LEADERSHIP LAB: Writing Beyond the Academy 1.23.15

all right uh let me go ahead and get started um please do finish eating that way i'm confident that you're getting something of value out of this out of this session my name is larry mcinerney let me tell you a little bit about why i'm here and what we're going to talk about and why i hope i can be valuable for you i'm the head of the writing program here at the university of chicago what's probably more relevant to you is that i have a long-standing consulting practice not only with other universities but with a

lot of professional firms businesses ngo policy institutes etc who hire me to come to work with people who are working for them that they have hired mostly out of places like the university of chicago and they hire me in a desperate attempt to this is going to sound overdramatic to save your jobs this is way overdramatic but sometimes not i just had last month i had a for break i had somebody from a professional firm come and spend a week with me here in chicago because he was about to lose his job for writing issues

what is so frustrating to everybody about this is that the writing issues involved are actually conceptually extremely simple they are so this is so much easier than the stuff you people study what i do is so easy what you do is so hard that it frustrates everybody that people who are the best in the world at this hard stuff have trouble with what's actually pretty easy stuff so what i'm here to talk to you about is at two levels one is sort of a high level explaining why it is that people who are really really

smart something faculty at the university of chicago students at the university of chicago really smart people why do they have trouble writing effectively just why is that writing doesn't seem to be that hard all right give me a first contribution why is it why do i have a job why do people who are really smart have trouble writing well that's beautiful say that what do you mean can you elaborate a little bit uh because like most of us like things we do is reading accumulating knowledge right but we don't express it that much often this

i want to i want to pull this a little more out he says you're not used to writing well i can't agree this is so important and i agree so much but i want to push it in a way that you probably didn't even mean i would be willing to bet that over the course of your careers you've done a lot of writing you've been in school for how many years 16 18 20. i'm sorry i walk around with a t-shirt actually i work out with a t-shirt that says graduate student because i'm still officially

a graduate student at the university chicago well actually i'm not i would be if 20 15 years ago they hadn't realized that they needed to cut me off because i skew the data results you know they need to get people finishing and when you've got somebody who's been on the campus since 1977 then doesn't look good for the statistics very very sensitive subject of how long we have been in school again you've done enormous amounts of writing though right you've done enormous amounts of writing why hasn't that prepared you to write well serious question you've

done enormous amounts of writing in your life how is it possible you can walk out of this campus and not write well i'm going to make it more extreme just to be controversial you haven't been required to write at all not what i i'm this i mean i'm obviously being intentionally provocative right you haven't done any writing that's real writing any of it i would claim um and that's the big that's that's the big picture difficulty you have uh today i want to talk a little bit about the big picture and then i'm going to

talk about some very specific things so that we can spend some time working on specific techniques specific literally i have exercises in this handout so that by the time you leave today you'll have actually done some specific things that you can walk out tomorrow and do differently with your writing but i want to spend a moment on the big picture stuff you've been writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing but it's not real for a couple of reasons this is the one i'm going to be

most aggravating about when i work with writers of almost all sorts there's usually four characteristics of their writing that matter they need their writing to be clear organized persuasive the bottom two are not very interesting a little bit but the top one is valuable when you leave as a student whether you're a professor or working outside the academy the most important thing about your writing is that it'd be valuable and i would argue that not only have you not learned how to do this you've learned habits that work against your ability to make your writing

valuable why a lot of the writing we do is jargony and more to impress like either teachers or officers the jargony part i don't worry about one of the things i should tell you is that i spend a lot of time sort of not saying things that most people say most people say that if you're writing outside the academy you shouldn't use jargon that's just demonstrably false it turns out there are certain ways that you use jargon that feel valuable to the readers and certain ways you use it that destroys value you need to learn

how to use it in the way that feel valuable to say just don't use it that's just crazy i mean it's it's it's impossible um here's here's the approach that i take to writing that it might be should introduce at this moment most of you have been taught things about writing that are what we call text based that is somebody's given you advice about what your text should look like they say something like don't use jargon or they say something like have a thesis sentence or they say something like don't use passive verbs all these

are ridiculous things to say but the point is they make sense to you and they shouldn't because they're rules about the text itself that is there are rules about what a text should look like we think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of language anytime somebody tells you let's give you advice about writing that's text based they say something like keep your sentences short i hope from now on in the back of your head you say for which readers and what purpose because we think no advice about writing makes any sense unless you've clarified who's reading

it and the function of the text and you don't think that way somebody says to you here's a good advice about writing don't have more than six sentences in a paragraph you say okay and we want you to say that doesn't make not that that's wrong it doesn't make any sense because you haven't told me which readers and what function here's what we teach we teach our our specialty at the university of chicago is what we call expert writing that is we work with people who are experts in the way they think about the world

