How to Be Perfect

Yes, "the old ones are the best ones". This version of the joke is my favourite and precisely the form in which I first heard it. It is this scene from The Muppet Show that I think of when I tell the joke in lectures and seminars. I don't always get a laugh, sometimes because I don't tell it right. In fact, it's a bit harder to tell in words because you have to set up the fact that the answer comes from a musician: a tourist in New York stops a guy carrying a saxophone case on the street. "Do you know how to get to Carnegie hall?" asks the tourist. "Practice, man. Practice," says the guy. I suppose he could also be a street musician, as in the scene above.

Anyway, I've been telling students at all levels that if they want to master academic writing they have to practice. They have to write something every day; they have to articulate what they know regularly. Musicians practice their scales as well as pieces of actual music. I normally suggest two exercises that vaguely resemble these two kinds of practice. First, as a kind of "scale", re-type the words of an exemplary text you have found in the literature. Pick a paragraph, and type it out again and again. Don't think too much about it, just type. After a while, you should be able to do it from memory. Then go back and see what sorts of mistakes you are making. Some of those "mistakes" are actually the interposition of your own style.

Next, take the key sentence (the main point) of that paragraph and restate it in your owns words. Now write a paragraph of your own to support that claim. Write about six sentences, edit to make a nice clean paragraph. Then do it again. And again. Work at it about 30 minutes each day. In both cases, of course, you are free to switch to another exemplary paragraph when you feel like the one you've been working on is too easy.

Okay, now for some freer improvisation. Give yourself a claim that you know to be true, something you are confident you can defend. Write the claim down. Now, spend those 30 minutes, once a day for a week, composing a paragraph to support it. If you're fast, you may be able to do it twice in 30 minutes. You should certainly be striving to write a competent paragraph in support of a well-defined claim in under 30 minutes. That is, if you know what you want to say, it shouldn't take you more than half an hour to write a first draft of a paragraph (about six sentences) explaining it.

The old ones are the best ones. Here's one now: practice makes perfect.

"Aim small, miss small"

This week I'm going to be talking to a lot of students about academic writing. I've decided to make Benjamin Martin's rule of thumb my running theme. "Aim small, miss small," he reminds his sons as they are preparing to ambush a unit of British soldiers. (Benjamin Martin is Mel Gibson's character in the 2000 movie The Patriot. I used the scene in my second "film assignment" at SMT the other week. I still have to post my answer.) The Internet Movie Database explains the line as follows:

When teaching Mel Gibson and Heath Ledger how to shoot a muzzle-loading rifle, technical advisor Mark Baker gave them the advice to "aim small, miss small", meaning that if you aim at a man and miss, you miss the man, while if you aim at a button (for instance) and miss, you still hit the man. Gibson liked this bit of advice so much he incorporated it into the movie, just prior to the ambush scene.

I want to suggest that the same thing is true of composing a paper. First of all, you can't just set out to ambush the British. You have to resolve to shoot each individual soldier. Here, that means you can't just aim to write the paper, you have to conceive of the task as writing 20, 30 or 40 paragraphs. Aiming for the paper is simply aiming too "big".

But those paragraphs themselves each need to have a focus. You establish this focus by writing a key sentence—a single sentence that expresses clearly what you want the paragraph to say. (The rest of paragraph merely supports this key sentence.) It is by focusing on this sentence, by aiming only to get that smaller point across that you get the job done. You move from one small focus to the next, rather than from one vague area of the whole subject to the next. If you write forty paragraphs, each focused on a key sentence that has been defined in advance to be well within the subject of your paper (like a button on a man's uniform is well within the space he occupies) you are likely to hit the subject of your paper even if you sometimes miss your specific mark. If you aim, in each case, for that sentence, you are correspondingly likely to hit the larger subject of the paragraph.

After drafting the paper, you may still have some work to do on individual paragraphs. You may need to add a few hadn't considered, or you may need to tighten some of them up. Or you may need to work on the connections between them. But you will find that your misses were small in direct proportion to the smallness of your aim. What is missing in your paper, that is, will be minor.

