Rules for Writing 7: Mind the gaps

I haven’t said much yet about the actual writing, in the sense of putting sentences together. This isn’t really the place, and I am not really the person, to give advice on how to write well in terms of style. But I do have one suggestion, which is perhaps especially germane to philosophy: to focus on transitions from section to section, from paragraph to paragraph, and from sentence to sentence. 

This goes together with the previous rule about having an overall structure that is evident to the reader. You can use little textual cues to carry the reader through that structure, so that it flows smoothly. Ideally they will almost get the sense that the text is reading itself for them, because it moves forward so effortlessly.

I think writing podcasts has made me especially attentive to this, since if you are writing for a listener and not a reader, you really need to make things easy to follow. So almost every sentence I write has some feature, usually a small one, that cues how each sentence fits with either the previous or the next sentence. Here’s a randomly chosen example from a recent script, with the connecting cues in boldface:

“But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, because having touched on the Discourse,we have learned no more about Descartes’ life than he wanted to tell us, which is almost nothing at all. Fortunately we do have other sources. There were other early biographers, notably Adrien Baillet, author of a Lifeof Monsieur Descartes that appeared in 1691, so 41 years after Descartes’ death. Then of course there are the letters. Pride of place here goes to the correspondence with Mersenne, but we also have exchanges between Descartes and numerous other figures. These sources allow us to reconstruct his life story in some detail. By ‘us’ I of course mean other people, like Geneviève Rodis-Lewis and Stephen Gaukroger, whose modern biographies have given me plenty to draw on in this episode.”

Which is not exactly rocket science but it’s a typical passage in that there is at least one word in every sentence that links to the previous sentence. 

Similarly, I try to write paragraphs so that the beginning and/or end of each paragraph signals the reader that this is a discrete unit of text (in the example above this is achieved through the first phrase “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” which both links to and creates a break from what went before). Even though in a podcast you can’t see the paragraph breaks, I try to write it (and then read it) in such a way that you can “feel” them; and this is something one should do in any piece of philosophy writing.

The same goes for the transitions between sections of a paper. As with all transitions, this can be done more elegantly or less elegantly. A bluntly straightforward transition like “having discussed X, I’ll now go on to discuss Y” is better than nothing at all, but only a little. What you really want is to end each section of the paper (whether or not it is explicitly labeled with its own sub-header) with a transition that suggests how the next section would follow on from it naturally. 

I would even go so far as to say that transitions are the most important stylistic thing to bear in mind when writing about philosophy: they don’t just make it easier to read, but also let the reader follow the logic of the argument step-by-step. In this sense they are the sentence-level feature that most helps you abide by the aforementioned rules.