This is a follow-up to my previous post about writing from the heart and writing exercises, in which I argued that, while it is always important to be true to the story that you want to tell, sometimes it is a valuable exercise to try to tell that story in a way that suits a particular audience, especially an unfriendly audience. This takes that same issue from a slightly different perspective—from the view that any story can be told in different ways. I’m not talking about there being two sides to every story, in the colloquial sense of different people viewing the same event in different lights—though that is closely related. I’m talking about how one person with one story can tell that one story in different ways and with different perspectives.
Consider, for example, this blog post and my previous one: both are telling my views on writing to varying audiences, including hostile ones, but the first focused on viewing the activity through the lens of a writing practice—a practice to develop your writing skills—and this through the lens of the variety of perspectives inherent in a given story.
Or consider, for example, a research analysis using a novel method: just from the start, one can focus on what the new method reveals about the subject or on how that particular analysis reveals insight into the method. Both of these are typically present in any research project that applies new research methodologies to old, established fields of study.
The perspective that you take in writing or telling your story can shift, even if the underlying story itself remains the same. Now it may be that you are more interested in one perspective than the other, but that only makes it a little harder to shift to other perspectives. Because stories are complex, the other perspectives are always there.
The researcher who picks up a new method may be so fascinated with the method and learning the method that he/she tends to focus on the methodological issues despite matters of interest in the subject, or may be so focused on the research subject that he/she disregards matters of method. And yet, in this generic situation—applying a new method of analysis to an old problem—both the perspectives are always there. This can be most easily seen by imagining two separate audiences: one, the audience of people interested in the subject, the other, the audience of people interested in the development of the method.
The perspectives focused on theory and subject aren’t the only possible perspectives, of course. Any work that bridges disciplines will naturally have separate perspectives for each discipline. And then any study of literature or history or any social phenomenon could choose to focus on a variety of perspectives, including historical, economic, sociological, or technological concerns. A Jane Austen novel, for example, could be examined through all these lenses (and probably has been). Or a building designed by Le Corbusier. These many lenses could be turned on almost anything related to humans.
How does this perspective (that every story can be told from multiple perspectives) affect your practice as a writer? In my previous post, I was talking about writing to a hostile audience while staying true to your own story, and I think there’s a similar opportunity there. In the previous post, I suggested using the attempt to write to a hostile audience, and to suit one’s words to the hostile audience, as an exercise to improve your skill as a writer. Now I’m suggesting a way to deepen your thinking about your work by imagining the different perspectives that different audiences are taking. What perspective is your hostile audience taking?
By understanding the perspective of your audience, you can better craft your response so that you can reach them. Understanding the perspective of your audience means understanding what they are going to focus on as important. Now it is quite possible that what they want to focus on is not what you want to focus on. In the long run, of course, you do want to try to bring the discourse around to focus on what you want to focus on. But the starting place is to focus on what they want to focus on.
If you think of the different perspectives on your story as all being present in your own story, you can start to see how to tell the story you want to tell, even if the first things you need to talk about (write about) are not the things that you care about most. Such shaping of your presentation to suit your audience is not a sell-out of your story: you can stay true to your story. It can be a very good learning experience as you try to imagine your work through someone else’s eyes. (But of course, try to imagine your work through reasonable eyes—you don’t want to get stuck asking yourself self-destructive questions about your work.) Imagining reasonable objections to your work is a good way to make it stronger—finding real weaknesses is the first step in fixing them. (But, again, be reasonable: all work has some limitations, so don’t throw your work away as soon as you see some weakness in it.)
Hostile audiences are often hostile because they see the world differently from you. Trying to understand their perspectives can help you gain some insight into your work by looking at it from angles you may not usually consider, and trying to communicate your understanding of their perspective can help reduce their hostility to your work.
Trying to build such communicative bridges is not, in my view, an abdication of your story or any sort of selling out. Communication need not be focused on and framed around a disagreement, even if that disagreement is central to the work being done. The very fact that you are communicating with a given group means that there is some common ground—some place on which you stand along with your hostile audience. That common ground is a good place place to start a discussion that will lead to a point of dispute. That shared perspective, however limited, is a tool to try to bridge the differences.
Showing posts with label audience. Show all posts
Showing posts with label audience. Show all posts
Monday, July 16, 2018
Tuesday, July 10, 2018
Writing from the heart and writing exercises
Last week I wrote about a scholar who does great work, but whose dissertation has not satisfied its reviewers. I am, to some extent, writing about that same or a tangential concern and a related idea that came up in my creative writer’s group. A poet in the group was talking about submitting work to various journals/e-journals and about his recognition of the tension between writing what he wanted to write and writing what would suit the journal/editor. This is a similar tension to that experienced by a scholar who is trying to please an audience that is in some way hostile to their work. To what extent do you change what you say to please the audience? Especially when the audience has power—power to accept or reject your work? This is, in a way, one face of “selling out”: doing work that you don’t really believe in for financial gain.
To speak of “selling out” focuses on a sacrifice of integrity, and that’s not really where I want to go. I think there is a lot more to the dynamic between writer and audience than a simple, clear assumption that pleasing and audience is always a sacrifice of integrity. There is a balance that can be found between (1) writing for yourself and to be true to your own vision and (2) writing to please an audience, especially one that doesn’t want the same things you do. There’s a lot in this dynamic that I’m not going to discuss in this post. I want to focus on just one suggestion: view the task of writing to please a specific (possibly hostile) audience as an exercise in developing your ideas and your skill as a writer.
A scholar—or any writer—should be aiming to write about things that really matter personally. Write about things that you really care about and believe in. If you’re working on something that you care about and believe in, it’s much easier to do the work, and much more satisfying to work, and that generally means that there’s less danger of writer’s block or avoidance.
But what do you really care about? Is that something that can be expressed in only one way? To what extent can you shape your work to suit your audience without sacrificing your own integrity?
It seems to me that any idea can be expressed in many different ways. It seems to me that most really substantive ideas have multiple dimensions that could be discussed in varying proportion to suit varying audiences.
To put this in terms of poetry, one might choose to express some thought—the transient nature of life, for example—in different poetic forms—sonnet, haiku, etc. Each form shapes how the idea is expressed, but none fundamentally change the underlying idea (or at least none need change the underlying idea—but most writers learn as they write, and learning does change ideas).
When writing to an audience that wants something other than what you want—if you really want to write haiku and your audience is expecting or demanding a sonnet, you can say “I’m not going to do it! I write haiku!” That would lead to something of an impasse. What I am suggesting is that you approach such situations saying to yourself, “Maybe I can learn something from the exercise of writing a sonnet. Maybe I can learn something about my ideas and something about the craft of writing that will help me write better haiku in the future.”
Approach such situations is as an exercise—opportunities to stretch your communicative repertoire. If you don’t want to write what the other person wants to read, and if you think of the task in those terms, you can easily feel resentment for having to work on something that you don’t want to work on. If you say “can I choose words that will satisfy my critical reviewer and also stay true to my purpose?”, then your challenge may not be flavored with resentment—and that’s worth a lot (especially if you are one of those people for whom resentment fuels procrastination).
There is a lot that can be done to shape a presentation of your ideas without sacrificing them or your integrity. Let’s set aside extreme cases where you are called upon to make a statement that directly contradicts your beliefs—if the editor at the journal wants a poem on a subject you don’t want to write about, don’t write it. If your professor wants you to say “Marx was right about everything” and you don’t agree, don’t write it. But if you’re not being forced to a direct contradiction of your beliefs, then look for the challenge of writing your own ideas in a way that will reach the difficult audience. Look for the opportunity to develop your skill as a writer and the opportunity to find a new way to express a familiar idea.
You may need to (temporarily) abandon the ways in which you have previously tried to write about your work. This can be frustrating and difficult, but it can be a great learning experience for a writer—both in terms of developing a greater discursive repertoire and skill as a writer.
Looking for new ways to communicate and old idea doesn’t change the underlying purposes, the underlying quality, or the underlying value of the work. It doesn’t stop the underlying message from being shared with others in other forms. What it does do is stretch the scholar/writer’s ability to bridge communicative and intellectual gaps.
There is a problem in trying to write in a way that reaches people with whom you have fundamental disagreements—trying to write in their language often requires adopting some of the conceptual structures that they use. This makes the exercise in trying to write across these communicative gaps quite difficult while still remaining true to your own vision. But, if you remember to think of the exercise as an exercise—an attempt to develop the ability to write/speak to disparate audiences—then these dangers are challenges to be surmounted, rather than causes to abandon your beliefs.