Intellectual Cowardice

In his too often forgotten little book, The Unquiet Grave, Cyril Connolly reminds us of "three faults, which are found together and which infect every activity: laziness, vanity, cowardice. If one is too lazy to think, too vain to do something badly, too cowardly to admit it, one will never attain wisdom" (20). He picks up the idea again later: "Sloth rots the intelligence, cowardice destroys all power at the source, while vanity inhibits us from facing any fact which might teach us something; it dulls all other sensation" (30).

This week I've been talking about some of the risks of scholarly writing, and I think it is fitting to close that theme by emphasizing the importance of facing those risks resolutely. Academic writing is difficult and, as I've argued, perhaps even dangerous work. There is the risk of injury, both conceptual and emotional, of hurting yourself and others. There is also the risk of embarrassing yourself by "doing something badly" as Connolly puts it. All of these possibilities are ready arguments for not writing and not publishing your work.

When I was younger a combination of sloth, vanity, and cowardice prevented me from writing altogether because I assumed (or pretended to think) that, once written, I would have no argument for not publishing. So for the sake of my reputation, for the sake of others, and for any other reason I could think of, I kept my ideas not only to myself, but in my head. Actually, I usually didn't mind talking about my ideas.

Once we resolve to do the real work of writing, we face a number of risks but also begin to feel the rewards. The work is sometimes hard and sometimes forces us to strain. We sometimes work at the edge of our abilities. But as any craftsman and any athlete knows, we can't work on that edge indefinitely. Courage and recklessness are not the same thing.

Christopher Hitchens notes Orwell's suggestion that a writer must have "a power of facing unpleasant facts". You don't have to have the intellectual courage of George Orwell to be an academic writer, but you do have to face the difficulty of writing about the facts your research circles round. You have to have the courage to face your own limitations, and to accept them, as limits, long enough to overcome them.

Intellectual Insults

There is a another kind of injury that is worth thinking seriously about, neatly captured by the Danish word "injurie", which means defamation. The relevant injury here is the damage that a piece of writing might do to your social relationships. As in the case of mental and physical injuries, however, the risk here correlates with opportunities for growth. A good piece of academic writing can transform your social relationships for the better by establishing connections. A bad, or even "nasty", piece of writing can do the opposite.

The relationships in question may be those you have established, or wish to establish, among other scholars (your peers), or those you have established, or wish to establish, among practitioners (your research subjects). In both cases, what you write may either please or offend, and that in turn may affect the way they relate to you in the future.

At first pass, however, there seems to be an asymmetry between injury proper and the consequences of insulting someone. The latter seems to depend on getting your work published, while the former (at least as I put it yesterday), could happen during the actual activity of writing. Here it is important to keep in mind that social relationships do not just depend on how others feel about you, but on how you feel about others.

I have written a little bit about the "emotional" side of academic writing before. If an "intellectual injury" is a kind of "conceptual damage", then "social injury" (here, an "intellectual insult") might be considered a kind of "emotional damage". As you write about one group of people (your research subjects) for another group (your peers) you inevitably transform the way you feel about both groups. Hopefully, both groups will become increasingly familiar to you. But if you are not careful you may find them becoming stranger and stranger.

In fact, I think most researchers experience both effects as they work through their research in writing. There are days when nothing and no one makes sense to them. There are days when the world—both of scholarship and life in general—seem utterly absurd, or at least very disappointing. The important thing is not to cultivate, fetishize and even, as is sometimes tempting, valorize that strangeness. If you never develop a working respect for your subjects and your peers, you need to rethink your choice of research area.

Consider how the way you think about someone affects the way you feel about them. If you need a very dramatic example, think Othello. It is not what Othello says to Desdemona that destroys their relationship—it is what he thinks of her. He has, in a sense, allowed Iago to defame her, to damage the bond between them.

Intellectual Injuries

As I wrote over at SMT yesterday, I had a disturbing thought at my son's hockey practice yesterday. I bruised my rib a week ago when I fell onto my stick at the first practice of the newly-formed parents' team, and yesterday I was sitting on the bench feeling somewhat sorry for myself. Then it struck me.

