Research as a second language

Entries collection (2012)

Thomas Basbøll

Contents

1 Claim/Support 4

2 Propositions 4

3 Opinions 5

4 Confucius said… 6

5 Logiotherapy? 7

6 What Everybody Knows 8

7 Specialist Knowledge 9

8 What You Know 9

9 Academic Reading 10

10 Science and the Sentence 11

11 Process vs. Product 11

12 The 40-Hour Challenge 12

13 Belief and Orthodoxy, Part 1 13

14 Belief and Orthodoxy, Part 2 13

15 Three Principles 15

16 Anxiety 16

17 The Page 16

18 The They 17

19 The Joint 18

20 The Body 18

21 Musculature 19

22 Knowing How and Knowing That 20

23 Why Is It Hard to Write? 21

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24 Russell Davies’ Big Idea 22

25 Saying and Doing 22

26 Strategy and Planning 23

27 Strategic Goals 24

28 Half-baked? 25

29 Getting to Review 26

30 Clarity is Difficult 26

31 Arts and Sciences 27

32 Concepts and Objects 27

33 Do You Like Paragraphs? 29

34 Paragraph Time 29

35 Theoretical and Methodological Papers 30

36 Theory Papers 31

37 Methods Papers 31

38 Critical Papers 32

39 Cutting Your Work Out for You 33

40 Intended to Accomplish Goals 34

41 One Idea at a Time 35

42 The Whole and the Long Run 35

43 Propositions and Statements 36

44 The Self as Critic 37

45 The Critic as Other 37

46 The Act of Writing 38

47 What and How 39

48 Who and Why 39

49 Key Sentences 40

50 Thought and Style 41

51 Perspicuity 41

52 Aim Small, Miss Small 42

53 A Paragraph is Not a Box 43

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54 Preparation 43

55 Learning 44

56 The Tasks at Hand 45

57 What to Do 45

58 What to Do Now 46

59 What to Do Next 47

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1 Claim/Support

Source

“I have heard it said that the two standard tutorial questions at Oxford are”What does
he mean?” and “How does he know?” I doubt the report—no university could be that
good…” (Wayne Booth)

As an academic writer, your aim should be to provide support for claims. The relevant unit of
composition is the prose paragraph, in which a key sentence states the claim and roughly five further
sentences support it. The key sentence tells us what you mean, the rest tell us how you know.

At any given time your mind will be occupied by one or more research projects. Such projects will
either be at the back of your mind or at the forefront of your attention, but in all cases they consist
of a series of more or less inchoate claims that you are more or less able to support. My first sug-
gestion for a “spiritual exercise” is to articulate those claims, to make them explicit. Remember, as
always, that a research project in the social sciences can be represented by a standard 40-paragraph
paper, which will cover familiar kids of ground: introduction, background, theory, method, results,
implications, conclusion.

The core of a project lies in its theory, method and results. Every night, before you go to bed, pick
one these sections in one of your projects. List three major claims in this section, i.e., write three
possible key sentences of a theoretical, methodological or empirical kind (i.e., how you see the
world, what you did, or what your data shows). If you are doing these exercises regularly, you will
probably have this list already made and you’ll only have to choose three sentences to look at. In
any case, read the three sentences out loud. Now, pick the one you know best. Put an “x” beside it.
This is the claim you will support in the morning. All in all this exercise shouldn’t take more than
five minutes. Don’t struggle with it. Pick a claim that you are very familiar with from among three
claims you are also familiar with.

The next exercise, to be carried out in 30 minutes, first thing in the morning, is to write the sup-
porting paragraph.

2 Propositions

Source

In the first place, in order that by exercises of this kind, as well he who gives as he who
receives them may be profited, it must be presupposed that every pious Christian ought
with a more ready mind to put a good sense upon an obscure opinion or proposition
of another than to condemn it; but if he can in no way defend it, let him inquire the
meaning of the speaker, and if he think or mean wrongly, correct him kindly ; if this
suffice not, try all suitable means by which he may render him sound in meaning and
safe from error. (St. Ignatius of Loyola)

In the evening, you briefly consider the truth of a claim (or several claims). In the morning, you
write a paragraph (or several paragraphs) supporting that claim (or those claims). This exercise
will foster a “propositional attitude” in your thinking. It will be good for your style.

But what does it mean to write a paragraph? For the purpose of this exercise, I encourage you to
start with a confidently (but not stubbornly) held opinion. It should be expressed in a proposition
you know to be true and the truth of which you can defend. Your ability to defend it is, as a first
approximation, your ability to write five or six supporting sentences, and a paragraph is simply

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those sentences arranged as support for the claim. We call the sentence that expresses the central
claim of the paragraph the “key sentence”.

Let’s consider an example. In the evening, you might write down the following sentence:

Sensemaking is the formation images that rationalize what people are doing.

In the morning, you get up and proceed to support it. Now, one of the reasons that you are confident
about this claim is that it is orthodox. It is not just your opinion but a widely held one. Indeed, it
is a classic definition of sensemaking. In fact, it turns out to be an almost verbatim transcription of
Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld’s definition. And (if you click on that link) you can see that the claim
has already been used to anchor a paragraph that supports it.

We might want either to mark the quotation —Sensemaking is the formation of “images that rationalize
what people are doing” (Weick, Sutcliffe and Obstfeld 2005: 409)— or rewrite the sentence as a
paraphrase of their point —Weick, Sutcliffe and Obstfeld (2005: 409) have defined sensemaking in
terms of the images that rationalize our activities. Either way, we can imagine a paragraph like the
following (from this post) to support it:

Sensemaking is the formation of “images that rationalize what people are doing” (We-
ick, Sutcliffe and Obstfeld 2005: 409). At the start of each day, for example, members
of a given organization may show up at the same places (their offices) and begin, say,
to make sense of their emails. They may answer some with great care and delete oth-
ers without even reading them. They will file some for later, or, if they answer them
right away, mentally note that they are engaging in “personal business” on “company
time”. This may be worth only a fleeting thought or a record in a logbook of some
kind. Or it may simply be an occasion for a mildly guilty conscience. It all depends
on the “images that rationalize what they are doing”. These images are particular to
particular organizations, and we therefore do well to study them when making sense
of organizations, i.e., studying them as organization theorists.

Having written such a paragraph, your peers are in a position to inquire your meaning, and if they
think you are wrong, to correct you kindly.

3 Opinions

Source

“…I have to retrace my steps by way of the shadows. I try to interfere as little as
possible in the evolution of the work. I do not want it to be distorted by my opinions,
which are the most trivial things about us.” (Jorge Luis Borges)

In your scholarly writing, there is no way around forming an opinion. I know the temptation
to think of our opinions as “trivial” and the desire to write a text that is not “distorted” by them.
(Such a text is a poem, which is “the work” that Borges is talking about.) I know academics who find
opinions tiresome, and who would like their writing to be about something else. But I think they
have somehow gotten into the wrong line of work. Opinions (claims, propositions) are absolutely
central to the scholarly enterprise.

Scholars should deal in more than “mere” opinion of course. They should be able to defend their
opinions, to engage in “discourse” about them. Their confidence is not mere arrogance, their re-
solve is not mere stubbornness. When they make claims they are expressing opinions that are well
founded in reasons to hold those views. When you talk to them, when you push back against the
claims they make, you encounter the resistance that those reasons provide. The art of writing a
prose paragraph, the art of academic writing more generally, is the art of making those reasons

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explicit. When scholars communicate in writing, they are telling each other what they believe and
providing each other with reasons for those beliefs.

As a young scholar, or even a student, you therefore do well to examine your opinions in a systematic
way. The “spiritual exercises” that I’ve been talking about his week offer such a system. In fact, you
might recall that not long ago I presented a utopian vision in which undergraduates give themselves
640 occasions during the course of their studies to examine their opinions. Such students will
develop disciplined minds and they’ll become more articulate people.

Over at OrgTheory, Fabio Rojas recently posted a TEDx Talk about irrationality in politics by
Michael Huemer. He rightly reminds us that it’s somewhat inconvenient to be rational because
it means that you can’t believe anything you want. If you’re rational you have to have reasons to
believe. It’s not about merely being “opinionated”, its about being able to make explicit the reasons
you have for holding your beliefs.

I suppose it’s the difference, also, between being a “moralist” and actually being a moral person.
Those who engage in orderly self-examination on a regular basis will have a number of moral at-
titudes that guide their behavior. They will also be less able to denounce the actions of others in
a superficial way. They know that their opinions about behavior apply only in particular circum-
stances and that we really only know in our own case whether those circumstances obtain in any
given situation.

Academic writing is the orderly formation of opinions in prose. A process of making claims and
supporting them with arguments. That’s why academic discourse is the way it is. Like I always say,
it’s not for everyone. But it does serve a particular social function.

4 Confucius said…

Source

“First: get to the middle of the mind; then stick to your word” (Analects I.8). That’s Ezra Pound’s
translation, and he appears to be reading something into it that isn’t there. D.C. Lau renders it,
“Make it your guiding principle to do your best for others and to be trustworthy in what you say.”
Pound’s version seems to be influenced by his own translation of the Great Digest, which is about
how “the intelligence increases through the process of looking straight into one’s own heart and
acting on the results” (1), and there is wisdom in it. The idea of being “trustworthy in what you
say” is more complicated than keeping your word. It is about saying what you mean as well.

We can transfer this insight to writing. Consider your daily writing routine not so much as the
process by which you speak words that you’ll have to keep (that happens only when you periodically
publish), but the process by which you look into your own heart, or, less dramatically, the process
by which you get to the center of the mind. Notice, by the way, that he does not say the center of
your mind. I think that’s an intentional attempt at capturing the “ancient Chinese wisdom” of “the
illusion of self”. Don’t feel as though you are “finding yourself”. Just get to the heart of the matter.

Perhaps this is what Hemingway was talking about when he suggested beginning with “one true
sentence”.

The middle of the mind is where you can make a series of stable claims in simple, unambiguous,
declarative sentences. The claims can be supported with evidence and argument, or can be elabo-
rated with detailed descriptions (that is, they can be supported with a paragraph). When you speak
from this center (what Pound/Kung also calls “the unwobbling pivot”) your studies carry a certain
weight. “A gentleman with no weight,” Pound translates (I.8), “will not be revered, his style of

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study lacks vigour.” You will not be afraid to speak your mind here because it is not just your mind,
it is the mind, it is intelligence as such.

But this chapter of the Analects concludes with with a very important qualification. “Don’t hesitate
to correct errors.” Lau renders it, “When you make a mistake, do not be afraid of mending your
ways.” You will be sticking by your word (“Yes, that is what I said”) but you will also be open to
correction, either from your own studies or those of others.

5 Logiotherapy?

Source

My arm was itchy. I was starting to lose feeling in my leg. The devil is to be encoun-
tered.

You say amnesia is different from bad memory. Because it could dislodge the lie.

I think it helps if you’re writing a book. Here’s the rain. Here’s the rain is a good title.
(Kate Greenstreet, Case Sensitive, p. 106)

My physiotherapist told me something interesting recently. Ten years ago, I broke my arm and
was not very disciplined about retraining it. I’ve always thought that a number of key muscles had
atrophied or something, because over the years I’ve been leaving all the lifting to the other one. But
it turns out that my arm is not worryingly weak. Rather, the “map” of my arm in my brain has been
distorted. Accordingly, the exercises I’ve been given do not involve any weight, only concentration.
I have to move my arms in particular circles in order to redraw my mental map of ordinary motion.
It’s very interesting to think about.

I suspect that bad writing habits also distort the maps that we have in our brains. If you don’t sit
down every day and write some true, declarative sentences, you get out of shape (lose strength) but
might not suffer any intellectual damage. If, however, when you do write, you studiously avoid
writing simple, declarative sentences that can be true or false, that is, if you are always constructing
some kind of qualifying clause so that you don’t actually have to know what you’re saying, then you
may really need to retrain your ability to speak your mind.

There really are people who seem to be always trying to “get around” writing a simple declarative
sentence, to “work around” having to say something true. Some do it very intentionally (because
they don’t believe in Truth) and, in some cases, a distinctive and effective style does emerge from
it. Note that this is because they really want a map of the motion of their language that does not
pass through any veridical territory. But when I failed to retrain my arm it was not because I had
anything in principle against using it to lift stuff. It just hurt to do so for a while, and I was too lazy
to work back to a normal state of health. So my brain found a way around it. A new normalcy.

This week I’m going to be discussing some simple exercises that can help you retrain your style
and keep it in shape. These exercises map onto my standard proposal for an introduction, i.e., the
first three paragraphs of a paper. The idea here is to write three sentences (and subsequently three
paragraphs) that you know to be true. But these sentences are to comport themselves differently
towards your reader’s knowledge. Since all three sentences are for the introduction of the paper,
however, their truth is not going to very “heavy”. That is, these exercises are only training the
motion of your prose, not its strength. There is almost no load here.

Here are the three exercises, which I will say more about in the days to come.

1. Write a sentence everyone knows is true. That is, write a commonplace.

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 2. Write a sentence about the same thing that only you and your peers know is true. That is,
“theorize” the first sentence. How do people who have access to specialized knowledge and
technical jargon talk about this thing that everyone knows to be true?

3. Finally, write a sentence that only you know is true. Before you exercise your reflex for false
modesty, consider your data. Your peers may be very smart, but they do not have access to
what your data tells you is true. Until you publish, only you know this stuff.

This exercise can obviously be completed within a single 30-minute writing session. Or you can
work at only one of them for 30 minutes. You can use them as a ten-minute “warm up” exercise
before you start your “real” writing. Or, finally, on one of those days when you “don’t have time
to write”, just do one of them for five minutes.

6 What Everybody Knows

Source

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded

Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows (Leonard Cohen)

Just because everybody knows something does not mean it is not interesting. The first paragraph
in a paper can usefully be a collection of such interesting commonplaces and it is precisely their
commonplace nature that, perhaps, leads us to devalue them in our writing. You don’t have be a Zen
monk, however, to know the importance of precision in ordinary things. The exercise I want to talk
about this morning is intended to develop this precision, this ability to articulate the commonplace.
Remember that “articulate”, really just means to join together.

The instructions for this exercise are simple: Write a sentence that everyone knows is true. But
what does it really mean to “write a sentence”? And are there not way too many things to choose
from (doesn’t everybody know quite a lot)? Well, begin with the topic of a paper you’re working
on or, at least, some corner of your field that currently interests you. Now, what does everybody
know about your subject, specialist and non-specialist alike? Remember that it has to be something
that you—an expert on the subject—also believe. You’re not writing down what everybody thinks.
You’re writing down what they know.

Since you’re writing down an item of knowledge it will not do to simply jot down keywords. You’ll
need to assert something, i.e., you’ll need to write a sentence. Let sentences come into your head
and then write them down. Let them be very simple sentences. Spend about four minutes writing
down a whole list of sentences, then pick one of them to rewrite.