i work with biochemists neurobiologists anthropologists historians lawyers fill in the blank they have one thing in common they're experts in the way they think about the world they deal with very complicated information lots of subtlety lots of nuance lots of sophistication lots of complexity and they think at very high levels they also write now 99 of them write and think at the same time that is they use their writing process to help themselves to think you do this while you're writing your stuff you're still thinking of your ideas to help yourself do your thinking you

have to do your writing you have to do this because the stuff you're thinking about is too damn complicated to just do it in your hand you should know that in classical rhetoric that's an enormous mistake i was taught in a classical model that says there are two separate functions there's the thinking process and there's the writing process as i constantly tell the story i had a high school english teacher who said to me larry there's two process there's thinking there's writing she said you're not ready to write until you're done thinking miss johnson and

she said to enforce this i'm going to make sure that when you turn in every essay you turn into me you're going to turn in the outline that you use to do your thinking this was not a problem first i wrote the paper then i wrote the outline because it was inconceivable to me that you can just think and then do the writing well most almost everybody's like me they think and write and write and think and thinking right right and thinking right right thing okay this is a very good thing and you should make

sure that nothing i do today interferes with this process because this is how you do your best thinking but in the real world not in school in the real world when you're done with this you have you will have created a text you will send that text to your readers and in the real world not the world you're in now the function of that text is to cause readers to change what they think about the world that's its job it's to cause the readers to change what they think about the world and whether or not

it's valuable depends on whether or not the readers perceive that you have valuably changed what they think or what they do or how they decide and i would be willing to bet that in your c your schooling years you virtually never did that was that what your writing was for as a student when you wrote a paper did you fail the paper if you didn't change what the teacher thought about the world was that the test was that how you got an a b c d or f i'm getting a lot of those like so

many people saying may was it the test was it all right let's make it let's start in high school when you were writing in high school were you changing the way your teachers saw the world when you wrote those high school papers how about college were you changing the way your instructors saw the world when you wrote those college papers i mean every once in a while i have somebody who say well yeah i mean i had professors tell me that my work was so valuable to them that was a lie i mean you know

that at least it was a lie in the sense of it didn't change what they thought you know how i know it was a lie because if you had changed what they thought they should have published your paper sometimes i have faculty say to me oh my students writing is very helpful to me i said yeah they said oh yeah i really do i learn a lot yeah i say then your student right reading your student stuff is part of your like your thinking process yeah i say okay then how often do you go find

student papers to read when you don't have to and what's the answer never right all right what made your writing valuable to them what created the value for them your writing didn't what did par me ideas here's what did oh i mean i offend people with this but let me tell you here's what you did in school and you're still doing it right now you're writing a paper you know a couple pages 10 pages three pages you're attaching 100 build to it and you're handing it to your instructor and saying hey will you read this

sure thing you think that's not what's happening really seriously do you think that's not what's happening this is what's happening and people say oh it's so awful that larry that you talk about money now let's say you go outside being a student i'm not just talking about beyond the academy let's say you want to be a professor and you write an article is that what's going to happen whether you're a professor or a consultant or in any other kind of real world operation are you going to write something and hand 100 bucks to your readers

to read it he's nodding his head is that what's going to happen what's going to happen now they don't have to read it not only this but it's more than that what's going to happen if you waste their time they're going to make sure you want to get paid right yes no do you forgive me i'm i won't pick on her do you want to get paid anybody here want to get paid here's what you're saying now you're saying here you can read this but you got to pay me first you can't read this until

you pay me pay me and i have to tell you you have 16 18 20 years of not doing that you've never written anything i would argue at all the problem is that doesn't just leave you neutral that leaves you with terrible habits why is it so hard for really smart people to write well one of the reasons is they have 20 years of bad habits the habit was they weren't writing to people who were doing this what were they writing to what are your teeth what were your teachers doing when you sent them papers

were they using your papers to change the way they saw the world what were they using your papers to do very roughly put you have learned to write in what wickenstein would call a form of life in which your readers were paid to care about you your teachers read your stuff because they were paid to read it to find out about you well he's handed in this new thing i'm going to read this why because somebody's paying me to assess him that's never going to happen again right whether you're in the academy or not nobody

else ever going to be paid to care about you ever again but because you guys are so successful you are the best people in the world at student kind of writing you're very good at it trouble is that's not what you need to do afterwards after school as a director of the writing program here on campus i often get asked about helping undergraduates make the transition from high school to college we help them it's not very difficult or i'm asked to help make undergraduate students make the transition from undergraduate to graduate school we help them

it's not very difficult what is really difficult is the transition from being in school to being out of school because this value issue suddenly dominates everything and you've had 20 years of never having to deal with it never having to deal with it so that's the big picture hard part of it as i said we're going to talk about some specifics but those specifics in my mind only make any sense inside this larger problem of what i've stealing from wittgenstein called the form of life you end a different form of life language is a different

