Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [37]
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 to be more comfortable with not knowing, you give yourself license to start working with your material, the data, before you try to decide what you think it means. Only then will you be able to see the questions, which are usually much more interesting than the temporary stopping points you have elected as answers.
2. THE JUDGMENT REFLEX
In its most primitive form—most automatic and least thoughtful—judging is like an on/off switch. When the switch gets thrown in one direction or the other—good/ bad, right/wrong, positive/negative—the resulting judgment predetermines and overdirects any subsequent thinking we might do. Rather than thinking about what X is or how X operates, we lock ourselves prematurely into proving that we were right to think that X should be banned or supported.
It would be impossible to overstate the mind-numbing effect that the judgment reflex has on thinking. The psychologist Carl Rogers has written at length on the problem of the judgment reflex. He claims that our habitual tendency as humans— virtually a programmed response—is to evaluate everything and to do so very quickly.
Walking out of a movie, for example, most people will immediately voice their approval or disapproval, usually in either/or terms: I liked it or didn’t like it; it was right/wrong, good/bad, interesting/boring. The other people in the conversation will then offer their own evaluation plus their judgment of the others’ judgments: I think it was a good movie and you are wrong to think it was bad. And so on. Like the knee jerking in response to the physician’s hammer, such reflex judgments are made without conscious thought (the source of the pejorative term “knee-jerk thinking”).
This is not to say that all judging should be avoided. Obviously, we all need to make decisions: whether we should or shouldn’t vote for a particular candidate, for instance. Analytical thinking does need to arrive at a point of view—which is a form of judgment—but analytical conclusions are usually not phrased in terms of like/ dislike or good/bad. They disclose what a person has come to understand about X rather than how he or she rules on the worth of X.
Three Cures for the Judgment Reflex
Neither agree nor disagree with another person’s position until you can repeat that position in a way the other person would accept as fair and accurate. Carl Rogers recommends this strategy to negotiators in industry and government.
Try eliminating the word “should” from your vocabulary for a while. Judgments often take the form of should statements.
Try eliminating evaluative adjectives—those that offer judgments with no data. “Jagged” is a descriptive,