I’ve not enjoyed substantial parts of my time as a graduate student, and I’ve finally decided to openly discuss it. These will all be posted under the title “Professionalism in Philosophy.” This first post is about writing evaluation. In particular, I’ll talk about writing instruction, including soliciting and understanding feedback as well as coursework-style instruction. I’m assuming that my own experience generalizes to a meaningful extent, but since I don’t have much data on this I could be wildly misguided. So I’d especially love to hear from folks on these professionalism posts. (I promise I’ll contribute to the “of science” part of this philosophy of science blog soon! *nervous laughter*)
Some background
As I understand it, these were the major criticisms of my earlier writing. First, it was difficult to follow. Here fell conceptual imprecision, structural deficiencies, poor grammar, and (especially) vague theses. Second, it was wrongly voiced and/or aimed. And here fell timidity, bluster, and amateurism. Accordingly, my earlier writing was evaluated negatively. I agree that it suffered from these problems… However, I also think there was a larger problem: I was left to teach myself how to write “philosophically.”
Until OSU I had (quite literally) zero exposure to philosophical writing or thought, and perhaps a few hours’ worth of exposure to academic writing in general. And even while at OSU I struggled to read the stuff, let alone comprehend it or how it was generated. But somehow I was accepted into LPS, where I immediately felt intimidated despite a generally welcoming atmosphere at the time. (For instance, I vividly recall telling my host during my visit that I didn’t feel I was good enough to be here. I should add that I recall very few things, period, let alone vividly.)
So upon entering graduate school, I had no model for how the writing process should work, and I also lacked an understanding of the standards by which philosophical writing was measured. (Honesty time: I still don’t have the latter.) This probably has several reasons that more-or-less generalize to the larger groups I fall into (e.g., first-gen college student*, rural, public-school-educated, not wealthy) . First, my rural, public high schools did not teach writing well–or, in the case of my first high school, at all because they left English to be taught by the football coach…who just let us play football every day instead. Second, my undergraduate writing courses were not preparatory for philosophy. And third, the few philosophy classes I did take asked for term papers. (There was one exception: in a philosophy of mathematics class, I was to write ~1.5 page responses to that week’s readings, and the professor provided helpful written and verbal feedback, as well as re-write opportunities.) Term papers are basically useless for teaching students how to write without any guidance through the process or serious feedback afterward.
Thought One
Surprisingly, we–the philosophical community, not just LPS–don’t really teach courses on how to write. Proseminars seem often to provide help in this respect, but my impression is that this is rarely the explicit goal. For instance, we have a couple proseminar-ish courses here at LPS, and two to three short papers is the usual requirement. In combination with the guidance provided in developing and defending the theses of each, the feedback had from this is undoubtedly helpful. But this is still not a course whose goal is teaching students how to write; the content and explicit goal of the course is not writing.
Unsurprisingly, I struggled to produce writing my first few years. This was especially true once I was outside of the proseminar environment that enforced some structure in my writing process. And even when I did manage to produce writing, it was not well-received. This was very discouraging, and it made writing even more difficult. It’s somewhat incredible that I’m still a student, to be honest.
Thus, my first thought: we need to explicitly teach the writing process and standards to which we expect our students to adhere. A writing course would have gone a long way toward preparing me for the rest of my graduate career. And stepping back a moment, it’s important to realize that, while underprivileged in some respects compared to the typical philosophy student (high-SES, white, Western, cis-het men), I am significantly more privileged in many ways. If *I* struggled, then (I think) the inequity is serious enough to warrant curricular attention.
Thought Two
So I struggled to produce writing, and I had no curricular route through which to learn these skills. This left many of the improvements I made to come through feedback. Problem: this feedback is wildly inconsistent in tone, structure/format, depth, quality, timeliness, appropriateness, etc.–and that’s assuming it ever comes at all. For instance, I got two kinds of feedback on an earlier paper of mine, the gist of them being:
- “Conceptually, the paper is a mess; I’m not even clear about what your argument is supposed to be. And you are assuming things in the background that are false. If you want to work on this more, it needs to be completely rethought and rewritten.”
- “I suppose it’s plausible, but the evidence you provide is fairly ambiguous and it shows in your argument. And besides, I’m not sure why anyone should care about this when there are more easily interpretable data out there.”**
Sorting through feedback like this is difficult enough when you are aware of how different can be the personalities, methods, values, etc. of the people providing it. This is rarely clear to students up front.
Moreover, it’s often unclear at what stage you should seek feedback during the writing process. Some people want to know your thesis and the structure of your argument, then send you off to write; some want to work up to the thesis with you; some want to see each section as it develops; some want nothing to do with you until you’ve produced a complete (and perhaps even publication-ready!) draft; and some don’t read your stuff, period. On top of this you’re going to have variations based on subject matter, time of year, assessed importance of getting you feedback, perceived aptitude, etc., so it can be difficult for students to grasp any underlying method to the madness. And still worse, if you don’t have a good grasp on the writing process, you may not even know what stage you are at in your writing process!
