The Long and the Short of It

I'm reacting to a couple of pieces I've read recently that talk about writing. As part of the message the authors delivered, each piece said to write less.  In my post I want to consider when that is good advice and when the advice should be challenged, perhaps even discarded altogether.  And I want to do this twice, first for more experienced writers, then for student writers.

Of the two pieces, the more recent is this one from the Chronicle of Higher Education called, Why Writing Will Make You a Better Person. (This piece is behind the Chronicle's paywall.  If you don't have access to the Chronicle but want to read the piece, contact me and I''ll send you a copy.)  The authors are two philosophy professors who want to treat writing as an ethical activity - be kind to the reader.  It is a novel approach from which to consider writing, one that made sense to me.  Yet I thought they made a rather serious error that I want to highlight, after which I will consider my alternative.   The other piece is called How to Get Every Email Returned - Or at least how to try.  The author is a former Op-Ed editor of the New York Times.  She talks about psychological factors that readers confront, which influence how they will read a piece, and then she bases her recommendations on these factors.

Now a bit about my writing online experience.  I got started with that in two different communities.  One was on campus done in FirstClass, with faculty who were teaching with ALN (what the Sloan Foundation called online learning at the time) and ed tech types who were supporting those faculty.  This started in late summer or early fall of 1995.  Then there was a discussion group for the various grantees of the Sloan Foundation in their ALN program, with representatives on many different campuses.  I found some comfort and social life in these discussions, as a parent with young children we were pretty much homebodies during the evening.  I also found I had some flair for this.  It was a way to meet interesting people and a way for me to contribute ideas to the community. This writing served as a gateway for my career change, from an academic economist to an ed tech administrator.

About ten years later I started this blog. The immediate cause was an analytic post that I wrote for a discussion that had stalled on the then Sloan-C listserv.  I received several private emails from well situated people on the list, thanking me for that post. But no subsequent discussion ensued on the list.  That bothered me, a lot.  So I thought to expand the audience for my analyses by making the writing public.  After a few months of doing that I got discovered by Scott Leslie, which served as a launch point for entering into the edu blog community.  A year or so later I met Barbara Ganley online, and along with a few others began some very interesting conversations about how to find the right sort of social adaptations to get the technology to truly work in service of learning, and about a lot of other stuff as well that all tied in. Barbara was featured in this piece about the slow blogging movement, which is a useful read now if only to show the tension to shorten online pieces and the push back from some writers who did the opposite existed even then, when Blackberry was still the smartphone market leader.  As for me, I too was a slow blogger and had something of a large following within the edu blog community, as indicated by this post.  Coincident with this I participated in several different professional listservs that stemmed from my administrator job, and I had an enormous amount of one-on-one and small group email as well.

Part of the reason to emphasize this background is to point out that how we write depends on context, in a community setting the mores of the group matter, and when there is an ongoing group discussion that you are reacting to, you need to ask - are you pushing the discussion further, providing a different framing for considering things or otherwise helping members of the group think through the issues?  Or are you mainly echoing what has been said before?  As I said earlier, I have a flair for this sort of thing, at least with respect to certain subject matter about learning and technology, and giving an analysis that takes some substantial writing to explicate may try the patience of some in the group while pleasing others who want that content.  In other words, readers are not a homogeneous group.  I believe that the philosophers who wrote the Chronicle piece linked above tacitly assumed they are.   What then should the writer do about reader heterogeneity if as a writer you want to treat readers ethically?

I'd like to illustrate the issue with some data.  We live at a time where analytics is the new buzzword. Unfortunately, for written documents online, such as this blog post, one can get measures of "hits" but hits don't indicate whether the person read through the entire piece carefully, merely skimmed it all, or didn't even get that far.  And, with tabbed browsing the norm, a person can have the piece open in the browser for quite a while, yet spend very little time on reading it.  Consequently, I want to momentarily looked at such data for video of a micro-lecture, specifically this one I made on the principal-agent model for a course I teach.  YouTube tracks not just hits, a bit more than 3,100 for this video, but it also tracks minutes viewed, with the average viewing time per hit less than 3 and a half minutes, while the video itself is over 12 minutes long.   On average, then, the video doesn't seem to be reaching the audience.  Yet there are a bunch of positive comments, only one negative comment, and a dozen likes with no dislikes.  How does one reconcile all this information and what does it tell me about how I should make other video micro-lectures in the future.  My conjecture is that the audience is bimodal, with the larger mode impatient and not willing to sit through the entire video and a smaller mode of students who watch it all the way through.  If that's right, is it ethically okay for me to focus on the smaller mode and as long as they are happy with the piece then I should feel I'm on the right track?  Or must I make content that the larger mode would watch in its entirety?

