The Blank Page

This morning I sat down in front of the machine without any clear idea of what I was going to write. Not suprisingly, I haven't been able to write anything. Fortunately, this reinforces the line I have been pushing of the last few weeks, so I can write a bit about that.

My problem this morning is not that I don't feel like writing, it's that I don't know what to write. And that's simply because I haven't decided what I'm going to write about in advance. This last point is important.

According to my schedule, I'm supposed to write every morning for about half an hour (before the kids get up). In order for that to work, I have to set my alarm clock and I have to respect it when it goes off. I have to get out of bed, put on a sweater, turn on the computer, drink two glasses of water (you don't do this?), make a cup of coffee. Etc.

But this process doesn't start with the routine of getting out of bed in the morning. Each iteration of the process begins (or should begin) just before setting the alarm. It is at this point that I normally remind myself of the specific task I've set myself for the morning's writing session.

This is sometimes very straightforward. When I was writing those five-paragraph essays, the predetermined outline of essays themselves made the decision for me. In such cases, I was able to make a more specific decision about the details (what exactly will I say about the sentence, or the point of view?). But it is enough to bring to mind a specific area of your current research (a passage of an interview transcript, a theoretical notion, a knot in your methodology) and resolve to write about it.

On this point I try to practice Hemingway's combination of discipline and mysticism: work hard at regular intervals but give your "unconscious" a chance to keep up. The best way to do this is to keep a promise to let it, i.e., your unconscious, express itself on a specific topic in the morning. To make this promise, you just have to make a decision: what are you going to write about when you get up?

As with any relationship, it takes time to build trust between the dream life of your unconscious processes and the conscious work of writing. You have to believe that each has the best interest of the other at heart. The conscious part comes to depend on the material delivered by the unconscious part. But your unconscious life comes to depend on the conscious process for its expression.

Like I say, there may be a bit of mysticism in this. I don't know if it would stand up under the scrutiny of a qualified psychologist. But it works for me.

3 x 80

I have mentioned Paul Silvia's How to Write a Lot before. He suggests writing on a schedule rather than on a series of "binges". A binge happens whenever you spontaneously take a day or a week out of your busy schedule to "get that paper written". It does not matter whether you are driven by inspiration or desperation. Any substantial amount of unplanned writing is a binge.

Writing on a schedule, by contrast, means writing regularly whether you feel like it or not. This morning, I want to suggest a concrete way of doing this. Not everyone will be able to do exactly what I suggest here, but it can serve as the model for your scheduling efforts. Minimally, it can serve as a thought experiment.

Try to give yourself a 17 week period at least once a year that includes 80 three-hour writing sessions. This may mean concentrating your teaching at other times, but I am not suggesting a sabbatical. In fact, with a little training, it may be possible to do this every semester, even with a normal teaching load.

The simplest model is three hours in the morning (9-12), Monday to Friday, taking one week off as vacation and/or "reading break". This will leave you with 80 afternoons for other things. Try to avoid two-session days (six hours of writing is rarely productive).

Now, think about what you want to write in this period. Suppose you have three papers on your mind and a grant proposal. Give yourself, say, 10 sessions to finish one of them off (the one that's been "almost finished" for some time, or the one you've been wanting to resubmit), 20 sessions to write one of the others (a bit further along), and 30 to start and finish the last. Give yourself another 10 sessions for the grant proposal.

Next, distribute these sessions in your calendar, specifying which days you will be working on which piece of writing. Make sure that this distribution respects whatever deadlines you may have (e.g., resubmissions, conference submissions, grant applications). Remember to take a week off somewhere in the middle. (And try to keep the weekends free, if you can.) I recommend that you include one or two writing projects that don't have a deadline in the scheduled period, i.e., projects you can work on without the sense that you absolutely have to get them finished.

Leave yourself plenty of time before deadlines. Don't plan to finish your grant proposal the day before it is due, for example. If you don't finish at the end of your scheduled time, make an emergency plan that doesn't interfere with your other schedule tasks. Respect your writing schedule as you would respect your scheduled classes. In fact, consider making "contingency plans" to keep emergencies from turning into catastrophes (where you cancel everything else).

Finally, divide each writing project into tasks corresponding to the amount of sessions you have. Here an outline of each text will be very useful. These tasks may be subdivided further, but keep it realistic. Make sure that you can complete the task in the three hour period you have.

