Research as a Second Language

7000 words, 7500 meters

2012-02-17T06:58:00.001+01:00

If yesterday was any indication, Thursdays are going to be something special for me as a writer. It turns out that I will be "building not writing" the book more literally than I thought. Contrary to my plan, it will consist of a substantial amount of cutting and pasting from this blog. There was some original writing to be done too (and I am very happy with what I came up, I must say), but it looks like I really have said already most of what I want to say in the book.

First, I wrote a 2000-word conclusion starting only with the 600-word sketch from this post. But as I began to write the introduction I could remember having covered particular topics before. Once I found the post and inserted it into the manuscript, I realized that another post could almost seamlessly continue the passage. And on it went. Working in this way I quickly put together a 5000-word chapter, which is perhaps a bit long for an introduction. Fortunately, since it is, precisely, an introduction, I should be able to shorten it by moving material into the main chapters of the book.

The short of it is that from 8 to 11 yesterday morning I added 7000 words to my book. As planned, I then went for run, resolving to celebrate by running a full 7.5 kilometers (one and a half circuits around the local park). As you can imagine, when I sat down to lunch, I felt great.

By spending a little bit of time reading and marking posts in the evenings until next Thursday, I should put myself into position to repeat the performance. That is, my writing for this blog seems to be paying off. Not only am I in great shape as a writer, I have a great deal of material for the book almost ready-made for the purpose. The book Research as a Second Language really will reflect my experience as the blogger who maintained Research as a Second Language.

Beginning the Book

2012-02-16T07:00:00.003+01:00

I'm now starting the work of writing my first real book. In order to keep it realistic I've conceived of it as a collection of 9 5000-word essays, framed by an introduction (3000 words) and a conclusion (2000 words). That's 50,000 words altogether in ten parts (I always think of the introduction and conclusion together as one "part").

My plan is to work on the book for three hours every Thursday. Since I can quite easily write 400 words in 30 minutes, I can expect to write 2400 words each session, or about half of each of the parts. In the spirit of Kafka's "The Great Wall of China", I'm going to work on each part in sequence without finishing it, going back to fill in the holes after the whole thing has been worked through. After 10 weeks, then, almost half the book (24,000 words) will have been written (importantly, however, it will not be the first half, but half the words along its whole "length"). This will give me a good sense of the shape of the book and will, hopefully, confirm that it's going to be a good book. At this point, I will increase the intensity, working two hours every day to fill in what is missing for another two or three weeks. Then I will take a break.

Maybe I'm being a bit optimistic (especially about the amount of words I'm going to write). But keep in mind that the content of this book is not at all a mystery to me. I've probably already said everything I'm going to say in the book on this blog. It is much more like I'm building something, putting something together, than "writing" it. (Though I will not, I've decided, be cutting and pasting from my posts.) I'm really just "packaging" my ideas for a particular kind of consumption.

Cold, Stale Coffee?

2012-02-15T07:00:00.006+01:00

A full-page ad for Capella University in the New Yorker (Feb. 13 & 20, p. 33) has gotten stuck in my craw. It's a picture of messy file-room full of medical files, and two hand-written notes-to-self. (1) "I wish the health care system would heal itself". (2) "I will drink cold, stale coffee at 2 a.m. to get through 78 pages of a textbook, I will take on hours of research, and I will learn to help fix what is broken". These thoughts were presumably jotted down by a student at Capella University. The ad goes on to explain: "Good intentions alone can't fix a broken system. Hard work and the right education can. Creating real change is a daunting task, but a Capella degree gives you the knowledge to turn the impossible into merely challenging. Are you ready to make a difference? To matter?"

University web-pages are full of romantic, idealized images of what "college life" is like. They are very often misleading or disturbing (i.e., either college life isn't really like that, or the fact that it is disturbs me). One gets the impression that most of the time is spent walking in cheerful groups from one class to another through grassy grounds. Or huddled around a computer in a group talking seriously about what's on the screen. (Even though group work has been shown to make people stupider.) There are, it is true, sometimes also pictures of students "studying" alone in a library or even in a dorm room. I'm not sure I've ever seen someone doing something that might count as writing in one of these idyls.

In the Capella ad we have the glamorization of late-night reading and, for an inexplicable reason, bad coffee. Instead of complaining, let me just offer a corrective. We should read with a clear head, in the afternoon or early evening. We should read and take notes and think about what we're reading, not how many pages we've been assigned. Most importantly: we should make ourselves fresh cups of hot coffee to consume at 6 a.m. while we write some coherent prose paragraphs about the subjects that are dealt with in our textbooks. We can get up at 6 a.m., mind you, because we were sleeping at 2 a.m., and we could sleep, probably, because we drank our last cup of (perfectly good) coffee around 8 p.m. (or whenever it will let us sleep at a decent hour).

It is not hard work that will fix our broken systems, but intelligently managed work. Chris Argyris famously proposed to "teach smart people how to to learn". My aim, these days, is to teach smart people how to work. Capella's ad agency doesn't seem to understand what university life ought to be (though, true, true, all too often what it is).

Undergraduate Utopia

2012-02-14T07:00:00.002+01:00

There are about sixteen weeks in a semester. That's about 80 working days, twice a year. 160 days. That leaves 205 days for other things*. There are four years in a typical bachelor program. That 640 days (128 weeks) of being in session, 820 days for others things. In this post I want to point something out about those 128 weeks of "school" that gives you your first university degree: you could be writing a prose paragraph a day.

Imagine the physical analogy. You could probably run about 5 kilometers (3 miles) every day. It would take you 30 minutes. For variation you could swim every other day for thirty minutes, or work out in the gym (most college campuses have facilities of some kind). If nothing else, you'd come out of your college days in great shape. (Barack Obama, as I recall, tells the story of how he got academically serious in simple terms: he stopped smoking weed and starting running every day. You too could be president one day!)

My point wasn't that you should take up jogging. There are 640 school days from commencement to graduation. Just as you might do a bit of exercise every day, you might write a prose paragraph every day. All you need is thirty minutes: write a sentence you know to be true. Then write five sentences that support the truth of that claim. Work on it for style and grammar until you've spent 25 minutes altogether. Then read it out loud. Then read it silently. Get on with your day.

By the end of the semester you will have written 80 prose paragraphs or about two full academic articles worth of prose, probably between 12,000 and 16,000 words. I don't know how that compares to the amount of writing you have to do for your assignments. But it's probably more than you are required to write. In any case, a 20-page term paper will probably consist of about 30 paragraphs. It will take you about 15 hours to draft. If you're in shape, the work will go easily and straightforwardly.

Not only will you have written a lot of prose. You will have supported 80 claims every semester. 640 claims throughout your undergraduate studies. This will make you a more articulate person. You will come out of college in great mental "shape". There will still be plenty of time for class, for reading, and for social life. You will just also have become a capable, confident writer.

I don't know exactly how it would change the world if everyone got into the habit of composing themselves in prose paragraphs for thirty minutes every day. But I think it would be for the better. And college, it seems to me, is a great place to develop this habit. I've even given you 820 days* to develop other habits.

_______________
*64 days a year are in-session weekends. This means that 256 days of those 820 days that you're not working on your discipline can be spent "unwinding" in the usual way. The rest can be devoted to vacationing and summer jobs. Also, there may be some "cramming" in there if your exams are held outside the semester calendar. But, but, but: if you've been working in a regular, disciplined way, you shouldn't really need to cram.

The New Program

2012-02-13T07:00:00.002+01:00

Hemingway once said, "I always live a hell of a healthy life for the first three hours of every day." At the time, he wasn't talking about his regular writing habits, but I've always misunderstood to him to mean about five hours, which would include three or four hours of writing and some exercise—then the "unhealthy" part, i.e., good food and lots of drink. These days, in any case, I'm living a hell of a healthy life for the first and last half hour of the working day.

I get up every weekday morning at 6:10AM and putter around making coffee and waking up. At 6:30AM I begin to write these blog posts, which I post at 7:00AM. That's means I've put in 30 minutes of writing. I find I can dependably write between 350 and 700 words, which is to say, about three or four paragraphs worth of words. (Not always quite so well-composed.) One morning I broke 1000 words. Naturally, I always know what I'm going to write about before I go bed at night. In the morning, I get up and just write it.

Most afternoons, I go swimming at the pool by my daughter's figure-skating rink. While she trains, I swim about a kilometer (that's on a really good day, I think I'm usually a bit under) in 30 minutes. Then I sit in the sauna for ten or fifteen minutes and, finally, jump under the cold shower. Thursdays are different because my daughter doesn't skate on Thursdays. So my exercise for that day consists in what will eventually be a 10 km jog (I'm at about 6.5 now) before lunch. I'll still write a 30-minute blog posts in the morning.

Between breakfast and the jog on Thursdays I'll be working on my book of this blog. In a sense, my blogging in the morning is just training/drafting for those three-hour sessions on Thursday, where I'll really be writing. So the program consists of 30 minutes of writing before breakfast and 30 minutes of exercise before dinner, except Thursdays, where I will do three hours of writing and one hour of exercise before lunch.

Standard Issue Theory

2012-02-10T07:00:00.001+01:00

There is arguably nothing more standard in a social science paper than the theory section. Most journals will demand not only a theory but some "theoretical contribution". Like PhD dissertations, however, papers are sometimes written with a theory separately in mind. The author will announce two objectives: first, to make that contribution to theory development, normally by producing a "literature review", and, second, to make an empirical contribution, i.e., to present a set of results. While such papers do sometimes get published too, I don't recommend this approach. Your empirical results ought to have theoretical implications. You should not "develop" your theory independently or in advance of your results.

As Pierre Bourdieu said, a theory is a "program of perception". In your theory section you are telling the reader how you see the world. In the social sciences, this means announcing which of the available theories of a particular, say, social practice you are letting inform your vision of that practice. It is how you are construing (or even outright constructing) your object. It is very important that, as a program of perception, you let your theory assign a series of descriptive tasks, marked by your concepts. Your theory tells you how you have to describe the world in your analysis (or "results" section). And for this reason it is important make an inventory of the concepts (the theoretical terms) you will use in your paper. While your analysis will use these concepts, your theory section will account for them.

A theory is built out of concepts. Concepts inform our vision; they make us see a set of facts, actions or events as something, i.e., as being of a particular kind. When we see something as, say, a "technology of self" or a "sensemaking process" or an "abstract machine" we have subsumed some part of the social world under a concept. Indeed, there will usually be more concrete objects and therefore more particular concepts: conduct, action, affects. This is why some people also call concepts "categories of observation". They simply make it possible to see particular things. More precisely, they make us construe the flux of experience as made up of empirical objects of a particular kinds. And objects in turn are simply limits on the possible. An object's "properties", i.e., the specific truths you can state about an object, are ultimately limits on the way they can be combined with other objects (defined by the theory).

These possibilities are precisely what you want to remind the reader of. They are the expectations that your results will artfully disappoint. A good research paper in the social sciences shows that the objects that constitute the social world are capable of being combined in ways we did not expect. And it was our theory that conditioned us to hold those expectations in the first place.

Standard Issue Implications

2012-02-09T06:59:00.002+01:00

These posts about the standard-issue social science paper (or standard issues in social science papers) are intended to get you thinking about the separate components of your knowledge base that put you in a position to write such a paper. You need not just "empirical results" but also an everyday "factual background", for example. It is not enough that you have seen something in your data; the result has to stand out in the everyday world of practice. I'll write about the theory section tomorrow to complete this series; this morning I want to talk about how important it is that your results have a specifiable set of "implications". Before you can expect to publish your paper, after all, you must be aware of how your reader's mind should be changed by reading. What does your work imply?

I have already said that the results section should artfully disappoint your reader's expectations. And the reader's expectations, in an academic paper, are shaped by the theory that the reader and writer share. But disappointments come in many shapes and sizes. Roughly speaking, a paper may highlight two kinds of implication, theoretical and practical. The results may evoke a disappointment in the theory, implying that the theory should be modified to accommodate the new facts brought to light by the study. Theories are always "underdetermined" by observation, i.e., our knowledge of particular facts, so we are getting used to having to modify our theories as new work brings new facts to light. You want to make sure that the implications of your study are precisely a modification of your theory, not its outright rejection. There are rare moments in the history of a discipline when a paper that argues for the replacement of one theory with another can be published (these moments are what Kuhn called "crises", which precede his "scientific revolutions"). But normally you want to imply only that a theory, which should remain in place (and dominant) after you have published your work, needs to rethink certain assumptions.

The other kind of implication is practical. Here we suggest that we are really disappointed in the world, the behavior of practitioners. If only they understood the theory (which is right about these matters), and lived up to our expectations of them, their practices would be much more successful. That is, we are making recommendations to practitioners in light of empirical study of their practices, framed by a particular theory. Bob Sutton's "no asshole rule" is such a recommendation. He is telling practitioners that "research shows" that hiring assholes (or keeping them around if you have accidentally already hired one) is a bad idea. He uses a variety of theories to show that assholes undermine your ability to bring about what he calls a "civilized" workplace. He is adjusting our view of who contributes to the value of an organization.

The implications section is best imagined as consisting of five paragraphs or one-eighth of the 40-paragraph paper. That will mean you are drawing between 3 and 5 specific implications (depending on how you write the section). And you are perfectly entitled to draw both kinds of implication: recommendations for practice and contributions to theory. Just keep it simple. The main critical standard here is a logical one: your recommendations have to "follow" from your background (description of practice), your theory, and your results in a logical way.

Standard Issue Background

2012-02-08T07:01:00.001+01:00

It is commonplace to begin a paper with a few commonplaces about the world in which we live. This world will be described in a way that emphasizes the social practices that the paper will offer a scientific analysis of. But the description will not itself be scientific. It will, of course, be "knowledgeable", but the knowledge it contains will not be dependent on either the theory or the method that supports the analysis. Instead, it will be based on sources that are also available to the reader, that is, published work.

That first paragraph of the paper, which establishes a common place where the reader and writer can share their interest in a particular corner of social life, will sometimes require elaboration. That is what the background section is for. The reader may know something about lean management practices, for example, but nothing about the manufacture and distribution of cardboard boxes in Sweden. Or the reader may need to know some general, historical facts about the company or companies that the writer has studied. The information that the writer provides here will, again, be available to the reader (and the writer does well to cite some good sources of the information along the way) but the writer is providing it anyway, for the reader's convenience. It is information that the reader could be aware of but presumably isn't. The reader will not find it presumptuous of the writer to assume that reader is ignorant about it.

The first paragraph of the introduction and the (roughly) five paragraphs of the background section really state the same claim. The introductory paragraph is the top of the iceberg (the summit), the background section is the tip of the iceberg (the part that is above water), and the dignity of the movement of this iceberg comes from everything the writer knows but does not say about the company, country or industry that the paper discusses. This is important to keep in mind as part of your growing base of knowledge. If you are doing a case study in a particular industry you will have a great deal of specialized knowledge about a particular company or, even more specifically, a particular team in a particular company. But you are not an expert on what that team does if you do not learn something about the factual world that it is embedded in. A scholar who has spent a lot of time within a company should be an interesting conversationalist about both that company and the industry it works in. That scholar should also be a reliable "go to person" for ordinary facts related to it.

The content of the background section can be easily distinguished from that of the "analysis" or "results" section by being "factual" but not, properly speaking, "empirical". The facts that are adduced here are not drawn from the experience of the writer, but from hearsay and reading (in the case of the former, preferably confirmed by the latter). By contrast, the facts that are presented in the results section are supported by "data" that have been gathered by way of a "method". This has an important consequence: the writer has a special authority to speak about his or her results. Because a valid method has been applied, we are entitled to trust the author's presentation. Moreover over, we have no easy way of validating the results themselves. To do so, we'd have to requisition the writer's data. Even then, we'd have to trust that it wasn't just made up. So, to be really sure, we'd have repeat the study, i.e., carry out our own observations of the same phenomena, i.e., have the same experiences. It is only in extreme cases that we'd go through that kind of trouble.

But the background section can be "fact checked" in a more workaday sense. The reader can simply read the sources that the writer uses to support his or her claims. We can even find some better sources, where these are available. That is, because the background consists of commonplace claims, the writer has no special authority to make them. The text is also open to critique in a quite different way here than the results section is.

Standard Issue Methods

2012-02-07T07:03:00.001+01:00

The methods section is perhaps the most conventional part of a standard research paper in the social sciences. There is a certain amount of room for creative syntheses of theory, and often a great deal of freedom in how the results themselves are presented. But the methods you use, and they way you talk about them, have to make your reader trust you. After all, you are setting the reader up for an artful disappointment. It is the methods section that ensures that the reader will actually feel that disappointment rather than merely doubt your results.

The most important thing, however, is that you tell the reader the truth about what you did. This section must accurately describe how you gathered the data on which you base your conclusions. How many interviews did you do? Over how long a period did you do onsite observation? How many surveys did you send out? How did you select your subjects and informants? How big was the data set you drew from industry databases?

But you must also show an awareness of the standard methodologies in your field. Though the distinction is sometimes blurred, method is what you did, methodology is the account of why it is the right thing to do. The standards here are often expressed by others in classic papers or handbooks. In the fields I normally work with, for example, if you're doing a case study you are likely to cite Kathleen Eisenhardt's paper "Building Theories from Case Study Research" (AMR, 1989) and, just as likely, Robert Yin's widely read handbook, Case Study Research (Sage, 2009). You do not have to agree with everything they say, and both approaches themselves have a history of reception, i.e., their views have been adapted and modified in particular studies that may look more like your own. The point is merely that in order to be taken seriously as a "case study", your paper must acknowledge precisely the tradition of case-study research that is informed and guided by such "standard" statements (accounts) of method.

The good news is that once you have shown that you are an intelligent reader of the methodologies that are available in your field, your reader is likely to trust even your intelligent breaches of those methods. In one sense, it is true what Paul Feyerabend said many years ago in Against Method: "The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes" (p. 7). But once you've done "whatever" it takes to reach your conclusions, you must make a compelling case for what you've done. And here it is always a good idea to gesture respectfully at the conventional wisdom that constitutes your field of research.

Standard Issue Results

2012-02-06T06:59:00.006+01:00

In a standard-issue academic paper, the analysis of your results occupies about 37.5% of the text, or fifteen out of forty paragraphs. This morning I'd like to say something about how those fifteen paragraphs should be written. Keep in mind that this is the section in which you are the epistemic authority. Unlike the theory and method sections, your reader is not presumed to understand in advance what you are saying. Unlike the background section, your reader is not presumed to have access to sources that might contradict you. In the results section, you have the data. Your readers are, on the whole, going to trust you when you tell them what your data says.

I suggest you divide the section into two to four main parts, perhaps framed by an opening paragraph or two and a concluding summary. (It possible to do away with this frame by letting your methods section outline the structure of your results section and opening the implications section with a summary of the results.) The results section will be making an overall claim, which will have been summarized in the third paragraph of your introduction ("This paper shows that..."). But this claim will find support in a number of sub-claims. I suggest coming up with two to four claims mainly to give us that much-needed sense of finitude, each claim can then be given three to four paragraphs of support. In some cases, however, you'll have ten or more claims, each of which will have its own paragraph. The point of these proportions is not impose a set form on the presentation of your results but to get you to think about how the space of your results section will be structured.

The structure of the space will make it easier to organize your time. You goal, as always, is to get your prose into good enough shape to let you write a coherent paragraph (six sentences of prose that support a single, well-defined claim) in thirty minutes. Since you'll be writing fifteen paragraphs, you'll need seven and a half hours to do it, or three two-and-a-half-hour sessions. So when you are looking over your data, try to analyze it into claims that your are able to support in this way. This is the key to "prosing your world", to putting what you have seen into writing.

A good results section is an account of your observations. It's not an account of everything you've seen or heard in the field, nor an exhaustive presentation of your data set. It is a summary of the data in support of empirical claims, i.e., claims about "what is the case". Your background section also makes claims about what is the case, but let's call these claims merely "factual" and not "empirical". Like your empirical claims (your results), you must strive for the truth, but unlike them they are not based on observation. It is in your results section that your claims are based on your own first-hand research experience (that's what "empirical" means). This is where you come to represent the world of practice. It is where you make it available for theorizing.

Standard Issue

2012-02-03T07:00:00.004+01:00

"The world exists to end up in a book," said Stéphane Mallarmé. For today's scholars, it might seem as though it exists to end up in a journal article. But it would be more accurate to say that their objects of inquiry are constructed precisely in order to end up in such an article. It is the standard unit of knowledge-production. Yesterday, one of my readers reminded me that I had promised to say something about the individual parts a journal article in upcoming posts. I'll get to that next week (I promise). This morning I want to say something more generally about the importance of the journal article for the life of inquiry.

Poets produce poems. Scholars produce articles. They convert experience into a particular kind of expression with a particular kind of form, one that is recognizable to their readers. A well-written journal article will present a single, easily identifiable claim; it will show that something is the case. And it will provide an argument not just for the truth of that claim but for its relevance for a particular line of inquiry. It will also situate both the claim and the line of inquiry in a world of shared concern that goes beyond the narrow, scholarly interests of both the writer and the reader. Within those narrow limits, however, it will respect the field's theoretical and methodological commitments. Before it is over, it will offer a simple one-paragraph statement of the argument for the central claim (thesis) of the paper that assumes that the very knowledgeable and highly intelligent reader has understood the rest of the paper.

The article will consist of roughly 40 paragraphs. Five of them will provide the introductory and concluding remarks. Five of them will establish a general, human background. Five of them will state the theory that informs the analysis. Five of them will state the method by which the data was gathered. The analysis will make roughly three overarching claims (that support the main thesis) in three five-paragraph sections. The implications of the research will be outlined in five paragraphs. These are ball-park figures, not hard and fast rules, but "knowing" something for academic purposes means being able to articulate yourself in roughly these proportions.

The scholarly conversation depends on respecting these proportions. That is: scholars expect to be talked to in a particular way, they do not expect a unique, transformative literary experience. Jonathan Mayhew has rightly described literature as the kind of writing that "kicks your ass with its transformative power". Academic writing serenely disdains to kick your ass like this. Rather, as I'm fond of saying, it is the purpose of a journal article to artfully disappoint our expectations of a particular object of inquiry. If you want to be a scholar, it is a good idea to learn that art.

Do You Need a Coach?

2012-02-02T07:00:00.003+01:00

The purpose of a coach is to help you train. But you can train on your own as well. So under what circumstances should you find yourself a coach? Consider an analogy. I play the piano every day, mostly for fun, training my ability to improvise. I enjoy it, and I get better. There was a time when I took piano lessons once a week, however, and I'm considering going back to it because I'd like to learn how to a play a few Bach pieces. I do try to play those pieces when I practice, but nothing really comes of it. I can play a few bars with one hand. That's about it. A weekly session with a teacher would probably help me make progress. But I would need to find the time, both to get to the session every week and to practice in a more disciplined way. There's no point in engaging a teacher if I'm not going to practice. Of course: there is a good chance that if I do engage a teacher I will practice more, simply to impress her. Commonsense stuff.

Writers can also benefit from the guidance and encouragement of a coach. But it's not for everyone, and today is not always the right time. When people contact me because they would like some coaching, therefore, I always begin by giving them some free advice. First I have them describe their current writing practices and the projects they are working on. Take a couple of weeks, I then tell them, and find one or two hours every day in which to work on those projects. Find 10 hours altogether and book them into your calendar. Now divide these writing sessions into 30-minute sections and spend each of them on a single, well-defined prose paragraph. Spend about 20 minutes writing it, one minute reading it out loud, and another five or six minutes editing it for clarity. Take a three minute break, then move on to the next paragraph. After ten hours of work, you've written 20 paragraphs, or about half a paper's worth of prose. (It's relatively easy to decide what 20 paragraphs of a current project will have to say in advance. Just think of your paper according my standard outline.)

The purpose of this exercise is to gauge your strength and ability as a writer. If you send me the results of these ten hours of work, I know what your prose is capable of "on command", as it were. You will have spent ten hours writing about something you know (which means something you're supposed to be able to write about.) You will have given each paragraph a reasonable amount of time. The paragraphs will not be perfect, but I will know what constraints they were written under. Most importantly, if you can't write this way for ten hours in a two week period, or if you think that's a stupid idea, you don't want me as a coach. It's the basic form of the discipline I train.

The Maintenance of Prose

2012-02-01T06:59:00.000+01:00

"Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the bad writer wants to do harm." (Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, p. 32)

Good academic writers contribute to the efficiency of language, and they do so in a very specific way. One thing that we need to be able to use language for is to state facts and support them with arguments; the universities should serve society by maintaing precisely that function. From undergraduates to full professors, academics ought to be keeping the language in shape to "assert and deny facts," as Bertrand Russell put it. They do this by keeping themselves (their minds) in shape. And they do this (or should be doing this) by writing regularly. A university should be a place where students meet teachers who care about language and where this passion is passed on in the natural way. People who are able to write clearly and accurately, and who want to write that way for a living, should find themselves drawn to the universities. They should feel that it is a natural environment for them. That is, they should get the sense that what is being required of them is also something they are good at. Maintaining the prose of the world is a labour of love.

Are YOU Adrift?

2012-01-31T06:59:00.001+01:00

Arum and Roksa showed that, by and large, undergraduates only get smarter if they are enrolled in programs that require them to do a significant amount of reading and writing. Now, the older we get the less justified we are in blaming our schools for our failure to learn. Indeed, when I talk to undergraduates, telling them about Arum and Roksa's study, I always emphasize that this is not another opportunity to blame your program or your teachers for your learning problems. On the contrary, since reading and writing are individual activities that anyone can do on their own, and since there is no real mystery (unless you insist on mystifying things) about what you could read and what you could write, it is within everyone's power to stop "drifting" and start "sailing" at any time.

This, then, also goes for PhD students and early-career researchers who no longer have a "writing requirement" as such. There is an increasing pressure to publish, to be sure, but there is no teacher or program that specifically requires you to write. Apart from not satisfying the demand to publish, the problem with not writing is that you are subject to same effects on your intelligence as undergraduates. My fear (though it is not actually borne out by Arum and Roksa's study) is that, in an academic setting, which insulates you from the need to engage in other intricate practical tasks as well (like those carried out by carpenters and dentists), not writing not only fails to improve your intelligence: it actually makes you dumber. You are letting your mind degenerate.

Remember that scholarship goes on in a sea of prose. You can take that prose in passively, by reading book reviews and newspapers, watching the news, going to lectures (and watching them on YouTube). Or you can keep your keel and rudder and screw squarely in the water. It will keep you in control of the ship and this will maintain your sense of direction. No one may be asking you stay at the helm and steer. The ocean itself is your imperative.

Are PhD Students "Academically Adrift"?

2012-01-30T06:59:00.003+01:00

After reading Arum and Roksa's book, I define "academically adrift" as the condition of being enrolled in a school that does not require that you read and, especially, write on a regular basis. Last week, I started thinking about whether PhD students can be said to work under those conditions. Programs vary, of course, but I think it is safe to say that many of them (especially in Europe) involve a great deal of independent study. Also, few PhD programs set a hard and fast deadline for the submission of the thesis at the end. The funding runs out, but the program does not thereby end. This means that it is often only after it is too late that problems in the writing process become conspicuous. Finally, supervisors, who are themselves busy people, rarely actually supervise the work in the sense of providing a surveillance function. If the student wants to defer a deadline or cancel a meeting, that's normally allowed without question.

This means that the typical PhD program is a great place to develop bad work habits. But it is also a place where all sorts of non-curricular activities impinge on the core activity of researching and writing the thesis. PhD students are embarked on an important leg of their careers as scholars, and they are acutely aware of the need to network, which often means participating in a wide variety of "social" activities that do not directly contribute to their project. In some periods, moreover, they are are also likely to feel the pressure to teach more strongly than the pressure to learn. All of these factors resemble, albeit at a "higher level", the conditions that keep undergraduates from learning anything of lasting value in school, i.e., that keeps them "adrift".

What Arum and Roksa showed is that being adrift in this way wastes the opportunity to become smarter. It is only students who read and write regularly who improve their capacities for analytical reasoning and critical thinking. They are keeping their brains in shape by swimming in a sea of knowledge rather than just floating on its surface.

Silence, Exile, and Cunning

2012-01-27T06:51:00.000+01:00

Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile and cunning. (James Joyce)

As always, let me urge some caution when interpreting the pronouncements of literary types about their art. First of all, as an academic writer your aim should not be to "express yourself" nor to do so "as freely and as wholly as you can". Secondly, in serving the modern university, you are very likely to be serving something in which, at least partially, you don't quite believe. That is, you will be subject to a great deal of ambiguity that Joyce was pretending to keep himself aloof from. (A good example of something similar in the world of academia is Wittgenstein, who was also able to decide for himself what he would and would not do, even when he was at Cambridge. But there is good reason to think that he was armed with more than just silence, exile and cunning. He was also very rich.) Still, I bring this up because there must be some part of us, often precisely the part of us that has the task of writing, that must experience "the loneliness which is the truth about things". We write in order to communicate a truth to others that they don't yet know. And so our knowledge of that truth is a lonely one as we write. Fortunately, as scholars, we are very much first and foremost (Heidegger's "proximally and for the most part") embedded in a community of shared knowledge. This makes the work easier. It means that we must withdraw into our exile for only a few hours each day.

Exiles

2012-01-26T07:02:00.004+01:00

Jonathan has joined a writing group started by Tanya. He meets with four other writers in a café twice a week to "do [their] solitary writing in company". It reminded me that, many years ago, I read a biography of Guillaume Apollinaire, in which he was described as meeting with a partner every day to sit at desks facing each other to write. I don't know how many other writers have worked this way, but it obviously works for some people. It is important, however, to remember that writing remains a solitary activity. If you're having trouble sitting down to do the work, I normally don't recommend solutions as drastic as meeting up with other people to keep each other motivated.

