T. Parent

Advice on Writing

Most people have been introduced to academic writing by high school English teachers. This is fine to some extent, yet often high school English teachers overemphasize the so-called RULES of composition, i.e. rules about how to structure your paper. Focusing on compositional RULES in high school often teaches people how to write well-organized and coherent papers. This is certainly a good thing. However, there are significant disadvantages if you continue to focus on the compositional RULES in your writing beyond high school.

First, what high school English teachers call RULES of composition are really rules of thumb: They say what is often good for composition, but not what is always good for it. Sometimes your paper can be greatly improved by violating certain rules on certain occasions. What should primarily guide your compositional choices is not the RULES per se, but the rhetorical advantages and disadvantages of those choices in the context of your paper.

Secondly, and more importantly, the emphasis on RULES creates the impression that a good paper is primarily a matter of compositional structure and rhetoric. This is ridiculous. Although composition and rhetoric are important, they are clearly secondary to the content of your paper. In philosophy, a good paper depends essentially on how powerful the arguments are. Accordingly, the primary concern in the writing process should be what you’re arguing and how you’re arguing it, rather than whether your paper conforms to various structural constraints. And besides, if you’re more focused on content, as opposed to fretting over split-infinitives, topic sentences, and the rest, you’ll have much more fun. I guarantee.

Your paper should of course be coherent, the arguments clear, and it should always be apparent where you’re heading in your discussion. But certain RULES which are strictly enforced in high school should be somewhat relaxed. In particular:

• You can use the first-person pronoun ‘I’, as long as you don’t come off as an egomaniac while you’re writing. The second-person pronoun is also ok in moderation; in some cases, however, second-person can sound too informal if used frequently.
• You shouldn’t feel obligated to employ a different expression each time you express the same idea. For example, there is no need to change the sentence “If birth control is morally wrong, then abortion is also morally wrong” to: “If birth control is morally wrong, then abortion is disgusting.” Just because the former employs the expression “morally wrong” twice doesn’t make it a bad sentence. In fact, oftentimes in philosophy, it is counterproductive to switch expressions in expressing the same idea. First of all, if you do switch expressions, it is no longer clear you are expressing the same idea. After all, some expressions that appear synonymous end up not being so (e.g. something might be disgusting without being morally wrong, e.g. a compost heap). Secondly, you may have spent much of the paper explaining what you meant by “morally wrong;” so you’ve rendered useless all that work if you start using different expressions in its place.
• You don’t always need an introductory paragraph; many times, they seem entirely superfluous. “Since the dawn of man, philosophers have pondered the blah, blah, blah…” Instead, just jump right into the issue. (It may feel strange not to “set things up” a bit, but trust me, an academic audience won’t get lost.) Also, in many cases, there’s no need to summarize your whole paper at the beginning. “In this paper, I will do X, then I will do Y, and finally I will do Z…” 
• It is not always advantageous to have a thesis statement in your first paragraph. Sometimes at the beginning, a thesis statement can be easily misconstrued or seem obviously false, outside the context of your arguments. To be sure, you should begin by formulating the issue which you’ll be making a thesis statement about. But often, it’s good to make conclusions at the end of an argument rather than right up front.

Remember, what you say is ultimately more important than the rhetorical devices you use to say it. Despite what you may have been led to believe, good writing is more thinking than writing. (You may quote me on that!)

Addendum. In philosophy, it is important that you present your thinking as clearly as possible. This means being clear on three levels:

1. The sentence level (it should be clear what each sentence is saying),
2. The paragraph level (it should be clear how the various sentences in a paragraph are working together, and what the point of the paragraph is),
3. The level of the paper as a whole (it should be clear how all the paragraphs work together to create a coherent line of reasoning, and what the main point of the paper is).

I know a lot of philosophers seem unclear in their writing, but that shouldn’t give you license to be unclear in your own. Although clear writing is neither necessary nor sufficient for a good philosophy paper, it certainly helps a lot. 

Addendum no. 2. Every semester, some of the brighter students do significantly worse on the papers than more mediocre students. How does this happen? Bright students, I think, are more inclined to be creative in their philosophical thinking. Often in high school, creative thinking is encouraged without restraint. But it seems to me that creativity is worthless if it only results in creatively generating rubbish. In philosophy, what's most important is that your statements are compelling rather than highly creative. Of course, an argument that is both compelling and highly original is best. But generally speaking, your primary concern should be to represent philosophical issues accurately, and to reason well about those issues. Creativity, although generally desirable, is subsidiary to these goals.