Writing as a Moral Act

Success in writing requires the virtue of temperance, self-mastery, which refers to an internal action less dreary and passive than mere abstinence. Temperance means disciplining oneself in order to realize one’s greatest potential.

Writing is a moral act, I often tell my undergraduate students. At first, naturally enough, they are puzzled by this claim. Not only are they prone to compartmentalizing—discuss ethics in a philosophy class, learn writing in an English class; they are unused to thinking ethically about ordinary, apparently nonmoral, activities. For them, morality is limited to (1) rules, such as the honor code’s prohibitions against lying, cheating, and stealing; (2) social-justice issues, such as the sins of the patriarchy and the faults of free enterprise; and (3) their informal sense of peer norms, such as having a friend’s back during a crisis.

To expand their horizons, I prompt them to think about moral aspects of everyday life and to consider the first steps of forming an ethical position and of acting morally. Sound ethical judgment begins not with prescription but with description: characterizing the situation accurately and fairly. Not “what ought we to do?” but “what is going on here?”

Limning the essential elements of a case requires vision sharp and sensitive and comprehensive; and we won’t see clearly if we do not, so far as possible, accomplish a temporary “unselfing of the self,” in Evelyn Underhill’s phrase, attempting to perceive with others’ eyes, according to perspectives different from our own. This entire effort lies at the heart of the ethical life; it is a work of the moral imagination.

Expectations

This approach is also fundamental to the task of essay writing, a practice with which students in higher education are largely familiar. The ethical underpinnings of a good piece of writing can be glimpsed even during the opening session of an introductory humanities course.

When I require two-page response papers, which their authors will read aloud to their peers, students at first believe I seek nothing more than a summary of an assignment’s main points. No, I answer, not a bare summary; consider your listeners; everyone would be bored to tears by a rehash of what the whole class (I state hopefully) has already read. Oh, well then, you want our opinions, right? No, I reply; no one would be interested in a college freshman’s opinions; you possess no recognized authority in the subject area.

These dead-ends confronted, all apparent options blocked, students feel stymied, puzzled, and a trifle dismayed—but still well short of mutinous. It’s the beginning of term, after all, and we’re just going over the syllabus, defining expectations. Now they’re ready to start learning something new and valuable.

Your paper, I advise them, should be the most intellectually alert and stylistically engaging commentary on your assigned section of the reading which you can produce. Of course I shall take into account the short time frame you have at your disposal as well as your limited background in this subject. Therefore, some summary, yes; but incorporate this evidence from the text in support of the main event, which is the unfolding of your thesis. In other words, maintain command of your paper as a rider keeps control of his or her horse: subordinate summary and quotations to the development of your position.

And some opinion, yes—opinion in the sense of your carefully considered view: argue for the best construal of the material you can manage. When you present your paper, your listeners will be interested not in your isolated, undefended opinion (“I really enjoyed this book, and if you like Westerns, I feel that you will too”) but in your rational analysis and informed judgment; and, along the way, your fellow students will be grateful for whatever elements of wit and elegance you can deploy in your phrasing.

Most of all, keep in mind your audience, which consists of the other students in this course. Anticipate objections to your case. In your paper, respond to this imagined challenger. As you dig into your subject as deeply as you can, have your readers’ likely understanding and potential appreciation in mind. Indeed, writers cannot achieve their objectives without taking into account their readers’ backgrounds. As Steven Pinker has pointed out in the Wall Street Journal (September 27, 2014), “The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by the reader.”

To put these rubrics another way, this exercise is not about your personal experience and self-expression, as might have been stressed in your high-school classes. Instead, think of your writing as being much more objective than subjective. It’s about piercing to the heart of the matter and writing as insightfully about this topic—for example, an image, a character, an ethical quandary, a historical dispute—as you can, supporting your case with the best logic and evidence you can muster. It is not so much your “opinion” as your carefully weighed judgment on and compellingly argued analysis of a particular theme which you should attempt to set forth.

Steven Backus, director of the Writing and Critical Thinking Center at the College of St. Scholastica, expresses the severity of this challenge: “Critical analysis … is a practice that requires keen observation, sharp reflection, cold-hearted logic, crisp reasoning, icy discernment, and cool evaluation.” Or, as General George C. Marshall succinctly urged graduates of the Virginia Military Institute in 1956, “Don’t be a deep feeler but a poor thinker.”

