This post honors the start of a new academic year, that hopeful time which spawns new writers plentiful as baby sea turtles. About sea turtles: Each breeding season, tens of thousands of adorable hatchlings emerge from their nests on U.S. beaches (many more worldwide), then plunge into Mother Ocean armed with little more than navigational instincts and high hopes. This moxie, while ever so commendable, does not prevent most of them from getting eaten. So it goes, metaphorically speaking, for each season’s novice writers who discover, often painfully with the “help” of unimpressed audiences (thesis committee members, convention attendees, peer reviewers, etc.), that in professional communication smarts and enthusiasm are not enough.
Few things are as important to professional success as writing, because even people who don’t blog or publish journal articles need to communicate effectively in writing. Even in the 21st Century.
Everyone agrees that writing is difficult. The plot of the Academy Award® winning film Shakespeare in Love hinges partly on the titular character’s inability to produce a promised play. In the real world, all kinds of technical terms relate for this creative torpor (dysgraphia, agraphia, etc.), and a Google search for the lay term “writer’s block” yields several hundred thousand results. It’s no coincidence, I submit, that the best-known* article ever published in a behavior analysis journal is Upper’s (1974) “The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer’s block.”
*It’s best known by a very wide margin, according to altmetric data. For example, Upper (1974) has been mentioned in more than 10 times as many social media posts as any other behavior analysis article.
Unsurprisingly, advice on writing is everywhere. Most of it is pretty useless because it misconstrues the function of writing and is vague about the behavioral processes that produce it [see Postscript 1].
So here is my attempt to take a more functional perspective, albeit without getting too technical. [My personal credentials for opining? See Postscript 2.].
I’ve gone on at some length here, so if you want to break up the read, think of Tips 1-5 as defining the oft-misunderstood general purpose of writing; and of Tips 6-10 as addressing the process of writing. Feel free to share with anyone who’s still learning how to get some decent words on the page.
PART 1: WHY TO WRITE
#1 Whose Motivating Operations?
Most people I know, even exceptional writers, spend a lot of time trying to set up conditions under which they are likely to actually write something. They have a reason to write, but find this to be an unacceptably low-probability behavior. Skinner (1981) addressed this problem in “How to discover what you have to say,” and his sage advice is worth checking out for yourself. Among other things, Skinner emphasized harnessing stimulus control by setting aside a time and place to write every day (because such a time and place will control few competing behaviors).
The written word can’t accomplish anything useful unless it actually exists, so your motivating operations absolutely matter. But for present purposes I’m more concerned with the audience’s motivating operations. Most writers fret how to get stuff written, but oddly few devote equal time to pondering why anyone would want to read what they’ve written.
This is a theory of mind problem:
The Critical Question every author must answer is: “Who might do what differently, with respect to what problem, as a function of reading this?” In other words, how does the writing serve the audience? Does it offer a new conceptual framework through which readers can make sense of their ongoing work in new ways? Does it answer questions people have been wrestling with? Does it suggest new hypotheses and illuminate ways of testing those? In general, will it have a heuristic-catalytic influence on future work? Unfortunately some authors think of manuscripts as displaying their thoughts rather than as influencing an audience. (adapted from this previous post).
To write effectively, you must transparently address the Critical Question. Potential readers have a million things to do and finite time, so they won’t pay attention unless it’s obvious how doing so serves their interests. And should someone happen to actually read what you’ve written, they won’t act on what you say unless it’s obvious how doing so would be beneficial (which is pretty much the same thing as not reading in the first place).
So, in plain and simple terms, writing is a tool of behavior control. Sure, you can journal or write poetry for your own consumption (in other words, you’re controlling the behavior of an audience of one, namely you). But that’s a hobby, not communication. The existence of professional writing can be justified in only one way: It has the potential to move the needle on the audience response meter.
I think we behavior analysts tend to overlook this very straightforward and very behavioral reality because in Verbal Behavior Skinner taught us to think mainly in terms of speaker behavior (after all, it’s a book about the process of composition). That made for a lovely theoretical analysis, but Verbal Behavior wasn’t a how-to guide. As a writer you have to be laser focused on the practical problem of what your verbal behavior is going to accomplish in terms of controlling listener behavior.