To speak of “selling out” focuses on a sacrifice of integrity, and that’s not really where I want to go. I think there is a lot more to the dynamic between writer and audience than a simple, clear assumption that pleasing and audience is always a sacrifice of integrity. There is a balance that can be found between (1) writing for yourself and to be true to your own vision and (2) writing to please an audience, especially one that doesn’t want the same things you do. There’s a lot in this dynamic that I’m not going to discuss in this post. I want to focus on just one suggestion: view the task of writing to please a specific (possibly hostile) audience as an exercise in developing your ideas and your skill as a writer.
A scholar—or any writer—should be aiming to write about things that really matter personally. Write about things that you really care about and believe in. If you’re working on something that you care about and believe in, it’s much easier to do the work, and much more satisfying to work, and that generally means that there’s less danger of writer’s block or avoidance.
But what do you really care about? Is that something that can be expressed in only one way? To what extent can you shape your work to suit your audience without sacrificing your own integrity?
It seems to me that any idea can be expressed in many different ways. It seems to me that most really substantive ideas have multiple dimensions that could be discussed in varying proportion to suit varying audiences.
To put this in terms of poetry, one might choose to express some thought—the transient nature of life, for example—in different poetic forms—sonnet, haiku, etc. Each form shapes how the idea is expressed, but none fundamentally change the underlying idea (or at least none need change the underlying idea—but most writers learn as they write, and learning does change ideas).
When writing to an audience that wants something other than what you want—if you really want to write haiku and your audience is expecting or demanding a sonnet, you can say “I’m not going to do it! I write haiku!” That would lead to something of an impasse. What I am suggesting is that you approach such situations saying to yourself, “Maybe I can learn something from the exercise of writing a sonnet. Maybe I can learn something about my ideas and something about the craft of writing that will help me write better haiku in the future.”
Approach such situations is as an exercise—opportunities to stretch your communicative repertoire. If you don’t want to write what the other person wants to read, and if you think of the task in those terms, you can easily feel resentment for having to work on something that you don’t want to work on. If you say “can I choose words that will satisfy my critical reviewer and also stay true to my purpose?”, then your challenge may not be flavored with resentment—and that’s worth a lot (especially if you are one of those people for whom resentment fuels procrastination).
There is a lot that can be done to shape a presentation of your ideas without sacrificing them or your integrity. Let’s set aside extreme cases where you are called upon to make a statement that directly contradicts your beliefs—if the editor at the journal wants a poem on a subject you don’t want to write about, don’t write it. If your professor wants you to say “Marx was right about everything” and you don’t agree, don’t write it. But if you’re not being forced to a direct contradiction of your beliefs, then look for the challenge of writing your own ideas in a way that will reach the difficult audience. Look for the opportunity to develop your skill as a writer and the opportunity to find a new way to express a familiar idea.
You may need to (temporarily) abandon the ways in which you have previously tried to write about your work. This can be frustrating and difficult, but it can be a great learning experience for a writer—both in terms of developing a greater discursive repertoire and skill as a writer.
Looking for new ways to communicate and old idea doesn’t change the underlying purposes, the underlying quality, or the underlying value of the work. It doesn’t stop the underlying message from being shared with others in other forms. What it does do is stretch the scholar/writer’s ability to bridge communicative and intellectual gaps.
There is a problem in trying to write in a way that reaches people with whom you have fundamental disagreements—trying to write in their language often requires adopting some of the conceptual structures that they use. This makes the exercise in trying to write across these communicative gaps quite difficult while still remaining true to your own vision. But, if you remember to think of the exercise as an exercise—an attempt to develop the ability to write/speak to disparate audiences—then these dangers are challenges to be surmounted, rather than causes to abandon your beliefs.
Tuesday, June 26, 2018
What are they thinking? Part 2: Speaking the same language
Last week, I wrote about the importance trying to understand the reasoning used by people who do things that seem inexplicable within our own reasoning schemes. I used two examples, one of a scholar struggling to communicate with her advisor, the other of the Democratic bewilderment at the behavior of GOP voters (who supposedly vote against their own best interests). That previous post wasn’t necessarily focused in reaching some point, but I suppose that I might summarize it as follows: people’s decisions are made with respect to their own sets of reasons; the fact that some decision seems unreasonable to you, implies that you do not understand the reasoning that guided the decision. Advisors want their students to graduate, and people vote for what they perceive to be their own best interests. Assuming anything else is silly.
People are sometimes wrong about their beliefs, and people sometimes draw bad conclusions from good evidence. I’m not denying that people make mistakes. In the case of the scholar who can’t get her advisor to approve her work, I think the advisor is making a mistake. But my thinking that it is a mistake doesn’t change what the advisor believes. In the case of GOP voters, it may be that they would benefit in some ways from voting for non-GOP candidates, but that doesn’t mean that they weigh the costs and benefits of their decisions in the same way that you would.
The question of this post is on how to communicate with people who are seeing the world radically differently, and, if possible, to convince such people to consider seeing the world more as you do. For both the scholar trying to convince her advisor, and for the politician trying to convince a potential voter, the issue is how does one sway the ideas so that the other will do as desired?
I have framed this in terms of Democrats trying convince Republicans because I don’t hear the Republicans saying “why do they vote against their best interests,” but the same dynamic is surely applicable--every single person has some desire to get others to act in ways that serve their own personal interests. I want people to act in ways that serve my interests, and you want people to act in ways that serve your interests—in a way, that’s exactly what “interests” are: the things that we want to happen. When person A sees person B do something that A feels is not in his/her bet interest, A is motivated to get B to do otherwise. Democrats want to get people who didn’t vote Democratic in the past to vote Democratic in the future. Republicans want to get people who didn’t vote Republican to vote Republican in the future. And, of course, every scholar wants to convince their readers to accept their work.
The first step in getting people to see things your way is to make sure that you speak their language, and I mean “language” in a general sense to mean not only the large-scale language that determines their vocabulary and sentence structure (e.g., English vs. French), but also the more personal intellectual structures that shape their ideas. If, for example, a scholar has a deep reliance on the idea of “objective truth”, that belief will shape the language that they use and how they interpret language, too: such a scholar might not be able to hear or absorb ideas and language shaped by the assumption that there is no objective truth. Or a profoundly religious person might see the world through a lens of religious belief that makes little or no sense to a less religious person, and that difference in perspective may mean that each person views the ideas of the other as incoherent or wrong-headed.
Understanding the underlying logical structures that people are using creates an opportunity to begin to work with people and to begin to shape their reasoning. The problem with speaking someone else’s language is that it will only make sense if you accept some of their underlying reasoning—and that can be uncomfortable. But, if you can keep in mind that your effort is to communicate, then you can begin to build the necessary communicative bridges that will help you reach the person who understands the world very differently.
So, to summarize: 1. Remember that people are reasoning with respect to their own sets of ideas; assuming that they are incoherent or working against their best interests doesn’t provide insight into the reasoning that is guiding their decisions. 2. Understanding their reasoning, allows you to begin to speak their language, and unless you speak their language, they probably won’t understand you—and if they don’t understand you, you’re not going to have success convincing them that your work is good.
Tuesday, June 19, 2018
What are they thinking?
What I’m thinking about is two separate issues that have at least one point of intersection. One of these issues is the struggle of a scholar to get her Ph.D. accepted by her committee. This scholar does work of exceptionally high quality. I know plenty of people who did worse work and got a Ph.D., including myself. The other issue is the more general political trope common on America’s political left of asking why so many people vote for GOP candidates who propose policies that are clearly to their detriment, at least in some ways.
In both cases, we could ask ourselves: “what are they thinking?” In the case of my scholar and her committee, she can reasonably ask “what are they thinking?” with respect to her dissertation, when by many standards her work obviously qualifies, and the reception her work receives from many scholars not on her committee confirms this. In the case of the GOP voters, we might ask “what are they thinking?” with respect to those GOP voters who have no health care, who need health care, who can’t afford health care, and who also regularly vote for candidates who are hostile to government action to provide health care for everyone.
Now, “what are they thinking?” can be asked from a point of curiosity—of wanting to know what they are thinking? But it can also be asked from a more settled position—a position of greater belief in one’s own rightness—as a paraphrase of “how silly they are to think that!”
This post is about the importance of asking that question from the first perspective, not the second. I don’t mean to say that you should not believe your own opinions—if you think someone is doing something silly or wrong, you may very well be right. People do all sorts of silly things. And if you’re just sitting back watching, thinking what they do is silly works just fine. But if you’re involved—if you have some need to interact with or convince these people—as the scholar needs to convince her committee, and the political left wants to convince people to vote for candidates who align with the left—then that second version of the question is not going to help you get what you need.
