Writing, Learning, and Teaching Advice

Today I was culling through some old notes when I came across some simple advice from one of my graduate history instructors on the subject of writing.

1. Treat your words like hundred dollar bills.
2. Don’t confuse conditional tense (would be) with direct past tense (did). This was especially important in historical writing. He called this the “ESPN effect”: “He would go all the way!”
3. Avoid “due to” sentences like the plague.

It made me think of other advice on writing, learning, teaching I’ve received over the years. I’ll probably add to the following list as I think of more examples, but here’s a start:

1. Fill your writing pipeline, and keep it full. I.e., the publication process takes forever, so it is best to keep many irons in the fire. Never wait for an external decision on one project before moving onto another.
2. Some people have sitzfleisch; others don’t. If you stick your butt in chair and work hard, you’re more likely to get things done. This was a favorite saying of Dr. Geoffrey Parker, who often cited the Knickerbocker Rule in our writing seminars.
3. Chronology is important; most people are historically illiterate.
4. Rote memorization is far from the best way to learn.
5. The point of education is installing adaptive attitudes. Most people realize far too late that attitudinal improvement is the point of their degree.
6. Teachers (and writers) should focus on emotional engagement first. Read the room. Audiences need a reason to care–and keep caring.
7. You can’t truly teach people anything; people can only teach themselves.
8. You read by re-reading.
9. The non-finality of learning is a story of the obsolescence of teachers. In theory, if you do your job right, you ultimately do yourself out of a job.
10. To be worthy of your job as a teacher, you must put your students’ needs on par with your own. Be willing to listen and take their ideas seriously. You are not a one-way conduit, dispensing wisdom and knowledge.
11. Hold yourself to higher standards than you hold your audience.
12. Students cannot learn without love; teachers prove their worth when students think on their words 10, 20, 30 years down the line. They also cannot learn without fear; if students feel too safe in the classroom, they won’t give it their best. They have to hustle, see mistakes penalized, get shaken out of their comfort zone. School is a mix of pain and comfort. Schools of hard knocks work for a reason–you learn out of necessity. One professor at Notre Dame elaborated thus: “Gary, Indiana. Looks like the bowels of hell. But guess what? It also produces the most Nobel laureates per capita. You know why? Because everybody wants out of Gary. They’ll do whatever it takes, and that pushes them to succeed.”
13. Buildings are better with structure. Lectures, discussions, and essays are too.
14. If you know a ton and care about it, that comes across as genius. Transmit passion and craftsmanship, not just information. If you want to see genius, go visit an old church or a temple; somebody did something there that nobody would probably ever see–a tiny detail on the roof, in a corner, with the molding. They never cared who saw it, but they did it way better than it ever needed to be done.
15. Don’t be an acolyte of a particular school, mentor, or group. You do YOU to eleven.
16. Making a fool of yourself can be a good pedagogical tool. Don’t be afraid to ask dumb questions, or look vulnerable to your audience. Calculated vulnerability can be an endearing, trust-building trait.
17. In line with 15: Audiences–particularly kids–can smell a phony a mile off. You have to be authentic. Never try to be something that you’re not.
18. When teaching, modulate your pitch, volume, and cadence. Monotone doesn’t work. The same applies to writing. Variate your sentence structure. Listen to yourself out loud. If you were a drummer, are you leaving enough holes? LEAVE HOLES…let the beat drop.
19. Don’t be a Chuck-e-Cheese animatronic when you wind up in front of others; get your audience to talk about what matters most to them, or figure it out and talk about it yourself.
20. Take a drink whenever you ask for questions. Count to three. Let time hang in the air. People need time to gin up the courage to speak.
21. Repetition is part of learning. Learning should always be self-reflexive; points made last should be interwoven with points made prior.
22. Simplicity rules. Remember Clausewitz: Everything is simple, but the simplest things are very hard.
23. Teaching is an infinite demand problem; so make BOUNDARIES. Allocate time strategically. Prepping lectures should take 3x the time required to give them.