This rewriting is important. Put the sentence at the top of a blank page. Now, write the sentence
again exactly as you wrote it the first time. Is there anything in the way it is written that feels
“wrong” or imprecise? Don’t fix it by editing; instead, start a new line and write the sentence again.
If you can write it less wrongly that’s great, but if you can’t think of a way of doing it differently
just do it again and notice what happens when you get to the part that didn’t seem to work. Keep
doing it for four minutes. Then take a break. You can then do it again, do exercise number 2
(which I’ll explain tomorrow), or move on to other things. You can also decide to spend 15 minutes
elaborating the sentence in a paragraph.

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Remember not to strain at this. Pick a claim that you (and everybody else) knows very well and
use words that you know the full meaning of. You are training your sense of the sentence, your
sensitivity for meaning, the ordinary motion of your prose.

7 Specialist Knowledge

Source

…Ladies and gentlemen, tonight’s weather has been canceled. The Academy has con-
demned the Blue Tit. The poor are stealing the saltlicks. Grenades luxuriate in the
garden of decommissioned adjectives. It is the Sabbath. I must invite you

to lay down your knowledge claims, to lay them down slowly and with great sadness.
(Ben Lerner)

The second exercise begins with the results of the first. Write a sentence about the same topic as
the first exercise but one that only you and your peers know is true. That is, “theorize” the first
sentence. How do people who have access to specialized knowledge and technical jargon talk about
this thing that everyone knows to be true? Again, since you are working on your style, your manner
of writing true sentences, don’t pick a really difficult truth, a really sophisticated theoretical insight.
Pick something that everyone agrees about or a disagreement that is familiar to everyone in your
field. (Just because someone usually disagrees with you does not mean that what you’re saying is
not true.)

As in the first exercise, spend about four minutes jotting down candidate sentences. Then pick
one to rewrite for four minutes. Then take a two-minute break. As I was saying yesterday, these
movements are available for you train in whatever way you like. You can repeat it. Or you can
go on to the next exercise. Or you can start writing a paragraph elaborating and supporting the
sentence.

Remember that part of the exercise here involves imagining the knowledge of your reader. For
the first exercise you were imagining a “general reader”, i.e., one with the knowledge that pretty
much anyone will bring to the text. Obviously, we’re talking about adult, educated, intelligent, etc.,
readers, perhaps even someone who has been educated in a way that resembles yours. That is, what
“everyone knows” for a physicist will not be the same as for a sociologist. The important distinction
is between the general reader and the specialist reader. When you are doing this exercise you are
imagining a reader with training very similar to yours, someone who understands the same theories
and has largely the same expectations of reality that you have.

And remember also that you are not to strain while doing this. Don’t make the sentence carry any
significant load. This does not mean that you’re not going to make a big claim (most claims that
your peers know are true are very sweeping ones) it just means that you’re not going to have to
carry all of it (they will too). State it as a simple, unqualified (or very straightforwardly qualified)
sentence.

8 What You Know

Source

because as says Aristotle philosophy is not for young men their Katholou can not be
sufficiently derived from their hekasta their generalities cannot be born from a suffi-

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 cient phalanx of particulars lord of his work and master of utterance who turneth his
word in its season and shapes it (Ezra Pound)

Your knowledge as a scholar falls back on your knowledge of concrete particulars about which you
are the authority. There are things that your peers know today only because one of them (perhaps
you) first discovered them. In the social sciences, we are often talking about what you learn about
a particular domain of fact from your data. Before you make your results available to your peers,
only you know about these facts (the particular organization that you have studied, for example).
Only you know what your interview subjects said. Only you know what was going on while you
were observing them.

This kind of knowledge constitutes about half of a journal article, especially in the results section
and the methods section. After all, just as you know best what you saw (i.e., your results), you
know best what you did (i.e., your method). Before you tell the reader these things, the reader has
no chance of knowing. So you speak here with a particular kind of authority.

The exercise, then, is to spend four minutes writing some sentences that only you (and nobody else)
knows are true. Then pick one of these sentences and re-write it for four minutes. Then take a break.
Again, let me stress that once you’re comfortable with the basic motion of writing down facts about
which you are the authority, you can do the exercise however you like. You can repeat it. Or you
can go back to one of the other exercises. Or you can start writing a paragraph elaborating and
supporting the sentence (for the remaining twenty minutes of the writing session).

What you are giving yourself here is simply an opportunity to “go through the motions” of writing
factual prose without having to dig deep for the “strength” to support it. You pick something you
know well, something you can write about comfortably, and then you simply write a sentence you
know to be true. In this case, it’s even a sentence that no one is going to be in a position to critique
the content of (they haven’t seen what you’ve seen, done what you’ve done). As with the other
exercises, it’s like moving your arm without lifting anything. Just concentrate on the motion of
your prose.

9 Academic Reading

Source

I’m holding a lecture this morning about reading. What I’m going to try to do is to apply the advice
I give for writing to the act of reading. I’m going to argue that just as we should be writing on a
schedule, we should be reading on one too. Of course, there will be plenty of times when we read
for pleasure, and this will not be the focus of my concern. What I’m going to talk about is those
moments (every day) when we join the intended audience of an academic text.

Academic writing communicates the ideas of knowledgeable people to other knowledgeable people.
When you are reading academically, therefore, you are confronting a text with what you know (not
what you don’t know); and you are confronting your knowledge (not your ignorance) with a text. I
often cite Wayne Booth’s description of the Oxford seminars where the only questions that are put
to a text are “What does the author mean?” and “How does the author know?” These are certainly
useful guides. And they are useful because they identify the epistemic content of a text and get you
to notice the way the text is (hopefully) structured into paragraphs, which is to say, sequences of
claims and support for those claims. Each paragraph announces a meaning (a claim) and tells you
how the writer knows (support).

As always, the lecture will include a great deal of practical advice about how to structure your time.
My interest here is actually in defending the writing process from reading just as much as it is in
providing a stable basis for the writing. It is true that you need to read in order to become a good

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writer. But it is not true that you need to read before you write. Your writing is just your way of
keeping yourself articulate about what you know. In your reading, you confront that knowledge
with the articulateness of someone else.

10 Science and the Sentence

Source

Wittgenstein famously said that science consists of everything that can be said about the facts. He
called the things that can be said about the facts “propositions”, Sätze in German, which can also
mean simply sentences. His precursor, Bernard Bolzano approached logic, which he called a “theory
of science”, as the art of writing these sentences and composing scientific “treatises”. There is little
doubt that I work in this tradition, which has the somewhat wounded name, logical positivism.

Though I grant that science has an “existential” aspect, a practical, everyday “hustle and bustle”,
I have never thought that this defines its essence. And I do, contrary to what is still, I think, the
consensus view, believe that science has an essence. Science is, essentially, the attempt to uncover
the facts, to discover the truth about them, and to write those truths down in sentences. We might
also put it this way: it is the purpose of science to articulate the facts. And this is done in series of
true sentences, or at least sentences that are proposed to be true, i.e., propositions, Sätze.

When writing, it can be useful to remember that this what you are doing. You are trying to arrange
your sentences on the page in such a way that they make the “joints” (“articulation” comes from
Latin, artus, which means “joint”) between the facts, and within the facts, conspicuous. That’s what
sentences are for. Right now I am writing on my laptop. That’s a fact. But the fact has many parts
that are joined together in particular ways. (I am sitting on a chair, by the table, whereon the laptop
lies. The screen is open. The keys are black.) Any sentence I might write about those parts and how
they are related would articulate the fact that I am writing. And writing makes me more articulate
about those facts.

11 Process vs. Product

Source

At one of my writing seminars yesterday, I slowly became aware that there’s something I’m perhaps
leaving too implicit when I talk about writing every day, one paragraph, a half-hour at a time.
Participants often ask questions about how to apply this idea in accomplishing some particular
writing project—a paper they’ve got due or a dissertation chapter their supervisor wants to see. I
have to explain that what I mean by “writing process reengineering” is somewhat more longterm
process, and that they should not think that they can immediately use it to realize some concrete
goal over the next few weeks. In fact, what I’m suggesting is that you see your writing process as
something you can, and should, develop without a particular writing project in mind.

There are some (many?) researchers who write only when they have to. This means that they
are always writing some particular text, for some particular purpose, usually with some particular
deadline in view. They never write just to see what they think (even when they “free write”, it’s
as an initial stage of some project), or, even better, just to keep their prose in shape. They’re never
just writing, always writing something.

My view of the writing process is that it should simply be going on at all times alongside your
research process. Even when you don’t have a research paper or chapter to finish, you should
devote time to writing your ideas down, forming them in prose. This act of “prosing” your thoughts

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without the immediate pressure of publishing them will be good for both your prose and your
thinking. Now, since you’re writing academic prose you’ve still got to have a clear idea of who
your audience is (your peers) and you’re still writing claims and supporting them, one paragraph
at a time. The task remains the same. It’s just the feeling you have while doing it that’s somewhat
different.

Then, when you need to “write something”, i.e., produce a text for some given occasion, and this
will of course happen quite often, you can just take this smoothly running process and hitch your
project to it. Your writing process should just be that part of your life that is continuously delivering
reliable prose about the things you know. You can then use that prose in the usual way.

12 The 40-Hour Challenge

Source

Since an article consists of about forty 40 paragraphs and you should be able to write a paragraph
about something you know in about 30 minutes, you should be able to draft a journal article in
around 20 hours. This insight is the basis of the 40-Hour Challenge. Here’s what you do.

First, plan a 40-paragraph article. You don’t have to use my standard outline (3-paragraph intro-
duction, 5-paragraph background, 5-paragraph theory, 5-paragraph method, 3 x 5-paragraph of
analysis, 5-paragraph implications, 2-paragraph conclusion) but it should be something with a sim-
ilar kind of a down-to-the-paragraph structure. The reason for this, of course, is that you will need
to know exactly which paragraph you are going to be writing in which half hour.

Next, find 40 hours of writing time in your calendar. As much as possible, spend at least 30 minutes
every working day on this challenge. Never spend more than three hours. Notice that this means
you will at most devote 16-weeks (80 working days) and at least two and a half weeks. I would
recommend taking the challenge over four to eight weeks, mostly working 1-2 hours a day.

Now, distribute the work of writing the paragraphs you have outlined across the first twenty of the
forty hours you’ve given yourself. Give yourself 30 minutes (including a few minutes of revision
and a short break between paragraphs) for each. Plan to spend the 21st hour reading what you have
produced and deciding which paragraphs need another 30 minutes. Choose the 20 most revision-
needy paragraphs and work on them over the next 10 hours.

The next step is to make an after-the-fact outline of what you have accomplished. Spend about
1 minute per paragraph deciding which sentence expresses its main point (we call this the “key
sentence”). Do this in two 30-minute sessions, 20 paragraphs at a time. Do it quickly and effectively.

You can now spend five minutes on each sentence (four minutes, followed by a break) making it as
sharp and clear as you can. You have a few hours left. First, make sure that the sequence of key
sentences makes sense on its own (without the body of each of paragraph). Your argument should
be clear from this survey of just your main points. Next, make a list of the most important defects
of the text at this point. Give yourself 30 minutes to work on each of them, starting at the top of
the list.

That’s it. You’re not finished, of course. But you’ve done forty hours of serious work on a paper.
Knowing you can do that, make a plan for another 20 or 40 hours. That’s how you’ll get your ideas
written down in the long run.

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13 Belief and Orthodoxy, Part 1

Source

An elementary school principal I respect a great deal said something to me once that I’ve never
forgotten. “Formal education will never produce a genius, but with a little diligence we may destroy
some.” I think it is an important insight for educators to keep in mind. It should not be the aim of
our schools, especially our universities, to “produce” minds of a particular kind. Rather, we should
provide a context in which minds can develop in their own way, ever mindful of the risk, namely,
that by being too zealous in the pursuit of particular educational goals (by being too “diligent”), we
provide a context in which they cannot develop.

I don’t have very much to do with teaching these days. But as the promoter of a system for the
production of academic results in writing, I too should keep the risks in mind. A writing discipline,
after all, will never produce a work of genius, but it just may destroy one.

So I’ve been reflecting a little on a couple of basic principles that must be observed as you write
your papers, one paragraph at a time, 30 minutes at a time. The first is never to let this become
“mere busyness” or toil. To develop the basis of a claim you know to be true in the space of a
paragraph, you don’t need more than 30 minutes. This will often leave you with time left over, and
this time can be used to read it out loud, and to think about what you are doing. You can do it
slowly enough to keep this from being an exercise in writing words for the sake of writing words.

Second, believe the claims you are making. That is, confine yourself to making claims you believe. I
always emphasize this when I define knowledge as “justified, true belief”. In order to know, say the
philosophers, you must hold a belief, and that belief must be true, and you must have a good reason
to believe it is true. It’s that first condition that sometimes gets lost in this “publish or perish” world.
We know what “one” says on a certain subject, even without being sure we believe it. I think if
there is one sure way to undermine your sense of your own genius it is to begin to say things you
know to be publishable without being sure they are true. Or even things you know to be “true” but
don’t understand well enough to believe.

In times when there are strong orthodoxies it can sometimes be difficult to know what to believe.
Or, rather, it is all too easy to know what to believe (what the “right belief” is). It is therefore
difficult to stick to statements of one’s own belief. I sometimes worry that our universities, which
are systems of formal education and formalized research environments, have become too orthodox.
I’m sure the orthodoxies are largely true and justified. I’m just not sure we’re giving each other,
and ourselves, the time we need to believe in them. Because that would demand giving us the time
also to doubt them. And the luxury of remaining silent.

To underscore the point: this post took me 25 minutes to write and consists of 529 words. A
paragraph of academic prose is usually less than half as long. There would have been plenty of
time to write about this subject more carefully.

14 Belief and Orthodoxy, Part 2

Source

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly
what you really felt, rather than what your were supposed to feel, and had been taught
to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were
which produced the emotion that you experienced. In writing for a newspaper you

13
 told what happened aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion
to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the
sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in
a year or in ten years or, with luck and if your stated it purely enough, always, was
beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (Ernest Hemingway, Death in
the Afternoon, 1932, p. 10)

One of the stories Hemingway may have been trying to write is “Soldier’s Home”. It is about a
soldier who returns late from the first world war and finds that the people in his town are no longer
very interested in hearing what happened there. “Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had
to lie, and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking
about it.” This reminds me of Anne-Wil Harzing’s disturbing study of the citation of expatriate
failure rates in the literature. She found that the figure was systematically inflated. The only figure
with any basis in fact is 8-11 percent, while the figure that is often is cited is 40% (sometimes even
70%). Moreover, very few researchers would cite the actual study that put a number on it. Most
would cite second-hand accounts. It is not difficult to understand why people who study expatriate
failure would want to cite a high figure (it makes their studies of, say, the cultural mechanisms of
expatriate failure all the more “relevant”). This also resonates with Hemingway’s story.

His lies were quite unimportant lies and consisted in attributing to himself things other
men had seen, done or heard of, and stating as facts certain apocryphal incidents fa-
miliar to all soldiers. Even his lies were not sensational at the pool room. His acquain-
tances, who had heard detailed accounts of German women found chained to machine
guns in the Argonne forest and who could not comprehend, or were barred by their
patriotism from interest in, any German machine gunners who were not chained, were
not thrilled by his stories.