Having made that little embrace with data, let's return to talking about writing in the presence of reader heterogeneity and note that the issue has been around for some time.  Consider this essay by Saul Bellow from the New York Times series Writers on Writing, published in October 1999 when the Internet was still in its gestation period. It shows a parallel argument about writing novels in an era where most people were going to the movies (or watching TV) rather than reading books.  It is an eloquent defense that the writer is entitled to concentrate on the smaller mode, consisting of those readers who still appreciate the writing.  Of course, Bellow had won the Nobel Prize for Literature more than 20 years earlier and the audience for his writing, though much smaller than the audience for blockbuster movies, was still sizeable.  What of us writers who are not as skilled as Bellow and have a much smaller audience?  Can we still make a case that it is ethical to appeal to the smaller mode?

I think that's a tough question and I certainly don't have an ideal philosophical answer to it.  I can report what I do, which is to take a mixed mode approach.  Theses days, I definitely have more hits on my Twitter posts than on my posts at Blogger.  I do something novel with Twitter, which is to post short rhymes there (which I re-post to Facebook).  Some of them resonate with the audience and in Facebook I will occasionally get a friend to rhyme back at me - the most sincere form of flattery. But I do this longer writing too.   At this point, the blogging is not that different form an alternative  where I keep a journal only for myself.  I need to process my thinking and the writing helps with that.  Having even a little bit of an audience then encourages the proofreading after the processing and the tracking down of links to insert into the piece.  I also do a fair amount of other writing in the volunteer work I do, editing training documents, putting together grant proposals, and communicating with the others who are also volunteering.  The context determines much about the writing.  I am for clarity, always, but brevity, only some of the time.  I do think that writing supports collegial interaction and I try hard to be a good colleague. I think it is important to develop a sense of taste in these things, more so than simply follow a set of rules.  That sense of taste come from reading and finding other authors whom I enjoy reading.  (When I started the blog I tried to emulate Stephen J. Gould, as he would write in the New York Review of Books.)  Now I always try to please myself with my writing.  I can sign off when I've done that.

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I want to switch gears here and talk about student writing.  In the class I teach I have students write weekly blog posts.  I first did this when I was teaching a class for the Campus Honors Program and wrote about the experience here.  This was before I retired so the teaching was done as an overload, work you'd only do if you really enjoy it and/or if you thought it contributed to doing your full time job better. Teaching honors students is always fun and I've learned that my little experiments with pedagogy are much more likely to give good results with honors students.  Those good results then encourage me to try the approach with regular students.

I retired just a few days after that article was published, which was more than a semester after the class had concluded. When I've taught since then it has been for the Economics Department, once intermediate microeconomics, all other times upper level courses in the majors.  From 2012 on that has been a course on the economics of organizations.  Student blogging is a mainstay of the course and what I write here is based on which I've learned from that experience.  Students post weekly, typically in response to a prompt I give them, which relates to subject matter the class will consider, though they have the freedom of writing about something else, as long as they can connect it to course themes.  There is a 600 word minimum requirement for these posts.  I don't enforce this strictly, but I mean to convey by the requirement that the students should put in real and substantial effort in the writing.  I comment on each post students make, provided the posts don't come in too late.  I also require students to comment on my comment.  That much of the mechanism is fixed now. I've also sometimes required students to comment on the posts of other students.  That has been more of a mixed success, though it does make the students aware of how their peers write.  They sometimes get discouraged when comparing their own writing to mine.

I don't think of this as teaching writing.  I think of it as using writing to build connections between the economics we are studying and the experiences the students have already had.  This is not something they do in their other classes and eventually, though definitely not early in the semester, students come to appreciate the value in making those connections for their learning.  The students do grow some as writers during the semester and I would like to mark that trajectory a bit.

I should note first that the students are writing under an alias, but then are writing out in open.  A potential employer won't know who the student is, but the student's classmates might be able to match the alias to the person.  As I assign the aliases to the students, I am not in the dark about which student is writing under an alias.  In spite of this particular form of protection, many of the students are extremely uncomfortable with the blogging early on.  It takes about a month for them to relax about the blogging.  Much of this is about poor self-image as a writer.  Apart from the required rhetoric classes and some dreaded term papers in other general education courses, the students don't do much writing academically, a downside of attending Big Public U.

