The Craft of Writing Effectively

• U Chicago writing program created to help faculty
  • It’s not remedial
  • It’s not about rules; in fact, most of the rules-governed training is for people who are churning out a lot of writing each of which is of relatively low value (e.g., memos can be standardized)
• People writing about a topic on which they are experts–on the frontiers of knowledge
  • Thinking at a complex enough/high enough level that you are using your writing to help yourself think
  • So “Think about world” always occurs with “Write about world”
  • So you write a text (grant proposal, paper?) while you are doing your thinking
  • Typically – and this is the problem – that’s the text you distribute to people to read
  • If you did your job, readers will change the way they think
  • “Here’s the problem. Very predictably, experts use language in one set of patterns to do their thinking, but those very same experts read with a different pattern. So here’s what happens. You have used your text as you must use it to help yourself think. But you’re gonna use writing patterns and language patterns that interfere with the way your readers read when they read. Even when those readers are also other experts. So you’re interfering with their reading process when you’re writing.”
• What happens to readers when you make your stuff hard to read
  • They slow down (or read and re-read)
  • They don’t understand
  • They get aggravated
  • They stop
• Read and re-read only happens if the reader has a vested interest in finishing
  • How many academic texts have you written in your life?
  • Did the reader stop reading them?
  • No, because they were your teachers and they’re paid to grade it.
  • They weren’t reading it to change how they see the world.
  • Teachers read text because they are paid to care about the students. They use the text as a proxy to understand the quality of your thought process, not the contents of your thoughts.
  • Why will journals read your stuff?
    • Because they think it’s valuable to them?
  • If students' written assignments are valuable to faculty, it’s because they learned that people misunderstood things in ways they had no idea people could misunderstand things
  • “Faculty sometimes look at me and say, ‘No, no, Larry, you’re wrong, no, student writing is actually professionally valuable’, I say ‘then did you publish it?'”
• Your writing needs to be
  • Clear
  • Organized
  • Persuasive
  • Valuable
    • This is the most important characteristic by a long shot
    • Clear and useless is useless; organized and useless is useless; persuasive and useless is useless
    • And this characteristic goes undeveloped your entire time as a student.
• 15:15 Some people think that value is in content alone
  • But value is created for readers
  • “Can you imagine a text which one group of readers think is terrifically useful and another group of readers thinks is useless? Well, yeah! I gotta tell you. Sometimes PhD students come into my office and say ‘I really gotta get this article published, I’m under so much pressure to publish, I gotta publish’, and I say, ‘Okay. Which journals are you going to submit it to?’ And they look at me and say, ‘What does that matter?'”
  • “God help you if you came up in a system with standardized tests, […] because it specifically teaches you not to think about any differences between readers.”
• Biology example (3 alternative grant proposals/abstracts) - which one would you fund and why
  • What’s wrong with 1a?
  • It doesn’t sound important
• Don’t over-explain
  • “Imagine you were the writer of 1a and we said to her, ‘Your work doesn’t seem important.’ What’s her likely response? ‘You obviously didn’t understand!’ And we said, ‘All right, fix it. make it better.’ Alright, what is that writer likely to do […]. They’re about to make a gigantic mistake, because they would […] explain.”
  • Why did your teachers want you to explain stuff?
  • Because they wanted to know whether you understood it?
  • “You have learned that what explaining is it’s revealing to the world the inside of your head. No one cares about the inside of your head. At least, not unless you pay us.”
• Your goal is to change the reader’s thinking
  • “Here’s a shock: You think writing is conveying your ideas to your readers. It’s not. […] What is professional writing? It’s changing their ideas.”
• Why doesn’t ‘because I said so’ suffice?
  • There’s a rule in academia that nothing will be accepted as knowledge or understanding until it has been challenged by someone competent to challenge it.
  • “Your readers have the professional function of challenging what you said”
• Back to biology example
  • 1a doesn’t sound new or original
  • “We can create new knowledge in the next 30 seconds. All we have to do is count up the number of people who are in this room. Because nobody in the world knows how many people are in this room. […] Is anyone going to read that paper?”
• New Knowledge
  • “In a positivistic world, knowledge is just built up over time, and any time you find out something that people didn’t know, you get to just add up to this model and now it just keeps on growin’ and everybody’s happy. And that is dead, dead, wrong.”
  • “Here’s the model: there are conversations moving through time, and there’s a bunch of people, and they get to say what knowledge is. Isn’t that horrifying. Why would those people get to say? Why do they get to say? Especially because, historically of course, they’ve looked just like me. As my niece says to me every time she sees me, ‘Too male, too pale, too stale.’ Why on earth would these people get to say what knowledge is? I get it. I get it. Big problem. But they do. And that’s a fact. These people get to say what knowledge is.”
  • In other words, think about knowledge as a working set, and think of the people who permit that working set to be updated as the key community
  • The good news is, the conversation (and the people who control what is knowledge) move through time, and the boundary is permeable. And also, ideas enter and ideas leave. It’s not this cumulative model.