Then again, for what must be a couple of years now, I've been meeting with a running partner, for similar reasons. The social commitment makes it (or at least made it at the time) a bit more likely that I would actually get the run in. The trick here was that neither of us was allowed to cancel if we couldn't make it. We'd just not show up. The other would thereby have gotten "fooled" into running. I've heard of other jogging partnerships that fall apart precisely because one calls up the other the night before to say they're not feeling well, or will be away on a business trip, and the morning jog is thereby essentially cancelled. So, if you're going to have a writing group, I say, make sure that you show up regardless of whether anyone else does.

Yesterday, I started thinking seriously about organizing a retreat for writers, or possibly just an internal exile (a short version of the "Writers' Colony" I did last year.) I'm generally resistant to this idea too because it gives the false impression that writing is supposed to get done in a short period of intense work. But my retreat would involve three hours of writing every day and three hours of discussion. So it would really just enforce "ideal conditions". And the social dimension would certainly help some people maintain their discipline.

James Joyce famously advised "the artist as a young man" to cultivate "silence, exile and cunning". More on this later.

Mens sana...

2012-01-25T06:59:00.001+01:00

I'm trying to unpack Juvenal's slogan "mens sana in corpore sano". "A healthy mind in a healthy body," some translate it. Apparently, however, it really means "a sound mind in a healthy [or sound] body." That suits me fine because it allows me to avoid talk of "mental health". But what is a "sound mind"?

If good health (a sound body) is about being "in shape" to carry out the work that gives you pleasure, I want to argue, then a sound mind is likewise one that let's you experience pleasure in your work. We don't have to distinguish between physical and intellectual labour in this regard. Any craftsman needs to be of both sound mind and sound body in order to enjoy the work he or she does. There is a an aesthetic dimension to the careful manipulation of materials, their composition into a particular arrangement, to a particular end.

"Beauty is aptness to purpose," Ezra Pound reminds us. To produce an object, whether a piece of music, a painting, a table, or a text that is beautiful is a pleasurable experience. Or, at least, it ought to be. Even the most romantically suffering artist, I like to think, suspends that suffering in the actual creative moment. I.e., when the work is going well, when the artist feels that object is becoming increasingly apt to its purpose, this is a pleasurable experience.

Writers, especially academic writers, sometimes lack this soundness of mind. Their texts are written in painful confusion rather than pleasurable illumination. They loathe the work of writing because it gives them pain. They struggle, sometimes, with the language (even, sometimes, when it is their first language), and sometimes with the ideas they are trying to express. They are like untrained bodies climbing a flight of stairs. They quickly run out of breath.

How do you keep your mind sound? A healthy and varied diet: read different kinds of text, and read in moderation. And chew your food: read carefully, with comprehension. Exercise: write every day, in moderation. (Don't wear yourself out.) And write in a calm and orderly way: one paragraph at a time, 30 minutes at a time.

...in corpore sano

2012-01-24T07:00:00.000+01:00

"It is more than the simple athleticism of the mens sana in corpore sano. The conception of the body as perfect instrument of the increasing intelligence pervades." (Ezra Pound)

What is a healthy body? We often associate health with a certain kind of look, promoted by health magazines, television and movies. A healthy body "looks good". It has a certain leanness; it is slim and muscular. It is also clean and (often) relatively hairless (at least neatly trimmed). It has a fresh smile. Or a serious, determined look on its face. Its eyes are clear, bright.

In a more substantial sense, being in good health simply means not suffering from any diseases and, more generally, a healthy body is a resilient body—one that doesn't get sick. We can add to this that a healthy body has strength and endurance. It is capable of effort. It also has a certain way of carrying itself. It is comfortable within its skin.

Health is, fortunately, still associated with moderation, balance, the middle way. Body builders are not "pictures of health". They are artists, working at the extreme limits of what their bodies can accomplish. Even professional athletes, like cyclists and football players, are not what we immediately think of when we think of healthy people. They are successful, to be sure, but we understand that they are sacrificing their bodies to the cause.

Like wealth, health is about knowing when you've got enough. The healthy body has the strength it needs to do the work that needs to get done. If you live on the fifth floor and can take the stairs easily, two steps at a time, you're demonstrating health. If you can get out of bed in the morning without grumbling (too much), you're demonstrating health. If you can stay awake, concentrate, and make intricate movements as needed you're in good, practical health. You've got good posture. You move gracefully. Etc.

The capacity for work has become an almost legal definition of health. The body is healthy so long as it can contribute to the gross national product. An unhealthy body, accordingly, is more difficult to insure. It is more likely to get hurt and sick.

I want to add a more subjective but very important aspect of health. It is a capacity for experience of a particular kind, namely, a capacity for pleasure. A healthy body is able to enjoy life.

Sleep, Rest and Repetition

2012-01-23T06:55:00.001+01:00

The key to keeping in shape, whether mentally or physically, is to maintain a regular pattern of work and rest. Too much work, too often, wears you down. Too much rest, too often, drains your strength.

Sleeping is a normal, nightly way of getting some rest, and if you feel as though you're not performing at your best in your work, you may want to look at your pattern of sleep. Spend a few days prioritizing sleep, which means getting to bed at a suitable time, i.e., mindful of when you're getting up. For me, this actually means getting up at a suitable hour and then avoiding any extended napping during the day (which makes it hard to fall asleep when I need to). Given a good alarm clock, it is easier to control when you are awake than when you fall asleep.

By a similar token, if your periods of inactivity and activity are too long (say three eight- or ten-hour days working on a project followed by a week of vaguely worrying about it, you can begin to discipline the process at both ends. On the working days, stop earlier (you should be cutting this down to three or, at most, four hours a day). On the non-working days, force yourself to work on the project, no matter how ineffectually, for thirty minutes (it's much easier to begin work on a project knowing that you'll stop half an hour later).

You should not rest only when you sleep.

I don't know whether there's a non-arbitrary reason for the length of the week. But the idea of having a day of rest every seven days, in any case, is firmly entrenched in our culture (and pretty much all cultures). It is worth observing. Knowing that you will rest a little every day and that you will spend a whole day largely resting and enjoying the company of your friends and family is a good way to keep your workday focused. The whole idea is to have regular routine that you can count on: know when you will be doing what. Let your mind and body count on when it will be exerting itself and when it will be recovering.

The Socratic Position

2012-01-17T07:00:00.000+01:00

"Popular opinion maintains that the world needs a republic, needs a new social order and a new religion—but no one considers that what the world, confused simply by too much knowledge, needs is a Socrates." (S. Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death)

Socrates considered himself a "midwife". The god, he tells Theaetetus, did not grant him the power to conceive ideas of his own, but he could help others give birth to theirs. Also, once delivered, he could help his client determine whether what had been expressed was a true brain child or a mere "wind egg". Socrates, that is, did not possess any knowledge himself. Instead, he possessed the ability to distinguish between the known and the unknown.

I like to think that this is what I do too. The difference is that Socrates practiced his art in conversation, whereas I practice it in writing. I help scholars get their ideas written down on paper, where they can be examined. I then help them edit their texts so that they become the clearest possible statement of their views.

But Socrates' approach is often distinguished from that of the Sophists, who also helped their clients express their ideas. The Sophists were spin doctors, helping people express themselves more persuasively. More concretely, Kierkegaard reminds us that Aristotle defined "sophistry as the art of making money" (PF, p. 6). That is, part of the Socratic position is not to charge the client for the service. This is something I've been able to do for the past five years by having a permanent position within an academic department. I made a salary, but I didn't charge my authors individually for services rendered. So while I did help people become more persuasive, I could say that was not thereby practicing "the art of making money".

The challenge of constructing a socratic position now lies in making sure that my economic relationship is with the institutions that hire scholars, i.e., universities. My work with the individual authors must remain that of a barren midwife helping deliver the ideas of others into the world ... for free.

Half-hour Literature

2012-01-12T07:00:00.001+01:00

In the preface to his Philosophical Fragments, Søren Kierkegaard announces that the book is "merely a pamphlet". It's his way of simulating Socratic ignorance ("I know that I know nothing") in writing. He says he is not offering a contribution to "the scientific-scholarly endeavor", and that we should please not ask him what his opinion is. Holding an opinion, he says, is counter to his training in "danc[ing] lightly in the service of thought". He thereby renounces "the concordance of joys that go with holding an opinion" (I think we safely read some irony into that statement). This passage, in particular, struck me when I read it last night:

It is merely a pamphlet and will not become anything more, even if I ... continue it with seventeen others. It has as little chance of becoming anything more as a writer of half-hour pieces has of writing anything else even if he writes folios.

"Half-hour pieces". Blogposts? Another translation talks about "half-hour literature"; the Danish has "halvtimeslæsning", i.e., "half-hour reading", which suggests that it's the time it takes to read the piece, not write it, that is in question. In any case, I've decided to cut down my blogging sessions to 30 minutes. In a sense, I've become too effective at writing one-hour pieces of prose. They come off too composed, too "opinionated" if you will, and certainly too long. I'm going to use my blogging as a training in "dancing lightly" instead.

Métier

2012-01-10T08:00:00.002+01:00

I'm in transition these days. I've decided to leave my position as "resident writing consultant" and go into business for myself, working with writing processes and publication strategies at a number of different European universities. My focus remains on the efficiency and integrity of the individual writing process, which is to say on "the work" itself. But I'm increasingly interested in how research institutions can support that work actively. Too much knowledge remains "in the heads" of scholars, or remains there unnecessarily long.

So I'm once again thinking very seriously about my "métier". What is it that I do? What's my trade? My aim is to help scholars get their ideas "out" in the best possible journal in the shortest possible time. "To put forward" is a root meaning of "to edit", and in that sense, I suppose, my trade is that of an editor. But I'm also seriously concerned about the factors that actually hold their ideas back. These factors are sometimes found in the lives of individual scholars, and sometimes in the scholarly environment in which they work. Overcoming them sometimes requires something more akin to a coach, and sometimes a management consultant.

At a more abstract level, I remain an epistemologist. A philosopher. I am interested in what Kant called "the conditions of the possibility of the experience of objects" or, more colloquially, in what makes knowledge of the world possible. Knowledge is an inexorably social affair. Many of the conditions that enable and inhibit knowing are found in the social environment of research. And many of these are "conversational" in the sense that knowing is always the ability to participate in a conversation. My task, as a philosopher, is simply to make scholars more conversant. This is arguably what Socrates was also doing.

Formal Occasions

2012-01-05T09:17:00.001+01:00

Jonathan and Andrew recommend against "signposting" in your writing. This recommendation is in line with their cultivation of the "classic" style, as presented in Thomas & Turner's Clear and Simple as the Truth (2011). I haven't read the book, but Princeton University Press tells us that

In classic style, the motive is truth, the purpose is presentation, the reader and writer are intellectual equals, and the occasion is informal.

My approach to academic writing endorses all but the last of these; that is, I think academic writers should present truths to peers, but I don't think formalities are entirely out of place. This may well be because I work mainly with writers in the social sciences. The style of writing in the humanities is probably less formal, more classic.

Among the formal constraints of social science writing are the need to present your theory and your method. And the need to state a clear thesis and draw some theoretical or practical implications from it. Another is the need to summarize the argument, first, briefly in an abstract, second, in the introduction and, third, in the conclusion. (These three summaries are directed at subtly different "audiences"—an issue I will speak to in a later post.) The constraints are formal in the sense that they are imposed independent of considerations of content. The reader expects to find a theory section, a methods section, etc. The reader has certain expectations of what the the introduction and conclusion will tell us.

This allows the (experienced) reader of social science to read a paper very selectively and therefore survey its contents very quickly. The classic style, by contrast, presumes that the reader will read the text from start to finish. This presumption, I want to emphasize, is very good for your style. If you write a section on the presumption that most readers (or just bored ones) will simply skip over it, you're liable to lower your standards while editing it too. What I suggest therefore is writing a paper that has a certain kind of surface structure (including signposting, e.g., "In this paper, I show that...", "This section will shift our attention to...", "I will now draw out a number of implications...") but that would make sense without that structure. The best of both worlds, in a sense.

In my heart, I agree with Andrew and Jonathan. Whenever you have to talk about your argument, the "paper-ness of the paper" as Andrew put it, you are taking some of the intensity out of the presentation. But that's also what formalities are for. In business and legal writing, as in social life quite generally, various institutions guide us through what would otherwise be complex intellectual and emotional situations in a few simple moves, recognized by all as well-intentioned, if often not very interesting, attempts to satisfy a range of interested parties. It is sometimes said that we resort to formal rules in order to "avoid misunderstandings". Sadly, but I think unavoidably, we also resort to them in order to avoid understanding each other too well. More constructively, we might say that they spare our readers the trouble of having to understand everything we think we know in order to engage with some of it. The formal constraints of academic writing allow us to share our thoughts with each other without having to share all of them. They let us examine each other's ideas one at a time, as Ezra Pound hoped we could.

The First Three Paragraphs

2012-01-03T08:07:00.000+01:00

It is difficult to overstate the importance of a good introduction. If your reader does not have a good sense of your argument by the end of the third paragraph (before reading the 600th word), there is something seriously wrong with your paper. Or, perhaps more tellingly, if you are unable to outline your argument straightforwardly and clearly in three paragraphs, you will be unable to write a good paper. When I talk about what a scholarly article is, I always use the opportunity to sketch "the ideal introduction". It consists of exactly three paragraphs and no more than six-hundred words.

The first paragraph tells us about the world we are living in. This should obviously be the world that your paper helps us to better understand. It's the world that needs to be understood in precisely the way you understand it. But in this paragraph we (your readers) don't want this understanding, we just want a recognizable description of the world we share with you. Talk to us like we only need to be reminded that this is where we live. It should be familiar to us and based on widely available sources. While you should avoid the letter of a statement like "We live in a world of ..." or "Ours is an age of ...", this is very much the spirit of the first paragraph. It's a time for commonplaces; it provides a shared place for you and your readers. In an important sense, you are here describing the practices that your paper is about. And these practices are interesting because there is some problem with them.

The second paragraph tells us about the science that studies this world. It summarizes the body of scholarship that has taken an interest in the problem that is described in the first paragraph. There are two good ways and one common but bad way to structure this paragraph. It can state either a constitutive consensus in the literature or a just as constitutive controversy. Scholarship will normally be characterized either by broad agreement about some issue (which your work will then challenge) or by a standing disagreement (where your paper will provide support to one side). Many papers these days begin by identifying a "gap" in the literature (which the paper then proposes to fill), but this is a false start. The gap is only interesting because what you have found there bears upon some interesting consensus or controversy. So you should fill in the gap in advance (i.e., in this second paragraph) with the theoretical assumptions that shape your readers' expectations of your subject matter. Indeed, if the first paragraph is about practice, this paragraph is about theory; the problem persists despite precisely this theory.

The third paragraph tells us about your paper. "In this paper, I show that..." is a nice, tight way to do this. Notice that supporting such a sentence requires you not to offer evidence but to outline your paper; it's a statement about your paper not about your object. So here you have to say something about, especially, your method (what have you done to put yourself in a position to know you are right). It should also briefly sketch the content of each section and leave us with a good sense of the implications of the paper as a whole (a paper will normally have a section for implications, so you may just summarize that section). The implications may be either theoretical or practical: you may show that practice ought to fall in line with a perfectly good theory, thus solving the problem by making the world a more "ideal" place, or that the theory has be adjusted to better capture the "real-world" practices, thus at least acknowledging the problem. Or you may argue for some combination of such implications.

These three paragraphs, finally, should each be organized around a claim that can be expressed in a single, declarative sentence. The rest of the paragraph merely supports that claim. Notice that the thesis of your paper is stated only within a larger claim about its being the thesis of your paper. And that claim has been nested in a claim about the world and a claim about the research that has already been done about that world. Since the world is construed in terms of some interesting problem, there should be no need for an explicit "statement of the problem". But if your editor (or teacher) insists, there's no harm in providing it.

Resolve

2012-01-02T13:59:00.003+01:00

Though we all know it doesn't do any good, many of you have probably resolved to be more disciplined about your writing this year. Resolutions don't work, but discipline does. So let's, once again, begin the year by issuing the 16-Week Challenge.

First, some basic math. There are eight weeks from the second week of February until the Easter break (in Denmark many of us take the week between Palm Sunday and Easter off; some also take week 7 off because it's a school holiday. If you do this as well, you can recover that week by starting a week earlier, right at the end of January). There are then another eight weeks until the end of May. 16 weeks of 5 working days each is 80 days. If you imagine writing for three hours a day, that gives you 240 hours. Let that be the maximum limit. Try to appreciate the finitude of the problem.

Now, look into your calendar from February 6 to May 31. Block out the Easter and May holidays (in Denmark there are quite a few statutory holidays; adjust the challenge to your local conditions; in fact, Easter may not be especially relevant for your purposes). Resolve to write every remaining weekday for at least 30 minutes and at most 3 hours. (Never write for a whole day.) Book these sessions into your calendar. In an ideal world you would book 80 three-hour sessions from, say, 9:00 to noon. But you'll probably have to settle for about 70 sessions, many of which will only last 30 minutes. It all depends on your time and, to an extent, on your resolve.

How many hours of writing time does that give you? How much do you realistically think you can accomplish in that time? Set some writing goals on that basis. Then break those goals up into smaller tasks ("things to do") and assign those tasks time in your calendar. Be as a specific as possible about what you will be writing on a particular day. Try to be realistic. If you need time for "free writing" or "thought writing" (writing to find out what you think) book that into your calendar as well, but the important part of the challenge is to find time to write down what you already know needs to be written. If you don't yet know what you're going to say this semester, then your challenge is, in part, to figure that out. But you should still find at least 30 minutes a day to write down something you know you want to say. Keep in mind that we are only talking about sixteen weeks in the very near future. Surely you know something about what you have to get down on paper.

Assuming that you do have something say, then, here's the challenge: write always and only when (and what) your calendar tells you to. Don't write when "inspired" to do so (unless this happens to coincide with your writing schedule) and do everything possible to keep your appointments with yourself (the writer). Make a plan and resolve (if you must) to stick to it.

Happy New Year!

Orhan Pamuk: "I am a planner."

2011-12-29T11:17:00.003+01:00

Pamuk talks about his writing process beginning at 28:33.

Schools & Scholars

2011-12-20T06:59:00.000+01:00

When we talk about "academic writing", we're often talking about the sort of writing that students are expected to do. But we're really talking about something students are expected to learn how to do while at school, and which they'll presumably continue to do throughout their lives. That is, "writing for academic purposes" is not writing for the purpose of passing an examination, and it is not writing to an audience of one, i.e., the teacher. Nor are the "conventions" that govern the writing tanatamount to the demands of the "assignment". The artificiality of a school assignment is intended to simulate the conditions under which students might develop the art of scholarship.

When I went looking for standard guidelines for writing in the humanities just now, the result was, not suprisingly, the guidelines that teachers make available to their students. I really liked Celia Easton's guidelines because of her focus on the reader. "The first thought any writer should give to a paper is not 'What am I going to say?' but 'Who is my audience?'" And she then points out that the audience should consist of a like-minded readers (such as fellow students). Even when the reader is the course instructor, he or she is "not a bored or sneering reader looking for a single interpretation. The professor is interested in the same work that you are writing about, probably knows a good deal about it, and wants to be persuaded by a claim that you make about your topic." This shift of attention from the teacher or examinor to an "interested reader" is very important. Today, to many working scholars have installed a "bored and sneering" reviewer between themselves as writers and their real readers. Some have entirely lost sight of the reader (as, sadly, have some reviewers and editors).

I want to emphasize the knowledge of the reader here. "To know whom to write for," said Virginia Woolf, "is to know how to write." That's the very basic principle of all academic writing, and in the humanities it has an interesting twist:

When writing about a treatise, a satire, a novel, a document, etc., remember that your reader already knows the plot or substance of the text. Concentrate on how the author expresses what happens. You can refer to events and ideas without describing them as though they were completely new to your reader. E.g., rather than telling your reader, "Jefferson argues for the American colonies to break away from the domination of Britain," you can say, "Jefferson's argument that the American colonies break away from the domination of Britain combines inductive reasoning with an emotional rhetorical appeal." From there you would provide textual examples, and comment upon each one you select. (Easton, my emphasis)

I think this is the most important thing that social science writers need to learn if they want to make the move towards "liberal learning". Unlike the results of field work, interviews, or surveys, the materials being analyzed in the humanities should be presumed to be known to the reader. That is, in the humanities, we're talking to people who already know.

* * *

RSL will now be taking a break. There will be some changes, but I'll explain all that when I get back to it in 2012. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Hitch's 20-minute Prose Form

2011-12-16T12:05:00.001+01:00

Christopher Hitchens will be missed here at RSL too for his "facility with words". You don't have to like his ideas, or even his style, to admire the strength of his prose. The shape of his form. This interview on 60-minutes underscores the point. Though I don't recommend begging off for a moment to write after dinner, having the power to do so is entirely part of that "power of facing unpleasant facts" that Hitchens himself praised Orwell for. Your writing must have a certain strength to be deployed effectively in a short burst at short notice. You do well to develop that strength. Hitchens, it would seem, was setting a good example until the end.

Form in the Humanities (2)

2011-12-15T06:57:00.002+01:00

Where social science seeks knowledge, the humanities seek understanding. While the social sciences stake their credibility on their theories and methods, the humanities stake their credibility on their style. Pure forms are hard to find, of course. Many social scientists have humanistic ambitions—roughly speaking, literary ambitions—while many humanists have grown envious of, especially, the theoretical sophistication of their peers in the sciences. For the past fifty years, the language of the social sciences (the appeal to theory and method) has been actively supported by a network of opinion leaders and funding bodies. This year, a central institution in that network, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, proposed a reorientation in a more humanistic direction. My concern, as always, is with the effect of such reorientations on the way we write the results of our research down.

(An aside: Fabio Rojas recently posted a link to Clifford Geertz's interesting first-hand account of an academic career as it develops its initial literary ambition into a pursuit of a "common language for the social sciences" [PDF].)

If the central conceit of the social sciences is that they have a shared "program of perception" (a theory) and a proven set of procedures (a method), it is the central conceit of the humanities that a good style makes such things unnecessary. The humanistic conceit is sometimes promoted within the social sciences; John Van Maanen's "Style as Theory" is probably the best example. But it's important to keep in mind that the style is here proposed precisely as a theory, and Barbara Czarniawska has, rightly, taken this proposal to have important "methodological" implications*. Here the boundaries between the social sciences and liberal arts are certainly blurred, but I think it is safe to say that this kind of rhetoric is intended to allow (Czarniawska uses the word "permit") us to use a notion of "style" to underpin both our methodological and theoretical discussions. That is, we are still dealing in theory and method, we're just using style to sell them.

The more radical proposal is to do away with theory and method, replacing both, simultaneously, with style. This, I want to suggest, means writing not as one knower to another (one social scientist to another) but as one thinker to another (one humanist to another). What is presented in the writing is not knowledge but understanding. The presentation will still consist of a series of claims, and many of these claims will be expressions of "justified, true belief" in coherent paragraphs. So, yes, there will be lots of knowledge in the text, and a humanist remains a very a knowledgeable person. But the style of the writing, not formed by theory and method, is very different. The reader is not expected to believe, but to think.

What I am making explicit here is in many ways the standard defense of a now-familiar kind of work in the social sciences. When I challenge the epistemic foundations of sensemaking research for example, I am often told that it was never meant to be "true". But it must be stressed that sensemaking research—like the kind of journalism that Malcolm Gladwell practices—depends on a reader who will will take the style of the writing as a sign of its credibility (to use James March's word), i.e., as an implicit theory and method, and who will then essentially believe, or "trust" (Czarniawska's word)*, the text. It presents the results of reading as though it were the results of data-collection, i.e., as though the reader does not have access to the sources. If the reader were being addressed not as a social scientist but as a humanist, a more careful kind of scholarship would be required. Sensemaking research is written in the voice of a humanist addressing a social scientist, the voice of someone who claims to understand something reaching out to someone who knows something (else).

I think that if we're truly going to take a turn towards "liberal learning" in business scholarship, we need to begin to write as humanists to one another. What would that mean? Well, it would mean discussing what happens in the books we read as though our readers read those books too. We would not read a novel or a work of popular non-fiction on behalf of our peers in the social sciences; we would read along with our peers in the humanities. We might say that we should address the reader as someone who has the time to read; the social scientist, by contrast, is presumably too busy (engaged in "empirical research") to read books. I can see that I'm going to have to write another post to make good on my promise to offer some practical advice for writers. More on Tuesday.

___________
*See "Karl Weick: Concepts, style, and reflection", published in the Sociological Review.

Form in the Humanities (1)

2011-12-13T06:59:00.002+01:00

My posts about introduction, conclusion and body of a paper provide an outline for a standard social science paper. But what about the humanities? To answer this question I want to explore the possibility of writing a publishable paper without an explicit statement of your "theory" and your "method". I'm doing this both because I want to be of use also to scholars working the humanities and because of the growing interest in a "liberal arts" approach to business studies.

Papers in the humanities will still need an introduction, a conclusion and a substantial analysis. They also do well to have a section devoted to the implications of their results. And there is no immediate reason that these sections cannot be written according to my ideal form. Also, it is often legitimate to provide some background information about, e.g., the author(s) that the paper is about. But instead of telling the reader explicitly how the writer sees the world (theory) and what the writer has done to get a better look at it (method), the paper will try to give the reader an indication of the writer's style. In fact, the possibility I would like to explore here is that the humanities differ from the social sciences precisely in their reliance on style over theory and method to build rapport with the reader. (I'm sure a historian of the social sciences can tell us the importance of the late nineteenth century for the rising fortunes of theory and method against the baseline of style.)

When writing about your theory and method what you are doing is activating the reader's expectations and standards. You're describing the reader's mind and getting the reader to trust you long enough to let you try to change it. A style, meanwhile, is a way of talking about the world and also a way of looking at it; it is the perfect immanence of theory and method, their seamless integration. The fifteen paragraphs that are devoted to background, theory and method in a social science paper must work up to the twenty paragraphs of its analysis and implications. In a humanities paper, you do well to think in similar terms. After the introduction you're going to have to prepare the reader's mind to be changed.

"Form in literature is an arousing and fulfillment of desires," said Kenneth Burke. I often say that in scholarship it is the art of disappointing our peers' expectations—a paper artfully evokes and then artfully disappoints the reader's expectations. So you can see the arc of a piece of scholarship in the humanities as follows:

Introduction
Arousal
Fulfillment
Conclusion

And we can further divide the tasks of "arousal" and "fulfillment" into sub-tasks. There's a kind of general, underlying, "human" arousal and a more specialized, scholarly arousal. That is, we can talk about the broad cultural assumptions about, say, Shakespeare, that no piece of scholarship, no matter how well researched, can proceed without taking stock of, and we can talk about the more focused expectations that a community of specialists have of a reading of any one of its members.

When evoking the expectations of scholars, a writer does well also to give some indication of the sort of reading he or she has done, both its extent and its intensity. A popular audience, or "general reader", will generally be impressed with the scholar's ability simply to summarize the basic plot points of Hamlet and Othello, and saying something half-way interesting about the sixteenth century. But a fellow scholar will want to see an understanding of the issues of interpretation that arise around these works and that period. So the writer must carefully drop names and problems into the first fifteen paragraphs of the paper in order to give the reader a recognizable frame of reference. Also, the reader does well to demonstrate familiarity with the works of Shakespeare, especially those under scrutiny. The writer is here always reminding, not telling, the reader what is going on on the page.

I'll continue this theme on Thursday, getting into greater detail about the passage from "arousal" to "fulfillment" of scholarly desire.

The Professional Human

2011-12-08T06:59:00.003+01:00

It's probably a perennial topic. Lately, however, I've been seeing increasing concern among scholars and administrators about the status of the "humanities" in the university and in social life. A new Carnegie Foundation report argues that undergraduate business education should move towards a "liberal learning" model. On Monday, Jonathan posted his objections to MLA President Russell Berman's "vile editorial", which argues for more efficient (cost-effective) graduate studies in the humanities. The two proposals share the belief that education should produce "professionals". Indeed, on the Harvard Business Review blog last year, Bill Sullivan, one of the authors of the Carnegie report, talked about "the cause of professionalism".

It is instructive to read Sullivan's call for a "liberalized" business curriculum alongside Berman's call for a "professionalized" humanities doctoral program. In many ways the Carnegie Foundation's and the Modern Language Association's take on the future of the humanities pull in opposite directions. Sullivan wants the currently social-science-based business curriculum to look to the humanities as a model for business education. This is in part a reaction to the criticism of the business school's role in forming the minds of the people who, simplifying a little, gave us the financial crisis. The economics-based business curriculum, Sullivan says, is "too narrow". Programs

frequently fail to promote intellectual curiosity, they underemphasize flexibility of mind, and they provide too little understanding of the real business challenges their students will face. The result is that business students often take the conceptual tools they are taught not as instruments but as simple descriptions of reality. The efficient market hypothesis, it's been said, rarely gets taught as a hypothesis.

Teaching students about business the way we traditionally teach them about history, philosophy and literature, he proposes, will give students "the ability to grasp the pluralism in ways of thinking and acting that is so salient a characteristic of the contemporary world". Such professionals are just what we need.

Berman, to my mind unwisely, looks to the social sciences for a model. That is, just as business educators are learning to look to the humanities for inspiration, the humanities are trying to adapt to the way things have been done in business schools. Berman wants a three-year course-based doctoral program, rounded off with an article-based thesis, not a monograph. This, as Jonathan notes, will simply reduce the amount of reading and writing that is required to get a PhD. Note that this is at odds with the results of Arum and Roksa's widely discussed study of critical thinking and analytical reasoning among undergraduates. They found that traditional humanities programs, with strong reading and writing requirements, were virtually unique in their ability to make students, well, smarter. Social science (especially as a basis for business education), again simplifying a little, rots the brain.

