Great post. Your point about how arguments can be presented in different forms gets to what I see as a real challenge with young academics who have been taught to see their task (and they have often been told this by people who should know better) as to "write articles" rather than to make arguments that can be then be presented, among other ways, as journal articles. There are fields where arguments are disappearing, in a sea of AI-like presentations of regressions, and I don't mean just STEM.
In my household, we call this "a new turtle from the Mesozoic of Kazakhstan." At least, I think that's what you mean: the sort of article that is written to describe (and to be "a publication") rather than to persuade or argue.
This is exactly right (well, it's exactly what I meant): the argument is "out there" as a series of connected ideas and supporting evidence, but the form of the argument is always manifested differently based on audience, form, genre, etc.
Last endnote: I have always wondered why writing classes (with a given high level of competence and ambition among students) don't ever hand out like, Didion and Sontag essays (or Lockwood, or really anything in NYRB) and talk about how they work and challenge students to attempt things similar in some way! It really is so much more appealing. I know Ta-Nehisi has written about staff meetings at the Washington Monthly reverse engineering New Yorker pieces; surely there are more people who can and want to do that reverse engineering with a group.
One challenge I've encountered in doing similar things is that students have simply never encountered these sorts of essays before. High-level nonfiction writing is a foreign experience. This would be a good way to approach it.
Great post. Your point about how arguments can be presented in different forms gets to what I see as a real challenge with young academics who have been taught to see their task (and they have often been told this by people who should know better) as to "write articles" rather than to make arguments that can be then be presented, among other ways, as journal articles. There are fields where arguments are disappearing, in a sea of AI-like presentations of regressions, and I don't mean just STEM.
In my household, we call this "a new turtle from the Mesozoic of Kazakhstan." At least, I think that's what you mean: the sort of article that is written to describe (and to be "a publication") rather than to persuade or argue.
physics or stamp collecting, as they say
This is exactly right (well, it's exactly what I meant): the argument is "out there" as a series of connected ideas and supporting evidence, but the form of the argument is always manifested differently based on audience, form, genre, etc.
Very interesting!
Last endnote: I have always wondered why writing classes (with a given high level of competence and ambition among students) don't ever hand out like, Didion and Sontag essays (or Lockwood, or really anything in NYRB) and talk about how they work and challenge students to attempt things similar in some way! It really is so much more appealing. I know Ta-Nehisi has written about staff meetings at the Washington Monthly reverse engineering New Yorker pieces; surely there are more people who can and want to do that reverse engineering with a group.
One challenge I've encountered in doing similar things is that students have simply never encountered these sorts of essays before. High-level nonfiction writing is a foreign experience. This would be a good way to approach it.