Poetry and Prose

I did not intend to be "provocative" when I said that the paragraph is the smallest unit of scholarly composition. Though it's increasingly unfashionable (for good reason), I could cite Strunk and White's Elements of Style for support. Instead, however, I'm going to take up the challenge and show what I mean by comparing the poetry and prose of my favorite poet, Tony Tost.

Consider this paragraph (you can read it in context at The Rumpus), taken from his book Johnny's Cash's American Recordings (Continuum, 2011):

If Cash’s violence was often excessive, it was never gratuitous. “Blessed with a profound imagination,” Dylan wrote of Cash, “he used the gift to express all the various lost causes of the human soul.” Cash took residence within songs in which sinners too were brought into conversation with the possibilities of grace and human dignity, songs in which even the wicked were invited to share their song. When he conjured moral authority expertly in his work, that authority was derived not from his ability to embody normative values but from his drive to sing powerfully from a location outside of a moralistic middle-range. Cash had a unique genius for bridging and containing these locations within the mythic version of himself: not as contradictions, but as a total vision.

Tony is obviously a capable writer of prose. In this paragraph it is clear what he is trying to get us to believe. He tells us in the first sentence. In order to support his claim he uses a standard rhetorical move, namely, the appeal to authority (here, one step short of an appeal to God, namely, an appeal to Bob). He then explains what Dylan might have meant by "lost causes of the human souls" by describing the place Cash granted to sinners. It is because Cash's work does not exclude "the wicked" that the violence we find in his songs is not gratuitous.

You don't have to agree with Tony to grant that he has here composed a perfectly good paragraph. And if you go back and read it in its context, it should become immediately clear how a paragraph supporting the claim that "Cash's violence was never gratuitous" fits into his larger argument. It is a unit of that argument that had to be composed to function in precisely that larger context. If Tony had just just left it at the first sentence, assuming we would take his word for it, rather than Dylan's, or just left it at a quotation of Dylan, without explaining what that quote is supposed to mean for his own purposes, he would have accomplished very little.

But compare his accomplishment in prose with the following excerpt from a project he called "1001 Sentences":

Every successful sentence lessens one’s reliance on memory.

What we do we do because of what we didn’t.

Erotic silence.

Unimportant themes are thrust forward to protect the more important ones.

The sun is also in the wrong.

I am assured that this poem is actually myself or at least that part of me which demands always to be before the camera.

Sometimes freedom is found in the teeth of the ladder.

My career is distinguished by how shamelessly I judge my enemy (the reader).

I see everything in you.

The center of all ignorance is found to pulsate a few miles behind your eyes.

This is the work of the same writer. And while it consists of sentences, and is certainly as accomplished in its way as the paragraph about Cash, it is clearly not prose. We could, perhaps, imagine this as a kind of "after the fact outline" of the key sentences of a ten-paragraph essay. The sort of thing that would happen if we extracted only the most pregnant phrases from the Cash piece:

It is grieving for the downtrodden while ignoring how one’s own boot heel leaves a mark on their throats.

His violence was often excessive, it was never gratuitous.

This is not a generalized desire to be free, but a very specific lust for freedom.

"I had a friend who was playing guitar with him at the time."

[etc.]

This is not quite poetry, but it's getting there. One of the most important differences between Tony's paragraphs and his sentences is that his paragraphs are clearly about something, they "represent" something, namely, the music of Johnny Cash. But a sentence by itself does not do this. In fact, in "1001" Tony is intentionally undermining the ability of each sentence to be about anything specific, by putting it in the context of the others. We can imagine writing a paragraph around each sentence that would make perfect sense of it. This is plausible precisely because we know how the "aboutness" of those sentences that were originally about Johnny Cash was lost. We'd just be doing that sort of thing in reverse.

There's a homework assignment here. First, turn Tony's prose about Johnny Cash into 10 sentences of poetry. Next, write a ten-paragraph essay that uses ten of Tony's "1001 Sentences" as key sentences. This will teach you something about what prose is (and isn't), perhaps even something mildly provocative.

The Article and the Paragraph

It's not enough to be able to write a sentence. Scholars must be able to compose themselves in bigger textual situations, like paragraphs and articles.

The paragraph is really the smallest unit of scholarly composition. If you're only writing sentences, then, you may be a perfectly good poet, but you're not writing scholarly prose. As a general rule—and there are, of course, exceptions—to write a paragraph you need to get at least six sentence to work together in stating a claim and supporting it. In scholarly writing we don't say things with the expectation that our readers will just believe us. We say things that the reader will believe after we give them reasons to do so, and those reasons are provided in the paragraph that supports each individual claim. The reader, then, will not be satisfied simply with six sentences that each assert something to be true. The sentences must be organized around a single claim (made by one of those sentences) and it must be clear how they all contribute to the believability of that claim.

