I’m curious. For those in their 20s, how were you taught to write essays?
Back in the Stone Age when I was growing up, we were taught to have a thesis statement early on so that our readers would know what we were going to be talking about. Here’s where we’re going with this. Is that entirely out of fashion?
My advisor in grad school expanded on this, to here’s the issue, here’s the thesis, here’s how we’re going to get there. A tidy map to let the reader know where we’re going, to make it easier to know what to look for to follow along with the progress of the trip.
After a couple of paragraphs, I have no idea where this is going, Are we setting up some analogy to current events, or just setting up the context in which some thesis operates? I don’t know, and I find I just don’t care enough to continue reading.
I have often griped about essays here, suggesting that people start with an abstract. But here, I want to get get some information on how people are being taught to write. I’m often infuriated by journalists these days, as they write and write and write, and I wonder and I wonder and I wonder where the hell it’s all going. Are people doing this on purpose?
Are they being taught to do this? If so, what are the specifics of the pedagogy involved?
I think the author is being obfuscatory in order to try to get the readers to have particular feelings about a specific real-life political conflict by analogy, without revealing too early what the actual conflict under discussion is. Unfortunately I don’t think the author is really able to pull this off.
At school, I was taught that the correct way to write is...
Summary-introduction.
The main text of the article.
Summary-conclusion.
...so that at the beginning people have an idea about what will be said (so they can focus on the important parts instead of tangents), and at the end they can review and remember the important points.
There is a slightly modified version for teachers, where as an introduction you ask motivating questions, such as “how could we do X?”, and then you proceed by a lesson that includes how to do X.
However, out of school, when I was writing short stories, I was told that this is the part of school education that is most important to unlearn for writers. You do not write stories like this, because they will be super boring—the introduction will contain unnecessary spoilers, and the conclusion will just repeat what you already know if you paid any attention to the story. The lesson is that text written with a different purpose requires different structure.
Instead, here is what works for stories:
Something short and impressive, even if it is completely out of context, to capture the audience.
The main text of the story, at the beginning seemingly unrelated to the introduction, but later the situation from the introduction appears in the story. (The exact place depends on the length of the story, for short stories it is about 90-95%, for a novel it must be soon enough lest the reader forgets the introduction completely.)
tl;dr—how you write should reflect your expectations why and how people will read your text; for example textbook vs fiction, but also tutorial vs reference, etc.
At school, I was taught that the correct way to write is...
About the same for me. But I pictured you older than my 20s target group. No?
“how could we do X?”, and then you proceed by a lesson that includes how to do X.
Yep. Let them know where you’re going, so they can more easily follow along. In this case, the payoff is clear—you will learn how to do X. More generally, we’re going to answer the question we asked.
how you write should reflect your expectations why and how people will read your text; for example textbook vs fiction, but also tutorial vs reference, etc.
Yes. Write to the purpose you want to achieve. Keep in mind the purposes of your readers to achieve your purpose.
In keeping with the title, consider the incentives of all parties when writing.
I think you should be old enough to have been an adult when The Change occurred. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Or something.
By my recollection, once upon a time, I’m thinking maybe 20 years ago, journalists used to write articles that articulated a point. They made a case for something. There was some presentation of evidence. Arguments. Arguments and evidence arrayed to make a point.
At least 10 years ago, I’m not sure when, I started seeing recognizable points being replaced by vomitous streams of consciousness, or article by anecdote. The blah blah blah continues until i stop reading, or gouge my eyes out.
Perhaps I’ve overstated the change a bit, but I think there has been a definite shift in the direction indicated. Do you perceive anything of the sort?
I started seeing recognizable points being replaced by vomitous streams of consciousness, or article by anecdote. The blah blah blah continues until i stop reading, or gouge my eyes out.
That might be related to the process of news organizations (like newspapers and magazines) going out of business.
They used to make money. Some of that money was used to pay more-or-less professional journalists to write more-or-less competent articles and stories. Large papers maintained their own foreign bureaus, for example, and had their own man-on-the-spot who lived in that country and didn’t just fly in for a few hours to do a quickie reportage in front of the issue du jour.