Hockey coaches understand that the sport is built around a number of inherent dangers—sharp blades; hard, fast pucks; sudden falls to the ice. Training is therefore built around principles that minimize injury—the right equipment, suitable exercises (including practicing the art of falling), and a certain etiquette—while ensuring development. Are we as good at respecting the inherent mental dangers of scholarship? Do we even recognize the possibility of getting "injured" while engaged in our "knowledge work"? Can we get hurt during the two or three hours we sit in front of the computer writing our papers, practicing our thinking? Can we "break" something? Or is scholarship a completely harmless activity?

What would a mental or intellectual injury look like? First of all, it would prevent us from thinking clearly, or at least make it more difficult to do so. Breaking a leg makes it impossible to walk without crutches. My bruised rib makes everything a little painful. Here's a thought: can carelessness in writing damage your style of expression, both "on and off the ice"? That is, if you don't concentrate during your writing sessions and write sloppy sentences, will your intellectual posture suffer in general? Will your language skills as such suffer? Take it a step further: Since clear writing depends on clear thinking, can writing carelessly have consequences for your concepts?

Suppose you spend a writing session trying to subsume a particular set of phenomena under a theoretical concept. It's not that the phenomena don't "fit"; it's just that the operation is very difficult (the concept is very advanced; the phenomena are very subtle). You work too hard at it and you slip. You fall. Now what? You twist your concept? You break it?

Maybe. Maybe that actually happens. But we rarely (if ever) conceive of writing and thinking in these terms. If my constant attempts to present the development of writing skills by analogy to physical training are right, however, then perhaps we do well to think also in terms of possible injuries like this. Perhaps some of the difficulties we commonly face in our writing stem from our inability to recognize that we are, in fact, "hurt", and we need to take a break and let the concept we strained yesterday recover.

Ultimately, of course, we need to think in terms of preventing injury. Working steadily is important, and doing so in regular sessions of reasonable length, under orderly conditions, without interruptions, in good light, able to concentrate on the tasks we have set ourselves. But we must also always work within the limits of our stage of development. There are certain "moves" that we are not able to make in prose today, but that we will be able to make if we work at them with the awareness that we will fail, i.e., fall, and will have pick ourselves up do it again and again before we master it.

It may hurt, but if we're prepared for it, we will not actually get hurt (i.e., injured). It also hurts sometimes when you are first learning how to ride a bike. But because you (and your dad) were prepared for it, the injuries amounted to a few scrapes and scratches. Tomorrow was another day.

Forces & Names 3

Here's another rewrite of the paragraph I worked on on Wednesday. Notice what happens when we remove the organizing gesture of "two forces":

The 1970s were a tough decade for U.S. corporations. Slow economic growth meant that the major markets of many firms stopped expanding, causing their profits to stagnate. High inflation meant that interest rates were quite high over the period, which pushed investors toward fixed-income securities like government bonds and away from stocks, and this caused stock prices to drift downward over the decade. Inflation also caused firms to have assets on their books that were increasing in value, but from which they were not earning higher profits. Since many measures of firm performance were based on returns to assets or investments, this meant that firms looked even less profitable. Meanwhile, foreign competition, particularly with the Japanese, heated up. American firms lost market shares and, in some cases, like consumer electronics, entire markets. Taken together, profit margins were squeezed by inflation, competition, and slow economic growth. By the late 1970s, with low stock prices, undervalued assets, and slow growth in sales and profits, many large U.S. firms had stock prices that valued them as being worth less than the value of their assets and cash.

It becomes easier to read because the reader is not tasked with organizing the information under the headings of "slow economic growth and high inflation" and "increased foreign competition"; instead, late in the paragraph, the sense in which things were "tough" is summarized as follows: "profit margins were squeezed by inflation, competition, and slow economic growth". Indeed, this could have been the first sentence. Watch what happens:

During the 1970s, profit margins were squeezed by inflation, competition, and slow economic growth. Slow economic growth meant that the major markets of many firms stopped expanding, causing their profits to stagnate. High inflation meant that interest rates were quite high over the period, which pushed investors toward fixed-income securities like government bonds and away from stocks, and this caused stock prices to drift downward over the decade. Inflation also caused firms to have assets on their books that were increasing in value, but from which they were not earning higher profits. Since many measures of firm performance were based on returns to assets or investments, this meant that firms looked even less profitable. Meanwhile, foreign competition, particularly with the Japanese, heated up. American firms lost market shares and, in some cases, like consumer electronics, entire markets. By the late 1970s, with low stock prices, undervalued assets, and slow growth in sales and profits, many large U.S. firms had stock prices that valued them as being worth less than the value of their assets and cash.

