How do you plan (and write) academic philosophy essays?

November 27, 2015 7:47 AM

I've never been very good at outlining or planning academic papers. My method of attack has consisted of sitting down at my laptop and hammering out prose, then going back and editing draft after draft until I come up with something I like. This method served me just fine in most of my humanities and social science courses in college, but I have a much harder time approaching philosophy essays in this unstructured way. Does anyone have any particular tips or methods that have helped them plan and write academic philosophy essays?
posted by tango! to Education (19 answers total)

Can you tell us more about the context? Is this for an undergraduate class? Were you given a prompt?
posted by meese at 7:52 AM on November 27, 2015

Response by poster: Sorry about that. This is for graduate school. I did write philosophy essays in undergrad but was always frustrated with my lack of "planning" ability.

I'm given prompts for some essays, no prompts for others. I work on topics at the intersections of philosophy and social policy, so the type of essay I aspire to write is closest to something found in a journal like Philosophy and Pubic Affairs.
posted by tango! at 7:58 AM on November 27, 2015

What length of paper are we talking about? Without knowing more, I'll give you one tip: don't try to do very much. You will write more prose about more contained parts of problems than in other subject areas. If you are not used to doing it, you are likely to hugely overestimate how much you can do in (say) a 5-page paper.

Student papers sometimes try to do "a new theory of X" in 5 pages. This tends not to fly. A good topic for 5 pages sounds more like: "Author X makes assumption Y in argument Z (and a bit on why it matters)."

Another thing beginners might not grasp is that the basic subject matter of philosophy is arguments. In English you study texts; in psychology you study behaviors; in philosophy you study arguments. It sometimes seems like you're studying the mind or the world or knowledge, and that's all there, but the bread and butter is arguments. Your paper should reflect that focus.
posted by grobstein at 8:02 AM on November 27, 2015

Response by poster: I was trying to keep my original post as succinct as possible, but realize now that the lack of specificity might be a problem! I didn't have a particular paper length in mind - but in practice, perhaps around 4,500 words or a bit longer (15-25 double spaced pages). I hope that helps. Thank you.
posted by tango! at 8:14 AM on November 27, 2015

Do you know how to outline at all?

It depends on your work style, but I would use Microsoft Word's multilevel list (not Outline view) or Workflowy. Type out all your ideas--one per line--just as you would "hammer out prose" before, but don't worry about crafting nice sentences. When you're done, reorganize it all. Once you have it decent shape, start writing your draft.
posted by Leontine at 8:36 AM on November 27, 2015 [3 favorites]

Yeah as mentioned above, you can't just start with your own idea right off the bat in a philosophy paper -- you have to put it in context.

So the first thing you can do is sketch an outline of the first viewpoint in a debate.

Then usually there's one or two other positions that it will be relevant to bring up as they'll map out the "space" you'll be playing in. Eg AuthorA is utilitarian, AuthorB is a deontologist, AuthorC is somewhere between. This is pretty simplified (but please forgive me for using a basic undergrad example -- I just want to illustrate).

To clearly explicate someone's argument it usually takes a couple pages. Don't do that just yet -- just outline for now and save the writing for later.

Ok, now what are the main points on which your authors disagree? Which position is ultimately most convincing and why? Is there a fault in one of their premises, or something they've overlooked? Does one of them ignore a compelling common sense intuition? Or should we be forced to accept a counter intuitive result?

Anyway, once you've got these mapped out in bullet points you can start writing the longer explications. Then when you're writing you'll be able to foreshadow your own unique arguments / points. This will cut down on your revision time and make your paper feel more pointed.
posted by hyperion at 8:50 AM on November 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

One thing I tell my students (and I do not specifically do Philosophy so YMMV, although this is pretty general advice) is that a good research question is gold. It serves as a guideline at every stage in the paper, from research (does this source apply to my question?), to each paragraph (does this advance answering my question;have I supported it with outside information?) to the conclusion (did I answer the question?). In any paper, a strong through-line is really critical, and everything you write should be a) laying foundation for future argument, b) making arguments, or c) connecting those arguments to your through-line. Anything that you write that isn't doing at least some of that is more likely to confuse the issue than communicate your ideas to the reader.