For a fresh example consider a remarkably candid description of how Ben Rhodes, a mid-level White House official, was able to effectively manipulate the media coverage of the Iran nuclear deal. He is quite open about it:
Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
As you have noticed, things changed. There is no money to pay professional journalists (or professional news photographers) any more. They’ve been replaced by “citizen journalists” and bloggers—see HuffPo for where the whole thing goes.
Is it horrible and terrible and the end of the world? Well, as usual it depends :-) You gain some, you lose some. From my point of view you lose effortless access to competent summaries of what’s happening. You gain somewhat effortful access (you need to do a LOT of filtering) to multiple and very different points of view. I count it as a net loss for issues I care little about and a net gain for issues I care more about. YMMV, of course.
I get that with the proliferation of outlets, and free media, compensation and quality have gone down.
But I’m not commenting on quality of the writing as much as the structure of what is written. The structures have changed away from the communication of a reasoned argument marshaling facts to support a point.
But I’m not commenting on quality of the writing as much as the structure of what is written.
That structure is a major element of the “quality of writing”.
Plus, of course, the incentives changed somewhat. If you are going out of business, clicks/eyeballs become more important than the reputation of a respectable publication.
It’s not really that people were trained differently. (May or may not be). Instead, market conditions have changed, and therefore what the market produces has changed.
Evidence and argument takes time. Stories and stream of consciousness can be churned out. Whether that trade off is better to survive in current conditions is dependent on the particulars of the conditions.
I can see an argument that with the barriers to entry in publishing removed, the proliferation of outlets means fewer eyeballs for each. In that environment, revenue goes down.
Also, the number of people who want a reasoned and evidenced article is limited. Their tastes were probably overly accommodated in the past, because of the meritocratic competition for the few chairs at the table left smart, talented people at the table making decisions. With the click democracy and proliferation of outlets, the mass who have relatively little interest in reason and evidence will have more outlets more suited to their tastes.
See another current story on the fall of Salon which goes into some details about how quality first slipped and then went into free fall. Notable quote:
“The low point arrived when my editor G-chatted me with the observation that our traffic figures were lagging that day and ordered me to ‘publish something within the hour,’” Andrew Leonard, who left Salon in 2014, recalled in a post. “Which, translated into my new reality, meant ‘Go troll Twitter for something to get mad about — Uber, or Mark Zuckerberg, or Tea Party Republicans — and then produce a rant about it.’ … I performed my duty, but not without thinking, ‘Is this what 25 years as a dedicated reporter have led to?’ That’s when it dawned on me: I was no longer inventing the future. I was a victim of it. So I quit my job to keep my sanity.”
When you hire as cheap people as possible, and make them write every day as many articles as possible, you get neither reasonable jurnalists nor reasonable article structure.
My country is far behind the most current wave of clickbait journalism, but things have been reliably going downhill for years. I know a person who worked for one of the most respected newspapers in the country. Their job description was like this: “at morning, the boss gave them a random topic; till 4pm they had to write two long articles for the paper version, and two more short articles for the web version”. Every day way like this; after a year most people were fired because they were burned out, and they were replaced by fresh ones. Mind you, this was one of the serious newspapers.
Now imagine yourself, that you get a task to write four articles about a topic you know nothing about. What can you do? Use google to get some background, then pick up the phone and call a few random people, ask them some questions, and write as fast as you can. Most people will refuse to answer the phone because they already have experience of being misrepresented by media. However, there are a few people who are willing to give you a simplistic opinion on any topic; any experienced journalist has a list of them, because when everything else fails and your boss is screaming at you, these people can save your day. So, you get some background by reading articles in English about the topic (yeah, we are stealing shamelessly), you invent a probable story, then you fish for some quotes, and then you hurry writing the text because you barely have time. Four stories a day, about a topic you previously never heard about.
When I write blog articles, I usually spend much more time writing an article than a journalist could afford.
You and Lumifer pointed out the economic aspects, by which I see that:
It’s not really that people were trained differently. (May or may not be). Instead, market conditions have changed, and therefore what the market produces has changed.
I’m puzzled as to why people think formulaic writing is good writing.
Thesis statements tell the reader whether they agree with the work or not in advance. I disagree firmly with their use, as they encourage a lazy style of reading in which you decide before you begin reading whether or not you’re going to discard the evidence before you, or consider it.
