English Writing For german speakers – Part 5

In this blog series—English Writing für Deutschsprachler—I've been quite critical of nominal style. I've pointed out how writers use noun phrases to make their ideas sound more sophisticated and complex than they really are. But I've also described how writers accidentally confuse their readers because of the "curse of knowledge"—because writers forget what it is like not to know about their topic, and hence they unwittingly use big jargony nouns.

When teaching German speakers, I'm so tough on nominal style because it tends to be strongly fixed as their standard approach to writing. To help German speakers adjust their default settings in English, I dramatically emphasize verbal style because it is the best choice for most professional writing. That said, there is indeed a place for nominal style, which I'll show you here.

Let's start with a passage in German, which you may remember from your Abitur days:

Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbst verschuldeten Unmündigkeit. Unmündigkeit ist das Unvermögen, sich seines Verstandes ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen. Selbstverschuldet ist diese Unmündigkeit, wenn die Ursache derselben nicht am Mangel des Verstandes, sondern der Entschließung und des Mutes liegt, sich seiner ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen. (Immanuel Kant)

In this opening passage, Kant presents a pithy definition of Aufklärung, violating every principle of verbal style as he goes:

1. He uses the lifeless, non-action verbs of ist and liegt.

2. His main verbs come at the end of very long clauses (zu bedienen & liegt).

3. He uses non-character subjects, like Aufklärung, Unmündigkeit, and Ursache.

4. His entire definition is built on long and complex noun phrases:

   • der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbst verschuldeten Unmündigkeit

   • das Unvermögen, sich seines Verstandes ohne Leitung eines anderen

   • nicht am Mangel des Verstandes, sondern der Entschließung und des Mutes

Does this make Kant's passage bad writing? Of course not! But a passage in this style has a very specific purpose.

Think back to the first entry of this series, where I joked that nominal style overworks our brain's RAM and thus makes us reread a passage multiple times to get it. In philosophy, the point is sometimes to make the brain short-circuit precisely in this way so that people have to stop and reflect. The purpose of nominal style is not to get the reader into the flow but actually to break the reader's flow. It takes effort to interpret all those long noun phrases, especially when the verbs are pushed to the end. And the more effort the reader puts into parsing the syntax, the more they're rewarded with flashes of insight. (For those familiar with Kant, I daresay this style here provokes Vernunft in his reader rather than merely Verstand.)

The tableau effect

Reading Kant's passage is not at all like watching a film—a key feature of verbal style that I've discussed at length here. It's more like gazing at a painter's masterpiece. There is no explicit movement; rather the dynamism comes when the reader pauses, reflects, and uses their imagination to import meaning onto what they see. The best metaphor here may be that of a tableau: a frozen scene containing infinite interpretations, like The School of Athens below.

Click to open

Although English speakers use nominal style far less than German speakers, we do indeed throw it in at choice moments to have this tableau effect. Even George Orwell, one of the most famous proponents of verbal style, would dip into nominal style in key sentences to make his readers think:

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. (George Orwell)

Orwell offers a definition of power, and he writes it in a style much like Kant's Aufklärung passage: the definition comes through a long noun phrase (tearing...choosing), whose nominal structure is a speed bump for the reader. For Orwell's readers too, pausing to understand means pausing to reflect. 

He could have avoided this speed bump by writing in a verbal style like this:

A powerful person tears human minds to pieces and puts them together again in new shapes that they choose.

This style feels clear and informative, but it would not have the right effect. Orwell sought to give his definition the weightiness of a proverb etched into a stone monument. My verb-driven version feels like the Hollywood ripoff. Here he needs the tableau, not the movie. 

Good writers of nonfiction certainly use this technique of nominal style, especially in texts that seek to persuade through contemplation or emotion. But you'll notice that it's never the default style of the best English writers. If you stay in the nominal gear for too long, your weighty proverb turns into a pedantic bore. 

People mostly like to be spoken to in simple terms, in who-does-what language. Kant also understood this, and he immediately followed his dense definition with examples written in everyday, verbal style:

Es ist so bequem, unmündig zu sein. Habe ich ein Buch, das für mich Verstand hat, einen Seelsorger, der für mich Gewissen hat, einen Arzt, der für mich die Diät beurteilt, u.s.w., so brauche ich mich ja nicht selbst zu bemühen. Ich habe nicht nötig zu denken, wenn ich nur bezahlen kann; andere werden das verdrießliche Geschäft schon für mich übernehmen...