activity it's a different language game from being in school to being out of school so i don't want to talk we'll talk about text but i only want to talk about it in terms of the language game of readers who need you to make your text valuable to them in their reading process because i'm claiming that's a different language game all right turn to the first page of your handout let's get started looking at some specifics so on the first page i've given you three instances of a text that's either by roger meyerson or partially

by roger marston do you hand that anybody else need a handout okay roger meyerson whom some of you very well may know personally i should say i don't really interesting writer here's three examples of his writing one's from the journal of economic theory number two is from the new york times and number three is from a journal called journal of conflict resolution do me a favor take a minute and just scan these quickly you don't have to read them to figure out the content of it scan it and describe tell me some of the things

that somebody would say about the differences in the writing between these three cases one that's definitely inside the academy the journal of economic theory one that's definitely outside the academy the new york times and one that's sort of in the middle the journal of conflict resolution take a quick look at them so all right now let's say somebody asked you the question how are these texts different and i hope now for the rest of your life you have a little voice in the back of your head that says well wait a minute let's talk about

readers and function but let's imagine that you're not talking about that and they won't let you talk about that they're just saying how are these texts and texts different point to something that's different between them or that people would point out as different first one is very descriptive descriptive all right how so give me an example of being descriptive like looks like terms like expected action profile and the conditional probability and the hyper plane so he explains that kind of a creation well it's descriptive but take contrast that would you say that three is not

descriptive or two to put this in perspective imagine if president obama named democrats is he not is are they not describing there yeah that was the description that's true right it's all right so give me some other things that people would say well this is obviously different between these readers the readers are different for sure and we're going to talk about that actually the readers are in many ways quite similar but we'll talk about that but i want to imagine what somebody who's just trying to describe the text would say okay so we'll say something

we'll come i i've obviously scared you about saying once a oh my god the first one has equations in it you know that's obviously different the first one has equations the other ones don't use equations right just to be textually simple all right notice some other things textual about this that are purely we don't talk about things like describing textual the sentences in the second one are shorter the sentences are literally shorter just look look at the first paragraph of number two see how many sentences there are there one two three four there's four sentences

in it how about the same length in number one how many sentences number one have two how many sentences number three have three all right so here's what here's what somebody's gonna tell you when you go out to work in a place that's not the academy they're gonna say oh my god use short sentences they will say that to you use short sentences and they will point to this and say look these are shorter sentences they won't ask the question why are they shorter sentences what is it about the readers that makes it shorter sentences

what do you think it is about the readers of the new york times that makes it a good idea to use shorter sentences there it is a good idea to use shorter sentences in general in a new york times op-ed piece why i suppose it's true about the readers of the new york times op-ed piece that makes sense shorter sentences probably a good idea they don't have so much time what's the value to a reader of a new york times op-ed piece what makes it valuable to them possibly but that's probably not why most people

read new york times op-ed pieces people say that they say oh yes it's like you know i read it i read it for the art i read it for information how many hours circumstances when they read for example in the train that it's easy to make sure they're saying one thing is they they're probably they may not be sitting at their desk reading it they're reading it on a train someplace in car moving walking or something so a shorter a longer sentence is going to demand their attention for milliseconds longer that's actually kind of awkward

and that kind of but the other thing is why they're re what value do they get out of an it piece a lot of times people don't really know how to interpret um like what's going on in ukraine so they want to think about it from different perspectives so and it's an interesting point right what's the difference between reading an op-ed piece and reading a news hard news piece i mean i would just go back to saying that one is purely supposed to inform whereas the other is supposed to present and what present and what

entertain and if you think that's not the case talk to the editors of the new york times why do people watch why do people watch television or listen to radio that have people we bemoan it all the time oh why do people listen to these demagogic uh journalists who are just spouting their opinions why are they listening to rush limbo and rachel maddow why don't they just get objective journalism well why don't they you can't watch it because it's more fun come on i have lots of colleagues who come to me roger's not one of

them trying to get stuff published in the new york times and the first thing i say to them is the new signs i'm not going to publish this because nobody's going to read it and they say but people are interested in this everybody's interested in the ukraine right now everybody's interested in this but this is boring and that's what he suppose they did they look at me and they say well i can't be responsible for the fact that people aren't rigorous in their thinking but but why why the show sentence entertaining more people why do

you think because people are able to judge if that contents are boring or not see this is the mistake you're making because what i do for a living is not think about the relationship between the writer and the world or the text in the world my job is to think about how readers read you're thinking about content i'm thinking about closer to somebody standing in a subway and the process that's actually going on in their cognitive processing to to do this and you know what happens when we read we're using all kinds of cognitive processing

to use this text to think about the world and what happens when you interfere with the cognitive process when the text makes it hard to do the process what happens to readers when there's something about the text that makes it interfering with the reading process i suppose readers do i can tell you what they do the first thing is they slow down the second thing is they don't understand the third thing is they get annoyed and the fourth thing is they stop and i got all kinds of people in your position who say well that's