Even after they relax some, many students still struggle with generating prose.  I talk about pre-writing with them in class and the necessity of that, but I don't think it sinks in, especially not at first.  The benefit from this struggle to generate prose is that the students subsequently become more amenable to suggestions from me.  They may then be ready to embrace pre-writing and come to understand why it is necessary.  Of course, writer's block happens even to experienced writers who have put in substantial time thinking prior to sitting down at the keyboard about what they will say.  I like this page from the Online Writing Lab at Purdue and especially the suggestion to start in the middle, which is very easy to do when writing on a computer, as paragraphs can be moved around via a simple copy and paste.

Eventually, most of my students find that the minimum word requirement doesn't bind (at least during weeks where they don't have exams or term papers due in their other courses).   Yet the students still often only gloss the surface of the subject they are writing about.  My comments are meant to encourage them to explore their topic further.  Sometimes they also have a cognitive issue when describing their own experiences.  They are eye witnesses, but the reader wasn't there and needs background and context to understand the experience.  Providing such context is a particular writing skill that will serve them well later and does make the the student more empathetic for the reader, but it does not lead to the student writing less.  If anything, the student needs to write more.

A very small number of students treat the blogging as if they are opening up a vein and then just let it flow, producing a large volume of prose.  If it is coherent, I will not object.  If it is scattered, I will encourage the student to spend more time on editing and them make sure the various bits connect to one another.  But such students are the exception.  For most students, getting more depth in their pieces remains the goal through the entire semester.

Therefore, I believe it is a mistake to tell such students to write less at this time in their development.  Ultimately, of course, the skill they need to develop is to be able to write a cogent memo or perhaps to be able to write a tolerably good (1 page) executive summary to accompany a white paper. Eventually, writing less will be an important lesson for them to learn.  But they need to understand that a lot of thought was put in before that cogent memo was produced.  They simply will not understand that until they've done a lot of other writing that demanded substantial pre-writing from them.

I haven't yet talked much at all about proofreading and editing.  Many students don't get why that's necessary, because they have yet to develop empathy for the reader, and feeling the writing in the class is just another hoop to get through.  As I think comments about grammar and spelling are rarely effective (except, for example, when they use a homophone for an economic term, principle-agent model is one common student error) I will not give feedback at all on that front, but will encourage proof-reading, which in the ideal should happen with some time interval after the composition of the piece.

Editing for substance is a different matter, one I don't discuss much in the class because I don't think students are ready for it.  Instead, with some of the better students I've tried a strategy where they split their blog post into pieces.  The first part is a reflection on the blog post they wrote the previous week. The second part addresses the current prompt.  The going back to what they've written earlier is in lieu of editing the earlier piece.  I only do this for the very good students, who are willing to do the extra work.

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I want to wrap this up.   As income inequality may be the number one social issue of our time, I'm sensitive to criticism about being elitist.  Indeed with respect to my teaching I've opted to teach regular students rather than honors student partially because with my teaching I think it is right to focus my attention on the larger mode (although I continue to believe that typical students need to raise their game about what they bring to the academic table).  But I may very well be elitist in writing slow blogging posts like this one, though the few readers I still have may not consider themselves elite at all, but rather are hungry for more thoughtful analysis expressed in generalist writing, which is becoming increasingly rare.

I do think we need to be careful about sending messages to students that encourage them to put in less effort in their studies and to imitate the communication strategies they've adopted when they text with their friends.  It is a reality that the students are very busy and they tend to have their heads focused on their electronic devices at all times.  But I believe that reality needs to be combated int their class.  What I see, instead, is acquiescence.  There is no short cut to thinking well. That's a hard lesson to learn and, until it is learned, focus on the limited attention span of some readers is likely to be counterproductive.

The writer who produces long form writing regularly but is cognizant of the reader learns to be able to produce short form writing that is effective, when the need arises for it.  Along the learning curve, it is my belief that should come later.  An effective one pager has its uses, no doubt.  I'm not denying that.  I'm only questioning how people come to develop that skill.   And I want to note that many college educated people never do, which I surmise is because they haven't spent enough time writing.  If students don't have enough practice and the message from the instructor is - write less - what does that say about the amount of practice students will get?