Writing. Insights.

Or, thinking about thinking about writing…

Strategies for making the writing happen

• 1. Seek complexity.
• 2. Seek tension.
• 3. Apply sources.
• 4. Apply a concept.
• 5. Dismantle arguments.
• 6. Justify your position.
• 7. Change the terms.
• 8. Escape the status quo.
• 9. Assess your thinking.

Seek Complexity:�Focus the question

Broad questions

• 1. What causes violence?
• 2. How do children learn to read?
• 3. Why are “big-box” stores so successful?
• 4. How has feminism changed society?
• 5. How has computer technology changed society?

Narrow questions

• 1. How does poverty figure into domestic violence?
• 2. How do beginning readers use paragraphs to follow a story line?
• 3. How do “big-box” stores use local resources to increase sales?
• 4. How did feminism help change working conditions in the 1970s?
• 5. How has robotic technology impacted human interaction?

*Broad questions provide initial energy but are prone to simplistic statements.

Seek Tension: Looking for complexity, confusion & conundrums.

Sloppy thinking happens when we:

• Don’t see what we don’t expect.
• Abandon our own wonder.
• Run from intellectual friction.

Good thinking happens when we:

• See what we aren’t expecting.
• Recognize the misalignment between what we expect and what we witness.
• Try to understand that misalignment.

• Open conflict is easy to see. It involves physical standoffs, vocal debate, and obvious pressure. Subtle tension is quiet; sensed intuitively.

Tao Te ching,�Lao Tzu

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• Yield and overcome
• Bend and be straight
• Empty and be full
• Wear out and be new
• Have little and gain
• Have much and be confused

6^th century philosophy on “dualism”

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Apply Sources

• “Sources” are “sources of thought” that change, flip, thicken, substantiate and counter your own ideas.
• Sources will help you
• bust up a duality,
• explain the tension surrounding a topic,
• dismantle someone else’s argument,
• justify your position,
• change the terms of a debate,
• escape the status quo.
• In the end, sources provide “intellectual momentum.”

Summary, Paraphrase, Quotation

• Key to Summary: PRECISION. To summarize is to describe someone else’s ideas. You want to offer the most accurate version possible.
• Too general: Harry Potter is the story of a boy with no parents.
• Too brief: Harry Potter is the story of an orphaned boy with magical powers.
• Short but accurate: Harry Potter is the story of a young wizard who must discover his own power and use it to destroy the ultimate evil force in the world.
• Key to Paraphrase: VOICE. Give your voice to the ideas from a source. Like summary, paraphrase involves rewording ideas from a source but the goal is not to condense or abbreviate; rather, you’re aiming to re-explain without using direct phrases from the source. It’s about understanding the author but putting it in your own words.
• Key to Quotation: RELEVANCY. Use the best words, phrases or sentences that directly apply to your writing. Be strategic.

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Apply a Concept

• A concept is an idea that moves through time, across situations, from one person to another.
• Concepts are part of the world. They determine how we live, what we do, and how we think.
• Example: “protagonist” is a concept and defined thusly: “The protagonist in a work of fiction is the character with whom the reader is meant to be chiefly concerned; she or he is the main character, who, whether sympathetic or not, is the focus of the plot (there may be more than one). (Notice in the passage below ways in which we are “chiefly concerned” with Tolkien’s protagonist, Frodo Baggins. We are not going to simply say, “Frodo is the protagonist” instead we try to explain HOW we are concerned:

Lord of the Rings

• “At the climax of the final book, just as Frodo prepares to destroy the ring by throwing it into the fires of Mt. Doom, he hesitates. He decides he will keep it. “It is precious to me,” he says. Our concern now has reached its peak. We realize, after hundreds of pages and many scenes following Frodo through hardship, that he is falling prey to the ring. his selflessness has withered away. We fear that Middle Earth and all of the characters who have come to matter to us will be destroyed because Frodo has, in the end, given in to greed.”
• We are not simply describing a character but we are applying a concept: how, and for what reasons, the reader cares about Frodo.

“We care about Frodo and his mission. We follow him from the moment he inherits the ring of power, so we watch him go from an innocent bystander to an active player in the battle for Middle Earth. Of course, we hope that Frodo and his companion, Sam, survive – that they don’t end up as spider food or Orc victims, but we also hope that Frodo does not give in to the ring. We want him to survive, save the world, and not crave power. We want him to stay uncorrupted, and this is maybe our most consistent but quiet concern throughout the story.”