not my responsibility isn't it their job to read when they're teachers you've been writing you've been writing ineffectively and your readers haven't put it down why not because you were paying them to read it when that stops happening now your job is to make sure that process is valuable for the reader all the time and you've never had to do that before you've never had to make the reading process feel valuable for the readers as they go now in the first one roger meyerson can write a big long sentence which doesn't feel valuable to the

readers until they get to the end of the sentence he writes a lot of sentences where the value to the reader appears at the end of the sentence and he can take him three or four lines to get there and when he's writing in the journal of economic theory he can do that because his readers will get to the end of that sentence but when you're writing in the new york times you can't they won't get there and we'll get there does it mean you have to write short sentence in the new york times no

you can write very very long sentences in the new york times and be very successful but you have to know how to make then parts of sentences feel valuable to readers before they get to the end you can't have the value sitting just at the end because they won't get there but doesn't that mean that you should always write short sentences no sure no it's a great question it's a great question there's several reasons for it one of them is that in english and it's true of lots of other languages too the end of a

sentence has what we call a stress position that is ending of sentences have extra stress compared to the rest of the sentence quite surprising to people who've been told the beginning of the sentences where readers pay the most attention it's not true it's actually they pay attention at the end of the sentence all right well this would say well then i should use lots of short sentences but think about it let's say one version of it has six of these another version has three can you feel the difference this one is saying to readers hey

readers there's six really important things i want you to notice in this passage this one says hey readers there's three well imagine if this goes on for several pages pretty soon you say this is important this is important this is important this is important this is important this is important and pretty soon nothing is important what you know how to do when you command longer english sentences is you know how to have smaller moments of importance forgive me for for quoting a very long sentence but this is a famous sentence and it's it was given

in a speech but it shows what i mean here it's the last sentence of lincoln's second inaugural with malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as god gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and orphan to do all which shall achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations well the end of that whole thing is peace

among ourselves and with all nation he wants that to get the most stress but along the way he's manipulated the sentence so that other things have lesser sense lesser stress building to that so sorry that wasn't actually on the agenda it's a great question the point i'm trying to make is not that there's all kinds of cool language techniques that you don't know and can learn wow that's really not it my point is you already know everything you need to know about english language technique but you haven't been trained in how to think about how

to use that technique to create value you know what you've been trained in you've been trained in how to use language to reveal what's in your mind or how your what your abilities are you've been trained to use language to demonstrate to your teachers here's what i know and here's what i can do and those are the habits you have you know the techniques i promise you it's a question of redeploying them to doing a different function to live in a different language game afterwards notice some other things about the text differences notice that not

only in the second one the sentences are shorter they don't need to be shorter but it's smart to make them shorter because you have to have higher language skills to make longer sentences valuable notice in the second paragraph the writers are doing something that some of you may have been told this again is against the rule you notice they start a sentence with because in the second paragraph you ever been told you shouldn't start a sentence with because you notice in this in second line on the bottom they start a sentence with and you've been

told you shouldn't start sentence with land how would you account for the fact that they do it they start a sentence with because they start a sentence with and if you've been told oh you shouldn't do that there's a rule against that and you just saw some very respectable people doing it how people usually account for that did i see it because at the beginning of the sentence i know i'm going to learn something oh no no it's a very good thing it's a very good thing to do it i'm saying you've all been told

that you shouldn't do this imagine you went back to the teacher who said you told me i shouldn't do it but look what would that teacher say do you think the teacher says one of two things one is oh that's the new york times they don't follow the rules there or they do this thing like when you're important enough and powerful enough then you get to do it i tell you both of this is this is one of the things i'm getting at you've been taught a whole lot of rules about texts that are nonsense

there is no such rule that you stood and start a sentence with because or you shouldn't start a sentence with ann there is no such rule that you shouldn't split infinitives there is no such rule that you shouldn't use passive verbs go down the line almost no matter what you've been told about writing is wrong as if they say a rule the big exception is spelling keep spelling you know other than that these are crazy people i say i'm not i mean i'm being hyperbolic but my mentor the guy who started the writing program at

the university chicago in 1979 wrote a wonderful article for the journal of english teachers college english teachers and he said all these rules your people are teaching stop teaching them because they're not rules they said real grow when actual readers read text and think about the world none of these rules make any difference it's a brilliant article 15 page long and in the last paragraph he says okay did you get the joke this article has more than 100 errors in it more than a hundred and he says to those readers how many did you notice

while you were reading errors and the answer was i didn't notice any of them because they're not errors they didn't notice them because they were actually reading a text to think about the world but once they read that paragraph what do you suppose they all did they got their red pens out they went back to the beginning and said oh there's one there's one there's one there's one in one great sentence one sentence has seven errors in it he and i helped him with this we had so much fun you know writing these sentences it