Schoolteachers teach formulaic writing because (1) it’s easy to teach formulas and hard to teach actual clear thinking and good writing style, (2) it’s easy to assess writing against a formula and hard to assess actual clear thinking and good writing style, (3) writing to a formula is relatively easy to do, compared with writing well without one, and (4) most schoolchildren’s baseline writing skills are so terrible that giving them a formula and saying “do it like this” makes for a considerable improvement.
Schoolteachers suffering from déformation professionelle may think formulaic writing is good writing. Their pupils may think the same, having been taught that way; hopefully those who end up doing much writing will learn better in due course.
Aside from that—does anyone actually “think formulaic writing is good writing”? I don’t see anyone here saying it is. What I do see is some people saying “this article was hard to read and would have been improved by more indication of where it’s going, the sort of thing that writing-by-formula tends to encourage”. I hope you can see the difference between “formulaic writing is good” and “this specific element of one kind of formulaic writing is actually often a good idea”.
I disagree firmly with their use
Fair enough. But note that buybuydandavis’s complaint isn’t really “there isn’t a thesis statement” but “after a couple of paragraphs, I have no idea where this is going”: a thesis statement would be one way to address that, but not the only one. (And your own articles on LW, thesis statements or no, seem to me to have the key property BBDD is complaining casebash’s lacks: it is made clear from early on where the article’s going, and there are sufficient signposts to keep the reader on track. Possible exception: “The Winding Path”, which you say was an aesthetic experiment.)
Aside from that—does anyone actually “think formulaic writing is good writing”?
Yes.
What I do see is some people saying “this article was hard to read and would have been improved by more indication of where it’s going, the sort of thing that writing-by-formula tends to encourage”. I hope you can see the difference between “formulaic writing is good” and “this specific element of one kind of formulaic writing is actually often a good idea”.
The title tells you exactly what the article is about and where it was going.
And your own articles on LW, thesis statements or no, seem to me to have the key property BBDD is complaining casebash’s lacks: it is made clear from early on where the article’s going, and there are sufficient signposts to keep the reader on track.
The article isn’t ambiguous, however. If anything, it’s overextended and overwritten in support of that point—yes, we get it, everybody in the construction is suspicious of everybody else’s incentives and for genuinely good reasons, and everybody is engaging in motivated reasoning.
The only “confusing” aspect is if you read the body of work looking for a hidden purpose.
The title tells you exactly what the article is about and where it was going.
Except that most of the article makes rather little contact with the idea stated in the title, and instead concerns incidental details of the squabble between the As and the Bs. Or, to put it differently:
it’s overextended and overwritten
This is exactly why …
you read the body of work looking for a hidden purpose.
The article reads very much like other articles I have read before that have a hidden purpose. So I think there may be one. Why is that unreasonable?
Except that most of the article makes rather little contact with the idea stated in the title, and instead concerns incidental details of the squabble between the As and the Bs.
The incidental details are the point of the article, however; they’re an in-depth example of how the incentives of the two groups interact and intersect.
The article reads very much like other articles I have read before that have a hidden purpose. So I think there may be one. Why is that unreasonable?
Instrumentally, it detracted from your understanding of the article.
The incidental details are the point of the article [...] in-depth example [...]
It seems to me that the article could have done just fine with about half the quantity of incidental details. I am guessing that in fact you agree, given your description of it as “overextended”.
it detracted from your understanding of the article.
What about it do you believe I failed to understand?
It seems to me that the article could have done just fine with about half the quantity of incidental details. I am guessing that in fact you agree, given your description of it as “overextended”.
Quite, yes. I don’t think it’s a perfect article—indeed, my primary issue with the criticisms of it are that they are criticizing the wrong things.
What about it do you believe I failed to understand?
I have no idea. But you’ve indicated, if not in those exact words, you found it difficult to read.
you’ve indicated, if not in those exact words, you found it difficult to read.
I’ve indicated that I found it harder to read than it should have been because of the barrage of incidental details and the constant feeling that it’s really about something else besides its surface meaning.
I was (as you will readily see if you read my original comment) perfectly well able to extract what in your view was the entire point of the article. I just felt like I had to do more work to do so than was warranted.