Berman and Sullivan agree on one major thing. Whether as bachelor, master, or doctor, graduates should be, to use a phrase that was coined by a group of students here in Denmark, "suitable for business", that is, able to go to work, even after getting a liberal arts degree. As Berman puts it:

we must recognize that the literature PhD is already a gateway to many different careers. These varied professional directions—which deserve our validation—include opportunities as teachers throughout the educational system as well as nonfaculty positions in higher education. In addition, the literature PhD can lead to careers in the public humanities, in cultural sectors—publishing, translation, journalism, the film industry—or, frankly, anywhere in business, government, or the not-for-profit world where intensive research skills are at a premium.

This has not traditionally been an issue in business education, which presumably prepared people for a career first and foremost, and that's why the Carnegie Foundation pulls towards a more traditional set of humanistic values. It continues to presume that business majors will find gainful employment, and hopes to ensure that the people who go into business or government might also become slightly, for lack of better phrase, "better people" than those who got us into the current mess. The MLA, meanwhile, presumes that a formative immersion in the humanities will give you all those qualities of critical thinking and analytical reasoning, but will not suit you for a life in business or government.

Like Jonathan, I'm a bit saddened when the high church of liberal learning, the MLA, begins to envy the "efficiency" of the social sciences. I'm not saying the humanities are perfect. But if they want to be a formative basis for a new class of "professionals" they should not look for ways of becoming more like some other intellectual pursuit. They should search for better ways of being themselves. And that, of course, is exactly what being "human" is all about.

Time

2011-12-06T07:41:00.002+01:00

My recent posts about the introduction, conclusion and body of a paper were an attempt to provide a kind of "a priori" sketch of the outline a standard social science paper. The idea was to rough out a space for your writing. By a similar logic, a schedule provides a time for your writing. To be present in your writing process is to coordinate the here and the now of your writing by coordinating an outline with your schedule.

If the basic trick to outlining was to conceive of your paper as 40 paragraphs, distributed across roughly 8 sections, the basic trick to scheduling is to work in 30 minute sessions, no more than six a day. You can work as little as five minutes a day (for the purpose of writing every day), but you'll be most effective if you're working at least 30 minutes and at most 3 hours on your writing every working day. I encourage you to take your weekends off, but some people do find it useful to take ten or fifteen minutes even on their days off to keep the process "primed".

Like outlines, schedules should be both rational and conventional. An outline should satisfy the inner logic of your argument, but also the expectations of your reader. Similarly, your writing schedule should be coordinated with the thinking, reading, and observing you are doing to build your knowledge of its contents, but it should also be convenient for yourself and others. You are a social being before you are a writer and you should find time for you writing in social life, not outside it or in opposition to it.

If you get yourself into shape to write a paragraph in under 30 minutes you have a good unit of time to coordinate with the fundamental unit of scholarly space (the paragraph). You can begin to plan the first 20 hours of drafting, one paragraph at a time. Each week will have at most 15 hours of work. And to rewrite a paper three times (which is roughly what it will take to get the paper into shape for a first submission) you'll need at least four weeks, i.e., sixty hours. And that's if you've got an ideal amount of time for your writing.

So you do well to map your 40-paragraph outline onto a writing schedule that spans 8 or 16 weeks. This will give to time work on a paper, lay it aside (to work on another), think about it, read background materials, do more fieldwork, etc., and then return to it again in an orderly fashion. The process that will be produce your paper should be visible to you, stretching before you into the future.

Your schedule helps you keep everything from happening all at once just as your outline keeps it from piling up all in the same place. That is, your outline makes a space for your writing. Your schedule gives you time.

The Body

2011-12-01T06:59:00.009+01:00

Not long ago, I wrote about the introduction and conclusion of a standard journal article. These sections are important because they contain the essence of the whole and therefore frame your writing problem. If you can write a good introduction and conclusion, you're well on your way to writing a good a article. This morning I want to show you why that is the case by connecting specific elements of the introduction to the individual sections of the body of your paper. As always, I'm here assuming you're writing a generic social-science paper. Next week I'll say some things about how to adjust this form to the context that is specific to your field. I will even try to say something about how to write a paper in the humanities.

A journal article normally has a recognizable structure:

I. Introduction
II. Background
III. Theory
IV. Method
V. Analysis
VI. Implications
VII. Conclusion

I always suggest counting the introduction and conclusion as one part of the paper, and the analysis as three. That gives us eight parts altogether, which are usefully imagined as a being roughly five paragraphs long each. That is, the paper consists of 8 x 5 paragraphs.

The background section provides the reader with information that is publicly available but presumably not in his or her possession at the time of reading. The authors I work with will often have to provide information about the country, region, industry, or company that their study is situated in. This section might also recount developments in a particular policy area or cultural field. (If you're writing about the management of coffee shops in Amsterdam, you might write something about drug policy in Holland; if you're writing about innovation management at Pixar, you could write about the company's role in the history of computer animation.) It serves the dual purpose of establishing you as a knowledgeable expert on this subject and providing background knowledge to the reader that will make the empirical analysis easier to follow. There should be a natural connection between this section and the first paragraph of your introduction. If the first paragraph describes the world that needs your paper, this section describes an area within that world in greater detail.

The theory section sets up the reader's expectations of your empirical analysis. It should be an elaboration of the consensus or controversy that you have clearly marked in the second paragraph of your introduction. "A theory," Bourdieu tells us, "is a program of perception." It is because your reader perceives the world in this particular way that s/he expects your results to come out in a particular way. The theory articulates our presumptions about a particular empirical object or event, i.e., it explains what we think or imagine will be true of it prior to taking a close look at it. In some fields, of course, this section is the basis for deducing hypotheses to be tested. But a softer and more general way of saying this, which is of use to you even if your field does not engage in classical hypothesis testing, is to say that your theory section evokes expectations to be satisfied or disappointed.

The key claims of the next three sections should all be presented in the third paragraph of your introduction, which says something like "This paper shows that..." and therefore describes how you know (method), why it is true (analysis), and what follows (implications).

The method section tells the reader what you did in terms that will make your results more compelling. Keep that dual purpose in mind. You should truthfully describe your research practices, i.e., the things you did to give you the knowledge you are now presenting to the reader. But you should describe these practices in such a way that they make your results more convincing, more credible. You should not, then, say, "I only did three rather unstructured interviews with peripheral members of the organization." Nor should you lie and say, "I did twenty-five in-depth interviews with key members of the organization." Nor should you mislead the reader by saying, "Several interviews were conducted to bring knowledge of the key processes involved in the organization." Rather, you should describe the interviews in sufficient detail to make them a plausible source of precisely the results you will present. There is no absolute standard of how many interviews you must conduct or documents you must read or newspaper articles you must analyze. It depends on what you are studying and what you claim to have learned. I have once sung the praises of Bernie Madoff's confession in this regard.

The analysis section presents the results of your empirical investigation in a way that artfully disappoints your readers (theoretical) expectations. I'll write a separate post on this section soon. It is important to keep in mind that your reader has to trust you here because you are working with data that you have privileged access to. The previous sections are all subject to criticism from a reader that either is or could be as well-informed as you. Here you are on your home turf.

The implications section draws out the consequences of the disappointment implicit in your analysis. These implications may be either theoretical or practical, scientific or political, of interest to researchers or of interest to managers. The important thing is to respect your reader's intelligence (logical faculties) when drawing them out. There are presumably many different logical implications of your work. You are here identifying the four or five implications that you think are most important.

Like I say, I've already written about how the introduction and conclusion frame these sections. Notice that for anything that you know as the result of careful, detailed study, a presentation that follows this form is possible. You can always situate your results in an area of the world; you can always present the "program of perception" that shapes our expectations of your results; you can always tell us what you did to get your results; you can always present the results themselves; and you can always tell us what the logical consequences of your results are. This is the important sense in which "knowing" something, at least for academic purposes, means being able to write a journal article about it. I've here tried to show what the body of such a paper should look like.

* * *

[Process note: as always, I started writing this post at 6:00 AM. By 6:50 I had written 1020 words, which I then copy-edited before posting at 6:59. Naturally, I'm writing about something that I've spoken about many times, i.e., something I know very well. My knowledge of the structure and content of a standard journal article just is my ability to write 20 words/minute about it to form a series of coherent prose paragraphs. In your area of expertise, you should have the same facility with words. For academic prose (as opposed to merely blogging), I usually recommend training your ability to write a 200-word or 6-sentence (whatever comes first) paragraph in 30 minutes, including language editing and reading it out loud.]

The Totality of Prose

2011-11-29T07:00:00.002+01:00

There's always Hegel. Thomas Presskorn tracked down the source of the phrase "the prose of the world" for me in his comment to a post three weeks ago. It's given me something to think about.

It turns out that the phrase appears in Hegel's Lectures on Fine Arts. I can't say I've fully digested the passage, and I haven't looked at the rest of the text, but it looks as though he is using the concept of prose to indicate the quotidian—that “gorgeous Latinate word” which “suggests the depth and reach of the commonplace”, as Don DeLillo put it (Underworld, p. 542). In short, prose is the ordinary. He ties this idea of a "world of prose" to the "deficiency of natural beauty" and contrasts it to the pursuit of "Ideal beauty", as in the fine arts. This is also what Merleau-Ponty seems to have been after when he confronted "the prose of the world" with "a poetry of human relations". Well, beauty is difficult, said Aubrey Beardsley to Ezra Pound. In a sense, then, prose articulates that difficulty.

In writing, I want to argue, prose emerges from the unavoidable partiality of our experience. A poem is arguably an expression of our own universality, but when we write in prose we are implicitly admitting that we're only getting some of the experience down on the page. But we are also, as academic writers, trying to be objective and universal—in a word, impartial. Again, "prose" comes to stand for a particular kind of difficulty, namely, our struggle with "the entire finitude of appearance .... the totality which is not actual within [us]" (147). We are, first and foremost, implicated in the ordinary, the hustle and bustle (as Heidegger might say) of everyday living.

Even in our pursuit of "spiritual interests"—like knowledge, I presume—we do not get beyond prose. The life of the spirit, Hegel points out, depends upon satisfying also our "physical vital aims". Even the most sincere and diligent (and even the most distracted) scholar will not completely extricate herself from practical contingencies. "[T]he individual as he appears in this world of prose and everyday is not active out of the entirety of his ownself and his resources, and he is intelligible not from himself, but from something else" (149). Maybe this is where DeLillo got his views on "the quotidian". Hegel says: "Here is revealed the whole breadth of prose in human existence" (148).

Scholarship in general, and academic writing in particular, is deeply implicated in ordinary pursuits. When we express ourselves in prose we are implicitly engaging with these day-to-day contingencies. We are struggling to keep our footing in a world of everyday "actions and events," as Hegel puts it. (In my book, I'm going to have to tie this to Heidegger's views on research as Betrieb.) It is precisely because the scholar expresses her views in a world of ordinary concerns that research must be approached as a conversation where other interests and concerns must be respected. That is, in prose you write about things that you might be wrong about. And you write prepared to listen to what others think of what you think. You are not "active out of the entirety of [your] own self". What your words mean depends on what others make of them. The totality of that dependence, then, is what Hegel is talking about.

"This is the prose of the world ... —a world of finitude and mutability, of entanglement in the relative, of the pressure of necessity from which the individual is in no position to withdraw" (150). But a community, I want to suggest, allows for a partial withdrawal, a smaller place within "the entire finitude of appearance". A finite finitude, if you will. (I'm always harping about how the academic writer must appreciate her finitude.) It is a way of simplifying (for a particular set of themes) your "entanglement in the relative", a way of relieving "the pressure of necessity". This is the community of scholarship that constitutes your field. A community of prose. It helps you to engage precisely with the ordinary totality.

The Elasticity of Prose

2011-11-24T06:59:00.004+01:00

In Tuesday's post I pointed out that Dexter Kimball appeared to be familiar with the basic principles of what we today call "stress". He talks about how hard work of any kind, including intellectual work, "results in the breaking down of tissues" and releases toxins into the blood (Kimball 1939: 244). And he points out that rest is the means by which these toxins are "cleansed" out of the system. He could, perhaps, also have noted that rest also allows our tissues to rebuild, and, typically, that this rebuilding makes them stronger. When we exercise, our muscle fibres are torn apart. They repair themselves with extra fibres, which strengthens them.

"Fatigue within the 'elastic limit'," Kimball tells us, "is wholesome for anyone and good health cannot be maintained without some bodily effort." This idea of an "elastic limit" can also be applied to your prose. Remember that I think of your prose not as something that happens on the page but as the ability of your mind and body to make something happen on the page. Your "prose" is your ability to write coherent paragraphs on subjects you know something about. You can keep your prose healthy or you can let it degenerate. And the relevant "effort" here—the activity that keeps your prose healthy—is, of course, writing.

But you must write within your limit. Don't write for a whole day until you reach the point of exhaustion—and don't write "on your nerve" for days at a time. How often do we meet scholars who tell us that they are "tired" of the text they're working on? They "can't look at it" anymore. They need us to tell us what it means. These are writers who have exhausted their prose. They can't "bear it" any more.

Usually, these writers have overloaded their text with what they know. It's not that their text actually express a lot of knowledge now; normally these texts are not well-written enough for that. It's that their authors have unloaded everything they know on the subject in their work with a single text, straining it beyond its elastic limit. And in so doing (wihtout knowing it) they've more than just overloaded their text. They've overloaded their prose. That's why they can't even read the text any longer.

We can provisionally distinguish the elasticity of prose from its plasticity. Elasticity is the propensity of a material to return to its original shape after being subjected to a particular strain. (The classic example, of course, is the elastic band. You stretch it and when you let go it returns to its original shape.) Plasticity is the tendency of a material to stay in the shape you bend it to (that's why manufactures like to make so many things out of "plastic"). We sometimes think of our prose as a highly plastic material precisely because it is so easy to move words around on the page. What we forget is that our minds are always trying to keep up. And this means that if you move too many words around, for too long, you are really "stretching" the elastic bonds between your words, pulling them in too many directions. Eventually they snap. Or, which is perhaps sadder, they lose their elasticity.

Materials don't just stretch elastically but absord pressures elastically too. When you put a load on a beam, it deforms a little. But when you take the load off, it returns to its original shape. Your prose is supposed to be able to carry something (the weight of your knowledge). It is not merely supposed to contort itself into whatever shape the reader wants or expects from you. If you try to make it do this, you will stress your prose by forcing it to be too long at the limit of its elasticity. This means there'll be no "give" in it when readers begin to critique your text, i.e., to expose it to the weight of the their knowledge.

To avoid fatigue (of the kind that reduces elasticity by exceeding its limits), Kimball offers a good piece of advice, which ought to resonate especially with scholars. "It should be remembered that also that change of work is relative rest and under the old methods, where the worker performed several tasks daily, recovery from one task took place to a certain extent while performing another...Under modern conditions, however, where mean are compelled to work at one machine or, worse still, where the work is of a repetitive nature..." (1939: 244) Do not work at "one machine" all day. I.e., do not spend a whole day writing. Write for a few hours and then shift to another machine. A book is a great machine for resting some of the muscles of your prose while exerting others.

Fatigue, ca. 1939

2011-11-22T07:00:00.009+01:00

Writing Process Reengineering is inspired by Business Process Reengineering, which emerges from the long tradition of scientific management, going back to the work of F.W. Taylor. One sometimes-forgotten member of that tradition, is Dexter Kimball, whose work I expect will experience a bit of a revival if the "liberal turn" in management studies is fully executed. He was dean of engineering at Cornell and wrote the sorts of detailed books on industrial organization (how to organize a factory) that you rarely see these days. He was also a great champion of the humanities in business education, i.e., what the Carnegie foundation calls liberal learning. “The man interested in industry,” he said in 1925, “will find many things made plainer and his horizon greatly broadened by studying the recorded experience of those that have preceded him.” But he also noted that “the humanities are not matters that belong to a distant past. They flow in an unbroken stream from our experience with life.” This morning, I'd like to draw your attention to his work on fatigue or, as I think you'll recognize, what we today call "stress".

My interest in Kimball arises out of my interest in the great American poet Ezra Pound. Pound quotes Kimball in his Canto 38, from 1934—a characteristic incorporation of material that is not normally seen in a poem (notice the use of what today also looks like an author-date citation):

(…cigar makers whose work is highly repetitive
can perform the necessary operations almost automatically
and at the same time listen to readers who are hired
for the purpose of providing mental entertainment while they
work; Dexter Kimball 1929.)

While Pound cites Kimball's 1929 book Industrial Economics, the idea also appears in a comprehensive textbook called Principles of Industrial Organization, which came out in several editions starting in 1913. I've got the fifth edition, from 1939, beside me. The "readers" are mentioned (on page 245) in the section devoted fatigue, where he says a number of things that writers could learn from as well.

He sorts the problem of fatigue under the need, in the organization of work, for "personal allowances", here the allowance that managers must make for periodic rest periods, i.e., breaks. Whenever I discuss this passage, I always draw attention to something that really ought to be an an embarrassing fact about twentieth-century industrial organization:

Under the old and still much-used methods, the common idea was to keep a man as busy as possible during the entire working period for which he had engaged. It now appears that he will do more and better work if given periodic rests. (Kimball 1939: 244, my emphasis)

"It now appears"??? How could we ever have thought that work without periodic rest could be a good idea? After all, as Kimball himself notes, fatigue is something that everyone has direct experience with, and the solution has never been a mystery waiting to be illuminated by scientific discovery.

All are familiar with the phenomenon of fatigue. In beginning work there is a period during which effort is not only easy but agreeable, and the rate of production increases. Then follows a period during which conditions are uniform, succceeded in turn by a decline in interest and pleasure in production, straining begins to be felt, and finally, if the effort is continued, pain appears. During this last period the worker must put forth his will power to continue at the task, "working on his nerve," as is said; and at last, if the effort is continued, it becomes unbearable and complete exhaustion takes place. (244)

I balk at the need to discover these facts. (Kimball makes it appear as though modern science has made us aware of the importance of rest.) But maybe I shouldn't. After all, how many writers approach their work as though this description doesn't apply to them? How many writers strain at the work long after it stops being "agreeable", stops giving them pleasure? Kimball, for his part, emphasizes that the principle of periodic rest (and, in fact, variation of work tasks) also applies to mental labour:

[Fatigue is not] a function of bodily exertion alone. Jobs that require little or no bodily effort but very close attention and concentration may be even more fatiguing than others that involve considerable muscular effort. Mental work is often as fatiguing as bodily effort. (245)

Interestingly (and, in my ignorance, surprisingly) Kimball appears to be aware of the basic principles of what we today call "stress", urging work to be carried out within the "elastic limit", where it is "wholesome" and conducive to "good health". Indeed, he notes,

Physical or mental effort of any kind results in the breaking down of tissue, which creates certain toxic poisons in the blood giving rise thereby to the phenomena described [i.e., those of fatigue]. (244)

All this just to say that already before the second world war, the basic principles of the organization of work, including the work of writing, were well-understood. Make sure you work at your writing within the elastic limit of your prose (a notion I'll take up on Thursday). Get some rest. Keep the work agreeable.

Introduction/Conclusion

2011-11-17T06:54:00.005+01:00

Just this week, during one of my undergraduate workshops, I had something of an epiphany about the rhetoric of an academic article. I've long argued that the only difference between the introduction and conclusion is a rhetorical one. The two sections say the same thing, which is to say, the conclusion does not contain information that the introduction has not already presented; but they say it differently or, more precisely, they address different audiences. And the difference is a very small and precise one: the reader of your conclusion is the same reader as the reader of your introduction except that the reader of your introduction has not yet read your paper and the reader of your conclusion has just read it. Beyond that, I used to say, you're free to write the conclusion as you choose ... oh yes, except that you only have two paragraphs to accomplish what you did with three in your introduction.

But look what I discovered while workshopping a conclusion this week. We began by sharpening the introduction to give us the ideal form. The first paragraph provided a description of the world in which the paper is needed. "We live in an age of..." it might (too) typically begin. The second paragraph introduces the relevant science: "Scholars agree that..." (or, conversely, "Current scholarship is divided about...") It is only the third paragraph that introduces your thesis: "In this paper, I show that..." Notice that until the third paragraph, no mention is made of you or your thesis; you are positioning your thesis in a world of shared concern and a body of current scholarship.

And notice also that even in that third paragraph you don't actually state your thesis. The key sentence of that paragraph is not a claim about your object; it is a claim about your paper. This means that the relevant kind of support is provided by a description of your paper ("After recalling the recent history of efforts to ..., I will outline my theoretical framework. The analysis uses the method of ..., which gives access to ... On this basis, I conclude that ... and emphasize the importance of ... in rethinking best practices in this area.") It is not actually an argument for the truth of your thesis. It is a description or outline of such an argument.

I have said before that the first paragraph of your conclusion and the last paragraph of your introduction should mirror each other. In the introduction there should be a paragraph about what you will say, while in the conclusion the same paragraph should tell us what you have said. But this can be quite boring ("In this paper, I have shown that..." etc.) We now arrive at the epiphany.

"In this paper, I show that..." will continue with some proposition. "In this paper, I show that organizational designs not market forces are to blame for the financial crisis." That proposition, of course, states the major thesis of the paper. Now, what your paper should be putting you in a position to do is precisely to state that thesis, plainly and straightforwardly. After reading your paper, the reader should be in a position to understand a simple, efficient, 6-sentence, 150-word argument for your thesis. Let the first paragraph of your conclusion be that argument.

Its key sentence will be your thesis. "Organizational designs not market forces are to blame for the financial crisis." Leave out explicit mentions of method and instead state the major empirical claims that your method allowed you to discover. Also leave out any explicit mentions of theory, but use theoretical terms as though they are part of the vocabulary shared by you and your reader (if your paper is any good, by this point they are.) Three of the sentences will normally simply state the sub-theses that your analysis arrives at. However, you choose to do it, keep it simple. This is the moment when you show the reader that s/he's understood what you've been trying to say. Here's the simplest possible statement of your argument for the most informed possible reader.

There's one paragraph left. To write it, think about your "implications" section. What change (whether in theory or practice) in the mind of your reader does your paper suggest? How should the reader see or do things differently after granting the rightness of your conclusions? In a word, how have you changed the reader's world? Write the last paragraph as a description of this new world. The first and last paragraph, set side by side, should describe the "before" and "after" images of the world that your research pertains to—the world that needs your research. It is the world that needs to change in the way suggested by these images.

When I explained this to a group a faculty members recently something truly profound hit me: that last paragraph is also the first paragraph of your next paper.

The Great Learning

2011-11-10T06:58:00.001+01:00

Confucius's classic text The Great Learning begins like this:

The great learning takes root in clarifying the way wherein the intelligence increases through the process of looking straight into one’s own heart and acting on the results; it is rooted in watching with affection the way people grow; it is rooted in coming to rest, being at ease in perfect equity.

This is Ezra Pound's translation—he calls it The Great Digest or Adult Study. Reading the passage last night, I realized that this really does very much express my philosophy, and especially what I try to accomplish when helping people to improve their writing. Writing is very much part of the process of adult study.

I agree with Pound/Kung that intelligence can be increased through a disciplined process. "Looking straight into one’s own heart and acting on the results," is of course a way of improving your whole intelligence. An important step is to develop "precise verbal definitions of [your] inarticulate thoughts"; Pound simply calls this "sincerity", i.e., to be able to say plainly and straightforwardly what you think. When you think about it, it is easy to see how such frankness can improve your intelligence and, I hope, just as easy to see how insincerity might hinder or even counter such development.

Universities ought to be places where the frank expression of thought is encouraged and protected. (There is, unfortunately, reason to think that they are becoming less and less so.) They should also be places where "the way people grow" is "watched with affection". I have had the pleasure of watching people grow over the past five years. But I have mainly been working with early-career researchers and PhD students. Or rather, it is mainly when working with them that I have the privilege of watching people grow. As undergraduate programs grow and are made more cost-effective, the contact between student and teacher offers little opportunity for such careful observation. I think this is a loss to the teacher as well as the student.

Notice that, according to Kung, your learning is rooted in watching how others grow. One of the functions of students on a university campus is to provide teachers with this important experience. Interestingly, some translations of Kung reduce Pound's (perhaps overly interpretative) phrase to the claim that the aim of the Great Learning is "to renovate the people". This top-down attitude seems to be more common today. Certainly, programs are organized in ways that leave little room for teachers to appreciate how their students' minds are growing more articulate. This is due in part to a number of unproductive misconceptions about the role of writing in education. I'll say more about this next week; for now I just want to emphasize that writing should have a much more prominent place in higher education than it does today. Less talk. More text, I say.

Lately, I have also noticed my need to come to rest, to achieve a balance. Intelligence grows naturally if we think about things (and articulate our thoughts) in an orderly way. The process can't be forced but it can be supported. It can also be interrupted, confounded, and sabotaged. Scholars have an interest in finding ways "to rest in the highest excellence," as other translations put it. It is their job, in a sense, to "grasp the azure".

The Prose of the World

2011-11-08T07:00:00.001+01:00

The Prose of the World is the title of a posthumously published book by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the title of the second chapter of Michel Foucault's The Order of Things. It appears to be something Hegel said about the Roman state. "Prosaic writing," said Merleau-Ponty, "limits itself to using, through accepted signs, the meanings already accepted in a given culture." He seems to distinguish both "great prose" and poetry from such ordinary prose writing, which occurs "when a writer is no longer capable of ... founding a new universality and of taking the risk of communicating". Well, I would argue that academic prose is also incapable of "founding a new universality", and this is really for the better. Academic writing is very much an attempt to use the language within the limits of accepted usage. There is a whole world of prose: the universe of which it is always already possible to speak.

It is possible to read Foucault as an argument for the contingency of this prosaic world. "Don Quixote is the negative of the Renaissance world," he tells us; "writing has ceased to be the prose of the world." And it is of course true that Merleau-Ponty's "new universalities" do emerge, that the conditions of (prosaically) meaningful communication do change. For him, poetic language was the means by which such changes occurred. Again, I want to emphasize the virtues of prose, of ordinary usage, of writing that does not imply institutional change or the dissolution of what Foucault called the "alliance" of "resemblances and signs". It is in ordinary, academic prose that we make and support knowledge claims. Somebody has got to do it.

And not nearly enough of us do, I think. Many academics struggle with the language in the manner of Don Quixote, who "wanders off on his own," as Foucault put it. We "no longer read nature and books alike as part of a single text", in terms of their similitude. But why not? Why don't we acknowledge the simple utility of producing a description of the facts, or articulating them in prose? Why have we become so skeptical of this basic function of writing? My answer is simply that we are out of practice, and therefore a bit out of shape. We're in poor form.

Students and, too often, scholars do not make writing a regular part of their studies, of their life of inquiry. In relative terms, they do "read a lot", but they read even ostensibly factual prose as though it were the accounts of adventures of madmen, "without content, without resemblance to fill their emptiness ... no longer the marks of things ... sleeping ... covered in dust" (Foucault, op. cit.). Maybe we will never recover of our form. All it would take, of course, is a bit of regular work. We would need to sit down, for an hour or two every day and record what we know as claims that have support. And when we read the work of others, we would read them as making claims and offering support in turn.

Instead, it often seems, we have, like Foucault, come to see such activities as tantamount to a belief in magic. All writing has become fiction. We appreciate each other's writing in the manner of literature rather than simply and straightforwardly "taking issue" with what is said—on the assumption that the words we are using are meaningful in the ordinary prosaic way and may therefore be compared to, i.e., "read against", the world of facts that make our utterances true or false. Ironically (which is to say, appropriately), this little rant in favor of the representational function of language will be considered by many to be the ravings of a madman who has read, with a certain romance, too many books and his brain has dried up. Perhaps I am tilting at windmills?

Assertion

2011-11-03T07:59:00.004+01:00

“The essential business of language,” said Bertrand Russell, “is to assert and deny facts.” He was clearly thinking of scientific language, not language in general; as Deleuze and Guattari point out somewhere, language is just as often meant to be obeyed as to be understood. But academic writers, in my view, nonetheless do well to think of themselves primarily as asserters and deniers of facts. I sometimes say that what they need is a little bit of “assertiveness training” or, as I’ve also put it, they need to develop a “propositional attitude”. Their essential business, we might say, is very much as Russell conceived it.

An assertion, in the sense I’m after here, is really just a claim that something is the case. As a rough approximation, we think of a journal article as making forty such claims of various kinds. The introduction makes three claims: the first is about the world of practice, the second is about the theory of that practice, and the third is about the paper itself (a claim about what the paper will show). There are then five claims that elaborate on the world of practice (providing essential background information), five claims that elaborate the theory, and five claims that present your method. This is followed by fifteen claims that constitute your analysis, presenting the results of your inquiry, and five claims about the implications of your analysis, whether for theory or practice. Finally, your conclusion makes two claims that remind the reader of what you have just argued and emphasize its importance.

You are asserting that importance, of course. By starting in a particular part of the world and claiming particular things to be true about it, you are setting yourself up to make a particular contribution to our understanding. Keep in mind that in doing this you are likely to engage with your readers’ beliefs in a quite aggressive way. Your knowledge will often conflict with what others think on the same subject. But you are not doing yourself or your readers any favors by mumbling or otherwise obscuring your views. By stating clearly, assertively, what you think is true, you allow your readers to formulate their own views just as clearly, just as assertively. This will foster a precise confrontation of views, rather than a merely vague sense of disagreement. Your reader will know which facts to marshal against your position—if your reader intends to disagree with you. A good paper is written to occasion such a confrontation, not to avoid it.

Academic writers, that is, need to “get their facts straight”, and then assert them in the literature. This, like I say, is necessary for the conversation among scholars to remain precise and constructive, but it is also, in my view, necessary to maintain the true function of scholarship in society. Academic writing ought to foster high-quality discourse about subjects of importance to the surrounding society, and this discourse ought to have effects on the quality of discourse in general in that society. It is not that everyone needs to think like an academic, or go around asserting and denying facts (as if that were their essential business). But there must be a place somewhere in society for a conversation that is assertive in precisely that way. By training your ability as an academic writer, you are training your ability to make that contribution social life. I do sometimes worry that academics lack the confidence—grounded in a particular kind of strength and a particular kind of poise—to assert themselves even among their peers. This would go a long way towards explaining the marginal status of what they know in social life more generally. My aim is to help them assert the facts they know to be true.