By the end of the story, Krebs finds himself lying also about his love for his mother, his desire to
be useful member of society, and his faith in God. This underscores the damage that his lying had
already done to his character.

All of the times that had been able to make him feel cool and clear inside himself when
he thought of them; the times so long back when he had done the one thing, the only
thing for a man to do, easily and naturally, when he might have done something else,
now lost their cool, valuable quality and then were lost themselves.

Notice the connection between “the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally,
when he might have done something else” and “the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact
which made the emotion”. Here Hemingway is having one of his characters experience the same
difficulties about storytelling that he himself experienced at the time. The problem is that of writing
honestly.

Masterfully tongue-in-cheek, Andrew Gelman suggests that I should drive my point home with a
story about a group of soldiers following a map in mountainous terrain. Perhaps I could have told
the story of Krebs as though it was a true story, not a work of fiction, thereby performing the very
mistake that I’m trying to warn against. And Andrew is, of course, alluding to the way Karl Weick
exaggerated the “truth” of the story about those soldiers in the Alps. I like my solution: I tell the
story along with some remarks about the storyteller’s views on writing. This allows me to use the
moral of the story in my advice for writers. (Indeed, as I show in a paper you can download here,
it is possible to make a similar move with the Alps story. We can tell the story of how the story
circulated among the scientists in Szent-Gyorgyi’s circle, eventually ending up in a poem.) But
Hemingway does allow me to invoke the joy that a good map can bring:

[Krebs] sat there on the porch reading a book on the war. It was a history and he was
reading about all the engagements he had been in. It was the most interesting reading

14
 he had ever done. He wished there were more maps. He looked forward with a good
feeling to reading all the really good histories when they would come out with good
detail maps.

15 Three Principles

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Many scholars correctly identify writing as one of their main problems. Solving it, however, is
another matter. If you think that your writing is what is holding you back, here are three principles
that might help you gain control over your writing process. Understanding these principles will
not magically solve the problem, but it might guide you back on track so that your prose gets
progressively stronger.

1. Focus on submission, not publication

It is natural to think of our writing as being aimed at the publication of our results. But we don’t
have direct control over whether or not we get published. Making publication our focus, therefore,
is likely to lead to frustration, because there is no dependable connection between the effort we
expend and the results they bring us. But if we shift our focus to the submission of articles, we are
able to direct our efforts towards a goal that we have final control over. The process that leads to
submission is entirely in our hands as writers.

2. Think in paragraphs

It is also natural to think that our writing is about our “ideas”. But as Mallarmé said of poems,
journal articles are ultimately not made of ideas, they are made of words. Those words need to be
arranged into paragraphs. The problem with thinking about your writing in terms of your ideas is
that “writing an idea down” is a very vaguely defined task. Writing about six sentences that provide
support for a specific claim in under 200 words, by comparison, is a much more precise task. It can
be accomplished within 30 minutes and will make a specifiable contribution to your paper. Keep
in mind that your paper will consist of about 40 claims. By approaching the problem not as one
of putting your ideas down on paper but of writing paragraphs, you are able to see the paper as
arrangement of parts, each of which you can straightforwardly produce.

3. Appreciate your finitude

You don’t have all the time in the world. And you don’t have to say it all. By thinking of your writing
as a process that produces paragraphs to be submitted to journals, you can put it in a manageable
perspective. You can keep things in proportion. How many hours do you want to spend writing how
many paragraphs to submit before what date? How much time does that give you per paragraph?
Even if you don’t use my 30-minute paragraph approach, you will have to divide your time so that
each section (consisting of a certain number of paragraphs) gets a fair share of the total time. Then
you have to spend that time as planned.

To implement these principles, I recommend working in a mildly disciplined way over a period of
weeks. To get a good sense of what you are getting into, start by planning 9 hours worth of work.
Decide exactly what paragraphs you are going to write in those hours, and then write them. You
now have a good sense of what you are capable of. This lets you make a plan for, say, 8 weeks of
concerted effort. Ultimately, you’ll want a writing process that dependably produces paragraphs
over something like two 16-week periods per year, devoting a maximum of 480 hours.

15
16 Anxiety

Source

Next week, I’m going to be blogging about the phenomenology of writing—what it is like to write.
Maybe I should say “the psychology of writing”, but I have issues with the whole discipline of
psychology, the very idea of a science of the mind. It is true that, like Hemingway and Mailer (and
many others), my approach assigns an important role to “the unconscious”. But this should not be
taken as a invitation to psychologize. This morning, I’ll take a first stab at explaining what I mean.

Back in the early twentieth century, inspired by their reading of Søren Kierkegaard, the existential-
ists drew attention to the fundamental place of “anxiety” (Angst) in our experience of the world.
Heidegger describes it as a “basic state of mind” that “provides the phenomenal basis for explicitly
grasping … the primordial totality of Being” that our individual existence is rooted in (H. 182).
Anxiety is not seen as a pathology but as a basic condition. It is not something to be cured or
avoided, but something to be faced, as Heidegger would say, “resolutely”. Indeed, “the world as
such is that in the face of which one has anxiety” (H. 186).

Now, you don’t of course have to be an existentialist in order to write well. But I think it is important
to understand that when we face “the page” (for most people, this means the computer screen) we
are are facing “a world”, and we therefore experience our anxiety in a fundamental way. Heidegger
ties anxiety to Being-in-the-world and, through this, to “the they”, Being-with-others. Anxiety
worries that we are “nothing and nowhere”, that there is no “place” or “there” for us. It is a
place that is largely determined by other people. We live, “proximally and for the most part”, in a
shared world.

That is precisely why a page of academic prose can inspire anxiety in the more “psychological”
sense: an uneasy feeling, dread or, as Heidegger’s translators suggest, “malaise” (which is a very
common feeling writers face when they face the “world” implicit on their screen). Next week, then,
I will get at the phenomenon of academic writing by talking about the anxiety that a blank page can
(and indeed should) inspire and the resoluteness that an outline (a way of structuring that blank
space) can bring about. This will not make the anxiety go away, but it will provide a “there” for
the writing. A place in the world for our ideas.

17 The Page

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“Intention draws a bold, black line across an otherwise white field.” Ben Lerner

When we sit down to write we face, if not a literally blank page, then at least the blank spaces on
the page, the part of the text that has yet to be written. If we are disciplined, we knew already the
night before what we were going to be writing about. We even knew what we were going to say.
And yet somehow an open space, a white field, lies before us.

The anxiety that we face here comes, primarily, from two sources. First, we are aware that our
writing will stand in some relation to the world, second, that it will be directed at a reader. The
reader will determine whether or not what we say makes sense; the world will determine whether
or not it is true. If the problem were to fill a completely open space, a completely white field, a
totally blank page, with words that mean something and are true, then we would not know where
to begin. Fortunately, the page is structured for us in advance. Not only does it occupy a position
between the world and the reader: the world and the reader themselves are structured.

16
Across the blank page, then, we can draw a line. We can isolate the paragraph we are working on and
ask ourselves whether it belongs to the background section, the theory section, the methods section,
or the analysis section. Will we tell the reader what we knew in advance, what we expected to find,
how we went about our study, or what we learned there? This directs our efforts at a particular
area of the reader’s mind (a particular nexus of the reader’s knowledge and the reader’s ignorance)
and simplifies the problem. It gives our words particular goals to accomplish. And once we have
isolated the relevant paragraph, once we have defined the particular problem of our writing at the
moment, we can remind ourselves that solving it means writing about six sentences, one of which
will make our claim and the rest of which will support it.

The page then is not blank after all. It is a structured task. It occupies a place in the world and it
is directed at others, but it is not just any random place, and it does not address just any random
reader. The page brings together a “there” and a “them”, and this may occasion a bit of anxiety.
Writing is just the act of facing that anxiety resolutely.

18 The They

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“Watt had watched people smile and thought he understood how it was done.” Samuel Beckett

There is the worry about how your writing relates to the world, and there is the worry about how
it relates to others. On Monday, I distinguished these two worries in terms of the “truth” and
“meaning” of your words. The world determines whether or not what you are saying is true; the
others (your readers) determine whether or not they make any sense. In both cases, there is no
particular threat. After all, you think you’re right and you know what you mean. It is the entirely
unspecific possibility of being undermined during some ill-defined confrontation (with “the facts”
or with the reader) that is at work here, which is what makes us anxious. We might call it the
possibility of critique and it is very much a part of the “there” of your text.

What other people might think of our writing is very much a part of the experience of writing.
Writing is an intrinsically social activity, even though, at the time that it happens, it is also a
very individual one. Academic writing, in particular, expresses the truth that is a conversation (as
opposed to what Virginia Woolf called “the loneliness that is the truth about things”). In writing,
then, we must fundamentally care what other people think.

This can be taken too far. As Heidegger tells us, our existence is largely determined by the way we
have “fallen” into the world of everyday concerns. One aspect of this fallenness is our recourse to
“idle talk” (Gerede) in which we say things, not because we know them to be true (i.e., because we
have some evidence for saying so) but because it is what “one” says on these matters, what is “in
the talk”, as Heidegger puts it. This “one”, das Man, is often translated as “the they”. If we did not
draw on this mode of speaking, and this goes also for our writing, we would appear very strange
to our readers. We must say things sometimes that only tell the reader that we, too, are ordinary,
well-educated, contemporary people. That we don’t see the reader as some abstract “them” but as
a concrete “we” that we’re also part of.

(To see a classic example of writing that does not do this, let me recommend Beckett’s How It Is.)

But we must not be so worried about this that we tell them only what they want—what “the they”
wants—to hear. Nor must we write in such a way that they are only able to be impressed with our
intelligence. We must write in a resolute attempt to engage with their opinion. And this means
being willing to inspire criticism. We might say that in order to avoid falling completely into the
everyday, we must be willing to risk saying things that fly in the face of common sense.

17
19 The Joint

Source

“The time is out of joint.” > Hamlet

“Joint” may be the hippest word in the English language. Not only does it play a key role in one
of the most famous sentences of all time, it can be used to mean both a marijuana cigarette and
the male sexual organ. It can also be used to refer to a night club and to a prison. Or it can refer
to a work of popular culture like a song or a film (“a Spike Lee joint,” for example). If you’re hip
enough, I imagine, it can be used to refer to any work of art.

And the word “art” actually stems from the Latin for “joint”. A work of art puts things together, we
might say. (Just as a venue—“the joint down the street”—brings people together for an evening.)
Hamlet was living in a world that was coming apart because of the lies told by the current king
about the death of the previous king. To expose the lie he put on a play. That was his joint. If
you’re hip enough, you can call your journal article a “joint”. “My next joint is going to be about
cultural change processes in high-technology companies,” for example.

To be articulate is not just to speak clearly. It is to be able to join words together in meaningful
ways. And meaning is use. A good joint doesn’t just keep things together, it gives them a particular
range of motion, it limits their usefulness but also makes it more precise. That’s what happens
when you join words together in an article—notice that root again: art-icle, i.e., “It’s the joint.”*
You limit their range of meaning but also focus their effect. A piece of writing is internally jointed
(especially between the paragraphs) and also joined to the outside world. There are specific points
of connection between your text and the work of others, some explicit (in your references) some
implicit (in your choice of words).

Research is a conversation. You join a conversation.

*By linking to the Beastie Boys’ “Shake Your Rump”, I’m revealing my ignorance of music history.
The line was in fact sampled from “That’s the Joint” by Funky 4 +1.

20 The Body

Source

“Is a bit of white paper with black lines on it like a human body?” > Ludwig Wittgen-
stein

Scholarly writing articulates what you know. I have long promoted a definition of knowledge at
three levels: (1) knowledge is justified, true belief, (2) knowledge is the ability to hold your own
in conversation, (3) knowledge is the ability to compose a coherent prose paragraph in 30 minutes.
Knowing is a mental state, a social relationship, and a practical competence. It is both a state of the
mind and a state of the body. If you know about something, you don’t just see it with a particular
set of eyes, you are able to do something with your hands.

Knowledge is an ability to move your body in particular ways. And it is the ability to mark up a
page in particular ways. Meaningful ways. If you know something you are able to make a piece of
paper behave like a human body. You mark up the page and it comes to look human; other human
bodies can understand what it is doing. There is a correspondence between what you are able to
make happen on the page and what you are able to make your body do. Whenever we are reading,

18
we are answering Wittgenstein’s question: how is this piece of paper with black lines on it like a
human body? In what sense?

Suppose you know how to bake bread. Writing well about it means articulating what your body
can do in the kitchen. It will give the reader a way in to acquiring that skill himmerherself. In
the case of academic writing, however, it is hard to imagine “what your body can do” that might
correspond to a journal article you want to write. That’s the thing about academic writing. It’s the
sense in which academic knowledge is more “abstract”. But you must keep in mind that when you
are writing you are always doing something with your body. Your knowledge is something your
body can do, even if the only place it seems to do it, when it is not writing, is “in the head”.

“Writing well is at one and the same time good thinking, good feeling, and good expression,” said
Buffon (and is quoted by Connolly before his remark about coordinating “what is not there”, which
I quoted earlier this week). It is important not to think there is some direct relationship between
your words the facts in the world and the words of others, that, in a sense, the discourse does the
writing and the reading. That will only make you anxious. What happens is that one body writes
and other bodies read. These bodies are in the world, anxiously and resolutely in the world. Make
sure that your words are coming from your body. Make sure that your writing articulates it.

Postscript: Last week, I had an epiphany, which I undertook to express by sketching a “phenomenol-
ogy of writing”, a description of “what it is like” to write. This is the last post in that series. The
reference to Buffon, I now note, is also reference back to a post on my “philosophy of writing”, from
almost exactly a year ago. And the philosophy remains more or less the same.

21 Musculature

Source

The department I last worked at gave me Haruki Murakami’s Wind-up Bird Chronicle as a going away
present when I left. I read it over the Easter break and enjoyed it so much that I’ve moved straight
on to his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which I’ve been meaning to read for
a while. After all, it’s a got a chapter called “Most of What I Know About Writing Fiction I Learned
by Running Every Day”, and I’ve long been arguing that becoming a better writer is like becoming
a better runner. More specifically, most of what I know about blogging I learned by jogging every
other day.

Murakami has an uncanny ability to write about familiar things in ways that make you see them
again for the first time. It may not work out of context, but I was struck by this passage in particular:

When I first started running I couldn’t run long distances. I could only run for about
twenty minutes, or thirty. That much left me panting, my heart pounding, my legs
shaky. It was to be expected, though, since I hadn’t really exercised for a long time.
At first, I was also a little embarrassed to have people in the neighborhood see me
running—the same feeling I had upon first seeing the title novelist put in parentheses
after my name. But as I continued to run, my body started to accept the fact that it
was running, and I could gradually increase the distance. I was starting to acquire a
runner’s form, my breathing became more regular, and my pulse settled down. The
main thing was not the speed or distance so much as running every day. (39)

Replace “novelist” with “scholar” and readers of this blog should be on the same page. It is inter-
esting how “embarrassing” it can in a “neighborhood” of busy academics to begin to insist that you

19
really are a scholar and that your writing actually gets done by sitting down and working at it every
day. Especially if, at the beginning, the work leaves you panting and shaky.