All you have to do now is follow the schedule. You will get better and better at planning your work as you get a better sense of what you can accomplish in the allotted time. You will also, of course, get better at accomplishing things in a specific period of time. If you do this once or twice a year, you will train yourself to use 240 hours at a time in a effective, goal-oriented manner. You may be surprised at the results.

Reflections on the Working Week

Working for about half an hour every morning, following a tight schedule and a clear outline (actually, two outlines: one for each essay), I have managed to produce two five-paragraph essays in two weeks. I have posted my journal of the process. If you plan to follow my example here, I suggest you do this as well. Just spend three minutes after you finish writing to jot down your impressions of the writing session.

The first essay runs to 887 words, the second to 1451. That's about 2300 words, or just over a quarter the length of a standard academic journal article. In fact, I have the basis of a pretty good paper, I think, whose working title will be "Composition/Decomposition". It will reconstruct and then deconstruct the concept of "rhetorical composition" (or the rhetoric of composition, if you will). In so doing, it will attempt to make one of my central arguments, namely, that writing a deconstructive text is as much a craft as writing a narrative or a case description. It will also demonstrate it.

A bit optimistally, two hours a day, for another two weeks should yield the full paper. But that will demand that I first make an outline of the longer paper, and read up a bit more. As it turns out I will need to brush up on both Derrida and Foucault. And I also want to include more current sources on composition (Grierson's is from 1944 and is useful because it is a sort of minor classic). I'm going to let it simmer in the back of my mind for a few days or weeks first.

But I am going to stick to this morning routine of writing a blog post for 30 minutes at the start of every day. I have to start jogging again, too, (I've let it slip in the darkness of the winter months), so I will soon implement a rigorous regimen of "Blogging & Jogging" every other day.

Journal of the Working Weeks

This is a journal to keep track of my writing process during the "working week" program that I've laid out for myself.

14.01.2008 Wrote the first paragraph (from 8:00 to 8:20) and posted it. It was based on light reading in Grierson the night before. I was not in doubt about the the overall theme ("composition and construction") and knew that the three elements to be introduced would be the sentence, the paragraph and the whole the text. The quotes leapt out at me while reading to this end. I had a hard time with the last sentence, which I'm not quite happy with.

15.01.2008 It took me about half an hour (6:00 to 6:30) to write about the sentence. The paragraph strikes me as a bit choppy and should perhaps make its debt to Wittgenstein more explicit. I had company last night, so I didn't get a chance to read Grierson until this morning, over breakfast, immediately before writing. Also, I'm off to Leicester in a few hours (9:20 departure) so I may not be at my most focused. Still, it was good to get up and do this.

16.01.2008 "The paragraph." The first of two posts I will have to write on the road (in Leicester). It went pretty well. I read two pages of Grierson before bed and dipped into it again over breakfast in the hotel restaurant. Returned to my room and wrote most of the paragraph in about twenty minutes (7:30-7:50). I then needed to arrange an internet connection, after which I wrote the last two sentences, added the Grierson quote, and did a bit of editing (about 10 minutes).

17.01.2008 I got up late and was running out of web-time. Quickly wrote the main points and posted. The "whole text" paragraph will probably need a lot of editing.

18.01.2008 My flight out of Birmingham (yesterday afternoon) was cancelled. Impressively, they got me to Copenhagen through Munich, only 4.5 hours late, arriving at 23.30. On the flight I was plagued by a toothache, however, so instead of writing this morning I went to the dentist and had a wisdom tooth (with a cavity) removed. I'll write the last of the five paragraphs on composition tomorrow morning.

19.01.2008 I read over the four preceding paragraphs and wrote the last one. I gave myself exactly 30 minutes to do all of that, and worked against the clock. That is, during the last five minutes, I simply polished the rough edges of what I had accomplished so far. Then I posted it. Tomorrow (Sunday), I will rest.

21.01.2008 Started writing at 8.00 and posted at 8.31. I actually began with the last few sentences ("Texts often crumble...") but it seemed right to start with Grierson (the text to be deconstructed). Also, I thought I was going to introduce an essay that would deconstruct along the lines of composition: that is, a paragraph devoted to the whole text, one to the paragraph, and one to the sentence. But I changed my mind half-way through. This essay will traverse this classical structure and deal with (in)coherence, (excess of) emphasis, and (multiple) points of view (each to be given a single paragraph, of course).

