Combating the Sprawl: A Formula for Narrowing Your Reading and Writing
Some ideas for orienting research to avoid aimless, unproductive studies.
Does your writing and reading ever feel like it is sprawling all over the place?
Do you ever feel like you’re playing a game of Twister with yourself, trying to read this book and that book, write this post and that one, and all of this at the same time?
It may be true that sometimes you need to just let your mind wander from topic to topic, book to book, writing project to writing project. However, at other times (and this, for me, is most of the time), you need some way of narrowing down your intellectual activities so as to not fall prey to unproductive curiosity. Reading two pages of this four-hundred-page book and then ten pages of that six-hundred-page book is almost always disheartening.
For me, at least, I don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere when I jump too quickly from book to book, article to article.
Limit Your Possibilities
As you know, nowadays we have more information, books, and articles than we know what to do with. We need some way of determining which road to take regarding our reading and writing. If we don’t set some limits on these activities, our productive energies may dissipate. We’ll get discouraged. We’ll close our laptops, put down our books, and go on a very long walk with a tiny rain cloud hovering over our somber little heads. There’s just not enough time (or arms or legs) to read and write everything we want.
Take heart, though. There is a reasonable way to limit yourself. I want to share with you (rather quickly, so you can get back to reading/writing something else) a very nice little trick for settling into a groove.
Of course, what follows presupposes that you not only read but also write (and you should seriously consider writing if you don’t already). Reading primarily (or only) what you can write about is a good first step in delimiting your reading. But you also have this issue about what to write about to begin with, which is what this post is about.
Lastly (and I know I said I’d be rather quick), temperance is also helpful. I won’t claim to be a master here. From what I’ve been told, temperance is the virtue that offsets curiosity, which is itself the vice that sets us off and running in many different intellectual directions.
The “CDCD” Formula
I imagine people don’t like using formulas to structure their writing. However, the ancients and medievals knew better. They knew the power of a good rhetorical commonplace—literally, a “place” you could go to sift through the best possible arguments in any given situation. There are many, many such commonplaces—far too many to list in just this one post.
For this post’s purposes, I want to explain just one, which I call the “CDCD” commonplace and which comes from Wayne Booth et al’s The Craft of Research. The essence of CDCD is to take your initial interest/topic and then play around with various configurations of the following words: conflict, description, contribution, and developing.
Let’s say your topic is “nihilism” (sorry for the grim example). You can’t really write anything about nihilism as such. You need some way of focusing on one thing specifically related to this topic. To this end, you could make yourself a handy dandy bulleted list that modulates this topic into a variety of different sentences incorporating the CDCD words above.
For example:
The conflict between various 20th century philosophers regarding Nietzsche’s description of nihilism in The Will to Power.
The conflict between nihilism and its antithesis in post-Hegelian idealism
The contribution of socialism to Nietzsche’s reactionary nihilism in The Antichrist
The contribution of Peter Ramus’ educational theories in developing 20th century nihilism.
Sometimes, as you notice above, you can get away with using just one of these words instead of two.
For Booth et al, these four words (conflict, description, contribution, and developing) [CDCD] transform broad topics from static things into paths to pursue. Some of these might be dead ends. Fair enough. But it is a useful thing to find a dead end or cul-de-sac, because it indicates where you need to turn around.
Turn Your CDCD Statements into Sentences
The final step in narrowing a topic with this strategy would be converting the items in the bulleted list to complete sentences:
Various 20th centuries disagreed (i.e., were conflicted) on how to interpret Nietzsche’s description of nihilism in The Will to Power.
Post-Hegelian idealists held various interpretations concerning the conflict between nihilism and its antithesis.
Socialism contributed to Nietzsche’s reactionary nihilism in The Antichrist.
Peter Ramus’ educational theories contributed to the development and growth of nihilism in the 20th century.
If you struggle to convert your narrowed statements into sentences, then maybe there’s nothing there. That’s a good thing to know. You thought there was a path, but there isn’t one. Your formulation (like my second bullet point immediately above) may still be fuzzy and somewhat nonsensical. Is that so? Good. Maybe it needs refined or abandoned. You’ve just learned something.
Let’s say the fourth bullet point above caught my interest most. What would I need to read in this case? Well, I’d need to read Ramus to understand his educational theories and also read Ramus’ commentators, perhaps. I’d also be wise to figure out who were the most prominent 20th century advocates for nihilism. Reading these two bodies of literature alongside one another, I’d be looking for ways to synthesize one with the other.
Again, maybe I find nothing here, and I need to go and revise my sentence. But such negative findings still play a role in telling me where not to go. And by learning where not to go, perhaps paradoxically, I learn where I can and should go.
So, now you’ve got some claims (or “theses”) to set you off and running on a tighter course. Even if you don’t intend to do much writing, especially at a scholarly level, you could still keep a list of these handy to help orient your reading.
That’s all for now. Happy trails!