[EDITED to add:] It seems that you actually had the same experience. So apparently we are agreed that casebash’s article was stuffed with unnecessary incidental details, that it gave the impression of having some kind of hidden meaning, and that these made it harder to read; the difference is … what? That you have decided, I know not on what basis, that I was “mindkilled” whereas you “treated it as practice in dealing with mindkilling”. Except that you haven’t offered any actual evidence that I was mindkilled (I’m pretty sure I wasn’t, for what it’s worth) or that I was any less successful than you were in understanding the article.
You do make one specific complaint about a line of criticism that, e.g., buybuydandavis and I have made. We say that it’s not clear where the article is heading and it could have used more signposts up front; you say no, there’s a thesis statement right in the title and that’s all anyone needs. (And you suggest that this indicates a failure to make sense of the article, which you blame on mind-killed-ness.)
But you are missing the point. The title, considered as thesis statement, is manifestly insufficient to explain what’s going on in the article, because most of the article consists of (what you yourself describe as) overextended elaboration of details of the argument between the As and the Bs. This is what readers could use some help in navigating. With only the title to go on, the best we can do is to pay careful attention to each paragraph and analyse the motivations of both As and Bs therein. But that’s a lot of work for very little payback, because then basically every paragraph is telling us more or less the same thing in more or less the same way.
What would have helped with this is some framing material at the start indicating one or more of the following: (1) This story is functioning as a metaphor for such-and-such a thing in the real world; you will follow the details more easily if you match them up with reality. (2) The details of this story aren’t terribly important in themselves; if you ignore some of the details you will lose nothing. (3) The really important bit of this story, as far as the point of the article goes, is such-and-such; the rest is there just to give it context.
… Or, of course, just losing about half of the incidental details. But buybuydandavis and I were both willing to give casebash the benefit of the doubt and assume there was a reason why all those details were there.
They enable a lazy style of reading. They also enable the reverse: a style of reading where the reader knows ahead of time that certain of their buttons are about to be pushed, and takes measures in advance to minimize the effect.
For my part, I find both helpful. Sometimes it’s clear that something is unlikely to be worth my time to read because it’s entirely based on premises I don’t accept. Sometimes it’s clear that while the author’s position is very different from mine, they have interesting things to say that I might find helpful. Sometimes their position is very different from mine and I read on in the hope that if I’m wrong I can be corrected. All of these require different attitudes while reading.
(Of course one can do without. But the more mental effort the author kindly saves me from expending in figuring out whether their piece is worth reading, whether I need to be reading it with an eye to revising my most deeply held beliefs, etc., etc., the more I can give to the actual content of what they’ve written.)
You find it helpful for the following cases:
1.) You’re not going to agree no matter what evidence is presented, so it’s not worth reading their evidence.
2.) They might have interesting things to say.
3.) They might be right, and you might be wrong.
The issue, of course, is that you can’t actually distinguish between these three cases from the thesis statement; a properly-constructed thesis statement offers no information to actually tell you which attitude you should come into reading the work with, it only states what conclusion the body of evidence reaches.
Again, I am not concerned solely with thesis statements as such, but with the practice of beginning an article with an indication of where it’s headed. Something that merely says what the conclusion is going to be, indeed, is unlikely to help much with distinguishing 1,2,3; but something that does a better job of indicating what’s ahead may do much better.
Suppose, for instance, I am interested in some question about the morality of abortion in certain circumstances, and suppose my current opinion is that it’s unproblematic. Article One begins “I shall argue that abortion is in all cases unbiblical and contrary to the traditions of the church”. That might be a very useful article for Christians, but it’s unlikely to offer me any useful guidance in thinking about abortion if I am not among their number; I reject some of their key premises and this article is unlikely to be justifying them. Article Two begins “The purpose of this article is to argue against abortion in circumstances X, not on the usual grounds that Y but because of the often-neglected Z”. I’ve thought a bit about Z before and decided that it doesn’t actually affect my opinions about abortion which are dominated by other considerations P,Q,R; but it hadn’t previously occurred to me that Z is the case in circumstances X, so it might be interesting to read the article. Article Three begins “Abortion is widely held to be permissible in circumstances X because P, Q, and R; I shall argue that this is a mistake because P and Q don’t actually hold and R is irrelevant because S.” This speaks directly to my reasons for holding the position I do; if there are other indications that the author is intelligent and sensible, they may have compelling arguments and persuade me to rethink.