The Shape of Form

2011-11-01T07:00:00.008+01:00

This week I'm going to the University of the West of England in Bristol to hold my one-day workshop in Writing Process Reengineering. I've promised the participants (hello everyone!) that this morning I'd outline my basic approach, so that they know what to expect when we meet. They already have a program for the day (which I've summarized in this post). In this post, therefore, I'm going to say a few basic things about what one workshop participant of mine was kind enough to call my "philosophy of writing".

My view is that academic writers need to make a concerted effort to keep their prose in shape. What I do, therefore, is to offer a number of exercises that will help them develop mastery of form. Writers of course also need a number of purely "cognitive" or "intellectual" capacities, and very definitely some mastery of content, but these are specific to the field in which they work and, largely, a personal matter. You don't have to be a genius to be a successful academic writer, but you might of course want to be such a thing. Regardless of your level of intellectual ambition, you do well to keep the part of you that writes in shape. For convenience, I just call that part your prose.

What I call Writing Process Reengineering (WPR) is an attempt to get writers to appreciate the finitude of the problem. Today, your prose is in a particular kind of shape and you will not improve it noticably overnight. But you can make real strides if you subject your development to a program that resembles the sort of training people undertake to get into physical shape: start out with short sessions every other day. From there, develop a regular habit of writing. That is, mastery of the prose form is, in one sense, mastery of time and space. When and where will you write?

My workshops are really a long argument for the plausibility of two forms, one spatial and one temporal. The first is the 40-Paragraph Article (40PA). While actual articles will of course deviate from this ideal form, it is always possible to imagine an idea expressed in 40, roughly 6-sentence or 200-word paragraphs. Each paragraph makes exactly one claim and offers support for it. The key implication is the—for some people startling—insight that you have to know exactly 40 things in order to write an academic article. The forty paragraphs themselves are distributed across 8 five-paragraph sections: the introduction and conclusion count as one section, and then there's the background, theory, methods, three sections of analysis, and implications. Whenever you are "writing" (in the specific sense I'm after), then, you are writing (or revising) a paragraph in a paper of roughly this form. You are keeping your ability to write such a paragraph in shape.

Temporally, I offer participants what I call the 16-Week Challenge (16WC). You should never write for more than three hours a day, so a given 16-week period (of 5-day working weeks) has a maximum of 240 writing hours. That's a good ball-park figure to start with, but most people will have to find the 60 or 120 or 180 hours that constitute a more realistic estimate of their resources. These hours-available-for-writing should then be booked into the writers' calendars and they should decide which writing sessions will be devoted to which parts of the ideal 40PA form I just outlined. Here it can be useful to think of your prose as your ability to compose a coherent paragraph about something you know in 20-30 minutes (you will discover the limits of you own form in this regard). Taken together, then the 16WC and the 40PA give academic writers who want to embark on a program of personal development a complete frame, in time and in space, in which to train their prose.

The workshop provides you with a rhetorically robust concept of "knowledge" that corresponds to these formal exercises. It argues that your knowledge is your ability to hold your own in a conversation among knowledgeable peers—which makes it the basis of your strength and poise, i.e., grace, in writing. Gaining this formal mastery is a matter of getting prose into shape. Prose, that is, is "the shape of form".

Note: I like to lead by example. This post of just over 700 words took exactly one hour to write. I did of course start out knowing what I wanted to talk about. See you soon, Bristol!

The Build for It

2011-10-27T06:58:00.001+02:00

Jonathan has raised two related issues this week: one about the idea of a "natural talent" for writing and one about your image of yourself as a writer. The first post, especially, reminded me of a passage in J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. It's the scene where Holden Caulfield's roommate, Stradlater, asks him to write his English composition for him. He'd be free to write anything he wanted, "just as a long as it's descriptive as hell", and just as long as he doesn't put commas all in the right place because that would be a dead giveaway that Stradlater hadn't done the assignment himself.

That’s something else that gives me a royal pain. I mean if you’re good at writing compositions and somebody starts talking about commas. Stradlater was always doing that. He wanted you to think that the only reason he was lousy at writing compositions was because he stuck all the commas in the wrong place. He was a little bit like Ackley, that way. I once sat next to Ackley at this basketball game. We had a terrific guy on the team, Howie Coyle, that could sink them from the middle of the floor, without even touching the backboard or anything. Ackley kept saying, the whole goddam game, that Coyle had a perfect build for basketball. God, how I hate that stuff.

Stradlater doesn't know what it takes to be a good writer, just as a Ackley doesn't know what makes a good basketball player. It's not, of course, that your build or where you put the commas is completely unimportant, it's just that by reducing the question to these things, we miss the essential thing: practice. Writers gain mastery of the craft by continuous practice. They may start with some natural disposition to become writers, but they have to develop that talent in the usual way.

Caulfield hates the way Stradlater and Ackley talk about the talent of others because it's a way of trivializing it. It is a way of not really being impressed. (It's also represented by Stradlater's yawn while while he asks Caulfield for this favor. Stradlater is saying that Caulfield should do it for him because, for reasons entirely beyond their combined control, Caulfield can write and Stradlater cannot. From each according to his ability, we might say, to each according to their need.) And if you're not really impressed by people who can write—if you don't appreciate their efforts to develop their talent—then you're not going to make an effort to emulate them in your own writing. You won't look to them as models.

When I teach writing, I try not to introduce rules and criteria. Instead, I introduce forms. That is, I try to show writers what the different parts of a paper are for, and then I tell them to practice getting their sentences to work together to accomplish those goals. (I give them the that/which distinction not as a rule of grammar but as a way of deciding whether you are restricting the meaning of a term or not.) I also normally always give students something that they'll learn (only) by doing for twenty minutes or half an hour. One of the problems with an image of a oneself as a non-writer grounded in the belief that one "doesn't know where the commas go" is that it suggests that your writing is held back by a lack of knowledge about writing. It's usually not. It's held back by a lack of writing. The relevant "build" emerges from your training.

The Prose Experience

2011-10-25T06:51:00.001+02:00

Last week was very busy for me. I had been invited to Barcelona and Budapest to talk about various aspects of the writing process. In between, I spent two days here in Copenhagen talking about the new Carnegie Foundation report about "liberal learning" in business education. Bill Sullivan, one of the report's authors, made an interesting comment at the end of the first day. He cited the widely discussed study of critical thinking and analytical reasoning among undergraduates by Arum and Roksa. That study found that students develop these abilities only in programs that demand a significant amount of reading and writing. That is, our ability to think depends on our degree of engagement with prose.

Well, in my talks at ESADE and Corvinus I was telling researchers and PhD students how to keep their prose "in shape". In fact, the difficulty that researchers have finding time to read and write is distressing in the light of Arum and Roksa's study. If students need to read and write in order to improve their intellectual capacities, then it is highly likely that the rest of us must read and write in order to maintain them. If students must make reading and writing part of their learning, then scholars must make it part of their knowing. Like musicians and athletes (a comparison I never tire of making), scholars cannot expect to perform well if they don't work at their talent every day. In an important sense, scholars who haven't been writing for a few months simply don't know what they are talking about.

I should admit, at this point, that I've been neglecting my own prose for some time. My reasons are the usual ones: I've had other things to think about. But I'm going to have to get back to writing every day (not just blogging twice a week) if I'm to keep my wits about me. Lately, I really have been feeling distracted, and that feeling is nothing other than a lack of prose in my life. A mind that is continuously informing itself by reading well-formed paragraphs and expressing itself in likewise well-formed paragraphs is maintaining a kind of "rigor". That's what Arum and Roksa call it, but I like to think of it as "grace", i.e., the precision that comes from strength—from being much stronger than a given task requires, from not always working at the outer limits of your abilities.

I tell researchers to master the time and space of their writing. I tell them to think of the text they are writing as an object with 40 parts distributed across 8 five-paragraph sections. This is the space in which they work, and it is, importantly, an orderly space in which 40 discrete claims can be supported. Likewise, I ask them to think of their time in 16-week periods of structured work, writing every day, but for no more than 3 hours. The rest of the day can be spent engaged in other activities, including, of course, reading.

Kant was probably right that without time and space we wouldn't experience anything at all. Bergson was right to say that time is what keeps everything from happening all at once, and space, I like to add, is what keeps everything from piling up in the same place. A continuous engagement with prose, then, is a particular way of ordering experience. It is, in many ways, what university is all about (as the Arum and Roksa study shows). Unfortunately, scholars increasingly find themselves with "no time" to read and write—and no place to do it. I worry a great deal about this situation, I must say. We have forgotten the value of maintaining a group of people in society, namely, scholars, whose primary activity is to read and write prose. We need some people to keep their prose strong.

Hope, an epigram

2011-10-19T23:35:00.003+02:00

Here's another sentence that google gives me reason to think I just coined:

If there's any hope, it lies in the prose.

It's a variation on Orwell's (Winston Smith's) famous remark about the proles, of course. And I really have a hard time believing that no one out there has punned it before.

Weekend Clip

2011-10-15T20:26:00.001+02:00

I've been wanting to post something on weekends as well. Here's the sort of thing I'm thinking about. I'd like to just post this sort of thing without comment. Watch it with the implicit question: What does this have to do with academic writing? (This one's kind of a no brainer.)

RSL on Tour

2011-10-13T06:55:00.008+02:00

Next week, I won't be blogging on the regular schedule because I'm travelling. On Sunday, I leave for Barcelona to run a couple of workshops for PhD students at the ESADE Business School. I return Wednesday, and will be spending the following two days here in Copenhagen at a round table on the recently proposed "liberal learning" model of business of education. Then I fly to Budapest to do a one-day seminar and workshop on Writing Process Reengineering at Corvinus University on Saturday. I'll be back at the regular blogging on Tuesday, October 25. But the following week, November 3, I'll be in Bristol at the University of the West of England. It feels a bit like a European tour.

I'm looking to forward to meeting a lot of new people and to testing my "product". In the new year, I'll begin my freelance career as a writing consultant, and I hope that the majority of the work will consist of doing seminars and workshops like these, as well as advising administrators (including department heads) on how to organize productive writing environments. I will also, no doubt, continue to offer individual coaching and editorial assistance here in Copenhagen. A number of my current authors have expressed interest in continuing the relationship, and that is still something that gives me a great deal of satisfation to do (though it's relatively time consuming). But I'm also very interested in building a network of institutions, especially in Europe, around the concepts of Research as a Second Language and Writing Process Reengineering. I think "discursive impact", for example, ought to be an explicit part of any research strategy, whether at the individual, departmental, university or national level. Even the EU, to my mind, should be thinking about it.

I'm willing to help in whatever way I can.

One simple thing I can do is to share my experiences as a resident writing consultant, presented in the form of a proposal for how to reengineer your writing process, individually and collectively. The one-day workshop I'll be doing in Budapest and Bristol deals with the problem of managing the writing process and developing the written product. It is a workshop in four parts:

1. Research as a Second Language. Even researchers who have English as their native language find themselves struggling with the idiom of their chosen field. In this introductory lecture, I define academic writing both in terms of the knowledge it communicates and the conversation that it informs. I argue that your prose style is a crucial part of your skill set as a scholar. The challenge is simply to become an articulate member of your scholarly community.

2. Discursive Impact. Your ability to speak and write knowledgeably is conditioned by the "discursive formation" or "disciplinary matrix" in which you participate. I talk to participants about how the exemplary work that has already been done in their traditions can be used to inform their own efforts to write more effectively. I show participants how to use our growing knowledge of citation networks to give their writing the impact it deserves.

3. Time Management. One of the most common explanations scholars give for not writing is that there is no time to do so. I try to dismantle some common myths about the time that is required to write effectively and provide a number of simple tools to help participants secure the time they need to work. These tools can be used by individuals, but can benefit greatly from a supportive collegial environment.

4. Space Management. The "space" for writing must be thought of both physically and conceptually. It is important to structure both the environment in which writing goes on (i.e., that it be sequestered enough from everything else that is going on at the same time) and the manuscript that is being developed. If you begin with a blank page in an open space you are not likely to work effectively. I show participants how to get organized to avoid this problem.

This is familiar stuff to readers of this blog. (New readers who want to get a sense of what I'm about might read my sketch of the book I'm working on.) If you want to experience me live, then, you now have a simple way of making it happen. My standard fee is 1000€ per day, plus expenses, to hold the workshop. Participants are expected to do a little bit of work in advance to prepare (I have a form for them to fill out). Contact me by email at tbasboll at gmail dot com.

Teacher or Coach?

2011-10-11T06:58:00.003+02:00

Reading Awul Gawande's recent in piece in The New Yorker got me thinking about whether I'm primarily a teacher of writing or a coach. And it got me thinking about which of these labels I prefer. I've been aware of the distinction for some time—ever since I noticed the difference between how my children learn at school and how they learn at sports. The difference is getting muddled, however, as teachers are increasingly expected to function as coaches.

There's a video of Gawande's talk at the New Yorker Festival at Fora TV. Here he talks about the passage from unconscious incompetence to unconcious competence through the stages of concious incompetence and conscious competence. Now, in my view, both teachers and coaches facilate this passage, but they begin and end their involvement at different points.

Part of the teacher's job is to make you conscious of your incompetence.* This is much more necessary than it might sound, and in two senses. It is necessary in the sense that you can't really get around it given the way the classroom situation is set up: attendance is mandatory; the class itself is simply part of a curriculum. The student often shows up without any awareness of their incompetence and often only a vague interest in the subject matter. It is also necessary in the other sense that there are many things we must learn that we will not learn if we are not made aware of our ignorance. These are competences that our culture requires of us, but which we do not immediately possess and don't naturally feel we need. Teachers give us those competences.

But because of the structure of education into courses, the teacher's final task is often the exam, which is to say, a highly conscious moment. The students end their involvement with their teacher acutely aware of what they learned (hopefully not just what they don't know) mainly because they have just been graded. That is, teachers start with the unconscious incompetence of students and try to bring them to the stage of conscious competence.

Coaches, meanwhile, start with (let's call them) aspirants who are normally very conscious of their incompetence. Gawande himself, for example, sought out a coach after eight years of practice as a surgeon because he noticed he was no longer improving. These are people who not only want to get better, they know what they want to get better at. But the coach works with them continuously, so that the skills they learn pass into the unconscious on a running basis. The coach does not subject the aspirant to an exam. That is, coaches start with conscious incompetence and stays with it until it is unconscious.

Another important difference between coaching and teaching, to my mind, is that coaches deal directly with the relevant competence in its performance. Teachers assign homework and check whether or not its been done. The teachers themselves "perform" in front the students with the aim of transfering something to them. But the coach simply watches and suggests alternative and exercises.

I would much prefer to be a writing coach than a writing teacher. Sometimes, however, my job really is to teach writing. That is, I show up in the classroom with the task of showing students what competences they lack. And I leave the students after I've given and graded an exam. Fortunately, there are many writers I work with in a manner that better resembles coaching. I give them things to do. I observe the results and suggests ways of doing it better. And I only get a sense of their competence by watching (or hearing about) their performance. (PhD students for example tell me what their committee thought about their writing. Scholars show me the reviews they got back from the journal.)

I have a feeling that under the many complicated reasons that lay behind my decision not to return to academia (a suitable position recently opened up, which I didn't apply for) this difference between being a teacher and a coach is important. Teachers are bound to teach even students who don't want to learn; one of the most noble things a teacher can do is to "awaken" the interest of a student in a subject that the culture values. Coaches have the luxury of being sought out by people who aspire to a competence, i.e., who are already interested in the relevant art. I respect what teachers do, of course, but I'm not sure it's my thing. Teachers are authorities in one way, coaches in another. Socrates, like all the other sophists, I might argue, was not so much a teacher as a coach. His student, Plato, founded the Academy.

______________
*I mean this in a somewhat different sense than Gawande, I should note. He constructs the contrast between the "teaching model" and the "coaching model" differently. More later, perhaps.

Professorial Writers

2011-10-06T06:57:00.004+02:00

"A writer doesn't have an office organization to protect him from friends the way a business man does," said Hemingway (Conversations, p. 46). His solution, as I noted in my last post, was to put some physical distance between himself and his potential visitors. The ultimate "threat" from which the writer needs to be "protected" is, of course, not friendship, but distraction. Hemingway welcomed distractions (and accordingly had to "enforce" his discipline) precisely because they came in the form of his friends. Academic writers, however, sometimes seem to welcome distractions for their own sake. That is, they gladly let their work be interrupted, or certainly allow it as a matter of course.

In a sense, professors need to protect their writing process from precisely the "office organization" that Hemingway said litarary writers don't have. Academics are not just professional writers, they are also professional researchers, teachers and administrators. Hemingway only had to live and write. Professors have to organize their work into smaller compartments and then also, of course, find time to live. And that life, in turn, is not what they write about. Here it is important to keep in mind that they do in fact have an office, and an organization around it.

First, there is the familiar concept of "office hours". Professors can limit their time with students to the classroom and a few hours a week, during which they are available to answer questions and offer advice. Similarly, the administrative work they do can be given a particular amount of time each week, usually centred around preparations for meetings with colleagues and university officials. Their research, too, whether it consists of reading books or conducting field work, can be confined to particular times of the day, though they may dominate the schedule more in some periods than others.

And then, like Hemingway, professors must find time to write. Here they can also use their office, or even their larger "office organization". Consider that people who wanted to talk to Hemingway sought him out in his home (where he also worked). But when people want to speak to a professor, they normally wait until she turns up in the office. And they do largely respect her closed door. The university institution really does offer "protection" from distractions.

Another difference between Hemingway's "professional writer" and this professorial counterpart has to do with the peer relationship. "Discussing other writers for publication is distasteful," said Hemingway. "Any good professional writer knows the strong points and the weaknesses of the other professionals. He is not under any obligation to point them out to the other writer's reading public" (Conversations, p. 52). Well, professors do have such an obligation, precisely because they are not writing for public consumption but for their fellow scholars. A professional writer works for (i.e., writes for) a non-professional reader. A professorial writer is working with her readers to understand the subject. And this means that they often have to point out the errors that their peers have made while, of course, also acknowledging their contributions. The writing of scholar is instrinsically much more social than the writing of a novelist.

The work of our professors is constitutively tied to, not severed from, the "life" that the writing is about. It is the luxury of the professional (literary) writer to write, as Hemingway put it, "one true sentence that you know" after another, without worrying too much about what your friends or other writers are up to. But the professor must constantly write with peers and students in mind. There is no abstract "reading public" for whom to keep up "professional" appearances. The reader and the "critic" are one. This difference in the social organization of academic and literary life, which, I would argue, is much more complex in the case of the academic, is, perhaps, what accounts for the famous persona of "the distracted professor".

Professional Writers

2011-10-04T07:02:00.010+02:00

Ernest Hemingway was famously "professional" about his writing. He cultivated a certain seriousness about "the work" of writing, which could be seen in his discipline, his unsentimentality about his own genius, and his principled respect for his fellow writers. Beyond his infectuous (and some would say inisidious) prose style, Hemingway's professionalism was arguably his greatest influence on the literature of his age. This morning, I want to describe this professionalism, and how it was taken up by Norman Mailer in shaping his own writing process. I'll do this with an eye to another post on Thursday about what "professorial" writing might look like by comparison.

Let's begin with discipline. Here's a typical statement of his famous method as it appeared in a 1946 newspaper article.

Not as fast a writer as you might think from his easy style, Mr. Hemingway works on a strict schedule that produces an average of 500 to 1,000 words a day. "I start in at seven in the morning," he says, "and I always quit when I'm going good, so that I'll be able to pick right up again the next day." (Conversations, p. 46)

Notice both the early start and the moderate quantity of writing he gets done. (This blog post, written from 6:00 to 7:00 AM will break 900.) He goes on to note that "a writer doesn't have an office organization to protect him from friends the way a business man does", which is why he needs "enforced discipline". He accomplished this by living in a physically inaccessible house on Cuba, with signs reminding visitors they'd better have an appointment.

In a 1937 speech, he described "the writer's problem" simply as "writing truly". "There is nothing more difficult to do," he says (a professional's pride, of course, is that he's good at something difficult), and the good writer is therefore justly rewarded. Even if these rewards only come posthumously, he says, "a really good writer is sure of eventual recognition. Only romantics think there are such things as unkonwn masters." (Conversations, p. 193) That is: the professional writer is someone who sets out to do good work and expects to rewarded appropriately. I.e., he expects to be paid. He does not complain that people (or whole ages) who won't reward him don't understand his genius.

Ten years after that speech, Time magazine asked Hemingway to identify "once-prominent writers that have slipped or failed to measure up to early promise." He declined to answer the question on the grounds that "A writer has no more right to inform the public of the weaknesses and strengths of his fellow professionals than a doctor or a lawyer has." (Conversations, p. 50) Two years later, in a letter to the New York Review of Books, he put the point forcefully:

Discussing other writers for publication is distasteful. Any good professional writer knows the strong points and the weaknesses of the other professionals. He is not under any obligation to point them out to the other writer's reading public. If te other writer is read the public must find the good in him. I see no reason to try to put him out of business by disillusioning anyone that he may mystify." (Conversations, p. 52)

I'll return to this point in the next post, but do notice that we do (morally) expect doctors and lawyers to put the known frauds among them "out of business" (though we don't hold our breath, to be sure).

Norman Mailer is one of Hemingway's greatest legacies, and he certainly claimed to practice what Papa preached. "To be a professional," he famously said, "is to do good work on a bad day", i.e., to write even when you don't 'feel like it'. (I need to find the reference for this.) He was as disciplined as (and, at times, harder working than) Hemingway. And he adopted the master's faith in the unconscious:

Over the years, I’ve found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing. A simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to pick up such valuables at a given time. Count on me, you are saying to a few forces below: I will be there to write. ((The Spooky Art)

This is something I practice too, not least when writing these regularly scheduled blog posts. The theme of Hemingway's professionalism has been with me half-consciously since Thursday.

Another idea I've taken from Mailer, and Mailer has taken from Hemingway, is the idea that one keeps oneself "in shape" by writing, and that one is always working to improve one's style. Mailer sometimes compared himself to Muhammad Ali, and once, as in the following passage, to a professional football player.

In the absence of a greater faith, a professional keeps himself in shape by remaining true to his professionalism. Amateurs write when they are drunk. For a serious writer to do that is equivalent to a professional football player throwing imaginary passes in traffic when he is bombed., and smashing his body into parked cars on the mistaken impression that he is taking out the linebacker. Such a professional football player will feel like crying in the morning when he discovers that his ribs are broken. (Preface to Deaths for the Ladies, reprinted in Existential Errands, p. 200)

Mailer, of course, learned this the hard way, as do many writers. And some never learn it. But no writer who takes himmerherself seriously as a professional can say they have not been warned. The "professional writer" has a long and proud tradition to draw on—and to live up to.

The Professorial Bureaucracy

2011-09-29T06:57:00.001+02:00

The word "professional" has different meanings depending on what you choose to contrast it with. In one sense, it simply means getting paid for what you do, and is then contrasted with "amateur". In another sense, however, it points to a subclass of all those who get paid for the work they do and is to be contrasted with a word like "labourer". The professional, we might say, is not just in it for the money but is not quite doing it for love either.

Then there is professionalism, a sort of work ethic, a particular kind of seriousness about what one does. Here "professional" is best contrasted with "personal". Professionals don't take sucess or failure personally, and they don't serve people they like any differently than people they don't like. (Doctors and lawyers are committed to this code for natural reasons.) Some people take a hard line on this, refusing to do anything job-related for their friends. They simply won't mix business and pleasure. They're professionals.

Professionals are always specialized. Their professionalism applies to their use of a particular subset of their skills, not to everything they know how to do. And these skills are always "knowledge intensive", i.e., the product of a long period of education and (often) apprenticeship (or internship). Professionalism is very much about the authority that this knowledge gives them in the exercise of their competences. Mintzberg makes the interesting point that the education of professionals also includes a great deal of "indoctrination". A concerted effort is made to make sure that the professionals in our society use their skills in the service of "the good". That is, professionalism implies both epistemic and ethical formation.

It has seemed to me for some time that scholars are becoming increasingly "professional" about their work. This was once a paradox, but Heidegger was probably on to something when he said that the scholar is simply disappearing from the "modern" scene. The "professional" scholar is really not a scholar at all but a "researcher", and this is indeed the more commonly used word for the employees in the "operative core" of a university. Professional researchers are more likely to separate business and pleasure, work and play. Also, they maintain a certain formality about their authority, which also, like most professionals, allows them to be quite informal about who they are when they are not directly engaged in research and teaching. They have a keen sense of their obligations.

I want to make another important contrast to the "professional" stance, namely, the "professorial", i.e., the traditional stance of the scholar. The professional holds knowledge for the sake of some practical end while the professor, traditionally, holds knowledge "for its own sake". The professional must be able to do particular things, while the professor must believe certain truths (and, of course, have an understanding of them). It is the job of the professor precisely to "profess" these beliefs.

It is the social function of professing that is being lost in the modern university. In an important sense, even seeing the university as a "professional bureaucracy" is inappropriate (at least on strictly philosophical grounds), and doing so may have been part of its undoing, its devolution into a machine bureaucracy. Knowledge is justified, true belief, and the professional is not actually obligated to believe anything personally. So our conception of knowledge (our epistemology) is changing because the social function of our knowers is changing.

Next week, I'll try to clarify these thoughts a bit more by distinguishing professional and professorial writing. As always, I think the culprit is social science, which has been reshaping the way we "know" about each other—and ourselves—for about a hundred years now.

The University as a Machine Bureaucracy

2011-09-27T07:00:00.010+02:00

Last week I was teaching Mintzberg's model of organizational structure and Taylor's principles of scientific management and I got to thinking about how the organization of universities is changing. The essential function of organizational structure, says Mintzberg, is to coordinate work processes, so the aptness of the organizational form will depend on the work that the organization does, i.e., the processes that must be coordinated. And these processes will differ greatly depending on the amount of authority we grant to those who carry them out. Do we assume that the "workers" know how best to do their jobs or not?

This is one of the main differences between what Mintzberg calls a "machine bureaucracy" and what he calls a "professional bureaucracy". In a machine bureaucracy like a car factory, for example, workers are not expected to know very much about how to build cars. So the work is organized for them, by people who know better. But in a university, a professional bureaucracy, he argues, the knowledge held by the faculty members gives them a great deal of autonomy (as a group) about how to carry out the tasks related to research and teaching (which is the "work" that is carried out in the "operative core" of a university). That means that coordination depends on the thorough indoctrination of the "workers", so that they all think more or less in the same way when they think for themselves. In a factory, by contrast, coordination depends on detailed instructions, which can be carried out without deeper indoctrination.

That's the essential contrast: are the workers presumed to know how best to do their jobs? (It is because this knowledge belongs to the professionals in the operative core that a professional bureaucracy has a relatively small technostructure.) And this was what got me thinking when reading Taylor. After all, Taylor's "revolution" was precisely to question the assumption that the worker who shoveled pig iron really understood how best to carry out even that simple task. Taylor undertook to determine, by "scientific" means, exactly how much pig iron there should be on each shovelful, and exactly how long the break between shovelings should be. That is, by applying "science" to the work processes, he actively shifted authority away from the worker and onto the manager (or management consultant). That is, he made the worker relatively less knowledgeable about the work.

It's important to keep in mind that scientific management arises (also in inchoate forms before Taylor made the "theory" explicit) at the beginning of the "managerial revolution" and the rise of the machine bureaucracy as the preferred organizational form for industrial production. (Even the divisionalized form is to be thought of as a loose affiliation of machine bureaucracies.) That is, a certain organizational form becomes more and more apt precisely because more and more knowledge is produced ("scientifically") about how the work processes themselves are best carried out. "Craftsmanship" is thereby increasingly replaced with "coordination".

This is where I had a moment of lucidity. Since the second world war, with the rise of Big Science, a great deal of "science" has been done to determine how scientists themselves do what they do. Naturally, this has informed both science policy and research management. At the same time, another "scientific" discipline, namely, pedagogy, has turned its attention to the work that scholars do as teachers, determining the best way to educate students.

Notice what this does to the authority of the scholar. Scholars were once presumed to know best how to teach students in their particular field (pedagogy was simply part of the background indoctrination of the field); now, teaching in all fields is being "evaluated" on principles that are defined by an overarching theory. The same goes for research methods, which are increasingly defined by generalized "handbooks" on the subject, not passed on through craft traditions in particular sciences. Moreover, the social organization of science (and its relation to other social institutions) is guided by research done in specialized disciplines, i.e., "science studies", which is essentially anthropology and sociology applied to the "problem of knowledge".

Obviously, Socrates is ultimately to blame. He has become the iconic "philosopher" who convinced professional knowers that they didn't really know what knowledge was. The irony, unfortunately, was lost both on the scientists themselves and subsequent generations of philosophers. (This is something, I think, that Steve Fuller taught me.)

The result is that, while technology (especially IT) has replaced a great deal of the "support staff" (secretaries, for example), the "technostructure" of the organization (i.e., the planners of how the work is carried out) has increased a great deal. That is, in so far as the faculty members themselves no longer know very much about either teaching or research, they are increasingly dependent on the scientifically informed ("technostructured", if you will) "management" of the middle line. In an oft-invoked "sign of the times", corporation executives are now being hired to "run" universities.

Like Socrates, unfortunately, I seem to be part of the problem. After all, what is a "writing consultant" but someone who claims to know more about an aspect of the work of scholarship, namely, writing, than the scholars themselves? On Thursday I'll try to think my way out of this tight spot by distinguishing between the "professional" and the "professorial" organization. More then.

Knowing & Writing

2011-09-22T06:50:00.003+02:00

Jonathan's comment to Tuesday's post reminded that writing and knowing are not the same thing. On my pragmatic definition, your knowledge is the basis of your ability to write, and your writing therefore demonstrates that ability, but the text you write is not your knowledge. Your writing is an elaboration (a "working out") of what you know.

