talk about being “kind to the reader”, this is what we have in mind.

When I talk to students and faculty about writing I always presume that they want to improve their ability to write academically. Like all presumptions (e.g., the presumption of innocence), it is not always true,* but it helps us to manage the problem of how to proceed. Presuming a desire to learn is always a good starting point for a teacher and it is only at the end (when the “verdict” is handed down) that the presumption’s truth value might be properly assessed. (Procedurally, the accused has been treated “as if” they were innocent; but that doesn’t mean that we had been assuming this. In a sense, it’s a hypothesis we were testing.) One simple way to find out whether a writer really wants to improve their writing is to ask them whether they ever practice. Do they devote some number of deliberate moments to the problem of becoming a better writer?

This commitment, in turn, has to make sense to the writer. My standard suggestion is to choose something you know to be true and then devote a half hour to writing it down the next day. During that half hour you should pose the writing problem, write some sentences, compose them into a paragraph, and read it out loud. All of these things, including the act of deciding what to write about the day before, are skills that you will become better at through practice. But what does it mean to become “better” at them? How do you know you’re improving as a writer? What does it feel like?

First of all, the work of writing will become easier. As you improve you will find that deciding what to write about, and choosing the right words to express it, is less of a struggle than it once was. Here it is important to confine your writing to matters that you are confident you know something about. If writing is hard because you don’t really know what you’re talking about then you are not giving yourself an opportunity to become a better writer. You are just experiencing your ignorance. To be sure, that’s an important experience too, but it is not a good way to work on your style. In fact, there is a risk that you will develop a style that “works around” the problem of actually knowing what you’re talking about. You will be learning how to pretend to know things in writing. Your writing will become pretentious.

Another way to notice that you’re improving is that your readers will become more interesting to you. Presumably you are interested in your own ideas, and if you’re writing them down more clearly your readers will begin to engage more relevantly with what you think. You’ll notice this in everything from your colleagues when they read your drafts to your end readers when they cite you in their own work. You’ll hopefully also notice this in the quality of your peer reviews, which will increasingly address the real strengths and weaknesses of your arguments, rather than the straw men you have haplessly marshalled in their defense. If you are a student, you will find that you are learning more from your teachers’ feedback and, if you are sharing your writing with peers (as you should), that your conversations outside of class are getting richer and deeper. To experience all of this more intensely, try giving a peer reader a single paragraph of your prose to read out loud to you and comment on while you sit and listen. A good writer is someone who, given twenty-seven minutes, can make another human being interesting for nine.

Finally, you will find that writing becomes more pleasurable as you get better at it. Your running coach and piano teacher, helpful as they might otherwise be, don’t need to tell you that you’re getting into better shape or becoming a better musician if you’re practicing regularly. You can feel this improvement yourself in the pleasure it gives you to engage in the work. The same is true of writing. Of course, you’ll have your ups and down, good days and bad days, but if you think back to how it felt to write a few weeks or months ago, it should be immediately apparent that it’s now a more enjoyable experience. If not, you need to change your approach. Good writers are not people who suffer more profoundly than bad writers when they write. As a scholar or student you will be spending many hours doing it. Don’t get into the the habit of resenting it. Try to find joy in it.

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*You might be wondering why people who don’t want to become better writers would be listening to me. My sense is that some people expect me to tell them “the secret” to getting published in a prestigious journal or to getting a good grade. They want a rule to follow, not a discipline to build. I must, of course, disappoint them. As I often say, you’re going to become a better writer, not by believing what I tell you, but by doing as I say.