Tag Archives: Academic writing

Links: Same As It Ever Was, Revision and Sprezzatura, Writing as Habit

Posted on February 11, 2011 | Leave a comment

Here is a review in Times Higher Education of a book about the management of scholarly information in the medieval and early modern world. The reviewer calls it a prehistory of our current predicament and argues that there is nothing new about our feeling that there is ‘too much to know’. I am interested in the idea that we have always needed strategies for managing information, that reading ‘the whole thing’ has never been a simple norm in scholarly work.

In this article from the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Greenblatt discusses the invisible labour of writing: writers revise endlessly, but readers only see final versions. Greenblatt’s interest is Shakespeare and the notion of sprezzatura, but these ideas are also relevant for academic writing. We might make more time for revision if we understood how much revision goes into published work. Imagining that everything comes easier to other people may be tempting, but it will not help us commit to extensive revision.

Finally, a blog post from The Thesis Whisperer that I could not resist. It starts with an anecdote about infant sleep patterns and moves on to some astute observations about the role of habit in writing. Every parent of a newborn knows (or has been told) that ‘sleep breeds sleep’; could it be equally true that ‘writing breeds writing’? And is it possible that we resist writing as vigorously as babies resist sleeping? The post goes on to suggest that one obstacle to good writing habits may be the absence of an obvious audience; to counteract this anti-social aspect of writing, the post lists some interesting questions designed to bring our potential audience into focus while we write.

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Reverse Outlines

Posted on February 9, 2011 | 75 comments

My favourite revision strategy is the reverse outline. Simply stated, a reverse outline is an outline that we create from an existing text; rather than turning an outline into a text, we are turning a text into an outline. Regardless of whether or not you create an outline before you write, creating one after you have written a first draft can be invaluable. A reverse outline will reveal the structure—and thus the structural problems—of a text.

The steps to creating a reverse outline are simple:

1 Number the paragraphs
2 Identify the topic of each paragraph
3 Arrange these topics into an outline
4 Analyze this outline
5 Create a revised outline
6 Reorganize the text according to the revised outline
7 Check for topic sentences and cohesion

Step 1: Number the paragraphs
The basic unit of a reverse outline is the paragraph, so the first step is to number the paragraphs. The simple act of directing our attention towards paragraphs—and thus away from sentences—can be helpful: while writers naturally focus on sentences, we must always remember that our readers are naturally inclined to focus on paragraphs.

Step 2: Identify the topic of each paragraph 
Once the paragraphs have been numbered, try to identify a topic in each one. Since you are looking at an early draft, this process will be challenging: not all paragraphs will have topics and not all topics will be expressed neatly in a single paragraph. When doing a reverse outline, it is crucial to remember that you are trying to make evident what is there rather than what ought to be there. In other words, this step is diagnostic. You are simply noting what each paragraph was trying to do, for better or worse. Once you’ve done that, you can observe whether topic sentences can be found and make a note of paragraph length. Again, at this stage, you are observing rather than judging or remedying. Does the paragraph have a topic sentence? Yes or no? And how long is the paragraph? The latter can be recorded in word count or in more qualitative terms as short, average, or long.

Step 3: Arrange these topics into an outline
To create this preliminary outline, you are doing nothing more than listing the topics that you’ve identified, paragraph by paragraph. The crucial thing at this stage is to leave your original text alone and work just on the outline; you are trying to keep yourself away from the muddling effect of the detailed content in your own writing. As an advocate for your future reader, you are trying to see past the detail and look just at essential structure.

Step 4: Analyze this outline
The next step is to analyze this outline, paying particular attention to the logic  and proportionality of your internal organization. Understanding the logic involves observing the way elements have been placed in relation to one another. Understanding the proportionality involves observing how much space is being devoted to each element. This step is the bridge between noting what you have and preparing to create something new.

Step 5: Create a revised outline
During steps 3 and 4, you’ve been working with a list of topics; in step 5, you will have to transform that list into a genuine outline. Now that you can see all the topics and can start to see possible weaknesses in either your ordering of points or your allocation of space, you are ready to create a better outline for the text. You have the best of both worlds at this point: you know a great deal that you didn’t know before you started writing, but you are still working at a level of abstraction that will keep you from getting bogged down in the details.

