Loving Writing

Techniques for the University and Beyond

Wendy M.K. Shaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367612504, 9780367620370
• eBook ISBN: 9781000398359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This writing textbook bridges factual, critical, and expressive modes of writing to help students develop a reflective sense of why and how to write for university, professional, and public audiences.

Exploring the ways in which writing builds tools for argument both in and beyond the university, it enables students to break out of the dusty and formulaic patterns of writing that too often threaten to render academic studies irrelevant. In a playful, personal, essayistic style, it examines existing academic writing methods and develops new modes of narrative-based expression rooted in the humanities. Reflective analysis invites emerging writers to self-consciously craft convincing and impassioned writing practices using an expanded methodological toolbox. It aims to imbue academic writing with the expressive potential of artistic research by transforming existing methods of articulating analysis within a broader expressive system, developing skills more typical of creative writing, such as providing a setting, considering frame, engaging emotions, expansion and concision. If we believe in the value of our thoughts, discoveries, and arguments, we must enable them to sing.

Loving Writing can be used as a textbook for advanced or introductory college writing courses and provides innovative guidance to liberal arts students seeking to develop their writing abilities.

Part I

Who Writes?

• How writing is a greeting
• and a meeting
• and a coming together.
• Not just of minds, but of bodies,
• A place and a space as real as
• imagination
• capable of
• time travel.
• From A to B:
• A matters! It’s not all about B!
• enthymeme
• Where are you in this journey?
• How do you embark?
• Where do you want it to take you?
• Where do you want to take it?
• Who gets to write?
• Why this worried Plato …
• And why this should worry you:
• Democracy.
• Hope.
• Truth.
• Love.
• Love? Why love?
• Where has it been all these years of dispassionate writing?
• Who dares to be an author?
• Where does this authority come from?
• Who authorizes?
• Does power come from status
• or
• from love born of discourse?
• persuasion?
• passion?
• Who is writing?
• The third person
• author authority midwife
• … and the first person.
• The power of argument equalizes authority,
• and so
• we write.

Chapter 1

Writing Is a River

Reasoning and Methods in the Craft of Writing

At the beginning of Plato’s dialogue, Phaedrus, a guy named Phaedrus sees his buddy Socrates walking aimlessly on the streets of Athens. He calls out, “Hey dude, how’s it going?”

That’s not true. He said, “Whassup?”

He said, “How’s it hangin’?”

That was, of course, in the first draft. Plato’s first readers could scarcely believe that Phaedrus, overly eager social butterfly that he was, would have been so disrespectful to the famous teacher. After long discussion, Plato agreed to tame the story as he had heard it. Instead, he obeyed the logic and decorum that editors, and the society of readers they thought they represented, demanded.

This practice is what Plato calls a “noble lie.” ¹ Unlike an ignoble lie, it has a happy ending. By ensuring that people believe in a shared fiction, it enables them to behave for the collective good. But what is happy, and what is good, according to whom, and for whom? And is there such a thing as an “ignoble truth,” that tells things exactly as they are but makes people do the wrong thing? Yes, yes, truth and lies are complicated things, and you can thread your needle through one and find yourself at the other …

In Plato’s final draft – the one read and translated the world over and taken for true – Phaedrus asks Socrates, “Where have you been, and where are you going?”

Sigh.

It gets the message across, anyway.

This was the birth of academic writing. It mediates between the messy experience of gathering information and the formats in which society constructs truth. It uses clear, informative language as a marker of that truth. It is not entirely false. In fact, it is mostly true.

Strunk and White (1959) make some pretty hefty admonitions about the word “fact:”

Use this word only of matter capable of direct certification, not of matters of judgement. That a particular event happened on a given date, that lead melts at a certain temperature are facts. But such conclusions as that Napoleon was the greatest of modern generals or that the climate of California is delightful, however defensible they may be, are not properly called facts. ²

But is this true?

In fact, the phrase “in fact” is often used as a discourse marker, adding more detailed information to whatever has just been said, whether it is verifiably true or not. Language goofs around and slips up, despite our best intentions. The fact that we call things facts makes them appear true, whether they are or not. How can we account for this effect in writing? Why do we have to? This puzzle may seem new in an era of “fake news,” but it’s as old as writing, maybe even as old as speech. Socrates and Plato were already trying to solve it, and so are we.

One problem with all this truth-telling is that it often translates the exciting mess that is life into a somewhat duller set of pronouncements. The fact that the pronouncements are boring gives them authority. If it weren’t true, it seems to ask, how could such a boring text survive? What the text gains in authority, it loses by putting its audience to sleep. And this authoritative affect – both the feeling that it is true, and the falling asleep – may not even be very good at ensuring truth. We’ve gotten very good at telling ignoble truths – unassailable in their facticity, but vulnerable in their efficacy.

How can we turn this around? How can writing become less of a chore and more of a passion? How can it provide an energizing romp through the world? How can writing cross mountains of evidence and valleys of imagination, and come out at the end communicating something neither false nor boring, but compelling and engaging? And why are we obliged, as thinking participants in self-determined engagement with the world around us, to take on this quest?

These are the riddles this book tries to unravel. Existing manuals give advice to answer questions like, “What is the correct formula for writing?” or “How can I get a good grade?” Instead, this book assumes that writing is not for a teacher, and not for a grade, but for the world. It asks, “How can we write so that our writing allows for expression and communication?” And, “Why do we need to write? What is the role of writing beyond an exercise in school? Why does writing matter enough that we should train our muscles and practice it like a finely-honed sport?” That is just the beginning of what it asks. It asks a lot of questions.

