Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [36]
On this note, we turn to a closer examination of four of the most stubbornly counterproductive habits of mind: (1) premature leaps, (2) the judgment reflex, (3) generalizing, and (4) naturalizing assumptions (overpersonalizing).
1. PREMATURE LEAPS
In a way, the premature leap is the most fundamental bad habit. The others—reflex judgments, generalizing, and overpersonalizing—are all versions of leaping too quickly to conclusions.
A classic example of the premature leap is the one that inexperienced writers make to arrive at a thesis statement before they have observed enough and reflected enough to find one worth using. These writers end up clinging to the first idea that they think might serve as a thesis, with the result that they stop looking at anything in their evidence except what they want and expect to see. Typically, they find themselves proving the obvious—some too general and superficial idea. Worse, they miss opportunities for the better paper lurking in the more complicated evidence screened out by the desire to make the thesis “work.”
You’ll know you are becoming a more accomplished analytical writer when the meaning of your evidence starts to seem less rather than more clear to you, perhaps even strange—and you don’t panic. Then you will begin to see details you hadn’t seen before and a range of competing meanings where you had thought there was only one.
Make It Strange
Making it strange rather than trying to normalize what you see and read is a productive habit of mind. It opposes our more usual habit to quickly render things familiar by locating them in comfortable and habitual categories. One purpose of writing, as the writer David Lodge suggests, “is to overcome the deadening effects of habit by representing familiar things in unfamiliar ways.” Defamiliarization is a term used by artists, philosophers and psychologists to talk about the need to fight against the deadening effects of habit. The man who coined the term defamiliarization, Victor Shklovsky, wrote, “Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war… . And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life” (David Lodge, The Art of Fiction. New York: Penguin, 1992, p.53).
The following quotation from an article entitled “The Transition to College Reading” remarks on the need for defamiliarizing in its account of students’ misunderstandings of readings:
“I find that [students] are most inclined to substitute what they generally think a text should be saying for what it actually says [… .] They want to read every text as saying something extremely familiar that they might agree with”. Robert Scholes, “The Transition to College Reading,” Pedagogy, volume 2, number 2, Duke UP, 2002, page165.
What is interesting here is the idea that people actually substitute something they already think, their habitual frames of reference, for what is actually on the page.
Get Comfortable with Uncertainty
To short-circuit premature leaps and see though the veil of familiarity, you’ll need to find ways of becoming more comfortable with uncertainty. In fact, it’s a healthy practice to assume you’re missing something, always. Prepare to be surprised at how difficult this can be. Why? Most of us learn early in life to pretend that we understand things even when we don’t. Rather than ask questions and risk looking foolish, we nod our heads. Soon, we even come to believe that we understand things when really we don’t, or not nearly as well as we think we do.
The nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson, writes about this problem in her poem that begins “Perception of an object/Costs precise the object’s loss.” The point of the Dickinson poem is a paradox: when we think we understand something, we in a sense cease to see it. Our idea of the thing has replaced the thing itself, producing a form of mental blindness—loss of the object.
By training yourself