If you need to communicate with people, and you want to get them to cooperate with you, there is great value in sincerely and openly asking “what are you thinking?” And there is great danger in the second version: “how could anyone be so silly as to think that?”
In the case of the scholar, it’s a little hard to dismiss her committee as silly, but taking them seriously is not quite enough to convince them that they should be on board with a project. It’s necessary to find out and understand what they are thinking so that you can create the necessary communicative bridges that will help them understand what you’re thinking. (As I write that, it occurs to me that if you’re thinking “what are they thinking?” about someone, they may well be thinking the same thing as you are—certainly the political right speaks of the political left as foolish/immoral/etc., which are flavors of “how could anyone be so silly to think that?”)
To communicate, and to persuade people to accept your way of thinking, you need to present to them ideas that make sense to them—and that means understanding what they think, so that you can suit your communication to their ideas.
If, for example, the scholar of my example wants her committee to accept her work she needs to convince them of its value (and the fact that other people find it valuable doesn’t help with that), and that means understanding what they value and framing your work with respect to ideas that they are already using. And then figuring out how to make some conceptual bridge to the ideas that you are using.
This can be particularly difficult if the ideas that you are using are radically different from the ideas that they are using. For the scholar, part of her struggle is getting her committee to accept her research methodology. In thinking about her situation, I was thinking about Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions and his idea that different scientific paradigms are “incommensurable”—that is to say that there is no absolute, objective standard by which all paradigms can be measured—what makes sense in one paradigm doesn’t make sense in others. In the scholar’s case, one of the crucial structures of her research doesn’t really play any role in the research paradigms used by her committee—the question, then, is how to bring this structure into her dissertation in a way that her committee accepts it. Ultimately, I think that the route is through understanding and focusing on what the committee wants. Yes, it may be true that what they want doesn’t make sense from the scholar’s paradigm, but focusing on that difference in view doesn’t suggest a good strategy for moving forward. What does, is to look at what the committee thinks is important, and then use that to create as much common ground as possible—then, once the common ground has been created, it becomes easier to start to make a bridge to her own work—how can she frame her choices in terms of questions that the committee thinks important? How can the ideas that are important to the committee be used to explain the choices she made that led her work to diverge from their expected paradigm?
There’s another dynamic that can play a role, too: if you think “how can they be so silly to think that?" about someone with whom you interact, you’re likely to antagonize them. Recently, while reading articles that brought up the “voting against their own interest” idea, I have been flashing back to a popular song from my youth: The Suicidal Tendencies’ Institutionalized. The song relates interactions between child and parents, and near the end, the parents say “We’ve decided it’s in your best interest that…” And the song narrator cries “My best interest? How do you know what my best interest is?” Knowing what is in someone’s best interests is complicated—in the song, maybe the parents really do know their child’s interests, or maybe the parents are wrong. Regardless of what the song narrator’s best interests really are—whether the parents are right or the child—we can certainly say that most people, like the child in the song, will resent having someone else tell them what their best interests are. And that is especially true if they think that the other person/people doesn’t/don’t understand them. Politicians are not going to win voters by saying “I know what you want better than you do.” Politicians are more likely to win voters by saying “your interests are valuable; here’s my plan to address them.” Or, if possible, to shift people fro one set of ideas to another: “your interests are valuable, but here’s something else that might be valuable to you, too.” This second is what the scholar needs to do with her committee, certainly: she needs her dissertation to be able to say “here’s something you care about; I want to work on that problem because it’s something we both care about; But I am going to take a very different approach, so please give me a moment to explain why I’m taking this approach, even though it may not make sense to you at first glance.” If she can convince her committee that the problem she is working on is a problem that they care about, and get them to focus on that problem, then that focus on the problem can serve as the conceptual landmark that helps the committee orient themselves with respect to the unfamiliar ideas that the scholar needs them to accept in order to accept her thesis.
This is not the most focused post ever—there is more to be said than I want to write now—but I’ve already gone well over one thousand words, which is generally my target for blog posts, so I’m going to call it a wrap.
In both cases, we could ask ourselves: “what are they thinking?” In the case of my scholar and her committee, she can reasonably ask “what are they thinking?” with respect to her dissertation, when by many standards her work obviously qualifies, and the reception her work receives from many scholars not on her committee confirms this. In the case of the GOP voters, we might ask “what are they thinking?” with respect to those GOP voters who have no health care, who need health care, who can’t afford health care, and who also regularly vote for candidates who are hostile to government action to provide health care for everyone.
Now, “what are they thinking?” can be asked from a point of curiosity—of wanting to know what they are thinking? But it can also be asked from a more settled position—a position of greater belief in one’s own rightness—as a paraphrase of “how silly they are to think that!”
This post is about the importance of asking that question from the first perspective, not the second. I don’t mean to say that you should not believe your own opinions—if you think someone is doing something silly or wrong, you may very well be right. People do all sorts of silly things. And if you’re just sitting back watching, thinking what they do is silly works just fine. But if you’re involved—if you have some need to interact with or convince these people—as the scholar needs to convince her committee, and the political left wants to convince people to vote for candidates who align with the left—then that second version of the question is not going to help you get what you need.
If you need to communicate with people, and you want to get them to cooperate with you, there is great value in sincerely and openly asking “what are you thinking?” And there is great danger in the second version: “how could anyone be so silly as to think that?”
In the case of the scholar, it’s a little hard to dismiss her committee as silly, but taking them seriously is not quite enough to convince them that they should be on board with a project. It’s necessary to find out and understand what they are thinking so that you can create the necessary communicative bridges that will help them understand what you’re thinking. (As I write that, it occurs to me that if you’re thinking “what are they thinking?” about someone, they may well be thinking the same thing as you are—certainly the political right speaks of the political left as foolish/immoral/etc., which are flavors of “how could anyone be so silly to think that?”)
To communicate, and to persuade people to accept your way of thinking, you need to present to them ideas that make sense to them—and that means understanding what they think, so that you can suit your communication to their ideas.
If, for example, the scholar of my example wants her committee to accept her work she needs to convince them of its value (and the fact that other people find it valuable doesn’t help with that), and that means understanding what they value and framing your work with respect to ideas that they are already using. And then figuring out how to make some conceptual bridge to the ideas that you are using.
This can be particularly difficult if the ideas that you are using are radically different from the ideas that they are using. For the scholar, part of her struggle is getting her committee to accept her research methodology. In thinking about her situation, I was thinking about Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions and his idea that different scientific paradigms are “incommensurable”—that is to say that there is no absolute, objective standard by which all paradigms can be measured—what makes sense in one paradigm doesn’t make sense in others. In the scholar’s case, one of the crucial structures of her research doesn’t really play any role in the research paradigms used by her committee—the question, then, is how to bring this structure into her dissertation in a way that her committee accepts it. Ultimately, I think that the route is through understanding and focusing on what the committee wants. Yes, it may be true that what they want doesn’t make sense from the scholar’s paradigm, but focusing on that difference in view doesn’t suggest a good strategy for moving forward. What does, is to look at what the committee thinks is important, and then use that to create as much common ground as possible—then, once the common ground has been created, it becomes easier to start to make a bridge to her own work—how can she frame her choices in terms of questions that the committee thinks important? How can the ideas that are important to the committee be used to explain the choices she made that led her work to diverge from their expected paradigm?
There’s another dynamic that can play a role, too: if you think “how can they be so silly to think that?" about someone with whom you interact, you’re likely to antagonize them. Recently, while reading articles that brought up the “voting against their own interest” idea, I have been flashing back to a popular song from my youth: The Suicidal Tendencies’ Institutionalized. The song relates interactions between child and parents, and near the end, the parents say “We’ve decided it’s in your best interest that…” And the song narrator cries “My best interest? How do you know what my best interest is?” Knowing what is in someone’s best interests is complicated—in the song, maybe the parents really do know their child’s interests, or maybe the parents are wrong. Regardless of what the song narrator’s best interests really are—whether the parents are right or the child—we can certainly say that most people, like the child in the song, will resent having someone else tell them what their best interests are. And that is especially true if they think that the other person/people doesn’t/don’t understand them. Politicians are not going to win voters by saying “I know what you want better than you do.” Politicians are more likely to win voters by saying “your interests are valuable; here’s my plan to address them.” Or, if possible, to shift people fro one set of ideas to another: “your interests are valuable, but here’s something else that might be valuable to you, too.” This second is what the scholar needs to do with her committee, certainly: she needs her dissertation to be able to say “here’s something you care about; I want to work on that problem because it’s something we both care about; But I am going to take a very different approach, so please give me a moment to explain why I’m taking this approach, even though it may not make sense to you at first glance.” If she can convince her committee that the problem she is working on is a problem that they care about, and get them to focus on that problem, then that focus on the problem can serve as the conceptual landmark that helps the committee orient themselves with respect to the unfamiliar ideas that the scholar needs them to accept in order to accept her thesis.
