This Youtube video was produced by the University of Chicago Social Sciences: “Do you worry about the effectiveness of your writing style? As emerging scholars, perfecting the craft of writing is an essential component of developing as graduate students, and yet resources for honing these skills are largely under utilized. Larry McEnerney, Director of the University of Chicago’s Writing Program, led this session in an effort to communicate helpful rules, skills, and resources that are available to graduate students interested in further developing their writing style.”
Writing is not about you. That is the core of what Larry McEnerney teaches, and it cuts against everything academic training instills. From the first grade onward, students write for readers who are paid to care: teachers whose job is to evaluate what is inside the student’s head. The entire apparatus of grades, rubrics, and academic feedback trains writers to perform comprehension, to demonstrate mastery, to reveal the interior of their minds. Then those students become graduate students and faculty, and they keep writing the same way, for readers who no longer owe them attention.
This is the central problem McEnerney identifies, and it is structural, not personal. The habits that made you a successful student are precisely the habits that make you an ineffective professional writer. You learned to explain. You learned to define terms. You learned to provide background before making a claim. You learned that original and new are virtues. None of this works outside the classroom, because outside the classroom nobody is paid to care whether you understand the material.
The shift McEnerney demands is from writing as self-expression or self-demonstration to writing as an act performed on readers. Professional writing is not communicating your ideas. It is changing your readers’ ideas. The distinction sounds simple. Its implications are radical.
If writing is about changing readers’ ideas, then value does not live in the work itself. It lives in the readers. There is no such thing as an inherently valuable piece of writing. A text is valuable to a specific community of readers who find it useful for their purposes, and worthless to everyone else. This is why knowing your readers is not a preliminary step before the real work of writing begins. It is the real work. You cannot create value for people you do not understand. You cannot be persuasive to people whose doubts you cannot predict. Half of doctoral training, McEnerney suggests, is not learning more content but learning the readers in a field well enough to write for them effectively.
The key to creating value, in McEnerney’s framework, is instability. Readers in any professional community are not looking for confirmation or summary. They are looking for a reason to keep reading, and that reason is almost always the sense that something they care about is uncertain, contested, or at risk. The language that creates this sense is the language of but, however, although, anomaly, inconsistent. These are not mere transition words. They are signals that something is wrong with the current state of knowledge in a way that costs the reader something or could benefit them if resolved.
The contrast with background-plus-thesis writing is sharp. Most graduate students open papers by establishing solid ground: a definition, a historical overview, a survey of the literature that shows the field has made steady progress. This model assumes that knowledge accumulates like bricks, each new piece resting on the foundation of what came before. But this is not how professional readers read. They are not looking for solidity. They are looking for a crack in the wall. When they encounter a text that gives them only stability and continuity, they slow down, grow confused, and eventually stop. Not because the writing is unclear but because it is not giving them what they came for.
The literature review error is a version of this. Students are trained to write literature reviews as demonstrations of comprehension: he said this in 1998, she said that in 2004, the field has developed in the following ways. This is writing to prove knowledge to an evaluator. A professional literature review does something different. It uses the existing literature to build the problem, to show that the field contains tensions and contradictions that the current paper will address. The point is not to prove you have read the material. It is to establish that the reader has something at stake in the question you are about to answer.
The gap argument is related and equally important. Many young academics, nervous about challenging established figures in their field, frame their contributions as gap-filling: nobody has studied this particular thing, and I am going to study it. McEnerney is skeptical of this move. A gap is only a problem if knowledge is bounded, if there are a finite number of pieces in the puzzle and finding one missing piece is an accomplishment. But if knowledge is open-ended and infinite, an unfilled gap is not a problem. There are infinite gaps. Filling one changes nothing unless you can show that this particular gap matters to this particular community of readers. Gap claims often fail because they locate the problem in the writer’s curiosity rather than in the readers’ needs.
The alternative is the error argument: showing that something the community currently believes or assumes is wrong, or inconsistent, or more complicated than they have recognized. This is riskier. It requires knowing the community well enough to tell them something is wrong in language they will accept rather than dismiss. McEnerney is precise about the code here. You do not walk into a field and announce that the important figures are idiots. You build them up, acknowledge their contributions, and then identify the specific point where their framework breaks down or produces a result inconsistent with something else they value. The form is deferential. The substance is a challenge. Both elements are necessary, and getting the balance wrong in either direction fails.
What underlies all of this is a model of knowledge that McEnerney borrows from Lyotard: knowledge is not a stockpile that grows over time in the minds of individual experts. It is a social process, a set of conversations moving through time, in which a specific community decides what counts and what does not. This community is not neutral. It is composed of real people with real interests and real power. The community decides what counts as knowledge, what counts as a problem, what counts as a solution. You may not like this. It is still the way it works.
The practical implication is that your relationship to your own knowledge is not the relationship of a custodian to something precious. It is the relationship of a producer to a commodity. Farmers grow wheat. Miners dig coal. Academics generate writing that either has value to a specific readership or does not. The goal is not to preserve your ideas indefinitely or to express your authentic voice or to demonstrate the depth of your understanding. The goal is to move the conversation in your field forward, for the readers who are in that conversation, in the moment when they are reading.
McEnerney’s harshest implication follows from this. Most of what gets written in academic contexts, including most of what is written at the graduate level, is not valuable to professional readers. It was written for readers who were paid to care. It carries the habits of that earlier audience into a context where those habits are liabilities. The writers are not incompetent. They are applying a well-learned skill set to the wrong problem.