22.01.2008 Late start today (needed to get the children off to kindergarden). Wrote from 9.00-9.30 and spent too much time editing (about 10 minutes). Posted at about 9.40 (note that the time stamp on the post marks when the text-editor was opened -- I then paste the text into the editor from Notepad). It is harder to write the deconstructive text, and the paragraphs are longer. Looking forward to editing.

23.01.2008 Started slowly, but worked steadily from 9.30-10.00 directly in Blogger's text editor. It actually went quite well, although the topic ("emphasis") is perhaps not as clearly distinguished from that of the preceding paragraph ("coherence") as I would have liked. Still, a nice statement about deconstruction based on the analysis of Gould and Jarrett I did with Asmund a while ago (published last year). It suggests a future deconstructive reading of Weick, actually. Real progress made. [Update: I've been rereading some of the posts today, catching minor and major errors. E.g., "knowledge by aquitance"!]

24.01.2008 I am taking the kids to the dentist this morning, so I have had to get up very early. I started at about 5.30 and posted at 6.10. A few minutes arguably went to making coffee and waking up in general. But it's still taking too long to write deconstructive paragraphs, which are themselves also too long. Interesting lesson. I read Grierson's chapter on point of view before going to bed last night and had a "singular purpose", as it were, when I sat down at the machine this morning. But it was not as easy as I thought it would be.

25.01.2008 Wrote the last of the rough paragraphs from 6.45 to 7.10, immediately upon waking. I read through the four preceding ones first and went back to them often as I wrote. I was trying to find some way of binding them together but the result feels somewhat artificial. I wasn't at the top of my game (felt a bit groggy, actually).

28.01.2008 Assembled and edited the first five-paragraph essay, "Composition", this morning. I think it can be improved quite a lot.

29.01.2008 Assembled the second five-paragraph essay and read it over very quickly (barely at all). I am teaching a PhD course today and want to write a few reflections on the "working week" project this morning as well.

Decomposition (first draft)

[Here's the first full draft of the second "working week" five-paragraph essay. Again, I'm just putting the paragraphs together and reading the text over. I can see that this one is going to need a lot of work.]

In his forgotten little handbook, Herbert Grierson insists that good composition is characterized by "coherence and the right distribution of emphasis as determined by the purpose you have in view" (1944:135). But who are "you"? Grierson clearly assumes that the writer, operating somewhere well outside the text (somewhere beyond the page on which the words have been gathered) is in control of his (always his) expression. He would no doubt install the reader in the same space. But why, then, do these two subjects (of the same merciful lord) need a text? Couldn't "you" and "I" just talk to each other? Can't we all just get along? No, let us assume that the only "you" to speak of is the reader. Texts often crumble in our hands when we pick them up. If "composition" denotes how a text is "put together", "decomposition" might denote how they "come apart". If construction is about how a text is built up, how it is assembled out of words, sentences, and paragraphs, deconstruction is about how a text breaks down, how it collapses (Derrida 1967; see Cuddon 1991: 222-225). Decompsition is about activating the incoherence of the text, its excesses of emphasis, the indeterminacy of its always multiple points of view. A new text may then grow out of such compost.

A text coheres if it is read charitably, that is, morally. Cued by markers that suggest the text wants to describe a place, or tell a story, or put forth an argument, we let our familiarity with space, time, or logic respectively, (and always respectfully) inform our reading. Herbert Grierson emphasizes the we have "knowledge by acquaintance" of these "orders of phenomena", that is, we are continually aware of these orders in going about our ordinary business (Grierson 1944: 21-22). Coherence is an attribute of the surface of discourse. The first sign of the underlying incoherence of a text is therefore the superficial interference, or dissonance, that may be observed between spatial, temporal and conceptual orders. The story may at first seem plausible, but not in the place suggested. The arrangement of things in the room may be quite reasonable but how did they get there? All sorts of embarrassing details lurk in the clash of orders that deconstruction brings to the fore. Most important, however, is the order that Grierson leaves out, or (more charitably) subordinates to the order of thought (logic): the order of emotion. Words and sentences do not just evoke thoughts, facts and acts, they also evoke particular feelings. Too often, writing makes too little or, in other literature, too much of the emotional response of the reader. It underestimates the indignation or overestimates the emphathy of the reader. And we, as readers, often much too easily play along. "[The] law of coherence is a heuristic rule," said Foucault, "a procedural obligation, almost a moral constraint of research." It tells us

not to multiply contradictions uselessly; not to be taken in by small differences; not to give too much weight to changes, disavowals, returns to the past, and polemics; not to suppose that men's discourse is perpetually undermined from within by the contradiction of their desires, the influences that they have been subjected to, or the conditions in which they live. (1972: 149)

To decompose a text is precisely to confront it, not with the "order of phenomena" normally supposed by the reader (to have been intended by the writer), but with the disorder by which the text is strangely disposed. It happens whenever we shamelessly insist on reading the text.

