Writing Resources

Here are some of my posts and writings on better writing:

• "Why Writing Better Will Make You a Better Person" June 4, 2019, Chronicle of Higher Education by Bob Fischer and Nathan Nobis.
• Organization and Clarity in Writing: Seeing the Forest Through the Trees
• Writing Tips
• Essay Evaluation Sheet

Here is a new, imperfect video on writing philosophy with an emphasis on organization and structure; I'm new to making videos and this is really a first attempt:

Ethics, Left and Right: The Moral Issues That Divide Us

 

Ethics, Left and Right

The Moral Issues That Divide Us

Bob Fischer

• Provides a model of civil dialogue for contentious moral issues--one that students can appreciate and emulate--through a series of commissioned essays on twenty contentious debates, written expressly with undergraduate students in mind
• Engages students in moral philosophy by examining highly relevant issues that students encounter in our current social and political landscape
• Presents two position pieces on each issue--one left-leaning, one right--followed by a reply from each author, giving you and your students the opportunity to engage in in-depth discussions of serious issues
• Prepares students to think philosophically and critically with an introductory chapter on ethical theory, moral reasoning, and arguments
• Includes case studies at the end of every main contribution to encourage students to examine related problems and/or delve deeper into the current issue
• An Ancillary Resource Center (ARC) contains an Instructor's Manual, a Computerized Test Bank, and PowerPoint lecture slides
• A Companion Website offers student resources including self-quizzes and web links

Abortion and Soundbites: Why Pro-Choice Arguments Are Harder to Make

New! "Abortion and Soundbites: Why Pro-Choice Arguments Are Harder to Make" in Areo Magazine!

Areo has unfortunately closed; the text of this article is below. 

"Soundbites," argue @NathanNobis and Kristina Grob, "make many pro-life arguments seem stronger than they really are, while the complexities of pro-choice arguments can't be readily reduced to soundbites."https://t.co/cry2DlKtyt

— Areo (@AreoMagazine) July 23, 2019

Abortion and Soundbites: Why Pro-Choice Arguments Are Harder to Make

https://areomagazine.com/2019/07/23/abortion-and-soundbites-why-pro-choice-arguments-are-harder-to-make/

Posted on July 23, 2019
7 minute read
By Nathan Nobis and Kristina Grob

Arguments are nowadays often presented as soundbites: as slogans, tweets, memes and even gifs. Arguments developed in detail often meet the response TL;DR (Too Long, Didn’t Read). This is unfortunate—especially when tackling the topic of abortion. Soundbites make many pro-life arguments seem stronger than they really are, while the complexities of pro-choice arguments can’t be readily reduced to soundbites.

Pro-Life Soundbites

Abortion is wrong because:

• fetuses are human or human beings.
• human beings have rights.
• human rights protect all humans.
• we should advocate for equality, including equality for unborn human beings.
• abortion ends a life.
• abortion is killing.

These soundbites can sound good because human beings are generally wrong to kill; human rights do protect human beings; human rights apply to all humans; equality is a good thing; and ending lives and killing are often wrong. Denying these things often results in silly assertions: that fetuses in human women aren’t human or aren’t alive, or that abortion doesn’t involve killing, etc.

That these soundbites are based on what seems to be common sense can make these simple cases against abortion seem strong.

Pro-Choice Presentations

Presentations of pro-choice perspectives often begin with abstractions:

• What does human mean? Does everything human have rights?
• Why do human beings have rights? What makes humans have rights?
• Do human rights really protect everything and everyone that is human, or all human beings?
• Do basic human rights include a right to someone else’s body? How could someone gain that right? What kind of rights to assistance do human rights entail?
• Denying equality among human beings is very bad, but is equality sometimes inappropriate or even wrong? What does equality mean?
• When is killing not wrong? Does killing ever raise few, if any, moral issues whatsoever?

Since pro-choice positions depend on more precise and complex theoretical thinking, they are harder to effectively communicate—especially when audiences and discussion partners will not—or cannot—seek to understand more deeply and carefully.

Pro-Choice Soundbites

Consider some common pro-choice soundbites:

• My body, my choice.
• A woman can do whatever she wants with her own body.
• People who oppose abortion just want to control women.
• If you’re against abortion, don’t have one.
• Abortion is just a medical procedure.
• Abortion is a personal choice.
• Every child a wanted child.
• Abortion is not up for debate.

The problems with these soundbites are obvious to anyone who doesn’t already accept them.