The corrective is specific and teachable. Circle the words in published articles in your field that create value for readers. Not the words that convey information, but the words that signal instability, challenge existing views, and show readers what is at stake. Do this systematically, in the journals you want to publish in, for a sustained period. You will build a vocabulary of value for your specific community. Then apply that vocabulary to your own writing. Check whether your first two paragraphs contain the signals that tell readers this matters to them. If they do not, you know what to fix.
Writing is not revealing the inside of your head. It is changing what is happening in the space between heads. Once you understand that, the question is no longer what you know. It is what your readers need to know that they do not know yet, and why they should care.
ChatGPT video summary:
Let me start by explaining what makes the University of Chicago writing program different.
We take a top-down approach to writing. Most schools take a bottom-up approach. Their main audience is freshmen, so they teach freshman composition, freshman seminars, and so on. We don’t do that.
Our program was created to help faculty, not students.
The founding idea was simple. Freshmen write pretty well. By junior and senior year, they write worse. Graduate students struggle. But the people with the biggest writing problems are faculty.
That flips the usual assumption. Writing is not a basic skill you master early. It is something that becomes harder as your thinking becomes more complex.
This is not a remedial course. It is not about rules. In fact, rule-based writing is often harmful at high levels.
Rules are fine if you are producing low-value writing like routine memos. But that is not what you are doing. Your writing has to generate value.
So you need to stop thinking about rules and start thinking about readers.
The Problem with Expert Writing
You are “expert writers” not because you write well, but because you write about things you understand deeply.
Your thinking is complex. You use writing to think.
That creates a problem.
You generate your text while thinking. But your readers encounter that text differently. They are not thinking with you. They are trying to read.
So your writing patterns interfere with their reading patterns.
What happens to readers?
They slow down
They misunderstand
They get frustrated
They stop reading
If they don’t need to read your work, they will stop.
And here is the issue. You have been trained in a system where readers are paid to care about you.
Teachers read because they are paid to care about students.
That ends outside school.
In the real world, readers only read if your work is valuable to them.
The Core Principle
Your writing must be:
Clear
Organized
Persuasive
But above all, it must be valuable.
If it is clear and useless, it is useless.
If it is organized and useless, it is useless.
If it is persuasive and useless, it is useless.
Value is not in the text. It is in the reader.
A piece of writing can be valuable to one group and useless to another.
If you don’t think about readers, you will fail.
Writing Is Not What You Think
You think writing communicates your ideas.
It does not.
Writing changes your readers’ ideas.
Nobody cares what is in your head.
Professional writing is not about expressing yourself. It is about altering how readers think.
Why Explaining Fails
When readers say “I don’t understand,” your instinct is to explain.
That is a mistake.
You learned to explain in school to prove you understood something.
That is not what professional readers want.
They don’t care about your understanding. They want to know why they should change their thinking.
Do not explain first. Argue.
Why “Original” and “New” Don’t Matter
People think their job is to produce original work.
That is wrong.
You can create new knowledge instantly by counting how many people are in a room. No one knows that number.
But no one cares.
Original does not equal valuable.
Knowledge is not a pile that grows endlessly. It is a conversation among communities.
Those communities decide what counts.
How Value Is Created in Writing
Look at these words:
nonetheless
however
although
inconsistent
anomaly
widely accepted
reported
These are not “flow” words. They signal value.
They show tension, instability, contradiction.
Readers are not looking for smooth flow. They are looking for problems.
The Key Move: Create Instability
Most people are taught to write like this:
Give background
Define terms
Present thesis
This creates stability.
But readers are looking for instability.
They want to see something is wrong, incomplete, or contradictory.
So instead of background, you start with a problem.
Not your problem. A problem that matters to your readers.
The Problem Must Do Two Things
Show instability
Show cost or benefit
You must signal that:
Something is wrong in the reader’s world
Fixing it matters to them
If there is no cost, they will not care.
The Role of Community
You are always writing to a specific community.
Words like “widely accepted” or “reported” signal that community.
If you don’t signal a community, your work has no context.
And if you don’t know your readers, you cannot persuade them.
The Real Structure of Academic Writing
Good writing does this:
Identifies a community
Shows a problem in that community
Demonstrates instability or contradiction
Shows why it matters
Offers a solution
Bad writing:
Starts with definitions
Gives background
Explains concepts
That is the “martini glass” model. It does not work.
Literature Reviews Done Right
Student version:
“In 1998 X said this. In 2000 Y said this.”
Professional version:
“X said this, but Y contradicts it. Z complicates both.”
A good literature review builds tension.
It does not summarize. It creates a problem.
The Gap Problem
Many writers say:
“There is a gap in the literature.”
That often fails.
Why?
Because knowledge is not a fixed puzzle. It is infinite.
Filling one gap does not matter unless it creates or resolves a meaningful problem.
A gap only works if it produces instability that matters to the community.
The Final Shift
You must separate two processes:
Writing to think
Writing for readers
You need the first to develop ideas.
But readers only see the second.
If you give them your thinking process, you will interfere with their reading process.
You must reconstruct your work for them.
The Bottom Line
Your job is not to express your thoughts.
Your job is to change what happens between people.
Writing is not about what is in your head.
It is about what happens in the space between heads.