Your paper is very much you, representing your best self; but it is even more you in relation to your readers, as you regularly think of them and even draw your imagined respondents into the conversation. This effort to write for others, not just for yourself, is one reason that writing is not only a moral but also a strenuous activity, despite the relatively light lifting required in its performance.

Effort

In fact, I have always found that as an instructor I could enter a class tired and the teaching process would reinvigorate me. I could go into an administrative meeting spent, with no resources in reserve, but need no additional alertness merely to stay afloat through the proceedings. I have never been able to write well, however—to start writing, particularly—when I was worn out; the little gray cells do not fire sufficiently fast to make for complete connections between lively thoughts and their fit expression. In his essay “Why I Write” (1946), George Orwell confesses that “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

Excellent thinking and writing always entail a substantial effort. If an acquaintance says she enjoys writing, then you can be pretty certain that she’s not a great writer. As Thomas Mann points out in his Essays of Three Decades (1947), “a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” I am always heartened by reports that the holograph manuscripts of lovely writers like Izaak Walton display evidence of repeated attempts to find the best wording. This additional labor is rarely in vain. It invariably pays dividends for readers. The opposite—clumsy, somniferous sentences—is typically more noticeable than fine prose that does not draw attention to itself. Samuel Johnson was right when he observed that “what is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”

Anyone writing for an intelligent, literate audience bears the responsibility to make his ideas intelligible. In an undergraduate course, the probability that a professor will not understand a student’s written argument because it is too sophisticated is not high. The brutal reality is that students must express themselves clearly or suffer the consequences. If a paper’s meaning is not apparent to the instructor, then the fault lies with the assignment’s author, not with its reader.

Disappointed students will sometimes try to argue for a higher grade by launching into descriptions of what their sentences and paragraphs “really meant.” Based on years of experience with dangling modifiers, missing transitions, faulty usage, and theses lacking cogent evidence, instructors can usually infer what their students were trying to say but must assess only what their students actually delivered—although they can take what their students “really meant” and enable them to see how they could have conveyed this meaning in better terms.

Learning to explain complex matters well is one of writing’s supreme challenges. But writing for the reader rather than for himself alone is good for an author’s character; it can relax his relentless self-regard.

Writers’ self-absorption can affect their judgment. Original sin means that the shadow of our selfishness falls across all our perspectives. In The Speechwriter (2015), Barton Swaim remarks that South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, whom Swaim worked for, “knew bad writing when he saw it, except when he was the author.” It’s hard for authors—and especially challenging for inexperienced writers, oblivious of parti pris—to appraise their work accurately.

In adopting an other-regarding stance and in laboring to engage their readers squarely, writers execute a craft that is moral in both its initiation and its accomplishment. Underscoring this point, the Cambridge scholar F. L. Lucas, in his learned and lively Style: The Art of Writing Well (1955; 2012), employs a thought-provoking verb when he says that an author achieves clarity “mainly by taking trouble; and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them.”

Serve them, yes, but maintain your dignity; do not kowtow to readers. Lucas also thinks “that the author of character will not bow too much to the character of his audience. Courtesy is better than deference.” A courteous author keeps in mind, for example, that readers are busy people; they have other good material to read and limited time in which to read it, so strive for concision and shun obscurity. Lucas believes that Confucius hit the mark “when he said that the gentleman is courteous, but not pliable; the common man pliable, but not courteous.”

Performing this balancing act—straining to express one’s distinctive ideas while keeping a diverse array of readers faithfully in mind—is partly why writing is such a chore. It’s one reason why good writers do not like to write; they like to have written—to paraphrase a famous remark by the New York poet and critic Dorothy Parker.

Excellence

An ethical undertaking in its general aspects, the writing process is also a moral course in respect of the habits of excellence necessary for its pursuit. Two key virtues, industry and perseverance, require little explanation, but they are absolutely crucial ones for students to take to heart. Producing a splendid paper requires taking pains to cast one’s thought in the best possible form. As William Zinsser says in his classic guide On Writing Well (1976; 2006), “Rewriting is the essence of writing well; it’s where the game is won or lost.” Because much of an essay’s quality depends on revision, bright but lazy, or often fairly bright but definitely overconfident, students will see their efforts go down a letter grade or two because of procrastination.