This brings me to my second thought: tell students when and for what they should seek our feedback, and track student progress w.r.t. the feedback we have already given. If I’m already embarrassed to be sharing my writing at any stage, it only makes matters worse for me to send it at the wrong time. (And early and late are both problems: e.g., too early and your ideas may not be as coherent as expected; too late and you may have taken a wrong turn or missed the window for useful feedback. Lose this game a few rounds in a row and you’ve “earned” yourself the lost-cause label.) Additionally, it is not helpful to be kicking at a moving goalpost. Shared and precisely specified expectations across all persons providing feedback on a given piece of writing would be great, but at the very least we should be recording what we tell students to improve upon and then noting that improvement the next time feedback is provided. (Likewise with failure to improve.) Not keeping records, using explicit metrics, etc., leaves a hell of a lot of wiggle room, as often emphasized (e.g., Devine and Cox in their workshop). And again, this wiggle room probably has disproportionately detrimental effects on underrepresented groups.
Thought Three
After a couple years of negative feedback, one person thought to wonder aloud why, on the one hand, I was prone to make these mistakes while, on the other, professing a desire to avoid them and appearing receptive to feedback. Coming out of that discussion, I felt I had a much better sense for what had gone wrong. This included preliminary versions of the above thoughts, but one more also stood out.
I learned to write by example because I had no other way. However, *I* was choosing the examples. This is a problem for a number of reasons. First, low selectivity for what makes writing easy to follow: I didn’t know what good writing looked like, and I was not “mature” enough to read “philosophically,” so the examples I chose were not ideal models to learn from. On the one hand, I was reading a lot of historical figures. I don’t think it’s too bold to say that many different rhetorical strategies, argument structures, and grammatical standards have been used, not to mention more contentful differences like conceptual clarity and thesis specificity. On the other hand, the contemporary works I did read were books or otherwise longer format (e.g., Wilson’s Wandering Significance). These did not help me learn to write concisely, as now required as philosophy transitions away from being a book field.
Second, many of the examples I chose to model after had less-than-ideal tone. Early on in my philosophy career, for instance, A.J. Ayer seemed a good model. Consider the opening of Chapter 1 of Language, Truth and Logic:
The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful. The surest way to end them is to establish beyond question what should be the purpose and method of a philosophical enquiry. And this is by no means so difficult a task as the history of philosophy would lead one to suppose. For if there are any questions which science leaves to philosophy to answer, a straightforward process of elimination must lead to their discovery.
Indeed, his is rather clear writing. However, it’s also incredibly arrogant and blustery writing in claiming that: traditional philosophy is shit; we should “just” establish once-and-for-all the right way of philosophizing; this isn’t really that difficult; and philosophy has a proper domain. Truth of these claims aside, his is a pretty blasé attitude toward (supposed) interlocutors. I think this kind of tone dominates among the preeminent philosophers of our past and present, especially those who strongly oppose being grouped with the other humanities or so-called continental traditions.
Thus, my third thought: we should point out and explain the good/bad aspects of the writing they are reading, and maybe even give them a paper or two to model their own on before sending them off to write. It should not be surprising that folks newer to the discipline–especially those with lower SES–tend to take longer to develop a writing style. Professional philosophy is a confusing place to learn how to write. In my experience even most university writing centers can’t help their philosophy students because the standards are so different. If philosophy is serious about being more inclusive–which I very seriously doubt in many instances–then openly discussing philosophical writing’s weirdness, practicing patience with students, and being open to reexamining the efficacy of the disciplinary standards seem like helpful first steps.
Concluding Thoughts
Providing feedback on written work is difficult. Learning to do this well is also difficult. And more generally, I think universities are partly to blame for providing little incentive for faculty to participate in professional development. However, it also seems to me that philosophy at-large has a problem with giving students the help they need with their writing. I consider this to be part of a broader theme: a failure to teach what students are expected to learn. Indeed, this is the guiding idea behind the “Professionalism in Philosophy” posts.
Finally, to reiterate: these thoughts were driven largely by my own experience, so I’d love to hear thoughts from others. (My apologies in advance if I don’t get back to you, though! I am swamped at the moment, and generally bad at replying to comments because it aggravates my anxiety.)
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* Each of my parents attended a technical college and earned an Associate’s degree, while one further attained B.S. and M.B.A. degrees as a non-traditional student.
** This paper went on to be published. But to be clear, the point here is not that the feedback was wrong per se–it was correct and moreover helpful in some ways–but that I had a lot of trouble determining what it really meant for the future of the paper.
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