Consider the difference between the two words "writing" and "knowing". The first is most commonly used to name an activity (putting words together), while the second is just as commonly used to name a state of being (the state of having knowledge, "being in the know"). But "writing" is sometimes also a less active noun. "How's your writing going?" or "How do you like Simon's writing?" Interestingly, we don't talk about our "knowing" that way. In fact, we very rarely talk explicitly about the development of our body our knowledge, even at our universities. We talk about the work, namely, the writing. Or we talk about other actvities, like teaching. We might also talk about our research, and we might talk about our reading—mainly, that we just read something interesting.

But we don't talk about our knowledge as something we do. I can tell you (you can see) what I'm writing right now, but can we talk about what I'm knowing at the moment? Is this act of writing also an act of knowing? The act of knowing what I'm talking about, for example? Or does my writing merely demonstrate or manifest my knowledge?

There are similar verbs—owning, for example. Ownership is a state of being but we also own things, just like we know things. I can be an owner just as I can be a knower. I can hold ownership of something just as I can have knowledge of something. I can also acquire new ownership (come to own something), just as I can acquire new knowledge (come to know). Neither owning or knowing, though each is a gerund derived from a verb, are things we, properly speaking do. But it is not grammatically correct to say that they are things we are. Knowledge is something we are said to have.

Compare "dancing" and "writing". These are are certainly activities, things people do. They are also things you can well or not so well. They are abilities you develop with practice. Is there something like knowledge, understood as the basis of your ability to write, that lies beneath the dancer's ability to dance? Well, the dancer can rightly be said to "know how to dance". The dancing demonstrates mastery. But what kind of knowledge is that? What kind of mastery?

Dancing is often a very graceful activity. Dancers make graceful movements. Is it possible to be graceful in the same way that it is possible to be knowledgeable? Well, it's even possible "to grace" (as a verb), as in: "She graced us with her presence." But it is not common to say of someone that she entered the room and simply began to grace. Likewise, the teacher does not enter the classroom and proceed to "know" things. Rather, the lecture demonstrates (or fails to demonstrate) that the teacher knows something.

"What are you going to do this morning?" "Oh, I think I'll stay home and know that universities are going from being professional organizations to being machine organizations—in Mintzberg's sense." Well, you might just sit at home, but how are you going to go about "knowing" such a thing? There's the writing. The dancer does not just live in a "state of grace". She works on it. She becomes more precise in her movements by continual practice. Likewise, your writing is the outward and active manifestation of an underlying disposition, which we call knowledge. Scholars know many things; but writing is what they do.

Justified, True Belief

2011-09-20T06:59:00.005+02:00

"What is knowledge?" asked Socrates. After much discussion, he and Theaetetus finally arrive at the classic formula: knowledge is justified, true belief. That is, knowledge is not merely believing something, nor merely believing something that happens to be true, but believing something you also have reason to believe is true (i.e., something you are "justified" in believing is true.) In order to know that you stole my money, it is not enough that you in fact stole my money. I must believe it too. Conversely, it is not enough that I believe it, you must actually have done it. But even if you did take my money, I must believe it on reasonable grounds before my belief can be counted as knowledge. If I think you took my money only because you have curly hair, and I happen to mistrust curly-haired people, then even my true belief cannot be counted as knowledge. In the twentieth century, philosophers realized that things are even more complicated than this, but this definition of knowledge remains influential and has the virtue of being clear.

When I've been talking to students this semester, I've been contrasting this classic definition of knowledge with a more pragmatic one. Instead of thinking of knowledge as particular state of mind (a particular kind of belief), I've been suggesting they think of it as an ability—the ability to hold one's own in a conversation. And I've been telling them that they know they have something knowledgeable to say in this conversation if they can write a good prose paragraph about it. That is, if they can make a claim in a single clear, declarative sentence, and if they can then support it with five or six further sentences, then, for all practical purposes, they "know" it. Or rather, we might say they know it for "academic" purposes.

This won't satisfy a philosopher, of course. You can obviously write a paragraph in support of a claim you don't believe, and you can write a paragraph in support of a claim that turns out to be false. Even the third condition of knowing—justification—is not necessarily satisfied by writing a paragraph. Prejudice, too, can be expresses in well-formed prose.

But a paragraph that has been written in a specifically academic environment, like a university program or research community, is written under particular, shall we say, "pressures". If it holds up under those pressures, it has a certain kind of strength, and in academia this strength is valorized as knowledge. A trained academic will subject his or her writing to those pressures soon after drafting the paragraph. It will become clear almost immediately whether the words can maintain their "composure" in the face of criticism. That is, it will become clear whether the scholar or student was "able to write" the paragraph only after the roughly six sentence, roughly 200 words, have been committed to the page.

It's a bit like putting nine pieces of wood together in an attempt to make a table. Whether or not it's a table will be immediately clear once you try to stand it on its own four legs. Whether or not it's a good table, of course, will require further stress testing, but much of this can be done by the carpenter himmerherself. Or, to take another example, the figure skater knows intuitively whether or not she can land a triple axel, the pianist knows wether or not he can play a particular fugue, just from the experience of doing it. They turn to their master, coach or teacher only to learn how to improve their performance. Likewise, the paragraph will or will not "hold up" in an sense that should be immediately clear to the writer. The teacher merely identifies places the text, joints, that could be more precisely articulated.

In a workshop yesterday, I asked the students whether there was some other point of writing than (a) expressing justified, true beliefs or (b) holding one's own in a scholarly conversation. One student rightly suggested "to persuade". But in the face of this ambition—to write persuasively—I always try to defend the higher virtue of writing knowledgeably. In academic writing you are not always trying to convince your reader that something is the case. You are merely providing the best argument you have for it. It may be true. You may believe it is true. And you may have good reason to think so. But your readers come to your writing with their own beliefs and their own reasons. It is more important that your writing facilitates a conversation than that it wins your reader over. This is also why academic writing isn't for everyone. You're not really playing to win. As Jonathan puts it, the academic writer wants to be tackled.

* * *

I started writing this post at 6:00. By 6:45, I had written 795 words in 6 paragraphs. As always, we must keep in mind that I'm "merely" blogging, not actually writing an "academic" text. But the quantities are still suggestive. In regards to academic writing, I know what I'm talking about, so it takes me about ten minutes to write a paragraph that contributes to the ongoing conversation about it. In more critical contexts, like a book or journal article, you can expect it to take a bit longer. But let your goal be to be able to compose a solid prose paragraph, one that "holds up", in under 30 minutes. It's a good sign that you know your subject.

Insist on Knowing

2011-09-15T07:00:00.002+02:00

Last week I spoke at the release of Embedded, which is a student-run journal that has just been started here at the Copenhagen Business School. I began by quoting Ezra Pound in his ABC of Reading: "Real education must ultimately be limited to men who INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding." (84) It is encouraging, I told them, in a time when too many students expect to be herded into their qualifications, and too many educators are willing to satisfy those expectations, to see students themselves asserting the value of knowledge. This is not a student magazine, after all, but an academic journal run by students. It is manifestation of people who insist on knowing.

We aren't able to limit education in general to such people, but we might say that they are the only ones who are using their time at university to really get an education. Students who don't insist on knowing are not really learning. They are exposing themselves to the influence, not of knowledge, but of power. They are not building their understanding but shaping their obedience; they are being sheep-herded into a convenient set of truths, an ideology. I will grant that, for many of these students, this "truth" is, in a brute, materialistic kind of way, even a convenience to themselves.

Sometimes the production of this convenient truth travels under the banner of "engaged scholarship". This is the process by which scholars seek out ways of making their knowledge "relevant" to practitioners. If they insist too strongly on what they know, their perceived relevance will be at risk. That is why we need the relative luxury, the freedom from worry, of the university, or "academe". It gives us the means to entertain inconvenient notions.

Insistence is an interesting intellectual stance. It is something quite different than being curious or open-minded. And it takes a certain amount of strength. That strength should be manifest in your writing. In fact, insisting on knowing is precisely what academic writing is for. Popular writing does not give you, or your reader, an opportunity to insist on anything; it is intended to be believed in so far as it is understood. Academic writing, because it is written by knowledgeable people for other knowledgeable people, i.e., people who might challenge them about the truth of their claims, is a site of Pound's "real education". It is where learning takes place.

Happiness

2011-09-13T06:53:00.001+02:00

"Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." (Ernest Hemingway)

To know that tomorrow I will write is happiness. I don't mean that thinking, or hoping, or wishing to write tomorrow is happiness. I mean really knowing that I will write. And to know that you will write you must know both what you will write and when you will write. To vaguely intend to write something, sometime tomorrow is not to know that you will write tomorrow. Knowing means knowing when you will start writing, on which paper, in defense of which claims, and when you will stop writing.

It's a writer's happiness, of course. But, then again, your happiness as a writer is periodically the greatest happiness that is available to you. There are periods when your unhappiness as a writer is the foundation of your mood in all things. A writer is someone who needs to write; and a scholar is sometimes more acutely a writer, whether writing or not, than any other thing. There are also periods when your writing has little to do with your happiness, when you are happy or unhappy regardless of whether you are writing. But those periods are not what I'm talking about this morning.

I felt this writer's happiness last night. I had not yet decided what this morning's blog post would be about and I was acutely aware of having to make that decision. I was not happy. Being back on a schedule means that I am writing, that I'm a writer, that my happiness depends on whether or not I write. I knew when I would write, but not yet what I would write. So I was not yet happy. I got ready for bed and got under the covers with Book I, Part III, of Williams' Paterson. It begins: "How strange you are, idiot!" And ends: "Earth, the chatterer, father of all/speech . . . . ." And it has some sharp words along the way for "the university". A good tonic. And then I knew what I would write about.

I got up and sat at the table with my notebook, jotting down a long and clumsy version of what is now my opening sentence and a few loose thoughts. Then I went to bed and slept. From the moment I closed the notebook, to the moment I fell asleep, I was happy.

When do you feel this happiness? How often? For how long? Happiness is not writing, but knowing that tomorrow you will write. You may know, while you are writing today, that you will also write tomorrow. Or you may know at the moment you stop writing that you'll write again tomorrow. Then you will be happy for the rest of the day. You, the writer. (And like I say, there are periods in your life when nothing can make you miserable if the writer in you is happy, and nothing can make you happy if the writer is miserable.) Sometimes, however, you will finish your writing for the day and you will have to wait until later in the day to know that you will write again tomorrow. Or you will know that you won't write tomorrow, because you have planned not to write tomorrow. Why did you rob yourself of this happiness?

On Friday afternoon, I should mention, "tomorrow" means Monday. Consider the implications: a little bit of planning, a little bit of determination can make you happy all day long for weeks. Every day, you make a decision about when and what you will write tomorrow. You make that decision merely by looking at your writing plan. And you always do what your plan tells you to do. Or you change the plan for tomorrow, at the latest today. That is, you know you will not change your mind tomorrow morning when you are supposed to write. The writer in you has learned to trust the rest of you. When the writing is finished for the day, the rest of you takes over, first making a promise to bring you back to the desk tomorrow.

And that, again, is happiness.

We Now Return You to Regular Scheduled Posting

2011-09-08T06:58:00.002+02:00

I ran into a long-time reader of this blog yesterday who expressed her disappointment that I'm no longer posting on a schedule. I had gotten her used to reading RSL every other day by posting, regular as a clockwork, at 7 AM, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. These days, since I'm posting whenever I feel like it, she doesn't know when to check in, and the result has been that she doesn't keep up with my posts like she used to. That's worth thinking about.

And doing something about. I've immediately decided to impose a regular blogging pattern again. Every other day, I'll devote an hour to saying something intelligent about academic writing, based on my experience as the resident writing consultant at a major European business school.

Such regularity, after all, is part of my "brand", and my brand is going to become increasingly important to me in the months come. I will be going into business for myself, trying to spread the idea of Writing Process Reengineering to other universities. It is my belief that the competitiveness of universities is increasingly going to depend on their discursive strength, i.e., their ability to have an impact in the journal literature. I think I have a distinct contribution to make in that area.

My experience tells me that there is a great deal of unrealized potential in the heads and desks of researchers. They know much more than they write; the discourse in their fields is dominated by a handful of major reputations rather than being driven by fresh empirical and theoretical insight. If scholars would write more regularly, and submit that writing more regularly to journals, I think the quality of the conversation in many fields would significantly improve.

I also think scholars would be happier. One of the rhetorical challenges I have is to make sure that I'm not taken to be proposing that scholars should work harder. I believe they could work more effectively and that this work could be better supported by university administrators.

In any case, I firmly believe that the current "crisis of the European sciences" (to borrow Husserl's phrase) is rooted, at least in part, in the attitude of scholars and in the leadership of the universities, especially in regard to writing. In both cases, "publish or perish" promotes a vague feeling of anxiety rather than resolute strategic action. Fortunately, there are some simple things that can be done for the immediate benefit of the individual scholar, the academic department, and the university as a whole. I'm ready to help.

The first order of business, then, as my reader reminded me, is to get my own act together again and begin to set a good example. So, until Christmas, you'll find me blogging twice week, posting at 7 AM, Tuesdays and Thursdays. (I may also introduce a weekend post, but let's wait and see.) In the New Year, I'll probably go back to the Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule.

RSL: Table of Contents

2011-09-06T08:32:00.006+02:00

If you've been reading along lately, you know that I've decided to gather the ideas on this blog into a book of essays. My working title is

Research as a Second Language:
Essays on Academic Writing and the Crisis of Representation

Here's a table of contents, which links to my overview of each section:

Introduction

Part I: Science as Hustle and Bustle
1. The Scholar Disappears
2. The Archives of Babel
3. A Supplementary Clerk

Part II: Writing Process Reengineering
4. Finitude
5. Space
6. Time

Part III: Existential Errands
7. The Crisis of Representation
8. Getting Your Facts Straight
9. Getting Your Act Together

Conclusion

The book will consist of nine 5000-word essays. This will be framed by a 3000-word introduction and a 2000-word conclusion. 50,000 words in all.

RSL, Conclusion

2011-09-06T07:53:00.006+02:00

F. débaucher is, according to Littré and Hatzfeld, derived from n. bauche, of which the precise sense and origin are according to the latter unknown; according to the former it = ‘a place of work, workshop’, so that desbaucher would mean orig. ‘to draw away from the workshop, from one's work or duty’.
Oxford English Dictionary

I usually introduce my writing workshops by explaining the etymology of "debauchery". Today, the word means "a vicious indulgence in sensual pleasures", but it stems from "seduction from duty, integrity, or virtue; corruption." The modern sense of "debauch" apparently emerged in the 17th century, i.e., at the beginning of the modern era, when we began to separate the pursuit of profit from the pursuit of pleasure. Today, of course, these pursuits are specialized, and localized in places like factories and brothels, office buildings and movie houses. We commute back and forth between drudgery and debauchery, meaningless toil and mindless fun.

The central message of this book is that we must learn to "get back to work", that in a "post-industrial" age that is becoming a little too comfortable with the idea of "knowledge production", we must insist on research as a craft. A workshop is a place to take craftsmanship seriously and derive pleasure from the first-hand manipulation of materials. Quality in any art, I believe, depends on integrating (and in our age this means reintegrating) productivity and sensuality, industry and creativity. It is the opposite of the vicious indulgence in sensual pleasures, the pursuit of false pleasure, we might say. Quality is a true pleasure; it is the sensuality of work. We are not just 'producers', we are makers.

It is precisely in the development of a craft, after all, that it is important to see yourself as someone who makes something, not a merely particular kind of being. It is true that becoming a scholar will change you as a person, but it is your activities that will change you, not some act of will, and certainly not some state of mind. I have found, for example, that many students, and even young faculty, need to become much more assertive, much more confident about what they have to say. Some of them think they are following the example of the self-deprecating scholar who always reminds you how little they know, how new this topic is to them, how difficult it is even for them to understand. The students who witness this performance forget that it is an exercise in irony. The pose of the searching, uncertain scholar is grounded in an underlying confidence in one's ability to speak intelligently on a range of subjects (those that define the field). Don't think that if a famous scholar admits to being uncertain then your uncertainty, and your willingness to admit it, is a sure sign that you've got a future in scholarship. Look at what scholars do, not what they say they are, and ask yourself whether you can do it too.

[Back to Table of Contents]

RSL, Introduction

2011-09-04T20:55:00.009+02:00

We must retract our offerings, burnt as they are.
We must recall our lines of verse like faulty tires.
We must flay the curiatoriat, invest our sackcloth,

and enter the academy single file.

Ben Lerner

For a long time I used to get up early.* Well, it seemed like a long time to me and I, in any case, felt it would have been more natural to hit the snooze button when the alarm went off at 5:47 am. By six, after shaking the sleep out of my body, going to the bathroom, and drinking a glass of water, I'd either be putting on my running shoes (on Tuesdays and Thursdays) or (on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays) stirring a cup of instant coffee and sitting down in front of the computer to write. As a sometime Kantian, I don't quite raise the maxim of my actions to the level of a universal principle, but I do like to capture the things I do in a three-letter acronym or a catchy rhyme. I called this particular weekly regimen of exercise "Blogging and Jogging".

Three days a week, I'd spend a small hour composing a post for my blog, Research as a Second Language. In that time I'd usually manage to write seven or eight hundred words, neatly arranged in four or five paragraphs. The other two weekdays, I would run five kilometers, and I'd try to fit in a slightly longer run on Saturday afternoon. Whenever I was asked to speak to students about their writing, in order to emphasize the connection between physical and mental exercise (both require discipline) I'd ask whether they did any sports, and then I'd tell them that I, too, had recently started jogging. After a beat I'd add, "Because a body like this doesn't just happen, you know."** For some reason, it is especially first-year students who find that line amusing.

While my body still takes a sense of humour to love, after about three years of regular work on the blog, I like to think I've built up a more straightforwardly useful body of work about how to get the most out of your scholarly writing. This book brings together some of my best ideas, organized into nine little essays. There are plenty of writing manuals out there, many of which are perfectly good, and this book is not trying to replace any of them. I think that, as a philosopher who found himself in a position to hone his craft as a language editor under uncommonly luxurious conditions at a major European business school, I have a distinct perspective on the problem of writing as part of a life in research. It is that perspective that I hope to convey to readers of this book.

The first three essays take a historical view of the problem of what is commonly called "discourse", i.e., the conditions under which one becomes, or fails to become, an author. I try to show how academic work became the hustle and bustle it is—how science went from being a vocation to being almost a business and why some of us sometimes fall into despair. The next three essays go at the problem in an entirely practical way; they summarize my work as a writing consultant, your personal guide to what I call "writing process reengineering" (WPR). I offer you nothing less than a way of mastering time and space, at least in writing, a way to leverage the transcendental categories of experience, the underlying principles of the disposition and order of the universe, which keep everything, not least your words, from happening all at once and piling up in the same place. The last three essays reframe the problem in existential terms, reminding you to thine own self be true even as you hustle yourself down the tenure track. As I always say, intellectuals have a particular responsibility not to engage in soul-destroying labour. After all, it's our minds we're being paid to keep in shape, for the common good.

[Back to Table of Contents]

________________
*After I came up with this clever allusion to Proust's famous opening sentence, I knew someone else must have beaten me to it. I imagined lots of people had done so, in fact, but I didn't expect such distinguished company: John Ashbery. It's the opening line of "Bird's Eye View of the Tool and Die Co", which you can hear him read here. This reminded me of the poem that I've used as an epigraph (click Lerner's name to see exactly what I mean).
**I've stolen this joke from Don Knott's character on Three's Company (1979-1984), which I watched after school as a kid. It's the same joke but with slightly different meaning as a result of our different body types. As I recall, Ralph Furley claimed that he often went to the gym, "Because a body like this ...", which is funny because he's a very small guy. [Update: I just found a transcript of that episode and it looks like I've misremembered it a bit: Furley is talking about his "powerhouse" diet.]

RSL, Part III

2011-09-03T11:23:00.005+02:00

In the comments to my last post, Jonathan raised a reasonable concern about my plan for this book, Research as a Second Language. Is it really one book, or two or three shorter, or even (gasp!) incomplete, books? My answer is that I hope there is some method in the apparent madness, and that when I do finally get the three parts to fit together, this fit will be what makes the book distinctive. Roughly speaking, each of the three parts will develop historical, practical, and existential images of academic writing respectively. It's going to be the "thinking person's guide to academic writing", or "stupid motivational tricks," if you will, "for smart people."

Outlines change as you work on them, and while developing my image of the other two parts I decided to rename Part III, which will now be called "Existential Errands", as a reference to Norman Mailer, who called one of his own collections of odds and ends that, and who will be quoted in the epigraph to each essay. (It was previously the working title of the first essay.) This section will engage in a kind of "motivational speaking" or "existential psychology" for academic writers—perhaps more precisely, "assertiveness training". It will try to help scholars compose themselves in the ongoing "crisis of representation", which will be the subject of the first essay.

7. The Crisis of Representation
"I want to know how power works," said Mailer to James Baldwin, "how it really works, in detail." This will be the epigraph for the first essay, which will gather together my thoughts on the so-called "postmodern condition", seen from the point of view of the developing scholar (the PhD student and the early-career researcher). I want to use the opportunity to speak openly and honestly about the insecurities, both ontological and ethnological, that one faces as one one's understanding of the world, and the world of scholarship, becomes increasingly sophisticated. "Who am I to speak?" we ask ourselves. As I never tire of pointing out, however, we must distinguish the problem of scientific representation from the problem of political representation. In both cases, the question is how we may "speak for" or "on behalf of", but the difference lies in whether we speak for things or speak for people. The first takes knowledge (what scholars have); the second takes power (what leaders have). Of course, you may want both. But I'm coming to realize that my real interest lies in knowledge. I want to know how knowledge works, I guess. I mean, how it really works. In detail.

8. Getting Your Facts Straight
This was the title of one the first posts I wrote here at RSL, and I stand by it to this day, more or less. No matter how "postmodern" or "poststructuralist" you think you are, you are going to have assert a great many things in your writing. You are going to have to claim that something is true, and that something else is false. And you are going to have to support those claims with your prose. So in this essay I'm going to bring together all my strongest arguments for a kind of methodological realism about facts, a presumption that some things are, however problematically, "the case", even if each of them is, each in its own way, "constructed". I will present my tripartite division of facts into "accomplished" ones, "contested" ones, and "irenic" ones, i.e., facts that are yours to assert, facts that constitute an important dispute, and facts you assume are true but which, "pace" the critics, you aren't going to get into. My reflections here are intended to build the reader's ontological confidence—to show them that there really are things worth knowing and that it is not absurd to imagine that, after years of studying them, you are among those who know enough to speak of such things.

9. Getting Your Act Together
Scholarship is ultimately a process of self-formation and requires a great deal of what is sometimes called "identity work". This essay surveys some of the most common issues. These include the tension between research and teaching and the tension between theory and practice. All of the issues have a fundamentally social constitution, i.e., they arise from the fact that scholarship is a collective endeavor. Since this book is about writing, I will continually bring the discussion around to Foucault's famous question, "What is an author?" In our own small ways, each of us is trying to become an author, i.e., a more or less stable point of subjectivity within a larger discourse, or set of discourses. We want a bit of "name recognition" out there, but we also want our work to be recognizable to ourselves. This is very much the fundamental "existential" question: Who am I? "It took eighteen centuries of Christendom," said Mailer, "before Kierkegaard could come back alive with the knowledge that ... the characteristic way modern man found knowledge of his soul [was] ... by the act of perceiving that he was most certainly losing it." We must get it together, people!

On that note, we come to the end of this overview of the three parts of my hopefully soon-to-be-written book, based on this blog. I'll write one more post about the introduction and conclusion, which will also deal more directly with Jonathan's question. In that post I'll update the table of contents, and provide links to these summaries. I'll also provide links with these summaries to places in the archives that unpack some of the ideas in early, rudimentary ways.

[Back to Table of Contents]

RSL, Part II

2011-09-01T08:44:00.009+02:00

The second part of the book will be the most practical, and the part that most approaches a "writing manual". Having described the workaday reality of research (in Part I), I now move on to the question of how we can manage that reality, both as individuals and in groups.

Part II is called "Writing Process Reengineering" as an allusion to my own practical circumstances, embedded in a department of a business school. Business Process Reengineering serves as a metaphorical model. It was developed as a way of rethinking and improving how businesses deliver goods and services to their customers. I have not tried to translate anything directly from the BPR approach (and don't really know very much about it, though that may change during the writing of these chapters); what I've tried to do is simply to present an image of the writing process as something that can be managed, and myself as the corresponding management consultant.

4. Finitude
The idea of managing the writing process is intended to provoke scholars of a more, let's say, "speculative" mindset. Indeed, one of the tutelary figures of this section of the book is Immanuel Kant, who urged us to restrain our speculative impulses by understanding the transcendental limits of our capacity to reason. For my purposes, this means getting scholars to realize that they do not have infinite resources at their disposal, nor are their projects infinite in scope. Their minds are not passive media for an absolute truth. There is, more importantly, no way to "transcend" the problem of writing by merely mental exertion. One must sit down for a limited amount of time and commit a limited amount of words to the page. Kant said that the fundamental categories of experience are time and space. Virginia Woolf helpfully pointed out that in, order to write, we need money and a room of our own, which is just a practical way of saying the same thing. The trick to mastering time and space is planning (cf. Kant's "schematism", i.e., scheming). And the key to planning is appreciating your own finitude.

5. Space
Where does your writing happen? If time is, as Henri Bergson said, what keeps everything from happening all at once, then space is what keeps it from piling up all in the same place. It is therefore important to define your space in two senses: first, where does your body go to write? What office or room do you go to when you write? What closed door can you sit behind without being disturbed? You have to make sure that this space is not also being occupied by things other than your writing. Second, where do the words go when you write? What text are you working on? What part of that text will you be working at a particular time? Here, the challenge is to keep your ideas from piling up in the same part of the paper. Questions about both senses of "space" should have clear and unambiguous answers each time you write. In this essay, therefore, I will talk about the space in which you write both as a room, i.e., a literal space, and as a page, i.e., a literary space. I will use these images to construct the space of the journal article and to suggest ways of gaining mastery over it, one paragraph at a time. The centerpiece of this essay is my all-purpose outline of a 40-paragraph journal article.

6. Time
When does your writing happen? Many academic writers make the mistake of thinking of time in terms of their deadlines. They will say they have 3 months to finish an article, or 2 years to write their dissertation. But most people write at their best in 2- or 3-hour sessions, preferably every day. So they do well to think about how many of those sessions they have until their deadline. They do well to think of each week as offering them only about 5 of these sessions, which occupy their attention for no more than half the working day. This essay will include my “16-Week Challenge” to train the writer's ability to leverage that useful property of an otherwise rather abstract notion. The reader is asked to think about how many of the ideally 240 hours in a given 16-week period they will spend writing. They will then think about how much they can expect to accomplish.

The central image of this section of the book is the central image of my workshops, namely, a rectangle carved into regular sections. It can represent the structure of a paper (divided into sections) or a weekly calendar (divided into sessions). My goal in writing these three short essays (15,000 words in all) is to leave the reader with a clear sense that the writing process is a real, concrete, manageable entity. That is can be imagined in some detail, and that the greater the level of detail, the more manageable it is. Though I have to admit that I'm providing a bunch of boxes into which to organize the process, it is also, I sometimes say, the box outside of which you think if you choose.

There you are. An overview of Part II of Research as a Second Language, the book. One more to go. Next week, I'm going to back to these posts and add links back into the archives. Then I'll really have my work cut out for me. But I'll also have a book proposal more or less ready to go.

[Back to Table of Contents]

RSL, Part I

2011-08-31T08:54:00.010+02:00

Part I will be called "Science as Hustle and Bustle", which plays on the title of a seminal work in the STS tradition, namely, Science as Practice and Culture, edited by Andrew Pickering, and published by Chicago University Press in 1992. The idea of science as "hustle and bustle" is an allusion to Heidegger's description of modern science as an "ongoing activity", which he calls Betrieb in German. That word is translated as "hustle" in Being and Time and indicates the danger of letting activity degenerate into "mere busy-ness". Indeed, Betrieb could also be translated as "business" or "enterprise". I unpack this theme in three 5000-word essays.

1. The Scholar Disappears
Here the title is a direct reference to Heidegger's famous essay "The Age of the World Picture", in which he describes what might be called "the modern condition". He uses the phrases to mark the shift away from "scholarship" and towards "research":

The scholar disappears. He is succeeded by the research man who is engaged in research projects. These, rather than the cultivating of erudition, lend to his work its atmosphere of incisiveness. The research man no longer needs a library at home. Moreover, he is constantly on the move. He negotiates at meetings and collects information at congresses. He contracts for commissions with publishers. The latter now determine with him which books must be written. (QT, p. 125)

I think that, today, we all recognize ourselves at least partly in this description. Interestingly, it was written in 1938, and already in 1927 (in Being and Time) Heidegger was talking about an "existential conception" of science as a contrast to the logical or positivist conception. It is that conception that this essay will develop.

2. The Archives of Babel
The 1960s were a pivotal time for our understanding of scientific research and its relation to writing. Most notably, Heidegger's existentialism found a new expression in Foucault's "archaeology", or what is often referred to as his theory of "discourse". At the heart of this theory is something he called "the archive", which to resonates nicely with the passage I just quoted from Heidegger above:

[The archive situates] a practice that causes a multiplicity of statements to emerge as so many regular events, as so many things to be dealt with and manipulated. It does not have the weight of tradition; and it does not constitute the library of all libraries, outside time and place; nor is it the welcoming oblivion that opens up to all new speech the operational field of its freedom: between traditions and oblivion, it reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification. It is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements.(AK, p. 130)

I normally read Foucault's Order of Things and Archaeology of Knowledge as detailed empirical and theoretical elaborations of Heidegger's "The Age of the World Picture". Both thinkers were trying to show how "modern" or "classical" representation was contingent on historical processes, and that history appeared to be moving on. In this essay, I will try to show that the "postmodern condition" is precisely expressed in this image of an "Archive", somewhere between Bolzano's book of "the totality of all human knowledge" and Borges's famous "Library of Babel".

