General Writing Guide

How to Write a Passable Philosophy Paper

Or

How not to Impale Yourself on Your Own Sword

            I do not tolerate inattentive, thoughtless or lazy writing.  Since I am a bastard in the margins of student papers, since students may occasionally find my comments harsh, I am providing you with the following advice:

1.0   A thought is nothing over and above its expression.  There is no principled distinction to draw between content and style.  (Confusedly thinking that there is has caused a tremendous amount of bad writing (as writers concentrated on style, leaving content to fend for itself).  If you must keep the distinction, then give up on any concern over style altogether—trust concern over content to do all the work.)

2.0   A person thinks only as well as he or she writes.  Don’t cry to me that your ideas were good by that you couldn’t get them on paper clearly. If your writing is poor, then your thinking is poor.  Period. (“What a man cannot state he does not perfectly know, and conversely the inability to put his thoughts in words sets a boundary to his thought…English is not merely the medium of our thought; it is the very stuff and process of it.” –Report of the Departmental Committee on the Teaching of English in England.)

3.0   Faulty diction is evidence of faulty thinking.  Errors in expression show your thinking to be inattentive, thoughtless or lazy. Remember, any diction is faulty that forces your reader to conjecture what you may have meant.

4.0   Strive to write precisely and economically.  Use all and only the necessary words.  Never use a longer word where a shorter will do, an unfamiliar where a familiar will do. 

5.0   Avoid complicated structure.  Avoid any overly complex or elaborate structuring of sentences or paragraphs, etc.  Endeavor to write simply.

6.0   Be ever wary of solecism.  Exercise great caution when choosing words.  Be sure that the word you choose is the word you want.  (“The golden rule [of good writing] is not a rule of grammar or syntax.  It concerns less the arrangement of words than the choice of them.  ‘After all,’ said Lord Macaulay, ‘the first law of writing, that law to which all other laws are subordinate, is this:  that the word employed be such as to convey to the reader the meaning of the writer.’ The golden rule is to pick those words and the use them and only them. Arrangement is of course important, but if the right words are used they generally have a happy knack of arranging themselves.” –Ernest Gowers.)  To insure correctness of choice, it is necessary to read those who practice it, and to practice it yourself—employing a good dictionary.  (Acquire the dictionary habit!)

7.0   Do not indulge the desire to flaunt your vocabulary.  Words are like fish—the big ones often get away from you.  Use words you’re comfortable using, words you know. Especially troublesome are technical terms.  (“It is my strong belief that…philosophy which cannot be written in plain terms, without reliance on the jargon of any school, must be…false philosophy.”  --R. G. Collingwood)

8.0   Be utterly scrupulous when using modal terms (‘impossible’, ‘possible’, ‘necessary’, etc.) and when using ‘real’ or any of its cognates (especially ‘reality’).

9.0   Limit your use of abstract nouns and adjectives.   When drafting a paper, stop often and count the number of –tion and –ation words.  Rewrite to eliminate as many as possible.

10.0  Be specific.  Often whether or not a sentence is clear depends on whether it is specific.  “He was hanged” is clearer than “he was killed” and “he was killed” is clearer than “he died”.

11.0  Rhetorical questions are not substitutes for arguments.  “Who’d believe that?” is neither an argument nor an objection to an argument.  Avoid rhetorical questions altogether, if possible.

12.0  Rewrite.  The only sure way to improve a paper is (using William James’ phrase) “to torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends…no more”.

13.0  Easy writing makes damned poor philosophizing.  Wittgenstein said that philosophy is even harder than we think it is. Take your cue from this and work, work, work.

14.0  Buy a copy of Fowler’s Modern English Usageor of Gower’s The Complete Plain Wordsand use it to fill your idle hours.

15.0  My advice for writing, philosophy or whatever:  you’ll be better if you practice and you won’t if you don’t.

KDJ