#2 Writing and Thinking
Recently, Adam Mastroianni of the Experimental History blog wrote this about his experience working in a college writing center:
Most of the students who came into the Writing Center thought the problem with their essay was located somewhere between their forehead and the paper in front of them. That is, they assumed their thinking was fine, but they were stuck on this last, annoying, arbitrary step where they have to find the right words for the contents of their minds. But the problem was actually located between their ears. Their thoughts were not clear enough yet, and that’s why they refused to be shoehorned into words. Which is to say: lots of people think they need to get better at writing, but nobody thinks they need to get better at thinking, and this is why they don’t get better at writing.
Although I enjoyed most of Adam’s observations about writing, this one misses the mark entirely. It does, however, nicely frame a reason why we fail to make writing audience-focused: We get caught up in the common fallacy that writing is for expressing ideas.
The fanciful story line goes something like this: There’s a thing called a YOU which has ideas swirling around inside it. The YOU invented those ideas, just manufactured them out of nothingness, using something else that’s swirling around inside of YOU, called creativity. The ideas inside YOU exist whether or not YOU do anything with them, but since YOU have decided to share them with other people, now YOU must fret over which words best express them.
Nope. There are all sorts of mentalistic land mines in this account, but for present purposes it’s enough to just say that it’s wildly narcissistic. When you worry primarily about expressing your ideas, you’re making the writing about YOU. When you address the Critical Question (above), what you write is for, and about, your audience. [Skinner actually agreed. in “How to discover what you have to say,” he pointed out: “Your audience as a source of reinforcement is not to be overlooked. …. Writing often suffers when it is not directed toward a particular kind of reader.”]
#3 Controlling Variables
I should add that if you focus on getting your ideas 100% straight before you start writing, you might never actually start writing. In “How to discover that you have to say,” Skinner admitted admitted that he often didn’t know exactly what his ideas were until he started putting them on paper (more on this in a bit). Tons of accomplished writers have said similar things (see Tip #7).
But we’re so culturally conditioned to think in terms of ideas that we set ourselves up to fail. Or, more precisely, when we don’t immediately write something brilliant we decide that we have failed. And it doesn’t take a behavior analyst to figure out that feeling like a failure rarely is a precursor to behavioral persistence.
The fix? Start by remembering how behavior (including writing behavior) works. It’s not something a person creates. It’s something that emerges from a combination of contemporary circumstances and historical experiences that happen to find their locus in a given individual (YOU). That makes you the conduit of writing, but not its creator.
Skinner offered this analogy:
In a paper called “On ‘Having’ a Poem” (Skinner, 1972), I compared a poet with a mother. Although the mother bears the child and we call it her child, she is not responsible for any of its features. She gave it half its genes, but she got those from her parents…. The same thing could be said of the poet. Critics who trace the origins and influences of a poem seem to agree, at least to the extent that they can account for features of a poem by pointing to the verbal or non-verbal history of the poet. Samuel Butler’s comment that “A hen is simply an egg’s way of making another egg” holds for the human egg as well and for the poet. A poet is a literary tradition’s way of making more of a literary tradition. (Much the same thing could be said of the scholar. A psychologist is just psychology’s way of making more psychology.) (Skinner, 1981, p. 6).
When a person becomes pregnant and generates a fleshy creation (baby), we may be pleased about the outcome but we don’t pretend the mother heroically willed the baby into existence (see Postscript 3). In a pregnancy we see no biological magic but, man oh man, do we love to pretend that writers perform compositional magic! When consuming a magnificent wordy creation, we act as if it was conjured with otherworldly wizardry. And, unfortunately, when we ourselves fail to write magnificently, we beat ourselves up for not conjuring similarly. But Skinner’s point was that because writing is behavior, it’s as much subject to the laws of nature as procreating. When magnificent wordy creations don’t emerge, that just means the controlling variables were not right. More on this theme momentarily.
#4 Knowing Something
Don’t get me wrong. To write you need something to say, and and if you want to interest people at the highest levels of behavior analysis, you first need to know a lot of behavior analysis. But it’s a mistake to think of your professional training as a font of ideas. Training in behavior analysis is a start. It gives you a shared verbal history with an audience, and that helps with the theory of mind problem. But shared history isn’t enough, because writing that tells people what they already know from their training will not be very interesting.