Deconstruction is a shift of emphasis while reading. It actively challenges the principle of composition: "coherence and the right distribution of the emphasis" (Grierson 1944: 135). We have just dealt with coherence; to better understand the decomposition of emphasis, consider two different ways of playing Bach. Wolfgang Sandner has said that Keith Jarrett (the famous jazz pianist) plays Bach "emphasizing nothing, demanding nothing, concealing nothing and withholding nothing. In one word: natural." He cites the pianist himself in support of this thesis. "This music does not need my assistance," says Jarrett. "The melodic lines themselves are expressive to me." Compare this with what Sandner says of perhaps the most famous interpreter of Bach, Glenn Gould. "Obviously," writes Sandner, "he did not even trust his own analyses. He remained in search of clues. He spread the tones, loosened their coherence, emphasized side-lines and with his extreme tempi subjected the works of Bach to a kind of stress test." There may be no better way to summarize the spirit of deconstruction: don't trust your own analyses but continue the search for clues; emphasize side-lines and read at extreme speeds (whether fast or slow); all in all, subject the text to a stress test. You can experience the difference by listening to their recordings of the thirteenth prelude in Book I of Bach’s Wohltemperierte Klavier (BWV 858). By slowing it down, and emphasizing the space between the tones, Gould is able to draw our attention to our own contribution to the music, our listening (Basbøll and Born, 2007). It is important to keep in mind that Sandner is talking about two performances of the same composition, two "readings" of the same "text". The composer may have preferred one or the other, but there is no basic sense in which one is "right" and the other "wrong". Each reveals something about the composition. A "natural" emphasis may offer a great deal of immediate aesthetic pleasure, to be sure, but deconstruction is the pursuit of a more difficult beauty. Decomposition results from an excess of emphasis.

It often assumed that good academic writing is rooted in a singularity of purpose. "The specialist," Grierson tells us, "need think of nothing in regard to style but clearness and precision." And he alleges a reason: both his subject-matter and his audience is given to him so his point of view is largely fixed in advance. He need only ensure that his style does not obstruct the audience's view of his subject. "Everything else is an intrusion, and an unnecessary intrusion, because he can count upon willing and patient readers who desire to study the subject" (1944: 25). For Grierson, specialist writing is a particular way of establishing the point of view of a text, which in turn "determines everything" (16). Since the point of view depends on the speaker, the subject-matter, and the audience involved (Aristotle, Rhetoric, I, 3), says Grierson, there are really an infinity of possible points of view for any text. But he makes a crucial assumption, namely, that a given text will have a single point of view, i.e., that the writer can make a number of rhetorical decision to, as it were, "fix" it. Deconstruction draws this assumption radically into question, beginning with the allegedly singular purpose of the writer; for even the most academic writers are torn, at least, between enlightening their readers and furthering their careers. This immediately suggests multiple audiences, but it also suggests that a text is about any number of things that are not mentioned in the abstract. Deconstruction attempts to chronicle the "wars of signification" that take place behind the often irenic facade of an academic text. What we might call "academic composure" is fostered by an illusion of the writer's singular purpose, namely, that his only intention is to instruct a "willing and patient" reader, one whose only desire, in turn, is "to study the subject". Once we drop this assumption the text begins to decompose.

The essential thing is to read the text. To deconstruct it, we loosen its coherence, redistribute its emphasis, and question the unity of its purpose. All of these are acts of reading. It is true that deconstruction demands that we set aside the usual obligations of reading; it demands that we read against what are often the clearly marked intentions of the author. But deconstruction should not be taken as a personal attack on the author. Grierson assures the writer that the text will be read in the light of the reader's "knowledge by acquaintance" of the basic orderliness of experience, that it will be read with a natural emphasis, that it its readers, desirous only of study, will be patient and willing. Such assurances, when believed, produce a particular kind of text, and it may be a very good one. Every once in a while, however, we need as writers to see what our assumptions about the reader have actually accomplished. On such readings, the text will begin to come apart, sometimes like a collapsing structure, and sometimes like a mound of compost. We can use the results of such decompositions when we compose texts of our own.