Something you might try for planning, especially if you don't like outlining, is a) concept mapping, where you write down your ideas for your paper on a paper or whiteboard (there are apps and websites to help with this bubbl.us being one) and draw connections between them. This can help develop that through-line I mentioned above, plus it might help you identify related ideas and things that are likely to lead you off track. You could then transfer the most promising "nodes" to 3x5 cards and lay them out with the conclusion at the top and your various arguments below, which might help you decide what order you want to make your arguments and the general structure of the paper. This lets you slide the cards around and take advantage of tactile and visual ways of representing the structure you want, rather than relying on the list-like format of the outline, which does not make the best sense to every mind.
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:53 AM on November 27, 2015 [5 favorites]

Best answer: I agree with everyone else that, probably, what will help you most is pre-writing. The point of pre-writing is to allow yourself to be creative and exploratory without any pressure to present the points well. Along with outlines, 3-by-5 cards, and the like, here's another thing to try: open up Notepad or some other very simple word processor, turn off or cover up the monitor, and just write. The idea, here, is to be writing in a format that feels extremely informal and ephemeral. Turning off the monitor makes sure you can't get caught up in formatting issues or anything. The point isn't to develop a good product (you may want to immediately delete everything you've written!), but to go through the process of developing it. Just giving yourself the opportunity to think through the process of writing can help tremendously.

Another thing: if you're not sure what you want to write about or what your argument will look like, one of the best things you can do is go back to the texts and study them. Chances are, you could do more to understand how the arguments are structured (because that's almost always true, for everyone). One of the major problems students having writing philosophy, I think, is that their understanding of what they're writing about is too shallow: just understanding the major point of a piece or the philosophic theory being presented in it isn't enough to engage with that piece. If you're feeling lost or unsure how to start, chances are you need a firmer foundational understanding of the material you should be interacting with.

Try to map out the arguments. Maybe try writing out the text's argument(s) in standard form (where individual premises are numbered, leading to the main conclusion in the piece). Go through and work out how the author gets from starting assumptions or definitions to their major conclusion. This will give you a much more nuanced appreciation of what the author is doing. And that, in turn, will make it a lot easier for you to determine where to focus your energy: when you can see clearly how Conclusion follows from Premise only because of Definition or Assumption or something, you can pinpoint exactly where you want to focus in your own work.

Finally, doing some pre-writing that is focused primarily on understanding the material you'll be commenting on gives you a great way to get help from your professors. If you just go to your professor and say, "I don't know where to start," they may not know how to help you figure out what to do. If you go with a half-baked outline or super early draft, there may be too many different things going on with your work for them to know how to guide you. But if you go in and say, "I want to write on Author X's paper, and I'm trying to make sure I thoroughly understand it--can you look over this expression of their argument and see if I got it right?" then you're giving them a really clear way to work with you. And then you can say things like, "So, given this, I'm thinking I really want to focus on what I'm presenting as Premise 2, here..." or something. And that, again, will make it easy for them to give you clear advice. Remember, your professors are there to help you. Use them as a resource.
posted by meese at 9:27 AM on November 27, 2015 [7 favorites]

Best answer: Didn't initially realize you were a grad. My advice was a bit entry-level I guess.

Stephen Mumford has a sort of "system" he promotes. There isn't really much to it, but if you are entirely at sea about outlining then it may help you to see it spelled out.

I am mostly a hammerer-out myself, and I'm not sure how much you can really plan before you know your argument at a pretty fine level of grain.

But Mumford makes one point that I think is very good. First: accept that you are going to have to revise and iterate a lot. You will have to work and re-work to know what the details of your argument are. Given that: your working and re-working process should be as frictionless as possible. In particular, don't write down prose that is final in its level of polish or detail, until you are just about done figuring out your argument. If you do n passes over your prose, every word you omit in your first pass saves you ~n words of re-writing.