So, good professional writing must tell readers something they don’t know. That means two important things. First, it’s essential to know in advance who the audience will be. Second, to avoid the problem of telling readers what they already know, you’re virtually always writing partly for people who aren’t just like you — in effect, strangers.
Even the smartest and most skilled writers struggle when writing for an audience of strangers. For many reasons I recommend a lovely essay in which Pat Friman advocates writing about behavior analysis for medical professionals. But Pat admits that when he first tried to do this he took some lumps. Peer review feedback wasn’t… ecstatic. In hindsight this is expected because medical-profession listeners are accustomed to speakers behaving in certain ways that weren’t part of Pat’s repertoire. He and the audience didn’t have enough of a shared history. Pat might have gotten peeved about his tepid feedback and blamed his audience for not appreciating the genius of his writing. But instead he wisely let audience reactions shape his writing, and persisted at trying until he learned how to write in ways that medical folks can appreciate.
Pat’s essay makes clear that writing is more than just reporting what you know, because knowing stuff isn’t the same as motivating and assisting readers.
Maybe, for students, the best place to begin working on professional writing is where audience motivation is somewhat de-emphasized. I’m talking about the very unexciting APA Style report of research, because there’s a tacit understanding that research reports are mostly about, well, reporting rather than persuading. There’s a rigid structure of what should be said where, especially in the Methods and Results section, and the assumption is that the title and abstract exist to alert readers to why they might want to read. That takes some of the theory-of-mind pressure off of other sections.
However: A research report doesn’t absolve you of the need to be thorough and to make sense. Sentence by sentence you still need to anticipate a reader’s needs. In my experience, student writers usually explain too little because they overestimate the reader’s skills. It’s true that a student writer knows fewer things overall than a professional-level reader. But with respect to that research study you conducted, you are, by definition, the expert. Don’t say too little because you’re afraid you’ll be talking down to your audience.
#5 Saying Something People Will Care About
Okay, let’s say that you just completed an ironclad investigation showing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that hippopotami can be taught to do the Macarena. No one has ever accomplished this before, and you’re ready to share your groundbreaking results with the world. As a writer, you will now confront the distinction between nobody’s done this before, which applies to all sorts of theoretical and practical matters that attract scientific and societal interest, and nobody’s thought to ask about this before, which probably applies to Macarena hippos.
When you address something that people have already demonstrated that they care about, you have a leg up in crafting a motivational narrative. Otherwise, before you can get around to presenting your message, you must perform considerable narrative legerdemain just to persuade readers to delve into your message (see Postscript 4). Just be aware: No matter what you say, it may still turn out that nobody cares about your dancing hippos.
I’m a gigantic hypocrite in commenting on this topic. A few years ago I made a list of the articles I’ve most enjoyed working on over the years. Then I checked the citation rates of those articles and, damn, if every single one of them wasn’t in the bottom quintile of my articles overall (proof: see Postscript 5). Similarly, I have enjoyed writing for ABAI’s Behavior Analysis Blogs, but no matter how stoked I feel about my posts, the truth is that very few people read most of them. I therefore know of which I speak when I say that being brilliant 😅 doesn’t guarantee you an audience.
Now, I would never advise ditching a good message because you don’t think it’ll be popular (see Postscript 6). But of course if nobody reads your message it serves no purpose. So….
PART 2: HOW TO WRITE
#6 Saying What and Saying Why
When I first started teaching college classes a colleague gave me this advice: Map out everything you want to present; then cut it by half; then use the newly-liberated time to explain not what, but why — that is, the value to your audience of knowing what you have set out to present.
Without the why, new information feels like like memorizing an encyclopedia. For example, the what of an A-B-A-B steady-state experimental design is easy enough to explain. But why do we replicate conditions in single-case experiments? Why do we obtain many measurements within a condition? What is the function of replications? What problems do they diagnose and rule out? In my experience, students are way more interested in the what when they understand how it solves a thorny problem.
Guess what? The same goes for readers of professional writing. Returning to the composition of a research report, a Method section contains lots of little details that serve an important purpose in the research procedures. But writers often list the details without addressing their purpose. Similarly, a Results section is packed with data details but may be light on explanations of how each bit of data contributes to reasoning about the existence and validity of an effect. Even many professional writers do a sketchy job in this regard.