This is not the most focused post ever—there is more to be said than I want to write now—but I’ve already gone well over one thousand words, which is generally my target for blog posts, so I’m going to call it a wrap.
Sunday, April 8, 2018
Inevitably, you will be asked to compromise.
You are going to get asked to do things you don't want to do. And you will have to negotiate some compromise. It's difficult, but accepting this inevitability makes it easier to set aside the frustration and focus on what you can accomplish.
When you’re a doctoral candidate, it can be pretty natural to start thinking “once I’m done, I’ll be free; I won’t have to do what my professors tell me any more. I’ll be able to do my work to suit myself.” Feeling adversarial toward your professors is pretty natural, as is feeling resentment for doing things that you don’t want to do. It’s not fun to be forced to write about something that you think off-subject just to please your professor. And it is therefore also natural to feel excitement at the prospect of being free of such disagreements with your professors.
The thing is, if it’s not your professors, it’s going to be someone else. This point was really driven home to me when I was talking with an author who was negotiating with the president of his publisher. The book is deep in process. The author has already edited it down significantly in size to suit the publisher. But recently the publisher asked him to change the title. “People won’t understand it. It won’t sell,” the publisher said.
This author is a tenure-track professor and a department chair, with multiple publications and a book manuscript that got rave reviews from the blind reviewers. But this morning, he had to face someone saying “I want you to do it differently.”
If you show your work to enough people, there is sure to be someone who will ask you to change it. And even if you’re only working with one person (or one institution), you might well get asked to change it. You are not, after all, the only independent actor with plans and desires and expectations.
I guess the message I’d like to boil this down to is that the need to compromise never goes away if you want to work with other people, so you have to figure out how (and when) to compromise on stuff.
You can do awesome work that many people will love, and you can still find people who will dislike it or want to change it. Are those people wrong? At times, it becomes necessary to make choices that aren’t entirely palatable: does the author insist on the title, even though it might mean losing the publisher? Does the author, give up the title to satisfy the publisher? Of course, the author could also decide that it’s a good idea to trust the publisher: after all, it would be nice to sell a lot of copies, right? And publishers know something about selling—more about selling than most professors, I would imagine.
I’ve been writing about perfectionism recently, and this is another angle on perfectionism: what one person views as perfect, another might view as problematic. What one person views as excellent, another might view as insufficient. Such differences in perception and evaluation reveal that “perfect” is not, practically speaking, the same as excellent.
When working on a project, it’s natural to focus on your own vision and on making a creation that matches that vision, and lives up to the standards that you set. It’s super important to be aware of your own standards, and to be able to strive for them.
To the extent that you hope your work will communicate with others—and that’s the purpose of writing—and will get good responses, the question of what is “perfect” is problematized: by which standard is the work evaluated? By your standard? By the standards of the audience?
It can often feel frustrating and even disempowering when someone asks you to change something you do to satisfy their desires. This is especially true if you don’t agree with their position. But at the same time, that very disagreement is important: to the extent that you dismiss their position, you are frustrating and disempowering them. There are times to hold firm to what you believe—I recommended that the author hold firm on the title—and there are times to think about what the other person is asking from you, and why they want it. Communication and community require compromise. If not yours, then someone else’s. It’s not always fun to compromise, and it’s not always appropriate. But it can be taken for granted that you will be asked and that you will have to negotiate it. For me, at least, understanding that reality helps make it more palatable: this isn’t something that I can change by being smarter or working harder; this is the way it is.
Thursday, March 15, 2018
The boy who cried wolf and ad hominem arguments
The story of the boy who cried “wolf” is the story of a person who lies, and as a result is not believed when he tells the truth—to his great detriment.
As an academic, one ought not give in to ad hominem arguments--arguments that a claim is false because the speaker is untrustworthy. A liar who tells you that the earth orbits the sun is telling the truth, even if he/she lies very often. Just because a speaker is untrustworthy, doesn’t mean that she/he isn’t telling the truth on a given occasion. This, indeed, is the resolution/denouement of the story of the boy who cried “wolf:” In the end, the boy falls victim to a real wolf because, having given people reason to doubt his veracity, no one is willing to help him when there is a real wolf.
As an academic, it is always appropriate to check the accuracy of statements that other people make, regardless of who makes the statement.
But in real life, having a record of telling the truth matters. There’s a reason that The New York Times is more respected than The National Enquirer. The Times is far less likely to publish utter falsehoods.
If you regularly tell lies, people will stop trusting you. Someone should tell that to Donald Trump, who made a speech on Wednesday in which he proudly announced that he made up stuff when talking with Justin Trudeau of Canada. Trump may tell the truth sometimes. He may tell the truth often. But if he lies often, then people will stop trusting him. And that may be fine for some contexts, but it will surely make it harder for him to negotiate with foreign leaders who will become disinclined to listen to his promises.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Structural Thinking
I met a young woman, an undergraduate at Cal, and asked her what she was studying. "Rhetoric," she said, sighing, "a completely worthless degree." I was obliged to disagree.
What is rhetoric? "The art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing," says one dictionary; "the study of the elements used in literature and public speaking, such as content, structure, cadence and style," says another. In short, it is the study of how to effectively present ideas, distinct from the question of whether the idea is good or not. This has led to rhetoric getting a bad rap--"language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience, but is often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content," says the first dictionary; "affectation or exaggeration...unsupported or inflated discourse," says the second.
Bad rap or not, we have to learn how to think in these terms. the five paragraph essay that they used to teach in elementary school or junior high--that gets a bad rap now, too. But it is an elegant example of basic rhetorical principles. You have an opening paragraph that introduces the idea to the reader, you have three examples, and you have a conclusion that ties everything up. This is, in simple form, the basic structure of a lot of really effective speaking and writing. Yes, there are those who wish to create emotional effects of surprise or blind enthusiasm who might not wish to present material this way, but as academic writers we want to follow the basic paradigm: introduce the ideas, give details/examples that develop the ideas presented in the introduction, and then wrap up the discussion by summarizing the main points and talking about what the point of the whole exercise was--what you take moving forward.
Whether talking about a paragraph, a section, a chapter, or the whole work, we can always use the same basic paradigm for thinking about how we are presenting our ideas to an audience. We can always rely on the template:
First I introduce the ideas I discuss in this [paragraph|section|chapter|dissertation]
Second I present materials that develop the ideas of the [paragraph|section|etc.]
Finally, I draw conclusions from the material I presented in the [paragraph|etc.].
At the level of the academic writer, with the scope of the dissertation, there are certainly structural liberties one can take, if one is a confident writer. But if one is struggling to write, using a worthy template can help simplify the problem--by simplifying the rhetorical aspect of the argument, one can focus on the logic, theory and analysis and use of data.
Thinking about the rhetorical aspect--how do I present this to an audience? how do I draw the audience in? how do I ensure that they will follow me where I want to go?--can provide an extra angle by which to help organize material. Sometimes ideas don't organize themselves in linear forms--for example some ideas face chicken-and-egg problems: you can't understand one without understanding the other, so which do you present first? A template can help somewhat, if you think of it as a way of imposing order on the ideas--an additional order that doesn't exist in the ideas themselves, but that serves your rhetorical purposes.
For example, when presenting material that has the aforementioned chicken-and-egg problem, you can think in terms of roles. Suppose you have four parts to the main idea. you can impose roles on the ideas: one part is presented first an an introduction: it defines ideas and sets up the rest of the discussion. The second part will still do some defining of ideas, but it will also start to go into greater depth; it presumes familiarity with the basics (provided by the first part), so it can look more at complexities; the third part then begins the process of closing up the argument: it brings out the details and the full depth of the argument, so that all the main detail and complexity of the has been brought out before the final section. The final part (of this hypothetical four-part idea) is used to summarize and conclude; what details you discuss of the fourth part of the idea can be used to bring together the details from the other parts to highlight the points that you want to make.
Ok, I've obviously simplified this example. There may not be four parts, and they may not want to work the way I've described, but whatever you write can follow the simple elegant template of introducing, giving details, and concluding. This template provides a way to think about how to communicate with your audience. If you can see a way to use it, it could make writing easier.