Here we see lots of short clauses driven by great character subjects and action verbs. In order for his noun-heavy passages to have the right effect, they must be interspersed carefully with verb-driven prose. 

What does all this have to do with your writing?

I hope to have given a clear view of how nominal style can be used for a specific rhetorical purpose—namely, to make your reader ruminate. But assuming you're not a philosopher, politician, or poet, you probably don't need to do this much.

When you're simply describing and informing, your reader will prefer the cognitive experience of verbal style—the movie effect I've discussed earlier. This guideline covers 95% of the writing you do as an engineer, lawyer, programmer, investor, manager, academic, and so on. 

So, the greater purpose of this post is to help German speakers let go of their bias towards nominal style in English. It's to tell you, Yes, nominal style can be great, but not for what you usually write in your job.

Banner image Source: Panoramio

English Writing for german speakers – part 4

In the last few posts, I have emphasized how good writing in English can be quickly and effortlessly visualized. I gave you the basics of verbal style, the writing tradition upheld in English for decades if not centuries. This week, I want to further explore the cognitive effect of using lots of rich verbs.

Let's warm up with some good writing:

The pinpoints of starlight we see with the naked eye are photons that have been streaming toward us for a few years or a few thousand. The light from more distant objects, captured by powerful telescopes, has been traveling toward us far longer than that, sometimes for billions of years. When we look at such ancient light, we are seeing—literally—ancient times. (Brian Greene, New York Times)

Here, the physicist Brian Greene begins to describe something that is remarkably complex: the history and evolution of the universe. But he does it in a way that immediately generates a mental scene that looks and feels something like...

...this...

...or maybe this...

Greene does this by using character subjects like pinpoint of starlight, light, and we, and action verbs like stream, travel, look, and see. Greene describes the logic-defying concept of space-time relativity as it it experienced by everyday stargazers like you and me: “When we look at such ancient light, we are seeing—literally—ancient times.”

Greene is a fantastic writer because he makes his grammar correspond to the reality that we see and experience. To illustrate this point, let's try out the opposite. Here is Greene's main idea in the most boring, dry, and pedantic style I can come up with:

The transiting of photons between two points in space is such that the moment of a photon's detection at one point may be displaced in time from the initial moment of said photon's emission by a duration of time proportionate to the distance separating the two points.

Believe it or not, people publish sentences like this all the time. (If you don't believe me, enjoy a few winning passages from the short-lived Bad Writing Contest.) Needless to say, this sentence in no way evokes the majesty of the night sky or the thrilling prospects of space travel. The reason is simple: the grammatical subjects are not characters and the grammatical verbs are not dynamic actions. 

Don't paint a picture, make a film

What does this have to do with your writing? You might be an engineer, a project manager, a lawyer—what can you learn from the writing of an astrophysicist? I chose this dramatic example for the sake of illustration: even the most complex topics can be made understandable to the reader, in a way that is quick, clear, and even enjoyable. 

Forget the cliché about "painting a picture in the reader's mind." A movie is the right metaphor. Vivid writing stimulates a sequence of scenes in the reader's mind—a "motion picture," as they used to say. This movie feeling comes through using lots of character subjects and action verbs. In the paragraph below, an engineer at a US Government agency writes in this movie-like style to describe earthquakes in California:

Scientists have learned that the Earth's crust is fractured into a series of "plates" that have been moving very slowly over the Earth's surface for millions of years. Two of these moving plates meet in western California; the boundary between them is the San Andreas fault. The Pacific Plate (on the west) moves northwestward relative to the North American Plate (on the east), causing earthquakes along the fault. The San Andreas is the "master" fault of an intricate fault network that cuts through rocks of the California coastal region. The entire San Andreas fault system is more than 800 miles long and extends to depths of at least 10 miles within the Earth. [...] Many smaller faults branch from and join the San Andreas fault zone. (US Geological Survey)

As I read this passage, it triggers a documentary film reel in my mind—first we're interviewing scientists on the edge of an excavation site and then panning the California landscape from a drone's-eye view. This feeling comes from the many short clauses with character subjects and action verbs:

• Scientists have learned

• Earth's crust is fractured

• "plates" that have been moving

• Two of these moving plates meet

• an intricate fault network that cuts through

• The entire San Andreas fault system [...] extends to depths

• Many smaller faults branch from and join

You'll notice that the verbs are what syncopate the text, pushing the mental film along. Since the verbs always come early in the sentence, the action of each scene starts right away. The verb is like the clapper thing in the movies.