An article is the result of joining paragraphs together, typically about forty of them. At least one of these will tell the reader what the article will show and support this claim with a description of the article itself, i.e., it will explain how the article will show it. An article has sections that group its forty compositional units (the paragraphs) according the kinds of claims they make and the effect they are to have on the reader. And these effects are again "composed" into a larger whole. In general, you are trying to transform the reader's expectations about how the world works. (You are contributing to the reader's ongoing intellectual development.) The theory section is devoted to establishing those expectations and the analysis is devoted to challenging them. In order for this work, of course, the reader must share your theory and find your analysis persuasive. The other sections are there to support this larger effect, to channel that rhetorical force, if you will.

"Article" means "little joint". (And "joint" is the hippest word in the English language.) In an article you join paragraphs together in order to join the conversation that is going on among scholars in your field.

Some Basics

A standard journal article in the social sciences comprises about forty paragraphs. Each paragraph is normally composed of at least six sentences and rarely more than two-hundred words in all. A good paragraph has a clearly defined "key sentence" that states the central claim of the paragraph; the rest of the sentences offer support or elaboration for that claim. If you read only the key sentences of a paper, you would know what the writer is trying to tell you, but not why you should believe it.

A paper consists of a number of stock moves. Normally, it will have to establish both the practical relevance of its conclusions and a theoretical framework around them. It will have to account for the method by which the data that is used to support the conclusions was collected, and it will have to present that data in a clear and surveyable manner. Finally, it will have to draw some implications from the conclusions.

Most of the tasks in a paper are descriptive. As a scholar you do well to learn how to write prose that describes what happens in ordinary, everyday practice. You also do well to learn how to re-describe that practice as the object of a theory, how practical activities look in theory. But a theoretical object can only be observed by following an acknowledged method. So learn to describe what you did to gather your data in a convincing, compelling way. Know what you readers expect you to have done before they'll believe you.

When writing your analysis, keep in mind that you are articulating a series of facts on the basis of the data. You are not just describing your data. You have to claim that the data indicates certain facts that exist independent of the data. You aren't just saying that people answered survey questions in a particular way, for example; you are saying that they believe certain things of their organization. It is your statements about those facts (about what people believe) that are true or false. The truths will have implications and some of them may be normative. So you do well, finally, learn how to write prescriptively, either for practitioners or for theorists.

Academic Writing

It may not seem so, but I've actually been trying to avoid the topic of academic writing these past few months. I'm afraid I've been cultivating a kind of mysticism about it, suggesting that as long as you sit down every day and try to write down something you know, style and structure will follow naturally. This is the "wax on, wax off" school of academic writing.

But a client of mine has recently persuaded me to return to explicit instruction in basic principles, including the elements of style. I'm going to be developing some workshops that are centered on the product (a journal article) rather than the process. To get started I thought I'd blog a little about what I take academic writing, or scholarly composition, to be.

Scholarly writing is, ideally, assertive and discursive. A journal article should make a series of well-defined, easily identifiable claims and provide support for them. And it should be written as part of a conversation in which those claims are discussed and evaluated. As the reader I should be able to quickly discover what the writer is trying to get me to believe—much more quickly than I should come to believe those things. I should just as easily be able to discern the reasons the writer is giving me to believe those things. Then I can make up my own mind.

All that is of course obvious in some sense. But it often seems to me that people forget these simple values when writing. They tend to forget especially that they should be writing down things they know, they should be stating claims they believe are true, and have some justification to believe are true. Their writing should mainly consist in statements of their beliefs and their justifications for them.

Scholarship is the process of forming beliefs in a critical and careful manner. And while writing certainly plays a role in that process, it is by no means a magical one. Perhaps the best way to see this is to think about what you assume will happen in the mind of the reader when they read your text. Hopefully, you assume the reader will come to believe what you believe about the topic you've studied. Hopefully you think the value of your research generalizes beyond satisfying our own curiosity or occupying your time. Rather, you are engaged in research in order to discover things that can be clearly and simply communicated to your peers, so that the true beliefs you've come to hold can also be held by others.

The fact that they are your peers should make it easier, not harder, to communicate with them. You know their language and have a good sense of the state of their knowledge when they begin reading your paper. The conventions of the journal article are a support too.

Once you realize that the background, theory, methods, analysis and implications sections constitute discrete rhetorical tasks, the task of planning and writing a whole paper becomes more manageable. The background offers an argument for the practical relevance of your study. The theory sets up expectations of your object that are shared by you and your reader. The methods section builds trust about the quality of your materials. The analysis adduces a series of facts to artfully disappoint the expectations you set up in the theory section. The implications deduces either a set of practical consequences (from the background and your analysis) or a set of theoretical consequences (from the theory and analysis) or both. The introduction and conclusion don't add anything substantial; these sections merely introduce and conclude.