But if you stick with it, working, say, thirty minutes a day in the beginning until you get into shape,
you’ll find that your discipline is quite normal. There are many other people in the neighborhood
who write on a daily basis too, and nobody really noticed those early attempts—certainly, no one
remembers it now that you’re in shape. Murakami notes how dramatically his body has changed
since he ran his first marathon.

When you compare me in these photos to the way I am now, they make me look like
a completely different person. After years of running, my musculature has changed
completely. But even then I could feel physical changes happening every day, which
made me really happy. I felt like even though I was past thirty, there were still more
possibilities left for me and my body. The more I ran, the more my physical potential
was revealed. (41)

I noticed a similar effect especially during the period when I was swimming every day: “…physical
changes happening every day, which made me really happy.” Like I say, the same goes for someone
who is writing prose every day. Here you can just replace “running” with “writing”, “body” with
“mind”, and “physical” with “mental”.

22 Knowing How and Knowing That

Source

Jason Stanley has a thought-provoking, if somewhat puzzling, piece up on the New York Times
blog. It’s being discussed over at OrgTheory.net. I’m not at all sure that the distinction between
practical and theoretical knowledge is a mere “fiction” that should just be abandoned. But I’m
also not sure that Stanley is right about how firmly that distinction is held by ordinary people (i.e.,
non-philosophers). It seems to me to be in itself a practical distinction, which applies to everything
that everyone knows. We are able to distinguish between knowing that something is the case and
knowing how it is done.

Sociologists, for example, may know that social movements mobilize a variety of resources in bring-
ing about social change. They do not, however, know how to bring about social change. They study
people (the leaders and members of social movements) who have know-how in this area, and whose
“knowledge” is demonstrated in the effects of their efforts.

But there is something the sociologist does know how to do. The sociologist knows how to write
about social change. One of the main dogmas that underlies my work on this blog is that if you know
something as a scholar then you also know how to compose prose paragraphs about it. If, as an
academic, you know that something is true, then you also know how to say it in complete sentences
that are grouped into paragraphs, which are then in turn grouped into articles or books. (This is
very much the distinction between “book learning” and “hands on” knowledge that a commenter has
recently drawn attention to. And which also figures in the opening moves of Stanley’s argument.)

While I believe the issue is purely terminological (and does not affect the folk distinction between
“academic knowledge” and “know how”, which is perfectly sensible) I would actually not use the
word “knowledge” to describe “know how”. I think there is a subtle kind of snobbery involved
in valorizing what a pianist or plumber can do with the honorific “knowledge”—and, even more
strikingly, by insisting that this knowledge is knowledge “of truths”. It can be seen in the way
Stanley thinks that someone who commits to repairing cars for a living at an early age might “rob
not only her[self] of opportunities but also society of a potentially important contributor to literary
analysis or mathematics”. “Important”, presumably, when compared to fixing cars.

20
In my view, the competent pianist or plumber demonstrates practical mastery, not “practical knowl-
edge”. All knowledge is essentially “theoretical” (as are all truths). People who are said to “know”
how to do things actually wield power. Perhaps it is the scholar’s fear of powerful people that gets
him to attribute knowledge and a receptivity to truth to people who really posses power and a
capacity for justice. Indeed, the ability to write, as Orwell said, is also more a kind of power than
a kind of knowledge, and this academic “power” is the occasion for a bit anxiety among scholars.
It is the “power of facing unpleasant facts.”

23 Why Is It Hard to Write?

Source

It is not my intention to make writing look easy or to belittle the difficulties that people have in
doing it. The techniques I suggest are not ways of denying the difficulties of writing but ways of
facing them. My point is that, like any other difficult activity, mastery will come from practice.
If I told you to train every day in preparation for a marathon, or practice every day in order to
learn how to play the piano, I would not be pretending that it’s “easy”. On the contrary, I would
be insisting that it’s difficult. I’m not saying that you just have to write every day, then; I’m saying
that you really must do so.

One author recently told me that working according to my advice gives her time to reread every
paragraph as she goes. (She writes it in about 15 minutes, which leaves about 10 to improve it
before moving on to the next one.) But she doesn’t like the editing part. She feels “discomfort”
when reading her words. My response is that this is like feeling a bit of pain in your legs when
running or getting out of breath. It’s to be expected at the beginning, and getting into shape is all
about getting through that discomfort. They key here—the “trick”, if you will—is to remember that
the discomfort will end. After ten minutes, you move on to the next paragraph. But the discomfort
is just part of the job.

There are many sources of discomfort like that when writing. That’s because it fundamentally isn’t
easy to write. The pianist must learn to execute a series of intricate movements with her fingers.
The runner must build up strength in the right combination of muscles (which are different for
a sprinter and a marathon runner.) Writing does not depend as much on physical strength and
precision (typing is not really the problem here) but it does require both stamina and acumen. You
sit down in front of the machine and choose words, one after the other, to represent your thoughts.

The writer and the pianist feels discomfort because she runs into her limits, she experiences her
limitations. On the day of the concert, or the day of the marathon, she will take a step back from
those limits. She will begin at a slightly slower tempo or pace. She will play the piece or run
the course in a relatively “easy” way. All the practice, all the training, has made her aware of the
difficulty, and she is now able to “perform” in an optimal way. If done right, she will not experience
her limits, she will experience her abilities. She will not just barely succeed; she will simply perform
at her best.

Too many writers forget this distinction between training (practicing) and performing. As result,
they experience only the difficulty of writing and not the joy, as a paper is nearing completion,
of rewriting it well within the limits of their abilities. They hand in the paper when the deadline
arrives like a runner stumbling across the finish line. It doesn’t have to be that way. But to say that
is not to say that it isn’t hard to write. We have to respect the efforts of the pianist and the runner,
even if what they do “in the event” (and in a very particular sense) is not actually hard for them.
What was hard was getting to that point.

21
24 Russell Davies’ Big Idea

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One of my secret influences for work on this blog is Russell Davies, head of planning at R/GA. I don’t
remember how I stumbled on him, but I think it was while searching for models for YouTube videos
about PowerPoint presentations. There is something about his style that appeals to me. It reminds
me of Frank O’Hara. See, for example, his “Having a Coke With You” and compare Russell’s easy
manner in this interview.

He says that marketing is dominated by the “myth” of the “big idea” because the big organizations
who advertise are at the same time trying deal with their own internal communicative complexity.
“So what you really want,” he notes, “is one big simple thing that you know you’re going to say for
five years.” Sound familiar, scholars? Just as familiar should be his alternative suggestions. Stop
worrying so much about what you are going to say and start doing things. Academics, and especially
academic departments, should not worry so much about their “research strategy”, and instead just
execute one thing at a time. They should especially start writing—every day. Not big things, like
articles and books, but little things, like paragraphs.

In 1955, Frank O’Hara and Larry Rivers published a famous little text called “How to Proceed in the
Arts”. It provides great advice such as, “Do you hear them say painting is action? We say painting
is the timid appraisal of yourself by lions.” Nice, no? Half a century later, Russell Davies wrote a
blog post called “The Tyranny of the Big Idea”. His five-point procedure begins:

Start doing stuff. Start executing things which seem right. Do it quickly and do it often.
Don’t cling onto anything, good or bad. Don’t repeat much. Take what was good and
do it differently.

And ends with: “And something else and something else.”

I don’t know enough about either man to say for sure that Russell Davies is the Frank O’Hara of
advertising. But I know I’d like to have a coke with him.

25 Saying and Doing

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“And something else and something else.”

Russell Davies

Scholars want to communicate their ideas. They want to say something to their community of peers.
But too often this desire to say something, and to say something important, gets in the way of the
actual writing. And the writing is important because it is in writing that a scholar’s ideas has the
greatest influence. It is the writing we assess the “impact” of. The worry about what they will
say, however, gets in the way of the the problem of how they will say it. Russell Davies’ advice to
marketers is apt here: don’t keep trying to come up with something to say to the customer. Come
up with things you can do. “Start doing things.”

In scholarship, it isn’t really a choice between saying and doing, of course. The point is to approach
saying as doing. What you have to “do” is to “say” something. And to say something you have to
do something. That something is writing. Or perhaps its a matter of distinguishing between saying
and writing. Writing is a way of communicating something without really saying it. Writing is
more like doing something than saying something. The trick is to turn what you want to say into
something you can do. Something you can do with your hands.

22
A journal article is made by doing a bunch of small things, not by saying one big thing. The small
things add up, of course, but they don’t have to become huge to be meaningful. In fact, if we
know anything about academic discourse it is that the fate of an “idea”, i.e., that which determines
whether an idea is “big”, is really out of our hands as authors. All we can do is assemble those
all-important paragraphs. We can write between one and six of them every day. And we can put
them together in interesting arrangements. Then we publish them and see what other people make
of them.

Writing is something you do. But remember: if I tell you writing is action you must reply that, no,
“it is the timid appraisal of yourself by lions”.

26 Strategy and Planning

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“Those who approach strategy as planning almost always filter any opportunities
through current capabilities. Instead of determining what the organization must
become to deliver in new and big ways, they never really think big.” (Ann Latham)

“These days, a brand’s first job is to be interesting. And being interesting for most
brands, most of the time means new ideas, new things to say, new ways to say it. …
Big ideas militate against that. Big ideas tend to stop you having new ideas.” (Russell
Davies)

Latham and Davies have been doing this much longer than I have, and they’re better at it. But I’m
starting to develop my approach to academic writing into a new perspective on research strategy at
the institutional level, so I have to try to think like a business visionary. Now, obviously the point
of putting these two quotes side by side is to indicate a tension. There’s a lot of advice out there and
it sometimes pulls in opposite directions. In this post, I want to pull in the direction of planning,
i.e., Russell Davies’ approach.

When thinking about research strategy, and even something as relatively pedestrian as a publica-
tion strategy, universities and departments sometimes make real efforts to “think big”. Implicitly
following Latham’s advice, they try to “determine what the organization must become” rather than
“filter [their] opportunities through current capabilities”. This usually means developing research
“platforms”, and establishing special research units, around themes that have some currency in ei-
ther the business world or policy circles. It explains the proliferation of research programs in, say,
“sustainability”. Many of the researches involved in these “strategic initiatives” have turned their
attention on this theme, sometimes away from other things they would rather have been doing, and
sometimes quite seriously twisted their attention in the process. They are pursuing someone’s else’s
ideas, not their own.

And that’s what Davies gets right, to my mind. If you impose a “big idea” on your organization, it
will prevent you, i.e., your members, from having new ideas. That’s because even if the big idea is
“new” to the organization, and new to the people who will implement it, it is old in the sense that
it existed before your organization and its members came up with it. The ideas that shape large
strategic initiatives are given in advance. A truly productive (and joyful) research environment will
generate truly new ideas, which means ideas that the researchers themselves did not know they
were going to have. Such an environment will have a better chance of being, precisely, interesting.

If you want a thriving research environment you have to stop worrying about “who you are” and
“what you must become”. That is, you have to stop thinking like a strategist and start thinking like
a planner. There is some truth is Latham’s perspective as a perspective on strategy. Her mistake,
I think, is to promote strategizing as something that should be happening almost all the time in

23
the organization. Instead, you need to do exactly what Latham argues against: you must filter your
opportunities through your capabilities. You have to get your people to do all the small things they
are already capable of and, importantly, ready and willing to do. You have keep your researchers
interested if you want interesting results.

This of course also goes for the individual writer. Don’t try to reinvent yourself when trying to get
published, don’t chase after other people’s priorities (as expressed in calls for special issues and
conference tracks). Try to get your ideas published. You must constantly be doing things, making
things, in order to exercise your capabilities. And what you should be making, of course, is a series
of coherent paragraphs that support claims you believe to be true. Your research department should
provide you with a good environment to do exactly that. In such an environment, new ideas will
follow naturally from old ones.

27 Strategic Goals

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I do believe that strategy and planning are closely related. Ann Latham says that “those who
approach strategy as planning are severely handicapped by their current situation,” but I have
more often found that those who detach strategy from planning are just as handicapped by their
unrealistic strategy. In the case of research strategy and, more specifically, publication strategy I
think it is very important to do what Latham advises against, namely, to “filter … opportunities
through current capabilities.” How can research institutions do that in practice?

My advice is to look back over the last five years of publications in the research group, department,
or school in question. From all the work that has been produced select a set of articles that have been
published in well-established, international, peer-reviewed journals—the sort of articles that you’re
unhesitatingly proud of. What you’re interested in here is not some absolute figure of research
productivity or quality, but a relative indicator you track over time.

It will, of course, be a finite list. If you take all the articles you’ve published in prestigious journals
over the last five years, you’ll have a manageable list, and since you’re only discussing work that’s
actually been published, you don’t need to have abstract conversations about the quality of every
journal in your field. Once the list of articles you want “count” has been made for the last five years
in total, you organize them by year. You now simply count how many articles you’ve published in
the key, “indicator” journals in each year. This will give you a sense of your current situation and
some sense of your future prospects.

Now, add some journals to the list that seem within your reach over the next five years but that you
have not yet published in. (Keep in mind that I’m referring to “you” as a collective—a research group
or department—but you can obviously do a similar exercise in your own, individual case.) These
are journals that, if you do manage to publish in them, you’ll count too. You are also measuring you
past performance by whether or not you published in them in a particular year; you just happen to
have published zero articles in them so far.

The list of journals is now a bit bigger, but still finite. Now your publication strategy has some
goals, namely, that list of journals that you’ve either successfully published in in the past, or feel it
is possible to publish in in the future. You must now make a plan for how to reach these goals. And
the plan is quite simple: you write in order to submit to these journals. But you should of course
plan to submit more articles to these journals than you hope to publish. A rough way to estimate
how many more is to look at their rejection rate. If you school wants to publish in a journal with an
80% rejection rate, for example, it should plan to submit five articles for every one article it hopes
to publish there.

24
Notice what this means. At the end of the year, you can of course ask yourself whether or not you
met your publication goals for that year. But you can also ask yourself whether or not you met
your submission goals. Publications are nice to show off, but they are difficult to plan. Submissions,
however, are entirely within your ability to control. My advice to research directors, department
heads, and deans, therefore, is have a strategy for where to submit and how often to do so, and
then track success on that indicator, not the elusive prize of actual publication. Publications will
come in a natural way from the disciplined pursuit of submissions.

28 Half-baked?

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In their comments to yesterday’s post, Thomas Presskorn and Andrew Gelman have raised the
worry that by encouraging people to submit their work regularly to journals I’m going to increase
the amount of “half-baked” work that their editors and reviewers have to deal with. Thomas’s
version of this worry (as expressed at this blog) includes the idea that authors might try to use
review reports in the development of the article. That is, the author knows that the article is not
finished, but submits it for review in order to gather input about how to proceed.

I should start by saying that I have not encouraged people to submit their work before it is finished.
I have encouraged them to finish their work more regularly in order to be able to submit it. So if
my advice is followed in the right spirit it should only increase the amount of finished work that is
submitted to journals. That is, it will give journals more material to choose from, but not simply
more material that has to be filtered out.