Step 6: Reorganize the text according to the revised outline
Here comes the hard part. In steps 3, 4, and 5, you’ve been working with the outline. Now it’s time to use this new outline to transform the text. And unless you are an incredibly confident writer, you will find this scary. That initial draft—even with all the flaws that you’ve just uncovered—will generally have a real hold on you. That hold comes from the legitimate fear that you might take away existing coherence and flow without being able to replace it with something better. At this point, you need faith, faith in the new outline and faith in your ability to transform your text into something better. Practically, what you do here is move the text around to reflect the organization of the new outline. The result, at this point, can be pretty rough. If you take a few paragraphs from the second half of a paper, for instance, and move them up to an earlier section, they can’t possibly sit right. The time for massaging everything into a cohesive whole will come, but for now you must trust that the new outline has allowed you to devise a new and improved configuration of your text.

Step 7: Check for topic sentences and cohesion
The final step is to pay attention to the way your new paragraphs work. The new and improved configuration will be, needless to say, both better and worse. It will be better because it will reflect your careful and clearheaded analysis of what it needs to do; it will be worse because it will still bear too many traces of its earlier self. To get a head start on the next stages of revision, you can identify whether you have topic sentences early in your paragraphs and whether those paragraphs use their length effectively to develop clear topics. While there will still be lots of work to do, you can turn to that work secure in the knowledge that you have created an effective structure for this text. Polishing a text is time-consuming work, but it is easier and more efficient when you are working on a text that you know to be well-organized and well-proportioned.

In sum, the reverse outline is an effective strategy because it can create an objective distance between you and your text. Reverse outlining gives us a way into a text that might otherwise resist our editorial efforts. We often find our early drafts disconcerting: we know they are flawed but changing them can still seem risky. A reverse outline can give us purpose and direction as we undertake the valuable project of restructuring our written work.

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This post describes the first of five key strategies for strong academic writing; I have chosen these five simply because they are the ones that I most frequently turn to in my work with students. In the four other posts, I discuss paragraphs, transitions, sentences, and metadiscourse.

For more on using reverse outlines, you can consult these other posts:

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Links: Meritocracy, Artful Sentences, Comprehensive Exams

Posted on February 4, 2011 | 2 comments

From Inside Higher Ed, here is an argument against restricting the levels of graduate school admissions. Tucker argues that admitting fewer PhD candidates is a poor response to the lack of academic jobs; he doesn’t want to see the pool of talent diminished before graduate students have a chance to begin their training. While he admits that graduate school is not a perfect meritocracy, he still prefers the idea of training more students than the academic job market can handle. Here is a strongly worded response to Tucker, one that suggests that this argument for meritocracy predictably ignores structural factors.

Here is a widely shared article from Slate about the art of the sentence. The article and the book it is reviewing (Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One) are both ultimately concerned with literary writing, but I was interested in the assessment of the enduring popularity of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style: “It is spoken in the voice of unquestioned authority in a world where that no longer exists. . . . And when it comes to an activity as variable, difficult, and ultimately ungovernable as writing sentences, the allure of rules that dictate brevity and concreteness is enduring.”

Finally, here is a blog post from Hook and Eye on preparing for comprehensive exams; the author is collecting tips on studying for these types of exams, so check the comments for further insights from other graduate students.

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Key Sources

Posted on February 2, 2011 | 3 comments

Today’s post will discuss the sources that I find most helpful for academic writing. This list could be longer, of course, but it was abridged intentionally: these are the five books that I would not want to write without.

Jacques Barzun, Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers, Fourth Edition (New York: Quill, 2001). This is an interesting and highly readable book about style; it is divided into chapters on diction, linking, tone, meaning, composition, and revision. Barzun includes sample sentences and some hints towards improving those sentences. His aim throughout is to breed an analytical self-awareness about the choices we make when we write.

Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph Williams, The Craft of Research, Third Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). First published in 1995, this book provides invaluable advice about conceiving a research plan, conducting the research, and then conveying the results of the research in a manner that meets the needs and expectations of the reader. The book includes sections on the centrality of research; understanding your reader; finding topics; using sources; making and supporting claims; outlining, drafting, and revising; writing introductions and conclusions; communicating evidence visually; and the ethics of research.

Claire Kehrwald Cook, Line by Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985). Written by a professional editor, this books attempts to demystify the process of sentence-level editing so that writers can understand and improve their own sentences. It also has two helpful appendices: one, a technical discussion of the parts of a sentence and, two, a glossary of ‘questionable usage’. Cook has a deep understanding of sentence-level problems and a subtle approach to solving those problems; this book can be a great resource but it requires a willingness to dive into a technical treatment of grammatical issues.

Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, “They Say/I Say”: The Moves that Matter in Persuasive Writing, Second Edition (New York: Norton, 2010). This book argues that grounding our own claims in the previous scholarly work is “the internal DNA … of all effective argument”. In other words, all effective academic writers must learn how to situate their contribution within the ongoing scholarly conversation. This book offers concrete strategies for doing just that. By distilling the essence of the most common rhetorical moves in academic writing, this book is able to provide a useful collection of templates for academic writing. Even if using templates does not fit your writing style, reading this book will help to clarify the extent to which effective arguments follow discernible patterns. Recognizing those patterns can help you to strengthen your writing or even to clarify what you need to say.

Joseph M. Williams, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). This valuable text offers a comprehensive approach to revising complex prose into a form that is optimal for the reader. After an interesting discussion of the causes of bad writing, Williams offers four main lenses through which to approach style: clarity, cohesion, coherence, and concision. The book concludes with two additional chapters, one on elegance and one on usage. The chapter on elegance offers modest guidance about what we can do to our clear, coherent, and concise prose in order to make it even better. Finally, the chapter on usage offers a delightful discussion of the nature of rules in writing, one which leaves the reader with far fewer rules and far more insight into the history of linguistic infighting. Throughout, the text is animated by Williams’s belief that managing complexity so that readers can understand what is being expressed is a key social responsibility facing any writer. Note: This book has appeared in many forms and editions since its original appearance as a textbook in 1981. The edition discussed here is widely available at the lowest cost.

When asked to recommend one book about writing for graduate students, I usually choose The Craft of Research. I think this book is the most valuable because graduate students rarely have writing tasks that are not also research tasks. Placing writing in the context of a research agenda is usually fruitful for graduate students. And if more engagement with issues of style is required, The Craft of Research does have a great chapter on style, one which fully reflects Williams’s approach to sound writing.

Note: A more extensive list of books on writing can be found in a later post, “Can you recommend a good book on writing?”.

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Links: Public Intellectuals, Socializing Doctoral Students, Journal of Universal Rejection

Posted on January 28, 2011 | 1 comment

Here is an article about scholarly communication from Inside Higher Ed that talks about the desirability of public intellectuals, of academics who can also communicate their results to the population at large. I happen to agree, but my interest is actually in the self-awareness of ourselves as writers that this imperative demands. We cannot write for multiple audiences without thinking about audience in a sophisticated way.

Here is an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education about the need for graduate students to have realistic expectations and adequate professional development. Despite my genuine interest in this topic, I hesitated to share this particular article because the tone is so dire. I am sure I will post things from the ‘disastrous state of academia’ genre from time to time, but I do think it is crucial to read them critically. Such scenarios do not always apply: the voices of despair speak of an experience that will not be shared equally across all fields and all degrees and all countries. But we cannot know what we genuinely ought to be concerned with unless we engage with the commentary. The call here for more consistent professional development for graduate students is one that I fully endorse.

Finally, the funniest thing I saw this week: The Journal of Universal Rejection. While it may not initially sound appealing, the journal editor does a great job of selling it. And Kent Anderson gives it this endorsement in The Scholarly Kitchen: “For stringent editorial standards and an untarnished reputation, the Journal of Universal Rejection stands apart.”

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Understanding the Needs of Your Reader

Posted on January 26, 2011 | 9 comments

This blog is grounded in three principles that I see as crucial for strong academic writing. The first stresses the connection between writing and thinking; the second emphasizes the importance of extensive revision; and the third underscores the value of understanding the needs of your reader.

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The third principle that informs my approach to academic writing is understanding the needs of your reader. This principle relies on the simple but surprisingly elusive idea that the reader’s needs are different from our own. What we need to say—especially as we struggle with the early stages of writing—and what our readers will need to hear can be strikingly different. Extensive revision is the solution for this dilemma, but early drafts often confound us. Revisiting those texts with the needs of the reader in mind can be extremely helpful. The reader always has expectations, some that are conscious and others that are unconscious. Conscious expectations come from genre or disciplinary conventions (these are the expectations readers have before they ever read your text) and also from promises made by the writer (these are expectation readers have after reading the early passages of your text). Unconscious expectations are more complex and involve anticipation about the placement of information, particularly within paragraphs and sentences.

These three principles lay the groundwork for the more practical discussions of writing offered elsewhere on this blog. Here I would like to comment briefly on the source that knits these three principles together: Joseph Williams. Nobody, in my view, has done more to explain the normative dimensions of sound writing or to advance a practical approach to improving our own writing. I will conclude with a quote from Williams that expresses all three principles as one idea:

We write the first draft for ourselves; the drafts thereafter increasingly for the reader (Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, p. x).

In other words, we must write to figure out what we think; we must commit to writing a succession of drafts; and we must alter those drafts according to the anticipated demands of the reader.