The basic unit of composition is the paragraph. An article is composed of paragraphs. Each paragraph says one thing and supports it. That's my topic for Thursday.

The Writing Process and the Learning Process

My last post has been getting quite a lot of traffic because of a tweet by Pat Thomson that described it as being about "not writing too soon". That's an entirely fair summary, but it makes me want to clarify something important. I don't want to leave the impression that writing should be put off until you, as it were, "know enough". My advice is that you should write what you know—but please don't forget that you always know something. That is, don't decide, on the basis of my advice, not to write for a few weeks while you're learning whatever it is you want to write about. Write about something else instead.

The misconception I'm trying to push back against is that we should always be writing on the project we're working on. Some people think that our writing should be collecting new discoveries for us, that if we don't write them down now we'll lose them. This idea is closely related to another widely held view: that knowledge is actually (and some say only) produced in the writing process. It's true that presenting your thoughts to yourself in writing can help clarify them, but real knowledge comes from your actual experience with the facts you are studying.

Your prose is a capacity to write your knowledge down, and you write in part to make a record of what you know that can enter a conversation with peers, and in part to keep your prose in shape. With that capacity in place you can go about the business of learning, i.e., becoming more knowledgeable, at a reasonable, comfortable pace.

This learning process should be separated from the writing process. You can never predict when you'll finally figure something out, i.e., when new knowledge will come to you. And you don't want to expose your writing process to that unpredictability. So at the end of every day, after having learned whatever it is you've learned, just take a moment (five or ten minutes) to choose between one and six things that you've known for a while to write down tomorrow, one half hour at a time.

For at least half an hour every day, you should be writing down things you learned weeks, months, even years ago. In addition to teaching and administration, you should then also spend some amount of time every day learning new things (by reading, thinking, analyzing, observing, etc.). You should not be learning those things as "preparation" for tomorrow's writing session. You should not be learning under the pressure to write. You should just be learning. And you should not be writing under the pressure to learn. You should just be writing what you know.

Means and Ends

It's a question that is sometimes put to novelists: Do you eat in order to write or write in order to eat? In academic settings, we can ask a similar question: Do you know in order to write or write in order to know? Both questions are supposed to indicate a paradox, or at least a dilemma. In this post I'm not going to pursue any profound solution, but use them as a jumping off point for some ideas about separating your research process from your writing process.

Do you engage in research in order to publish articles or publish articles in order to engage in research? Neither seems quite right. That's because, in addition to its role in making the other possible, each activity has an intrinsic value. You have to do some research in order to have something to say in your papers, and if you don't publish, you perish, i.e., you lose the academic position that gives you the time you need to conduct research, but neither explains why you do the other.

You conduct your research to satisfy your curiosity about a topic that interests you. And you publish the results of your research out of a genuine interest in discussing what you've discovered with your peers. But these intrinsic values have been challenged in recent times by the extrinsic values of research assessment. As a result, it sometimes seems to me, scholars too often envision their research projects with a far too narrow focus on generating publishable results. They are too worried about the "deliverable", namely, the papers that they hope to write on the basis of the research they're doing.

They are not writing down what they know but coming to know things they can write down. There are a great many political issues here that I will leave on the side for now. I want to point out that this approach is trying to solve the problem of writing by a very poorly suited means.

It assumes that there's a well-defined goal, namely, writing a research paper, and that a research project must be undertaken to provide materials for that paper. The transformation of your opinions on the subject of your inquiry falls entirely into the background. We have to find a way of recovering a place for this important experience. We have to have a place to change our minds. Since it is still April, let us call this place "the imagination".

My practical solution is to set up your writing process to be writing down things you know well, and have known for some time, rather than things you're just beginning to understand. I can't tell you how long it will take you to discover whether or how a particular management practice works or how it is transforming the nature of work itself. But once you have made your discovery, I have a pretty good way of writing it down so that after twenty hours of work you've got a first draft. And while you're doing this, I want to emphasize, you're discovering new things that you will be writing down in the same calm and orderly way weeks or months down the road. The problem of writing arises after you know something. But don't let that subordinate the problem of writing to the problem of knowing. They are two separate but equally important tasks.

I'll talk some more about all this in the weeks to come.

Norms and Models

The answer to Tuesday's yesterday's riddle (which was inspired by Thomas Presskorn's comment) is that models are to theories what norms are to practices. That is,

Models determine the meaning of a "mere" perception as an empirical fact.

That wasn't actually a very good sentence, but it was enough to suggest a solution to the puzzle.