Once you step away from the tight structure of a research report, the pressure mounts to actively connect with your audience. The Introduction section is critical. Should someone decide, based on title and abstract, to give what you’ve written a read, understand that they will be reconsidering this decision throughout the first 3-4 manuscript pages (maybe 750-1000 words). If the thing doesn’t sing, they may tune out. [This isn’t speculation. For instance, ABAI’s data say that the typical prospective reader of a Behavior Analysis Blogs post decides within a minute or less whether to read the whole post.]
This first few pages, therefore, constitute your beachhead, where your invasion of the reader’s headspace either takes hold or is dashed against fortifications built from their other commitments and interests. This is your chance to make the case that your paper is important enough to set aside everything else for. While every so often someone may craft a masterful slow-burn exposition, don’t assume that you have this luxury.
Within that constraint, the Introduction is a classic three-bears problem. One obvious type of explanatory error is to say too much. Some theses and dissertations, for instance, preface the main message with a 60-page literature review that starts with the formation of the first stars 14 billion years ago and works methodically forward to the present research topic. Nobody will read that.
But it’s equally important not to say too little. I will never forget the presentation that I attended at my first professional conference that opened with, “Now, you all remember my Equation 5 from last year’s talk….” Nope, I didn’t, and consequently that opening is all I remember of the presentation, which was predicated on something outside of my repertoire and thus sailed completely over my head. Similarly, I have seen many published papers that leap in at a sophisticated level of topical expertise that maybe 20 people in the world have achieved. Those people might be entranced, but to everyone else this kind of exposition screams You’re not invited to the party.
In the case of saying too little, I think the problem is partly that the more specialized our expertise becomes the more we overestimate how compelling our topic of choice is to other people. In effect we think, “I have moved heaven and earth to understand this, so it must be important!” Maybe it is important, but the key to good writing is making the topic’s importance evident to people who have not yet moved heaven and earth on behalf of it.
In sum, professional writing always has a specialized topic — of course! — but remember that according to the dictionary specialized means not something a lot of people know about. Attracting an audience requires you to link your topic to things other people already know and care about. Let’s make this concrete. Imagine that the Introduction section of a typical article contains about 10 paragraphs. By Paragraph 6 you should absolutely be addressing the specialized topic, but not before you have done what’s necessary, in Paragraphs 1-5, to recruit the interest of non-specialist readers. This requires a hefty dose of, “Why this matters to you.”
[Any by the way, this directive carries more weight than ever in an era with abundantly available AI tools that are happy to compose for you. AI has access to a lot of WHAT, but it is pretty clueless about anticipating your audience’s WHY needs.]
#7 Puke on the Page
Every time you sit down to begin a new writing project, read this paragraph from Annie Lamont’s essay “Shitty First Drafts.”
Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it. Nor do they go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled. They do not type a few stiff warm-up sentences and then find themselves bounding along like huskies across the snow. One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, “It’s not like you don’t have a choice, because you do — you can either type, or kill yourself.” We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time.
Every single successful writer of whom I’m aware agrees that really good prose is not born fully formed but rather is coaxed into being, a bit at a time. Indeed, if you were to distill Skinner’s “How to discover what you have to say” down it its essence, it would be: “Start writing. Improve what you wrote. Repeat.”
Behavior can be shaped, but only after it has been emitted, and without any words on the page, you have zero chance of influencing an audience. Julie Vargas taught me a lot about getting words on a page, and about refining those words subsequently. Her first advice was to simply generate some words, quickly, without concern for mechanical accuracy or conceptual coherence. This might be in the form of sentence fragments, or disconnected paragraphs, or an outline, or whatever. By no means should you get caught up in grammar or punctuation or formatting, because that slows things down by adding effort. Someone (Not Julie!) called this process Puke On The Page, which is an apt label because the first step in composing should reflect roughly the same level of forethought that is applied to the label’s titular act.
This initial step of composition is too important to skip. More wisdom from Annie Lamont:
For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts. The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, “Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?,” you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you’re supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go — but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages. (emphasis added)
#7 Self-Shaping
The Puke that first lands on a page usually contains a lot of, well, what one expects to find in puke. But quite often it contains the essence of some pretty good ideas too. This was Skinner’s point about discovering what you have to say. Your ideas are what emerge when you emit verbal behavior. And sometimes, even often, at the point when you begin writing you don’t fully anticipate what that behavior will look like.