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For more on the role of reader in the writing process, you can consult these other posts:

  • In Audience and Anxiety, I acknowledge that while remembering the needs of the audience can help us with revision decisions, the spectre of being read can be a source of anxiety.
  • In Self-Expression or Adherence to Form, I discuss a particular tension for graduate students: how to balance their desire for self-expression through writing with the expectations or predilections of their audience.
  • In Understanding Incoherence, I talk about the legitimate conflict between the messiness of our developing ideas and the needs of the reader.
  • In One-Way Trip, I consider what the reader is entitled to as they make their way through our texts.
  • In Metadiscourse, I provide an overview of different types of metadiscourse. In Signposting and Metadiscourse, I look at what the reader will need in order to follow our writing. In The Evolution of Signposting, I address a common complaint about metadiscourse. And, in You Know It and I Know It, I own up to overusing one of my favourite bits  of metadiscourse.

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Links: Editing, Clunkiness, Fonts

Posted on January 21, 2011 | 4 comments

Each week in this blog, I plan to provide links to articles that I find relevant to academic writing and academic life more generally.

First up, here is something on revision strategies. In my last post, I promised that actual revision strategies would be forthcoming in future posts. And they will, but, in the meantime, here is a helpful article on the importance of editing from Inside Higher Ed.

Here is a recent piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education on the clunkiness of contemporary student writing. In this article, Ben Yagoda argues that students are not, as some fear, engaging in sprightly and efficient–albeit informal–writing of the sort prized in social media. Instead, they are going in the opposite direction and offering laboured and awkward prose that is clearly designed to be formal. Undergraduates are particularly susceptible to this problem, but it is a worthwhile reminder for everyone: the formality required by academic writing will not be achieved through verbosity.

Finally, on a lighter note, here is a Salon article about the possibility that there is a beneficial effect of hideous fonts. A provocative claim, but fonts are not actually my interest. I was struck by the following sentence: “A surprising number of older authors name Courier as the font they prefer to write in because it resembles the characters of a typewriter and therefore kindly suggests that the current draft is still available for improvement.” This observation jumped out at me because it acknowledges the importance of how we format our drafts. It is important that a draft look as though it is “available for improvement”. Students often give me drafts that are single spaced or, worse still, single spaced and set in columns. This practice may seem environmentally friendly, but it is working against good editorial practice. Make sure that a draft looks like a draft; it should be easy to comment on (room between lines; room in the margins) and it should look different (to your own eyes) than a finished text.

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Committing to Extensive Revision

Posted on January 19, 2011 | 12 comments

This blog is grounded in three principles that I see as crucial for strong academic writing. The first stresses the connection between writing and thinking; the second emphasizes the importance of extensive revision; and the third underscores the value of understanding the needs of your reader.

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The second key principle that informs my approach to academic writing is committing to extensive revision. Most people will readily agree that more revision would improve their writing. But despite this widespread recognition of the importance of revision, many writers simply do not make revision an essential part of their writing process. One reason for this resistance is that many writers believe their own first drafts to be uniquely flawed; in other words, they think the weakness of the first draft comes from their lack of writing skill rather than from the intrinsic weakness of any first draft. As a result, they have little faith in their ability to fix what ails their writing. I suggest a shift in perspective: rather than worrying that your writing requires an exceptional amount of revision, try thinking that all writing requires a great deal of revision. A first draft must be evaluated as stringently as we can, but there is no need to apply those harsh standards to ourselves as writers. This caution is important since very few people excel at writing first drafts; the tendency towards self-criticism means that the initial draft becomes a source of frustration rather than a valuable starting point. Accepting that the writing process must be iterative makes it easier to understand that writing will rarely be suitable for a reader without extensive revision.

Another obstacle that stands in the way of revision is the fact that many writers are stymied by their own drafts. When I ask students to bring me a piece of their writing with their own changes marked on the pages, those suggested changes are generally tentative and minor. Our own written texts can seem daunting; they may be flawed, but they do possess a certain unity and coherence. Changing them can be more challenging than letting them stand, even with their manifest weaknesses. However, we must be willing to treat our own texts as essentially mutable, as raw material that will eventually take the requisite shape. As we will see in the next post, we can learn more about the changes we need to make to our early drafts by understanding the needs of our reader.

