First, a TL;DR
Coming from industry into academia I knew that I needed to write well. My journey began from wanting to describe things better. “Describe things better” is a wonderful example! The words "things" and "better" are vague. Did I want to describe them or did I want to retell my thoughts? Do I want to address things or have a voice within a disciplinary field of literature? Maybe I wanted to retell my thoughts within a disciplinary field of literature, to effect bottom-up socio-economic change using automation and AI. Not the best of sentences, but it has an aliveness that the first sentence did not. It squirms and begs for further attention, either for myself, through revision, or you, the reader, to see what’s next.
In academia writing is something that everyone does for a living but few discuss how they making a living doing it well. In a sense, it’s at the tail end of the work, that must be gotten over to successfully publish. Given how important publishing is, isn’t it odd how little we discuss writing?
My writing journey was in some ways more complicated than it needed to be, but in other ways the diversions were just as important, a nod to the journey metaphor throughout this three part series. I started after receiving a critique of not incorporating theory and conceptualization enough, by turning to logic, heavily looking into Greek syllogisms. When those proved too limiting, too simplistic (e.g., the excluded middle fallacy), I moved to Ibn Avicenna, the father of modern medicine. His logic was beautiful — for me, it incorporated time while avoiding the inscrutability of modern higher order logics — forming a concise dynamic perspective of the world. But eventually, it became clear that I was overly focusing on logical sequence over a sequence of hearts, of the argument. Without writing to the heart of things context becomes missing and things are taken for granted.
From Peter Elbow I read about speaking aloud as a form of writing, writing recursively, and writing without stopping, particularly without prior research or disciplinary biases. I explored an ancient invention that proved to be extremely powerful: rhetorical stasis: the levels and places of argument. At a more granular level, suggestions for crafting sentences, borrowing form a Finnish online virtual academy, helped me organize, and start my sentences. Beyond that were wonderful suggestions by Thomas Basbøll, who sadly has stopped blogging (it's his 20th year), enabled me to draft my final thesis chapter with a self-confidence that my prior papers didn’t contain from myself.
Tactical books like Howard S. Becker's Tricks of the Trade (so useful for my preliminary milestone, when complaining about the difficulty of writing to my advisers), and Wendy Belcher's Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks, helped contextualize writing in terms of academic goal setting.
Of all the resources here, Thomas Basbøll has been the most transformative and Howard Becker the most eye-opening — yet Martin Camper the deepest, because he strikes into the very heart of writing that many overlook: you, dearest, gentle reader. The interpreting reader, or reviewer #2, who reads the prose.
And now, on Making Arguments
I started down the road of argument making from reading literature constructed nearly 2,000 years ago, meandered through a 1,000 BC Islamic revitalization thereof, and stopped over at a modern revival of a different kind of rhetoric. While reading reams of critical theory and perspectives on Information during my first two years I distinctly remember encountering novel concepts and ideas but was left wondering: how did they get there? It was as if in each academic there was a magic person behind the curtain, producing greatness through unknown machinations.
A large part of this, I realized, was rhetorical. Any scientific discipline can be viewed as an intellectual community under an established form of rhetoric. Typically, quantitative fields use the language of mathematics and design of experiments, arguing at the level of definitions and causality. Qualitative work, I found, focused not only on facts but on the objective description of subjective experiences: connections, values, and eventual policy implications.
So what is this rhetorical space? You can view it in terms of discussions taken as arguments: or, stasis theory. Stasis are levels of argument, discussions involving fact, definition, causality, value, and policy. I discovered that by summarizing material in these terms, from “simplest” (e.g. fact) to “complex,” that I could lead the reader through a retelling from the basics to the complex. This helped me systemize my thinking and pinpoint where confusions lie. The Open English book from the Salt Lake Community College has an excellent article on stasis theory.