  • “We think a lot of what we think right now is wrong. We just don’t know what the wrong is. And we don’t know what better is. We wanna know, we do. We wanna get better at it. But in order for us to do that, you have to be dealing with the stuff we say is knowledge.”
• Biology example - go through 1b and find the words that make it valuable
  • Every community has its own code, a set of words that communicates value. They are particular to communities.
  • This is about knowing your readers
  • Half of the time in a PhD is learning more stuff, half of it is learning your readers
  • Persuasion depends on what they doubt.
  • Words in 1b
    • widely, accepted, reported: there is a community that wants to understand this
    • nonetheless, however, although, but, inconsistent, anomaly
• Frame a challenge
  • “Imagine if you go to your readers and you say, ‘Hey reader, hey community. I’ve read your stuff. I’ve thought about what you think. And i have something to say’. ‘Hey readers. I’ve read your stuff. I know what you think. But, you’re wrong’. Which one are they going to pay attention to?”
  • “If you say to the people who are the dominant figures in your field, ‘You know what, I’ve read all your stuff. And you’re idiots.’ It’s not going to go well. Don’t say that. What should you say to them, to the dominant figures in the field? […] The code is ‘Wow, are you smart! Wow, I mean, whoa, I’m just amazed. You are so smart. And you’ve contributed, and you’ve advanced this community through in fabulous ways. But, there’s this little thing you got wrong here”
  • Then you better have an argument (not an explanation: these are the people who wrote this stuff). You have to predict what they’re gonna doubt when you say they’re wrong.
• Challenging the status quo from within the status quo
  • “The University of Chicago writing program is not real popular in the world of writing programs. And you can see why. A lotta people think we’re fascists.”
  • “Here’s what we teach people to do. We say, ‘identify the people with power in your community, and give them what they want’.” That’s what we teach people to do. Lots of people have said to us in some version or another, ‘you’re supposed to teach people to challenge the existing community.’ Well actually, I just did, right, but notice that I did it inside the terms of the community. People say, ‘why don’t you teach people to have their own individual voice?’ I gotta say, I get that argument. I get the moral and ethical pressure to teach people to have their individual voices. But when I sit with somebody up in my office who’s worried about their career not going anywhere, it can’t be about their individual voice. It’s about what’s going to make it valuable to their readers. You need to understand that this program that we have is motivated by those people who have come to us and said, ‘Our writing is not succeeding’, and our whole program is aimed at them. How do you help them succeed. There’s a ton of ethical issues in involved in that."
  • There’s also a personal at-risk issue of challenging influential figures, and this is exactly why you need to do it within the code/norms of the community.
• Function
  • “The function of your writing is to move this conversation forward. It cannot do that if it’s in your desk drawer. […] It’s not to preserve indefinitely.”
• Lyotard quote
  • “When I was in school, and somebody said, “[…] Professor so-and-so is amazing, […], we talked about how much she had in her head, […] she’s forgotten more than I will ever learn’, and what Lyotard is saying here is that knowledge no longer has anything to do with the inside of individual heads. Now, if you talk about somebody being a great professor, what are you talking about? […] You talk about what they have done in this exterior space between heads.”
  • “Your relationship to your own knowledge is the same as the relationship of the farmer to the wheat, or the miner to the coal. The relationship is a form of value.”
• Structures - back to the biology texts and what makes 1b good
  • nonetheless, however, although, but, inconsistent, anomaly: create instability
  • Standard structures that are bad:
    • generalization, background, definitions, thesis
    • martini glass: generalization, work a specific example extensively, extrapolate back out to generalization
  • Frame a problem that a specific set of readers has
    • The situation should be unstable
    • Frame the problem/solution in terms of cost/benefit: frame the instability as creating a cost on the readers (or the solution as giving them a benefit)
  • Give a solution
  • The problem with the bad structures is that they frame your content in the language of stability and continuity.
• Writing a literature review
  • If your reader is a teacher, the function of the lit review is to show you understood the literature
  • In a professional text
    • you can use it for ego massaging
    • establish credibility
    • enrich the problem’s instability/cost
• gaps vs errors
  • often, young academics worried about challenging prominent figures use language that points to the field as having a knowledge gap
  • Gap assumes another model of knowledge that is now dead: knowledge is bounded, it’s a jigsaw puzzle and you can put a single piece in the right place. In the positivist view where knowledge increases monotonically, this doesn’t make sense.
  • But it’s not knowledge that’s bounded, it’s the working set of knowledge that is bounded.
• Interdisciplinary stuff is extremely hard to write
  • “Here’s the problem you’re going to have when you do interdisciplinary work: who’s in your community of readers? Go ahead, put that committee together that has somebody, 3 people on it and they’re from 3 different communities. Be very careful. You’ve got the right 3 people, amazing. You’ve got the wrong 3 people, you’re going to have a writing nightmare. Because those are 3 different communities who are not only going to define problems differently, they’re going to see arguments differently.”