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For more on the challenges of revision, you can consult these other posts:

  • In Revising Out Loud, I articulate how important it can be to develop a process for committing to our own writing, even before we tackle revision.
  • In The Craft of Revision, I discuss my approach to the task of revision, from start to finish.
  • In Remembering to Edit, I present some strategies for ensuring that we keep our eyes on the task of revision.
  • In Bad News, Good News, I describe a common pattern: a lack of overall coherence despite local cohesion. In The Perils of Local Cohesion, I talk about the way that local cohesion can blind us to larger problems in our texts.
  • In Best Laid Plans, I encourage writers to think about the ideal relationship between prior planning and actual writing.
  • In Letting Go, I acknowledge how hard it can be to let go of hard-won text, even when it may not be serving any purpose.
  • In Scaffolding Phrases, I introduce the distinction between writing that may be helpful to us as writers and writing that serves the ultimate goal of satisfying the reader.
  • In Problem Sentences, I consider a radical revising solution: starting over.
  • Finally, in Reverse Outlines, I discuss the best way to tackle structural problems in our writing. The process of reverse outlining get elaborated in my discussion of Literature Reviews and Reverse Outlines. In Truth in Outlining, I stress the importance of being honest when crafting reverse outlines. In Topic Sentence Paragraphs, I look at a strategy that helps us to see if we have created coherence in a late-stage draft.

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Using Writing to Clarify Your Own Thinking

Posted on January 12, 2011 | 24 comments

This blog is grounded in three principles that I see as crucial for strong academic writing. The first stresses the connection between writing and thinking; the second emphasizes the importance of extensive revision; and the third underscores the value of understanding the needs of your reader.

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The first principle is using writing to clarify your own thinking. This principle holds that it is often difficult to establish what we think before we have put it down in words. In many cases, we simply do not know what we want to say until we have tried to say it. But if we cannot decide what we want to say without writing and if we believe that we cannot write without a solid idea about what we want to say, we are in an obvious bind. For most of us, the best way out of this dilemma is to write. Let’s say we’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about two connected issues without ever having been able to identify the exact nature of their relationship. When we write about this relationship, the demands of syntax will naturally encourage us to characterize the relationship more precisely. The text we create may be provisional, but it will still help to refine our thinking. Even if we are puzzled or surprised or disappointed by what we have written, we are still ahead of where we were before writing.

As a practical matter, this principle translates into a simple call to write more. Rather than postponing writing until you know what you want to say, use writing to figure out what you want to say. While this is generally sound advice, this call for more exploratory writing must come with a warning. Writing more freely means that we will need strategies for working with those provisional texts we create. Writing earlier and in a more exploratory mode often leaves us with texts that are less coherent than we might like. More freedom in the writing process demands more responsiveness in the revision process.

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For more on the complicated nature of composition, you can consult these other posts:

  • In Can You Write Too Early?, I argue that early writing is the best way to work through the difficult process of figuring out what we need to say.
  • In A Cut-and-Paste Job, I consider the pros and cons of reusing our own texts in new ways.
  • In The Discomforts of Uncertainty, I address some of the challenges of exploratory writing.
  • In Between Drafting and Editing, I outline a strategy for making sure that our early drafts don’t become unmanageable.
  • In Is It All Writing?, I wonder whether the nomenclature that we use to define the various stages of writing matters.
  • In The Faintest Ink, I discuss the importance of getting things down on paper before we forget them.
  • In Writing as Thinking, I reiterate my commitment to exploratory writing in response to an articulation of an opposing view.

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Welcome to Explorations of Style!

Posted on January 4, 2011 | 13 comments

Welcome to Explorations of Style: A Blog about Academic Writing. In this blog, I will offer my perspective on how to meet the central challenges of academic writing. As an instructor in a program that supports graduate student writers, I spend a great deal of time looking at student writing and thinking about strategies for its improvement. In general, I do this in the classroom or in response to particular pieces of writing that students bring to me. This blog is an experiment in trying to shape this advice into a slightly more enduring form. The next three posts will present the general principles that inform all of my teaching. The subsequent posts will explore the five strategies that I turn to most often when working with students. I will then discuss the resources we can use to support academic writing. With that groundwork in place, I will turn to a discussion of common writing issues; drawing on my experience of academic writing, I will present my own approach to such issues.

Interspersed among these entries will be my reflections on the act of teaching writing and on media stories about various issues in academic life. My hope is that I will also be able to answer your questions about academic writing. Please feel free to submit questions by leaving a comment or by replying to a particular post.

The blog is called Explorations of Style because I am interested in exploring how we make sound choices about stylistic matters in our academic writing. Definitive answers about writing questions are rare; there are some rules, of course, but much of what we do when we write or revise is to make choices. I focus on stylistic choices rather than grammatical correctness because correct grammar is already the norm in academic writing. Effective writing, however, is not quite so common! This blog will focus on the stylistic choices we can all make to increase the effectiveness of our academic writing. I hope you’ll join me.

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