“Pity the poor reader” is one of philosopher Penelope Maddy‘s writing maxims.
Maddy is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine, and is interviewed about her writing by Nathan Ballantyne (Arizona State) at his site, The Workbench.
What does she mean by it? She says:
In philosophy especially, I figure the reader is nearly always gasping for breath, in danger of being swept out to sea, so the writer should do everything in their power to help. Keep things as simple and explicit, as direct and straightforward as you can. Don’t hedge or obfuscate. Don’t use jargon unless you define it. (Philosophical words—realism, analyticity, empiricism, etc.—are used in so many different ways that it’s not safe to call on one without saying explicitly what you mean by it.) Give concrete examples.
Down to earth examples are always best, I think… I sometimes said to my students, I don’t care what happens on Mars (Twin Earth, etc.), tell me what happens here!
Later in the interview she shares a variant of this advice, picked up during her time in grad school at Princeton, which she has passed on to others:
At the time, [Thomas Nagel] lived in New York City and commuted down to Princeton by train. Rumor had it that he read his students’ short papers during the train ride, with all the noise and distractions that would involve. So the grad student scuttlebutt was that we needed to write our papers clearly and directly enough to come through to someone in that challenging environment. I used to share that advice with my students: Write for Nagel on the Train.
The interview contains further interesting details about Maddy’s writing, along with more bits of writing advice. You can read the whole interview here. Discussion welcome, as are writing suggestions.
This sounds all fine and dandy, but unfortunately as a student we are mainly introduced to obscure, terribly esoteric, and what comes off as willfully obtuse writing, and when we do not use enough jargon ourselves we get shitty grades.
Here’s some tonic for that, perhaps:
Philosophy’s Most Beautiful Sentence or Paragraph
That link doesn’t give me much hope. I certainly hope students don’t try to mimic most of those examples.
Note that she doesn’t say not to use jargon, but that you should clearly define it. The problem is not that there are specialized terms within the discipline, but that you need to be really clear how you are using the concept or idea for your own purposes.
I had/have a very good habit of doing this, but my papers end up with reference lists the size of a lit review. Recently went to a professor to ask how I might improve my writing and I was told I didn’t need to be defining terms, because I don’t have enough space. He said at MA level, it’s taken for granted that both myself and the lecturers know the terms, so it’s a waste of space. I was also told the straight forward pain English writing was “like a sweet wine, whereas I prefer dry” aka peppered with tons of new concepts.
What i’ve learnt from all this is that I need to get to know my lecturers well before I write.
This is horrible advice. Not to mention all the red flags (writing like “sweet wine”, seriously??), I wouldn’t consult with that professor again, if I were in your position and could avoid him.
I say this as someone who otherwise prefers sweet to dry (non-metaphorical) wine.
There are advantages to trying to keep your writing as straightforward and plain as you can – but when there is a term you are aiming to use precisely (whether it’s a standard bit of jargon, or a bit of ordinary English that is doing important work for your argument) you want to do what you can to ensure the reader knows precisely what you mean by it.
If you’re writing something for an MA level class, it may be relatively short papers directly responding to specific readings – in that case, it’s worth skipping the definitions and just replying to the argument as it has already been set up.
But when you’re writing something more substantive of your own, that isn’t a direct response to something else, you’ll almost certainly need to define your terms.
The other day, I developed a list of 11 short philosophical writing tips, to follow up on some previous tips. Posted here:
https://nathannobis.substack.com/p/philosophical-writing-tips-again
Good tips, Nathan.
On #7: instead of “rigorously edit”, I tell students and others to “ruthlessly edit.” This conveys that nothing in their draft is sacred; sometimes, you need to slash and burn to get a draft down to size…
A variant of this: if you really can’t get the draft to work, identify the single sentence or example you like the most. Then delete it, and see if that helps.
I like to tell people to create a second document, and cut this out of your main document and paste it into the other document for the next paper you want to write.
That makes it less painful, whether or not you actually end up writing that second paper.
One thing worth taking into account is how catering to the poor reader can lead to poor readers developing an expectation of being catered to which reaffirms their poor reading habits.
Like most skills, you become a better reader by pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and challenging yourself. A culture that prioritizes the needs of the poor reader seems likely to create more and more poor readers who themselves reinforce this norm.
Not really saying this as an argument against the piece, since I think most of the pushback against clear writing (at least at the graduate level) comes from either a desire not to reflect on what one is saying or an inability to translate jargon out of its narrow technical applications.
I guess my point is that we need to balance catering to the bad reader with creating an environment that actually fosters good reading (there might be a connection between what I’m saying and Barry Lam’s new book but idk I haven’t read it yet).
I also don’t think this general point is super relevant to people writing philosophy professionally, but just on the topic of people being catered to and not developing their skill at reading difficult stuff: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346
This comment seems to take Maddy as using “poor reader” to mean “reader will poor skills / bad reader”, when I think she means something more like “suffering reader”. Perhaps I’m the one who is mistaken, but I took the advice to be to think of the reader when writing, rather than to think of a reader who doesn’t read well.
Jeff
You are absolutely right. The poor reader is the suffering reading … the one we authors slay on the alter of erudition 😉
I took Gaardian to be deliberately punning to make the point that we can turn suffering readers into bad ones. But maybe I read too much into the comment!
On a different note, but to your same recommendation: I don’t think I would’ve stayed in philosophy and worked so hard at it if the texts I came across weren’t in some measure mysterious. They gave the impression of rewarding a cultivated mind; their opacity promised insight, if only I would work to get it.
Of course, it didn’t, and doesn’t, always turn out that way, and, of course, some opacity was, and is, bound up with sloppy thinking on the part of the author. But grappling with these inefficient, sprawling, oddly-worded texts helped me learn how to tell the difference.
We aren’t just writing for readers in our own culture – some of us hope that some of our work will be read by non-philosophers, whether it’s by mathematicians or linguists or cognitive scientists or members of the general public. And even if we are read by philosophers, some of us hope we will be read by philosophers from other countries, a decade or two from now, when background assumptions will be different.
We *can’t* anticipate *all* the relevant differences. But we can foster good reading by being explicit about what we are asking the reader to do, rather than just passive-aggressively assuming they will conform to the norms of our own intellectual background.
I dream of being but one small part of the Holy Training Data.
What is it like to be Nagel on the Train?
Lots of people complain that analytic philosophy is awful writing, a kind of anti-literature, written with the dead robot voice, etc.
Are there any analytic philosophy texts (articles, books, etc.) which strive to be literate? I mean that strive to be a literary works of art, and that combine that artistry with the philosophy.
There’s lots of historical philosophy which is literate: Plato, Plotinus, Boehme, Leibniz, Hegel, Emerson, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and so many others.
More recently, outside analytic philosophy, there are literate philosophical works like Gloria Anzaldua’s “Now let us shift…”, Steven Shakespeare’s “Of plications”, Eugenie Brinkema’s Life-Destroying Diagrams, Vinciane Despret’s Living as a Bird.
Anything like this in analytic philosophy?