Recently, David published a few blog posts on why we blog and how we should blog. He suggested that a five paragraph essay following technical writing structures as explained by Celia Eliot is a more suited format than, for example, a more free flowing kind like what Paul Graham describes. I find this discussion quite exciting.
David’s first argument defending five paragraph essays against Paul Graham’s description of essay is the limited amount of time. Good essays, he says, the Graham essays, need too much time for polishing. We do not have the time. So in this case, the pre-structured five paragraph essay is a better format.
I disagree. I think any format or structure of essay needs a lot of time and effort to be good. A five paragraph essay needs just as much work to flow well and be convincing. In my opinion, constraints like “topic sentence, then evidence, then analysis” do not make the essay better with less work. A 30 minute essay following Eliot’s ideas will not be better than a 30 minute essay following Graham, even if it deceptively sounds like the five paragraph structure is capable of giving you a well organized final product in shorter time.
Furthermore, even if the structure could produce something in shorter time, it is not clear to me that speed gains are a good target to pursue. After reading biographies of authors and books on the experience of writing, I have come to the conclusion that for most, except perhaps a lucky few, writing well never becomes fast and easy. There are no silver bullets, no techniques to spit out a wonderfully crafted essay in ten minutes. Not even years of practice makes a writer fast—-only better. The ultimate quality of the work gets better with experience, but after getting over the first stumblings, the gains in speed are minimal. Therefore, I think its better to focus on writing well, not fast.
Naturally, the two approaches have different definitions of what “writing well” and “good essays” mean. David and Celia Eliot focus on essays that argue and defend a point. Instead of flowing towards the most interesting possibilities and perhaps changing the question that they started with, they follow a predetermined path from point A to a well defined point B. The author is like a lawyer when these are considered. The structure Eliot describes is great for a lawyer to convince a jury. It is also great for scientific papers, which basically propose and defend a new idea or discovery. This ties in to David’s second argument about why these blogs should follow the five paragraph structure. We are scientists, we need to learn how to convey, argue and defend our scientific ideas. These blogs are our venue for practice. Therefore we should use the most suitable format for convincing the audience of a conclusion we already had when we started.
In my opinion, however, a blog post should be very different from a scientific paper. It should be interesting and surprising, rather than convincing. It should excite readers and take them unexpected places where the flow leads, instead of removing doubts one by one. The author should arrive at these unexpected places with the reader, take a breath, and enjoy the scenery. Perhaps the author and the reader may share a little bread and wine on this beautiful meadow.
I believe that the main difference between my and David’s approach to blogs boils down to the reasons of blogging. We have different, yet equally valid ideas on why it is important to blog. I think, just as David does, that it is a great opportunity to practice communicating ideas in writing. For David, the best target for this training is skills of conveying and defending your (or somebody else’s) research, which is crucial for grant proposals and papers—-a very important part of science. I, on the other hand, see blogging as practice for sharing ideas and scientific results with a general audience, getting excited together, but not necessarily convincing anybody of anything with 100% certainty. I think both of these are excellent reasons to blog, and a scientist would benefit from training either skill set.
Both Building Good Paragraphs by Celia Eliot and The Age of the Essay by Paul Graham are excellent sources. I suggest reading both of them. I then suggest flowing with your essay to exciting new grounds for a picnic. But the choice is yours, of course.
— Irmak