Here the opening sentence doesn't introduce a theme of "things were tough" but three specific pressures that "squeezed" profit margins.

* * *

You'll notice I've removed the reference to Friedman 1985. Like I said on Wednesday, it's not my field, so I don't feel qualified to make a final judgment, but the reference seems very imprecise to me. Here's the entry in the reference list:

Friedman, B. (ed.).1985. Corporate Capital Structures in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

As we can see, Friedman did not write this book; he edited it. So the reference might be to the introduction he contributed or to the whole book, but this is not made clear. Referencing a whole book for such a specific account is not ever entirely helpful, of course, but it gets even harder to understand once we look at the book itself.

It can be previewed at Google Books. Strangely, a search for "foreign competition" comes up empty. And "competition" alone doesn't shed much light on things either. "High inflation" gets us similarly inconclusive results. You can also watch the results dwindle as we narrow the search from "growth" (42 pages) to "economic growth" (12 pages) to "slow economic growth" (0). While a search for "1970s", does give us results, like page 238, that describes them as "inflationary", it is hard to see the argument for "two forces" presented as such in Friedman 1985.

Maybe an economist would know how to use the reference to the Friedman volume more effectively. But I for one would have liked a page reference, or a reference (or several references) to the chapter (or chapters) in the book that the account is based on. More on this on Monday.

Forces & Names 2

This morning, I've been trying to rewrite the paragraph from Fligstein and Shin 2007, that I discussed on Monday. Here's what I've come up with so far:

As Friedman (1985) has shown, U.S. corporations were under siege from two forces during the 1970s: stagflation and foreign competition. The period was marked, first, by high unemployment and high inflation. Slow economic growth meant that the major markets of many firms stopped expanding, causing their profits to stagnate. High inflation led to high interest rates, which pushed investors toward fixed-income securities like government bonds and away from stocks, causing stock prices to drift downward over the decade. Inflation also caused firms to have assets on their books that were increasing in value, but from which they were not earning higher profits. Since many measures of firm performance were based on returns to assets or investments, this meant that firms looked even less profitable. Meanwhile, American firms faced increased foreign competition, particularly with Japan. They lost market shares and in some cases, like consumer electronics, entire markets. Taken together, profit margins were squeezed by inflation, competition, and slow economic growth. By the late 1970s, with low stock prices, undervalued assets, and slow growth in sales and profits, many large U.S. firms had stock prices that valued them as being worth less than the value of their assets and cash.

I've moved the reference up into the first sentence to signal that Friedman 1985 is the basis of the whole paragraph. (But I've also looked briefly at Friedman 1985, and I'm having a hard time understanding what the reference refers to exactly. This isn't my field, so perhaps that's to be expected, but I'll look more closely at that issue on Friday.)

It still isn't perfect. The reader can probably be expected to know that "stagflation" means the combination of high unemployment and high inflation and this may make the second sentence unnecessary. The "meanwhile" is intended to mark the tradition to the second force, but this may need a bit more work, which I'll also try to get to in my next post.

Forces & Names

Here's a paragraph from an article by Neil Fligstein and Taekjin Shin, published in Sociological Forum in 2007 (PDF here).

During the 1970s, U.S. corporations were under siege from two forces: the slow economic growth and high inflation of the 1970s, and increased foreign competition (Friedman, 1985). Slow economic growth meant that the major markets of many firms stopped expanding, causing their profits to stagnate. The inflation of the 1970s had a set of negative effects on corporations. Interest rates were quite high over the period. These high rates pushed investors toward fixed-income securities like government bonds and away from stocks, causing stock prices to drift downward over the decade. Inflation caused firms to have assets on their books that were increasing in value, but from which they were not earning higher profits. Since many measures of firm performance were based on returns to assets or investments, this meant that firms looked even less profitable. Foreign competition, particularly with the Japanese, heated up. American firms lost market shares and, in some cases, like consumer electronics, entire markets. Taken together, profit margins were squeezed by inflation, competition, and slow economic growth. By the late 1970s, with low stock prices, undervalued assets, and slow growth in sales and profits, many large U.S. firms had stock prices that valued them as being worth less than the value of their assets and cash (Friedman, 1985).