24. Overcome the curse of knowledge by remembering what it was like to learn how to swim. You must practice movements on land first, then in the shallows, then in mid-depth water with aid. Eventually, with hard work, one learns to swim on their own.
25. Never bury the lede.
26. Get rid of all jargon, “weasel words” in introductions and historiography.
27. Come up with an elevator pitch for each of your projects: Make sure it reinforces how said project moves the subject conversation along. What’s the significance?
28. Get OUT of your immediate subfield. Don’t silo yourself. Connect with other groups; become energized by external perspectives, let them reinvigorate your own work.
29. Provide enough baseline information so there is a pre-agreed level of understanding between you and the audience before setting off on your lecture/writing project.
30. Come up with clear questions ahead of time, but don’t be scared to ask relevant open-ended questions as you go.
31. Never, ever be afraid of silence, especially if you’re doing something remotely (especially pertinent during the pandemic)
32. Write the book you want to read; teach the course you’d want taught.
33. On consistency: “One evening, in New York, at a gathering of writers and historians interested in the West, my boss, Alvin Josephy, pointed to a white-haired man across the room. He said, That’s Harry Drago. Harry Sinclair Drago. He’s written over a hundred books. I waited for my chance and walked over. Mr. Drago, I said, Alvin Josephy says that you’ve written over a hundred books. Yes, he said, that’s right. How do you do that? I asked. And he said, Four pages a day. Every day? Every day. It was the best advice an aspiring writer could be given. I wrote The Johnstown Flood at night after work. I would come home, we’d have dinner, put the kids to bed, and then at about nine I would go to a little room upstairs, close the door, and start working. I tried to write not four but two pages every night. Our oldest daughter remembers going to sleep to the sound of the typewriter.” (David McCullough)
34. On attention to detail: “Interviewer: Would you tell us about the motto tacked over your desk? McCullough: It says, ‘Look at your fish.’ It’s the test that Louis Agassiz, the nineteenth-century Harvard naturalist, gave every new student. He would take an odorous old fish out of a jar, set it in a tin pan in front of the student and say, Look at your fish. Then Agassiz would leave. When he came back, he would ask the student what he’d seen. Not very much, they would most often say, and Agassiz would say it again: ‘Look at your fish.’ This could go on for days. The student would be encouraged to draw the fish but could use no tools for the examination, just hands and eyes. Samuel Scudder, who later became a famous entomologist and expert on grasshoppers, left us the best account of the “ordeal with the fish.” After several days, he still could not see whatever it was Agassiz wanted him to see. But, he said, I see how little I saw before. Then Scudder had a brainstorm and he announced it to Agassiz the next morning: Paired organs, the same on both sides. Of course! Of course! Agassiz said, very pleased. So Scudder naturally asked what he should do next, and Agassiz said, ‘Look at your fish.’ I love that story and have used it often when teaching classes on writing, because seeing is so important in this work. Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new. Seeing is as much the job of an historian as it is of a poet or a painter, it seems to me. That’s Dickens’s great admonition to all writers, ‘Make me see.’”
35. Writing vs. Researching: “At the beginning of the work I had thought the best procedure would be to do all the research necessary, then write the book. Quite soon I had come to realize that, for me at least, it was best not to put off the writing, but rather to begin sooner than later, because it is then, in the writing, that you begin to see more clearly what you don’t know and need to find out.” (Ibid.)

Helpful Resources

Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do, pp. 15-19.
William James, “Talks to Students and Teachers”
John Dewey, Experience and Education
Plato, Symposium
Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America
Susan Blum, I Love Learning, I Hate School, conclusion.
Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way, chap. 10.
Roland Christensen et al. eds., Education for Judgment
Rhodes, Richard, How to write: Advice and Reflection
Bolker, Joan, Write Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day

---

---