You may be saying something like "oh no, something else to think about; this just makes it more complicated. I don't have time for this." On one level that's like saying "I don't have time to look in the rearview mirror when driving": the consequences may not be as dire, but it's something you have to think about to write well. On another level, even though it may seem like it makes it more complicated at first, I believe that it helps simplify the project: by looking at the work from the additional perspective, by adding additional conditions to satisfy, you limit what the final piece will look like, thus giving you better direction and reducing the number of possibilities that you need to consider.
In order to effectively communicate our ideas--which is our goal in writing--it helps to think of the rhetorical aspects: how is the work going to be presented? By thinking about the role structure will play in communicating our ideas to an audience, we can give ourselves valuable guidance that will help organize our writing.
What is rhetoric? "The art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing," says one dictionary; "the study of the elements used in literature and public speaking, such as content, structure, cadence and style," says another. In short, it is the study of how to effectively present ideas, distinct from the question of whether the idea is good or not. This has led to rhetoric getting a bad rap--"language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience, but is often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content," says the first dictionary; "affectation or exaggeration...unsupported or inflated discourse," says the second.
Bad rap or not, we have to learn how to think in these terms. the five paragraph essay that they used to teach in elementary school or junior high--that gets a bad rap now, too. But it is an elegant example of basic rhetorical principles. You have an opening paragraph that introduces the idea to the reader, you have three examples, and you have a conclusion that ties everything up. This is, in simple form, the basic structure of a lot of really effective speaking and writing. Yes, there are those who wish to create emotional effects of surprise or blind enthusiasm who might not wish to present material this way, but as academic writers we want to follow the basic paradigm: introduce the ideas, give details/examples that develop the ideas presented in the introduction, and then wrap up the discussion by summarizing the main points and talking about what the point of the whole exercise was--what you take moving forward.
Whether talking about a paragraph, a section, a chapter, or the whole work, we can always use the same basic paradigm for thinking about how we are presenting our ideas to an audience. We can always rely on the template:
First I introduce the ideas I discuss in this [paragraph|section|chapter|dissertation]
Second I present materials that develop the ideas of the [paragraph|section|etc.]
Finally, I draw conclusions from the material I presented in the [paragraph|etc.].
At the level of the academic writer, with the scope of the dissertation, there are certainly structural liberties one can take, if one is a confident writer. But if one is struggling to write, using a worthy template can help simplify the problem--by simplifying the rhetorical aspect of the argument, one can focus on the logic, theory and analysis and use of data.
Thinking about the rhetorical aspect--how do I present this to an audience? how do I draw the audience in? how do I ensure that they will follow me where I want to go?--can provide an extra angle by which to help organize material. Sometimes ideas don't organize themselves in linear forms--for example some ideas face chicken-and-egg problems: you can't understand one without understanding the other, so which do you present first? A template can help somewhat, if you think of it as a way of imposing order on the ideas--an additional order that doesn't exist in the ideas themselves, but that serves your rhetorical purposes.
For example, when presenting material that has the aforementioned chicken-and-egg problem, you can think in terms of roles. Suppose you have four parts to the main idea. you can impose roles on the ideas: one part is presented first an an introduction: it defines ideas and sets up the rest of the discussion. The second part will still do some defining of ideas, but it will also start to go into greater depth; it presumes familiarity with the basics (provided by the first part), so it can look more at complexities; the third part then begins the process of closing up the argument: it brings out the details and the full depth of the argument, so that all the main detail and complexity of the has been brought out before the final section. The final part (of this hypothetical four-part idea) is used to summarize and conclude; what details you discuss of the fourth part of the idea can be used to bring together the details from the other parts to highlight the points that you want to make.
Ok, I've obviously simplified this example. There may not be four parts, and they may not want to work the way I've described, but whatever you write can follow the simple elegant template of introducing, giving details, and concluding. This template provides a way to think about how to communicate with your audience. If you can see a way to use it, it could make writing easier.
You may be saying something like "oh no, something else to think about; this just makes it more complicated. I don't have time for this." On one level that's like saying "I don't have time to look in the rearview mirror when driving": the consequences may not be as dire, but it's something you have to think about to write well. On another level, even though it may seem like it makes it more complicated at first, I believe that it helps simplify the project: by looking at the work from the additional perspective, by adding additional conditions to satisfy, you limit what the final piece will look like, thus giving you better direction and reducing the number of possibilities that you need to consider.
In order to effectively communicate our ideas--which is our goal in writing--it helps to think of the rhetorical aspects: how is the work going to be presented? By thinking about the role structure will play in communicating our ideas to an audience, we can give ourselves valuable guidance that will help organize our writing.
Monday, September 29, 2008
No Apologies for Writing
When I told my friend Eve about my blog, I broke a rule that I generally propound in terms of presenting work: don't apologize. So writing my previous entry about Eve brought this to mind.
Speaking for myself, it's one thing to write for an anonymous world, and something different to write for someone I know. And something different to show work to a friend than to a professor or other person in a professional context.
But it's neither necessary nor appropriate to apologize for writing (presuming, of course, it's not writing of a nature that could be considered offensive--racist, perhaps).
Presumably you have done what you could do in the time you had, with the resources available to you. That is nothing to apologize for. And if you've been wasting time, out playing, why apologize for that. Or at least why apologize to someone else for that? It's your choice of what to do with your life.
I find in presenting my writing and in the writing itself, I have a tendency to apologize for my positions or to apologize for the quality or character. It is a tendency that I try to eliminate from my writing, because I don't think it helps make it better.
If we expect criticism, or if we are good at criticizing ourselves, then we look at our work and see the imperfections and the problems. But that is not how others are looking at the work.
Take me, for example. I'm good at finding problems--that's part of what makes me an effective editor. But my aim in reading is not to find problems. Yes, when I'm reading as an editor, I am looking for problems, but when I'm looking at a piece of work just to get an idea of what it is, as I do when making an estimate, I'm looking to see what the work has to offer--to see its strengths, its value and significance.
Of course people present their work to me with apologies all the time--which is a little silly because my role is to help clean up your work--but I think it's natural to have some apprehension that our work will not be treated lovingly. And if we are closely associating ourselves with our work, then that can be painful.
The worst thing about apologizing for work that we've done--whatever faults we might that the work has--is that apologizing sets the reader looking for the problems. And why would we want to do that? There may be a time and place to inform your reader of flaws in your document (especially when working on a dissertation), but even such indication of flaws should not be presented as a problem to apologize for, but as a part of the "to do" list.
If we can learn to let the work speak for itself, our luck, I think, will be better.
Speaking for myself, it's one thing to write for an anonymous world, and something different to write for someone I know. And something different to show work to a friend than to a professor or other person in a professional context.
But it's neither necessary nor appropriate to apologize for writing (presuming, of course, it's not writing of a nature that could be considered offensive--racist, perhaps).
Presumably you have done what you could do in the time you had, with the resources available to you. That is nothing to apologize for. And if you've been wasting time, out playing, why apologize for that. Or at least why apologize to someone else for that? It's your choice of what to do with your life.
I find in presenting my writing and in the writing itself, I have a tendency to apologize for my positions or to apologize for the quality or character. It is a tendency that I try to eliminate from my writing, because I don't think it helps make it better.
If we expect criticism, or if we are good at criticizing ourselves, then we look at our work and see the imperfections and the problems. But that is not how others are looking at the work.
Take me, for example. I'm good at finding problems--that's part of what makes me an effective editor. But my aim in reading is not to find problems. Yes, when I'm reading as an editor, I am looking for problems, but when I'm looking at a piece of work just to get an idea of what it is, as I do when making an estimate, I'm looking to see what the work has to offer--to see its strengths, its value and significance.
Of course people present their work to me with apologies all the time--which is a little silly because my role is to help clean up your work--but I think it's natural to have some apprehension that our work will not be treated lovingly. And if we are closely associating ourselves with our work, then that can be painful.
The worst thing about apologizing for work that we've done--whatever faults we might that the work has--is that apologizing sets the reader looking for the problems. And why would we want to do that? There may be a time and place to inform your reader of flaws in your document (especially when working on a dissertation), but even such indication of flaws should not be presented as a problem to apologize for, but as a part of the "to do" list.
If we can learn to let the work speak for itself, our luck, I think, will be better.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
The Introduction: APA recommendations
I was looking back over what the APA (American Psychological Association) Publication
Manual has to say about Introductions in preparation for a meeting with a writer tomorrow. As an aid to my own understanding, and because I need something to write about here, I figured I'd just make a few notes about what they say. I think these notes, while not entirely applicable to dissertations that aren't structured around an empirical study, provide some good insight into what readers are looking for--for what the APA thinks is worth asking for in introductions.
