Matthew S ([info]vectorious) wrote,
2003-03-03 19:30:00
  • Mood: convention challenging
  • Music: Gin Soaked boy

Hiding ideas

There is an attachment many people have to swathes of text.

In a novel, where the impression is as important as the contents I can swing with this. It is the tune to the lyrics of a song

However I find it a problem in reports, essays and the like.

I found, doing philosophy at university, that philosophers are very prone to patching over the holes in their ideas with a sleight of hand somewhere in a dense section of text.

I also found that when I had done no revision for the start of term exams and just wrote I often got better marks than my carefully crafted concise essays when I had done a lot of revision.

I developed some ideas for a new essay format, but never had the nerve to hand in an essay in this format: (in mock new format)

1) The main points of an essay would be listed and numbered at the front of the text
2)Definitions(a) of words used would be done by footnotes in appendices
3) The arguments for and against each step would be cross-referenced into each step(point1)
4) The considerations for and against an argument would be weighed and an explanation given as to why you came down on one side or another, possibly with consequences outlined if another position was taken.(point 2)
5) having established how you moved to the next step, you repeat the process until you reach your essay's conclusion. (Point 3)
6)Conclusion
The point of all this is that you cannot hide in glibness, but must truly test the strength of your argument.

Notes:
Point 1 - This is to show you have considered all arguments and can counter them and not just ignore them.
Point 2 - This establishes what arguments are used at each stage and how you made the step - you cannot simply "paper over the crack"
Point 3 - This means you can see the whole structure at a glance and challenge the bits you wish to in detail.

Appendix
Definitions: particularly of technical words that can be mis-interpreted in philosophy. Someone once went through a book by Kuhn and considered that he had used the word "paradigm" in something like 70 different ways.

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  • 7 comments

[info]andrewwyld

March 3 2003, 12:28:53 UTC 9 years ago

I like swathes of text, and I also like feeble statistical arguments.  This is because I like the facial expression people get when you quote the sentence they hoped you'd missed ten minutes of dense text later, and I love the facial expression people get when you do a low-grade mental calculation with the numbers they've just fed you and ask a nasty question about the result.

I've turned into my supervisor[1], haven't I.  Shoot me now.

[1]Tutor, for the Oxonians among you.

[info]mostlyacat

March 3 2003, 14:35:44 UTC 9 years ago

Your essay description reminds me a lot of the supposed ideal of well written structured programming code.

  • You define self-contained functions or objects or modules with clearly defined interfaces between them.
  • You define clear unambiguous data structures which can then be manipulated by the code.
  • The entire program can be broken down into simple and logical steps no matter what level you view it at.
  • There is a clear linear thread of execution (at least for the particular thread you're looking at)
  • The program memory available is your word limit and the processor performance and RAM available is the cleverness or subject-familiarity level of your readers.


When you write an essay you are acting as a compiler to condense your ideas into a single executable essay. If you know several different languages your essay can be compiled for any of these languages (or platforms).

This means that to write better essays:

  • A great deal of time should be spent on the design, testing and debugging of the essay relative to actually coding it.
  • Parts of the essay have probably been written before and should be reused - muhahahaaa!


This also means:

You'll probably have to write several documents about parts of the essay and spent *ages* having meetings with people to explain how your essay works and show them that it won't go wrong and lead to thousands of copies of your essay having to be recalled!

When your essay is written it will be very difficult to work out why the argument randomly crashes every so often!

[info]mostlyacat

March 3 2003, 14:37:56 UTC 9 years ago

When you write an essay you are acting as a compiler

Hmmm. Perhaps more likely the programmer methinks.

[info]mostlyacat

March 3 2003, 14:44:10 UTC 9 years ago

Also, even if you have a nice clear simple essay structure, people will later come along and change it with random things they want put in, but they'll write it in a very messy way with lots of tippex and probably spill coffee on the paper a bit and crumple it lots.

[info]mostlyacat

March 3 2003, 14:47:15 UTC 9 years ago

Also, when you've just about written a fairly good essay, someone will decide that it's going to be cheaper to buy someone else's essay in its entirety instead.

[info]andrewwyld

March 25 2003, 07:36:33 UTC 9 years ago

Your analogy attempted to access memory at 0xaafe7787 and has gone down the toilet.  Muhahahahaha!

[info]andrewwyld

March 25 2003, 07:33:11 UTC 9 years ago

I was going to put this in a post, but I hit the wrong key and lost all of it, so perhaps I should put it here instead.

At the best, we are presented with ideas from the outside world as crystals, carefully assembled around the single seed of another's thought.  We take these flawless and magnificent creations and shatter them into fragments because to understand an idea, we must rebuild it in our own heads, and to rebuild it, we must know how it is built.  This is, of course, heartbreaking for the thinker who made them.

I believe that the swathes of text attempt to achieve the provision of a set of instructions and parts for the assembly of a perfect crystal of thought in the stalactitic caverns of your own mind.  What seems like a flaw may be a component whose exact nature you are supposed to infer from the shape of its surroundings -- because the writer cannot supply such a component but must rely on you to make it.  A very good example of such a component is love -- you'll know when it happens, as I was unhelpfully (and slightly inaccurately) told as an adolescent.

A curious corrollary of the desire to present only the best crystalline thoughts to one another and of the resistance to having our creations shattered is the fact that two people who think precisely the same things may not recognize this fact, because they are presenting each other with gems whose boundaries interleave, and whose unity cannot be understood except by disassembly -- a process they will never attempt.

I'm spending a lot of my time measuring the insides of people's heads, now.  Occasionally I find I have a shard which fits a gap exactly.  I suppose I can only hope this is enough.
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