• No. You cannot choose to use your body to murder someone.
• No. You cannot do everything you want with your own body: you cannot murder someone.
• No. If women are doing something that should be illegal, they should be controlled, just as anyone else should.
• No. You wouldn’t say Against child abuse? Then don’t abuse children! so this response is foolish.
• No. If abortion is wrong, it’s not a mere medical procedure.
• No. We can’t or shouldn’t make certain personal choices, if those choices are profoundly wrong.
• No. That a child is unwanted wouldn’t entitle anyone to kill that child.
• No, abortion is up for debate. What do you think we are doing in talking about it?

Not every pro-choice soundbite generates these reactions, but many do. Pro-choice soundbites just don’t have the same initial plausibility as pro-life soundbites.

Critiques of Pro-Life Soundbites

Pro-choice critics don’t argue that pro-life soundbites are completely wrong. Pro-choicers argue that, if we look at the details, their initial plausibility fades: thinking them through reveals that the ideas don’t have the implications their advocates think they do.

• If human means biologically human, that means that random human cells and tissues have rights, which they don’t. So just because fetuses are biologically human doesn’t mean they have rights.
• We can ask why human beings have rights: why do rocks and vegetables not have rights? A long-influential family of theories of rights proposes that we have rights because we are conscious and feeling beings. This theory suggests that pre-conscious embryos and early fetuses don’t have rights.
• While people say that all human beings have rights, they don’t. Human corpses don’t have rights. Brain-dead human beings do not have the rights we have: letting their bodies die would be wrong if they had, say, the right to life. Babies born missing most of their brains seem to not have the rights that regular babies have: it’s hard to see why letting them die, even when they could be kept alive, would be wrong, since being alive does them no good. Not all human beings have features that rights are supposed to protect, so it seems that not all human beings have rights. So just because fetuses are human beings doesn’t, in itself, mean they have rights.
• The right to life is not a right to everything someone needs to live—especially someone else’s body. Explaining if, how and why a fetus would have a right to a pregnant woman’s body is a challenge.
• Denying equality among humans is very bad. But advocating for equality between human beings and, say, isolated human cells or organs (or plants or bacteria) would be wrong. And what does equal mean? Not everything is equal: there is such a thing as justified, reasonable discrimination: there might be good reasons to deny that human embryos and early fetuses are equal to us.
• Killing random cells, bacteria, plants, etc. is often not wrong at all. There is killing that’s wrong and killing that isn’t wrong: just because abortion is killing doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

Identifying these problems requires showing that things are more complicated than they seem. It requires seeing that some common ways of understanding aren’t quite correct and might even be harmful.

There are, of course, more sophisticated arguments against abortion. These often appeal to claims about human embryos and fetuses’ essence or essential properties, their rational natures and their being the same kind of beings that we are. These abstract claims and arguments are harder to evaluate. However, close critical examination reveals that these abstract arguments do not succeed: they raise more questions than they answer.

Critical Thinking and Abortion

Developing strong critical thinking skills requires training and practice.

In our recent short, introductory, open-access book on abortion, Thinking Critically About Abortion: Why Most Abortions Aren’t Wrong & Why All Abortions Should be Legal, we review a lot of bad arguments and ways of understanding abortion, from all sides. Our main positive arguments for pro-choice perspectives, briefly stated, are these.

• It is wrong to kill adults, children and babies because they are conscious, aware and have feelings. Since early fetuses entirely lack these characteristics, it is not inherently wrong to kill them, so most abortions are not morally wrong, since most abortions are done early in pregnancy, before consciousness and feeling develop in the fetus.
• Furthermore, since the right to life does not include the right to someone else’s body, a fetus might not have the right to the pregnant woman’s body—therefore she has the right to not allow the fetus use of her body. This further justifies abortion, at least until technology allows for the removal of fetuses to other wombs. Since morally permissible actions should be legal, abortions should be legal: it is an injustice to criminalize actions that are not wrong.

These arguments are not new, but they are new to most people, since most people are not familiar with the philosophical literature on abortion. Versions of these are likely to be the best arguments for pro-choice perspectives out there.

Soundbite-Free Advocacy

So, what can a pro-choice advocate do? Here are some ideas:

• Don’t provide soundbites. You’re better off saying nothing than giving what sounds like a bad argument—perhaps because it is a bad argument.
• Very clever and creative people could develop good pro-choice soundbites. These are likely to be based on abstract and theoretical considerations. But developing any such soundbites in an echo-chamber, with little reflection on how they would be received by the outside world, is a strategy for failure.
• Denying that the issues can be reduced to soundbites might do some good: acknowledging complexity can help.
• We’d all like to engage and persuade everyone, but it might be best to focus on people who are able and willing to engage complexity: judges and legal officials are generally able and willing to do that; elected politicians are less likely to. Focusing on audiences willing to listen and productively discuss would reduce discouragement and frustration. Many people are well-meaning and willing to engage the issues in serious, respectful and responsible ways. But these discussions aren’t likely to be fruitful if they appeal to soundbites.