But there's more than just argument. There's interpretation, wonderfully outlined in Martin Camper's work on interpretative stasis. This type of rhetorical analysis proved more powerful, allowing me to parse paragraphs in terms of intended interpretation and identify gaps or ways to problematize the material.
Interpretative stasis is in many ways otherworldly because it operates at a level that so many academics overlook. I do not deploy it much because I precede from the assumption that community-based economies are fundamentally worth doing — a value based assumption backing a policy argument, making what the world should be instead of how it is, that I try to argue for in sympathetic spaces. To apply the au jus from what we’ve read: other spaces might attack my work on several levels: Jurisdiction (who am I to claim generalization?), Assimilation (or analogy) (can I generalize beyond the Detroit case?), and launch contests over Letter vs. Spirit (your value is not mainstream economic value therefore the work is nonsensical even though I admit other kinds of values are important). Camper's analysis can be extremely useful in thinking through discussions, arguments, and writing. What level of interpretation am I considering here? And why? Who is it convincing to? In a sense, this is the What of the academic work.
On Concepts
Starting with a historical refresher course on logic, I made my way through what I call concepts. These are the core meanings, definitions, and phenomena involved in an argument. Without them there is no causality or effect to discuss. For me, concepts stared back at me as vapid grey toned ovals aspiring to take hold in SEM style models containing my “interventions” as they propagated through bubbles of theory. To begin to argue for this I had to consider and determine what concepts existed within, across, or even outside of the phenomena under investigation. Little did I know, this is how one can start with configurational analysis, where can you consider constellations of concepts, as variables, and investigate their effects on another. In my case, I was overly simplistic and started with Aristotle. It failed because there was no time component, among other things. No phenomena lasts forever, is constant, and exists undifferentiated. In grappling with this I came upon Ibn Sina, or Avicenna.
Ibn Sina was an amazing human, born in 980 A.D. Often called the father of medicine, he was also a widely regarded philosopher and developed a metaphysics view of science. One of the key things about his logic is that it includes time and temporality of variables. Some things may eventually happen, some things will necessarily happen. Some things are true for all time. I considered his matrices of his logic and thought through the implications in my own work, as a way to strengthen my conceptualization. The notion of time helped move my engineering perspective towards a more techno-social one, while the computer may maintain the state of a variable, a person might view it differently in different contexts. Measurement does not mean perfectly measured. I started as an adept, lightly qualifying sentences in the literature in terms of Avicenna’s logic, as a way to easily synthesize and generate logical pathways through work. While this failed it did eventually led me to the importance of rhetoric. Similarly, there are LLM style approaches, that seek to extract logical, casual statements, mainly in the bio-sciences, and generate and auto regressively created scientific discoveries. See a DARPA example here.
Earlier I mentioned configurational analysis. While having difficulty conceptualization, and writing, an adviser recommended to me Harold Saul Becker’s Tricks of Trade. In it he describes and operationalizes an approach to qualitative research that borrows from logic to analyze qualitative phenomena, and quite beautifully so. One core method is qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). I explored the use of QCA in constructing new kinds of search engines to surface how those interviewed wanted to be found. This work, although rejected from an earlier conference (with 2/3 reviewers voting for accept, and no I ain’t mad), is one of my papers that I will revise and submit to another journal this summer. Fingers crossed. But, ultimately, configurational analysis, as a form of conceptualization, is a handy way to view qualitative data or even design quasi-experiments because you need far less data than traditional quantitative studies while deriving sufficient and necessary conditions in various ways that themselves are quite a contribution.
Entering the Academe through literature
By now I have highlighted various writing, argumentation, and conceptualization experts, but for me this effort had to take place within the academy. I've mentioned before that science is a disciplinary community where argument takes place, using accepted rhetoric. The science of scientific revolutions points to how science changes over time, see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. But even with these core components, I did not have a firm direction where to point my What to write, other than mimicking my advisers. Mimicking is a valid form of learning, but towards the end of your PhD, you're evaluated on your originality and growth as a scholar. So mimicking won't get you all the way there.