3. A Supplementary Clerk
"It was now a great time for scriveners," writes Melville in his famous story about Bartleby. This essay brings him together with a colleague and near-contemporary, Kierkegaard's Johannes de Silentio. Both were writers who renounced the "system" of writing that gave their work meaning. "Extra-writers" as Kierkegaard puts it. I use these two characters to explore the ennui and ressentiment that too often subtends academic work (note Bartleby's laconic refrain, "I would prefer not to," and Silentio's evocative name). My own experience as a "consultant", always on the margin of the hustle and bustle academic enterprise, has often given me occasion to reflect upon what Derrida called "the dangerous supplement", and Bartleby and Silentio, each in their own way, served as "supplementary clerks" to a world, as Kierkegaard described it, "confused by too much knowledge". His solution has a long tradition: "Socrates, Socrates, Socrates! What the world needs, absorbed as it is in so much learning, is a new Socrates!"

That's it. An overview of part I of Research as a Second Language, the book.

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Handmaid of the Sciences

2011-08-30T14:54:00.008+02:00

I've been trying to get this to work for years. Just now, with the help of two of our PhD students everything suddenly fell into place. Thanks to Anja for the use of her iPhone. And special thanks to Nikolaj and Justine, who, when I think about it, represent the most important "subjects" of all. I hope the point (i.e., the critique of Foucault's reading of the painting) is obvious. And I hope that the sense in which this is a "self-portrait" is obvious too. Foucault claimed that "the subject is elided". Well, I'm absolutely elated about how well this finally worked!

I want to thank everyone who has ever stopped by my office while I was puzzling with this and stood in various positions to help me work out the angles. A very special debt of gratitude to Lena, who recently pointed out that I had half of the setup the wrong way round. (It's hard to work with mirrors.)

For those who want this effect spelled out in my somewhat belaboured prose of five years ago, see my "Reflexivity in Perspective" in the Journal of Economic Methodology.

RSL: The Book

2011-08-30T13:55:00.009+02:00

I've decided to start reworking the ideas that I've been presenting on this blog in fits and starts as a coherent book. I don't want to write a "manual", mainly on aesthetic grounds, so I'm think of framing it as a collection of essays, some of which, I suppose, might be published independently. My working title is:

Research as a Second Language: Essays on Academic Writing

(I haven't decided on whether to foreground the postmodern condition by adding "...and the Crisis of Representation" to that. I have a feeling it will do more to repell readers than attract them.)

Here's my working outline:

Introduction

Part I: Science as Hustle and Bustle

1. The Scholar Disappears
2. The Archives of Babel
3. A Supplementary Clerk

Part II: Writing Process Reengineering

4. Finitude
5. Space
6. Time

Part III: Research as a Second Language

7. Existential Errands*
8. Getting Your Facts Straight
9. Getting Your Act Together

Conclusion

The idea is to produce nine 5000-word essays, mainly drawn from the stuff I've already published here, sometimes elaborating on ideas I've only gestured at, always grounding my assertions in my experience as a writing consultant. This will be framed by a 3000-word introduction and a 2000-word conclusion. 50,000 words in all.

In the days and weeks to come, I'll think out loud about the different parts of this outline, working out the ideas to be presented in each essay. Since each essay will be 5000 words long, I'm going to need about 25 ideas for each of them (to be presented in neat 200-word paragraphs). And about 250 ideas altogether. I've written 527 posts since I started this blog, so I'm hopeful.

____________
*I've stolen this title from Norman Mailer's essay collection of the same name. But it is also a reference to Mailer. Each essay in this section will use a quote from him as its epigraph.

Constructivism, An Epigram

2011-08-26T12:15:00.003+02:00

If Google is to be trusted, I just coined a phrase. (It's got one hit, but context gives it a different meaning.) "Facts do not make themselves known," I suddenly thought to myself. It's a rather well-turned phrase, if you ask me, almost epigrammatic. What does it mean?

Well, it captures the the reason we need science, i.e., organized, critical inquiry. The fact (that something is true) does not ensure that we will know it. Facts do not make themselves known. Someone must discover them. Indeed, most facts are discovered hidden under a false belief. The centrality of the sun in the solar system was discovered under a belief in geocentrism (i.e., not under plain ignorance but under the belief in the opposite). Not only do facts not make themselves known, we often believe that something which is not the case (an "unfact") is the case (a fact).

The next thought is a bit more disturbing, but nonetheless unavoidably true. Just because you discover a fact, i.e., know something to be true, does not yet mean that the fact "is known". The fact did not make itself known to you, and will not make itself known to others just because you have exposed its secret. You've got to convince people that it's true, and these people also believe that something else is true (about the same thing). That is, you've got to change people's minds. Just telling them about the fact will not suffice. You've got to make an argument.

It's a long process. There's a lot of work to be done between the facts and our knowledge of them. We sometimes call that work "the social construction of reality". As with any other kind of labour, not everyone is willing to do it.

Getting Your Act Together

2011-08-25T08:23:00.004+02:00

I began then to make those first painful efforts to acquire the most elusive habit of all, the mind of a writer, and though I could hardly judge from my early pages whether I were a talent or a fool, I continued, I went on for a little while, until I ended with an idea that many men have had, and many will have again—and indeed I started with that idea—but I knew that finally one must do, simply do, for we act in total ignorance and yet in honest ignorance we must act, or we can never learn for we can hardly believe what we are told. . .
Norman Mailer, The Deer Park, Ch. 24

[This post is the much-delayed follow-up to one of the first posts I published here at RSL. It was called "Getting Your Facts Straight". I wrote this follow-up the same day, March 9, 2005, but for some reason (bashfulness?) I never posted it. I'll write another post soon to consider the fearful symmetry I'm trying to suggest.]

Texts can be difficult. Neither writing nor reading are always easy, but over time it is something we get better at. We come to understand texts, how they work, what they do to us, and what we are supposed to do to them. And we come to understand how they are implicated in a great many other activities that both extend beyond our research and infiltrate its core.

It is the presence of this activity, which is in fact a kind of absence, or abyss, or opening in our texts, when compared to the tangible presence facts, that deconstructivists make so much of. If facts are articulated by the copula, i.e., the "is" of "The door is open," and "The fridge is empty", not the "is" of identity, as in, "George Bush is the president" or "I am Thomas Basbøll", then acts are articulated by the différance, i.e., the "becomes" of "The seed becomes the flower," not "The dress becomes the queen," the movement or process that produces difference, differentiating terms by deferring their meaning for later (it does not say what the seed is in the meantime), keeping things moving, keeping people talking.

For research is not, finally, just a collection of facts that somehow "come to light" before a panel of official witnesses. Research is an ongoing activity, as Heidegger noted, using the German word "Betrieb", which can also mean "business" or "hustle". Academic research cannot be understood if we confine our attention to the statements it makes and the facts they state. We must also have an understanding of the hustle and bustle of research, what Foucault described as its "fragile, pulsating history" or the way it relates to an experience that would otherwise be a "bloomin', buzzin' confusion," as Kuhn proposes, quoting William James. Indeed, as the ordinary ambiguity of the word "writing", which can be used as both a verb and noun, shows, academic writings (texts) must be understood not just in their manifest facticity as words that are set into a more or less orderly arrangement on a page, but in their palpable activity, i.e., as phenomena that are always experienced through acts of reading and writing.

Indeed, if facts in their various forms constitute the knowledge base of academic research and are the concern of epistemology, acts indicate that research also needs (and very definitely has) a power base that is the proper concern of an ethics of research, and therefore an ethics of academic writing. Much of the moral fervor of deconstruction has to do precisely with showing which sorts of power our knowledge depends on, and which sorts of acts (of differentiation) our facts depend upon in order to be articulated (identified). It has to do with who is speaking and who is being spoken to, i.e., the community that the research is conducted in. A good deal of the work of defining this community is done by those brackets, containing names, dates and page numbers, that we pepper our texts with.

There is a struggle within every text between the act of reading it and the act of writing it, one that we have already located in the way that we contest some facts and leave others in peace. Recall that this had everything to do with the interest we took in the arrangement of things into more or less determinate facts. Research objectifies things by implicating them in facts, but research also subjectifies (sometimes even subjugates) people by implicating them in acts. The ethics of this process are, again, the perfectly legitimate concern of deconstructive texts. Indeed, writing that deconstructs the political activity at work in experience is just as legitimate as writing that reconstructs its scientific facticity.

This is the existential moment of research. Writing makes you who you are. But only in a limited sense: it makes you who you are when you are doing research. You might say that writing the research text involves establishing a suitable "persona" (a mask) for making the sorts of statements you are interested in making. This persona will implicate you in a whole series of activities, from doing literature reviews to conducting interviews, that all establish the position from which you say what you are saying. This position also goes a long way towards defining who your reader is, i.e., it implicates also the reader in a series of activities that some people are competent at, and some people are not. Your peers are those who are good at doing the sorts of things you are good at.

"It is the acts of men, not their sentiments, that make history," wrote Norman Mailer in his Advertisements for Myself. And history, in turn, produces subjects, i.e., positions from which things can be said. An important part of the research you do, then, involves implicating yourself in a hustle and bustle of activities that your writing then emerges from. You must, that is, get your act into line with a lot of other acts that are already going on as you begin. You must get that act together. And then you must advertise it.

Faith, Knowledge and Storytelling

2011-08-22T08:27:00.008+02:00

I'm reading Michael Lewis's The Big Short these days and enjoying it immensely. It is about the Wall Street outsiders and oddballs who "shorted" (i.e., bet against) the subprime mortgage market and made a killing when it finally collapsed. One interesting thing I'm learning is that, after they had decided that the market was going to collapse, it was not, actually, a straightforward matter to bet against it. Had they thought that a company was going to go bust, there'd be standard way of making money on that belief: they could borrow stock in the company, sell it, and then wait for its shareprice to crash. At that point, they buy back the shares (cheap) and pay off their debt. But, as Lewis points out, things were very different with mortgage bonds:

To sell a stock or bond short you need to borrow it, and [the bonds they were interested in] were tiny and impossible to find. You could buy them or not buy them but you couldn't bet explicitly against them; the market for subprime mortages simply had no place for people in it who took a dim view of them. You might know with certainty that the entire mortgage bond market was doomed, but you could do nothing about it. (p. 29)

I had a shock of recognition when I read that. I've been trying to "bet against" a number of stories that have been told in the organization studies literature for years now, and the thing I'm learning is that there's no place in the literature for people who take a dim view of them. There isn't really a genre (in the area of management studies) of papers that only points out errors in other people's work. You have to make a "contribution" too. In a sense, you can buy the stories people are telling you or not buy them but you can't criticize them.

This got me thinking about the difference between faith and knowledge. Knowledge, it seems to me, is a belief held in a critical environment. Faith, we might say, is a belief held in an "evangelical" environment. The mortgage bond market was an evangelical environment in which to hold beliefs about housing prices, default rates, and credit ratings on CDOs. There was no simple way to critique the "good news". So it took some dedicated outsiders to see what was really going on. These were people who insisted on looking at the basis of the mortgage bonds that were being pooled and traded on Wall Street in increasingly exotic ways.

One of these guys was Steve Eisman, who was a notoriously cantankerous personality. He recalls meeting Ken Lewis, the CEO of Bank of America. "[The CEO's on Wall Street] didn't know their own balance sheet ... I was sitting there listening to [Ken Lewis]. I had an epiphany. I said to myself, 'Oh my God, he's dumb!' A lightbulb went off. The guy running one of the biggest banks in the world is dumb" (TBS, p. 174). Yes, or perhaps he was just working an in an envangelical rather than critical environment. Here, "any old balance sheet" will do ... as long as you think it's bringing good news.

I think, sadly, the same thing can be said about various corners of organization studies that pursue what is called "storytelling". We've been talking about my favourite example recently. (See also this post of Jonathan's, and the comments.) I've been trying for some time, and with great difficulty, to publish straightforward critiques of some very influential stories that circulate in the literature. Given that these people are quite influential in today's business school, it's not surprising that an uncritical mindset pervades Wall Street.

Planning and Bullshit

2011-08-16T12:28:00.005+02:00

I suppose that one of the aims of my 16 Week Challenge is to make writers aware of the effect that the combination of poor planning and bullshit excuses has on their writing processes. Those who submit to the discipline of the Challenge, especially those who make the weekly reports, are in most cases forced to admit that their planning is inadequate or their excuses are implausible. Sometimes both.

In fact, the reason I defend the dignity of planning is that it is all too easy to say that all plans are illusory, that they presume an "ideal" world. What this forgets is that plans can be more or less realistic, and that a good plan will correctly anticipate the conditions under which the work will have to be done. A good plan will also allow you to get down to the business of writing, confident that other tasks will be taken care of later.

Too often, the excuse only seems plausible if we politely avoid assigning you responsibility for planning your work. That is not to say that you won't sometimes have a good excuse for not writing. But where planning has been completely abandoned, or where "any old plan" has been assumed to "do", the writing process is likely to be abandoned too. Any old reason not to write will be found to be adequate.

Once you've resolved to do a particular amount of work in a particular allotment of time, the real reasons you are not writing enough will become obvious.

Any old plan will do?

2011-08-15T10:58:00.005+02:00

Jonathan must mean this piece in the CHE. It's a complicated issue for me because I do actually believe in strategy and, especially, planning. What I object to, and what I think Jonathan also objects to, is pseudo-planning and empty strategies.

That also seems to be the point of Ginbserg's critique. He does not say that planning is always pointless, he says that many planning processes are not intended to actually guide behaviour. Rather, they are intended to promote the image of the leader, a university president, for example, who wants to leave his mark on the institution, or just appear to be doing something important, before moving on to another one, where he can repeat the process. The end of the article struck particular chord with me:

The documents promulgated by most colleges and universities ... lack a number of ... fundamental elements of planning. Their goals tend to be vague and their means undefined. Often there is no budget based on actual or projected resources. Instead the plan sets out a number of fund-raising goals. These plans are, for the most part, simply expanded "vision statements." One college president said at the culmination of a yearlong planning process that engaged the energies of faculty, administrators, and staffers that the plan was not a specific blueprint, but a set of goals the college hoped to meet.

Obviously what was important was not the plan but the process. The president, a new appointee, asserted his leadership, involved the campus community, and created an impression of feverish activity and forward movement. The ultimate plan itself was indistinguishable from dozens of others and could have been scribbled on the back of an envelope or copied from some other college's planning document. As I noticed while reading dozens of strategic plans, plagiarism in planning is not uncommon. Similar phrases and paragraphs can be found in many plans. In 2006, the chancellor of Southern Illinois University's Carbondale campus was forced to resign after it was discovered that much of its new strategic plan, "Southern at 150," had been copied from Texas A&M University's strategic plan, "Vision 2020." The chancellor had previously served as vice chancellor at Texas A&M, where he had coordinated work on the strategic plan. In a similar vein, the president of Edward Waters College was forced to resign when it was noticed that his new "Quality Enhancement Plan" seemed to have been copied from Alabama A&M University's strategic plan.

This interchangeability of visions for the future underscores the fact that the precise content of most colleges' strategic plans is pretty much irrelevant. Plans are usually forgotten soon after they are promulgated. My university has presented two systemwide strategic plans and one arts-and-sciences strategic plan in the past 15 years. No one can remember much about any of those plans, but another one is in the works. The plan is not a blueprint for the future. It is, instead, a management tool for the present. The ubiquity of planning at America's colleges and universities is another reflection and reinforcement of the continuing growth of administrative power.

Regular readers of this blog perhaps already know why this resonated with me. I blame a particular school of organization theory, namely, sensemaking, for the proliferation of meaningless strategic plans. Keep in mind that these theories are taught in business schools, and the graduates of these schools are increasingly running our universities.

Organizational sensemaking is closely tied to a school of strategy research called "strategy as practice", which focuses precisely on the process of strategizing and its immediate organizational effects rather than the long-term effects of planning (and action that follows the plan). Caricaturing somewhat, the basic insight here is that "any old plan will do". What is important is not the plan but the actions that are coordinated around it, even if those actions have almost nothing to do with the letter of the plan.

Karl Weick, who was the at the time the editor of the most prestigious journal in organization theory, the Administrative Science Quarterly, made what is perhaps the most famous statement of this insight back in 1983 in an article called "Misconceptions about Managerial Productivity" in a widely read journal called Business Horizons:

Planning isn't nearly as crucial for productive action as people think it is. I can illustrate this point most clearly by recounting an incident that happened to a small Hungarian detachment on military maneuvers in the Alps. Their young lieutenant sent a reconnaissance unit out into the icy wilderness just as it began to snow. It snowed for two days, and the unit did not return. The lieutenant feared that he had dispatched his people to their deaths, but the third day the unit came back. Where had they been? How had they made their way? Yes, they said, we considered ourselves lost and waited for the end, but then one of us found a map in his pocket. That calmed us down. We pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm, and then with the map we found our bearings. And here we are. The lieutenant took a good look at this map and discovered to his astonishment that it was not a map of the Alps, but of the Pyrenees.

Apparently, when you're lost, any old map will give you the confidence to go on. By extension, when you're confused about productivity, any old plan will do.

Plans are like maps. They animate people. And this is the most crucial thing they do. When people actually do things, they generate concrete outcomes that help them discover what is occurring, what needs to be explained, and what should be done next. Plans, even when they are wrong, are useful because they serve as a pretext to start acting. What managers keep forgetting is that it is the action, not the plan, that explains their success. They keep giving credit to the wrong thing—the plan—and, having made this error, spend more time planning so that they'll have more good outcomes. They are astonished when more planning improves nothing. (Pp. 48-9)

I hope it is easy to see how this kind of statement, which passes for wisdom in management and organization theory, as well as the study of corporate strategy, might underwrite the production of the sort of strategy documents that Ginsberg is worried about. It should also be easy to see how the processes that produce those documents might be justified by it. Weick here offers an argument for not taking the details of planning very seriously. But, and this is important, he does not say that you should not have a plan. On the contrary, it is crucial to have a plan that doesn't mean anything (in the sense that a map of the Pyrenees is meaningless in the Alps). Action will take it from there.

I'm not sure I want to call it "irony"—perhaps tragedy would be a better word—but another likeness between the passage I quoted from Ginsberg and the passage I quoted from Weick needs to be emphasized. That story about the soldiers in the Alps who use a map of the Pyrenees to get back to camp? First of all, it is very unlikely to have ever happened. Weick certainly has no documentation for it (though he has told it again and again in the literature). Worse, like "Southern at 150", Weick simply plagiarized it from a poem that was published in the TLS in 1977. In 1998, addressing the annual meeting of the Academy of Management in San Diego, citing the same story, Weick boldly declared that in managament research, indeed, in any attempt to "find your way out of the puzzle of the human condition", "any old story will do".*

In that sense, I guess, Weick really was giving us a "blueprint of the future". We certainly seem to be following any old map any which way.

___________
*This remark is reported by Barbara Czarniawska in her study of Weick's work, "Karl Weick: Concepts, style, and reflection", published in the Sociological Review.

The 16-Week Challenge

2011-08-08T11:05:00.002+02:00

When people hear my ideas about Writing Process Reengineering, they often ask how best to get started. In response, I normally recommend some version of the 16-Week Challenge, which I issue every semester to the faculty and PhD students of my department and then try to help them meet. For those who aren't tired of hearing about it, then, here, once again, is how it works.

(The following is written with the Danish academic calendar in mind. Adjust as necessary.)

There are 8 working weeks from August 22 to October 14 (when the fall break begins), and then another 8 from October 24 to December 16. If we consider three hours a day to be an "ideal" writing intensity, that gives us 3 hours x 5 days x (8 weeks x 2) = 240 hours of "ideal" writing time. I do of course wish for everyone that the coming semester offers ideal conditions for their writing, but most people will have to make do with less time. Most people who imagine they have more time, however, perhaps because they have a sabatical this semester, are being "idealistic" in the pejorative sense: "unrealistic". In my experience, the best you can hope for in a given 17-week period (two 8-week periods with a one-week break between them) is to use 240 hours effectively towards your writing. You may be able to do a bit better than that, but I'm often sceptical about the efficiency of the extra hours you might devote to your writing. The challenge, therefore, goes to how you are going to spend the first 240 hours you can set aside.

The most important thing is to pass from an entirely vague image of "wanting to get some writing done" this semester, to that much more precise ideal image of your resources, and then on to an equally precise but also realistic image of your time in the weeks to come. Look at your calendar and begin to block in your writing time. For most people, it is easiest to protect writing time when it is put in early in the day, starting as early as 7 o'clock for some, and stopping, in any case, before lunchtime. Take this planning excercise seriously: don't plan to write at times when you know that something is likely to "come up". But do plan a little bit of time where you can, preferrably every day. As little as 30 minutes a day can do a great deal for your writing projects if you stick to it for 16 weeks.

Now, having secured yourself some time to write, decide what you want to get done in those hours. Here, again, be realistic. Choose some projects on which to make a particular amount of progress. Then decide what sorts of writing tasks this requires.

At this point, many people ask me what I mean by writing tasks, and I always begin by emphasizing the importance of appreciating your finitide. I'm interested in (and trying to get you interested in) the time you can spend sitting down at the computer (or a pad of paper, if you prefer) and actually producing or editing the prose that you hope, one day, to publish. I don't mean the time you spend reading, or making stray notes, or even "thought writing" to find out what you mean. I don't mean the time you spend transcribing field notes or interview tapes. I certainly don't mean the time you spend in the archives or in the field collecting data, or online sifting through databases, or searching the literature.

Suppose you discover that, realistically, you have 82 hours to devote to your writing this semester, spread over those 17 weeks from August 22 to December 16. Those 82 hours, then, should be devoted to writing down what you know. And this means you can only plan to use them to express opinions you already know you have. You are free to set aside other time to activities that are intended to help you discover what you think, just as you matter-of-factly set aside time to discover the facts and understand the theories that constitute your field of expertise. My point is only that you need to set aside a particular quantity of hours to tell your peers what you think. And that time is the "writing time" that my challenge is about.

The 16-Week Challenge, then, is an occasion to get the things you already know and have already understood written down and submitted to review by your peers.

In order to make sure you get it done, I encourage you to form groups (of 4-6 people) who meet once a week, on a Friday afternoon, for example, to answer three simple questions honestly and simply:

What/when did you plan to write this week?
What/when did you actually write this week?
What/when do you plan to write next week?

The disciplining effect of these questions, answered in a social context, should not be difficult to imagine. The meeting can be as short as 30 minutes, and should never run longer than an hour. Part of the challenge is to meet 16 times and answer those questions.

So, to summarize: First, get a clear view of the time you have available to write this semester. Second, define a set of realistic goals, focused on producing publishable prose. Third, commit a group of your colleagues to meeting once a week to remind each other what you hoped to accomplish.

A Teachable Moment

2011-08-04T14:16:00.001+02:00

A former colleague of mine is planning a module in a graduate program on academic writing at another university. He asked for my advice and we talked for an hour, after which he sent me his ideas about what he was going to do. I had, of course, said that the most important thing is to get the students writing, every day if possible. So I was struck by this part of his mail:

My experience tells me that the students will not have the necessary self-discipline to write every day for several weeks. So I will orient the course towards the more ‘teachable’ aspects, including such matters as planning, structure of articles, getting published, etc., rather than towards writing as such.

Here is the substance of my response:

You learn how to write by writing. It’s the only way. So I don’t have much hope for a writing program that begins, as you seem to, by giving up on the students’ discipline. If you don’t expect them to write, you can't expect them to learn how to write, no matter how much you teach them. But if you can get them to write every day they will get better at writing, almost regardless of what you teach them. That’s my philosophy of writing instruction in a nutshell. I guess I’m saying I don’t believe writing has any distinctly "teachable aspects".

Students have to learn that an academic text has recognizable parts and you can certainly teach them various all-purpose outlines (I do this). But they also have to learn that those parts must be "built" and then "assembled" into a coherent whole, and that, in order to do this well, you have to plan, not just the content of the paper, but the structure of the weeks, days, and hours that will be spent writing. You have to work on your introduction at some point, for example, then stop, and then return to it. The same goes for every other part of the paper. And the only way to get this across is to get the students to feel it in their brains and in their hands.

The students must experience the joy of composing a good prose paragraph and the (sometimes transcendent) bliss of putting several paragraphs together persuasively. If you only teach them what an academic text is, and don’t bring them into contact with the process by which a text comes into being, your chances of success are (in my humble opinion) not very high.

"My experience tells me that the students will not have the necessary self-discipline," you say. I have the same experience, of course. But my experience also says that some students will acquire that discipline if you provide an occasion for them to do so. More importantly, those that don’t acquire this discipline won’t learn how to write (any better than they already do) anyway. Those that do, however, are learning how to write as well as they can. By turning this into a straight "teaching" module, you might think you’re making do with what’s achievable. But I fear you are settling for achieving very little.

An engagement with the student's self-discipline is fundamentally an engagement with their "authorial" persona, their literary authority as scholars, what I sometimes call their "writing selves". If you do not attempt to engage with that core strength (their self-discipline) you are not likely to improve the part of them that writes. That is, you won’t make them into better writers, no matter how “true” the things you will tell them may be.

I think that last point is worth emphasizing. Scholarship is difficult in many ways. It takes a lot of thought, knowledge, and sometimes courage. But the writing itself is easy; you just have to do it. It requires no heavy lifting or special skills (you already know the language). What you are developing when you are developing your writing skills (as distinct from the other skills that make you a scholar) is a competence that is, let's say, "right next to" your basic self-discipline. Writing gets done almost exclusively by, well, doing it. The most important to muscle to train when you write is your will. Writing perhaps, just is an act of will.

Can I Write Something Else?

2011-08-02T10:13:00.005+02:00

As an alternative—or antidote, if you will—to Jonathan Franzen's "lame" depiction of his struggle to write, here's a video essay by Kate Greenstreet, which was just published in Evening Will Come.

Cloth from Kate Greenstreet on Vimeo.

Of course, it's not a fair comparison. Kate is telling us how she writes poems. Franzen was talking about the novel, which is a different beast. And their problems, I would emphasize, are, in both cases, importantly different from those of academic writing. But perhaps you were moved, as I was, by part 5 (starting at 3:03). It is a very precise image of the struggle with a thought we're trying to put into words.

Being There

2011-08-01T09:38:00.005+02:00

After spending a week largely at home, largely alone, immersed in my intellectual projects, trying to prioritize among them, it's good to be back in the office, among people (though it's still quiet around here). My attention is now turning to all the work I'll be doing with people this coming semester, a sizable part of which will be teaching a course.

It was with this in mind, perhaps, that I paused over my morning coffee while reading about Jaron Lanier in the New Yorker. I generally share his views about social media and what they are doing to our sense of ourselves, at a deeper level, what they are doing to "existence", and I thought he provided a very good, very everyday sort of example that I will take with me into my reflections on teaching:

At the South by Southwest interactive conference, in Austin, in March of 2010, Lanier gave a talk, before which he asked his audience not to blog, text, or tweet while he was speaking. He later wrote that his message to the crowd had been: "If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?"

Last year, I once suggested to my class that they all put away their laptops and mobile phones for an hour and just draw on their memories (of what they had read for class) and their available intelligence, in short, their brains. Some of them said they enjoyed the experience, but we only tried it once. This year, I might insist on it for three hours at a time, and all ten lectures. "Try really to be here," I'll tell them.

Lanier's remark looks a bit like something Fran Lebowitz once said. I'm fond of saying she has answered Heidegger's "question concerning technology" simply "No". In Martin Scorcese's documentary, Public Speaking, she offers the following bit of wisdom:

I have none of these machines which allow people to not be wherever they are. Since I don't have them I'm forced to be where I am all the time, which is why I'm noticing what people are doing.

Heidegger's word for human existence is "Dasein", which literally means there-being or here-being, or being there, and is intimately related to presence. It's the opposite, we might say, of "being neither here nor there". What Lanier and Lebowitz are trying to tell us (Lanier from his vast experience with technology, Lebowitz from her vast inexperience) is that technology prevents existence—it prevents you from being there.

When I saw Cake play in London earlier this year, John McCrea implored us to put away our phones. "You don't have to prove to everyone else that you are here right now," he said. "Can't we just all be together here tonight." My teaching will, of course, be just like a Cake concert in so many other ways too.

Progress Report 5

2011-07-28T11:38:00.002+02:00

There's lots of work to do. I've been spending most the morning brooding over how to proceed. Part of the strategy, going forward, is going to have to be to give myself a larger space in which to think about academic writing consultancy, and I have already made a decision to spend the next 16-week blogging regimen (starting mid-August) simply perusing the archives and reposting some "classics". The selections will then also be moved into the framework of a book. Working title (of course): Research as a Second Language.

What I need is a more fully developed theory of academic writing, as well as proper methodology. I have been learning largely by doing these past five years, albeit always with a tradition at the back of my mind. Epistemology, philosophy of science, phenomenology. In order to write about what I have been doing, I need to make a whole set of tacit competences explicit, and then set these against the available theories of scientific knowledge (and especially the recent theories of the production and distribution of knowledge). Otherwise, it become a mere memoir.

Progress Report 4

2011-07-27T11:42:00.002+02:00

Done. I've finished the first draft, rough as it is. As I've been saying, I've been very unsatisfied with the actual business of writing, but forcing myself to in fact experience that lack of satisfaction, without sitting down (except for structured breaks) at the piano, or indulging in other distractions, has been an important experience. It has moved the project forward, and the next three days of editing will, I hope, show me exactly how far I've come, if not the page, then at least in my thinking on this subject.

Progress Report 3

2011-07-26T11:58:00.002+02:00

This is really not the satisfying week of writing I'd been anticipating. But it is having one of the very desired effects of sitting down and doing the work. I'm discovering how vague my understanding of what I've been doing all these years really is. I'm writing plenty of prose, but it seems to me to be quite breezy. Today I wrote another 10 paragraph, and more than 2000 words in two hour-and-a-half sessions. But if I'd put my mind to it I could probably have doubled that.