If we wrote this in nominal style, it would feel like the clapper never drops and the scene never starts: 

The fracturing of the Earth's crust into a series of "plates" and their slow movement apart over millions of years has been observed...

The English-speaker's brain short-circuits when we have to wait so long before the verb. There is a time and place for these kinds of noun-driven sentences, but this is not it. Come back next week to learn when this nominal style is the best choice.

In last week’s post, we looked at verbal style as the mainstay of English writing. We saw a technique to help you transform noun-laden sentences into verb-driven sentences. This week, we’ll explore what verbal style does to your choices of subjects. But first as a warm-up, I have a goofy exercise for you.

Take out a pen and paper. I want you to scroll down to the GIF below and quickly write down a single sentence describing what you see. Don’t take more than 30 seconds for this—simply write whatever sentence first comes to mind.

Pen and paper ready?...

Click to open the GIF

Now I’m going to show you a second GIF, and I want you to do the exact same thing.

Click to open the GIF

What did you write for the first GIF? When I do this exercise in workshops, people inevitably write something like:

“A man swings a hammer to hit a wall, but the hammer’s head slips off and flies through the wall.”

And for the second GIF, here's a typical response:

“A car pulls up a treehouse with a rope, but the treehouse then falls over again.”

The point of this exercise is to give you a peek into how your brain works. When you simply observe something happening, with no time to invent abstractions and stories, you notice two key things: the main actions and the main characters—who does what.

Characters

• man

• hammer

• head

• car

• treehouse

Actions

• swing

• slip off

• fly

• pull

• fall

The meaning of “action” is clear enough: it is the word that best depicts the dynamism and movement of the scene. But what about “character”?*

When you watch a film, you can easily name the main characters. When you read a well-written text, it should be just as easy to name the main people or things that the text is about. They are the characters, protagonists, agents, doers—call them what you like. And they should become the grammatical subjects of your sentences.

If you write a lot about people, then choose humans as your character subjects. If you’re in a technical field, think about the things and phenomena that do something in your everyday work. A lawyer might talk about defendants and plaintiffs, an automotive engineer about chassis and drive chains, a software architect about structure and code, and an entrepreneur about markets and investors.

For any one of those character subjects, you could easily rattle off a list of actions that those people or things can do. A drive chain engages with the axle and propels a car forward. A market might boom one year but plummet the next. Whatever your field, here’s the key:

Make your grammar correspond to reality.

This means following the natural, who’s-doing-what style that came out of the GIF exercise above. We perceive the world mainly through our eyes. Try to write in a way that your reader immediately visualizes what’s going on with little effort. Have your words set off a virtual GIF in your reader’s mind. The way to do this is by using characters as your subjects and vibrant actions as your verbs.

Why is this an important lesson for German speakers in particular? First, as I discussed last week, German is a predominantly noun-driven language. The German linguaculture tends to exalt nominal style and put down the verbal style shown here. Second, German has the unique and charming ability to create infinitely long noun phrases. Among those that landed in my inbox this week were a message about “eine rechtzeitliche, verbindliche Terminvereinbarung” and an invitation to present at a few "Erstsemestereinführungsveranstaltungen." Then there’s one of my regular favorites: “Die von Ihnen gewählte Rufnummer…”

Not only can German speakers form noun phrases like these, but they appear to enjoy it. It seems to be a playful competition to see who can create the longest, most creative noun phrase—a national pastime up there with figuring out the Steuerabzugsfähigkeit of every euro spent.

If we revisit our second GIF above, it's certainly possible to describe what we see in a highly nominal style:

“The attempt by the car to erect the treehouse is hindered by the fact that its equilibrium once upright is unstable, causing its subsequent falling to the opposite side.”