This isn’t about persuasion in the sense of manipulation, public relations or anything that could be called sophistry. We want to move people towards reasonable, justified messages.

While pro-life soundbites often move people, they do not seem to move people towards views that are ultimately justified by strong evidence and arguments: we believe this can be demonstrated by reasoning rigorously, patiently and critically about those arguments. Our book’s subtitle is Why Most Abortions Aren’t Wrong & Why All Abortions Should be Legal because we believe that critical thinking reveals that this view is supported by better arguments than its opposite. Soundbites don’t help show that, to most people. We need to find out what will.

 

Nathan Nobis

Nathan Nobis is is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Morehouse College, in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. He has authored and co-authored many articles, essays, reviews and a few books on topics in ethics and philosophy.

Kristina Grob

Kristina Grob is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina Sumter. Each semester she shows students that philosophy can be a way of life, no matter their day jobs. 

Why Writing Better Will Make You a Better Person

New, in the Chronicle of Higher Education,

"Why Writing Better Will Make You a Better Person" By Bob Fischer and Nathan Nobis JUNE 04, 2019

Also here, without advertisements. 

Free OER (Open Educational Resource) Textbooks in Philosophy

I recent saw these two calls for contributions to two Free OER (Open Educational Resource) Textbooks in Philosophy in development in (1) Ethics and (2) Philosophy of Religion. 

Writing Coach

If you are seeking someone to help you with your writing, I am available as a "writing coach" or consultant: I can help you plan, get organized and stay on task. I'm also available as editor, for anything from "big picture" organizational guidance to a detailed review of your manuscript.

I'm happy to help you make any writing project – dissertation, article, chapter, book, essay or anything else – more clear, vivid, organized and concise.

To get a better sense for whether I can help you, you might want to read some of my writings to get a sense for my writing style. You could also check out the more recent essays at 1000-Word Philosophy: I've helped guide the production of the last 30 or so essays. And here are three posts by me on better writing:

·         Organization and Clarity in Writing: Seeing the Forest Through the Trees

·         Writing Tips

·         Essay Evaluation Sheet

Please contact me to discuss your needs. Thank you!

Keywords: philosophical writing coach, humanities writing coach, social science writing coach, non-fiction writing coach

"Don't Hide your Light Under a Bushel" - On Trying to be a Scholar for the Public

1. "Don't hide your light under a bushel"



See below the fold for more:

Decatur FM

A version of this will be out in the October Decatur Focus. Need something written? Contact me!

“Good morning, DE-CA-TUR!!!”

Where do you get your Decatur news? Blogs? City publications? Facebook? Talking to people?

There’s a new option in town: radio!

Organization and Clarity in Writing: Seeing the Forest Through the Trees

Philosophy papers, or philosophical presentations (talks or lectures, audio or video presentations, which are usually based on something written in preparation for the talk), typically attempt to do a number of things, such as:

1. State a view or claim.
2. State and explain a view or claim. 
3. State and explain a view or claim, and explain an argument(s) or reason(s) given in its favor, e.g., that the view is true or reasonable to believe, or state and explain a view or claim, and explain an argument(s) or reason(s) given against it, e.g., that the view is false or unreasonable to believe.  
4. State and explain a view or claim, and explain an argument(s) or reason(s) given in its favor or against it, and state and explain some objection(s) to that (or those) argument(s) - that is, a reason to think that the initial argument is somehow faulty - and explain whether that objection(s) is strong or not.  

And there are other tasks that one might do in a philosophy paper or presentation. It's important that whatever you decide you are going to do, you do it. See below the fold for more:

Essay Evaluation Sheet

Philosophy Essay Evaluation Sheet

Here are some concerns for argumentative essays. How well does your essay address them?

1.      Introduction: do you have an introduction that explains the topic(s) you will address, or the question(s) you will answer?

2.      Thesis: does your paper have a thesis, that is, a conclusion that you try to support?

3.      Arguments: does your paper give an explicit argument or arguments in support of your conclusion?

a.      Do you explicitly state your premises, and why they should be accepted?

b.      Do you explicitly explain how your premises lead to your conclusions?

4.      Do you respond to any objections or counterarguments? Do you respond to questions that readers might have about your arguments?

5.      Does your paper have a conclusion that reviews what you discussed and what you argued for?

6.      Organization: could your paper be outlined to show its structure? Is it well organized?

7.      Paragraphs: does each paragraph focus on one, and only one, topic?

8.      Writing: is your paper written in plain, ordinary English? Do you use ‘fancy’ words – words that people wouldn’t use in ordinary conversation – only if it is absolutely necessary?