Determined to crank out papers in the shortest possible time, they fail to take the trouble to plan in advance and by that means to allow sufficient time for reviewing and revising their work. Whether felled by acedia or seduced by misplaced priorities, careless students manifestly lack prudence—and growing this capacity for practical judgment is much of what the undergraduate years are all about. Deferring gratification may require temporarily denying one’s friends; thus a modicum of moral courage, too, might be needed in order to hold procrastination at bay.

An outstanding professional writer will take the trouble to reread her work fifty or sixty times. After a paragraph is composed and revised and revised again, she might look over it and nod with tentative approval, until she begins to pick at a blemish or two and starts to work on the smoothest transition to the next paragraph. All the while, she is steadily keeping in mind the architecture of the whole essay and the (waxing or waning?) persuasiveness of her argument.

To be a superb writer, it helps to have a somewhat obsessive personality. Writing is a thoroughly involving activity that demands not only tremendous focus but also the capacity to hold in mind numerous bits and pieces simultaneously. For this reason, serious writers do not like distractions; most cannot bear any interruptions. They covet solitude. Dissertation writers sometimes crash under the pressure of realizing this lonely high-wire act.

In the Times Literary Supplement (August 11, 2006), Brian Dillon speaks of Jenny Diski’s need for peace and quiet while working on a writing project. Dillon notes how, in her book On Trying to Keep Still, Diski “is honest and funny on the everyday ruthlessness of the average writer, whose monstrous, adolescent need for solitude is such that Diski cannot even bear to know, when she sits down at her desk, that she has an appointment in three days’ time.” I can sympathize with Jenny Diski. And yet, while it may be necessary for a writer to be absorbed in her work, it is not good to be so compulsive about it as to become a costive perfectionist. In the end, as one of my own editors assured me, a book manuscript is not so much finished as let go of.

In many cases, for both children and adults, work is put off not because of perfectionism, overconfidence, or time constraints but rather because of anxieties about competence and control: the nagging sense that I’m just not very good at this business; it gives me no pleasure and I can envision no reward because I doubt I’ll be successful. At least if I postpone completing my assignment until the last possible moment and the final result is deficient, I can tell myself I could have done better if I hadn’t been so rushed, so overwhelmed by too many items on my plate. Of course, this psychological defense mechanism offers no protection at all against low marks or bad reviews.

Instructors know that timely assistance is available. Before turning in their papers, both beginning and advanced students would benefit from consulting their teachers, their writing center, or both. Not only will their papers’ grades improve; students will receive valuable pointers, good for the long haul. But getting ahead of the game requires an effort of forethought, taking the time to set and meet high standards, and disciplined perseverance to the goal.

Success, in other words, requires the virtue of temperance, self-mastery, which refers to an internal action less dreary and passive than mere abstinence—renouncing parties during Lent, for example. Temperance means disciplining oneself in order to realize one’s greatest potential. Freedom, therefore, is the close, not the distant, relative of temperance. Self-mastery enables a person to be truly free: free because now equipped to meet all the challenges that life—or at least a professor or coach—throws at you.

I know a high-school football player who spent many hours drilling, practicing, and giving up more pleasurable activities on summer afternoons in order to master the art of kicking successful field goals. By the fall he had become an accomplished kicker. Now he was freer to score points for his team by kicking field goals than players—even ones with much more natural ability—who never put in the hours of practice.

Scorning self-discipline leaves a person not freer but weaker, more likely to succumb to momentary desires and transitory drives, lacking impulse control, less a master than a captive: what Saint Augustine of Hippo means when he refers to that liberty which is not true self-possession but merely its simulacrum, “the freedom of a runaway slave.” Temperance, then, is a positive character trait more exciting than it sounds: it stands for the discipline of the self which produces excellence and for the self-command which liberates for good.

Too often, sheer sloppiness, rather than care and precision, characterizes essays by both undergraduate and postgraduate students. These papers are often slapdash affairs bearing all the telltale marks of efforts composed in haste. Frequently, a student who reads his paper aloud in class will notice mistakes and infelicities he would have found earlier if he had taken the trouble to engage in this exercise half a dozen times prior to the class meeting.

Such discoveries are a good reason to have students read their essays aloud in front of an audience of their peers and listen in turn to their classmates’ work. This practice will inevitably deepen their sense of writing to please and inform a variety of readers rather than hurriedly cobbling together a paper for the instructor—resulting in, as my father used to say, a shoemaker’s job of carpentry.