Notice that it introduces its subject matter very clearly in the first sentence along with a structuring principle for the paragraph. We expect the paragraph to deal with two main forces, and that the first will have two distinct components. And that's exactly what we get. The closing sentence then summarizes the effects of the mentioned forces in a single, relevantly problematic situation.

As a "unit of composition" in a larger whole, this paragraph is doing its job. It is making a claim and supporting it with detail. Even the individual sentences are perfectly clear. But there are several things about it that reduce its effectiveness.

Let's begin with the relationship it has to its source. Since Friedman 1985 is the only text cited, and since it is cited at the beginning and then again at the end, I think we can assume that the whole argument of the paragraph can be found there. The authors should therefore have considered simplifying the reference by writing it into the prose of the paragraph. "Friedman (1985) has convincingly shown that U.S. corporations were under siege from two forces during the 1970s. First, he said, they faced slow economic growth and high inflation." And so on. While this may look like a more obtrusive way of citing Friedman, it is actually less in the way. It gets the relation between this paragraph and Friedman properly established in one simple gesture that stays with the reader throughout.

Another weakness of the paragraph is that it refers to two forces using three names. That makes it a bit more difficult to follow. Notice that in the last sentence three factors, not two forces, are invoked to explain the fact that companies were worth more on paper than on the stock market by the end of the 1970s. It forces the authors to re-organize the paragraph early on, with the signposting sentence, "The inflation of the 1970s had a set of negative effects on corporations." This sentence does not actually convey information (we already know the corporations were "under seige" by inflation), but it was deemed necessary to shift the focus to inflation after slow growth had been dealt with. If the paragraph had opened with a reference to three things, it could have used a conventional, "First, ... Second, ... Third, ...." form to present the supporting detail. If it had used two names (instead of three) it could have used those names, not a whole sentence, to shift the focus. By the time we get to the end of the paragraph, the organizing potential of the two forces (which I presume could have been called "domestic stagflation" and "foreign competition") has been entirely abandoned.

I'll look at this paragraph a bit more closely on Wednesday. It helps me respond to Jonathan's questions about the difference between writing sentences and composing paragraphs from Friday's post.

Sententiousness

Christopher Lasch says that "the sentence is the basic unit of literary composition". The word "literary" might avoid a clash with William Strunk's classic "elementary principle", namely, "make the paragraph the unit of composition", but I think it is important to get clear about what the "unit" of an academic article is, and what it is a unit of.

My suggestion is that we write sentences and compose paragraphs. (We spell words.) Sentences are the units of writing, and paragraphs are the units of composition. This makes it possible to distinguish between good writing and good composition, and it may explain why I had such a hard time finding well-formed paragraphs in what I thought were examples of well-written prose. A text may be well-written (at the level of the sentence) and yet poorly composed (at the level of the paragraph).

Karl Weick says we should "aim for good sentences" (2005: 409). I have taken issue with this way of putting it before, but what he means, namely, that we should try to write good sentences, is of course true enough. It is, however, often a misplaced emphasis. If we recall Lasch's definition, we can see that Weick's aim is a literary one and, I would argue, is therefore not especially academic. His style is too focused on the sentence, too concerned with the sound or "voice" of the text, and not sufficiently concerned with the ideas being presented, the knowledge content. But there are those, like Barbara Czarniawska, who would defend his style precisely on these terms: his writing is "poetic", not "scientistic". Indeed, he might himself say that he'd rather keep his writing "open to context" than "stuffed with content". That's important to keep in mind.

In some traditions, a paper that consists of well-written sentences in poorly composed paragraphs may be more "publishable" than a paper that consists of poorly written sentences in well-composed paragraphs. This may even be true in most traditions (people may generally be fooled by good sentences even if they value content over form). Still, a culture that values the sentence over the paragraph also values voice over thought. It values style, in a very superficial sense, over composition, which is just style in a deeper sense. It values the expression of ideas over their communication.