Getting from Puke On The Page to a reasonably complete first draft is an uncertain process, but it’s much like the old adage that a statue is what’s left after you remove all of the unneeded stone from a block of marble. Good writers generate a lot of words, then throw a lot of those words away. They are ruthless about this in fact. When I first started writing, I found that to be the hardest part. I worked so hard to craft passages of text that they all seemed profound to me.
I think that the more we read in the field the better we become at sniffing out what’s really profound. What you read comes from potential audience members, and reading therefore allows you to discriminate audience repertoires. This makes it possible to determine what, in service of audience influence, must be added, isn’t needed, doesn’t make sense, etc.
Once a reasonably complete draft (whether of a section or a full paper) exists, it’s time for another of Julie’s tricks: The sentence outline, which works like this:
- Write a single sentence summarizing each paragraph.
- Check for small-scale (paragraph level) coherence. Each paragraph should convey one substantive point and one only. If you need more than one sentence to summarize a paragraph, it should be broken into two or more paragraphs.
- Check for large-scale coherence. If two paragraphs yield pretty much the same summary sentence, they should be combined. If reading through the summary sentences doesn’t tell a clear, linear story, you may need additional paragraphs to bridge from point to point. Or, you may need to re-sequence your paragraphs, Or, you may be including points that don’t work well together, in which case some content has to go.
I recommend making a sentence outline very early in composing a paper, and making more sentence outlines periodically as the paper is refined.
#8 Shaping Through Audience Feedback
Whenever you think you’re really communicating effectively, it’s time to do two things.
First, read your draft aloud, or better yet have someone else read it to you because this helps you to simulate the reader’s experience. Silent reading is private verbal behavior, so in a sense your audience will hear your written words inside their heads. What those words say is important, but so is how they sound. Pleasing-sounding words help to keep people reading, and clunky words discourage that. Hearing your words spoken aloud thus helps you to supercharge your own listener repertoire to identify things in need of revision. Likely you’ll find occasion to replace awkward phrasing with something simpler and/or more melodic, and to break lengthy sentences into two or more shorter ones.
Second, get an outside opinion. Not even the world’s greatest writer fully anticipates how text will strike an audience. There’s a famous story about the writing of To Kill a Mockingbird. Author Harper Lee’s initial effort was a not-so-great novel about an adult woman. An editor found it uninspiring overall but recognized one interesting feature: the woman’s reminiscences about childhood events involving her larger-than-life father, and recommended making these the centerpiece of a novel. The rest is literary history.
So — let knowledgeable people see and respond to what you’re writing. Trust their reactions as indicative of how a broader audience may respond. And by all means let what you write be shaped into more of a Mockingbird, even when (or especially when) that’s hard.
#9 The Rule of Ten
Writing is an iterative process. You write, you repair, you edit, you replace. Then you write some more, and you keep going until the job is done, by which I mean objective readers agree that you’ve got something worth saying, and you’ve said it clearly, coherently, and persuasively.
Although there is no a priori way to predict how long this process will take, here’s an actuarial perspective: Just about everything I write professionally (journal article, presentation, even this post) goes through at least 10 drafts. And that’s 10 drafts after the sometimes-extended Puke On The Page phase (see Postscript 7).
Writing, therefore, means being in it for the long haul. If you’re thinking 10+ drafts isn’t how you want to spend your valuable time, if the chance to budge someone’s thinking doesn’t seem worth this much hassle, then just don’t write. The composition process will only make you unhappy, and what you create won’t be very good, so in the unlikely event it finds any readers they will be unhappy too. Look, we were placed on this earth to spread joy. Not everyone will accomplish that through writing, and that’s okay.
#10 Some Rabbit Holes Contain What Rabbit Holes Usually Contain
I hope it’s obvious by now that writing is a leap into a deep, dark rabbit hole, and you can never know for sure what you’ll find at the bottom. A lot of psychological flexibility is needed to trust in the process.
It also takes psychological flexibility to confront the fact that this process isn’t foolproof. Once you “discover what you have to say,” you may realize it’s not really worth saying. That happens fairly often, actually. Every single serious writer has amassed about a bzillion electrons worth of dead files — writing projects that were abandoned in various stages of development.