Composition (first draft)

[It is now time to put the paragraphs I've written over the last two "working weeks" together into two five-paragraph essays. Here's the first. After putting the individual posts together, I have done some light copy-editing. I will do some more editing over the next couple of weeks.]

Composition is the art of constructing texts. In his classic handbook, Rhetoric and English Composition, Herbert Grierson (1944) points out that this can be understood on three levels: the construction of sentences, paragraphs and whole texts. But he also emphasizes the relation between these levels. Not only is the "the ideal paragraph" essentially "an expanded sentence" (115), the work should always be guided by the same principles. At all levels, "coherence and the right distribution of the emphasis as determined by the purpose you have in view" are paramount (135). There is a sense in which style is just your "choice of words". Composition demands that we put words together, in sentences, paragraphs, and texts, to achieve a well-defined goal.

In a sentence, words are put together grammatically in your attempt to mean something by them. In isolation, words don't mean anything very specific; they do not convey a clear meaning. In fact, until a group of letters is positioned among other words, it is unclear even what language it belongs to. The word "hat", for example, refers to something you wear on your head in English but is a form of the verb "to have" in German. A word really only finds its meaning in the context of a sentence, and here its meaning is determined by usage. Usage is the governing principle of grammatical correctness (Grierson 1944: 94) and that is why the way you construct your sentences goes such a long way towards defining your style. What is often called "accepted usage" by grammarians and editors determines the effect that particular words have in particular combinations and in particular settings. The style of your composition, as you try to get the words to mean what you want to say, is your struggle with what usage (in your particular context) would have your words mean before you started using them. This struggle takes place first and foremost within the sentences you write.

If a sentence is an arrangement of words, a paragraph is an arrangement of sentences. There is obviously no grammar of such arrangements, but there are some principles to keep in mind. First and foremost, a paragraph should have a unified purpose. This means that all the sentences that are gathered in a paragraph should, at a general level, be about the same thing. They will not, of course, say the same thing, but they will each play a specific role in elaborating, supporting or illustrating a common subject matter. This, in turn, is but one part of the overall subject matter of the text. "The bearing of each sentence upon what precedes," says Grierson (1944: 115), "should be explicit and unmistakable." In an important sense, then, the text's agenda is not advanced (moved forward) within its paragraphs but between them. A paragraph slows down and dwells, as it were, on a particular element of the larger subject covered by the text.

Ultimately, a composition consists of a series of paragraphs. If you looked only at the topic sentences (usually the first sentences) of these paragraphs, you should get a good sense of how the text is organized and what it wants to accomplish. When writing a text, it can therefore be useful to generate an outline simply by listing these topic sentences and perhaps to organize them further using what will turn out to be section headings. You will here need to decide what the organizing principle of the text as a whole will be: a narrative plot, a logical argument, a call to arms, a set of impressions, etc. "It is," says Grierson, "an additional satisfaction if in an essay or a book you can feel at the end not only that you have derived pleasure from this or that part of the work, or this or that special feature—the language, the character drawing, the thoughts, the descriptions—but that as you lay it down you have the impression of a single directing purpose throughout" (1944: 135). The reader should feel, as Aristotle also said, that there was a reason to begin exactly where you began and end exactly where you ended. The composition of the whole text depends on the way the paragraphs are strung together to achieve this single purpose.

Texts are constructed out of words, not ideas, as Mallarmé might say. Words are arranged into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into whole compositions. The correctness or rightness of these arrangements depend on their overall effect, that is, their aptness to a single purpose. This purpose, which gives the composition its coherence, makes demands of the text as a whole, and the demands of the text will make demands of the individual paragraphs, which will then pass further demands onto the sentences. It's really like any other construction project: the smaller parts must contribute to the larger whole; they must make themselves useful. It is often in working with the sentences that one discovers the style that is best suited to accomplishing the overall goal, always working under the general constraints of usage. It is also here that you might find a truly creative solution to the problem of writing, which can be a very complex problem because there are so many different reasons to write. Composition, in any case, is the simple art of solving it.