Feel free to send a Memail if you want to talk this over.
posted by grobstein at 9:28 AM on November 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

I have a pandoc LaTeX template for two-column Mumford-style handouts, if that's your flavor of nerd-dom.
posted by grobstein at 9:30 AM on November 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

You've written papers that you're happy with. Read those and outline them. If you find the formal outline template is intimidating, just do a bare-bones list or word sketch. Then you can see that your good papers show patterns and a structure that's your own. You can also "outline" papers written by other people, (including your professors) just to get more of a feel for the basic building blocks and how they can be stacked.

When I was in school, I had a terrible time writing papers. Outlines and index cards made me freeze. In the first years of college I did it your way; it was time-consuming and stressful. The solution that worked for me after that and in grad school was sort of a hybrid. I started writing, but not in detail. Instead, I'd make notes about what I'd later flesh out. So: paragraph paragraph, "refer to Putnam re ambiguity of wording, examples, paragraph of my differing view, refer to Reckford." I didn't force myself to keep it to bare bones, but in the earliest stages just wrote superficially. Of course I kept going back, adding and changing and restructuring, but it was much faster and less of a grind than working my ass off only to have to do a number of rewrites in which a lot of my previous work got deleted or redone.

Uh. On preview, I see that grobstein said it better.
posted by wryly at 9:43 AM on November 27, 2015

One almost stupid-sounding, but really well-working planning rule I once was given was "tell them that you're gonna tell them / tell them / tell them that you told them."

Of course this needs refinement, but basically it is sound advice for what an intro and a summary should be about. Other than that, try to have ONE good research question per essay, yes.

Then there's the more elaborate outlining system according to which we're supposed to teach, supervise, and examine here in Sweden; this would apply exactly to the essay length you're talking about:

Introduction (why did you get interested in the topic).
Research question (needs to be clear-cut, answerable).
Layout (argue for your choices).
Previous research (what have others in the field done regarding your topic area and research question).
Theory (which theoretical framework are you going to apply to whatever material you're looking at, and why).
Presentation of material (typical ways of presenting would be: in one or another logical manner sorted into sub-topics, going from general to more detailed or vice versa, chronological, in a 'first a then b' type of contrasting manner, and so on.).
Discussion (ideally keeping the same order as in the presentation. Presentation and discussion can also be combined, of course. If you had an 'a versus b' layout above, the synthesis comes here...).
Conclusion (including ideas for future research).
Literature list.


I will admit that for the kind of work I'm doing myself, this outline structure, handled rigidly, is outrageously clunky. For students, it tends to produce standardized, boring and unimaginative work, easy to examine but excruciating to read.

But it nevertheless contains everything you need and it can be adapted to your own field, way of working, and actual outlines. And that's ultimately what's needed here: to find out for yourself what works best for you. Matter of testing and evaluating.
posted by Namlit at 9:52 AM on November 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

Best answer: The sort of pre-writing one needs in philosophy is argument construction. Once your argument is in place, the actual writing is pretty straightforward. Begin by getting very clear on your thesis. Then build your first top-level argument. Be sure that the argument is valid. Formalize it if you have to. Then build a sub-argument for each premiss in your top-level argument. Again, be sure that the sub-arguments are valid. For a shorter paper, you can probably stop there. Write the thing. The structure can mirror the argument. If you have a three premiss argument, write a four section paper with the following structure: begin with an introduction in which you state the claim you will be defending, give the argument, review the literature, and map the paper to come; then in Section 1, defend your first premiss; then in Section 2, defend your second premiss; then in Section 3; defend your third premiss; then in Section 4, remind your reader what you argued and reflect on why it matters.

Having written the core of your paper, shop it around to friends, colleagues, professors, etc. to get critical feedback. It's much easier to let other people identify the important objections to your arguments than to try to anticipate all of the objections. In revising your paper, either add a section or sections on objections and replies or add material replying to objections as they arise in the paper.

For a longer paper, build a second top-level argument, and then build sub-arguments for all of the premisses in the second top-level argument. Otherwise, the same pattern holds.

As a graduate student, you want to write short, tightly-argued, clear papers that you can submit to conferences. Since most philosophy conferences want papers around 3,000 words, you probably don't need to be thinking about longer papers at this stage of your career.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 10:56 AM on November 27, 2015 [6 favorites]

I was so relieved to hear our subject librarian (though the subject isn't philosophy) confess to me that outlining is an abstracted and idealized process that almost no one actually starts out with, and that iteration is the way almost everyone really does it. It is just messy and ugly to start with. (I thought I was missing some major cognitive function. Which might be the case, but if so, it's not related to "outlining".)