There are a great many things available for me to read and I would prefer to figure out whether I want to read a particular piece before finishing it. There are way too many idiots who managed to figure out how a keyboard works.
Formula’s are quite helpful in achieving an end. If someone has already achieved an end in a certain way, you can use that way too, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
Given the general limits of pedagogues, what is taught is the formula, and not the ends. That was how I was taught when young. Do this. That’s the right way.
In grad school, my advisor gave both the end to be achieved, and a formula for doing so. The end was getting people to read and understand the article. The formula was a means to do so.
If you want people to read your articles, you need to motivate them to do so. They need to anticipate a payoff of value to them, which will we weighed against the anticipated cost.
If you want people to understand, you should help them to do so.
I want to use my time efficiently getting value for me, and appreciate it when writers help make that happen. Help me assess the value of their article to me up front. Help me to extract the value from their article.
they encourage a lazy style of reading in which you decide before you begin reading whether or not you’re going to discard the evidence before you, or consider it.
I prefer the ultimate lazy style of reading—to not read at all if I don’t see value. I don’t think I’m alone in that.
I’m curious. For those in their 20s, how were you taught to write essays?
Back in the Stone Age when I was growing up, we were taught to have a thesis statement early on so that our readers would know what we were going to be talking about. Here’s where we’re going with this. Is that entirely out of fashion?
My advisor in grad school expanded on this, to here’s the issue, here’s the thesis, here’s how we’re going to get there. A tidy map to let the reader know where we’re going, to make it easier to know what to look for to follow along with the progress of the trip.
After a couple of paragraphs, I have no idea where this is going, Are we setting up some analogy to current events, or just setting up the context in which some thesis operates? I don’t know, and I find I just don’t care enough to continue reading.
I have often griped about essays here, suggesting that people start with an abstract. But here, I want to get get some information on how people are being taught to write. I’m often infuriated by journalists these days, as they write and write and write, and I wonder and I wonder and I wonder where the hell it’s all going. Are people doing this on purpose?
Are they being taught to do this? If so, what are the specifics of the pedagogy involved?
I think the author is being obfuscatory in order to try to get the readers to have particular feelings about a specific real-life political conflict by analogy, without revealing too early what the actual conflict under discussion is. Unfortunately I don’t think the author is really able to pull this off.
At school, I was taught that the correct way to write is...
...so that at the beginning people have an idea about what will be said (so they can focus on the important parts instead of tangents), and at the end they can review and remember the important points.
There is a slightly modified version for teachers, where as an introduction you ask motivating questions, such as “how could we do X?”, and then you proceed by a lesson that includes how to do X.
However, out of school, when I was writing short stories, I was told that this is the part of school education that is most important to unlearn for writers. You do not write stories like this, because they will be super boring—the introduction will contain unnecessary spoilers, and the conclusion will just repeat what you already know if you paid any attention to the story. The lesson is that text written with a different purpose requires different structure.
Instead, here is what works for stories:
tl;dr—how you write should reflect your expectations why and how people will read your text; for example textbook vs fiction, but also tutorial vs reference, etc.
About the same for me. But I pictured you older than my 20s target group. No?
Yep. Let them know where you’re going, so they can more easily follow along. In this case, the payoff is clear—you will learn how to do X. More generally, we’re going to answer the question we asked.
Yes. Write to the purpose you want to achieve. Keep in mind the purposes of your readers to achieve your purpose.
In keeping with the title, consider the incentives of all parties when writing.
Correct; I’m 40 now.
I’m 51.
I think you should be old enough to have been an adult when The Change occurred. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Or something.
By my recollection, once upon a time, I’m thinking maybe 20 years ago, journalists used to write articles that articulated a point. They made a case for something. There was some presentation of evidence. Arguments. Arguments and evidence arrayed to make a point.
At least 10 years ago, I’m not sure when, I started seeing recognizable points being replaced by vomitous streams of consciousness, or article by anecdote. The blah blah blah continues until i stop reading, or gouge my eyes out.
Perhaps I’ve overstated the change a bit, but I think there has been a definite shift in the direction indicated. Do you perceive anything of the sort?
That might be related to the process of news organizations (like newspapers and magazines) going out of business.