That said, I don’t think journals should complain about people submitting work to them. And I
don’t think they do; I don’t hear this complaint from journal editors, but from other scholars and,
sometimes, reviewers. Reviewers, however, should complain about the desk-rejection mechanism
of the journal if they are asked to review a paper that is clearly half-baked. They should not
complain about the author’s judgment, but the editor’s. The whole point of the review process is
that we can’t rely on the author’s judgment.

There are some simple things you can look for in the first 600 and last 400 words of a paper in order
to see whether a paper should be sent back to the author on purely formal grounds (I’ll write a post
about them tomorrow). A good set of guidelines for authors about the structure of the manuscript
can also make it easy to see whether a paper is unfinished. However it chooses to do it, it is very
much the responsibility of journal to figure something out. Journals want high rejection rates for
good and bad reasons. Some want you to submit your work to give them an opportunity to publish
it, some to have an opportunity to reject it. But if they want those high rejection rates then they
have find an efficient way of processing submissions. Putting moral restraint on authors is not the
right way to do this. (The problem of self-plagiarism, which Andrew raises, like the problem of
plagiarism generally, is an ethical issue, of course. But not one that arises out of concern for the
work load of editors and reviewers.)

In any case, what’s driving increased submissions is the increased pressure to publish. My advice,
to focus your own efforts (and the planning of your department) on submitting work, rather than
obsessing about publishing it, is just a way of making something explicit that will happen implicitly
anyway. In order to publish more you have to submit more. And when you submit more you will
get rejected more. And that means you’ll give journals a bit more work to do. But it really is their
job.

25
29 Getting to Review

Source

The editor’s “desk” is the entry point to the review process. You finish your article and send it off
to the journal and that’s where it lands. If the editor chooses to send it back to you immediately,
without sending it out to the reviewers, you have been “desk rejected”. How does the editor make
this decision?

There’s an abstract and concrete answer to that question. In the abstract sense, the editor has to
assess the degree of fit between your paper and the aims and scope of the journal. Is your paper
about the right things? Does your research use a methodology that its readers respect? Does your
research contribute to one of the bodies of literature that also shapes the thinking of the readers? Is
it well-written enough? Does it seem finished? Can the editor actually think of suitable reviewers
for the paper?

But there is also a more concrete way to answer the question of how the editor makes the desk
decision. What does the editor do? How does the editor read you paper? I don’t really know how
your editor does it, but here’s one way to go about it. First, the editor reads the title and the abstract
of the paper. The question here is whether the paper that is being described is about the sorts of
things that the journal is interested in and whether it reaches an interesting conclusion about those
things. If the editor can’t answer this question, the paper is likely to be desk-rejected, so you should
make sure, when writing the abstract, that you state clearly and efficiently what you are talking
about, and what you are saying about it. If if the editor is puzzled or unmoved by the abstract, he
or she may still look at the whole paper, but properly speaking, if the abstract describes a paper
that is not obviously suitable for the journal, the paper could legitimately be returned to the author
with a remark to that effect alone.

Next, the editor reads the introduction. This is a very important section in this part of the process.
After reading the introduction, which should not be very long (about 600 words, on my approach),
the editor should know exactly what you are going to show, how you are going to show it, why
you think it is important, and which scholars ought to think so too. Notice that if the editor does
not know the answer to these questions, he or she can’t send it anywhere in particular for review.
After reading the introduction it has to be clear who the intended reader of the paper is. The editor
can then find someone to represent that reader in the decision-making process for publication.

Next, your editor will now probably read the conclusion in order make sure that the paper stays on
topic or “feels connected”, as Andrew Shields put it in the comment to yesterday’s post. The editor
is now making a preliminary assessment of the quality of the paper, its argument and the writing.
This will probably only involve skimming the text itself (though some editors pride themselves on
reading everything that lands on their desk). It is usually easy to spot a paper that simply hasn’t
been finished and will waste a reviewers time.

Keep in mind that you are anonymous in the review process. If the reviewer feels his or her time is
being wasted, he or she will blame the journal, not you. The editor is trying to protect the journal
from this judgment because the journal needs the reviewers. When the reviewer gets the paper, the
first thing they should do is exactly what the editor did, in order to decide whether they want to
review it and are qualified to do so.

30 Clarity is Difficult

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26
Ezra Pound reports that when Yeats asked Aubrey Beardsley “why he drew horrors”, the illustrator
replied simply that “beauty is difficult” (Pound, Canto 80). So is clarity. Indeed, there is a sense
in which clarity just is the beauty of scholarly writing, its highest stylistic virtue. The best way to
achieve it is to say what we mean through a series of assertions, i.e., statements of fact we believe
to be true. At one end, therefore, the difficulty lies in the nature of the idea we are trying to express,
sometimes in the obscurity of the facts we are going to have to state. At the other end, the difficulty
lies in the limitations of language—more precisely, the limits of our mastery of the language. (It can
be argued that the expressive resources of the language are limitless.) It is always possible, however,
to attain clarity by compromising the idea. Failing to state one fact, we might state another one,
a less obscure one. The result may be perfectly clear prose, but we have of course sidestepped the
difficulty. overcoming the real difficulty of scholarly writing is hard work that requires repeated
effort, one statement at a time.

Update at 8:02 AM: I’ve struck the last sentence because the paragraph seems to me to end more
squarely with the previous one. The idea in the last sentence (now struck) actually deserves another
paragraph, namely, the one I wrote yesterday.

31 Arts and Sciences

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The liberal arts are not social sciences. While the social sciences attempt to know about social life,
the humanities are trying to understand the human condition. The difference may appear subtle
but it is quite obvious when we look at the consequences for research practices. In social science,
research is shaped by theories and methods, i.e., by perspectives that guide the attention of re-
searchers toward particular objects and approaches that structure their activities in particular ways.
The social sciences gain access to their objects by generating data, which they then subject to analy-
sis. In the humanities, by contrast, research (or what is much more accurately called “scholarship”)
is guided by a comprehensive style, i.e., a way of reading and writing, as well as thinking and feel-
ing, about what it means to be human. They do not really have an object. Where a science tries to
overcome our ignorance, an art seeks to improve our ability to imagine. The only relelevant “data
set” here is the imagery that is made available by our literature. And the only relevant form of
analysis is to think on it seriously in the light of experience.

32 Concepts and Objects

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The logician Gottlob Frege defined concepts as functions that take objects as arguments to yield
truth-values. That sounds more difficult than it really is. Consider the function “x + 3”, which lets
you put a number in the place of x to yield a numerical value. So if x = 7, the function yields 10
as its value. Now consider the function “x is a horse”. What Frege suggested was that if you put
various creatures in the place of x then the sentence will become either true or false. “Smarty Jones
is a horse” is true, while “Thomas Basbøll is a horse” is false, Just as “7 + 3” is 10, while “5 + 3”
is 8. The same function yields different values when given different arguments. When the value of
a function is either true or false then the function is a concept and its arguments are objects.

One of Frege’s most fascinating contributions to modern philosophy was the idea of a Begriffsschrift,
a “conceptual notation”. He tried to develop a way of writing our concepts down in such a way that

27
their truth-functionality, if you will, could be easily surveyed. Unfortunately, it looked like this:

(Source: Frank Hartmann)

My hope is that our prose can approach the (logical) clarity of this kind of presentation while
overcoming its (epistemic) austerity.

One way to test your prose for clarity is to ask yourself what concepts and objects are distributed on
the surface of the page. Just as there will be a finite number of paragraphs (and, therefore, a finite
number of knowledge claims), there will be a finite number of concepts and objects. You should be
able to make a complete list of the conceptual and objective content of your text. You should even
be able to extend that list to include some of the concepts that are relevant to the named objects
but are not at work (functioning) in your text, and some of the objects that are not named in the

28
paper but nonetheless yield true statements when the concepts that are at work in your paper take
them as arguments. All this will help you realize the promise of what Frege called “perspicuity”
(Übersichtlichkeit) on “the two-dimensional expanse of the writing surface”. Even in prose.

33 Do You Like Paragraphs?

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Stanley Fish begins his How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One (read the chapter here) with
a story first told by Annie Dillard. Here’s how she tells it:

A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I
could be a writer?” “Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know. . . . Do you like sentences?”
The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am
20 years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could
begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said,
“I liked the smell of the paint.” (From The Writer’s Life, reprinted in Three by Annie
Dillard, p. 591, excerpted in the New York Times Book Review)

It’s important to keep in mind that Fish and Dillard are thinking about “writing” in literary terms.
The student wanted to be a writer of “belles lettres”, fine writing. If a student was to ask me,“Do
you think I could be a scholar?” I would answer differently: Do you like paragraphs?

Like Fish, I would say it’s about how to write and read them. If you don’t like expressing yourself
in paragraphs, or if reading them bores you, then you will probably not enjoy the work. You have
to have, as Fish puts it, “a feel for the nitty-gritty material of the medium”. And, in the case of
scholarly writing, that material is composed, in an essential way, into paragraphs.

The novelist or short-story writer or essayist can concentrate, I’m sure, on sentences. The reader
is moved along by their rhythm and experiences the break between paragraphs mainly as a part
of this rhythm. The poet’s material is perhaps even more finely grained: composed of the turn of
phrase. (“Strophe” means “turn”.) But scholars must compose themselves roughly six sentences
and 150-200 words at a time. They must always say something, some one thing that can be stated
in a simple declarative sentence, and then support it with about five sentences more. As I’ve said
before, the paragraph is the unit of scholarly composition.

It’s important to find your métier. If you are drawn to beautiful sounding phrases, you may be a
poet. If you like sentences, perhaps you are a novelist. Scholarly writing can benefit from good
phrases and good sentences, of course, but it cannot rely on them, and it must not get hung up on
them. To enjoy the scholarly literature you must be able to appreciate paragraphs, the composition
of ideas into groups of sentences that clearly state and support identifiable ideas. You are not just
evoking images or telling a story. You are communicating what you know.

34 Paragraph Time

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If you know something, I always say, you should be able to compose a prose paragraph about it
in 27 minutes. A paragraph consists of about six sentences and no more than 200 words. So you
should be able to write 3-400 words an hour about something you know, taking a three-minute
break between each paragraph. Try it, and you will see that it’s quite a lot of time.

29
Fans of The Matrix will remember “bullet time”, the hyper-slow motion camera effect that allowed us
to see objects and situations from all sides as action sequences unfolded. It was intended to simulate
the way the characters were able to stay ahead of “reality” when dealing with it. They would slow
the world down in their minds and therefore be able to take actions in an almost leisurely way that
would otherwise require split-second reflexes.

I like to think that scholars can become adept at dealing with their textual environment in the same
way. The idea is simply to establish a “long moment” (27 minutes) in which your only problem
is to compose a single paragraph. You should know in advance (before you go to bed the night
before) what the paragraph will say, i.e., what the “key sentence” is. Then, when you begin writing,
everything slows down and you can manipulate the words you need in a calm and collected manner.
If you learn to use 27 minutes effectively to compose a paragraph you will never regret having this
skill.

“To write,” said Virginia Woolf, “a woman needs money and a room of her own.” A room is a region
of space and time is money, as everyone knows. So all you have to do is become a Master of Time
of Space. Just take it 27 minutes and one paragraph at a time.

35 Theoretical and Methodological Papers

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My advice, whether here on the blog or in my seminars, is focused mainly on what I call “the
standard social science article”. The core of such a paper is composed of a theory section, a methods
section and a substantial empirical analysis. But people often ask me for advice about writing whole
papers, not sections, devoted to theory or method. I’ll say some quick things this morning and then
take up the subject in greater detail next week.

First, the basic approach doesn’t change. You’ll still have to sit down and write about 40 para-
graphs, so you’ll have to organize your time to make that possible. Also, you’ll have to reach an
understanding of what your reader believes before reading your paper, and you’ll have to devote
some of the paper to presenting this current state of the art. You’ll have to situate the paper in a
“world” of shared concern with this reader as well. All this means that the introduction will have a
similar form as an empirical paper.

Recall that the ideal introduction begins in the world, proceeds to the science, and ends in your
paper. In one sense, theoretical or empirical papers begin with the science not “the world”; in
another sense, however, it is simply the world of the scientists that you begin with. So you want to
start with some claim about the state of research that is more general than the state of the specific
theory or method you want to discuss. You might, for example, start with trends in the underlying
epistemology of the field, or with some broader theoretical orthodoxy—one you don’t intend to
challenge or question.

Then narrow the focus, in the second paragraph, to the part of the theory (or method) that your
paper wants to make a contribution to. And then, in the third paragraph, introduce the concepts or
techniques that you have invented. As in a standard paper, this will either challenge the consensus
you’ve outlined in paragraph two or weigh in on a controversy. Importantly, it will not directly
affect the underlying situation you’ve sketched in paragraph one. That remains the world of concern
you share with your reader. Paragraph two has presented that part of your reader’s mind you hope
to influence.

30
36 Theory Papers

Source

In general, papers should make a theoretical contribution. While most papers will bring empirical
material to bear in order to accomplish this goal, however, some papers, which are often called
“theoretical” or “conceptual” papers, accomplish their theoretical aims by purely theoretical means.

Theories, Bourdieu tells us, are “programs of perception”. They condition what researchers see
and do not see when they look at the world. They are also, I tell people, systems of expectation;
they condition what people expect of your object. But in a theoretical paper, there is no specific
empirical object. Instead, there is a general class of objects—the kinds of things you are able to
see, but have not looked at. Your reader has certain expectations of these objects, is programmed
to perceive them in certain ways.

You are trying to change those expectations, reprogram them. And you are trying to do so without
showing them anything about any particular object. What you bring to bear on their expectations
is more theory —that is, other expectations, other parts of their program.

Normally, those who hold a particular theory have a kind of knee-jerk version of it in mind. When
you mention a social practice, they’ll immediately theorize it in a certain way, and this will reduce
the complexity of their image of the object. In an empirical paper, you use your data to push against
this simplified image. That’s how you “artfully disappoint your reader’s expectations of the object”
as I usually say.

But in a purely theoretical paper, you are trying to reconfigure your reader’s expectations by acti-
vating other expectations. This may be accomplished by drawing in other theorists that the reader
is, if perhaps only vaguely, aware of but does not use in the initial conceptualization of a practice.
You here argue that these other theorists should affect our expectations of the object in question,
that they should have a stronger influence on us. If your argument holds, the reader’s expectations
will change without being confronted by any new empirical data.

Alternatively, you can offer a closer reading of the theory in question. You can show that our
expectations of our object have been formed by superficial or careless readings of the major theorist
in the field. Since your readers presumably respect the work of this theorist, this may go some way
towards changing their expectations.

The new expectations will of course have to be somehow “tested”, but in a theoretical paper, this
task is left for future research, perhaps done by other researchers. This means that you do well to
identify the methodological implications of your research. If we now see the world differently, what
should we do differently when we look at it?