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BUT WE ARE NOT DONE. Continue by applying concept (protagonist) to the specific character (Frodo) by focusing on a specific scene. >>>

Apply a Concept, cont’d…

• Transporting even relatively simple concepts like “teamwork” and “collaboration,” can change the way people think, and the way they implement policies. For example, in his article from Arts Education Policy Review, Ryan Fisher examines operational challenges in the field of arts education. Right out of the gate, he brings business management concepts to his aid:
• “To better understand the true importance of teamwork and collaboration, it is important to reach outside the field of education and examine a field in which teamwork has been implemented and proven effective. The business world has focused on creating and improving teams, teamwork, and collaboration for the past twenty years…”

Dismantle Arguments

• Arguments come at us constantly. From passionate diatribes to calm treatises, arguments move us to feel and act. We take positions, go to college, take jobs, leave jobs, declare a major, and sign on the dotted line because someone along the way has provoked our thinking. Arguments shape our lives; start countries; get people thrown in jail and freed from tyranny. Being a good reader of arguments means holding off on the rush to judge or respond (difficult because arguments incite judgment and response). The more powerful the argument, the more powerful the drive to agree, disagree, or shout back. But we comprehend more about an argument when we consider it rather than automatically react to it.
• Sloppy thinking happens when we: Ignore an argument’s complexity and/or judge it, dismiss it, accept it, or respond to it before we’ve fully understood it.
• Good thinking happens when we: Work to understand the argument and/or Articulate how the argument works before responding.

Dismantle Arguments, cont’d

• Consider the context. Get a sense of the cultural surroundings (shared concerns, attitudes, or even political climate) to better determine the function of the other elements (of the argument).
• Analyze the reasoning. Arguments depend on a claim (an assertion that expresses someone’s position) and reasoning (the why, or justification for someone’s claim).
• Claim: Student loans should be interest-free.
• Reasons:
• Most college students cannot pay for college and, therefore, must get loans.
• Most college students will graduate with loan debt.
• A generation of debtors is bad for the economy.

Dismantle Arguments, cont’d

• Analyze the writer/speaker. When we analyze the writer, we’re not concerned about the biological human who wrote the text. Instead, we’re interested in the person who is implied by the text, what some critics call the persona. (If it is hard to imagine how a writer is implied by a text, think of the difference between the persona you create when you write a thank-you note to a relative versus the one you create when you text a friend ironically threatening to do him violence if he’s late again. You’re the same person who wrote both texts, but you’ve adopted two very different roles.)
• Analyze the audience. When we say audience, we don’t mean the specific people reading an argument at a given time. We mean the people who would most likely sit through, listen to, or read the argument – the people who have certain values, attitudes, knowledge, and expectations that would make them most apt to tune in. (Consider how you’d approach writing an article for Family Circle versus Body Piercing Journal.)

Dismantle Arguments, cont’d…

• Call out the quiet argument.
• Arguments don’t always look like arguments. In fact, they can stow away in other things – questions, jokes, stories, songs, films, and pieces of fine art. This is not to say that everything you encounter is arguing a point. We mean that all kinds of things besides written and spoken arguments assert something about the world. For example, a movie like Juno (2007) asserts something about the emotional and social struggles of teen pregnancy. The Harry Potter series asserts something about the power of fellowship over evil. And the new World Trade Center, being erected to replace the towers destroyed on 9/11, will most likely assert something about American endurance.
• To find these arguments/claims/statements you’re not looking for stated and unstated reasons but elements that build up to a claim – details that accumulate and express something.

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Justify your Position

• Adopt a Position and Purpose.
• Supporting or condemning: (This is…or Isn’t…a Good Idea) these arguments call on readers to recognize a flaw in or to see the value of the subject matter. They denounce something or celebrate its worth – or, as is the case most often, do a little of both.
• Fixing: (It’s Not Quite What We Thought): In these arguments, writers are not out to change the fundamentals or to call for a different direction but to amend some prior approach or shared thinking.
• Choosing a side: (I’m Weighing In on This Debate): These argumetns begin with a careful explanation of the debate. Then, the writer comes down on one side and breaks down her reasons.
• Warning: (There’s Danger Ahead): In these arguments, writers set out to warn others of whatever is coming. Such are often based on past and present trends.
• Proposing: (Here’s a Better Way of Doing It): Here, writers make a case that something needs to change, so they describe the need and the specific way to address it. Sometimes, they even chart out particular steps for addressing prob.
• Transforming: (Let’s Escape the Status Quo): Here, writers call on their readers to recognize a flaw in the usual way of doing things. And if that flaw is buried deep in the workings of a field, then the call for change can become insistent.