Decomposition 5

[This post is part of the "Working Week" series.]

The essential thing is to read the text. To deconstruct it, we loosen its coherence, redistribute its emphasis, and question the unity of its purpose. All of these are acts of reading. It is true that deconstruction demands that we set aside the usual obligations of reading; it demands that we read against what are often the clearly marked intentions of the author. But deconstruction should not be taken as a personal attack on the author. Grierson assures the writer that the text will be read in the light of the reader's "knowledge by acquaintance" of the basic orderliness of experience, that it will be read with a natural emphasis, that it its readers, desirous only of study, will be patient and willing. Such assurances, when believed, produce a particular kind of text, and it may be a very good one. Every once in a while, however, we need as writers to see what our assumptions about the reader have actually accomplished. On such readings, the text will begin to come apart, sometimes like a collapsing structure, and sometimes like a mound of compost. We can use the results of such decompositions when we compose texts of our own.

Decomposition 4: purpose

[This post is part of the "Working Week" series.]

It often assumed that good academic writing is rooted in a singularity of purpose. "The specialist," Grierson tells us, "need think of nothing in regard to style but clearness and precision." And he alleges a reason: both his subject-matter and his audience is given to him so his point of view is largely fixed in advance. He need only ensure that his style does not obstruct the audience's view of his subject. "Everything else is an intrusion, and an unnecessary intrusion, because he can count upon willing and patient readers who desire to study the subject" (1944: 25). For Grierson, specialist writing is a particular way of establishing the point of view of a text, which in turn "determines everything" (16). Since the point of view depends on the speaker, the subject-matter, and the audience involved (Aristotle, Rhetoric, I, 3), says Grierson, there are really an infinity of possible points of view for any text. But he makes a crucial assumption, namely, that a given text will have a single point of view, i.e., that the writer can make a number of rhetorical decision to, as it were, "fix" it. Deconstruction draws this assumption radically into question, beginning with the allegedly singular purpose of the writer; for even the most academic writers are torn, at least, between enlightening their readers and furthering their careers. This immediately suggests multiple audiences, but it also suggests that a text is about any number of things that are not mentioned in the abstract. Deconstruction attempts to chronicle the "wars of signification" that take place behind the often irenic facade of an academic text. What we might call "academic composure" is fostered by an illusion of the writer's singular purpose, namely, that his only intention is to instruct a "willing and patient" reader, one whose only desire, in turn, is "to study the subject". Once we drop this assumption the text begins to decompose.

Decomposition 3: emphasis

[This post is part of the "Working Week" series.]

Deconstruction is a shift of emphasis while reading. It actively challenges the principle of composition: "coherence and the right distribution of the emphasis" (Grierson 1944: 135). We have just dealt with coherence; to better understand the decomposition of emphasis, consider two different ways of playing Bach. Wolfgang Sandner has said that Keith Jarrett (the famous jazz pianist) plays Bach "emphasizing nothing, demanding nothing, concealing nothing and withholding nothing. In one word: natural." He cites the pianist himself in support of this thesis. "This music does not need my assistance," says Jarrett. "The melodic lines themselves are expressive to me." Compare this with what Sandner says of perhaps the most famous interpreter of Bach, Glenn Gould. "Obviously," writes Sandner, "he did not even trust his own analyses. He remained in search of clues. He spread the tones, loosened their coherence, emphasized side-lines and with his extreme tempi subjected the works of Bach to a kind of stress test." There may be no better way to summarize the spirit of deconstruction: don't trust your own analyses but continue the search for clues; emphasize side-lines and read at extreme speeds (whether fast or slow); all in all, subject the text to a stress test. You can experience the difference by listening to their recordings of the thirteenth prelude in Book I of Bach’s Wohltemperierte Klavier (BWV 858). By slowing it down, and emphasizing the space between the tones, Gould is able to draw our attention to our own contribution to the music, our listening (Basbøll and Born, 2007). It is important to keep in mind that Sandner is talking about two performances of the same composition, two "readings" of the same "text". The composer may have preferred one or the other, but there is no basic sense in which one is "right" and the other "wrong". Each reveals something about the composition. A "natural" emphasis may offer a great deal of immediate aesthetic pleasure, to be sure, but deconstruction is the pursuit of a more difficult beauty. Decomposition results from an excess of emphasis.

Decomposition 2: coherence

[This post is part of the "Working Week" series.]