They used to make money. Some of that money was used to pay more-or-less professional journalists to write more-or-less competent articles and stories. Large papers maintained their own foreign bureaus, for example, and had their own man-on-the-spot who lived in that country and didn’t just fly in for a few hours to do a quickie reportage in front of the issue du jour.
For a fresh example consider a remarkably candid description of how Ben Rhodes, a mid-level White House official, was able to effectively manipulate the media coverage of the Iran nuclear deal. He is quite open about it:
As you have noticed, things changed. There is no money to pay professional journalists (or professional news photographers) any more. They’ve been replaced by “citizen journalists” and bloggers—see HuffPo for where the whole thing goes.
Is it horrible and terrible and the end of the world? Well, as usual it depends :-) You gain some, you lose some. From my point of view you lose effortless access to competent summaries of what’s happening. You gain somewhat effortful access (you need to do a LOT of filtering) to multiple and very different points of view. I count it as a net loss for issues I care little about and a net gain for issues I care more about. YMMV, of course.
I get that with the proliferation of outlets, and free media, compensation and quality have gone down.
But I’m not commenting on quality of the writing as much as the structure of what is written. The structures have changed away from the communication of a reasoned argument marshaling facts to support a point.
That structure is a major element of the “quality of writing”.
Plus, of course, the incentives changed somewhat. If you are going out of business, clicks/eyeballs become more important than the reputation of a respectable publication.
Ok, I think I’m catching on.
It’s not really that people were trained differently. (May or may not be). Instead, market conditions have changed, and therefore what the market produces has changed.
Evidence and argument takes time. Stories and stream of consciousness can be churned out. Whether that trade off is better to survive in current conditions is dependent on the particulars of the conditions.
I can see an argument that with the barriers to entry in publishing removed, the proliferation of outlets means fewer eyeballs for each. In that environment, revenue goes down.
Also, the number of people who want a reasoned and evidenced article is limited. Their tastes were probably overly accommodated in the past, because of the meritocratic competition for the few chairs at the table left smart, talented people at the table making decisions. With the click democracy and proliferation of outlets, the mass who have relatively little interest in reason and evidence will have more outlets more suited to their tastes.
See another current story on the fall of Salon which goes into some details about how quality first slipped and then went into free fall. Notable quote:
When you hire as cheap people as possible, and make them write every day as many articles as possible, you get neither reasonable jurnalists nor reasonable article structure.
My country is far behind the most current wave of clickbait journalism, but things have been reliably going downhill for years. I know a person who worked for one of the most respected newspapers in the country. Their job description was like this: “at morning, the boss gave them a random topic; till 4pm they had to write two long articles for the paper version, and two more short articles for the web version”. Every day way like this; after a year most people were fired because they were burned out, and they were replaced by fresh ones. Mind you, this was one of the serious newspapers.
Now imagine yourself, that you get a task to write four articles about a topic you know nothing about. What can you do? Use google to get some background, then pick up the phone and call a few random people, ask them some questions, and write as fast as you can. Most people will refuse to answer the phone because they already have experience of being misrepresented by media. However, there are a few people who are willing to give you a simplistic opinion on any topic; any experienced journalist has a list of them, because when everything else fails and your boss is screaming at you, these people can save your day. So, you get some background by reading articles in English about the topic (yeah, we are stealing shamelessly), you invent a probable story, then you fish for some quotes, and then you hurry writing the text because you barely have time. Four stories a day, about a topic you previously never heard about.
When I write blog articles, I usually spend much more time writing an article than a journalist could afford.
You and Lumifer pointed out the economic aspects, by which I see that:
Rest of my reply to Lumifer: http://lesswrong.com/lw/nnq/when_considering_incentives_consider_the/dbch
Essays are written that way, not stories
Are you saying you were just telling a story? This was a work of fiction?
I’m puzzled as to why people think formulaic writing is good writing.
Thesis statements tell the reader whether they agree with the work or not in advance. I disagree firmly with their use, as they encourage a lazy style of reading in which you decide before you begin reading whether or not you’re going to discard the evidence before you, or consider it.
What people are you talking about?
