Rules for Writing 1: The first question is, what is the question?

Having spent the last 25 years of my life teaching history of philosophy, I’ve obviously had a lot of opportunity to give advice and feedback to students on their writing projects. I often find myself giving the same tips over and over, so it occurred to me it might be helpful to write them up for a wider audience and post them here. Of course writing about philosophy is an art, not a science, and these points are going to be to some extent just a matter of taste. I’m calling them “rules” in the same somewhat tongue-in-cheek sense used in my earlier “20 rules for doing history of philosophy,” some of which are relevant here. In fact some of the points will overlap with what I say there but where that happens, the points bear repeating, and in any case what I say in this series of rules will be more with an eye to practical application.

Also I should mention that they really are geared towards writing about historical philosophical texts, since this is the only area I’m qualified to speak about; some of what I say is surely applicable to writing about philosophy more generally, and even writing in the humanities more generally. But some points will be more narrowly relevant. In another sense though the rules are meant generally, because they are should apply to students writing at BA, MA, or PhD level; indeed also to non-students, so anyone who is trying to write about history of philosophy at any length, from a term paper to a book-length study. This is going to be about academic writing, though, not e.g. writing for a popular audience; obviously I’d have some things to say about that too and some of this would apply there, but it is really a different issue.

As always I’d welcome feedback in the form of comments, which you can leave here at the bottom of the page!

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On then to my first rule, which is: “The first question is, what is the question?” I’ve said this to students countless times when they are in the first stages of working on a piece of writing. The point of the slogan is that people usually think they are looking for a topic or theme. That makes sense as a first initial framework to have in mind, but only insofar as it gives you a guide to what primary and secondary literature to read as you are thinking about your writing project. It is not the right idea when you are close to producing the piece of writing, still less when you are actually writing it. To imagine yourself addressing a mere topic can lead to writing that merely rehearses what the philosopher is saying about that topic in the primary text. But writing a book report is not doing philosophy! Rather, you are looking for a question to answer in the piece. 

This question needs to be neither too difficult nor too easy to answer, or as I sometimes tell students, the issue needs to be resolvable but not obvious. This may itself seem obvious, but it is a surprisingly difficult balance to get right. On the one hand, you need a question such that there are resources in the text to address it; on the other hand, the text can’t address it so squarely that the answer is right there in what the author says. Often, a good way to find a question like this is to pay attention to what you yourself find puzzling when you are reading; when you are confused, that’s a good sign! Because it means there is something unclear that you could then work on clarifying for others. When you actually start writing, at the outset you should try to get the reader to feel that same tension or puzzlement, so they get that your question is a good and pressing one.

Just as you should lean towards a question that is relatively narrow, you should lean towards a question where the answer is difficult to give (so, very non-obvious). Your answer doesn’t need to, and probably even shouldn’t be, “definitely right.” Rather it should be well-justified. As I often tell students, “you’re not necessarily shooting for true, you’re shooting for plausible.” 

Of course there are many kinds of questions one can put to historical texts: how does the form relate to the content; how does the work respond to other works by the same or other authors, or to its historical context; what are the underlying presuppositions or unstated implications; how does a given argument work; how would contemporary philosophical concepts apply to your text; what exactly does this bit of terminology mean; etc. What I say above applies to all these questions and more. Any question that feels like an answer would shed light on the text, author, topic etc is fair game, you just need to get the reader to feel that they too want the answer, and then provide a satisfying answer. That answer is of course the “thesis” of your paper, what you are trying to establish. So another way to think about this rule is simply that the thesis you are arguing for can best be thought of as an answer to a sufficiently difficult (but not impossible!) question.