Justify your Position, cont’d

• Line up the Evidence. Facts, data, testimonials. Evidence is information from the world beyond the argument. It is out there in studies, experiments, and reports.
• Break Down Your Reasons: Positions need reasons – statements that express why you believe in your position. You must BREAK DOWN and ARTICULATE your reasons, which can be a challenge if you are deeply committed to a position. Key: HOW do we discover the WHY behind our positions?
• Support Your Reasons: Evidence, facts, data, testimony.
• Dismantle and Deny the Opposition: Since opposition likely exists to your position, you must pinpoint and cite where/why opposition should be rejected.

Change the Terms

• Language is alive. It morphs over time. New terms and phrases are constantly coming along while plenty of others fall out of favor or fade from common use. Consider the following: kickers, house shoes, chap, cocksure, galoshes, hullabaloo, scallywag. Terms like these have gone the way of the dodo.
• Not long ago, women were dames, men were dudes, money was jack, bling was an orchid, detectives were dicks, and great was ducky.
• In academic life, the process of abandoning terms is often public and formal. Terms and phrases get examined in professional journas and at disciplinary conferences. They get inspected, interrogated, analyzed, and sometimes kicked to the sidelines.
• It all begins when someone detects something wrong or not quite accurate.

Detect and Describe Inaccuracy

• CONSIDER: Joan Herbers draws his colleague’s attention to the term “slave ants.” In the following passage, she explains how the widely used phrase misses something critical about the real behavior of the species:
• “I now call for biologists to discard the use of slave metaphors to describe insect behavior. Not only are the terms damaging, but in fact they are not particularly accurate. Unlike human slaves, captive worker ants cannot breed, nor are they sold to other captors. Instead, the predatory species must repeatedly raid colonies to replenish its work force; indeed, voracious colonies can overexploit their captives and engender their own demise when there is no one left to do the work.”

When it comes to describing or explaining something, accuracy might not seem like a big deal. After all, an airplane will not fall from the sky if we use the wrong term. But the wrong term can do plenty of damage. It might hamper thinking. It might conceal the complexity of a situation or blur subtleties.

Detect and Describe the Quiet Associations

• CONSIDER: In a passage from her book, A Way of Seeing, Margaret Mead detects something amiss with superstition and the way the term gets used in cultural anthropology:
• “In a religious context, where truths cannot be demonstrated, we accept them as a matter of faith. Superstitions, however, belong to the category of beliefs, practices and ways of thinking that have been discarded because they are inconsistent with scientific knowledge. It is easy to say that other people are superstitious because they believe what we regard to be untrue. “Superstition” used in that sense is a derogatory term for the beliefs of other people that we do not share. But there is more to it than that. For superstitions lead a kind of half-life in a twilight world where, sometimes, we partly suspend our disbelief and act as if magic worked.”

What happens when you see the words, “high school”? Probably: hallways, teachers, books, maybe a sport, marching band… This is natural and normal. Language works because people share in these associations. But sometimes, it’s this layer – the unspoken layer – that creates problems.

Propose a Different Term

• CONSIDER: Herbers proposes a new term (and metaphor) to replace the old slave ant metaphor. She also begins making the case for the new term. That is, she describes how the new term more appropriately fits with ant behavior:
• “I propose, then, that we adopt a pirate metaphor to replace the slavery jargon. Human pirates engage in behavior much like the ants I study: They attack ships to steal cargo, usually inflicting considerable mortality among the defending crew. We can therefore write about pirate ants, captive ants, raiding parties, and booty. Since we scientists love jargon, I further propose that we call this “leistic” behavior, from the Greek leistos for “pirate.”

Once an old term is shown to be insufficient or flawed, there’s room to offer something different. Sometimes, writers propose a substitution – something more accurate or something with less cultural baggage.

Flip the Terms

• CONSIDER: This process is not simply a thought experiment; it is an intellectual maneuver to open up possibilities. It may sound difficult but it happens all the time in daily life, even in informal conversations. The opposite of our normal intellectual path can sometimes create insights. R. Bringhurst flips some common logic about poetry:
• “Poetry, I’m often told, is something made of words. I think it really goes the other way around: words are made of poetry (and so is a good deal else).”

Sometimes, the most powerful way to change terms is to flip them upside down, to invert the logic that lurks within them so that doing becomes undoing, destruction becomes creation, seeing becomes blindness, and so on. A famous version of this idea is, “A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing.” In other words, developing a perspective means developing a blindness to things outside of that perspective. Here’s a more informal version of the idea: “Don’t believe everything you think.”