Schoolteachers teach formulaic writing because (1) it’s easy to teach formulas and hard to teach actual clear thinking and good writing style, (2) it’s easy to assess writing against a formula and hard to assess actual clear thinking and good writing style, (3) writing to a formula is relatively easy to do, compared with writing well without one, and (4) most schoolchildren’s baseline writing skills are so terrible that giving them a formula and saying “do it like this” makes for a considerable improvement.
Schoolteachers suffering from déformation professionelle may think formulaic writing is good writing. Their pupils may think the same, having been taught that way; hopefully those who end up doing much writing will learn better in due course.
Aside from that—does anyone actually “think formulaic writing is good writing”? I don’t see anyone here saying it is. What I do see is some people saying “this article was hard to read and would have been improved by more indication of where it’s going, the sort of thing that writing-by-formula tends to encourage”. I hope you can see the difference between “formulaic writing is good” and “this specific element of one kind of formulaic writing is actually often a good idea”.
Fair enough. But note that buybuydandavis’s complaint isn’t really “there isn’t a thesis statement” but “after a couple of paragraphs, I have no idea where this is going”: a thesis statement would be one way to address that, but not the only one. (And your own articles on LW, thesis statements or no, seem to me to have the key property BBDD is complaining casebash’s lacks: it is made clear from early on where the article’s going, and there are sufficient signposts to keep the reader on track. Possible exception: “The Winding Path”, which you say was an aesthetic experiment.)
Yes.
The title tells you exactly what the article is about and where it was going.
The article isn’t ambiguous, however. If anything, it’s overextended and overwritten in support of that point—yes, we get it, everybody in the construction is suspicious of everybody else’s incentives and for genuinely good reasons, and everybody is engaging in motivated reasoning.
The only “confusing” aspect is if you read the body of work looking for a hidden purpose.
Except that most of the article makes rather little contact with the idea stated in the title, and instead concerns incidental details of the squabble between the As and the Bs. Or, to put it differently:
This is exactly why …
The article reads very much like other articles I have read before that have a hidden purpose. So I think there may be one. Why is that unreasonable?
The incidental details are the point of the article, however; they’re an in-depth example of how the incentives of the two groups interact and intersect.
Instrumentally, it detracted from your understanding of the article.
It seems to me that the article could have done just fine with about half the quantity of incidental details. I am guessing that in fact you agree, given your description of it as “overextended”.
What about it do you believe I failed to understand?
Quite, yes. I don’t think it’s a perfect article—indeed, my primary issue with the criticisms of it are that they are criticizing the wrong things.
I have no idea. But you’ve indicated, if not in those exact words, you found it difficult to read.
I’ve indicated that I found it harder to read than it should have been because of the barrage of incidental details and the constant feeling that it’s really about something else besides its surface meaning.
I was (as you will readily see if you read my original comment) perfectly well able to extract what in your view was the entire point of the article. I just felt like I had to do more work to do so than was warranted.
[EDITED to add:] It seems that you actually had the same experience. So apparently we are agreed that casebash’s article was stuffed with unnecessary incidental details, that it gave the impression of having some kind of hidden meaning, and that these made it harder to read; the difference is … what? That you have decided, I know not on what basis, that I was “mindkilled” whereas you “treated it as practice in dealing with mindkilling”. Except that you haven’t offered any actual evidence that I was mindkilled (I’m pretty sure I wasn’t, for what it’s worth) or that I was any less successful than you were in understanding the article.
You do make one specific complaint about a line of criticism that, e.g., buybuydandavis and I have made. We say that it’s not clear where the article is heading and it could have used more signposts up front; you say no, there’s a thesis statement right in the title and that’s all anyone needs. (And you suggest that this indicates a failure to make sense of the article, which you blame on mind-killed-ness.)
But you are missing the point. The title, considered as thesis statement, is manifestly insufficient to explain what’s going on in the article, because most of the article consists of (what you yourself describe as) overextended elaboration of details of the argument between the As and the Bs. This is what readers could use some help in navigating. With only the title to go on, the best we can do is to pay careful attention to each paragraph and analyse the motivations of both As and Bs therein. But that’s a lot of work for very little payback, because then basically every paragraph is telling us more or less the same thing in more or less the same way.