Tomorrow, I'll write the last 2000 words that my draft is missing. That's a day or two ahead of schedule, depending on how you count (I have also started a day earlier than I originally planned to). So my task for Thursday will be to read the thing through and make an after-the-fact outline. I think that at that point it will become clear where the substance of the paper is missing. I can then spend the Friday and Saturday sessions doing something about it, after which I will send to someone who has kindly offered to read it.

There's still half a year to submission, so I'm not worried. But I do think I have some serious thinking to do in that time, in addition to the rewriting I will certainly have to do. In this case, the writing is becoming an occasion for self-knowledge, and the beginning of a new reading plan as well.

Progress Report 2

2011-07-25T11:40:00.000+02:00

Not quite the productive morning I had imagined. I started at 8:00 and have now been working (at times too vaguely) for three and a half hours. I've taken breaks to play the piano, shower, make coffee, and even read a little. I've written ten paragraphs (as planned) but only 1650 words (a bit less than the 2000 I had expected.) Some of the paragraphs are in very rough shape.

Tomorrow I'll start at 8:00 again, sticking to my plan by proceeding to the first two sections of my "results", i.e., factual descriptions of my work as a writing consultant. But I'm going to divide the morning into two 90 minute sessions. Each of which is to produce five paragraphs of prose, roughly 20 minutes at a time. I'll take 30 minutes after each section to reflect a little, probably reading a little more Foucault and Heidegger to nurse today's wounds (I felt I lacked precision mainly in regard to their work). I'll also spend part of the last 30 minutes tomorrow writing a post like this one.

Also, I found myself dissipating a little last night, surfing the internet, listening to music, getting to bed a bit later than I perhaps should have. I'm going to try to a be a bit more focused tonight so that I have more strength in the morning.

Progress Report 1

2011-07-24T13:28:00.002+02:00

I've been working since 10:00 and have now completed ten paragraphs of roughly 200 words each (some are a good deal longer than that). I have a three-paragraph introduction, a two-paragraph conclusion, and a five-paragraph background section. Tomorrow I will write the theory section and the methdology section. I had planned to work on each paragraph for 30 minutes, but this appears to be a decadent luxury I don't need. 20 minutes is enough for the present purpose of writing a first draft. That means that I should be able to write ten paragraphs every 4-hour session (taking some breaks along the way).

I'm going to have lunch now, and then do some leisure reading. (When I go back to work tomorrow, I've got meetings and administration to see to in the afternoons after my writing sessions.) Then I'm going to go for a jog (I plan to take a short jog every afternoon this week to see how that feels.)

Hemingway said he always lived a "hell of healthy life" for the first few hours every day (which is when he also did his writing). After the jog, I expect to do some less healthy things but nonetheless to get to bed early enough to begin my writing session at 7:00.

Practicing What I Preach (while preaching what I practice)

2011-07-16T13:39:00.002+02:00

I've got another week of vacation left, but then it's back to work. And to kick things off I've decided to draft a 40 paragraph paper in 20 hours, which will follow my "ideal" structure. (Do note Peter's reminder not to confuse those ideals with the achievable reality.) That is, it will have a three-paragraph introduction, five paragraphs of "background", five of "theory", five of "method", and then three five-paragraph sections presenting my "results", followed by five paragraphs of "discussion" and two paragraphs of conclusion.

My outline so far looks like this:

I. Introduction
§1 Publication is increasingly important in academic life.
§2 Since its inception, social epistemology has rightly construed knowledge as "the property of a distributed network of exchanges" (Fuller 1993), i.e., as embedded in what Foucault (1972) called "discourse".
§3 In this paper I propose a vocation for social epistemologists: that of "resident writing consultant", an "archivist" in Foucault's sense.

II. "Publish or Perish", Then and Now (Background)
§4-8 The history of "publish or perish" can be traced back to before WWII and forward to today's Denmark.

III. The Archives of Babel
§9 Bernard Bolzano's "Theory of Science" presented itself as a kind of "grammar" of academic writing, i.e., the rules by which treatises were to be written.
§10 Inspired by Wittgenstein, this dream was taken up in earnest by the logical positivists in the early 20th century.
§11 In the 1960s, an interest in "paradigms" (Kuhn) and "discourses" (Foucault) began to replace the positivists' focus on a logic of propositions and occasioned the so-called "crisis of representation".
§12 The resulting "post-modern condition" has been unfairly allegorized by invoking Borges's "Library of Babel".
§13 Social epistemology attempts to recover from this condition by emphasizing the "rhetorical function of representation" over the "representational function of language" (Fuller 1993).

IV. Inframethodology
§14 Foucault's "archive" is the site of discursive practices that lie between the corpus and the language.
§15 Inframethodology is a level of epistemological analaysis that lies "beneath method".
§16 Research is here construed as a craft.
§17 Knowledge is taken to be an ability to converse.
§18 The social epistemologist can best study these practices by engaging with them directly, i.e., supporting them.

V. The Resident Writing Consultant
§19-23 Since 2007, I have been the "resident writing consultant" at a major European business school.

VI. Research as a Second Language
§24-28 My basic approach was to go at the problem of scholarly writing through an immersion in the actual discourses/paradigms that the scholars I was supporting participated in.

VII. Writing Process Reengineering
§29-33 A significant component of my consultancy became helping scholars protect and manage their writing time.

VIII. Discussion
§34-38 There are several lessons to be drawn from my experience as a writing consultant.

IX. Conclusion
§39 This paper has forty paragraphs. [I really like this little bit of meta-writing. But it may be a darling I'll have to kill.]
§40 Johannes de Silentio (Kierkegaard) and Bartleby the Scrivener (Melville), both of whom were "supplementary clerks" are the literary partron saints of social epistemology construed as resident writing consultancy.

Please notice that this outline consists of a series of claims, not a series of topics to be discussed. Even where I have not yet decided on the key sentences of each paragraph (and even in the cases where I am just guessing at what I will be saying), I have made the effort of articulating a claim I believe to be true. This allows me to discuss (with myself and others) how I know them to be true and, to some extent, what I mean by them. Do let me know what you think.

Like I say, starting on the 25th, I will be spending four hours a day, a half hour at a time, writing each of the 40 paragraphs enumerated here. At the end of those 20 hours of work, then, I will have a pretty solid first draft. Obviously, I've spent quite a few hours already planning this out, thinking about it, etc. Now that I know what I want to say, I have to write it out. Then I can begin to think about how good my ideas really are.

The deadline for this paper is early 2012. So I'll have plenty of time to schedule a revision process as well.

Writing to Reach Summer

2011-07-01T08:17:00.004+02:00

Summer has arrived, and the colony has come to an end. This is the last entry in my "colonial diary" (which didn't turn out to be much of diary, after all. Next time, I think I'll make a daily entry.)

It is my hope (and my sense) that the participants had a good time and became, at the very least, more aware of their writing process. I hope they learned something about how to manage the time and space of their writing, and something about the finite object that a research paper is. I also hope that many of them actually finished their project or soon will (before they go on vacation) and that they will be submitting it for review. For them, I offer this little story, which I originally posted over at Jonathan Mayhew's Stupid Motivational Tricks.

It's my interpretation of Travis's music video "Writing to Reach You" as an allegory about the peer review process. Watch the video and read along.

The whole process is a "front stage" activity in Goffman's sense. Backstage, [0:04] you touch up the manuscript before submitting it, you put on your best face. Then you submit it [0:20], the manuscript is now in process.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Challenge of Multiple Projects

2011-06-27T16:19:00.002+02:00

At the Colony workshop last week, I was asked to devote the next (and final) workshop to the difficulties of managing multiple writing projects. I quickly decided to frame this in terms of 16-week challenge, and when I went back to my last post on the subject, what did I find? Matt's question about "working on multiple projects at once"? The challenge is precisely both a question and an answer.

Planning is all about appreciating your finitude.

Let's assume you are going on vacation at the end of June and that you'll be away until mid-August (counting a few summer conferences and workshops, etc.). By mid-to-late August you want to start up again. My advice is to make a plan to that effect. Use the fall break as a midway point. In Denmark that's week 42 (October 17-23). Count off eight full weeks before and eight full weeks after the break. That's August 22 to December 17. You've now got two limited periods of intensely planned (not necessarily intense) work. On how many of those days will you devote three hours to writing? On how many, two? On how many, only one or one half? What about those days where you can't give your writing even 30 minutes? Can you give it 15? 10? 5? Try resolving to write five days a week for eight weeks, and to do this twice between the summer and Christmas.

Write all those writing sessions (from 5 minutes to 3 hours) into your calender, well aware that you might have to move some of them around a bit, and even reduce some, in order to accommodate your other activities.

Now you can start making some goals. How many writing projects do you have going right now, even in the very early "just ideas in my head" stage? Make a list of them, starting with those that have substantial parts drafted and outlined, and stop when you're really just jotting down loose ideas as they come to you.

Then pick, say, three projects for the first 8 weeks. They don't have to be your most developed ones, but if there is one project that you think you can realistically complete within those 8 or 16 weeks and send off for review, it can be a good idea to choose that one. Perhaps pick another that you're just trying to start up. And a third that you want to send to someone to read and comment on.

The important thing is really that you think of the "project" not just as "the paper" but the process of bringing the paper from one stage of development to another. Outline the project's current state, and then outline it's desired end state (i.e., at the end of the 8 or 16 weeks). And then imagine what you will have to do to get it there.

Now go back to those writing sessions you've planned and begin to put the tasks into your calendar. The more often you take this challenge, the better you will get at cutting your work out for yourself.

Update: I just noticed that Tanya recently posted on this subject here.

Claims & Support

2011-06-22T09:47:00.000+02:00

One definition of beauty is: aptness to purpose. (Ezra Pound, ABC, p. 64)

A few months ago I argued that as an academic writer your job is to support claims. Preparing for our afternoon workshop on argumentation, reading Booth, Colomb and Williams' classic The Craft of Research, I am reminded how utterly non-earth-shattering (indeed, entirely foundational) this idea is. In the workshop, we will look at the logic and rhetoric of academic argument, which is to say, we will look at what it means to support a claim in the context of a conversation among knowledgeable peers. I will define some basic terms, of course, like "claim", "reason", "evidence", "warrant", and "objection", and I will talk about what Graff and Birkenstein call "the moves that matter in academic writing". In this post, I want to develop the metaphor of "support" in the sightly less metaphorical perspective of the "craft" of writing.

Consider the apprentice carpenter who is learning how to build cabinets, chair and tables. The finished product must, crucially, offer support. It must be structurally sound, and this will come both from the quality of the materials and the workmanship that goes into joining them together. The master carpenter draws on years of experience with various techniques and kinds of wood and guides the apprentice, not so much towards the right techniques or right materials, but the right experiences of joining materials together soundly. Some joints work best with some kinds of woods, others not so well. The support that is offered by a shelf in a cabinet is not of the same kind that is offered by a tabletop or a chair, though they all, it is true, "hold up". The apprentice is exposed to the possibilities that are implicit in the materials, the way they hold their shape, and the way the "give" under various kinds of pressure.

A chair can be tested in various situations. The elegance of its design is apparent in the efficiency with which it passes these tests. Now, there may of course be a great deal of "ornament" in a piece of furniture, features that serve no useful purpose ("all this useless beauty," Elvis Costello sings), and one must evaluate these features by the way they manage not to get in the way of the table or chair's primary function, namely, that of providing a stable thing to sit on and to put, say, your food on when you eat it. That is, the primary function of furniture is to hold things up in various ways: books on shelves, bodies on chairs, plates on tabletops. The alternative would be to leave them lying around all over the floor.

Your writing does the same thing, I want to argue, for your ideas. It holds them up, keeps them from lying around uselessly in piles on the floor. Even your most decorative ideas can be given a place in your writing, a place where they don't interfere with the orderly arrangement of the rest of your ideas. Most importantly, by furnishing your mind with structures (arguments) that support your ideas, and keeping things relatively neat and orderly, you are building a place where you can invite others in. They, too, can test these structures by putting ideas of their own on them. To situate an idea within the structure of argument (whether your own or someone else's) is to make a claim. Instead of holding the idea up yourself, you are putting it down somewhere, but not all the way down on the ground. You can pick it up later.

I hope I'm making my point. You are trying to build something that will help contribute to an orderly conversation. It must have a certain elegance, a kind of beauty, but it must also, very importantly, serve the purpose of supporting the argument you want to make, the series of claims you are trying to get across. You will learn how to do this well, not by exposing yourself to a set of principles or rules (whether mine, or Wayne Booth's, or Gerald Graff's), but by going into your workshop and joining the relevant materials (reasons, evidence) together to support claims against all manner of objections. The carpenter has to imagine how the table he builds will be used. And he will build it in such a way as to indicate its proper uses. He will not build a coffee table to look like a workbench or a dinner table to look like a writing desk. Likewise, when writing, make sure you build something that will serve your purpose, and make sure that this purpose is on the surface of the text. It is much more likely to hold up under the criticism of your peers in that case.

Half Way

2011-06-15T09:51:00.000+02:00

While there is a strong group of committed colonists, it is my distinct impression that a number of people who signed up at the end of May, thinking they would get a lot of writing done in June, have begun to have doubts. I would like to take this moment, halfway through the CBS Writers' Colony to address those doubts and, I hope, put them into perspective.

In my original call for participants, I may have set the bar a bit high. Here's what I announced to the faculty members at CBS (that is, all of the Copenhagen Business School received the invitation):

The CBS Writer’s Colony is an opportunity to plan and execute a month of work in a good-natured, supportive environment. Participants will meet regularly with Thomas, individually and in groups as schedules allow. But those schedules are expected to give a high priority to both the writing and the Colony. The participants will commit to planning and keeping a detailed record of their writing activities—as a rule, no more than 20 and no less than 5 hours per week. They can also expect to help each other think through their writing projects a little bit every day—whether by phone, mail or in person. Participation is free but obviously requires a strong commitment to both planning and tracking their writing activities. In exchange for this commitment, each participant will receive continuous individual coaching and editorial support with Thomas. You will also receive follow-up coaching and editorial support when you receive your review reports in the fall. [It was assumed that most people would be working towards a journal submission before leaving for vacation.]

The passage that I have here bolded appears to have caused some retrospective guilt among participants, and have even caused some to drop out, or at least to consider dropping out. I want to provide an argument here for "sticking with it", at least in a manner of speaking.

After all, the commitment here is not actually to work for (if you do the math) at least 20 hours in June. It is merely to plan at least 20 hours of work and "keep a detailed record of your writing activities". That is, you are meeting your obligations even if you don't get anything done, but have a clear and explicit sense of what you did instead during those 20 hours of work. I'm trying to raise our awareness of the vulnerability of the writing process; I am not running a gulag!

The idea is quite simple, really. If you thought you were "finally going to get something done" in June, before going on vacation, the Colony was a way to carry that thought through, taking it into the details of your activities, rather than being just a vague ambition. There are roughly 20 working days in June (in Denmark there are quite a few state and religious holidays this month), so it is not an insurmountable task to ask yourself, sometime in late May, what you will be doing on each of those days. How many hours, each day, can you devote to writing? One? Two? Three? Four? (Don't go above that, it'll only wear you out and leave you without energy for the next day.)

When that simple act of reflection has taken place, make some run-of-the-mill decisions. What hours of what days will you devote to writing? You will end with 20-80 scheduled writing hours. Great! Now just stick to the plan as best as you can, and keep a record of how well you are doing. Even if you planned 60 but worked only 10, your commitment to the Colony will show in the degree of awareness you have about where those 50 hours went. Why was 60 hours unrealistic? What kept "coming up"? If there's no good explanation, well, then you've spent the month of June learning an important lesson about your work discipline, at least as it pertains to writing.

So, that's my basic point. If you've signed up for the Colony, stick with it to the end. If you never got aroudn to making a good plan, you've still got two weeks left, so make one today, and see how well you can stick to it until the end of the month. Try only planning half and hour a day and see if you can protect those five remaining hours. Don't show me or anyone else that you can do it. Show yourself.

Work, Workshop, Work Camp

2011-06-10T18:32:00.002+02:00

Two lessons of the colony so far. First, it's good to have weekly activity. On Wednesday, we had a great workshop about how to structure the claims in your paper and we also decided on the themes of two workshops to come:

On Thursday next week, we’ll meet to talk about an important complement to any writing process, namely, the READING process. We’ll talk about how to coordinate the work of reading with the work of writing, and, importantly, how to keep them separated.

On Wednesday, June 22, we’ll meet to talk about how to structure an ARGUMENT, both as an exercise in logic and an occasion for rhetoric. On the logical end, we’ll use Booth, Colomb and Williams’ version of Toulmin’s model of argument, which teaches us to think in terms of claims, evidence, and warrant. On the rhetorical end, we’ll be guided by Graff and Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say, which teaches us to approach academic writing as participation in a conversation.

Second, like any summer camp, you can't just let people leave when they start to feel a bit homesick. You have to explain that the colony is a temporary inconvenience and an opportunity. You decide yourself how many hours to put into it, and the only question is whether you actually did put those hours in. Then we can ask what you got out of it.

Writing Can't Be Taught

2011-06-07T20:08:00.004+02:00

Via OrgTheory (thanks Fabio), Joseph Epstein gives it to us straight:

After thirty years of teaching a university course in something called advanced prose style, my accumulated wisdom on the subject, inspissated into a single thought, is that writing cannot be taught, though it can be learned—and that, friends, is the sound of one hand clapping.

I don't have an opinion of Fish's book or Epstein's review of it. I just really like that way of putting it.

So why do I bother trying to teach it? Because you can actually help someone learn if they are willing to put in the effort. At bottom, piano playing or skating or drawing can't be taught either, but someone who has learned how to do it can help someone who does not yet know how (but really wants to) figure it out. It's all in the figuring-it-out-by-yourself. Read other people and try to work out how they did it. And practice.

If you just want to write, you probably already know how. If you want to know how to write well you've got some work to do. And only you can do that work.

There are lots of tricks, but they are not tricks to writing. They are things like: first, clarify the key sentence in the paragraph, then write the paragraph three different ways. Or: make the five key sentences in a section of your paper so clear that you can memorize them and when you tell them to someone else only once they can give you the gist of the section back.

The knowledge you lack will be acquired simply by writing. There is no other way.

Jogging as a Model

2011-06-06T17:34:00.003+02:00

This morning I had to get my son to the train station for school camp. I normally get home from my jog at around seven, which would have cut it close. So I cut the jog down by 15 minutes, which is to say, by half. Just once around the park. It was pretty insignificant as exercise, but better than nothing, not just because I did actually break a sweat, but because it kept to the routine.

You can do the same for writing. Even a short writing session is better than nothing. It lets your routine know that there's still a place there in the morning for your writing. There's a will to hold that place.

Second Approximations

2011-06-01T12:37:00.004+02:00

The ideal introduction to a paper consists of three paragraphs. With 200 words to a paragraph, that's about 600 words. More importantly, with 6 sentences to a paragraph, that's about 18 sentences. Let's agree that the sentences in the introduction should be true. And let's suppose that you're happy with your introduction at present, i.e., you've done as much work on it as you intend to do for now. What's next?

Well, you could just go straight to he remaining sections of the paper (theory, method, results, etc.). But here's something else you could try. (Remember you said that the sentences in your introduction are true; so you must know why they are true, right?) Decide where each of the 15 sentences that support the 3 key sentences of your introduction are themselves supported in the body of the paper. If you're writing a paper according to my ideal image of one, the five supporting sentences of the first paragraph each need a paragraph of support in the "background" section. The five supporting sentences of the second paragraph need (at least) five paragraphs in the theory section. There will be two or three sentences about your method in the third paragraph, and one or two about about your results. There will also be a sentence about the "implications".

Write the methods sections as support for the claims you make about your method in the introduction. The sentence about the results can now be the key sentence of the opening paragraph of your results sections. Each of the supporting sentences become the key sentences of five or six paragraphs elaborating your results. You can "unfold" them one more time (or just some of them) if you choose. The sentence about the implications can work the same way in your "discussion" or "recommendations" section.

The whole point here is that your introduction really sets up the rhetorical problem of the paper. The paper solves that problem. And the relevant difficulty is always that of supporting your claims. So you should always, as a second approximation (after first approximating your temporal resources), try to articulate 20 or 30 claims to support.

First Approximations

2011-05-31T20:39:00.002+02:00

There are about 30 scholars in the CBS Writers' Colony. They have all (with one exception) picked a single text to make progress on throughout the month of June. After between 20 and 80 hours of work, they expect to submit the paper for review sometime in early July (the precise dates vary). Some will be submitting to a journal, some to a conference, some will be handing it off to a co-author, others will be presenting it as a working paper at a seminar. Some will just give to their supervisor to read.

I have explained to them that they are all working on a text that consists of around 40 paragraphs. So, we've got 30 people spending 20 to 80 hours spread over about 30 days, all trying to make, and support, around 40 claims. As their coach and editor, I've got my work cut out for me, then.

So does each of the authors. Suppose you've set aside 40 hours, 2 hours at a time, on 20 separate occasions. What are you going to do in those hours? First, you should write whatever paragraphs you're missing. Start with the introduction and conclusion. That's going to be a about five paragraphs. Great, now how long is your theory section going to be? About 5 paragraphs, say. It'll take you at least half an hour to write each of them. So find out what's missing and write it. Do the same with your methods section. And your results. And so forth.

Make a plan so that the first 20 hours of work get whole paper roughed out. (Starting from scratch it is possible to write 40 paragraphs in 20 hours. But most of the authors in the Colony are not starting from scratch. They've already got a working draft.) And make a plan for how you're going to spend the remaining 20. What parts, do you think, will require the most work? You can revise the plan later, but at least have some sense of how you're going to get finished.

Remember you'll need time at the very end to copy-edit, check references, and make sure the document is prepared properly for wherever you're submitting. Make a plan for that too.

If you can't fit everything you need to do into the plan. Rethink your goals. Or find more time. Don't try to accomplish an on-the-face-of it unrealistic goal.

Colonial Diaries

2011-05-27T06:59:00.000+02:00

This is the last day of the Sixteen-Week Challenge, which I issued in January. I had almost forgotten to stop up, and take stock. And to change the rhythm of my work for the summer months. The challenge begins again in mid-August, running until Christmas. That is, I have two periods every year in which I make a concerted effort to protect and make use of those 240 ideal hours of writing time.

This also means the end of my regular blogging routine. This summer I'm going to be jogging three times a week instead, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings and I will be writing on my book for an hour Tuesday and Thursday mornings (which is when I've been jogging). For reasons that I'm now going to explain, I'm going to blog very briefly and without much discipline in the evenings.

This year, I'm trying something new for the whole month of June. The HR department at the Copenhagen Business School has enlisted me to do something for all the researchers. We decided to invite them to participate in what we're calling the CBS Writer's Colony: a virtual community of scholars who see the month of June, after the end of exams and before the summer vacation, as a "big block of time" (to use Tara Gray's phrase) in which to "get some writing done".

Big blocks of time are too often squandered because we don't carve them up into smaller blocks of time (like hours and half hours). So we sent out a mail asking everyone who has a piece of writing that they hope to complete before they go on vacation to help us build a sense of community around the problem of writing for the whole month of June. We will bring them together regularly to help them not only improve their writing (and I will even do some editing for them) but to support them in their efforts get something done. I will introduce them to Writing Process Reengineering and, of course, some of Jonathan's "stupid motivational tricks".

We're having a kick-off meeting this afternoon. There will be some of the usual math: four weeks of five working days, with a maximum of four hours of writing each day (and, I will suggest, a minimum of fifteen minutes). That's 80 hours in an ideal world. How ideal will your June be? And what do you hope to accomplish in those 80 hours. It can be useful to work on a paper one paragraph at a time for 30 minutes (including taking a short break between sessions). That's 160 sessions. A standard journal articles consists of 8000 words composed into 200-word paragraphs. About 40 paragraphs. Your problem for the month of June, then, is to figure out how (when, where, what) you are going write those paragraphs.

We will form some smaller groups that will meet once a week so that the writers can report on progress and keep each other focused. We will also facilitate an exchange of papers for brief and efficient commenting. Most of the work (the writing) will, of course, be done alone. But it will be nice, I think, to know that there are some 30 writers at the School who are engaged in the same struggle.

To establish some continuity, I'm going to use this blog to keep a diary of our progress and activities, writing more or less every evening to keep everybody informed of where we are, and where we're going. I hope that might also be interesting to the regular readers of this blog.

What Scholars Do

2011-05-25T06:50:00.002+02:00

Scholars are participants in a conversation. Their job is to make claims and defend them, and to provide occasions for their peers to defend the claims they make. This job description is as general as saying of dancers that they make movements in front of an audience. Or of musicians that they make sounds for others to hear.

In the development of a craft, it is important to see yourself as a maker of something, not a particular kind of being. It is true that becoming a scholar will change you as a person, but it is your activities that will change you, not some act of will, and certainly not some state of mind. I have found, for example, that many students, and even young faculty, need to become much more assertive, much more confident about what they have to say. Some of them think they are following the example of the self-deprecating scholar who always reminds you how little they know, how new this topic is to them, how difficult it is even for them to understand. The students who witness this performance forget that it is an exercise in irony. The pose of the searching, uncertain scholar is grounded in an underlying confidence in one's ability to speak intelligently on a range of subjects (those that define the field). Don't think that if a famous scholar admits to being uncertain then your uncertainty, and your willingness to admit it, is a sure sign that you've got a future in scholarship. Look at what scholars do, not what they say they are, and ask yourself whether you can do it too.

Notice that even someone with no musical training can appreciate, and to some extent evaluate, the ability of a professional musician. I may not be able to select from among a group of aspirants to the Berlin Philharmonic who would be best for the job, but I can hear whether or not an individual is a reasonably accomplished cellist simply from listening to her play. Likewise, I can hear, simply from listening to someone speak, whether or not she is a learned scholar of the subject she is speaking about. The cellist is able to articulate sounds (produce them and join them together) into melodies; the scholar is able to articulate claims into arguments. I can follow the tune or the argument without being able to produce it myself.

The novice musician or scholar, having tried for many years to make what the experts make, is able to also appreciate the difficulty. The aspiration to become a scholar is always tempered by this awareness. One may have some basic intelligence, just as one may have some basic musical ability, but one may have failed to develop this ability, to overcome a particular set of difficulties. The particularity of this development is worth keeping in mind.

Obviously mere "musical ability" is not enough for a cellist. The cellist may be good enough to play in the finest orchestras in the world but only, precisely, as a cellist. Her general musicality will not help her play the same pieces on the piano or the violin at the same level. Likewise, the scholar must recognize that merely being intelligent is not enough. That intelligence must be applied to the formation of a particular set of strenghts, an ease and gracefulness in a particular area of scholarship, an ability to participate confidently in a particular conversation.

The musician naturally develops her talent by practicing. She takes out her instrument and tries to get it to make the sounds she wants. She is rarely satisfied with the immediate "result" (i.e., the actual sounds she produces while practicing), of course, because she is practicing precisely those sounds and phrases that she wants to get better at. But she knows that she is getting better with each attempt. She knows that she is learning how to do something, how to make something.

Scholars are in the same situation. They too often forget this. They should spend more time making claims and supporting them. Even when there is no one around to hear them.

Excommunication

2011-05-23T07:02:00.002+02:00

It's one of those mornings. As always, my alarm wakes me a 5:48, which gives me twelve minutes to shake the sleep out of my body, drink two glasses of water, make a cup of coffee, and sit down in front of what Henry Miller called "the machine" to write. As usual, I know what I'm supposed to write about because I have decided on a topic before going to bed. But sometimes, the words just don't come. So I quickly changed my title to "ignorance", thinking I could at least write about that, and then, when nothing came, I thought of that line from part three of Miller's Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch called "Paradise Lost" (also published as a separate novella under the title A Devil in Paradise):

"It was too wonderful a morning to surrender myself to the machine." (354)

If you're up now, at 6:26 on the twenty-third of May, 2011, in Copenhagen, you will know it is indeed a beautiful morning. But that is no excuse not to excercise your prose (if that's what your plan lays out, what your discipline requires.) But what do you do when nothing comes?

Let me admit that I've been feeling a bit sorry for myself these last few weeks. My life has been quite hectic; too many "projects", not enough time to reflect, and not enough time to write seriously about serious things.

There is a great passage in Big Sur, where Miller describes his relationship to his muse:

That voice! It was while writing the Tropic of Capricorn (in the Villa Seurat) that the real shenanigans took place. My life being rather hectic then—I was living on six levels at once—there would come dry spells lasting for weeks some times. They didn't bother me, these lulls, because I had a firm grip on the book and an inner certainty that nothing could scotch it. One day, for no accountable reason, unless it was an overdose of riotous living, the dictation commenced. Overjoyed, and also more wary this time (especially about making notes), I would go straight to the black desk which a friend had made for me, and, plugging in all the wires, together with amplifier and callbox, I would yell: "Je t'écoute ... Vas-y!" (I'm listening ... go to it!)

(An aside: I have always loved that image of Miller sitting in front of typwriter "wired" into some cosmic callbox shouting for his muse to have at it.)

And how it would come! I didn't have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room. Weary, I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough, let's say, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony. Nothing doing! I had to take it in one fell swoop or risk the penalty: excommunication. The most that was permitted me was the time it took to swallow an aspirin. The john could wait, "it" seemed to think. So could lunch, dinner, or whatever it was I thought was so necessary or important. (128-9)

There are two things to remember. First, Miller is a novelist and a particularly romantic breed of novelist at that. Second, he is here constructing an image of himself as a writer, which we must always approach with caution. Miller is no role model for us as academic writers. But he is useful to us because he here articulates a romance that I'm sure all academic writers (myself included) sometimes indulge in, namely, the need for "inspiration"—especially, the need to wait for inspiration. And then the need to set aside trivial things like eating and, yes, going to the bathroom, in order to listen to that message from "the celestial recording room". To ignore the inspiration (to merely note it down in that little book we carry with us) would be to risk, we tell ourselves, "excommunication".