Teachers do the authors of shoddy products a real disservice by consistently awarding all papers top marks or otherwise caving in to grade inflation. Surely in these cases equity is not justice. Indeed, this practice is not love, either, and it gives up on hope.

Contrary to popular belief, good teaching is still valued at most colleges, especially where maintaining departmental course enrollments is critical to program continuance; and therefore quality of instruction is often an important criterion for tenure and promotion. But it is hard to measure teaching effectiveness, especially during the semester, while students are still in the midst of their learning experience.

The standard institutional system of course evaluations, which may be heavily weighted in periodic reviews, can have a deleterious effect on instructional quality. This harm may be most prevalent in courses taught by adjuncts and untenured faculty, who readily adopt a do ut des relationship with their student evaluators. This transactional temptation is hardest to resist in environments in which maintaining appropriate rigor would make the candidate for reappointment an outlier in his or her department or institution.

Appraisal of student papers needs to be both fair and helpful. The best way to improve students’ writing quickly is to return papers at the next class meeting and then to meet with each student individually soon afterward: explaining corrections, saluting strengths, interpreting the overall evaluation, making it clear what he has to do to earn a higher grade, and offering sincere encouragement.

Quick feedback is impossible to provide if instructors assign only one or two big papers the entire semester and consequently receive a huge batch of papers on each day a paper is due. But this salutary method is workable if teachers—like anglers fishing a mighty river—divide their classes into smaller units, say six groups of five students each, and grade a few papers each evening, meeting students during office hours or even during the last fifteen minutes of a seventy-five-minute class.

In most cases in which students receive regular advice on their writing, gradual improvement will occur throughout the semester, and students who early on lacked confidence in their writing ability (“I’m just no good at writing”) will gain both competence and increased self-assurance (“I guess I can write after all”) by the last couple of weeks. It’s always good for them to peak at the playoffs, as a teaching mentor told me during my first year in the classroom. Students will forget much of a course’s content, but writing skills they can take with them and build on.

More significant than grades and even more valuable than writing ability is intellectual honesty. I always tell students that it is more important to graduate with honor than to graduate with honors. It doesn’t matter if, when honor offenders cross that stage at Commencement, they’re the only ones who know they’ve cheated; it’s enough that they know. Their misconduct soils their achievement; it devalues their degree; unacknowledged, it will hang over their heads forever.

A writer’s integrity is revealed in several ways. She does not dissemble. She fairly describes both her own views and those of others. F. L. Lucas says a writer should never “write a line without considering whether it is really true, whether you have not exaggerated your statement, or its evidence.” Misrepresenting another author by quoting inaccurately or distorting a source’s meaning by paraphrasing incorrectly or omitting pertinent material is wrong, and even worse when done intentionally in order to support your thesis.

In addition, the work a writer claims to be his own should actually be by him, not by someone else. We live in an era of moral equivocation. The group is emphasized over the individual, and traditional norms are invoked as guideposts far less often than in the past. The reality of authorship appears to be up for grabs. Isn’t every work the product of many hands? I know I’m not the only author who has been disappointed to discover his phrases employed verbatim but without attribution by other writers in books by reputable publishers and in articles in well-known journals—strings of words lifted but not cited, not even a footnote, let alone quotation marks.

Justice demands that we refuse to go along with this deception. Plagiarism—claiming someone else’s words or ideas as your own—manages to be lying, cheating, and stealing all rolled into one. Sadly, aided by the Internet, it is as widespread as it is repugnant. I do not allow my students to receive advice from anyone else about what their papers should look like. Any outside assistance I deem a violation of the honor code. The only exceptions are qualified teachers: the course instructor, tutors in the writing center, or a trusted professor whose name they should indicate on their papers.

My reason for this simple rule, which I recognize goes against statements in other course syllabi as well as against the regular practice of professional writers, is threefold:

First—I ask the student author—who has really earned the grade for your paper, you or your English-major roommate? How can I award a fair grade when I don’t know what you have written?

Second, if I cannot tell what specific work is yours, I cannot see where your problems lie, so how can I help you improve? The person who fixed up your prose style did not spend any time going over these corrections with you. Nor should she have; she’s not qualified to do so.