As an aside, the APA Manual also has a good section on what to put in abstracts (pp. 12-15) that is also worth reading, even if you're trying to write an introduction, because an introduction and an abstract are attempting to do very similar things: they are where the reader starts; they are what draws the reader in.
Ok, so I'm using section 1.08 of the 5th edition of The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, pp. 15-17.
The APA Manual breaks section 1.08 into three parts, which, if we want, we can also take as a basic outline for an Introduction--each part of the Manual's section 1.08 corresponds to a section of the Introduction. The three parts are titled: "Introduce the problem;" "Develop the Background;" and "State the Purpose and Rationale." The character of each part, I think, is basically apparent from the title of the section, but these section titles wouldn't really work as section titles in an actual introduction. Instead, one might have sections titled "Statement of Problem," "Background" (or "Literature Review"), and "Purpose and Rationale of the Study."
The first section, "Introduce the problem" says:
We can see in that terminal phrase--"what was done and why?"--a call for an explicit statement of purpose. At the least, I read it that way; regular readers of this blog have probably noted that I talk about sense of purpose a lot.
The four bulleted questions do not necessarily represent sections of the first section of the introduction (the "Statement of Problem"), but they could be, because that section is setting up all that comes after, and before getting into the details of a literature review, one wants to give the reader a complete sense of "what was done and why", so that the details of the literature review are framed in terms of the purpose of the project.
The "Develop the background" section opens with the sentences "Discuss the literature, but do not include an exhaustive historical review. Assume that the reader is knowledgeable about the field for which you are writing and does not require a complete digest" (p. 16).
What this means to me is: keep the details down, except with respect to those details that are directly related to your study. For example, if you are using a two variables, you need only discuss details of those variables that are related to how the two variables might interact, and not details about how each variable interacts with all other variables. (I think that last sentence doesn't really make sense; I apologize; I want to move on.)
Finally, the "State the purpose and rationale." Have I ever said anything about the value of an explicit statement of purpose? Ok, so here my claim is seconded.
Anyway, if you happen to be writing an APA paper, taking a look at section 1.08 of the manual can be of great help: it provides a model for what is expected.
If you don't have a manual of your own, and don't want to check the library (it's only two pages of reading), it's worth thinking about what the three tasks assigned to the introduction by the APA: "Introduce the problem;" "Develop the Background;" and "State the Purpose and Rationale." How is your paper going to accomplish these three things in the introduction? I think that every academic work wants to do something of the sort in its introduction, whether we're talking about the introduction to a chapter or to a book/dissertation. The introduction is where the foundation is laid for the rest o the argument; it is akin to the statement of axioms prior to the beginning of a logical proof. The introduction says what you're looking for, how you're going to look for it, and what kinds of evidence you're going to consider. This is a paradigm that any paper can follow.
If, for example, one is writing a paper in history the introduction might say (1) what the temporal parameters are, and what kind of development you're looking at (whether those are changes in a population (e.g. US expatriates in the 1920s), a process (e.g., agriculture) or type of object (e.g., furniture)), (2) what is your philosophical/theoretical lens (how do you define the task of the historian? Are you e.g., a Marxist theorist)?, and (3) what general primary evidence you will be using (actually, this last may be unnecessary for many fields like history or literature where what is considered acceptable evidence is so well accepted that no discussion of it is necessary).
Like yesterday, I think I could say more, and maybe will, but not right now, got other things to do...
Manual has to say about Introductions in preparation for a meeting with a writer tomorrow. As an aid to my own understanding, and because I need something to write about here, I figured I'd just make a few notes about what they say. I think these notes, while not entirely applicable to dissertations that aren't structured around an empirical study, provide some good insight into what readers are looking for--for what the APA thinks is worth asking for in introductions.
As an aside, the APA Manual also has a good section on what to put in abstracts (pp. 12-15) that is also worth reading, even if you're trying to write an introduction, because an introduction and an abstract are attempting to do very similar things: they are where the reader starts; they are what draws the reader in.
Ok, so I'm using section 1.08 of the 5th edition of The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, pp. 15-17.
The APA Manual breaks section 1.08 into three parts, which, if we want, we can also take as a basic outline for an Introduction--each part of the Manual's section 1.08 corresponds to a section of the Introduction. The three parts are titled: "Introduce the problem;" "Develop the Background;" and "State the Purpose and Rationale." The character of each part, I think, is basically apparent from the title of the section, but these section titles wouldn't really work as section titles in an actual introduction. Instead, one might have sections titled "Statement of Problem," "Background" (or "Literature Review"), and "Purpose and Rationale of the Study."
The first section, "Introduce the problem" says:
Before writing the introduction considerA good introduction answers these questions...and, by summarizing the relevant arguments and the data, gives the reader a firm sense of what was done and why. (p. 16)
- Why is this problem important?
- How do the hypothesis and the experimental design relate to the problem?
- What are the theoretical implications of the study, and how does the study relate to previous work in the area?
- What theoretical propositions are tested, and how were they derived?
We can see in that terminal phrase--"what was done and why?"--a call for an explicit statement of purpose. At the least, I read it that way; regular readers of this blog have probably noted that I talk about sense of purpose a lot.
The four bulleted questions do not necessarily represent sections of the first section of the introduction (the "Statement of Problem"), but they could be, because that section is setting up all that comes after, and before getting into the details of a literature review, one wants to give the reader a complete sense of "what was done and why", so that the details of the literature review are framed in terms of the purpose of the project.
The "Develop the background" section opens with the sentences "Discuss the literature, but do not include an exhaustive historical review. Assume that the reader is knowledgeable about the field for which you are writing and does not require a complete digest" (p. 16).
What this means to me is: keep the details down, except with respect to those details that are directly related to your study. For example, if you are using a two variables, you need only discuss details of those variables that are related to how the two variables might interact, and not details about how each variable interacts with all other variables. (I think that last sentence doesn't really make sense; I apologize; I want to move on.)
Finally, the "State the purpose and rationale." Have I ever said anything about the value of an explicit statement of purpose? Ok, so here my claim is seconded.
Anyway, if you happen to be writing an APA paper, taking a look at section 1.08 of the manual can be of great help: it provides a model for what is expected.
If you don't have a manual of your own, and don't want to check the library (it's only two pages of reading), it's worth thinking about what the three tasks assigned to the introduction by the APA: "Introduce the problem;" "Develop the Background;" and "State the Purpose and Rationale." How is your paper going to accomplish these three things in the introduction? I think that every academic work wants to do something of the sort in its introduction, whether we're talking about the introduction to a chapter or to a book/dissertation. The introduction is where the foundation is laid for the rest o the argument; it is akin to the statement of axioms prior to the beginning of a logical proof. The introduction says what you're looking for, how you're going to look for it, and what kinds of evidence you're going to consider. This is a paradigm that any paper can follow.
If, for example, one is writing a paper in history the introduction might say (1) what the temporal parameters are, and what kind of development you're looking at (whether those are changes in a population (e.g. US expatriates in the 1920s), a process (e.g., agriculture) or type of object (e.g., furniture)), (2) what is your philosophical/theoretical lens (how do you define the task of the historian? Are you e.g., a Marxist theorist)?, and (3) what general primary evidence you will be using (actually, this last may be unnecessary for many fields like history or literature where what is considered acceptable evidence is so well accepted that no discussion of it is necessary).
Like yesterday, I think I could say more, and maybe will, but not right now, got other things to do...
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Framing (2)
Sarah asks:
You might start an entire work saying "Our goal is to trace the history of X, in order to better understand what X is like today." Or maybe "The goal of this work is to trace the history of X, in order to provide an example of the general process Y." Or, to take an example from a book I revere: "The following essay is written in the conviction that anarchism, while perhaps not the most attractive political philosophy, is certainly excellent medicine for epistemology, and for the philosophy of science." (From Paul Feyerabend's Against Method. The italics are Feyerabend's.) Of course, when you start a work, the need to frame it is greatest.
When you are beginning a section of a larger work, you want to frame that section in terms of the larger work. This can be done by explaining to the reader the transition and flow of the work. For example: "This section discusses issues related to a specific aspect of X." Or "Having defined the basic parameters of X, we will look at some of the effects of process Y on X." Or maybe "In order to discuss X, we need to take a look at what came before X; therefore we must first examine W, which will serve as a foil for X."
