Rules for Writing 3: Go narrow

Practically every discussion I’ve ever had with a beginning PhD student has involved my telling them that their envisioned project is too ambitious and broad. Often, grad students outline dissertation topics that even sound like they could be projects for a whole career (“the problem of free will from Aristotle to medieval scholasticism”). It’s not uncommon for me to tell students that they can tackle about 20% of their planned topic in the actual thesis, and that their first task is to find the right 20%. 

Similar advice goes for all levels of philosophy writing: often I tell BA students that to write a 12-15 page term paper, they might select a single paragraph or even a single sentence in the primary text and focus on dealing with the problems it poses (this is a nice way to find a “question,” see Rule 1).

In my experience students often find this advice frustrating or disappointing; probably it feels like I am training them to do the kind of angels-on-a-pinhead scholarship that many people lament when it comes to modern-day philosophy. But the fact is that philosophy, and history of philosophy, are about detailed, fine-grained thinking, where progress is usually made in very small increments. I find it much more satisfying to read something that poses a narrow, exact question and provides a compelling answer, than to read something that goes over a lot of territory which people may already have discussed before, and which skips past the details where things get really difficult and interesting. Though there may be exceptions, there’s almost always a kind of trade-off between broad-and-shallow and narrow-and-deep, and since students in my experience tend to err on the broad-and-shallow side, I generally encourage them to tack back towards the narrow-and-deep side instead.