Remember: Writing is only valuable if it changes reader behavior, and not everything you write is destined to accomplish that. One of the hardest things to do professionally is to resist the sunk costs effect, which tells you that the more you have put into something the more valuable it is. But sometimes you have to size up your work and acknowledge that it’s unproductive to invest further in it.
Oh yes, it TOTALLY sucks to realize that you have just spent 40 or 50 hours, maybe more, on something that will never see the light of day. But there are worse things. Like wasting another big chunk of hours to get the same outcome.* Better to pivot to something with higher odds of success.
*It’s also seriously unkind to waste the valuable time of peer reviewers and other readers on something that’s just not ready for prime time.
If it’s any consolation, there is a cumulative benefit in iteratively working out “what you have to say.” You get better at it with repetition, and even a failed writing project adds to your pool of experience. With practice, you start to puke more coherent thoughts onto your first pages. You grow more savvy at editing and organizing. And because you’re recruiting external feedback, you get better at anticipating how to meet reader needs.
Also, keep in mind that one reason a writing project fails is that, although it’s a worthwhile message, you’re just not ready to say it effectively yet. Having worked out that message partway may come in very handy when, a year or 5 years or 10 years down the road, a version of you returns to refine it. All writing that is approached strategically today beefs up the repertoire that will impress readers tomorrow.
Epilogue: Growing as a Writer
To return to the strained metaphor that began this post, a sea turtle hatchling who somehow manages to evade hungry sea gulls and make it into the ocean is hardly home free. Countless underwater perils result in as few as 1 in 1000 surviving the decades-long journey to adulthood.
I think that’s a pretty fair account of new writers too. Many stall out and quit writing the instant that’s no longer required in coursework. The rest need considerable time and experience to develop their craft.
That’s pretty daunting unless you remember that there’s no perfect writer, and no perfect written product, so it’s not like you wake up one morning having finally become an Eternally Good Writer. You should think instead about developmental trajectories. Just as experience and maturity make sea turtles gradually less susceptible to environmental threats, the right kind of practice makes you less imperfect as a writer.
About degrees of imperfection: I never ever go back and read the articles I published at the start of my career because my Current Self cringes at what my Younger Self thought was pretty good. But I’m not sorry those things were written. Current Self may be embarrassed by the product but is supremely grateful for all of the hard work that Younger Self put in so that I could learn more about writing.
Every single word you compose within the process described here helps to make future compositions more apt and more powerful. But nobody is ever finished learning about writing. The best that anyone can do, at any point along the writer’s developmental trajectory, is earn the right to quote Skinner: “I know that I could write better than I do, but I also know that I could write worse.”
Postscript 1: Vonnegut
Some observers of the writing process have more of a behavioral bent than others. For instance, Kurt Vonnegut‘s Rules for Writing include emphasis on meeting reader needs: “Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient teachers, ever willing to simplify and clarify, whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.” I like this quote because it hammers home a key tension: Creating prose that works for readers often comes at the expense of creating prose that’s automatically reinforcing for you. Remember who the writing is for!
Postscript 2: My Credentials
Much of what I know about writing comes from three sources that connect directly or indirectly to B.F. Skinner:
- Like, B.F. Skinner, I was at one time a stymied creative writer — undergraduate English major who loved words but in traditional formats struggled to find something profound to say (“Skinner is also known to have said he failed at becoming a writer because he lacked anything of importance to say.”). At the very least, being in English Literature forced me to read a lot, and that exposed me to a lot of different writing styles, which shaped my thinking on what is, and is not, effective. The impressions only grew once I began applying the lessons to writing in behavior analysis.
- Once I got into behavior analysis, I instantly resonated to Skinner’s ideas about the composition of verbal behavior (For a fairly nontechnical starting point, see the excellent, “How to discover that you have to say.” For an account that’s deeply grounded in behavior principles, see Verbal Behavior.).
- In graduate school I benefitted immensely from the tutelage of Julie Skinner Vargas, who in my Master’s program gave great concrete advice about how to make writing functional and coherent.
My repertoire also has been shaped by a fair amount of peer-review feedback, and by having to give writing feedback to others in my roles as reviewer and action editor for a variety of journals.
None of that implies compositional wizardry. My stuff still gets rejected in peer review, and if it gets published it stills gets ignored (Postscript 5!). Overall, the best I can do is repeat Skinner’s (1981) observation that, “I know that I could write better than I do, but I also know that I could write worse.”