To return to Sarah's question, as you open those nine pages, do you reference the main question of your study? Do you reference the section that comes before those nine pages? Do you discuss what will follow those nine pages? If not, then I suggest adding a couple of sentences to tell the reader right up front something like "The history of the ABC commission played a crucial role in the development of the 123 department, which set the general parameters for who would be counted as receiving DEF benefits." This kind of statement only comes at the beginning of a section that is, in a way a self-contained unit in the larger work. This kind of framing requires your having a sense of actual purpose for including the discussion: why did you choose to include this discussion in your work? What does this specific discussion--whether it be a discussion of an event, of a theory, of a term, a person, etc.--what purpose does this discussion have in the context of the larger work?
Beyond that opening statement, I think that you want to start to work framing in through the use of simple sentences later in the section and at transitions within the section. As you start to wrap up the section you want to say to the reader stuff like "this detail that we just discussed is one of the key factors in stuff that I'm going to tell you about later," or maybe "this detail is one of the keys in understanding the stuff I discussed in the previous chapter."
Good methods of framing often rely on mentioning what has just been discussed or what will next be discussed in relation to the current section: how does this section relate to what comes before and after? What is the transition and what the logic? If you just finished discussing theory A and you're currently discussing theory B, how do those theories compare to each other? Are they in conflict or in agreement? where are they alike and where similar? If you framed the previous section well, then you can frame the current section in terms of the previous section. If you are trying to frame the current section with respect to what will come next, it helps to make some reference back to the main question, too.
How often do you need to remind the reader? I think the answer to that is: whenever the link starts to seem tenuous. I know that's not really clear. But what I'm thinking of is that sometimes, as we write about a subject we've been thinking about, it is easy to make leaps of reasoning and follow them--those are the places the reader gets lost. So, if you're working to tie your chain of reasoning together so the reader can follow it, then a lot of framing will naturally develop.
The most important framing of all is in your head: you, the writer, need to be able to explain to yourself what role a given section serves in relating to the main question of your work. If you are framing the ideas yourself--and you write about the things that you see the importance of--then the ideas will naturally come out framed.
If you want to show, for example, how the development of enumeration practices in government, business and charity, led to an entire segment of the population suffering from a series of problems, then each discussion of government policy, of business practice, of theory, etc., will naturally be imbued with framing because you, the writer, will be motivated. If you discuss a government commission, it will be because that commission had an impact in some way; if you discuss a theory, it is because that theory shaped some aspects of the phenomenon you're studying, and so on.
As a final note, the hardest things to frame are things that you need to include to satisfy others. In my dissertation, I was primarily interested in ideas of science and the practical implications of these ideas and how to improve on those ideas given things that we've learned about human cognition. But I included discussion of architectural aesthetics largely at the prompting of my committee; I was interested in the aesthetic questions, and I had a lot to say about them, but it was not quite as directly germane to my main sense of purpose, and so framing it was very difficult. One can't just drop the material in and say "oh by the way: here's 20 pages on some tangential issue," or at least it doesn't feel confident. I guess in such situations, I would recommend making sure that you have a strong vision of what you would like to include, and then it becomes easier, at least, to encapsulate difficult material, or to maybe work in little bits of it in unobtrusive manners, perhaps as a subtheme.
I'm looking back at my text and thinking to myself "I have 9 pages of revised single spaced text (with several more to follow) and no where in here do I feel I have shared with my reader why this long digression in detail is important."The most important place for framing is right near the beginning. It seems to me that you want your reader to know the general purpose and context of your work right from the start. As I said yesterday, this framing is related to the sense of purpose, and I have previously (on Aug. 18, in a post titled "Sense of Purpose: Explicit statements") noted how these explicit statements of purpose are placed in the preface--that is to say the first piece the reader is to read. This is true for the entire work, and it's true for pieces of the larger work: as you begin a new section, you frame that section within its context.
When should we tell the readers about our framing? How often do we need to remind them of it? What are some graceful and tactful ways of doing this without it feeling out of place?
You might start an entire work saying "Our goal is to trace the history of X, in order to better understand what X is like today." Or maybe "The goal of this work is to trace the history of X, in order to provide an example of the general process Y." Or, to take an example from a book I revere: "The following essay is written in the conviction that anarchism, while perhaps not the most attractive political philosophy, is certainly excellent medicine for epistemology, and for the philosophy of science." (From Paul Feyerabend's Against Method. The italics are Feyerabend's.) Of course, when you start a work, the need to frame it is greatest.
When you are beginning a section of a larger work, you want to frame that section in terms of the larger work. This can be done by explaining to the reader the transition and flow of the work. For example: "This section discusses issues related to a specific aspect of X." Or "Having defined the basic parameters of X, we will look at some of the effects of process Y on X." Or maybe "In order to discuss X, we need to take a look at what came before X; therefore we must first examine W, which will serve as a foil for X."
To return to Sarah's question, as you open those nine pages, do you reference the main question of your study? Do you reference the section that comes before those nine pages? Do you discuss what will follow those nine pages? If not, then I suggest adding a couple of sentences to tell the reader right up front something like "The history of the ABC commission played a crucial role in the development of the 123 department, which set the general parameters for who would be counted as receiving DEF benefits." This kind of statement only comes at the beginning of a section that is, in a way a self-contained unit in the larger work. This kind of framing requires your having a sense of actual purpose for including the discussion: why did you choose to include this discussion in your work? What does this specific discussion--whether it be a discussion of an event, of a theory, of a term, a person, etc.--what purpose does this discussion have in the context of the larger work?
Beyond that opening statement, I think that you want to start to work framing in through the use of simple sentences later in the section and at transitions within the section. As you start to wrap up the section you want to say to the reader stuff like "this detail that we just discussed is one of the key factors in stuff that I'm going to tell you about later," or maybe "this detail is one of the keys in understanding the stuff I discussed in the previous chapter."
Good methods of framing often rely on mentioning what has just been discussed or what will next be discussed in relation to the current section: how does this section relate to what comes before and after? What is the transition and what the logic? If you just finished discussing theory A and you're currently discussing theory B, how do those theories compare to each other? Are they in conflict or in agreement? where are they alike and where similar? If you framed the previous section well, then you can frame the current section in terms of the previous section. If you are trying to frame the current section with respect to what will come next, it helps to make some reference back to the main question, too.
How often do you need to remind the reader? I think the answer to that is: whenever the link starts to seem tenuous. I know that's not really clear. But what I'm thinking of is that sometimes, as we write about a subject we've been thinking about, it is easy to make leaps of reasoning and follow them--those are the places the reader gets lost. So, if you're working to tie your chain of reasoning together so the reader can follow it, then a lot of framing will naturally develop.
The most important framing of all is in your head: you, the writer, need to be able to explain to yourself what role a given section serves in relating to the main question of your work. If you are framing the ideas yourself--and you write about the things that you see the importance of--then the ideas will naturally come out framed.
If you want to show, for example, how the development of enumeration practices in government, business and charity, led to an entire segment of the population suffering from a series of problems, then each discussion of government policy, of business practice, of theory, etc., will naturally be imbued with framing because you, the writer, will be motivated. If you discuss a government commission, it will be because that commission had an impact in some way; if you discuss a theory, it is because that theory shaped some aspects of the phenomenon you're studying, and so on.
As a final note, the hardest things to frame are things that you need to include to satisfy others. In my dissertation, I was primarily interested in ideas of science and the practical implications of these ideas and how to improve on those ideas given things that we've learned about human cognition. But I included discussion of architectural aesthetics largely at the prompting of my committee; I was interested in the aesthetic questions, and I had a lot to say about them, but it was not quite as directly germane to my main sense of purpose, and so framing it was very difficult. One can't just drop the material in and say "oh by the way: here's 20 pages on some tangential issue," or at least it doesn't feel confident. I guess in such situations, I would recommend making sure that you have a strong vision of what you would like to include, and then it becomes easier, at least, to encapsulate difficult material, or to maybe work in little bits of it in unobtrusive manners, perhaps as a subtheme.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Rules and principles; Structure and audience
I try to rely on principles rather than rules. To me the distinction depends on the difference between a goal I'm trying to achieve and a clearly defined prescription for behavior. This is something of a situationalist perspective: a principle guides, but does not bind, for the boundary cases where the proper path is not clear. By contrast a rule is a rule; it is to be followed.
As example we might contrast the Judeo-Christian rule: "Thou shalt not kill" with the principle (Buddhist, perhaps) of preserving life. The rule is clear cut: but what do you do in the rare (but much discussed) situation where your ability to take the life of one person will save the lives of many others? The rule is simple, clear cut. It does, however, put aside the difficult conflicting values in the problem. The principle is conflicted; judgment is left in the hands of the individual. It is more difficult to apply a principle in this kind of case than a rule--or at least the decision is more difficult.
