I went out drinking with Thomas Paine
He said that all revolutions are not the same
They’re as different as the cultures that give them birth
For no one idea can solve every problem on earth
Chris asks how I teach writing, and my answer, as Thomas Paine’s is that all writing exercises are not the same. I’ve taught in a workshop setting, in a lecture setting, in a one-off pre-degree induction, in end-of-term revisions, and (most often) just working with individual students who want to learn to write better. In almost every case, motivated students want to learn to write deliberately, rather than just extruding verbiage; but very often they arrive at university having learned how to do well at extruding verbiage that includes items for which they get marks. And the higher marks they’ve gotten, the more firmly they’ve internalised the notion that writing = extrusion rather than rhetorical craft. In the current cultural economy, writing for pertinent points (‘perts’ in the HE argot of one niche I’ve inhabited) corresponds closely to writing for ‘likes’ or reskeets/retweets, so the extrusion model remains in place.
In this way, writing can seem like a kind of therapy. ‘What do you really want (to say)?’ ‘OK, what did you write? What does that mean? If you wanted to say this, why did you write that?’ ‘Why not just write what you just told me?’
Again, baby steps: I implore them to prefer active, colourful verbs, rather than lazily saying ‘This is that. That is the other. This is another other. So this is that.’ Using an active verb requires that you choose the verb that expresses what you think, rather than just stating stuff. ‘Lincoln argues that…’ ‘Campbell points out that… but many critics insist…’ Multiple wins in just this simple exercise: stronger preference for active constructions vs copulative or passive constructions, words that indicate something more specific than just existence, greater vigour and flavour to the prose.
I do not inveigh against passive constructions simpliciter; I point out reasons one might want to use a passive construction, and suggest the value and weakness of such constructions. Again, choose whether to use active or passive (or copulative) clauses.
I press them on the question of structure — having a sense of how the bits fit together into a whole. Some essays are like narratives of discovery, like Sherlock Holmes stories. These have the advantage that, when done well, they bring the reader along toward a satisfying conclusion; done less well, they allow the reader to anticipate a conclusion toward which the author isn’t driving, and to find the experience frustrating and entirely unsatisfactory. Others are more like the deprecated five-paragraph essay. This has the advantage of communicating to the reader what is at stake right from the start, and the reasons for the conclusion, but (as Cory and Chris note) risks being deadly dull. The important thing is to adopt a structure deliberately, and to keep vigilant attention to how a reader will probably construe one’s rhetoric.
Structure depends not just on building blocks, but also (especially) on transitions, from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph. An essay that handles transitions skilfully does lots of the work just in that careful composition.
For academic purposes, precision makes a huge difference. Write exactly what you want to write, so as to convey to the reader just what you want them to perceive.
Avoid lazy expressions. The intensifier du jour ‘incredibly’ has hardly any value in an academic essay in biblical studies. A student doesn’t need to tell examiners that ‘X or Y is incredibly important’; that either seems clear to us, in which case the intensifier adds nothing, or we doubt the importance of the matter, in which case‘incredibly’ rubs salt in an already irritated… uh, ‘paper cut’.
And more — but that’s all I have time for this morning, as a starter. Each composition is not the same; they’re as different as the student writers who give them birth, for no one approach will solve all the problems on earth.
(No running this morning; rainy day. Coffee and fruit, cleaned up, Morning Prayer, in to Oxford for a tutorial (with a stop at Love Coffee between arrival and tute), lunch, then back to Abingdon for sermon writing in the afternoon.
Thank you! I love writing and have spilled millions of words in my day for money and love. I’ve written with pens, thumbs, keyboards and my voice. I’ve written on pads, Moleskins, compositors, PCs, phones and a watch.
My only writing lessons came incidentally. I had encouraging English teachers in high school (two) a circle of peers who also loved good writing and one prof I worked for as a researcher who handed me a book on writing in 1989 (I can’t remember by whom) and helped me get to work writing imaginative case studies for his Indigenous management program.
At 57 I still feel there is much to learn. I feel warmth and generosity in your post here today and in this conversation. That is the miracle of setting words to the page.