This kind of phrasing takes much more effort to understand. Simply put, it is difficult to visualize. Many writers are tempted to write this way, either because they are trying to sound sophisticated or they suffer from the "curse of knowledge"—meaning that they're such experts in the field that they forget how to explain things to non-experts.

But since 90% of your readers will not be experts, it's better to get into the habit of writing in verbal style—who does what. Your readers are potential clients: the better they understand you, the more they'll trust you. 

*I’ve borrowed this term "character subjects" from the eminent writing critic Joseph Williams.

If you were paying attention in your high school German class, you may remember hearing about Nominalstil. And if your teachers were traditional, they might have emphatically told you that nominal style = sophistication. For those who daydreamed through that lesson, let me jog your memory with an example:

Apple’s gain in market share in the early 2000s was in large part the result of its channeling significant resources into the development of the iPhone.

This is nominal style because it comprises two long noun phrases—in blue above—joined by a measly “was” as the verb.

In the German-speaking context, your high school teacher was certainly right: nominal style pervades Amtssprache, Rechtssprache, and academic Fachsprachen. But the Anglo standard is different—even in our Amtsenglisch! If you don’t believe me, check out the official style recommendations of the UK government.

So, from California to Singapore to New Zealand, we English speakers would rather read this:

Apple gained market share in the early 2000s in large part because it channeled significant resources into developing the iPhone.

Here you can clearly see the jump from nominal to verbal style. The nouns “gain” and “channeling” transformed into the verbs “gained” and “channeled.” And with those vibrant verbs came the character subject “Apple.”

In my experience, most German speakers use nominal style as their default setting. A simple way to check your own English writing is to underline your grammatical subjects in every sentence of a paragraph. Then step back and ask yourself, "Am I regularly underlining long noun phrases or just one or two words?"

Let’s do this with a sample sentence from Part 1 of this series:

Understanding the difference between the funding requirements of start-ups as opposed to mature companies is indispensable business knowledge.

This is a clear specimen of nominal style. To make the shift to verbal style, try to figure out the main actions that are hidden within the massive noun phrase underlined here. You might notice that the nominalizations “understanding” and “requirements” are hiding the verbs “understand” and “require.” How could you rephrase this sentence using those verbs?

A successful entrepreneur understands that a company requires different funding sources as a start-up as opposed to a mature business.

Some object to this rewrite and say, “But you’ve changed the meaning of the sentence!” And my answer is, “Yes, you’re right. I’ve changed the meaning by making it more precise—and thus better!” When I shifted to verbal style, I had to choose human subjects to couple with the new verbs. I chose “A successful entrepreneur” for the first subject, but I could just as easily have written “A business manager must understand...” or “Smart investors understand…” Choose your subject based on whatever you want to say. Nominal style lets you fall into vague and imprecise wording. Verbal style forces you to make deliberate and specific choices about who is doing what.

So if you’d like make the shift from nominal to verbal style as you edit your work, follow these steps:

1. Underline the grammatical subjects of your sentences.
2. Are you underlining long noun phrases? If so, isolate the key nominalizations (nouns like “gain,” “channeling,” “understanding,” “requirements”).
3. Turn one or two of these key nominalizations back into verbs.
4. Find short, concrete subjects to match with those verbs.

Keep in mind that verbal style has been the English norm for centuries. It’s a pillar of my own writing bible and even a key ingredient of the “vigorous writing” taught in Strunk and White’s famous (or infamous) Elements of Style, written in 1911. In short, English prefers verbal style because it lets a reader clearly visualize who does what—the topic of next week’s post.

English Writing For German Speakers – Part 1

To write well in English, German speakers should start by switching off about half of their brain’s RAM. It’s as if their language brings them into adulthood with 8 gigs, while we English speakers have only 4. That’s the only way to explain how German speakers read sentences like this every day without having their brain short-circuit:

In dem Magazin werden mittels modernster Internet-Technologie die Megatrends der Zukunft wie beispielsweise eine steigende Anzahl von Herz-Kreislauf-Krankheiten, ein wachsender Bedarf an hochwertigen Nahrungsmitteln und die Kohlendioxid-Problematik angesprochen. (source)

This sentence overloads the English speaker’s RAM for one simple reason: the main verb is at the end. We rush through everything until we hear “angesprochen”, and then think: “OK nun...was wird angesprochen? Und mittels was?”—which of course takes us back to the start of the sentence.