Outlining, he said, usually really sort of happens in the middle, and is refined as you go, once you've digested the key arguments and come up with some of your own. Thinking of outlining as a way of keeping track of things might make it less daunting. I think, really come to grips with your material, first. Make notes in the most natural way for you. (For me, that's writing in the margins and using arrows, etc.) Then, transfer those to a bulleted list, or use those 3x5 cards, followed by later outlining. Then write, then revise.

(Revise dozens of times, if it's for a philosophy class. I haven't taken one in ages, but when I did, there was zero tolerance for fluff [in contrast to lit and some sociology courses, in which I was much more likely to be rewarded for bold inductions and pretty words or flow, and wasn't penalized for adhering to my own organic logic]. For philosophy, arguments need to be concise. Don't worry about flow, or making things sound lovely - choose the most precise words, not ones that necessarily sound the best. Focus on presenting the arguments in the most logical and clear manner possible. I'm sure any university-based primer on essay writing for philosophy would serve as a reasonable model to follow.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 11:22 AM on November 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

Best answer: All good advice above. One thing to add to it is an appendix by A.P. Martinich: ‘It’s Sunday Night and I Have an Essay Due Monday Morning’, which reprises the main point of his book 'Philosophical Writing' (which I recommend to all my students, and the good ones read it because they recognise that they might need more pointers than just 'wait for the feedback on the last piece').

The main point, which has been made in some comments above, is to identify a conclusion (your main thesis) and list all the reasons / arguments which support that conclusion. Then work through a process of 'successive elaboration' on that list. The method of 'successive elaboration' is what he talks about at greater length in the book, but it's clear enough in this appendix (which is purposefully short, given the motivation for it). You may end up modifying your thesis, making it stronger or more detailed, but at the very least the process of means that you'll be doing the right kind of focussed thinking and planning, and not just churning out prose and editing it down.
posted by Joeruckus at 11:22 AM on November 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I lecture in philosophy and regularly advise my students on writing philosophy papers. I also publish and review articles in philosophy journals.

I'd say the most important thing is to have a single, definite claim. The kind of thing that can be summarised in two sentences-even if it takes you pages to fully clarify it at the level of exactness that satisfies philosophers.

Once you have a single claim, your entire essay must be focused on proving it. The standard essay structure is accordingly: i) the problem ii) your solution+ reasons in favour iii) defence against potential objections.

What takes a lot of practice is knowing what kind of claim can be expressed in the word length available to you- and indeed what counts as a single claim. In a paper of around 4000 words, it's unlikely to be 'here is a new theory of emotions' and more like 'here's a new solution to a problem with this existing theory'.

Scholarship is important. You must convince the reader of your command over the relevant literature. However scholarship must serve argument. I usually spend several weeks developing my own ideas before I do a thorough review of the existing literature. It can of course happen that someone else has had the same idea, but that's never a big deal. You always take an extra step, or dig a little deeper.
posted by leibniz at 1:30 PM on November 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

Find Writing Philosophy by Richard A. Watson (Southern Illinois Univ Press, 1992).

Don't be fooled by the subtitle "a guide to professional writing and publishing" into thinking it's not for graduate school work. Graduate school is where you are expected to start being serious about writing. Papers are the start.
posted by lathrop at 3:01 PM on November 27, 2015

Response by poster: Thanks for all these fantastic answers! I think I learned something from every response - just makes me wish I had posted this Ask before painfully laboring over all my undergraduate papers! I'll keep this thread open in case anyone has additional input, but I'm really pleased with the responses I've gotten. Thank you, all!
posted by tango! at 4:21 PM on November 27, 2015

If you'd like a very structured approach to writing for the humanities (with an emphasis on the social sciences), then take a look at these posts from Research as a Second Language: Getting started, 40 paragraphs, 27 minutes. If his style works for you, go back through the archives.
posted by caek at 7:54 PM on November 27, 2015 [2 favorites]