A text coheres if it is read charitably, that is, morally. Cued by markers that suggest the text wants to describe a place, or tell a story, or put forth an argument, we let our familiarity with space, time, or logic respectively, (and always respectfully) inform our reading. Herbert Grierson emphasizes the we have "knowledge by acquaintance" of these "orders of phenomena", that is, we are continually aware of these orders in going about our ordinary business (Grierson 1944: 21-22). Coherence is an attribute of the surface of discourse. The first sign of the underlying incoherence of a text is therefore the superficial interference, or dissonance, that may be observed between spatial, temporal and conceptual orders. The story may at first seem plausible, but not in the place suggested. The arrangement of things in the room may be quite reasonable but how did they get there? All sorts of embarrassing details lurk in the clash of orders that deconstruction brings to the fore. Most important, however, is the order that Grierson leaves out, or (more charitably) subordinates to the order of thought (logic): the order of emotion. Words and sentences do not just evoke thoughts, facts and acts, they also evoke particular feelings. Too often, writing makes too little or, in other literature, too much of the emotional response of the reader. It underestimates the indignation or overestimates the emphathy of the reader. And we, as readers, often much too easily play along. "[The] law of coherence is a heuristic rule," said Foucault, "a procedural obligation, almost a moral constraint of research." It tells us

not to multiply contradictions uselessly; not to be taken in by small differences; not to give too much weight to changes, disavowals, returns to the past, and polemics; not to suppose that men's discourse is perpetually undermined from within by the contradiction of their desires, the influences that they have been subjected to, or the conditions in which they live. (1972: 149)

To decompose a text is precisely to confront it, not with the "order of phenomena" normally supposed by the reader (to have been intended by the writer), but with the disorder by which the text is strangely disposed. It happens whenever we shamelessly insist on reading the text.

Decomposition 1

[This post is part of the "Working Week" series.]

In his forgotten little handbook, Herbert Grierson insists that good composition is characterized by "coherence and the right distribution of emphasis as determined by the purpose you have in view" (1944:135). But who are "you"? Grierson clearly assumes that the writer, operating somewhere well outside the text (somewhere beyond the page on which the words have been gathered) is in control of his (always his) expression. He would no doubt install the reader in the same space. But why, then, do these two subjects (of the same merciful lord) need a text? Couldn't "you" and "I" just talk to each other? Can't we all just get along? No, let us assume that the only "you" to speak of is the reader. Texts often crumble in our hands when we pick them up. If "composition" denotes how a text is "put together", "decomposition" might denote how they "come apart". If construction is about how a text is built up, how it is assembled out of words, sentences, and paragraphs, deconstruction is about how a text breaks down, how it collapses (Derrida 1967; see Cuddon 1991: 222-225). Decompsition is about activating the incoherence of the text, its excesses of emphasis, the indeterminacy of its always multiple points of view. A new text may then grow out of such compost.

Composition 5

[This post is part of the "Working Week" series.]

Texts are constructed out of words, not ideas, as Mallarmé might say. These words are arranged into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into whole compositions. The correctness or rightness of these arrangements depend on their overall effect, that is, their aptness to a single purpose, which gives the composition its coherence. This purpose makes demands of the text as a whole, and the demands of the text will make demands of the individual paragraphs, which will then pass further demands onto the sentences. It's really like any other construction project: the smaller parts must contribute to the larger whole; they must make themselves useful. It is often in working with the sentences that one discovers the style that is best suited to accomplishing the overall goal, always working under the general constraints of usage. It is also here that you might find yourself being truly creative, not just for the sake of being creative, mind you, but for the sake of finding an elegant solution to the problem of writing, which emerges from the multiplicity of demands to express our ideas in the first place. Because there are so many different reasons to write, it is often a very complex problem. Composition, however, is the simple art of solving it.

Composition 4: the whole text

[This post is part of the "Working Week" series.]

Ultimately, a composition consists of a series of paragraphs. If you looked only at the topic sentences (usually the first sentences) of these paragraphs, you should get a good sense of how the text is organized and what it wants to accomplish. When writing a text it can therefore be useful to generate an outline simply by listing these topic sentences and perhaps to organize them further using what will turn out to be section headings. You will here need to decide what the organizing principle of the text as a whole will be: a narrative plot, a logical argument, a call to arms, a set of impressions, etc. "It is," says Grierson, "an additional satisfaction if in an essay or a book you can feel at the end not only that you have derived pleasure from this or that part of the work, or this or that special feature—the language, the character drawing, the thoughts, the descriptions—but that as you lay it down you have the impression of a single directing purpose throughout" (1944: 135). The reader should feel, as Aristotle also said, that there was a reason to begin exactly where you began and end exactly where you ended. The composition of the whole text depends on the way the paragraphs are strung together to achieve this single purpose.