9.      Are there any grammatical and spelling errors?

10.  Are your sentences short and clear? Did you look closely at each sentence to ensure it makes sense?

11.  Did you proofread?

12.  Did you get someone else to read your paper and give you helpful feedback for revision?

13.  Did you revise your paper?

14.  Would someone who is unfamiliar with the paper’s issues, the relevant readings, and your course be able to understand and learn from your paper?

Spring Classes

Introduction to Ethics
College Ethics 
Student Information Sheet

Paper template; Senior Thesis Guidelines; Writing Tips

Fall 2016 Courses

Introduction to Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, Student Information Sheet

Paper template; Senior Thesis Guidelines; Writing Tips

Writing Tips

There are many excellent guidelines on writing philosophy: James Pryor's, Michael Huemer's, and more (see this Daily Nous roundup of resources). I thought I'd offer a few suggestions also, as they come to mind:

• Make an outline, with section headings. We've all been told to do this for a long time, but it is really helpful. And keep those numbered section headings in the paper so the overall structure is clear. A well organized paper almost writes itself: you just have to fill in the details of the various sections. These sections are the parts that form the whole, and if you've got all those parts in mind, your presentation (or paper), again, is really organized and easy to write, and read. 
• Learn to use Microsoft Word's "Headings" feature, which will allow you to make a table of contents using Word's feature to do that. This too helps keep the organization clear. Google Docs has this "make a table of contents from headings" feature also. 
• Make your introduction short, no more than half a page. Tell your reader your topic (which should be narrow), what you are going to say or argue about it (that is, your main point, your thesis, which should be brief, e.g., "This argument is unsound," "This premise is false," "This isn't a good reason to believe that," etc., and what the structure of your paper will be: tell the audience what you are going to do (give them a "roadmap" of the presentation) and what the parts of your discussion are going to be (and how they build on each other). That's it and not much more. 
• Arguments: your arguments is just your main point(s), you conclusions(s) and the reason(s) you give in favor of those conclusion(s). Lay that all out in a step-by-step process. Stating the argument in numbered premises and conclusions is often very helpful for that, and that makes explaining the argument and objecting to the argument easier and clearer. 
• Break up longer sentences. If a sentence can be broken up into shorter sentences, do it: that always improves readability. 
• Make each sentence as short as it can be. Rigorously edit to cut words and be maximally concise.
• Each paragraph should have one, and only one, main topic. You should be able to say, "This paragraph is about that." Short paragraphs are fine. 
• Use ordinary words, unless you absolutely must use some special word. This helps you be concise and clear. Write so as many people as possible can understand you: do not alienate people with big words. 
• Use "I": talk to the reader. This helps you be concise and clear. 
• Generally, don't ask rhetorical questions. Make statements and support them. Don't ask questions and hope that the reader will respond how you hope they will: they might not.
• Revise, rewrite, rethink. After your write, reflect and revise. What can you say more concisely? What can you cut? Cut what distracts and isn't necessary to your overall purpose.

See also these rules on op-ed writing.

Here's a more recent post by me "Organization and Clarity in Writing: Seeing the Forest Through the Trees"

Here is an earlier post with some essay evaluation standards:

Philosophy Essay Evaluation Sheet

Here are some concerns for argumentative essays. How well does your essay address them?

1.      Introduction: do you have an introduction that explains the topic(s) you will address, or the question(s) you will answer?

2.      Thesis: does your paper have a thesis, that is, a conclusion that you try to support?

3.      Arguments: does your paper give an explicit argument or arguments in support of your conclusion?

a.      Do you explicitly state your premises, and why they should be accepted?

b.      Do you explicitly explain how your premises lead to your conclusions?

4.      Do you respond to any objections or counterarguments? Do you respond to questions that readers might have about your arguments?

5.      Does your paper have a conclusion that reviews what you discussed and what you argued for?

6.      Organization: could your paper be outlined to show its structure? Is it well organized?

7.      Paragraphs: does each paragraph focus on one, and only one, topic?

8.      Writing: is your paper written in plain, ordinary English? Do you use ‘fancy’ words – words that people wouldn’t use in ordinary conversation – only if it is absolutely necessary?

9.      Are there any grammatical and spelling errors?

10.  Are your sentences short and clear? Did you look closely at each sentence to ensure it makes sense?

11.  Did you proofread?

12.  Did you get someone else to read your paper and give you helpful feedback for revision?

13.  Did you revise your paper?

14.  Would someone who is unfamiliar with the paper’s issues, the relevant readings, and your course be able to understand and learn from your paper?