It’s not easy for us English speakers to keep so many bits suspended in our heads before we know what to do with them. It’s as if you handed us an armful of papers before we have a filing cabinet to put them in. Give us the cabinet first so we can then calmly slot the papers into it.

The verb is the anchor of the English sentence: when it appears early, it lets the reader calmly absorb the details to come. Of course this doesn’t mean that all English writers remember this. Take an example written in typical “academese”:

Understanding the difference between the funding requirements of start-ups as opposed to mature companies is indispensable business knowledge.

Here, too, we see the same loop-de-loop effect: we reach the end of the sentence only to ask, “OK, now what is indispensable business knowledge?”

This sentence becomes immensely more lucid with a simple switch-around: “It is indispensable business knowledge to understand the difference…” Even my 4-gig RAM can process this rewrite on the first pass through. The early verb guides the details into their place with minimal effort on the reader’s part.

(Some readers may find my “it is” suggestion a half-baked solution, which it is. But only now that our verb appears early can we start to think about what verb to use—the topic of next week’s post.)

Let’s see another example:

The template for the production of cellular proteins in a child—through which a child’s body is built and run—is created by genes.

Like in the previous example, this sentence becomes immensely easier to understand by merely putting the verb at the beginning: “Genes create the template…” You may have noticed that I made a passive sentence into an active one. This is often, but not always, a quick fix for a passive construction: just make it active to get the verb to the front.

German and English simply follow distinct rhythms, and the place of the verb has a lot to do with it. Back when I was learning German, I remember reading a sentence, understanding each word, but somehow not getting the big picture. The bricks were there but the mortar was missing. As I practiced, I felt my brain rewiring itself to process and produce the cadences of German.

So as your first major lesson, just remember to put the verb early. Even if you use weak and boring verbs—or dummy constructions like “it is”—if it comes early, you’ll keep the English speaker’s RAM running within its specs.

I owe much of what I know about writing to my undergrad thesis advisor at Harvard, Dr. Thomas Ponniah. When I first asked him whether he’d advise me, he posed a question back: “Will you turn in ten pages to me every week?” He cut me off before I could answer—“Go home, think about it, and tell me tomorrow.” Of course I said yes, with no idea how I would manage. But he didn’t leave me empty handed; he gave me the invaluable four-question method, which lets you turn your research into usable text on the spot.

I wrote about philosophy, which means I had to figure out my own ideas about a bunch of other people’s ideas. Here, you can’t just wax sophomoric about some dead guy’s musings; you have to wade through a lineage of interlocutors, deciding whose ideas to engage with and whose to ignore. Like in any field, you crack open one dusty classic, and suddenly you’re drowning in a breeding pit of claims, counterclaims, caveats, and contradictions. To survive with a worthwhile text of your own, you have to learn how to read to write.

Here’s the technique—relevant for anyone who needs to digest masses of words efficiently and painlessly. For each text you read, open up a new page in Word, copy the four bolded questions below, and fill them in as you read with complete, intelligible sentences and paragraphs. When I first did this as an undergrad, my ten pages a week became easy and enjoyable to write. It trained me to only ever read a text once, picking up everything I needed on the first pass.
 

1) What is the question?

Every good piece of writing has a central question or set of questions. When you read bad writing and think, “So what?” or “Who cares?”, the problem is that the writer has either a dull question or no question at all. A good question is a good motive. What is the writer trying to work out, and why is it interesting to others? If you can’t uncover a clear and pertinent question, you’re dealing with a confused author. Scrap it and look for something better to read.
 

2) What is the main argument?

Find the writer’s question and you’ll whet your interest in their answer—their main argument. In different cultures, the writer comes to the argument at different moments. In English—and most Western writing cultures—we tend to show our cards as early as possible. We tell our reader the main point quickly and then spend the rest of our text proving it through logic and evidence. Find an author’s main point as soon as you can and write it down in a concise paragraph. Even if you disagree, you should be as charitable as possible when writing their claim in your own words. It might become an essential counterargument that you have to build up thoroughly in order to tear down later.
 

3) What is the best proof of the argument?