Postscript 3: On Having a Baby
I’m writing this on Mother’s Day, 2025, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t say: I’ve seen pregnancy and childbirth up close, and a person who can pull that off deserves a gigantic medal of honor. I have also seen, up close, that some some child-bearing people make mess of the process in ways that harm the child. Skinner’s “fleshy creation” analogy of writing therefore comes across as a bit demeaning of all that most expectant moms do, quite actively, to assure a healthy gestation and successful birth. [In “How to discover what you have to say,” Skinner briefly acknowledged this oversight, albeit not very effusively: “The mother does make a contribution: She nourishes, protects, and in the end gives birth to the baby.” Easy peasy, right?]
More critical to the present discussion, Skinner’s well-intended pregnancy analogy misleads in a critical way. Comparing what you write to a child is a fatal tactical error, because we humans tend to cherish our children. You cannot afford to love what you write like you’d love a child, because it (the writing, not the child) must be ruthlessly dissected. Most of what appears in an early draft eventually is reworded or even discarded. The less emotion tied up in that, the better.
Postscript 4: Try Selling This in Your Article
About hippos doing the Macarena: It’s probably true that this has never been observed in real life, but on YouTube there exist an unsettling number of videos of hippos performing the Macarena (and other dances; see below). Which only accentuates the critical question that any writer must address: Why? Anything in your written product that prompts readers to ask question this doesn’t belong.
Postscript 5: Vāna glōria
Remember, writing simply because you like the message is narcissistic. Here are some papers that I really loved working on that very close to nobody loved reading. If there’s a moral to these works, it’s that writing them cost me at least 400 hours of my life (and powering them through peer review cost maybe another 80 hours).
Even a committed solipsist probably should ask: Might there have been better ways to spend that precious time?
*Total citations divided by years since publication date. Suffice it to say that a paper attracting less than one citation a year will need a loooooong time to become a citation classic.
**Attention Score reflects mentions a scholarly work receives from non-scholarly sources like news reports, social media, and policy documents. For context, the highest score of any JABA paper is 3135 (Upper’s famous 1974 report on writer’s block). The highest score of any JEAB paper is 488 (Watanabe et al’s 1995 study of “art appreciation” in pigeons). My own highest score is 122 (Heward et al., 2020, ABA from A to Z: Behavior science applied to 350 domains of socially significant behavior).
Postscript 6: A Special Kind of Unpersuasive Message
I’m trying to get you to think about how, within a particular paper, you can link what you have to say to audience interests. But there is one kind of message for which the necessary persuasion is all but impossible except across a program of scholarship. Maybe you’ve got a message that will change EVERYTHING. The most important innovation in behavior analysis history. Well, brace yourself, because people hate change. Or at least they resist it rather stubbornly. We can explain this in both actuarial terms (research across many disciplines shows that it can take decades for important innovations to become widely adopted) and behavioral terms (according to behavioral momentum theory, people will tend to keep doing what’s been reinforced in the past).
The depressing correlation is: The more radically innovative your message, the lower the odds that anyone is going to buy in. Unless you persist. One of my favorite examples comes from Fran McSweeney, whose research demonstrated that reinforcer effectiveness follows the principles of habituation — an insight with both theoretical and practical significance. Yet Fran had to experiment and write and present on this for literally decades before many noticed, because the simple notion that reinforcers “just are” worked okay in a lot of situations (by the way, the same roadblock has been encountered by other explanations of when a reinforcer is a reinforcer, like the response deprivation, or disequilibrium, hypothesis).
So, if you think you’re on to something really earth-shaking, by all means do everything possible to sell it in a first paper. But also be prepared for a marathon of persuasion in which you tell them and tell them again until you’ve worn the resisters down.
Postscript 7: Less is More
Consistent with comments elsewhere in this essay, my 10th draft is almost always shorter than earlier ones. An essential step in writing is to figure out which parts of the marble are not the statue, and late-stage cutting does many things. Most generally it shortens — always a good idea when your readers are busy people. More specifically it excises asides and details that matter to your methodical brain (and demonstrate how brilliant you are!) but will not measurably improve the reader experience. And then there is the matter of wording. Smart people like big words and labyrinthine sentences, but writing should contain no more of these than absolutely necessary. Find opportunities to employ simple wording. Make sentences crisp and to the point.