37 Methods Papers

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Like theory development, the evolution of research methods normally happens in the context of
original empirical work. A researcher finds that existing methods are unable to generate the data
needed to answer a particular research question and goes looking for new ways of observing the
world. If a theory is a “program of perception”, a method is a program of observation. It is not just
a way of seeing the world but a way of getting a good look at a particular part of it. It is therefore
quite reasonable to ask someone who claims to have developed a new method what it has made
them able to see. That is, we want to hear about that original empirical work.

31
Still, sometimes researchers will want to make contributions to methodological debates in their
field without at the same time presenting original empirical results. That is, they’ll want to write a
“methods paper”. I encourage such writers to begin as they would with any other paper:

First, identify some interesting set of real-world social practices.

Second, present the current state of the art as to the observation of those practices, emphasizing its
limitations or, at least, its potential to develop.

Third, present your paper. This will include a short description of your methodological innovation,
emphasizing how it overcomes those limitations, or realizes that potential. It will also outline your
paper.

Write a paragraph—that is, about six sentences, and no more than 200 words— for each of these.
Then, as a “background” section, develop your description of the real-world social practices you
think we need to be better at studying in about five paragraphs. Next, develop the state of the art
in another five paragraphs. Then provide some sense of your role in methods development. What
has forced you to take up these questions? How did you run into the limitations? How did you
notice this potential? This is where you build your credibility with the reader.

Now, write about 15 paragraphs that develops your methodological innovation. Make sure you
provide real or imagined examples of how the methods would be applied in practice, i.e., in a
research project.

Finally, write about 5 paragraphs that make the benefits of this method explicit. And then write a
short, two-paragraph conclusion that brings us back to the still-interesting, but now more readily
observable, “real” world of social practices. As in a theory paper, you will not actually have made
any claims about this world. You will only have proposed a better way generating data to support
such claims.

38 Critical Papers

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Methodological and theoretical papers share the problem of making a contribution to the literature
on the basis of no particular empirical experience. This does not mean that they don’t draw on
the experience of the scholar as a researcher; it just means that they do not present original data
in support of their argument. This is also true of a third kind of paper, one that I am very much
concerned about as a viable art form, namely, the critical essay. Such a paper attempts to contribute
to the conversation among scholars simply by reading the other contributions to that literature and
assessing the validity of their arguments.

This is a really important function in scholarship, but one that is being eclipsed in some fields by the
demand that papers make a theoretical contribution on the basis of methodical study. A good critical
essay will generally make a “negative” contribution, much like the contribution that weeding makes
to a garden. It will correct long-standing errors and remove tenacious but specious arguments. It
will point out underlying and perhaps mistaken assumptions in the work of particular scholars or
whole subfields. It will, as much of my work tries to do, point out problematic connections between
work that has been published in the literature and its sources. A critical essay is all about putting
what we think we know into a larger perspective.

While such work serves a distinct purpose, the process of writing it remains the same. You’ll want
to introduce your critique quickly and effectively. What’s the broader real-world setting (and theo-
retical issue) on which your essay bears? What’s the state of the art of the field you’ll be engaging

32
critically with? What conclusions will your critique arrive at, and how will it get there? You’ll want
to answer these questions within the first 600 words of the essay. That’a about three paragraphs.

I’m currently revising an essay of this kind for resubmission and have decided to use my standard
outline as a guide. This means it will have a three-paragraph introduction (as just described), and
this will be followed by about five paragraphs of “background” (which in this case will situate
an influential account of a social practice in a broader theory of social organization). I will then
summarize the account and its standard interpretation (in lieu of a “theory” section, but definitely to
remind readers of what they thought they knew). Where an empirical paper would have a “methods”
section, I will discuss how I located the sources I’ve uncovered to push against the standard account.
This leaves an “analysis” in which I present the substance of my critique and “implications” section
in which I suggest where we might go from here. I’ll then offer a standard two-paragraph conclusion.

It’ll be interesting to see if it works. If it does, it shows that pretty much any journal article can be
thought of as 40 paragraphs divided into sections consisting of 3, 5, 5, 5, 15, 5, and 2 each. That is
sort of comforting to know, even if it is only a rough approximation.

39 Cutting Your Work Out for You

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The standard, empirical social science paper can be given a simple provisional structure. By “pro-
visional”, I mean one that you can impose on your image of a paper in the early planning stages,
before you’ve written very much of it. It gets you “into the ballpark”, we might say. It does not
guarantee a home run.

The structure goes as follows:

3 paragraphs of introduction

(The first tells us something interesting about the world you have studied. The second
tells us about the science that studies it. The third tells us what your paper is going
to say.)

5 paragraphs of background (elaborates §1) 5 paragraphs of theory (elaborates §2) 5 paragraphs

of method 15 paragraphs of analysis (in 3 5-paragraph sections) 5 paragraphs of implications 2
paragraphs of conclusion

Now, over these past three days I’ve been considering other kinds of paper: theory papers, methods
papers, and critical essays. I suggested that a similar provisional structure could be used there too.
Here’s how I think it might look:

A theory paper could have:

3 paragraphs of introduction

(The first tells us something interesting about the practices that you want to theorize.
The second tells us about the state of the theory. The third tells us what your paper
is going to say.)

5 paragraphs of background (elaborates §1) 5 paragraphs on the current state of the theory (elabo-
rates §2) 5 paragraphs of the problems with that theory when confronted with practice (anomalies)
15 paragraphs of theory development (in 3 5-paragraph sections) 5 paragraphs of implications (usu-
ally methodological) 2 paragraphs of conclusion

A methods paper could have:

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3 paragraphs of introduction

(The first tells us something interesting about the kind of object that you want to
develop method to observe. The second tells us about the state of the methods today.
The third tells us what your paper is going to say.)

5 paragraphs about the object (elaborates §1) 5 paragraphs on current methods (elaborates §2) 5
paragraphs of the problems with those methods (impasses) 15 paragraphs of methodology (in 3 5-
paragraph sections) 5 paragraphs of promised advantages to using your new method 2 paragraphs
of conclusion

Finally, a critical paper could have:

3 paragraphs of introduction

(The first tells us something interesting about some interesting real-world issue. The
second tells us about the current state of scholarship. The third tells us what your
paper is going to say.)

5 paragraphs about the world as seen by scholars (elaborates §1) 5 paragraphs on what the schol-
ars believe about this (elaborates §2) 5 paragraphs about how you approached this material 15
paragraphs of critical analysis (in 3 5-paragraph sections) 5 paragraphs of implications for future
scholarship 2 paragraphs of conclusion

Like I say, these are just rough guides. They offer a place to start and a way of dividing up the
problem of writing in smaller tasks. You’ve now got your work cut out for you.

40 Intended to Accomplish Goals

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(I’ll follow up on my post about academic cheating later today. I want to stay on schedule with my
series on article design.)

The object that is specified by a designer must serve some specific set of ends. To understand a
design is, in part, to understand its purpose; if we cannot see the purpose of an object, if we do not
know what it’s for, then we do not understand its design. This is captured by the third part of Ralph
and Wand’s definition: a design is “intended to accomplish goals”.

When designing your article, therefore, it is useful, and quite necessary, to have some clear goals
in mind. You are obviously designing it to be published somewhere. This goal can be defined by
making a list of potential journals that indicate the public space in which the conversation you want
to participate in goes on.

But you also have decide what effect you want to have on the conversation. Do you want simply
to inform others about your results? Do you want to change their minds? Do you want to correct
a misconception? Do you want to re-orient the field and take it in another direction? (I’m going
to leave aside secondary goals like impressing future employers or earning tenure. As goals, these
don’t have a very specific effect on the design on the article.)

You can take this goal-orientation down to the level of the paragraph (and even the sentence). Ask
yourself what you want your reader to do with it: believe it, or agree with it, or understand it, for
example. These all set up slightly different tasks, slightly different rhetorical problems. You may
be saying something that you know the reader will find difficult to believe; your job here will be
to overcome their doubts. Or you may be engaging in an argument that has clearly defined sides

34
where you want them to come over to yours. Or you may be saying something that is difficult to
understand and your job is explain it clearly and effectively.

In any case, thinking about your article as an object to be designed demands that you make yourself
aware of your goals. It will be useful to have one overarching goal and a 40 smaller ones. One for
each paragraph.

41 One Idea at a Time

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I wrote another stand-alone page recently called “27 Minutes”. Added to “40 Paragraphs” and “16
Weeks”, a nice set of a not-quite-arbitrary proportions to guide your scholarly writing is emerging.
You can read these pages by following the links in the sidebar on the right.

I say “not-quite-arbitrary” because these guidelines are supposed to feel at least a little arbitrary.
They constitute an order you can impose on your writing process no matter what you are writing
about and no matter how the work is going intellectually. If you’re struggling with your ideas, you
will now be struggling with your ideas 27 minutes at a time, working on 1/40th of the problem, as
part of a 16-week program (divided into two 8-week periods). This allows you to appreciate your
finitude, and the finitude of your writing problem.

We might also say that this approach allows you to work on your writing one idea at a time. By
“idea” here I mean that which is expressed in a single true sentence supported by a paragraph. It is
something you know. You can work on an idea as many times as you like, as long as you do it for
27 minutes and then stop. After a three-minute break, you move on to another idea, or you stop
writing for the day.

On my approach, you can work on any given idea as many times as you like, not as long as you like.
Don’t spend an entire day, or (as some people do) several days, vaguely trying to think “something”
through. Sit down every day for 27 minutes and write something down. In some exceptional
circumstances, you might sit down every day for a week and work on the same idea, writing the
same paragraph five times. But this should happen only near the completion of the paper, when
you know that this paragraph is the one that needs the work.

That is, you can write a paragraph as a many times as you like, but not as often as you like. As
a general rule, try to work on each of the forty paragraphs once before you work on any of them
twice. (An exception here can be the introductory and concluding paragraphs, which you might
return to once after having written, say, half the paper.) Then decide which ones to work on again.
And then work through that list before you get hung up on any one idea/paragraph. This keeps
your process “flowing”, rather than getting stuck.

If you are left with a single paragraph to work over again and again, I recommend doing it only
once a day. You’ll find sleeping helps solve the problem. You may as well sleep between each
attempt.

42 The Whole and the Long Run

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When presenting the pragmatist slogan “the truth is what works”, my philosophy teacher used to
emphasize the qualifying clause “on the whole and in the long run”. It can also be used to qualify
my approach to scholarly writing, both at the level of the process and the product. My ideas about

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the writing process, we might say, are true (for you) if they “work” (for you) on the whole and in
the long run. And the product (your paper) is true if its claims “work”, i.e., function well in the
ongoing conversation that constitutes your field, on the whole and in the long run. That is, it’s not
the individual exception, the bad day, the glitch, that is important, but the discipline as it develops
over a longer period.

Keeping that in mind will obviously help us to think about the big picture. Though it really is
important to be able to focus on a single paragraph for 27 minutes, there is nothing magical about
how a paragraph is able to represent a truth you know. Getting a paragraph to work requires
strength and poise in your prose, which you develop over time through training. And the truth of a
paper or chapter or book depends not on what happens in each individual 27-minute session but on
steady work that is distributed over days and weeks and throughout the whole of the text you are
making. The more orderly the process of writing things down becomes, the more effectively can all
your other activities (observing, reading, thinking, talking) support the truth of your scholarship.
The key is to get your writing to “work”.

Finally, “the whole and the long run” extends beyond any individual writing project. Your prose
is like your health. It is a capacity you have, even when you’re not drawing on your full strength.
(And your style depends on not working at the limit of your strength at all times.) Your prose, when
it is in shape, also helps you avoid intellectual and grammatical error, just as a healthy, fit body is
less susceptible to disease and injury. In homage to the pragmatists, then, we might say that your
prose is your capacity to “practice the truth”, your ability to make something that works … on the
whole and in the long run.

43 Propositions and Statements

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I’ve promised to discuss scholarly writing “as such” for a few weeks. As a way into this subject, this
morning I’m going to be a bit philosophical, perhaps in the pejorative sense of “too abstract to be
useful”. It can’t be helped. Tomorrow, I’ll translate these ideas into more practical terms.

Propositions are the spectral entities in the universe that are true or false. They do not quite “exist”,
like the furniture in your home exists or you yourself exist. If there is a vase on your coffee table
then there is a proposition that articulates this fact and that proposition is true. No one has to say it
or even think it. All around you there is evidence of propositions because all around you there are
facts and these facts make propositions true. Even before you considered the fact that your stereo
had been left on, the proposition that it was so was true. It became true the moment your stereo
should have been turned off but wasn’t. In not turning off the stereo (in leaving it on), then, you
made a proposition true. But you didn’t make a proposition. That happened all by itself.

Propositions, said Gilles Deleuze, don’t exist, they insist, which is a nice way of putting it. There
are propositions in so far as we insist on them. Our insistence does not bring propositions into
existence; rather, we are insisting that the proposition (the articulable truth) is already there. Nor
is a proposition a sentence. A sentence may express a proposition, but so too may a plain and simple
fact, or a gesture, or a facial expression. And the same proposition may be expressed in any number
of sentences, in any number of languages. Propositions are not man-made.

Statements, by contrast, are made. There are no statements except in so far as we consciously
undertake to say something. While statements can be made in all sorts of media, our interest
here is the way scholars make statements in writing. A scholar sits down and composes a number
of sentences, each of which expresses a proposition (or sometimes several) and this asserting of a
proposition as true is a statement. It will normally take several sentences, indeed, a whole paragraph,

36
to make a proper scholarly statement. As we will see tomorrow, there is a difference between
composing six sentences that express propositions, and making a scholarly statement. We have to
intend to say something to someone.

44 The Self as Critic

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“Critic, n. A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries to please
him.” (Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary)

Among artists, the critic is often considered a necessary evil. Scholars, on the other hand, conde-
scend to the critic at their peril. Indeed, scholarly writing presumes that there will be critics and
that their opinions matter.

Nonetheless, the critic has been drawn into disrepute even within the academy. Critics, albeit some-
times more in the imagination of the writers they criticize than in reality, don’t always know their
place, and some scholars have therefore taken the view that critics should be avoided and ridiculed.
That is, when someone expresses a critical opinion of a scholar’s work, the scholar feels justified in
dismissing the critique on the grounds that critics are, by their very nature, perversely interested
in flaws, and writers in any case have a right to associate with more “positive” personalities who
will be “supportive” and offer them “encouragement”. While some critics do, of course, take things
too far, I think it is more often true that the writer doesn’t know how to take (and leave) criticism,
than that the critic has no sense of his or her place. It takes two to be undermined by critique.

And it takes one to know one. So the best way of developing an understanding of the critic’s function
in scholarly life is to train one’s own inner critic, to sharpen one’s own critical edge. (A sharp knife,
remember, is safer than a dull one.) Indeed, the first healthy or unhealthy relationship any writer
develops to a critic, the most important healthy or unhealthy attitude a writer has about criticism,
is that which is established in the writer’s own case. Some writers never let their inner critic speak
at all, and this shows in, well, very uncritical writing. But the more common problem is that the
voice of the critic that the writer hears in his or her own head prevents the writer from writing. And
this function of criticism—to prevent writing—is not healthy. Nor is it what the critic (if a proper
critic) meant, or at least not what the critic is entitled to mean.