One framework for academic writing, based on hundreds of classes and suitable for almost any discipline (except maybe pure mathematics?), is Wendy Belcher's “How to Write an Article in 12 Weeks.” I really enjoyed the book because it so nicely conceptualizes and contextualizes many things my advisers shared with me over the years, and includes many things that they didn’t (things they were either unaware of due to specialization or never had an issue with). Her book shines on a number of fronts: the importance of being able to answer "So What?" to a non-expert, the importance of re-reading key articles and being deeply familiar with the journals and conferences you seek to publish in, and articulating the kinds of things that count as impact: the difference between a new methods applied to an older subject, older methods applied to newer subjects, and the difficulty of developing newer methods with new methods, which likely requires at least a transitional paper or else you're trying to argue for too much. The procedures or templates were also very helpful. That said, I actually haven't carried out a paper revision using the book from end to end. But I could clearly see that the way she thought and wrote was the way I should write and think.
At the expense of being slightly dramatic, I sometimes think of my writing journey as falling on one of two times: before and after encountering Thomas Basbøll’s blog. Basbøll is a writing staff at the Copenhagen Business School Library and developed a series of writing clinics where he shared specific guidance. But, thankfully, he shares most of that publicly. My hot takeaway, and what I've applied to my work, is that you have about 25 to 30 paragraphs of content that you're sharing, or retelling, with the academic community. You don't have infinite space yet you need to have enough so that you can say something new. To say something new, every paragraph you’re writing is typically focused on one of three things: supporting, elaborating, or defending a key claim. That key claim should be reflected in what's called a key sentence that serves as the nucleus of your paragraph. It may be so unexpected, so shocking, novel or otherwise interesting that you must consider how to frame your sentences around it. But the key sentence should do the bulk of the paragraph’s work. These supporting sentences elaborate, support or defend the key sentence.
Just as importantly, to take things to the next level, you must understand, generally, what the work of a section does in an academic paper. And Basbøll was one to really shine light on that. Any investigation into a phenomena occurs in a world around us. So your background should introduce the world. It often is a familiar world to the scientific reader but not perfectly so. Basbøll writes this as the sky that is not blue but azure, familiar but not obvious. Then, to show that you know what you're talking about, you should introduce the background and the science of this phenomena (or world). How is the phenomenon currently investigated, what is commonly said, and what other disciplines that your discipline cares about think? What do non-experts think? All of this starts to wrap up a theoretical lens by which you can introduce your claim.
Then, your claim, the central thesis, and so on to the method or investigation protocol section. Here you describe how you will investigate what you've done so that the reader can trust your evidence. The discussion section covers what has occurred, the new phenomenon or thing that you found, perhaps as a result of your co-created community technology, and places this in context with the world the reader knew, showing that a new view is possible. How does this work reframe their understanding of things now? This, of course, is an imperfect summary (for example, I didn't mention how you should be an expert in what you chose to write the paragraph about, or that a paragraph is a chance to take 27 minutes of dedicated time to contribute to around your key sentence, that you figured out the day before). I highly recommend reading through his final post that includes a summary.
Conclusion
My journey to develop rhetorical and argumentative writing skills was windy and winding. It involved detours into logic (Avicenna’s Logic), guides for non-native (AWE) and native english writers (Peter Elbow). Among the most impactful were stasis theory, both the classic 5 stases (fact, definition, cause, value, policy) and Camper's interpretive stasis, along with Thomas Basbøll’s conceptualization. This isn’t a perfect summary of my writing path, but all these great thinkers — Ibn Sina, Elbow, Camper, Becker, Belcher, and Basbøll — guided their readers confidently and purposefully. And this, my reader, ends my three part series on what I’ve learned throughout my PhD program that I think will be most useful to others :) Thanks for reading.
P.S. As always you can follow my abbreviated day to day in my notes, here.