Composition 3: the paragraph

[This post is part of the "Working Week" series.]

If a sentence is an arrangement of words, a paragraph is an arrangement of sentences. There is obviously no grammar of such arrangements but there are some principles to keep in mind. First and foremost, a paragraph should have a unified purpose. This means that all the sentences that are gathered in a paragraph should, at a general level, be about the same thing. They will not, of course, say the same thing, but they will each play a specific role in elaborating, supporting or illustrating a common subject matter. This, in turn, is but one part of the overall subject matter of the text. "The bearing of each sentence upon what precedes," says Grierson (1944: 115), "should be explicit and unmistakable." In an important sense, then, the text's agenda is not advanced (moved forward) within its paragraphs but between them. A paragraph slows down and dwells, as it were, on a particular element of the larger subject covered by the text. Its sentences are arranged with that element clearly in mind.

Composition 2: the sentence

[This post is part of the "Working Week" series.]

In a sentence, words are put together grammatically in your attempt to mean something by them. In isolation, words don't mean anything very specific; they do not convey a clear meaning. In fact, until a group of letters is positioned among other words, it is unclear even what language it belongs to. The word "hat" refers to something you wear on your head in English but is a form of the verb "to have" in German. A word really only finds its meaning in the context of a sentence, and here its meaning is determined by usage, which is the governing principle of grammatical correctness (Grierson 1944: 94). That is why the way you construct your sentences goes a long way towards defining your style. What is often called "accepted usage" by grammarians and editors determines the effect that particular words have in particular combinations and in particular settings. The style of your composition, as you try to get the words to mean what you want to say, is your struggle with what usage would have your words mean before you started using them. This struggle takes place first and foremost within the sentences you write.

Composition 1

[This post is part of the "Working Week" series.]

Composition is the art of constructing texts. As Herbert Grierson (1944) has pointed out, this construction project can be understood on three levels: the sentence, the paragraph and the whole text. But he also emphasizes the relation between these levels. Not only is the "the ideal paragraph" essentially "an expanded sentence" (115), the work should always be guided by the same principles. At all levels, "coherence and the right distribution of the emphasis as determined by the purpose you have in view" are paramount (135). Composition demands that we put words together, in sentences, paragraphs, and texts, to achieve a well-defined goal.

Welcome to the Working Week

"I know it don't thrill you, I hope it won't kill you."
Elvis Costello

This year my activities are getting a bit more formalized. I've got a regular series of workshops to run and I have also put together a group of researchers who will be concentrating on writing this semester. There will still be all the usual editing tasks and I also want to do some writing of my own, not least on this blog. That means I'll have to develop some of the "regular work habits" that I suggest to my authors.

So here's my blogging plan for the following couple of weeks. A while back I promised to write two five paragraph essays. I will write one paragraph every morning (it should take no more than half an hour) and post it to the blog immediately. When all ten paragraphs are done, I will begin to edit them into the two essays I proposed and reflect a bit on the process of writing the draft paragraphs.

The essays will cover some basics of composition using Herbert Grierson's Rhetoric and English Composition as a source. I want first to reconstruct the classical concept of composition in terms of the "construction" of sentences, paragraphs and whole texts (with a one-paragraph introduction and a one-paragraph conclusion, that's stuff for five paragraphs). In order to prove that postmodern writing is as practical an affair as classical composition, I will then write a five-paragraph deconstruction of Grierson's view of composition, a "decomposition" if you will.

It should be a fun couple of weeks. I'll be off at a conference in Leicester on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, but I will keep to the schedule. See you tomorrow morning.

New Tricks

Jonathan is, as always, leading by example, and I'm having a hard time keeping up with him. Here are two recent "stupid motivational tricks". (They are "stupid" only in the sense that even an idiot can follow them):

Do small things quickly, but only after you have worked on your main project.

"String along as many days as possible in which you work on a major project or projects for some substantial number of hours, preferably at least two hours."