Paragraphs are excellent opportunities to communicate your ideas to a well-defined audience that already has a lot of other ideas. They offer occasions to "write what you know" to others who know as much (and sometimes more) about the subject—to say something and explain how you know.

An intellectual culture that aims only for good sentences is always in danger of falling into sententiousness. It becomes a place where people are merely (if sometimes altogether rightly) impressed with "formulations". Writers work on their pithiness rather than the substance of their ideas, and are all too satisfied with a neat turn of phrase. A culture that speaks only in aphorisms may abound in wisdom, but it has no knowledge.

Masters of Form

Last night, I went looking for examples of well-formed paragraphs and it wasn't easy to find one. Most writers, it seems, ignore the rules of composition, using an intuitive sense of when to start a new paragraph. I suppose this could be shown to be true of my writing as well (especially on this blog), but I was surprised at the extent of "the problem". Even works that I had previously thought were very well-written, seem to have been composed with almost no regard for form at this level. I finally found an exception in Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise (Fourth Estate, 2007), a history of twentieth-century music.

Culture ranked low among Franklin Delano Roosevelt's priorities. Music hardly registered at all. To the extent that the president supported the arts, it was with an obligatory aristocratic air. As Richard McKinzie has written, "Roosevelt was willing to do the noble thing, and support painting, theatre, and other creative arts in the same way he supported them as the 'lord' of Hyde Park manor." Alert to all twitches of the political web, Roosevelt knew the dangers inherent in federal funding of the arts. Only with the support of Eleanor Roosevelt, the adamantly liberal First Lady, did the experiment last as long as it did.

There's is nothing spectacular about this paragraph. It simply does its job. (For a spectacularly good paragraph, see this post.) It positions the arts (and music specifically) on FDR's list of priorities. It characterizes FDR's attitude (as aristocratic), it cites support from another source (McKinzie), and it explains why FDR prioritized as he did ("the political web"). It has a clear key sentence...

Or does it? What is the key sentence? The most natural candidate is the first one, and there would nothing wrong with reading the paragraph that way. But I think the real key sentence is the second one, except that it really says, "Music hardly registered among Franklin Delano Roosevelt's priorities". Or, the key sentence could be the first sentence with "music" instead of "culture" as the subject. That is, I think the paragraph is supposed to tell us that FDR gave a low priority to music, and that the explanation for this is that he didn't care much about art and culture in general. That the key sentence, then, is not actually there is not really a weakness of the paragraph. It just shows that after you have composed the paragraph around a key sentence, you can reword it for flow. Ross here displays his mastery of the form precisely by not being a slave to it.

I like the way that sounds so much that I'm going to say it again. Whatever their genre, good writers display their mastery of form by not being slaves to it.

Notice also the last sentence. Here Ross hands off the broader subject (of state patronage of the arts under Roosevelt) to his next paragraph (on Eleanor Roosevelt) without leaving the topic of the present paragraph (Franklin Delano Roosevelt). By telling us that is was "only with [her] support" that the experiment lasted, Ross is saying more about the president's commitment to the arts than the First Lady's. Her views and policies, however, are now nicely set up for subsequent elaboration.

The Paragraph

A standard journal article consists of about forty paragraphs. A standard paragraph consists of about six sentences. When I went to school, we were told that a paragraph should have a "topic sentence" and a "concluding sentence". (Here's a classic description.) About a year and a half ago, however, I read Tara Gray's Publish and Flourish, which convinced me to think in terms of "key sentences" instead. This method has the advantage of allowing you to easily generate an "after-the-fact outline", which is an enormous help in putting your paragraphs together to form a coherent argument.

Think of each prose paragraph as an argument in its own right. The key sentence is the conclusion of the argument, the proposition you want your reader to come away with. It will not always be a matter of getting the reader to believe something, however. You might only want the reader to understand something or entertain something for the sake of argument. But this ambition will normally be seen in the content of the proposition. There is a difference between a key sentence that says "The recession is over" and one that says "Jeff Frankel has declared the recession to be over". If you want the reader to question it, the key sentence might even be a question: "Is the recession really over as Jeff Frankel says?" These key sentences require different kinds of support, which is to say different paragraphs to support them.