Criticism is supposed to prevent bad writing, but not by preventing writing altogether. That is why
it is important to write down what one knows every day and then let the critic look at it only at
particular times. Moreover, the critic’s input needs to be absorbed in a constructive manner. That
is, we must train ourselves to receive criticism, and we do this by regularly translating criticism
into tasks that might improve the text. Absorbing the criticism is then a matter of completing those
tasks … one paragraph, 27 minutes, at a time. This gives the critic a robust, but limited object
to criticize. You, the writer, knows how much you have put into it. And this gives the critic an
important but limited task to complete: What could this paragraph get out of another 27-minutes of
work?

45 The Critic as Other

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Most people are their own worst critics. I mean “worst” here in the sense of “least competent”. It
is not that people say nastier things about themselves than they say about others (though that is
sometime true), it is that their criticism is less precise and less constructive. As I said yesterday,

37
the function of “the self as critic” is too often simply to prevent writing, not improve the results.
That is why scholars have to find good critics among their peers, both before, during, and after the
publication of their work. Criticism works best when it is a social activity.

As in the arts, a critic represents the larger body of readers of a work. The critic does not just
react personally to what an article says, but rather tries to imagine what competent, well-informed
readers will make of it. A peer-reviewer has to decide whether the paper will be worth the author’s
peer’s time to read it; after publication, other scholars have to frame their criticism in such a way
as to contribute to the knowledge project of other scholars in the field. Before publication, a critic
is also sometimes asked to imagine what peer-reviewers will say. In all cases, there is a reading
that is not merely engaged and interested in the text, but also carried out on behalf of the rest of
the field.

When we write as scholars we should keep those critical readers very much in mind. Wayne Booth
evokes the spirit of a mythical Oxford tutorial in which only two questions were put to any given
text: “What does the author mean?” and “How does the author know?” If you remember that
that is what your reader is always asking himmerherself of your text, you’ll be better able to write
a critically robust one. Note that, on this view, the critic is not constantly asking “Is the author
right?” or “How is the author wrong?” Criticism only involves identifying a claim and relating it to
its basis in the text being criticized. It is true that a critic may eventually conclude that an author
has nothing to say and has no knowledge of the subject. But the purpose of critical reading is, in
the first place, just to trace a statement back to the ground on which it is made.

This, of course, is why I recommend organizing your writing around claims that can be supported in
paragraphs. If you ask yourself “What do I want to say?” and “How do I know it is true?” and then
spend 27-minutes, six sentences, and about 175 words answering those questions, you are giving
your critical reader the right sort of material to work with.

46 The Act of Writing

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Let’s narrow the topic to the act of writing scholarly prose. On my view, this act takes about 30
minutes and, properly speaking, only really happens if it happens daily. (That is, you are not
behaving like a scholar if you write once every three months for 72 hours straight.) A scholar can
commit between one and six acts of writing every day. I recommend 27 minutes of writing followed
by a three-minute break.

I know that sounds rigid. Let me explain. Scholars do many different things and among their
activities is writing. But some of that writing cannot be considered “scholarly”; scholarly writing
requires a particular kind of attention. You know you are paying the right kind of attention when
you are working on your text one claim at a time, which is to say, one paragraph at a time, for
27 minutes. In the act of writing, you are putting down something you know for consideration by
other people who know something about the subject.

The art of writing scholarly prose effectively is really the art of using those 27 minutes effectively.
It is important that the writer knows in advance (the night before) what he or she wants to say.
The act of writing should begin at an appointed time and stop 27 minutes later, so there is no time
to discover what you want to say. The first perhaps 15 minutes will be spent just writing—putting
down things you are know are true and which support the major claim of the paragraph you are
working on. After that, time permitting, you can do some editing. One important component of
the act of writing, if you have the time and desire to do it, is to read your paragraph out loud. This
will give you a good sense of what you are saying and whether you are saying it well.

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Before you reject this approach to writing, let me point out that a standard 8000-word journal article
consists of about 40 paragraphs. It can therefore be composed during about 40 acts of writing, or
about 20 hours of work altogether. This will produce at least a first draft, but it will be much more
“composed” than what most people are used to when drafting. I don’t think 20 hours of work is a
lot. Spread over eight weeks, it will require only thirty minutes a day, five days a week.

The point of this rigidity is that is it makes your writing process explicit. If you work in this way,
you will soon learn exactly what you can accomplish in the act of writing. This can be a very
assuring thing to know.

47 What and How

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In the comments to Friday’s post, reader fjb has pushed against my suggestion that there is no time
to discover what you want to say within any given 27-minute “act of writing”. On my view, you
decide what you want to say the night before, and then you “simply” write it down in the morning.
“I can’t think of anything I’ve completed and published,” fjb counters, “that didn’t include some
ideas generated ‘in the act.’ ” This is especially true, he says in a later comment, in the case of
responding to objections. “It’s hard to anticipate all that except in the course of expressing your
arguments.”

Now, it is certainly true that an idea might come to you while writing. But if it is not part of the
supporting argument for the claim you happen to be working on at the time, you must note it down
in a notebook and save it for later. Such an idea might of course end up in a published paper and
we could say that it’s been “generated in the act”, but notice that it was not written down (in prose,
at least, just in a note) at the moment it was conceived. The prose that presents this idea will be
written sometime in the future, not now. Today, then, you are working on a claim that was not
determined in this act of writing.

The basic distinction that I’m suggesting you observe is the one between what you want to say and
how you want to say it. The “what” is determined in advance, and you don’t discover it while
writing. The “how” is what you have to spend 27-minutes working on. This distinction is actually
quite central to my method. We might say that you are not using my method if you don’t observe
this distinction because the whole point is to know what (and when) you will be writing the next
day. If you are waiting for the writing session itself to tell you what you want to say, then you don’t
know this, and this is robbing you of happiness as a writer. (Of course, if you are as happy as you
can be doing things your way, then I am not saying you must use my approach. My approach is for
those who feel their writing process leaves a lot to be desired.)

I want to make it clear, however, that even when you know what you will say in a particular
paragraph, 27-minutes of work towards saying it will by no means be boring or uneventful. It may
even hold surprises. You will discover lots of ideas you might not know you had in your attempt
to support the session’s key claim. That’s certainly part of the fun. What you do not want to do,
however, is to indulge in the hope that tomorrow you will “come up with something” and go to bed
with no idea in your mind about what you will say.

48 Who and Why

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A well-organized writing process coordinates the question of what you’re going to write with the
question of how you’re going to write it. It also specifies a where and a when for the writing. But
these practical matters should not entirely overshadow the, shall we say, existential questions of
who is writing and why you are doing it.

There is a decidedly practical reason to write scholarly prose: your career as a scholar depends
on it. Now, it is very possible that this is a deep existential reason for you as well. After all, you
may identify so strongly as a scholar that without an academic career you don’t know who you are.
Indeed, it may be very important to you not only to be seen as a scholar but to be known as an
author. In that case, writing is going to be an essential part of what you are doing when you are
being yourself.

On the other hand, many scholars today have, unfortunately, come to see writing as something they
are compelled to do by an almost alien force. Or, rather, much of the writing they do is done as
a reaction to this pressure. They must “publish or perish” and they will publish (these particular
texts) only in order to avoid perishing. The sense in which this is an “existential” issue is a bit too
practical. It’s simply “do or die”.

The who and the why of writing intersect interestingly in the conversation (or, more formally, the
“discourse”) that it hopes to make a contribution to. As an author, your identity (both personal
and social) is shaped by the conversation you want to participate in with your peers. Who “you”
are depends on who “they” are. And the best reason to write is because you find that conversation
interesting and want your peers to know something that you know. Not only do you like talking
to them; what they think is important to you. And it’s not just what they think of you that matters.
It’s what they think about the object you study. You are profoundly interested in influencing how
they think about a particular area of the world we share. You want to change their minds.

You should not raise these existential issues at the beginning of every writing session. Indeed, you
want to leave them at the margins of your writing until the session is over. But they are worth
reflecting on when choosing what you are working on. You don’t have to be fully “authentic” at all
times, of course, but you will find that your writing gives you more pleasure, and proceeds more
efficiently, if it is something you are doing when you are being yourself. You will find that having
what you yourself recognize as a good reason to write is good for your writing. It’s good for your
style to know who you are and why you are doing it.

49 Key Sentences

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The key sentence expresses the central claim of a paragraph. The rest of the sentences in the
paragraph elaborate or support this claim; that is, they either proceed from or tend toward it—
centrifugally or centripetally, if you will. Either way, the center of a well-written paragraph should
be immediately apparent; there should be no mystery about what constitutes the core and what
constitutes the periphery. If you were to pare it down to its essential content, to what it is basically
trying to say, you would arrive at the key sentence. All the other sentences are there to help that
central sentence deliver its message. They are gathered around it.

I’ve promised one of my weekly coaching groups that I will write about key sentences all this
week. I’ll try to compose my own paragraphs so they always have one and you can play the game
of identifying it in every paragraph of every post. (Keep in mind that blogging does not always
produce rigorous “scholarly” prose, but this week, like I say, I’ll try to compose myself in proper
paragraphs. Feel free to speak up in the comments if you think I’ve written a paragraph that lacks
focus, i.e., does not have a clear key sentence.) Every night, before I go to bed, I’ll decide on a

40
couple of things to say about key sentences and then write them down in the morning. Hopefully,
my posts will be both informative and exemplary.

Consider the two paragraphs I’ve just written. In both cases, the first sentence is the key sentence.
Notice that the first paragraph does not just define the term “key sentence”, it emphasizes the
centrality of key sentences in their paragraphs. And this then is the theme of the rest of the paragraph.
All the other sentences tend toward this point about the central claim. If I had instead talked about
the “point” or “focus” of the paragraph, the other sentences could have been written with that image
in mind. Notice also that the second paragraph actually has two claims in the first sentence, only
one of which is properly speaking the main claim, and therefore the key sentence. It says, first, that
I’ve made a promise to one of my weekly coaching groups and, second, that I will write about key
sentences all week. The latter is the point elaborated by the paragraph, which talks about my plan
for the week, you’ll notice. I could have broken that sentence into two, like I did in this (third)
paragraph. “I made a promise to one of my coaching groups on Friday,” I might have said. “I’ll be
writing about key sentences all this week.” Here the first sentence is not essential to the claim of
the paragraph. It just gets us going.

50 Thought and Style

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A key sentence is not an element of thought but of style. It is important to remember that it is not
your mind that divides into paragraphs but your text; the key sentence therefore does not summarize
an idea, it summarizes the expression of the idea in a particular context. Some writers make the
mistake of thinking that there is some ultimate set of claims, whether theoretical, methodological,
empirical, or normative, that it is their task to make. But when trying to come up with key sentences,
your goal is to choose, say, five theoretical claims out that infinity of claims that could present your
perspective on the world, or the five claims that best summarize your procedure for the purposes
of this paper, or the fifteen claims that summarize the facts you have discovered, or the five further
claims that tell us what is now to be done. There is no epistemological basis on which to determine
whether you have selected the right claims. It matters less what you think and more what you want
to say.

Everything is connected. A key sentence’s effectiveness can therefore only be assessed in the context
of the paper as a whole, i.e., by looking at the other key sentences that together summarize the paper.
Making a particular claim will work in one context and not in another because, no matter how true
a claim may be, whether or not it makes sense will depend on the other claims you are making.
It is the paragraph that must be assessed in terms of how well it supports the key claim, not the
claim that must be assessed by how well it corresponds to something in the real or ideal world.
In an important sense, there is nothing in the claim to correspond to anything until it has been
comfortably composed in a paragraph and installed in a paper. Key sentences make explicit your
rhetorical decisions about what to say. This gives you a focus for your efforts to say it. Of course,
in the end, what you say must also be true. But what that means is a larger question.

51 Perspicuity

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A key sentence should be clearly written. While it may not be obviously true, it should be obvious
what would be the case if it were true. It should be as free as possible of qualifiers that soften its
point and therefore make it true in any case. A key sentence should have a relatively narrow range

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of interpretations at the outset, and the rest of the paragraph should support the claim it makes in
precisely that sense. Perhaps most importantly, the meaning of the key sentence should be clear
to the writer. It should already make sense the night before the paragraph is written, and it should
gain in clarity as the writing proceeds the next day. Indeed, it is perfectly normal to rewrite the key
sentence a few times while writing the paragraph. Writing a paragraph should clarify the meaning
of its key sentence.

The key sentence of a paragraph should also be interesting. Keep in mind that it expresses roughly
one fortieth of your argument in a standard journal article. If you were to list the forty key sentences
in a paper separately without their supporting paragraphs (and you do well to do this every now
and then), you should not be left with a list of trivialities. Some of the claims, of course, may only
be interesting in the context of the other claims. Indeed, some of them may depend on the others
for their meaning, and even their clarity. But in this context it should be clear why the reader needs
to be told these things. It should be clear why the reader should be interested.

In other news, Profacero reminds us that learning anything is like learning a second language. It
is a “myth that only sports, music practice, and foreign languages need daily work”. I completely
agree with this. Whatever we become good at we become good at by concerted, daily effort, in
a word, through discipline. In the case of becoming a scholar, the relevant discipline is simple.
Write paragraphs on a daily basis about something you know for people who are knowledgeable on
the subject. If you are an undergraduate and think you might want to become scholar, start now.
Don’t let anyone tell you scholarship is different, that it is best accomplished by binging and fasting.
That’s a myth.

52 Aim Small, Miss Small

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In The Patriot, there is a scene in which Mel Gibson’s character, Benjamin Martin, heads off a group
of British soldiers in the woods with his sons. His goal is to rescue his oldest son who has just been
captured and to avenge the death of another son, who has just been killed. Before the action begins,
Martin reminds his sons to “aim small, miss small”. That line was added during the filming, as the
Internet Movie Database explains: “When teaching Mel Gibson and Heath Ledger how to shoot a
muzzle-loading rifle, technical advisor Mark Baker gave them the advice to ‘aim small, miss small’,
meaning that if you aim at a man and miss, you miss the man, while if you aim at a button (for
instance) and miss, you still hit the man. Gibson liked this bit of advice so much he incorporated it
into the movie, just prior to the ambush scene.”*

Writers often take what might be called a “broad view” of their writing task. They might set aside
a whole day, for example, to “work on the paper” they have been thinking about. When the day
begins, they find they aren’t really sure what they’re supposed to be doing and, predictably, they
don’t accomplish nearly as much as they had hoped. Even those who set aside a morning to “write
the theory section” are giving themselves a big task for a long time. They soon discover that it’s
unclear exactly what they have decided to do. And even those who sit down and actually write,
say, a thousand words at such times, are likely to find that they are not making the sort of progress
they had hoped to make. At the end of the day, there seems to be just as much left to say as there
was before they began.