has seven errors in it including the fact that this the verb is the subject singular and the verb is plural like a basic rule right nobody noticed there's no literal for me language is not rule following it's controlling the reading process it's understanding how readers read and i was saying to you and there's lots of times when a singular subject and a plural verb works better for readers all of these rules don't make sense to me because they're not rules or techniques language is a technique for controlling a reader's reading process and if you're sitting

there looking at your text not thinking about readers but thinking about rules you're probably writing badly because you just kind of got it wrong i think what language is this for so if we looked at this stuff the reason i gave you these passages is to say here's what people normally say about shifting from the academy to not in the academy they say you have to do things like stop using equations that's the jargon thing they say stop using jargon they say make your sentences shorter they say all kinds of things that have to do

with textual characteristics i'm here to say none of that's actually what's at stake what's at stake and what is in fact the same about these three texts is that they all create value for their readers roger myerson in all three of these instances is creating value for the reading process he's making it valuable for people to read it how there's lots of techniques i want to talk about one that goes to the next page look at the beginnings now this is the openings of these articles tell me what these have that common i'm sorry it's

page three on the numeration one this paper develops some fundamental mathematical tools for analyzing games with a very large number of players such as the games played by voters in a large election now go to two however the current crisis over crimea finally ends ukraine will still be left with a crisis of its own politics three management consultants have many theories of leaderships i'm going to go to the second sentence here leaders are often glorified as visionary strategic planners who set the course with bold insightful decisions but xenophon gives us a different view what do

these things have in common there's a lot of differences between them can you see anything that they have in common actually i'll tell you what they have in common you tell me how they're doing it each one of them is making the reading valuable for the reader no but thank god you said that no i mean this is so this is so this is so important i know you said that but it's crucial you ever heard something you said it tells what the paper will be about sorry about my handwriting that's what you said you

ever heard advice like tell them what you're going to tell them tell them tell them what you told them this is not a source of value why not imagine this can you imagine in a first sentence telling you i'm going to this paper is going to be about x and for you to decide i don't care about x i don't care it's of no value to me to care about to know anything about x then what are you gonna do and you look at me like oh my god and they the first thought is you

want me to lie you want me to cheat you want me to use rhetoric or something to to sell this stuff and they look at me like that's all wrong that's all morally right it's kind of slimy people say shouldn't that be what writing is about they say isn't that what writing is isn't writing to be about something yes no is that what you do in your papers when you write a paper do you describe something is that what you do in a paper is that what professional academics do is that what professional academic papers

do do they describe things is that their function now you'll hear at least the next thing is they make arguments they say they argue so there'd be a difference which is what the paper will argue can you feel that those might be different one says here's what my paper will be about another says here's what my paper will argue my people will argue that for example my people my paper will argue that uh cultural constructions are dynamic as opposed to saying this paper is about cultural constructions those are different sounds okay but is that what

academics do do they persuade do they make arguments professional academics in their published work is that what they do what do they do what do 98 of academic papers do that's better you see how different that is the opening tells us what question the paper will answer can you see a difference between these three can you feel the difference between these three what's the difference what's the difference in some sense this whole everything i do my entire career is summed up that's why i would forgive me for jumping on this one thing but everything i

teach is summed up in these three everything so we'll put numbers on them just so we can talk about it make sure to clear that what's the difference that's one way to put it in your own words describe the difference between these three one allows the reader to think all right i would say this way this one for sure makes room for the reader you know what would be even better when this one what if this says it tells whoops i should say tell us tells you what question you have that the paper will answer

now do you see a difference what about this one it tells us what the paper will be about there's no place for a reader there the reader has no role the only person with a role here is the writer the writer is going to talk about the world the writer will talk about the world writing about the world tells what the paper is about see that there is no space for a function for the reader here except one function which is the teacher's function which is show me what you know about this thing show me

how much you know about it and if you pay me i'll read it and i'll give you my judgment about what you know but there's no other value embedded in that language so how is roger myerson shifting more toward this roger doesn't just do this look at the very first one what does he say at the beginning that's not just here's what this is about point me to a word in the first sentence that says this is not just about this is actually valuable how about that one tools what's the difference between the word tools

and the word ideas he says tools tools implies purpose use and value ideas does not the word tools right there is extremely important in conveying to a readers this has a function for you you're going to be able to use this when was the last time you used the word tool in any of your writing you would have said ideas concepts roger meyerson's a very good writer methods not quite as good as tools but what's really good about this one isn't the first sentence it's the next one in such games it is unrealistic to assume

that every player knows all the other players in the game instead a more realistic model should admit some uncertainty about the number of players in the game what's that sentence doing there is it describing you could say it's describing but what is it describing do they go from unrealistic to realistic cases what's it describing this is a trick question what is he describing he says it is unrealistic to assume that every players know all the other players in the game there are people who do that there are people who assume exactly that who are these

