Speculative thinking and writing – 23
5 Regard this paragraph as no more than a hypothesis about, a
proposal for, or a forecast of, your eventual answer. It might
well lay the foundations of the opening paragraph of your
essay, but it will need to be tested out (and probably
changed) by your detailed reading – which should not begin
until now.
The aim of this chapter is to show you how to do these things. You
need to be aware at the outset that you may not find it easy to master
and apply these techniques of reflective questioning and exploratory
writing. You may well be strongly tempted to scurry back to the
apparent security of your books and the deceptive sense of being
‘busy’ in the library, leaving the hard thinking until a night or two
before the essay is due. There are two main reasons why you should
resist this temptation.
The first is that hard preliminary thinking and writing leads
eventually to better essays. The second is that it makes you more
efficient in your work, and consequently saves you important time.
It might seem that a procedure which asks you to produce
a draft paragraph which almost certainly will have to be changed,
and perhaps wholly scrapped, is academically worthless, not to say
inefficient. This is not so. You will remember we saw in chapter 1 that
writing and thinking beget more writing and thinking. Now if your
thinking is not constrained by the need to write down what comes of
it, it will usually be fairly undisciplined, not to say idle and disjointed.
Writing is your best way of discovering whether you have actually
captured a thought and whether it is any good. Improvement does
not emerge from nothing, but by changing what exists. The single
chief value of a speculative answer in a short paragraph is not just
that it might become the foundation of the eventual answer but that it
gives you something to change, something to improve on by further
reading, thinking and writing. This is what leads to better essays.
Having a speculative answer leads to a more efficient use
of time in a number of ways. Your reading becomes quicker and
you don’t lose concentration on a book so easily. Since you have
a better idea of what is likely to be relevant, you spend less time
taking mountains of notes that eventually turn out to be quite useless.
5 Regard this paragraph as no more than a hypothesis about, a
proposal for, or a forecast of, your eventual answer. It might
well lay the foundations of the opening paragraph of your
essay, but it will need to be tested out (and probably
changed) by your detailed reading – which should not begin
until now.
The aim of this chapter is to show you how to do these things. You
need to be aware at the outset that you may not find it easy to master
and apply these techniques of reflective questioning and exploratory
writing. You may well be strongly tempted to scurry back to the
apparent security of your books and the deceptive sense of being
‘busy’ in the library, leaving the hard thinking until a night or two
before the essay is due. There are two main reasons why you should
resist this temptation.
The first is that hard preliminary thinking and writing leads
eventually to better essays. The second is that it makes you more
efficient in your work, and consequently saves you important time.
It might seem that a procedure which asks you to produce
a draft paragraph which almost certainly will have to be changed,
and perhaps wholly scrapped, is academically worthless, not to say
inefficient. This is not so. You will remember we saw in chapter 1 that
writing and thinking beget more writing and thinking. Now if your
thinking is not constrained by the need to write down what comes of
it, it will usually be fairly undisciplined, not to say idle and disjointed.
Writing is your best way of discovering whether you have actually
captured a thought and whether it is any good. Improvement does
not emerge from nothing, but by changing what exists. The single
chief value of a speculative answer in a short paragraph is not just
that it might become the foundation of the eventual answer but that it
gives you something to change, something to improve on by further
reading, thinking and writing. This is what leads to better essays.
Having a speculative answer leads to a more efficient use
of time in a number of ways. Your reading becomes quicker and
you don’t lose concentration on a book so easily. Since you have
a better idea of what is likely to be relevant, you spend less time
taking mountains of notes that eventually turn out to be quite useless.