The etymology of "norm" was helpful: '"standard, pattern, model," 1821, from French norme, from Latin norma "carpenter's square, rule, pattern".' When we turn to "model", things get even better: 'from Latin modulus "a small measure, standard," diminutive of modus "manner, measure"'. A norm is essentially an ethical standard, just as a model is an epistemic one.

It's interesting here to recall Kuhn's reflections in his post-script to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:

...along the spectrum from heuristic to ontological models, all models have similar functions. Among other things they supply the group with preferred or permissible analogies and metaphors. By doing so they help determine what will be accepted as an explanation and as a puzzle-solution; conversely, they assist in the determination of the roster of unsolved puzzles and in the evaluation of the importance of each. (246)

Notice here the strong influence that models are said to have on what I've been talking about this month as imagination. By setting up "permissible analogies and metaphors", as well as defining relevant puzzles and acceptable solutions to them, they ultimately tell us what is to count as a "fact" in a particular area of research. [And facts are what the imagination makes us pictures of.] That's why Kuhn is right to talk about them as both "heuristic" and "metaphysical" components of paradigms. After all, what we find puzzling is the state of the facts, and only the discovery of new facts will dispel our puzzlement in a satisfying way. Models discipline the imagination.

Riffing on the etymology again, I think we can usefully think of norms as patterns in human action. It is those patterns that make our actions meaningful. And it's interesting to look at models precisely as "manners": they are are ways to experience things. Facts are really patterns in our data. And we notice some patterns and not others according the models we have been trained to use as guides ("carpenter's squares") in our analyses of our perceptions. Just as acts conform to, or push against, or even break with our norms, facts conform to, or push against, or break with our models. It's that relationship that makes them what they are.

(Notice the value of this kind of analogical reasoning. Thinking about the general features of norms, and tracing the etymology back to the Latin for a carpenter's square and pattern, we can apply these images to our understanding of models. Basically, we are noticing the "normative" aspect of models: how they influence our perceptions. We are also noticing the way norms constitute "model behavior", e.g., how the "normal" is constructed by appeal to "role models".)

The social sciences have to keep in mind that while they are, like all other sciences, primarily interested in the facts, which they derive from their perceptions according to their models, the relevance of their inquiries depends on the actions the facts bear upon. And those actions are meaningful, i.e., they become proper, socially sanctioned "acts", by virtue of the norms that are in force in a particular culture at a particular time.

Our Theoretical Others

We are as likely to distinguish the theoretical moment of research from its empirical moment as we are to distinguish theory from practice. But note that these two ways of setting up an "other" for theory are very different. In the one case, we are considering theory according to its empirical adequacy; in the other, we are considering it according to its practical relevance. This distinction can help us to think about the contribution that we would like to make with our research, or its "force", if you will. And this, in turn, can help us to organize the paper we are writing.

Consider the outline of what I call a "standard social science article". It has the following parts:

1. Introduction
2. Background
3. Theory
4. Method
5. Analysis I
6. Analysis II
7. Analysis III
8. Implications
9. Conclusion

Let's consider the structure of the introduction. The first paragraph will describe "the world"; the second will describe "the science"; the third will describe "the paper". These paragraphs can also be understood as summaries of the practical, theoretical and empirical content of the paper respectively. The first describes the practice that your research studies. The second describes the theory that frames your research. The third states your empirical conclusion, summarizing also your method (which generates the data on which your empirical claims are based) and the implications you have drawn from your work.

The background section merely develops the description of practice you have provided in your introduction. The theory section of course develops the content of the second paragraph, and the methods, analysis and implications sections unpack the content of paragraph three.

Finally, the conclusion consists of two paragraphs. The first states your empirical conclusion in the simplest possible way (given at least six sentences and at most 200 words). The second tells us how things stand from point of view of one who has come to understand your conclusion and, in particular, your implications.

Now, your implications may be of a theoretical or a practical nature. Your research, we might also say, may carry mainly empirical or normative force. You are either going to let the practice, construed as a empirical object, "push back" against your theory, i.e., let the theory absorb the implications of your empirical conclusions as a number of modifications (which will, of course, be specified in your implications section), or you will let the theory "push forward" into the practice, using your empirical conclusions to suggest normative implications (which are again stated in the "implications" section).

What I find personally interesting in this way of thinking about your paper is the subtle "otherings" that are going on—the way the various parts of the argument define themselves by distinguishing themselves from the other parts. First theory is introduced as an other to practice, then the empirical material as an other to the theoretical frame. Later, however, the empirical content itself may be distinguished from its normative force. And norms (ideals, if you will) are of course to practice what facts (realities) are to theory.

Where is all this brought together? In the imagination, of course—yours and that of your reader.