people other evidence his readers you know what academic papers mostly do they look their readers in the eye and say i know what you think and you're wrong you know what roger's just done in this sentence he said hey readers of the journal of economic theory i know what you think and it's unrealistic which is polite term for what you're wrong worse you're generating bad ideas and models because you're wrong in what you're assuming you shouldn't assume it anymore stop assuming it this is not as it were about the world this is about his readers

he's describing his readers he's saying to them hey readers this question you actually don't have but you ought to have can you see how that creates the value for his work and it's forgive me but it's not just a matter of interesting some people say well just it's more interesting if you're confrontational it's not just interesting believe me there's a lot of people who don't like confrontation and they don't want to argue but when an academic's professional job is to be right about this stuff and somebody looks them in the eye and says hey it's

your job to be right about this and you say yeah it is and you're wrong you have to listen it's like going to medical doctors and saying to medical doctors hey medical doctors you're treating this disease with this drug right doctor says yes stop you're killing people you got to pay attention to that value he's creating value that's what he's doing for specific readers right this notion oh my god people get told okay when you go outside the academy you should write as though you're writing to sixth graders oh my god don't you know who

you have to write to your readers and you know what you have to know about them what they value do not write to sixth graders your job is not to reveal your head your job is to change their heads you need to know what they think and you crucially need to know what they value so we'll come back to the new york times one go down to the third one management consultants have many theories of leadership leaders are often glorified as strategic visionary strategic planners who set the course with bold insightful decisions but xenophon gives

us a different view what's roger doing there what's he doing there what's the function of this opening do you think and what's he doing with these people who are management consultants right he's looking them in the eye and saying i know what you think you think leaders are glorified as visionary strategic planners and then what is the significance of saying xenophon gives a different view it's a polite way of saying what that i have a better idea you're wrong it's a polite way of saying you're wrong it's just a jargon it's a code for europe

and why is he why does he open with talking about what management consultants think why would he talk about them because they're the people who read the journal of conflict resolution see what i mean this isn't determined by the world at all it's determined by his readers this is being driven by his sense of his readers and how to create value for them now i should be clear outside the academy it's less common to say to your readers i know what you think in your own inside the academy 95 of most academic writing does that

it says to that's an exaggeration 85 percent of academic writing does that you say to your readers i know what you're thinking you're wrong you have we have very polite ways of saying it we have all this kind of coding language for it but that's what we mostly do outside the academy it turns out problems value is much more dif much more diverse sometimes you say to your readers i know what you think you're wrong sometimes you say to your readers i know what's valuable to you and i can do that i know what you

need and this text can provide them but you open with what they need not here's what the text is going to be about because if you open with here's what the text is going to be about you run the risk of them saying i don't care about that because they might not see the value of that i'm reading the second progress yeah and i'm trying to find the same thing right which says you are wrong so what's the how is he creating value in this one however the current crisis over crimea finally ends ukraine will

be still left with a crisis of its own politics a crisis that russia sees as a pretext to annex crimea and would invite further intervention in ukraine unless it is immediately addressed it means there's another crisis that we have to think about even though we're thinking about why does this create value it's there's a little bit by the way there is a little bit of it i know what you think and you're wrong um the the hint of that is here the origin of the current emergency in fact lying the failure of ukraine's political institute

institutions accomplished two fundamental tasks but that's that's really it's only faint and not important what's creating value for people why would people continue to read this what would be the value in it to them imagine if i wrote it this way however this current situation in crimea resolves ukraine will still be left with a situation of its own a situation that involves russia in its relationship to crimea and it would have further implications for the ukraine 90 of the readers of it would put it down why there's no sense of urgency and why do words

like crisis crisis seized russia seizing russia ceases right why does it create a sense of urgency in our reading of it yeah but they're not just that you're right you're absolutely right about that we value reading about bad stuff you laugh you think you don't look at the newspaper tomorrow what's the headline going to be is it going to be something good happened how about this headline in the newspaper yesterday nothing changed how about this go to a movie the next time you imagine walking into a movie and imagine sitting down in a movie theater

and having the first five minutes of the movie say see these people they're very content they're fine and for the next hour and a half they're going to stay fine and we're going to show you the details of their contentedness you going to watch that movie you going to watch it no why not is it not true do you not want to understand people how come people don't want to watch it how come you don't want to watch it it's not entertaining you want people to read your op-ed pieces in the new york times better

entertain them that's the case that's just the case turns out there's lots of different ways to entertain people but the most obvious one is to say oh my god oh my god oh my god something's wrong oh my god that's what draws our attention that's what we value when we read now is that a bad thing i don't know maybe maybe it is but it's the truth people when they're looking for entertainment are drawn to conflict tension trouble and we find it entertaining roger meyerson understands that he doesn't begin this by saying this will be

an op-ed piece about the ukraine and will contain suggestions for future policy in ukraine because if he wrote that sentence nobody would read the second sentence not nobody but very few people in his audience would read the second sentence so such as a breaking news like airplane clash so in your sense i mean your electorate would it be valuable in terms of in the context of new york times breaking news airplane crash have you ever heard breaking news airplane landed safely right we are drawn the new york times is a mass media it has to