Third, how is the employment of your knowledgeable associate fair to those students who either had no such assistance handy or refused to avail themselves of the informal resource they did have, preferring to rise or fall by their own efforts? This course is part of a learning process, which means getting better at essential skills of thinking and writing. Academic dishonesty is wrong in itself, and it short-circuits the intended functioning of this course and thus its whole point, which is not to boost your GPA but to teach you something worthwhile.

Instructors, especially at small colleges, are liberal with their time and eager to help, not just during office hours. Writing centers are usually not hard to book appointments with. But some students still prefer to take the easy path and to cheat for the sake of a higher grade, especially when they are earning a C- average from a top-flight instructor but A’s in all their education courses. Their decisions represent the worst kind of end-justifies-the-means ethical thinking.

End

Is a piece of writing ready for release when its author has set forth a solid thesis in clear prose? Perhaps. Certainly every undergraduate student I’ve ever taught would say yes, that’s it, finis. But the ordinary reader would heartily disagree and beg all writers to attempt one more step, if it has not been taken by them already as they went along: a reworking of the prose, giving special attention to word choice, cadence, excessive verbiage, inadequate explanations, metaphors and similes, clunky transitions, trite expressions, perhaps some humor, a striking phrase, maybe a surprise or two, a pleasing image to draw the reader in and prevent ennui. The Economist Style Guide, 11^th edition (2015), provides this advice, with admonition, to the magazine’s writers: “Words that are horrible to one writer may not be horrible to another, but if you are a writer for whom no words are horrible, you would do well to take up some other activity.”

In their pithy text on ethics and leadership, 10 Virtues of Outstanding Leaders (2013), Al Gini and Ronald M. Green include aesthetic sensitivity as one of their ten virtues, and they associate this refined—and valuable—capacity with Apple Inc.’s Steve Jobs.

A heightened awareness of aesthetics and design is a virtue not only of corporate innovators but also of the best authors. Most readers would acknowledge the merit of David Skinner’s comment, in The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published (2013), that a writer might follow all the rules of English grammar and diction and incorporate no errors in his text but “still not write with any distinction. Something additional, and far more precious, is needed to achieve a style that goes beyond mere competence: an overlay of personality, intelligence, fun, imagination, verbal dexterity, the taking of positions that are somehow unique … , a sense of intellectual drama … and a great deal of effort.”

Skinner’s comment points to a moral habit that is ingredient in the practice of all exceptional writers: fortitude, one of the four classical virtues. Strength to take time with yourself, to persevere, and to seek the best answers and the choicest means of expressing them. Endurance enabled by a resolute character. Intellectual steeliness. Courage under adversity—or at least patient submission to the struggle that all writers speak of.

Phyllis Rose, in The Shelf (2014), makes a statement that I like to explore when I talk with students about writing: A “writer [must] fight against every sentence, resisting the pressure of convention and conformity, resisting his or her impulses toward banality and the easy way.” That’s not primarily a statement about grammar or even style. It’s first of all tough moral tutelage implicitly in praise of fortitude: be of stout heart, resist the easy way, be courteous but not pliable, stand firm against commonplaces of either thought or expression.

Her arresting, quasi-metaphorical exhortation cannot be reduced to the language of direct translation. But, after we read her words, I tell students that their sentences and mine are constantly speaking back to us, saying something like, “that’s good enough, let it go, we’re done, you can’t do any better than what you’ve got; it doesn’t matter if your thoughts are kind of predictable, all the better to help you get along with others and fit in; turn it in, send it off.”

In response, practical wisdom might intervene at this point, ally itself with fortitude, and advise against a debilitating tug-of-war with our sentences. Rather, if we have time, we might turn off the computer for a few hours and go for a long walk or get some sleep, giving the unconscious an opportunity to resolve a knotty issue or two. Let the tangles sort themselves out if they can, and maybe better ideas will percolate through in useable form. In any event, we’ll be fresher for the contest the next day.

In my own thoughts about critical thinking and good writing, I recur to Phyllis Rose’s injunction again and again: A “writer [must] fight against every sentence, resisting the pressure of convention and conformity, resisting his or her impulses toward banality and the easy way.” Especially in our current situation of political and ethical disorder, her words convey prudent counsel for any imaginative conservative who is willing to embrace writing as a moral act.

This essay was first published here in August 2021.

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The featured image is “The Love Letter” by Adolf Hölzel (1853–1934), and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.