Flip the Terms cont’d…

• CONSIDER: In the following passage, Gopnik explains that early humans didn’t choose dogs as their closest animal companions. The dogs chose humans:
• “Dogs, we are now told, by a sequence of scientists and speculators…domesticated themselves. They chose us. A marginally calmer canid came close to the circle of human warmth-and, more important, human refuse-and was tolerated by the humans inside: let him eat the garbage. Then this scavenging wolf mated with another calm wolf, and soon a family of calmer wolves proliferated just outside the firelight. It wasn’t cub-snatching on the part of humans, but breaking and entering on the part of wolves, that gave us dogs.”

Escape the Status Quo

• Consider the infrastructure of your community: the buildings, roads, traffic lights, drainage ditches, gutters, fences, and so on. All of those structural features are designed to keep daily life working with a degree of regularity. Without a sound infrastructure, people would find it difficult, or impossible, to implement a schedule—to have regular meetings, get products at stores, ship crops, buy food, meet with clients, talk with students, answer emails, or post blogs. In other words the infrastructure maintains a status quo, or usual state of affairs.
• We all help to create and re-create normal modes of living: Most of us talk rather than sing our way through the day; most don’t wear leotards and helmets in public; we shop at stores rather than perform wrestling matches; we use restrooms rather than open sewers for our personal business; we sit on subway rather than stand on our heads.—we spend much of our day reinforcing normality.

Escape the Status Quo, cont’d

• Now consider the infrastructure of your intellectual life.
• What is the intellectual status quo?
• What are the usual ways of thinking?
• These are difficult questions because we normally don’t think about the way we think. It might be easy/tempting to imagine that everyone has his/her own separate thoughts, that we all have our own unique and personalized interior lives. But consider the following passage (which contains statements/observations likely shared by many college students and instructors)
• Other people matter. Tardiness is not a communicable disease. Cows are food sources; people are not. Fire is not one of my ancestors. Grass does not care to see me. Falling down can hurt. No matter how hard I flap, I cannot fly without the help of technology. Tomorrow, the staircases will lead to the same floors as today. A squirrel will not answer my questions even if I ask nicely. Other people are thinking right now. The moon is real, but it is not out to get me. No one owns Tuesday. Time does not have an opinion, self-esteem problems, or family reunions. The wind is not trying to steal my soul.
• This is not to say that we are all automatons—robots or puppets enslaved by a hive mind. But if we are participating in daily life, we automatically accepting some shared notions about ourselves, other people, and the world around us.

Escape the Status Quo, cont’d

• These shared notions help to constitute the status quo. They keep things normal.
• But the status quo is not simply a list of quiet assumptions. It also involves the way ideas flow along without contest or debate. The statements in the preceding passage, for instance, usually stay below people’s radar. They are camouflaged by broad acceptance. This is how the status quo works: it rolls along with quiet agreement or compliance. People generally do not keep redeciding to believe in shared assumptions. (Take a moment to re-consider the earlier statements and argue the opposite.)
• Consider the shift in educational organization: most classrooms were once organized to facilitate lecture. Today, many are organized to facilitate group work, discussion and interaction.

Escape the Status Quo, cont’d

• Begin identifying and calling out intellectual norms with these strategies:
• Call out quiet assumptions.
• Ex. race, gender
• Question the maxims.
• Opposites attract; Actions speak louder than words; No pain, no gain; Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger; Beauty is only skin deep; Experience is the best teacher; Honesty is the best policy; Beggars can’t be choosers; Boys will be boys;
• Challenge these maxims that appear in education: Everyone learns differently; You have to learn the rules before you can break them; You have to believe in yourself; When the student is ready, the teacher appears.
• Question the reasoning. If the status quo is to be questioned, its logic must be brought out into the light of day for scrutiny.
• Bust up common comparisons. There exists a common argument that “education” should be run based upon a “business model.”

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Assess Your Thinking

• Professionals in all fields devote countless hours to examining and judging their own performance: football players watch recorded games and inspect each play; dancers practice in front of mirrors; engineers inspect their methods at every step; actors study their gestures on camera; comedians record their acts and carefully analyze their timing.
• People only improve their craft/profession by self-assessing.
• It’s difficult to “shine a light on our thoughts” but we can inspect our writing.
• By doing so, we can look at how we’ve formulated ideas, how we’ve pursued some thoughts and ignored others; we can dismantle our own arguments; we can see how we supported or escaped the status quo.
• To improve, writers have to “get over themselves” and see their work from a distance. Make progress by:
• Examining past assumptions
• Describing new thinking