have lots and lots of people looking at it but the crucial point i'm trying to make is that the one of the crucial values we get from the new york times is actually entertainment or at least distraction so we want to be distracted we pick up the new york times we want to be distracted do we want to get information well the people who read the new york times want to feel better than the people who read the usa today they want to feel better about themselves this is true right now are they better i

leave that to you to judge but i promise you they want to feel better about it this sounds to people like i'm being corrosively cynical and i have to say i don't think so i deal with language as a relationship among people you guys have been taught to deal with language as a way of revealing what you think and i think you're just wrong language is social it's actually a relationship between you and other people so for me when i want to talk about language i need to talk about the other people not just about

you because there's other people to me always in the equation so the first thing i want to talk about today and we're basically done now is one of the things when you're writing either inside the academy or outside the academy you need to look at the patterns of your writing where what you're doing is just demonstrating demonstrating demonstrating say i know this i know this i know this i know this here's how i know it here's my method of thinking here's this just turn that off and be thinking from the first sentence of the reader's

value what's making it valuable for them why are they reading it they're not getting paid to read it therefore from the first sentence you've got to be describing not what you think but what they think how they engage this and you've not been taught you've been taught to do the opposite of that now here's a here's a small technique for doing that that i promised i'd not just be at the at the realm of the ethereal but would be specific turn all the way up to page um i'm going to skip a bunch of pages

turn up to page um let's pause at page eight and then i'm going to move on to something else here's a classic mistake 1a by a this happens to be lawyer but a lawyer is a you know well-trained academic who's trying to write to a client we won't go through the whole thing but this is the opening sentence the following discussion outlines obligations concerning payments of overtime to the federal fair labor standards act in the applicable relations forgive me for once again for coming back to the tell what the paper is about but that's what

the writer thought he was doing it happened to be a he said i'm telling the client what this is about this is about obligations concerning payments of overtime under federal fair labor standards act now the comparison might be unfair but look at the first sentence of the second one 1b dear client you've asked whether the new federal wage and hours laws will affect your obligation to pay overtime and provide compensatory time to your employees can you see the difference it's shocking right it's just shocking now sometimes people who write 1a say but doesn't the client

know that they wrote that they asked that question well what do you think about that the lawyer who writes 1a says to me but the client knows what question they asked well they might have forgotten and that makes incense in this sense i mean clients sitting at the desk reading text after text after text after text picks this one up and doesn't remember necessarily what this one was about but there's a way bigger issue here do you know how many texts clients have read from lawyers that were useless utterly completely useless and the client paid

for the privilege of reading it and it was useless for them so here's another message i have for you your readers do not trust you they don't trust you they think you're going to waste their time they think you're going to create stuff that's not valuable for them they do not trust you and you've spent 20 years with readers who trusted you you spent 20 years writing to readers who were going to read everything you wrote and you've gotten used to the idea that you're whatever you write your reader's just going to read i can't

tell you how wrong that is and i philosophically i think it's a gigantic mistake language is a relationship between people and you think about them i would argue from the beginning 1b signals to the reader that from the beginning i have you in mind and this is about what's going to be valuable for you so let me give you a more subtle example of that if you turn to page turn to page 9 for a moment top of page nine which we'll just use the first two sentences the dog chased the cat and the cat

was chased by the dog and i apologize to anybody who's heard me talk about this i use these sentences a lot which of those sentences is more clear and concise the dog chased the cat or the count was chased by the dog one no it depends and this is i'm going back to where i opened with when you try to make a decision about any piece of writing your first question should be what who's reading it most of you would think the first sentence is more concise because you've been taught formal rules two two rules

would you would come into play right you'd say what about sentence one versus sentence two it's shorter and some of you have been taught you should use active verbs and not passive verbs daylight nonsense clear nonsense it is absurd to say that one is more clear or more concise than two what about the readers does it depends on readers and what about the readers does it depend on if they care about the cat or if they care about the dog why would that make any difference both you're right she's absolutely right but other people say

what difference does that mean one sentence is still shorter it makes it more concise they're wrong why because the way english works the subject of the sentence is what we call the focus of the sentence it's what the sentence is about the first sentence is about what the dog the second sentence is about what the cat what if the reader wants to think about the cat and they read the first sentence the dog chased the cat why is that not concise for them they want to think about the cat i'm thinking about the cat the

cat the cat that's what i care about that's what i value i want to think about the cat and i read a sentence about a dog what do i have to do cognitively i have to flip it i have to process it twice first i process it as a sentence about a dog and i don't care about the dog so i have to process the sentence again making it into a sentence that's something i care about it takes me longer to read it and understand it and to us that's what concision is concision isn't the