Like I say, a paragraph offers about five sentences worth of support for a key sentence. Six sentences in all. That's a useful way of thinking about your finitude as the writer of a journal article. You are making about 40 claims, each of which can be adequately supported by five sentences. The adequacy of the supporting sentences (the bulk of a paragraph) depends almost entirely on context, i.e., your field.

You know you're taking the craft of writing a journal article seriously when you are thinking about what your forty key sentences are. Having identified them in a first draft of your paper, you now ask yourself whether each of them can reasonably be supported (in the face of the predictable concerns, questions, and criticisms of your field) with about five sentences. And, conversely, whether each of them really needs such support. A sentence that doesn't need further support should not be a key sentence.

A sentence that needs much more* than five sentences of support needs to be broken down into lesser claims. Could it not, then, you might ask, constitute the key sentence of a section? Yes, sort of. Each of the supporting sentences of this paragraph, which will likely be the opening paragraph of the section, will now provide the content of the key sentences of the rest of the paragraph. But in that case the key sentence of this first paragraph will, at least implicitly, have the section as is subject: "This section will deal with five key difficulties of applying phenomenology to organization studies."

In most cases, there are more elegant ways of doing this that actually meets the first standard of making claims that only require five sentences of support. "Scholars have traditionally been hesitant to apply phenomenology to organization theory." This statement can be supported with reference to relevant theorists and the problems they have raised, which will normally be adequate to support the claim about their hesitation. Assuaging their concerns (dealing with the difficulties they imply) is another matter, but you've now given yourself 25 sentences to do so instead of 5.

On Wednesday, I'll look at an example.

_________

*Update: I've added the qualifier "much" here, and I'd also like to emphasize the word "needs". Sometimes a twelve-sentence paragraph is perfectly justified. But it won't, properly speaking, need all those sentences. It's just extra detail that you know the reader will appreciate. This sometimes happens when you are reporting data, or presenting a close reading of another text.

The Perfect Sentence

Sentences are rarely perfect. A journal article consists of about 240 sentences and there is just not enough time to perfect every one of them. Still, it can be instructive to look at a single, wholly adequate sentence with an eye to its imperfections. One is not here making fun of the author; one is just trying to learn how a sentence works. Consider the one we looked at on Wednesday, written by James Surowiecki and published in The New Yorker:

That prompted the Harvard economist Jeff Frankel, a member of the committee that officially declares when recessions begin and end, to declare the downturn over.

The core of this sentence can be captured as follows:

That prompted Jeff Frankel to declare the downturn over.

But Surowiecki (or his editor) recognized that readers of The New Yorker might not know who this Frankel guy is. Since he is making a declaration, he has to be (a) an expert and (b) an authority. The two pieces of information—(a) he's a Harvard economist and (b) he's a member of the committee that officially declares when recessions begin and end—provide this information clearly and efficiently. Imperfect?

Well, yes. But perhaps unavoidably. My editing sense begins to tingle whenever a key term is used twice in the same sentence. Surowiecki explains why Frankel is the right guy "to declare the downturn over" by telling us that he is "a member of the committee that officially declares when recessions begin and end". This isn't as bad as using a word in its own definition, but it feels like the same kind of mistake. It seems uninformative even if it isn't. Now, like I say, this may be unavoidable and let me show you why.

If we want to fix the problem, we first need to learn something about Jeff Frankel. We can go to his homepage and get his "short bio" (a small PDF file). There we learn that Frankel "directs the program in International Finance and Macroeconomics at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he is also a member of the Business Cycle Dating Committee, which officially declares recessions." That confirms what Surowiecki told us, but it also gives another way of putting it:

That prompted the Harvard economist Jeff Frankel, a member of the Business Cycle Dating Committee, to declare the downturn over.

