Writing Beyond the Academy

• There are usually four characteristics that matter about professional writing: Clear, Organized, Persuasive, and Valuable (the first two rarely matter, and the last one matters most)
  • “I would argue that not only have you not learned how to do this, you’ve learned habits that work against your ability to make your writing valuable.”
• Here’s the approach that I take to writing.
  • Most of what you’ve been taught about writing is text-based: a list of properties about the text
  • They make sense to you because they’re rules about what a text should look like.
  • You should always evaluate such rules with “for which readers, and for what function?”
• As an expert, you often use the act of writing as a tool to do your best thinking. Don’t stop doing that.
  • That writing produces a text.
  • However, here’s where it goes wrong.
  • You’ll send that text to your readers.
  • The intended function of that text is to cause readers to change what they think about the world.
  • During your school years, you basically never aimed for (or succeeded at) the goal of changing your readers' minds.
  • “Sometimes I had faculty say to me, ‘Oh, the students’ writing is very helpful to me.' I say ‘Oh yeah?!’. They say ‘Oh yeah, I really do. I learn a lot.’ I say, ‘Oh yeah?!’. Then I say ‘Then reading your students’ stuff is part of your, like, part of your thinking process?' They’re like, ‘Yeah!’ Then I say, ‘Okay, then how often do you go find student papers to read when you don’t have to?’. And what is the answer? Never!”
  • “What made your writing valuable to them? What created value for them? Your writing didn’t. What did?”
  • They get paid to read it.
  • When you go outside of being a student (staying in the academy, or into consultancy or other professional contexts), what is going to happen?
  • Not only are you no longer paying to have your stuff read; now when you write something, you want people to start or keep paying you to write.
  • “Why is it so hard for really smart people to write well? One of the reasons is that they have 20 years of bad habits.”
  • Those habits are based on 20 years of writing to readers whose approval of your work depended not on what it convinces them about the world, but instead on what it teaches them about you as the writer. As Wittgenstein would say, these are different ‘forms of life’.
• 19:30, 3 different writings from Roger Myerson: one from Journal of Economic Theory, one from New York Times, one from Journal of Conflict Resolution
• How do the texts differ:
  • The first one has equations
  • The sentences in the second one are shorter
• What do you think it is about New York Times readers that makes it good to use shorter sentences
  • They read the paper for entertainment, and long sentences require work.
• Why not always write short sentences?
  • In English, the end of the sentence has a stress position.
  • This would suggest using lots of short sentences.
  • But think about how the emphasis lands when you have a bunch of small sentences, versus a few longer ones. You’re crying wolf.
  • So for these contexts you learn to have smaller moments of importance
• 32:05: Last sentence of Lincoln’s second inaugural: “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and orphan, to do all which shall achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
• “The point I’m trying to make is not that there’s all kinds of cool language techniques that you don’t know and can learn. Whoa, that’s really not it. My point is you already know everything you need to know about English language technique, but you haven’t been trained in how to think about how to use that technique to create value. You know what you’ve been trained in? You’ve been trained in how to use language to reveal what’s in your mind or to reveal what your abilities are.”
• Notice also that this NYT text breaks the rules you’ve been taught (sentences starting with “And” and “Because”).
  • Imagine you showed these to your old teachers and said “see, this is in the New York Times?”, they’ll react one of two ways: “Oh, that’s just the New York Times”, or “Once you’re big and important, you can do this too”
  • “Go down the line, almost no matter what you’ve been told about writing is wrong. If they say it’s a rule. The big exception is: spelling. Keep spelling. Y’know, other than that, these are crazy.”
  • “My mentor, the guy who started the writing program at the University of Chicago, in 1979, wrote a wonderful article for the Journal of English Teachers, College English Teachers, and he said ‘These rules–all these rules you people are teaching–stop teaching them, because they’re not rules.’ He said, ‘when actual readers read text to think about the world, none of these rules actually make any difference.’ it’s a brilliant article, 15 page long, and in the last paragraph he says, ‘Okay, did you get the joke? This article has more than 100 errors in it.’ More than a hundred. And he says to his readers, ‘How many did you notice when you were reading it?'”
  • “For me, language is not rule following, it’s controlling the reading process. It’s understanding how readers read.”
• 40:45 All 3 texts provide value, but how?
• Compare the way these approaches draw you in vs do not
  • opening paragraph tells you what the paper is about - informative
  • opening paragraph tells you what the paper will argue - shows that the paper adds something
  • opening paragraph tells you what question the paper will answer - might draw you in
  • opening paragraph tells you what question you have that the paper will answer - leaves room for the reader, attempts to directly engage the reader
• “You know what academic papers mostly do? They look their readers in the eye and say, ‘I know what you think, and you’re wrong.'”
  • “This is not, as it were, about the world, this is about his readers. He’s describing his readers. He’s saying to them, ‘Hey readers, this question you actually don’t have, but you ought to have.’ Can you see how that creates the value for his work.”
  • “Some people say ‘Well it’s just, it’s more interesting if you’re confrontational.’ It’s not just interesting, believe me there’s a lot of people who don’t like confrontation and they don’t want to argue. But when an academic’s professional job is to be right about this stuff and somebody looks them in the eye and says ‘Hey, it’s your job to be right about this.’ and you say ‘yeah it is’ and you’re wrong, you have to listen.”
• 54:40 Inside of the academy, mostly you’re saying to your readers “Here’s what you believe, and you’re wrong”. Outside of the academy, it’s usually “Here’s what you need, and I can provide that.”
• 1:04:00 “Here’s another message I have for you: your readers do not trust you. They don’t trust you. They think you’re gonna waste their time. They think you’re gonna create stuff that’s not valuable for them. They do not trust you, and you spent twenty years with readers who trusted you. You spent twenty years writing to readers who were gonna read everything you wrote. And you’ve gotten used to the idea that whatever you write readers are gonna read. I can’t tell you how wrong that is. And I, philosophically I think it’s a gigantic mistake. Language is a relationship between people.”
• “The dog chased the cat” and “The cat was chased by the dog”
  • Because we’ve been taught formal rules, we prefer the first (shorter, active voice)
  • But actually, it depends on the readers
  • Do the readers care about the cat or about the dog?
  • The subject is the focus of the sentence, what the sentence is about. What if the reader wants to think about the cat?
  • Cognitively, readers have to process it as a sentence about a dog, then process it into a thought about a cat.
  • “Concision isn’t the number of words on the page, it’s how long it takes readers to process what’s on the page.”
• 1:08:30 Stress vs Focus
  • Once we experience the focus, we don’t attend to it, but all the sentence’s information gets attributed to it. However, the stress position is very visible to us.
• 1:09:45 Underline the subjects of the sentences. Four times out of five, the focus is just the subject.
  • “Sometimes people pay me stupid amounts of money to fly to often wonderful cities, walk in and sit down with them and make them take the pen out and underline the subjects of their sentences. ‘Cause they’re saying to me ‘My readers don’t find this valuable’ or ‘I can’t get this published’ or ‘I can’t get promoted’ or I can’t get whatever. And we sit down, we take out a pencil, and we underline the subjects of their sentences and I can say ‘Do your readers care about this?’ and they say ‘No.’ and I say ‘Okay, we can fix this. We’re gonna figure out what your readers care about, what they wanna focus on, and we’re gonna put this in the subject position.'”