It is important to keep in mind that, even among novelists, there are less romantic images of inspiration. The most relevant here is probably Stephen King's. Yes, he grants, you need inspiration (at least at times) to write a novel, but your muse has to know where to find you. You don't go for weeks living (as Miller puts it) "riotously" and call this a "dry spell" of inspiration. Rather, no matter how beautiful the morning is, you sit down, in the same place at the same time every day, in front the machine and actually suffer through it. Have faith that the muse will strike one of these days.

For academic writers, especially, the risk of excommunication does not come from holding the muse at a distance when "the dictation commences" because, in an important sense, there is no dictation. That's not how an academic text gets written. You build them claim for claim, paragraph for paragraph. You risk being excommuicated from the source of your ideas only by breaking your discipline. By not writing though you have planned to write. And even (as I did this morning) by writing about something other than I had planned to write about. It couldn't be helped. It really is a wonderful morning.

The Hard Line

2011-05-18T07:08:00.008+02:00

One should never take mental illness lightly. But in an age dominated by the "diagnosis", one may be skeptical about people's psychological self-assessments. This goes for their amateur excursions into both normal and abnormal psychology. That is, it goes as much for people who claim to know what what is "wrong" with them as those who, less clinically, claim to know what "type" they are. I have said before that I don't believe there are different kinds of academic writers. In this post I want to talk about why I don't think very highly of mental diagnoses of difficulties in writing. I mean "mental" here in contrast to "moral" and "intellectual".

The theme was suggested to me by an article I read over lunch in a free daily newspaper here in Copenhagen yesterday. It is a first person account of a student's difficulties in "getting help" to deal with her "part-time" depression, which she had posted to the paper's blog. The post is in Danish, but I will summarize her story here.

"Camomilla" is a first-year master's student, and for the past two months she has "not been feeling too well". Like I say, I do not want to take this lightly, but it is important to keep in mind that this is all she tells us about her condition. At the beginning of the story, she does not have a more qualified opinion about how she is feeling. In fact, her story is a complaint about how difficult it is to get others to qualify her low spirits in professional terms.

She begins by approaching student services, but they were very busy and could not give her an appointment until mid-June. So she contacted the student advisor at her own department in person, but she "had barely gotten in the door before the tears began to roll down her cheeks". She now complains (I realize that is my word, not hers) that the advisor "lacked the tools" to help her with her real problem (i.e., the reason she is really "not feeling so good") and that they ended up (uselessly, one may imagine) discussing how she might prepare herself to write her thesis. As for the deeper issues, he suggested student services (which she had already tried) and her doctor.

Her doctor said she "might have a light depression", but that she could not tell for sure on the basis of a 15-minute consultation. She could come back in two weeks to see how things are going, but since there were no signs of "full time" depression, i.e., since the problem did not seem very serious, she could not refer her to a psychologist, at least not in a way that would be covered by health care. If she wanted to talk to a professional, she would have to pay for it. This struck her as absurd and deeply unfair, as does what she describes as the standard advice, namely, taking some time off from one's studies to "find yourself".

The moral of the story, which Camomilla makes quite explicit, is that students with light depressions are being left in the lurch by the educational system and the medical establishment. And this is where I begin to worry.

Education is not an easy or painless process. If you are learning something important, you are going through an emotional, transformative process. You will sometimes feel wonderful because you have finally gotten a point that has been eluding you for months, even years. You will sometimes feel miserable because it is eluding you, and this misery may, indeed, persist for months. Your teachers and counsellors must assume, as a first approximation, that your problems—even those that bring tears to your eyes, or angry words to your lips—are intellectual not psychological (critical not clinical, to play on the title of one of Deleuze's collection of essays). If you feel lost or confused during your studies, the most likely (and most constructive) reason for this is that you are having a hard time understanding the subject matter. So that's where the conversation begins. It is, after all, precisely the set of problems that educators have "the tools" to help you with.

Moreover, before they reach for the tools of clinical psychology (or the limits of their competence to help you), educators are entitled, indeed obligated, to approach you as a fellow human being. If you've been "out of sorts" for a few months, there may be a reason that it does not take a science to understand. You may find the program you are in difficult and have lost your girlfriend. Or someone close to you may have died. Or you may have begun to hang out with radical leftists who have introduced you to marijuana and you are now questioning your Christian faith. That's the sort of stuff that is supposed to happen at a university. It is the sense in which university is a period of both intellectual and moral formation.

Sometimes your moral struggles will take precedence over your intellectual ones and your grades will suffer. Most people for whom this happens end up understanding the necessity of the tradeoff, and some even talk about that semester with pride. It was the time they realized that "there are more important things than school", etc. But it is, of course, possible that there is something truly wrong with your mind. I know people whose problems in school can convincingly be attributed to mental causes, not intellectual or moral difficulty (because they are convincingly intellectually and morally qualified to be in school). My point is just that it will not (cannot, should not) be immediately clear to anyone (from the fact that you are crying or a 15-minute conversation) that your problems are more serious. (Note that if you haven't been able to get out of bed for two weeks, then it is immediately clear.)

The boundary between the "moral" and the "mental" cannot be patrolled by your teachers and counsellors. They can only offer advice at the boundary between the intellectual and the moral dimension of your studies. They can encourage you to work harder to try to understand difficult material. And they can, at the limit, try to get you to see that the program you have enrolled in is not right for you. Indeed, my problem with the shift to clinical explanations is that they avoid the obvious solution to being unhappy in school: find another major, or even another school. Learning is hard, but it should, on the whole, be a satisfying experience. If it doesn't make you happy, don't think there must be something wrong with you.

And if there is something wrong with you don't make it the school's responsibility to deal with it. You may have particular difficulties in your studies because of the way your mind works. Well, get help (outside the program) and if it gives you the tools to succeed that's great. If not, your mind simply may not be suited for the kind of work your studies are trying to prepare you for. There's no shame in that. It's like learning you don't have the hands to be a surgeon or a pianist. Or the eyes to be a pilot. Or the legs to be a football player.

So, yes, take some time off and find yourself. Figure out what you want to do and are able to do happily. Then do it. And when it gets hard, work harder. You may need to conquer some old-school laziness not some newfangled medical condition. That's what I did.

Demotivation

2011-05-16T07:05:00.001+02:00

"Real education must ultimately be limited to men who INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding." (Ezra Pound, ABC, p. 84)

Scott Eric Kaufman has a talent for writing about his encounters with his students. (Or perhaps his talent is simply to attract noteworthy encounters, which then only need to be transcribed. Here's his most famous one.) Last week, the encounter was about the difficulty of abstracting writing skills from writing courses; I guess in a deeper sense it was about the difficulty of teaching students skills that will help them in life rather than merely help them get through the course. (I'm not going to spoil it with a summary. Go read it, then come back.)

This difficulty persists in the acquisition and maintenance of any craft skill. Everything you have learned how to do well, and everything you actually do with some facility (ease) today, you have learned through regular practice. Hard work and dedication. And yet, again and again, when we realize that we are not "good enough" at something we would like to be good at, we look for someone to "make us do" something to improve our abilities. This dependence on the teacher's rules and tricks (and regular kicks in the pants), then, gets in the way of grasping the general lesson. In Scott's story, the fact that the teacher "made" the student revise interferes with the student's grasping the general utility of revision.

Psychology has always baffled me. Students can sometimes be remarkably lucid about their counterproductive ticks and still give the teacher the task of overcoming them. So, for example, one student explained that my repeated insistence on the importance of writing some prose every day just got tiresome and eventually became the reason she was not writing every day. (The class clearly "needed" a weekly reminder, but it didn't help much. Perhaps this was because I was only "suggesting" it to them, not "making" them do it by giving them a weekly assignment.) It is entirely possible that I'm not a very good "motivator", but the weird thing here is that the student knows she is being "demotivated" by something that has nothing to do with the quality of the advice. She knows that she is "resisting", and she still does not overcome it.

I hear this word, "demotivating", too often used by people who really should know better. It's always a way of explaining why someone is not doing something they actually know they should be doing. Someone else (higher up in the hierarchy) has "demotivated" them, by being inattentive, thoughtless, stupid, or even mean. The teacher's indifference, say, "demotivates" the student. The teacher may have made the student feel "stupid", or where did the teacher "get off" implying that the student did not work hard enough? Things like that.

I'm not defending such pedagogy, of course. But I am puzzled by people who recognize (often very accurately) the source of their lack of motivation as someone else's thoughtlessness or simply lack of teaching skills and then still let it "demotivate" them. I like Scott's story because I suspect it locates the problem more precisely.

The Articulated Self

2011-05-13T22:07:00.006+02:00

In philosophy, there is a long tradition of construing the self as a featureless entity. As Blackwell Reference Online puts it:

The Cartesian self and related versions of the "philosophical ‘I’," [is] classically a separate, simple thinking substance, tracing a subjective path through the world and capable of surviving bodily death.

But there is also a long tradition of rejecting this view. Hume, for example, unable to discover his self by introspection (i.e., "looking inside"), proposed that the self was merely a "bundle of perceptions". (I distinctly remember my philosophy professor getting us to try to find ourselves by introspection in a class one day. As he expected, we failed.) The problem with the "bundle theory", though, is that it's unclear what is finally doing the "bundling". It's a bundle of perceptions, it must have some sort of "twine" (as in inter-twine).

I'm feeling very philosophical this morning, as you can tell. There's a report coming out of the Carnegie Foundation soon, called Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education, which a number of us around the department are very interested in. My own approach to the question of "liberal learning" (or a "liberal arts model for business education") is to see it primarily as a process of self-fashioning. I get this from Jonathan Mayhew's reading of Stephen Greenblatt. If business schools adopt a liberal learning model they will need to take an explicit interest in the self-formation of their students as "business people" (administrators, organizers, managers, leaders), and part of this identity will include "scholarly" competence: a facility with words, an ability to read and write, an understanding of language, literature, and culture. But what does it mean to "shape" a self?

My provisional answer is that we are trying to make ourselves and our students more "articulate", which gives a special sense to teaching them how to "express themselves" (a term that generally leaves the wrong impression, if you ask me). What does it mean to be articulate? Well, many years ago in a seminar, a scholar (I forget who) used an image that has stuck with me, that of the British call an "articulated lorry":

"An articulated vehicle is a vehicle which has a permanent or semi-permanent pivoting joint in its construction, allowing the vehicle to turn more sharply. There are many kinds of articulated vehicles, from heavy equipment to buses, trams and . Steam locomotives were sometimes articulated in that the driving wheels could pivot around turns." (Wikipedia)

In making students more articulate, we are trying to put some "joints" or "pivots" into their thinking and to strengthen them. And I've come to realize that this means exercising the joints in their selves. There is a strong "Cartesian" presumption in everyday culture, i.e., people generally think their self is "one and indivisible", that it is simple and, as Blackwell puts it, merely "tracing a subjective path" through life. But this construes the self either as a hard little shiny thing inside us, or as some sort of malleable putty on which a form can be imposed. Something to be put in a box and treasured, or something to be moulded into shape. I prefer a different model.

"The articulation of the human hand is more complex and delicate than that of comparable organs in any other animal. Without this extra articulation, we would not be able to operate a wide variety of tools and devices, nor achieve the wide variety of possible hand gestures." (Wikipedia)

The self isn't like a stone (no matter how precious) dropped into a lake. It is like a high diver jumping off the platform. Because it is jointed it can make the most beautiful movements (gestures) even in the air.

The self is not "bound" together by something. It is articulated. But it is more "complex and delicate" even than the hand. So complex and delicate, indeed, that we ought really call it “subtle” (Ezra Pound talks of the “subtle joints of the craft” of poetry); it is as much "joint" as it is "bone". It must shaped by training, by practice, and it must be “kept in shape”, by exercise. It must not be overworked (wearing down the cartilage) and it must not languish in inactivity. The self, that is, has parts. Working parts. It is to that sense of self that I address myself.

A Philosophy of Writing

2011-05-11T07:00:00.001+02:00

"In every day terms, we understand ourselves and our existence by way of the activities we pursue and the things we take care of." (Martin Heidegger, BP, p. 159).

It's nice to be understood. The other day a PhD student who has been attending my workshops for some time gave me this gift of understanding. She described what I am trying to teach them as a "philosophy of writing" and my philosophy, she said, is that we must love our writing, we must "care for the text". Now, another participant explained to the group that this so-called philosophy of mine (which is also very clearly a moral philosophy) is tied to the contingencies of my own subjectivity, which, in turn, has been produced by a particular disposition of bio-political forces. They are both right.

Your own writing also expresses a "philosophy". And you don't have to adopt mine or anyone else's to write well. (But mine is pretty good.) As a scholar, writing is an important part of "the activities you pursue and the things you take care of", and it is therefore an important part of the way by which you understand your existence. Specifically, your academic writing will be an expression of your philosophy of language and your epistemology (you philosophy of knowledge). Your reader will get an implicit sense of what you think language and knowledge are from the way you write about what you know. Your reader may even (as I have in the case of one prominent organization scholar) try to make this philosophy explicit by carefully attending to what John Van Maanen (1995) has called your "literary performances", your style.

"Le style c'est l'homme même," said Georges-Louis Leclerc back in mid 18th century. "Writing well consists of thinking, feeling and expressing well, of clarity of mind, soul and taste .... The style is the man himself." (This is commonly taken to be the source of the motto "Style makes the man"). I like to say that a perfect style would do away with the need for both "theory" and "method". (Van Maanen has talked about how a style can essentially be a theory, as in the work of Karl Weick. Barbara Czarniawska has rightly tied the question of style to issues of methodology.) Indeed, the "liberal arts", as classically understood, arguably have this as their stylistic ideal. "Social science", we might say, is the attempt to accomplish with theory and method what humanists must accomplish by style.

It is important to keep in mind that your academic style does not have to express your whole existence; it is not an expression of your self entire. It must express only that part of you that cares about knowledge. Or, if that be the case, your academic writing could express the part of you that could care less about knowledge. There are skeptics out there who proudly declare that knowledge is a vain illusion that is fostered by a privileged elite. But they might be said to care about knowledge too, only they care about it as one might care about injustice (it is something to be opposed). And there are academic writers, of course, who are simply charlatans. They pretend to know but they don't really care about knowledge. This, my philosophy says, will show in their writing. The style of your writing tells us how much and how well you care about knowledge (and, obviously, how much you care about language) and what you take that care to imply. It tells us this whether you like it or not. What the reader learns from your style is not part of the "intention" of the text.

This may provoke some anxiety, as it should. It is impossible to understand the complex "bio-political" forces that are trying to make you care about particular things in particular ways, i.e., shape your subjectivity, i.e., make you who you are. We must proceed in a more intuitive and tacit way and we call this procedure the development of a "clarity of mind, soul and taste", in short, moral development, or what is traditionally called Bildung, and what Leclerc identified with your style. You cannot pretend to care about knowledge in a particular way, on this view (which is also largely my view). What you really care about will always be apparent in your style, at least to the careful reader. And whether or not you care about what the careful reader thinks may be the most important thing of all.

Priorities

2011-05-09T07:08:00.001+02:00

It is my belief that real happiness comes from developing one's talent. Mere success and pleasure are not enough. You have to feel like you are getting better at something and this skill must be an essential part of you. The difference between a mere skill and a talent has to do precisely with how important it is to your identity.

When I was an undergraduate, I was the founding member of a rock band. I had learned to play violin as a child, and began to play double bass in grade six, with the intention of playing bass in the junior high school stage band. You didn't get into the stage band until grade eight, and the normal thing to do was to play tuba in the concert band, starting in grade 7, if you were going to play bass (same sheet music). So I learned how to be play tuba and then electric bass. I had imagined that I would play upright (acoustic) bass at some point, I think, but as a teenager it was pretty cool to have an "electric guitar" in my room, even if it was a "just a bass".

In high school, however, I didn't join the school band. I decided to focus on electives that would prepare me for business school (I was determined to become a captain of industry, if you can believe it). So it wasn't until I had gotten into university, changed my major from pre-commerce to history, and then to philosophy, that I thought very seriously about music again. In 1991, Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" inspired everyone with even just a little bit of a talent to start a band. (I'm not saying Nirvana wasn't a very talented band, but they did make it sound easy!) I was recruited by a self-taught and very talented guitarist to be his bassist. He had written some songs, and for a short while, if I recall, we even had a drummer. Dave's Dog never did play for an audience, but there were times when I thought we were pretty good.

I was also developing my talent for philosophy at that time. And I remember distinctly the moment when I "gave up rock and rock roll" to become a scholar. When I moved to Europe to go to graduate school, I was fully committed (arguably a bit too committed) to my identity as philosopher (as many philosophy students are). At one point, I declined an invitation to play jazz once a week with some guys who did it just as a hobby and needed a bassist. (I didn't have an instrument, for one thing.) But then, not long ago, my wife brought her guitar home from her parents' house. I had learned three or four chords in college, mainly in an attempt to impress girls, and I would now pick up my wife's guitar once in awhile and strum it. For a time, this happened almost daily.

Our children were getting old enough to learn an instrument of their own. We settled on piano, and bought a small electric one (we live in an apartment). My talent here was a little less developed than my guitar playing, but I also soon found myself playing almost daily. I even took some lessons for a while as part of my project of learning how to do things with my hands. (At that time, I also did some drawing.) Today, I play a little piano every night, and I'm improving slowly and pleasantly.

I have clearly been ambivalent about my musical abilities. It is not, I would argue, one of my "talents", precisely because I have not subjected myself to any particular discipline in developing my skills in this area. Entering middle age, I do vaguely regret it. (I'm sure many people in my generation look on their twenties as a wasted opportunity, indeed, a series of wasted opportunities, to get really good at something worthwhile.) But this post is not about the neglected musician in me, it is about priorities. I tell this story as an example of something that I have devoted some time to throughout my life, but which has never been a priority. It has been a pleasant diversion.

But the point is that it really does take up some of my time. And my musical identity is, in fact, getting some love from the rest of me these days. Similarly, I do find time, two or three times a week, to go for a run. And I make sure my children get to their own piano lessons and skating practices, etc. That is, any impartial observer of my life will be able to read my values off what I do. I am the only one who can see everything I do, however, the only one who knows what I devote the balance of my time to.

This brings me to my point. Like any parent, I hope my children can see that they are important to me simply by the regularity of the attention I devote to them, and to ensuring that they get to the places they want to be (sport, music, school, play dates, etc.) They know I also have "work", but there is very distinctly "room for them" in my life. The musician in me also looks at how I spend my days, and he learns from this how important he is to me. He has to accept that he is not very important, of course. I treat him like a good but not very central colleague; I'm friendly with him and I keep my appointments, such as they are.

But the writer in me rightly looks at all these other relationships I have with some measure of jealousy. If I can jog three times a week, I better also keep this appointment to write a blog post three times a week. If I give myself time to develop my amateur "talent" as a pianist, I better well set aside time to develop my ability as a professional writer. Since I am a scholar, my talent for writing should be very central to my identity. And I must therefore devote serious amounts of time to it. I must see it as a core component of my talent for research.

Scholars do not need to be great poets or novelists; they need only be talented writers of academic prose. They don't need to be the best academic writers of their generation, but they need to see it as a core talent. If I didn't think my ability to write well (and to write good academic English, no less) was important, I would be leaving out an important part of my scholarly identity. An important part of me would feel neglected, in precisely the way that I don't feel like I'm neglecting anything very important by not developing my drawing skills or my musical ability. It's a question of priorities.

Evaluating Writing Workshops

2011-05-06T06:56:00.001+02:00

Jonathan asks how well my proposed workshop works in practice. The feedback I get is generally positive, but it is always hard to tell exactly how much of an impact I'm having. Most of what I teach people only "works" if you keep at it, if you practice. So the cases where I'm certain I've had a positive impact on someone's writing are also cases where I've had a chance to look at how their work develops over time. And then it is hard to know whether it was the workshop or the continuous feedback that followed that did the trick.

I have heard that some of the places I've visited now have a writing culture that is "lit" or "coloured" by my ideas. People talk about their "writing self", they keep each other writing every day, they are acutely conscious of what a paragraph is, and how an introduction works. Here the workshop becomes a kind of "delivery vehicle" for a way of thinking about writing. We might say that the practice serves as a "medium" to impart a theory of writing. When I meet people from places I've visited, what they tell me about how they write, and especially how people now talk about writing at their departments, warms my heart.

It's important to emphasize that my "ideas" are utterly unoriginal. My "theory" is cobbled together from the most ordinary of writing manuals and "gathered from the air" of a very established tradition of writing instruction. There is not much of a mystery about what you have to do to improve your writing. But there is, let us say, a "mysticism" about it. How well a workshops works in practice depends a great deal on the personality of the workshop leader (me) and his ability to create the right mood. Since I do have to do a bit of moralizing, and since clear writing does actually depend on clear thinking, and since the participants really do have a lot of work to do (there's a lot of room for improvement), I need to find just the right balance of irony and sincerity to get the message across. This goes both for general principles and specific tips.

One thing I've only come appreciate fully recently is how emotional one can be about one's writing. In a workshop, participants are really discovering their own mediocrity; they are exploring it at what Jonathan calls the "granular" level. They are discovering what they are unable to do easily, what they lack the grace and strength to do well. Crucially, these are things that they naturally would like to do well and easily. Things that they invest some pride in. One does not want to make it an unambiguous sign of success, but when participants resist with anger or with tears I know I'm getting at something important. A workshop is not trying to transfer knowledge, it is not trying to fill a open space of ignorance. It is trying to correct a misunderstanding, to move people from wrong ways of doing things to right ways of doing things. One is trying to get them to see the errors of their ways. People are not naturally inclined to have such visions.

There's one very concrete thing I have learned the hard way, especially from doing workshops at other institutions. Avoid whole days. Listening to me talk is, of course, a very pleasant experience. But after three hours, the charm sort of wears off. And I get tired and therefore unconvincing. Since it is the delivery that matters, not so much the ideas, this is an important thing to keep in mind. That's why I'm now trying to fill the first half day of what might otherwise be a full-day workshop with activities for the participants to do by themselves.

Workshop

2011-05-04T07:03:00.005+02:00

The essential thing about a workshop is, of course, the work. A workshop is a place to work on your ideas, not play with them, and I usually introduce my writing workshops by explaining the etymology of "debauchery".

F. débaucher is, according to Littré and Hatzfeld, derived from n. bauche, of which the precise sense and origin are according to the latter unknown; according to the former it = ‘a place of work, workshop’, so that desbaucher would mean orig. ‘to draw away from the workshop, from one's work or duty’. (Oxford English Dictionary.)

Today, the word means "a vicious indulgence in sensual pleasures", but it stems from "seduction from duty, integrity, or virtue; corruption." The current sense of "debauch" apparently emerged in the seventeenth century, i.e., at the beginning of the modern era, when we began to separate the pursuit of profit from the pursuit of pleasure. A workshop is not a playground, and it is not a brothel. It is not that there is no pleasure to be had in a workshop, it is just, and very definitely, that it is not "fun", it is not a vicious indulgence in pleasure. It is the deeper pleasure that the craftsman finds in working seriously with materials.

This morning I want to write something about the workshops I offer, especially to those who would like to invite me to visit their own institutions. Here in Copenhagen, I run 8-week workshops that meet once a week for three hours. I expect participants to devote at least one hour a day to their writing outside of our meetings. "Seriousness", to my mind, is established by demanding a commitment to the workshop (a commitment to attend all 8 meetings) and a commitment to the work itself (by demanding that writing be prioritized during the period of attendance). Also, by expecting people to spend more time writing than meeting, I am trying to bring the materiality of writing into focus. The workshop is not an opportunity to talk abstractly or "in principle" about writing, it is a place to assess the concrete results of a practical activity.

So, when I do these workshops out of town, I demand some preparation from the participants and (this is a new thing) I demand that they set aside as much time during my visit for writing as they do for meeting. So, if I'm doing, say, three 3-hour workshop meetings on the afternoons of three consecutive days, I will expect the participants to be writing (doing specific assignments) for three hours each morning. I want them to come to the workshop with a very concrete sense of their writing as a text—a piece of work. If I'm doing only one meeting, I will expect them to write the morning I arrive as well.

As preparation I expect the following. First, they must select a writing project to bring to the workshop and one published piece of "exemplary" scholarship, i.e., a recognized work of quality in the tradition that they are working in. These selections provide us with our materials. Next, they must produce an "after-the-fact" outline of their own writing project, i.e., a paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of the text. This is ultimately just a list of each paragraph's key sentence. Finally, they must choose one paragraph from the text they are going to be working on and give it a minimum of 30 minutes attention: they must read it out loud, edit it for style and grammar, make it as coherent as they can. They must bring the prose in that paragraph up their highest personal standard. The result of this preparation should be sent to the workshop coordinator and to me one week in advance of my visit. This is the best possible way of focusing the attention of the participants on the craft-dimension of writing and of giving me an insight into the linguistic and academic level that the workshop should be run at.

Suppose, then, that I come for a three-day visit to meet with a group of, say, eight PhD students, who have all prepared in the way I just described and have committed 18 hours over three days to working on their writing (9 alone, 9 with me). This establishes a space of serious pleasure, a place to work. In the morning of the first day, before we meet for the first time, they will be given the assignment of writing (presumably re-writing) their abstract, introduction and conclusion according to my increasingly famous formula. We will then meet for three hours.

In the first hour I talk in general terms about "how to write". The second hour is a master class in which the after-the-fact outlines of two participants are discussed with their authors in front of the rest of the group. The third hour consists of an editing demonstration: I project a submitted paragraph up onto the screen in an active Word window and edit it for 30 or 40 minutes, explaining my actions as a go. I then give them their assignment for the next day.

Their assignment will be to spend 1 hour on the theory section, then 1 hour on their methods section, and then 1 hour getting the two to fit together. They bring an after-the-fact outline and a sample paragraph from this work to class that afternoon. Again, I spend the first (less than an) hour talking about what a good theory section and methods section should accomplish and then master-class one or two outlines. The final hour or so is again spent editing a paragraph and giving them an assignment.

The assignment for the third day will be to write some empirical prose. "Empirical" prose is methodologically qualified and theoretically informed. So the previous day's work will have set up the task for them. They simply write about something that "is the case" in the terms they have articulated. They bring an after-the-fact outline of the three-hours of work to the class and, again, a sample paragraph. We master-class the outline and I edit the paragraph. Then we wrap things up for about twenty minutes.

While there is no need to have everyone in the workshop be at the same level of academic development or the same stage of completion on the selected project, some uniformity here may be a good idea. One way to do this is to have me come twice, doing a "getting started" and "getting finished" version with 8 or 10 weeks of individual work in between. The workshops would proceed in essentially the same way, but with different assumptions about the participant's familiarity with their own texts, and my principles.

A Visiting Card

2011-05-02T07:10:00.003+02:00

People who hear what I do sometimes ask whether they can get me to come visit their universities. My answer is generally yes, and this morning I want to reflect a little on what sorts of visits I am willing to make. This post will become the beginnings of page like Jonathan's "Fees and Services". Also, I am (as always) trying to set a good example for young researchers. Think a little bit about how to fit your travelling into your life. Many job announcements (I'm thinking mainly outside academia now) make clear how much travelling you can expect to do. They don't want people to apply who don't want to or can't easily travel if that's what the job requires. In academia, meanwhile, you have some freedom to decide how much travelling your job is going to entail. So you may as well think explicitly about it.

First, some logistical questions. I have both professional commitments (a job) and personal commitments (a family) in Copenhagen, so I like to keep my travelling focused and limited to four nights away (preferably less) and twice a month at most. I was recently asked to consider a two-week visit, and my immediate response was "yes, but...", where the "but" was simply that it would have to be four days there, three days back here in Copenhagen, and then another four days there. So when I think about what I can offer, I'm usually thinking about what I can accomplish in a few days.

Next, money issues. Here I have to distinguish between the primary nature of my visits. If I'm being invited somewhere, I will expect to have my travel and accomodation paid by the host university. If I am being invited only to come and discuss my research (at a seminar, for example), I will not of course expect any fee, but if I'm coming to do a writing workshop for PhD students or faculty I will normally expect a daily rate. Most universities have standard rates for external teachers, and I'm settling on around 500 Euros as a reasonable fee (but there are all kinds of considerations, so just ask).

Here then are some things I'm likely to accept invitations to do.

1. Research seminar. I sometimes get invited simply to talk about my research. I have a pretty focused research agenda, and I'm always eager to discuss my projects.

2. Academic writing seminar/lecture. I have a packaged presentation that can run from 1 to 3 hours and can run, depending on the size of the audience, either as a seminar or a lecture. It is a combination of a "how to" talk and "motivational" seminar. I try to give people a fresh perspective on academic writing, some basic principles of composition, and some time-management tools. All along, I'm trying to get them excited about the particular challenges of writing for an academic audience.

3. Writing workshops. This is something I do mainly for PhD students (and sometimes junior faculty). The workshops run from 1 to 3 days, 3 hours per day. Depending on the city, it is usually possible to fly in on the morning of day 1, do an afternoon workshop on the first day, then another in the morning on the next day, and get me home that same night. That sometimes makes it easier for me to fit into my schedule, but the ideal situation is to meet only in the afternoons, and have the participants work on their writing in the morning. For these workshops, all participants are expected to contribute their own writing projects and we cover issues of organizing a paper, writing an introduction and conclusion, thinking of your audience ("research as a conversation"), principles of composition (especially the importance of paragraphs), and time management (the importance of discipline). The workshops proceed as discussion about the work the participants are doing, with some elements of the "master class" format: a participant is briefly "coached" through an issue in their paper as an illustration for the others. There are "basic" and "advanced" versions of this workshop.

4. Longer-term visiting positions. Here in Copenhagen I run my workshops on a weekly basis, in 8-week series. I am not averse to building such a workshop into a longer stay at another university, but this will of course require a lot of planning and, in all likelihood, some way of bringing my family or letting me return to Copenhagen often. We can talk.

Okay. Those are my thoughts on visiting your institution. Drop me a line at tb dot lpf at cbs dot dk if you're interested.