What would have helped with this is some framing material at the start indicating one or more of the following: (1) This story is functioning as a metaphor for such-and-such a thing in the real world; you will follow the details more easily if you match them up with reality. (2) The details of this story aren’t terribly important in themselves; if you ignore some of the details you will lose nothing. (3) The really important bit of this story, as far as the point of the article goes, is such-and-such; the rest is there just to give it context.
… Or, of course, just losing about half of the incidental details. But buybuydandavis and I were both willing to give casebash the benefit of the doubt and assume there was a reason why all those details were there.
They enable a lazy style of reading. They also enable the reverse: a style of reading where the reader knows ahead of time that certain of their buttons are about to be pushed, and takes measures in advance to minimize the effect.
For my part, I find both helpful. Sometimes it’s clear that something is unlikely to be worth my time to read because it’s entirely based on premises I don’t accept. Sometimes it’s clear that while the author’s position is very different from mine, they have interesting things to say that I might find helpful. Sometimes their position is very different from mine and I read on in the hope that if I’m wrong I can be corrected. All of these require different attitudes while reading.
(Of course one can do without. But the more mental effort the author kindly saves me from expending in figuring out whether their piece is worth reading, whether I need to be reading it with an eye to revising my most deeply held beliefs, etc., etc., the more I can give to the actual content of what they’ve written.)
You find it helpful for the following cases: 1.) You’re not going to agree no matter what evidence is presented, so it’s not worth reading their evidence. 2.) They might have interesting things to say. 3.) They might be right, and you might be wrong.
The issue, of course, is that you can’t actually distinguish between these three cases from the thesis statement; a properly-constructed thesis statement offers no information to actually tell you which attitude you should come into reading the work with, it only states what conclusion the body of evidence reaches.
Again, I am not concerned solely with thesis statements as such, but with the practice of beginning an article with an indication of where it’s headed. Something that merely says what the conclusion is going to be, indeed, is unlikely to help much with distinguishing 1,2,3; but something that does a better job of indicating what’s ahead may do much better.
Suppose, for instance, I am interested in some question about the morality of abortion in certain circumstances, and suppose my current opinion is that it’s unproblematic. Article One begins “I shall argue that abortion is in all cases unbiblical and contrary to the traditions of the church”. That might be a very useful article for Christians, but it’s unlikely to offer me any useful guidance in thinking about abortion if I am not among their number; I reject some of their key premises and this article is unlikely to be justifying them. Article Two begins “The purpose of this article is to argue against abortion in circumstances X, not on the usual grounds that Y but because of the often-neglected Z”. I’ve thought a bit about Z before and decided that it doesn’t actually affect my opinions about abortion which are dominated by other considerations P,Q,R; but it hadn’t previously occurred to me that Z is the case in circumstances X, so it might be interesting to read the article. Article Three begins “Abortion is widely held to be permissible in circumstances X because P, Q, and R; I shall argue that this is a mistake because P and Q don’t actually hold and R is irrelevant because S.” This speaks directly to my reasons for holding the position I do; if there are other indications that the author is intelligent and sensible, they may have compelling arguments and persuade me to rethink.
I’ll merely point at the title, which says exactly what the article is about and what it is conveying.
Laziness is a virtue :-P
There are a great many things available for me to read and I would prefer to figure out whether I want to read a particular piece before finishing it. There are way too many idiots who managed to figure out how a keyboard works.
Winner.
Yep. Motivate the reader early that reading the article will be worthwhile.
I think I’m going to be using that one someday.
It takes about one paragraph to figure out whether or not a piece is worth finishing, with or without a thesis statement.
Often, yes. Not always.
Formula’s are quite helpful in achieving an end. If someone has already achieved an end in a certain way, you can use that way too, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
Given the general limits of pedagogues, what is taught is the formula, and not the ends. That was how I was taught when young. Do this. That’s the right way.
In grad school, my advisor gave both the end to be achieved, and a formula for doing so. The end was getting people to read and understand the article. The formula was a means to do so.
If you want people to read your articles, you need to motivate them to do so. They need to anticipate a payoff of value to them, which will we weighed against the anticipated cost.
If you want people to understand, you should help them to do so.
I want to use my time efficiently getting value for me, and appreciate it when writers help make that happen. Help me assess the value of their article to me up front. Help me to extract the value from their article.
I prefer the ultimate lazy style of reading—to not read at all if I don’t see value. I don’t think I’m alone in that.