As a sentence, this one is free of the imperfection I mentioned before. But an editor might rightly look at it and ask whether it really does the job of providing the reader with information about Frankel's authority to make the relevant declaration. Do people know what the Business Cycle Dating Committee does? Fine, the author might say, I'll replace the name of the committee with a description of its authority. (If you're curious, you can see what the committee looks like here.) And that's what gave us the published sentence.

To satisfy me, couldn't we just replace "declares" with another word that means the same thing. That's a possibility, but it may take some time to find a word that isn't subtly misleading. My impulse was to suggest "decides", as in:

That prompted the Harvard economist Jeff Frankel, a member of the committee that officially decides when recessions begin and end, to declare the downturn over.

But there's an important difference between deciding and declaring something, isn't there? Frankel and his committee did not decide that now was the time to end the downturn. They merely observed that their criteria had been met and could now "officially" (precisely) declare it to be over. So, we may be stuck with those two occurrences of "declare". If so, one option is to split it into two sentences:

Jeff Frankel is a member of the committee that officially declares recessions. The recent steady growth in the economy and creation of jobs prompted him to do declare this one over.

Something like that. But whether or not it's a suitable solution depends on the flow of the paragraph. And that's what we will look at next week.

One last thing. It is not true that a short sentence is more likely to be perfect than a long one. For an analysis of a short but imperfect sentence, see this post. For an analysis of a long sentence that approaches perfection, see this piece I published in Jacket.

Essential Information

Sentences are wonderfully flexible things. Consider this one by James Surowiecki:

That prompted the Harvard economist Jeff Frankel, a member of the committee that officially declares when recessions begin and end, to declare the downturn over.

As I pointed out in my last post, it contains enough information for three sentences:

Jeff Frankel has declared the downturn over. Jeff Frankel is an economist at Harvard. Jeff Frankel is a member of the committee that officially declares when recessions begin and end.

But while the subject of these three sentences is Jeff Frankel, he is merely the object of Surowiecki's sentence. Surowiecki is not really writing about Frankel, he is writing about the economy. The pronoun "that" refers to the previous sentence; in fact, it takes the place of a much longer subject, which could be filled in without any grammatical errors.

Three straight quarters of growth and the creation of more than a hundred and fifty thousand jobs prompted the Harvard economist Jeff Frankel, a member of the committee that officially declares when recessions begin and end, to declare the downturn over.

That is, the economy is doing something to Frankel (namely, prompting him to declare); Frankel is not doing something to the downturn (namely, declaring it to be over).

You might also be interested to know why there is a comma after "Frankel" but not after "economist". Consider the difference between these two sentences:

That prompted the Harvard economist Jeff Frankel, a member of the committee that officially declares when recessions begin and end, to declare the downturn over.

That prompted the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, who holds a PhD in economics from MIT, to declare the downturn over.

There are several Harvard economists but there is only one chairman of the Fed. The words "Harvard economist" do not adequately identify the person speaking, while the words "the Chairman of the Federal Reserve" do refer to a single person. The clause between commas is a kind of parenthetical insertion of perhaps useful but inessential information. We can see the difference by removing the names of the two people:

That prompted the Harvard economist, a member of the committee that officially declares when recessions begin and end, to declare the downturn over.

That prompted the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, who holds a PhD in economics from MIT, to declare the downturn over.

Notice that this "anonymizes" Jeff Frankel but not really Ben Bernanke (we all know who the Chairman of the Fed is). The "the" in the first sentence gives the erroneous impression, however, that there is only one Harvard economist in the world (like it's an official position, like chief economist at the IMF.) It should be written:

That prompted a Harvard economist who is also a member of the committee that officially declares when recessions begin and end to declare the downturn over.

Notice that all the commas now disappear. Why is that? Well, without the proper name (or the unique position) to identify the speaker, the descriptive language becomes more essential to the meaning of the sentence. Maybe this sentence will help you see why:

That prompted Jeff to declare the downturn over.

Who is Jeff to make this declaration? For those who recognize the name, it might be enough to identify him as Jeff Frankel. But readers of The New Yorker might easily be hearing that name for the first time when they read the column. By contrast, you can imagine a conversation in a pub where "Did you hear Jeff has declared the downturn over?" makes perfect sense. Context does much to determine what is essential and what is not.

More on Friday.