number of words on the page it's how long it takes readers to process what's on the page yeah i mean you got to put readers in the equation all the time but didn't you also say the stress of the sentence happens at the end this is great so here's how english works it has this is an over vast oversimplification but it works like this there's a focus of the sentence and there's a stress position in the sentence the focus is invisible to us but hugely important it tells us what the sentence is about then we

process everything else in the sentence in terms of that focus so in the first one the dog chase the cat we take all the chasing in the can and we refer back to the dog and then we think i don't care about the dog so we have to process it into being focused on the cat but this focus position once we get it we actually then don't attend to it it's not visible to us what's more visible to us is what comes in the end of the sentence which is what we call a stress position

so your point's really beautifully taken it turns out these two parts of a sentence have very different functions for readers your job is of course to control both parts for readers and if you're curious about how this works well let me give you an example real quick of how to do it turn now to page turn it up to page 11. i'm going to read this out loud i'd like you to just underline the subjects of the sentences because in english four times out of five there's plenty of exceptions but four times out of five

the focus is just the subject of the sentence subject is just what the sentence is about so for example in recent years several attempts have been made to discover an overall structural pattern in the book of amos what's the subject of that sentence anybody several attempts underline several attempts everybody on the same page with me all right underline several attempts that's the subject certainly inspired by the burgeoning interest in literary approaches to the bible these studies have divided amos into a relatively small number of extended sections underlying these studies that's the subject of that sentence

a comparison of these studies however soon reveals considerable diversity among them comparison of the studies as the subject underlined that thus to look no further than the authors mentioned in footnote 1 the following divergent analyses of chapter 3 to 6 have been proposed underlying the following divergent analyses only one more paragraph the only points these scholars are all agreed on are that 5 1 begins a new section although i shall argue below that it does not and 614 closes a section which has long been recognized so we have the only points these scholars are all

agreed on all that is the subject of the sentence r two things to note first can you see how the writer is constructing a problem can you see how he's looking at his reader's eyes and saying you're wrong do you see the language where he's doing that several attempts have been made to discover an overall structure certainly inspired by interest in literary approaches each of which in parentheses it is claimed can you see the force of that it is claimed what does that mean that means it's wrong and then he says a comparison of these

studies however soon reveals considerable diversity among them what he's doing is he's looking into his reader's eyes and saying i know what you think about the book of amos and you're wrong but now turn to the next page now i'd like you to underline the subjects as i go through here does the book of amos have an overall structural pattern how should such a pattern be characterized how does its presence or absence shape the text so the subjects were the book of amos such a pattern its presence or absence recently the book of amos has

been considered to be divided into blah blah blah the subject was the book of amos keep underlining the sections and their interrelations then reveal an essential structure underlying the sections in their interrelations however the nature or even the existence of an overall pattern is not clear the subject is the nature or even the existence of an overall pattern all that's a subject next sentence the book has been divided according to quite different schemes the book is the subject we're going to do one more one c same thing i want you to go through and underline

the subjects does the book of amos have an overall structural pattern subject was book of amos how should we characterize such a pattern subject was we how is our interpretation of the text shaped by such a pattern subject was our interpretation of the text in the past decades our readings of sculpture scriptural texts have come to be increasingly influenced by literary approach of the bible subject ones are readings of scriptural text in the case of the book of amos we've been made aware that the text is divided subject was we last sentence we have come

to see a unity and connectedness in the book that was previously neglected it was we next one but is what we see really there subject was we so we got three different versions of this paragraph this opening which one's best no god which one's best no i apparently have failed in my gold today i said from now on when anybody asks you about a text you should say what who's reading it and what's its function you were trying to answer the question without knowing who the readers were some readers would prefer one some readers would

prefer two some readers would prefer three depends on what they want to focus on in their thinking the first one is focused on what what's the first one focused on look at those subjects what are those subjects referring to studies of the book of amos number two what's that focused on the book of amos what's three focused on readers of the book of amos see the difference sometimes people pay me stupid amounts of money to fly to often wonderful cities walk in and sit down with them and make them take their pen out and underline

the subjects of their sentences because they're saying to me my readers don't find this valuable or i can't get this published or i can't get promoted or i can't get whatever and we sit down and we take out a pencil we underline the subject of their sentences and i can say do your readers care about this and they say no okay we can fix this we're going to figure out what your readers care about what they want to focus on and we're going to put that in the subject position why do smart people not know

this you are all very smart people i'll end again because you've been trained to think that your writing is about showing what you think and what you care about because in school that's what its function was and the hardest transition i know of is to stop your habits of thinking of writing as revealing yourself that's not going to happen anymore okay i'm sorry i've held you late good luck guys at the end of this handout you'll see some exercises that i encourage you to do in terms of rewriting some sentences but also one of the

joys of being director of the writing program at the university of chicago is that anybody on this campus can send me an email make an appointment we sit down and look at their work so if any of this stuff or for any other reason you want to talk about writing send me an email we'll make an appointment and we'll sit down and talk about it you