Graduate level writing and the importance of partial conclusions

Many writers struggle with developing their writing into a more appropriate academic style when they begin graduate school. There are many ways to improve your writing and developing an understanding of partial conclusions and how to use them is something that any writer will benefit from. However, for graduate students it is a necessity to achieve this level of professional understanding in their field.

Beginning writers are often given the task of “compare and contrast.” These assignments encourage writers to focus exclusively on sharp differences. Further, they encourage young writers to overstate differences, rather than comparing subtleties and developing a vision of the full relationship between the things being compared.

Writers who want to develop their writing past those simple comparisons need to develop their thinking beyond those simple comparisons. As your study of a field deepens, you will not be able to get away with describing perfect relationships of antagonism or cooperation. If you persist in that kind of thinking, you will not deepen your thinking. This does not mean adding “or not” either to your writing or your thinking. That the relationships between things are complex does not mean that we cannot know anything about them, it just means that what can be known is not necessarily universal or causal.

Being cautious means being careful, and the more intellectual care you take the more you will understand about your field. Eventually, it will make you better at what you do, whatever that is. Think of all the times you were taught that something was always this way, only to have to relearn that it was not the case. Consider how much of your college education was unlearning what you had been taught previously. In graduate school, you are to the point in your career where you should be teaching yourself much of the time. By now, not only should “always” and “never” be eliminated from your writing, it should be eliminated from your thinking.