These writers need to work on their aim. It is because they are aiming to write a whole paper or
section that they find themselves not hitting their targets. Instead, they should be aiming to write
a paragraph. They need to set up an “ambush” on their writing problem, and then make sure that

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they’re not just trying to “defeat the enemy” or “rescue their comrades”, but to hit the individual
buttons on their foes’ coats. The key sentence in a paragraph is the point of your aim. You spend
the paragraph trying to make that point rather than “saying something” on a certain topic. Even if
you miss this narrowly defined “button”, you are still likely to “hit the man”. That is, you’ll end up
with about six sentences that support the claim you want to make.

In the tension of waiting for the British to come within range, Martin offers up a short prayer. “Lord,
make me swift and accurate,” he says. Maybe that’s the way to begin your writing session. Define
your targets. Aim small. And pray for accuracy. Then, “with wings as swift as meditation”, sweep
to your revenge!

*For a more detailed unpacking of the lessons of this scene in the movie, see this post I wrote for
Jonathan Mayhew’s Stupid Motivational Tricks. Unfortunately, the YouTube clip has seen been
removed for copyright reasons.

53 A Paragraph is Not a Box

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Writers I work with sometimes interpret the 6 sentence/200 words rule of thumb a bit too strictly at
the beginning of the process. They imagine I’ve defined a paragraph as precisely as a Shakespearean
sonnet (14 lines of iambic pentameter, with a couplet at the end). As an exercise, it is perhaps worth
trying, but only to see that 200 words in 6 sentences makes for very long sentences. What I’m saying
is: in most cases, you will write at least six sentences and at most 200 words. And I’m suggesting
that you make such a paragraph in 27 minutes. The dimensions of a paragraph are not a frame to
stuff words into but a space in which to make a limited number of moves or gestures. I recommend
you view the paragraph as neither a set of requirements nor a set of limitations but as a resource.
Or, better, a space of freedom.

The key sentence provides you with what Ezra Pound called “a center around which, not a box
within which” to write your paragraph. The space of the paragraph opens up along dimensions that
are set out in that claim. If the key sentence names a particular event, your paragraph will describe
it in detail. If the key sentence identifies a controversy in the literature, the paragraph will present
arguments on both sides. If the key sentence says you conducted interviews, the paragraph will
tell us with how many people, under what circumstances, with what questions in mind. When you
focus on your key sentence, you will find that twenty-seven minutes is plenty of time to compose
yourself. You will feel the intellectual space around you as comfortably proportioned. Part of the
art of writing a key sentence is to conjure up this space in which to work.

54 Preparation

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“The readiness is all.” > — Hamlet

My advice is to always decide the night before what you will be writing on any given day. Further, I
propose not to bring any source materials, whether that be books or articles you’ve read or primary
sources you’re writing about, with you to the writing session. (I’ve noticed that this is an important
difference between my approach and, say, Jonathan Mayhew’s.) You should only bring the notes
you’ve made in preparation for the writing you are about to do. When you write, you should be

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writing down something you know, indeed, something you already knew quite comfortably at least
last night. You should not be discovering what you want to say in the act of writing. This requires
a clear separation of the research process and the writing process, i.e., the process that generates
ideas and the process that commits them to the page. Many scholars find this to be quite a radical
idea.

Authors I work with sometimes say that my approach very quickly draws attention to what happens
in preparation for writing. To plan their writing also means to plan the work that happens the day
(or days) before any particular paragraph is to be written. And I am sometimes asked whether I
have any advice about how to organize that time as well. I am always hesitant to say something
about this, however, because in the end nothing should depend on advance preparation. You’ve
decided to write something you know down, that is all. How you came to know it is none of my
business. At the end of the day, no matter how you conduct your research, there are things you
know, and all I am saying is that you should devote between one and six half hours to writing them
down in coherent prose paragraphs.

If one of those sessions does not go well, some writers tell me that this reveals their lack of prepa-
ration. They thought they knew but had not worked hard enough, or effectively enough, the day
before to make sure. They articulated a claim, but they discovered in the act of writing it that they
were unable to support it adequately. This week, I will offer some suggestions for how to structure
the non-writing research time (ideally, work done in the afternoon). But I want to emphasize that I
do not, in fact, believe that such organization is necessary. If you choose something you think you
know well enough to write a paragraph about every evening, and then write that paragraph every
morning, you will become better and better, not just at writing such a paragraph, but at choosing
which paragraph to write.

My aim is Socratic. I don’t want to help you become more knowledgeable. I want to help you better
distinguish what you know from what you don’t know.

55 Learning

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The important thing is to be learning something. As the writing process becomes more and more
dependable—a stable, recurring opportunity to write down something you know—you will become
increasingly interested in the research process that prepares you for it. Every day (at least ideally)
you will have a moment or two (or six) to write a paragraph, to support a single claim with what
you know, and you will begin to see your reading, your analysis, your thinking, and even your
conversations with peers as activities that bring those claims into focus and indicate the basis on
which you might better make them. Those activities, that is, become occasions for learning.

Scholars are sometimes said to be “learned”. They have acquired learning, their competence is
grounded in learning something. Unfortunately, many scholars spend a great deal of time learning
how little they know relative to the great mass of “what is known” on their subject. There is always
a book that everyone is talking about but they haven’t read yet. And after engaging closely with
their empirical material, whether that be ethnographic fieldwork in a particular organization or the
early novels of a particular writer, they get the sense that what they don’t know about the subject
greatly outweighs what they do know. They have so much to learn, they think. While it is true that
there is always more to learn, it is important to experience progress.

The way you experience that progress is to write paragraphs that support claims. And that is why
the research process should be organized around the claims you want to make. When you read,
make sure that your reading is answering questions. “What does the author mean?” for example.

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“How does the author know?” When you think, do really try to move from a vague sense of the
importance of your theme, or the connections between themes, to actual claims about actual objects
that can be true or false. Thinking can also move the other way: start with your claims and question
them. Move from actual objects to possible themes. Just be aware that these themes must eventually
re-focus on actual claims about objects. You are not just “doing research” you are learning the truth
of things.

56 The Tasks at Hand

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I have been somewhat vague this week. The idea was to talk about what you can do outside your
writing sessions to ensure that they go well. My general advice is to work on your research with
the writing task clearly in mind, albeit well in the future. Over the long term, this means that
you should be preparing yourself to support individual claims in prose. This preparatory work is
precisely what some writers find difficult. I wish I had something more specific to say about how
to do it but my experience says that, as with writing, you will become better at it simply by doing it
every day. One thing that is often useful is to put a little more time (and sleep) between the process
that generates your ideas and the process that writes them down.

Beyond that, the specifics of research can vary greatly from field to field. A historian will have tasks
that differ greatly from those of an economist. The activities of an ethnographer are not those of a
philosopher. In fact, the whole style or temper of disciplines can be so different that it is unwise to
say what scholars should be doing when they are not writing. But, outside their scheduled sessions,
they should certainly not be writing prose. And they should probably be taking notes of some kind
that will allow them to write prose when they’ve planned to do so.

Perhaps I can say this as a general rule: all scholars should be writing for their peers on a regular
basis and reading the work of their peers on a regular basis.

To make sure it happens regularly, both of these activities can be scheduled. And to make sure
that they actually happen, they should not be confused with each other. When reading, read, when
writing, write. Don’t bring your reading materials to the writing session. Don’t break off your
reading of a text when an idea hits you that you think you need to write down. Follow through on
the activity that you’ve planned for yourself for the period of time that you’ve planned it. Give the
part of you that wanted to do that activity the time it needs. It’s a long journey. Stick to the task at
hand.

57 What to Do

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You have twenty-seven minutes. You have decided in advance what you want to say. All you
have to do now is write it down in at least six sentences, at most two-hundred words. But how to
proceed?

(The question “How to write?” can be answered at various levels of abstraction, often to various
degrees of frustration for the questioner. “Write at least one paragraph, for at least half an hour,
every day,” is one answer. “Write what you know,” is another. “Think of your reader,” a third.
When writers want something more specific I sometimes find myself saying simply “Put words
together in a meaningful way, that’s how.” This week I want to see if I have something more useful
to say about how actually, how exactly, to write a paragraph. As always, I want to emphasize that

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this is just a suggestion. If you’re not doing it this way, you’re not necessarily doing it wrong. But
if you are unsatisfied with your way of doing it, you might try some of the things I suggest.)

First, write a sentence that expresses the truth you’ve decided to state. This is the key sentence.
Make it clear, concise, to the point. You will find it is useful to have articulated this sentence as
part of your decision to write. Simply type out the sentence as you conceived it the day before
and then make sure it still says what you want it to. You don’t want to spend a great deal of time
agonizing about it; after one or two minutes, this task should be behind you.

Now, think of your reader. Ask yourself, what is the difficulty that this sentence implies? Will the
reader find it hard to believe, or hard to understand, or hard to agree with? Once you have located
the difficulty, write two sentences that addresses it head-on. If you think the reader will not believe
you, write two sentences that provide evidence. If you think the reader will not understand, write
two sentences that clarify the meaning of certain terms. If you think the reader will disagree, write
two sentences that deal with his or her objections.

Alternatively, the reader may simply be intrigued. “Tell me more,” you might imagine the reader
thinking after reading the key sentence. Well, write a couple of sentences that elaborate.

In any case, you now have three sentences. You’re halfway there. For each of the two new sentences,
repeat the procedure. What’s the difficulty now? Or should I just go on? Ask your imagined reader.
Keep in mind that the difficulty may now have changed. You may have begun to elaborate and
must now explain your meaning or defend your position. You may have begun to tell a story that
is now becoming implausible enough to require documentation.

Hopefully, you’ve anticipated some of these needs in advance and brought some notes with you that
help you craft one or two sentences to provide further support for the two supporting sentences you
already wrote. Whatever you do, don’t let an unforeseen difficulty make you break off your writing and
look for something to read. Try to find the answer within yourself—less mystically, do the best you
can on the basis of the preparation you actually did. Next time, you will prepare better, with this
experience in mind.

After about twenty minutes, working in this way, you should have a good-sized block of prose.
Maybe 8 sentences, 175 words, say. Now begin to make them more coherent. You may have to
write a sentence that brings everything together at the end. Or you may just need to improve the
intelligibility and flow of the sentences you’ve written. When the twenty-seven minutes are over,
stop.

Until they are over, do not stop. Tomorrow I’ll say something about what to do if you find yourself
with a lot of time on your hands after writing the raw sentences.

See also: “What to Do Now” and “What to Do Next”.

58 What to Do Now

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For some people, twenty-seven minutes is a very long time to spend writing a single paragraph. After
seven or eight minutes, they’ve got eight sentences and a hundred-and-fifty words. Now what?

Remember, whatever you do, do not stop working on the paragraph before your planned 27 minutes are
up. To pass the time, try this:

First, read what you’ve written out loud. This could take about a minute. Read it slowly and
deliberately, like you would speak the words if they were coming to you spontaneously. A well-
written paragraph should be easy to read out loud. A piece of writing, it is said, has an “immanent

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orality”, and rhetoricians will sometimes say that all textual interpretation is about figuring out
how it would be “performed”. When your readers are trying to make sense of what you’ve written,
to understand it, they are really trying to “hear” it.

Next, retype it. That’s another two minutes. Remember that before the invention and propagation
of word-processing all texts were written and rewritten several times before they made it into print.
I am certain that this had immeasurable effects on the quality of the prose that was produced. While
the effect of less rewriting today is perhaps also immeasurable, it is, it seems to me, quite palpable.
Your reader will be pleasantly surprised (without quite knowing why) to meet, in your writing,
prose that has been physically rewritten (i.e., re-typed) several times as part of the process. Prose
that has been cared for in this way is also, of course, more likely to be re-read. It deserves it, you
might say.

Now, put a blank line between each sentence. Work on each sentence individually for, say, one
minute. (This, then, will take you eight minutes altogether. If you don’t have that much time,
pick one or two sentences to focus on.) This is a great opportunity to perfect the grammar and
punctuation of your sentences and to think about the order in which the important concepts appear.
Also, ask yourself whether you are using the most interesting verb that is available to you in the
sentence. The verbs “to be” and “to have” are often not the most interesting.

Finally, spend a couple of minutes putting it all back to together. Here, you should focus on the
connections between sentences and the progression of the argument through the paragraph. It is
sometimes said (and I have said this too) that you should work on the “flow” of the paragraph. But
flow is just one kind of progress, and it’s not always the most appropriate one. Sometimes you want
the reader to feel like the paragraph is a series of careful steps taken towards a conclusion.

If you find yourself with a great deal of time to spare often, you might consider writing more difficult
prose on more difficult subjects. It seems you have the strength to do it. Or you can cut your writing
sessions down to 17 or 18 minutes (with a 3 or 2 minute break). But remember that you must plan
this in advance. However much time you thought you would spend on a paragraph the night before,
that’s how much time you must spend on it on the day. Don’t “reward” yourself for finishing early.
All you are doing is punishing your writing self for being efficient. And remember always to give
yourself enough time to both care about and enjoy the act of writing. This, too, is good for your
style in the long run.

See also: “What to Do” and “What to Do Next”.

59 What to Do Next

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When the twenty-seven minutes are up, you should stop working on the paragraph and take a
break for three minutes. You will soon discover whether a three minute break is enough. There
is no shame in organizing your process into 26 minute sessions plus 4-minute breaks, or 25 +
5. Whatever works for you. As long as the break isn’t so long that your prose gets cold. After
the break, you continue with the next thing you’ve got planned for that day. That may be writing
another paragraph, or it may be some reading or analysis to prepare for tomorrow’s writing sessions,
or it may be something completely unrelated to what you’re writing. The important thing is to have
some specific task to move on to. The writing of this particular paragraph is, in any case, over now.
Don’t leave yourself an opening to keep struggling with it. You’ll have a chance to work on it again
further down the road.

If the next thing happens to be writing another paragraph, start, as I suggested on Monday, by
typing out the key sentence. Notice that this means that the next thing you’re writing has a very

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clear focus, and this sequence of shifts of focus is something you were aware of the night before.*

People are different and their writing processes may benefit from different ways of working through
their material. Imagine three writers who have each set aside ten hours, two hours a day, in a given
week. That means they will each write 20 paragraphs in all, 4 paragraphs a day. That’s half a paper.
Now, Writer A may write the introduction and the first paragraph of the conclusion on Monday,
then the first paragraph of the background, theory, methods, and analysis section on Tuesday. Then
the second paragraph of each of these sections on Wednesday, until there are four paragraphs in
each section by the end of Friday’s writing. Writer B, by contrast, may write four paragraphs for
each section in a row. Writer C, finally, might write the three paragraphs of the introduction and
the first paragraph of the background on Monday, continuing with the remaining four paragraphs
of the background on Tuesday, and the first four paragraphs of theory on Wednesday. By the end of
the week, Writer C has written the first 20 paragraphs of the paper in sequence. Whatever works.

*I should perhaps clarify that many writers prefer to establish this awareness immediately after their
writing is finished for the day. Others like to reflect on tomorrow’s writing tasks before they leave
the office in the afternoon. Some do it in the evenings, after closing the book they’re reading. And
some, finally, glance at the key sentences for the morning to come just before they put their head
on the pillow and go to sleep. Whatever works. What I mean is that you should know what you’re
writing tomorrow at the latest before you go to sleep.

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