And hopefully answers a few.

And invites many more for you to ask, and to answer.

It plants seeds.

This manual picks up on a little-known fact: that some of the earliest texts that we associate with a civilization we call “ours” are anything but boring. Oh, sure, school has often tried to make them boring. Very boring. So boring, in fact, that I wager you have never bothered to read them to find out if they are actually as boring as advertised. I hadn’t. Then I discovered: don’t believe everything your teachers told you. They often repeated what their teachers told them. Also, you often imagined things they didn’t even say. Instead, listen to me.

No, actually. Lend me your ear, and then go listen to the world yourself …

In art as in life, the greeting is everything. If this greeting goes well, we have a conversation, a story, a liaison. If not, then the story ends here.

In the case of Plato’s Phaedrus, the story didn’t end there: an entire dialogue starts from this humble question: Where have you been, and where are you going? In real life, the question may have been racier, sexier, more enticing. Or it may be that Socrates, who always enjoyed young men, liked the flutter of Phaedrus’ eyes as he asked his sultry question, and went along with him even if it was not well stated. Or it may be that Socrates, who refused emotion, stoically resisted Phaedrus’s flirtation, which made him flirt all the more.

“Socrates, flirt???” you say. Are you shocked? Appalled? Perplexed? Have you heard that Socrates was above all that? They say he didn’t want to get it on, and never actually did. He lived in his mind. His love was all high in the clouds and close to God, far far away from the smelly hairy bodies we inhabit in real life. There’s even a word for it: “Platonic Love,” love with everything but the sexy bits. Noble lies, I tell you!

Stranger still: even the most liberal proponent of sexual freedom will defend the honor of Socrates shocked that I might suggest that his erudition depended not on his monasticism but on his eroticism. I tell you, the “medieval” morality police are buried deep within us, a fainting “Victorian” scold each one! How free are we if that freedom’s only measure is against a past prudery that’s at least partly imagined?

Here’s the thing: the only time travel machines we have are books. And most people don’t write down what they do in their spare time. In private. In bed. No internet. No selfies. No Pornhub. All we know about Socrates is what his students and friends, mostly Plato and Xenophon (d. 354 BCE) wrote about him. Do you know the details of your teachers’ sex lives? Maybe you do, but I never did … (or wanted to…)

Where, then, do we get the persistent idea of Platonic love? Centuries of reading about the ancient world through the lens of Christianity have really cleaned those ancients up! ³ In a Christian framework that came to interpret same-sex love as a sin, its centrality in many ancient cultures, including many in Greece, became a big no-no. ⁴ During the Renaissance, Catholic translators of Platonic dialogues tried very hard to separate sexuality and thought in a way neither Plato nor Socrates would have recognized. In The Symposium, the young and beautiful Alcibiades (450–404 BCE) says, “Socrates is erotically attracted to beautiful boys, and is always hanging around them in a state of excitement.” ⁵ Nothing unclear here, except if one translates eromenoi as beauties, making it unclear exactly what or who might be turning Socrates on.

Rather than taking all the sexual hints and jokes and discussions in Plato’s dialogues at face value because they might raise modern eyebrows, it’s much easier to say that Socrates just wasn’t very interested. After all, The Symposium reports that Socrates turned down the offer for sex made by Alcibiades. Sure, it might be that Socrates wasn’t into sex. It might be that he didn’t fancy Alcibiades. ⁶ It might also be that the entire dialogue is a theatrical number in which a group of men come together and casually decide if they will hang out and drink themselves silly (along with everything that might entail, and entailed the night before), or if they will soberly honor the god Eros and thus philosophize. And that part at the end where Alcibiades describes how he tried to trick Socrates into exchanging his youthful bodily beauty for Socrates’ internal beauty of wisdom? That might not simply be a come-on, but the clever repetition of a juicy story in a (now lost) play by Euripides everybody would know about how the sleeping satyr Silenus was trapped by King Midas’ men, who spiked the river with wine. ⁷ And what is a satyr? A good-for-nothing hedonist shunning the burdens of civilized life, a daemon witnessing the birth of new epochs and cataclysms with a gigantic erection! ⁸ The modern use of this story as supposed proof of Socrates’ supposed purity resembles somebody today saying, “May the force be with you!” and people looking for its Biblical verse.

Among the many aspects of our modern understanding of the word “love” that Plato did not mention was agape, which is a Greek word more like what we understand as “Platonic love.” This love of God for man, or a general love for humanity, emerges as a translation of the Hebrew ahev in the Septuagint, which is the earliest Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. It was translated in the mid-second century BCE. The general kind of all-over, of-everything love indicated by agape became much stronger through the thought of Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE), a bishop in Roman North Africa who loved the emanationist Platonism expressed by Plotinus (204-270 CE) but gave up on all worldly pleasures, including sex, and thought all good Christians should do the same. When the Florentine Humanist Leonardo Bruni (1369–1444) translated Phaedrus in the fifteenth century, he used the Latin word amor to transform the “targeting energy” indicated by eros – sometimes expressed sexually, most often between an older and a younger man – as romantic love, largely divorced from messy, potentially sacrilegious sex. It was all downhill from there. First in Italian, then in English, and then in French, “Platonic love” became something Plato would never have recognized: love between two people of different sexes with no relation to the senses.

Plato wrote about eros not agape … it turns out that Plato’s love was not very “Platonic” at all …

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Introduction: Philosophizing the Craft of Writing
• Part I Who Writes?
• Part II How We Write
• Part III What We Write
• Part IV Where We Write
• References
• Cast of Characters, Real and Imagined
• Glossary of Tempting, Tentative Terminology