Yesterday I was writing about structure and the structure of the Introduction. I got a question about the structure that said "...are we expected to...". I know I'm kind of misreading this, because the questioner, I think, is not looking at me as an authority figure who sets expectations that must be met (I hope). But it made me think about structure, formulas and why we use structures and formulas.
Part of what I wanted to show, in addition to suggesting a specific sort of structure, was that structure is motivated. The formula is not there simply as a formalism to be followed, but rather the formula is there because the writer has some purposes, and the formula helps the writer accomplish that purpose.
One purpose that all writers share is the desire to get the reader engaged. Hence there is an introduction of some sort. In fiction, writers introduce there work in ways that set up tension, or that address the reader; the reader of fiction has certain expectations, and the writer is going to play with those expectations. In academic writing the introduction is done differently: the academic writer wants to put all the cards on the table--or at least the most important one; he academic writer draws the academic reader in by convincing the reader that the work addresses a significant issue, and that the work is done well. What happens if the academic reader thinks the study deals with an insignificant issue, or the research was executed in a such a shoddy manner as to be worthless?
The point of structural formulas is that they help us engage the reader. The models have been used because they work, but they have also been used because they suit the writer's purpose. If you can see structure as a tool to help you reach the reader and convince the reader of the quality of your work, then you will deal with structural formulas in a different fashion: you will see them as suggestions that may help you act in accordance with a guiding principle (like the desire to engage the reader), rather than onerous prescriptions.
As example we might contrast the Judeo-Christian rule: "Thou shalt not kill" with the principle (Buddhist, perhaps) of preserving life. The rule is clear cut: but what do you do in the rare (but much discussed) situation where your ability to take the life of one person will save the lives of many others? The rule is simple, clear cut. It does, however, put aside the difficult conflicting values in the problem. The principle is conflicted; judgment is left in the hands of the individual. It is more difficult to apply a principle in this kind of case than a rule--or at least the decision is more difficult.
Yesterday I was writing about structure and the structure of the Introduction. I got a question about the structure that said "...are we expected to...". I know I'm kind of misreading this, because the questioner, I think, is not looking at me as an authority figure who sets expectations that must be met (I hope). But it made me think about structure, formulas and why we use structures and formulas.
Part of what I wanted to show, in addition to suggesting a specific sort of structure, was that structure is motivated. The formula is not there simply as a formalism to be followed, but rather the formula is there because the writer has some purposes, and the formula helps the writer accomplish that purpose.
One purpose that all writers share is the desire to get the reader engaged. Hence there is an introduction of some sort. In fiction, writers introduce there work in ways that set up tension, or that address the reader; the reader of fiction has certain expectations, and the writer is going to play with those expectations. In academic writing the introduction is done differently: the academic writer wants to put all the cards on the table--or at least the most important one; he academic writer draws the academic reader in by convincing the reader that the work addresses a significant issue, and that the work is done well. What happens if the academic reader thinks the study deals with an insignificant issue, or the research was executed in a such a shoddy manner as to be worthless?
The point of structural formulas is that they help us engage the reader. The models have been used because they work, but they have also been used because they suit the writer's purpose. If you can see structure as a tool to help you reach the reader and convince the reader of the quality of your work, then you will deal with structural formulas in a different fashion: you will see them as suggestions that may help you act in accordance with a guiding principle (like the desire to engage the reader), rather than onerous prescriptions.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Structure and Audience 2
What I just wrote in my previous blog entry put me in mind of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, which is introduced with the following apropos passage (thanks to Project Gutenberg, a great resource for free electronic copies of many published works):
Fielding speaks metaphorically, and as a writer of fiction, of course, but what he says is true for the academic writer, too. What is the abstract, after all, except a "bill of fare" in Fielding's terms? As writers, especially as academic writers, our purpose is (or ought to be) to share our ideas, and to that end we should endeavor to reveal to our readers what they can expect, so they can decide whether to read or move on. On a more general level, what Fielding is suggesting is that structure, generally,--that is out choice of where to place elements--is one of the ways that we can reach our readers: we make structural choices so that we get the responses we want--for example, so that the reader can decide whether to move on or not.
An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money. In the former case, it is well known that the entertainer provides what fare he pleases; and though this should be very indifferent, and utterly disagreeable to the taste of his company, they must not find any fault; nay, on the contrary, good breeding forces them outwardly to approve and to commend whatever is set before them. Now the contrary of this happens to the master of an ordinary. Men who pay for what they eat will insist on gratifying their palates, however nice and whimsical these may prove; and if everything is not agreeable to their taste, will challenge a right to censure, to abuse, and to d--n their dinner without controul.
To prevent, therefore, giving offence to their customers by any such disappointment, it hath been usual with the honest and well-meaning host to provide a bill of fare which all persons may peruse at their first entrance into the house; and having thence acquainted themselves with the entertainment which they may expect, may either stay and regale with what is provided for them, or may depart to some other ordinary better accommodated to their taste.
Fielding speaks metaphorically, and as a writer of fiction, of course, but what he says is true for the academic writer, too. What is the abstract, after all, except a "bill of fare" in Fielding's terms? As writers, especially as academic writers, our purpose is (or ought to be) to share our ideas, and to that end we should endeavor to reveal to our readers what they can expect, so they can decide whether to read or move on. On a more general level, what Fielding is suggesting is that structure, generally,--that is out choice of where to place elements--is one of the ways that we can reach our readers: we make structural choices so that we get the responses we want--for example, so that the reader can decide whether to move on or not.
Structure and Audience
I wrote the following notes to a writer who had sent an introduction that was an uninterrupted six pages long. It was a pretty good draft, but...
But the structure of this as a whole could be more articulated. Right now you basically have six pages of uninterrupted flow which try to introduce the subject of the study and to describe its motivation. But, the different tasks of the introduction could be broken up into sections that you can then mark using section headers—which helps articulate the structure, so that the reader has an even easier time of following the structure.
A basic structure suggested in my preceding sentence would have two sections:
1. Introduction
a. Introduce ideas
b. describe motivation for the study
But this structure is a little more basic than is typically used in a dissertation, where the introduction is broken into sections, perhaps in the following manner:
1. Introduction
a. what it is that you're talking about (the subject matter)
b. why the reader should care (why the subject matter is important)
c. what you hope to find out about the subject matter (what your research question or intention is)
d. How you intend to learn about the subject matter (the research methodology—in your case this might also be a description of study aims like website creation).
In general it might help to remember that the writing is there to guide the responses of the reader: so sometimes think about the chunks of writing by asking yourself “what does this chunk of writing accomplish in my plan to control the response of the reader?” Notice in the four-part outline for an introduction above, each section has a plan with respect to the reader: first you give them an overview of what you’re talking abut, then you give them a reason to care about that subject, then you tell them how you plan to respond to that motivation (in two parts).
Concluding remark for the blog: We often forget about our audience when we're busy trying to say something, and when we're struggling to get it down in words. But keeping the audience in mind can help us focus our efforts, and make decisions about how to proceed. By reminding ourselves of the audience, and of our need to communicate with the audience, we are more likely to write in the important transitional material that makes a work readable.
But the structure of this as a whole could be more articulated. Right now you basically have six pages of uninterrupted flow which try to introduce the subject of the study and to describe its motivation. But, the different tasks of the introduction could be broken up into sections that you can then mark using section headers—which helps articulate the structure, so that the reader has an even easier time of following the structure.
A basic structure suggested in my preceding sentence would have two sections:
1. Introduction
a. Introduce ideas
b. describe motivation for the study
But this structure is a little more basic than is typically used in a dissertation, where the introduction is broken into sections, perhaps in the following manner:
1. Introduction
a. what it is that you're talking about (the subject matter)
b. why the reader should care (why the subject matter is important)
c. what you hope to find out about the subject matter (what your research question or intention is)
d. How you intend to learn about the subject matter (the research methodology—in your case this might also be a description of study aims like website creation).
In general it might help to remember that the writing is there to guide the responses of the reader: so sometimes think about the chunks of writing by asking yourself “what does this chunk of writing accomplish in my plan to control the response of the reader?” Notice in the four-part outline for an introduction above, each section has a plan with respect to the reader: first you give them an overview of what you’re talking abut, then you give them a reason to care about that subject, then you tell them how you plan to respond to that motivation (in two parts).
Concluding remark for the blog: We often forget about our audience when we're busy trying to say something, and when we're struggling to get it down in words. But keeping the audience in mind can help us focus our efforts, and make decisions about how to proceed. By reminding ourselves of the audience, and of our need to communicate with the audience, we are more likely to write in the important transitional material that makes a work readable.
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