The argument is like the left jab that makes way for the right cross—the proof. Though it’s the heart of a good piece, the argument is nothing without persuasive evidence. Keep your eyes open for a good metaphor, a convincing quote, or a cogent statistic or two. When you have to discuss the author in your own writing, you’ll want to summarize their argument and cap that off with the most impressive bit of proof you could find.
 

4) What is the connection to my project?

This question should be looming in your mind while you read and answer the other questions: what does all of this have to do with what I am writing? You will probably discover the connections in little bursts of insight. Jot those down in note form as they arise, then come back to turn the fragments into complete sentences later on. This question is usually the most difficult because it makes you not just reflect on what you’re reading but also transform those reflections into clear sentences. It requires a bit of discipline. But fifteen minutes of writing now—while the content is fresh—is worth an hour of writing later. If you try to write about it in a month, you’ll waste the first forty-five minutes reminding yourself what it all had to do with your text. 

Think of something you’d like to write about. Don’t read on until you’ve thought of something.

Now write down your thought in a full sentence—as an argument, as the main message you’d like to say.

Now ask yourself, what has changed in moving my thoughts from my head to the page? How has the idea evolved into a clearer, more precise statement, or how has it taken a new track completely or even devolved into a worse idea?

You’ll notice how much happened when your sentence took shape. When I did this now, my first thought was an article about “coffee.” But writing this thought here belies its complexity. When it arose in my mind, it wasn’t just a word but a network of rich associations I latch on to this word: the pleasure of drinking it; the aromas and gurgles of the espresso pot; the dynamics of the global coffee trade; the molecular makeup of coffee that wins it so many daily devotees. In this cacophony arose the question, why is it that the Danes top the list of coffee drinkers worldwide?—a random stat I recently picked up.

This web of ideas is a paradox. It is infinitely complex yet vague at the same time. Our thoughts bounce involuntarily among fragmented notions—some well developed and others nascent. To say that we “write down the idea” is false. When we write, we force ourselves to make choices, to condense something solid out of this nebula. I’d venture to say that only when we write something down does it become a true idea.

To describe what’s happening here, we might borrow Daniel Kahneman’s term, the “illusion of understanding”: we exaggerate how well we understand the past and are thus overconfident in predicting the future. As writers, we consistently overestimate our grasp of ideas while they are locked up in our head. Even with the sentence before us, we elude ourselves by thinking that we have simply transcribed the idea from brain to page.

Now look again at what you wrote down. It should no longer be a general topic but an actual claim. My sentence was, “Despite its benefits in eliminating free radicals, coffee may harm our health in the long term by making our bodies overly acidic.” Now I have something to work with—something to elaborate upon and justify, or even something to convince myself out of.

The point is that as a writer, you always need something to push against. Most good writers don’t dawdle much before putting something on the page. Write first, think second. As novelist E.O. Forster put it, “How do I know what I think until I’ve seen what I’ve said?”

Motive. No one will care about what you write unless you give them a reason to do so. You must present a motive to read on, answering their “so what?” doubts before they even arise. By way of illustration, the motive of this blog is to do away with unethical writing—writing that wastes your breath as a writer and squanders the attention of your readers.

A motive fires up a good discussion on both emotive and rhetorical levels. Emotionally, we like reading about things that affect our lives or the lives of others. This means we’re gossipy at our worst but visionary at our best, and the most forceful motives appeal to this higher drive. In rhetorical terms, a motive gives a frame for the main message—the argument.

Argument. Like a motive, an argument is present in any piece of writing. It may seek to persuade and motivate, to inspire and entertain, or simply to inform. In a sales pitch, the argument is a persuasive case for what we should buy and why. An ethical argument motivates people to change their behavior. A news blurb, in turn, is largely informative, laying out the skeleton of its message in the headline. Many genres combine these approaches, but any strong piece has a core claim.

These two elements—motive and argument—are the essence of clear writing. They set a course for your thoughts in the first draft, and belong in the opening of your polished product. While you need not dwell on the motive, try to weave your entire text around the argument, bringing all evidence and reasoning to bear on your main point with no dead ends and minimal detours.

If your argument is not clear to you from the start, don’t worry; the best introductions are usually written last. Of course you need some sense of direction to begin, but don’t hesitate to revise it as you go. You will only know if you have a good argument once you run it through the gauntlet of counterargument. Entertain alternatives as you write, and use this understanding to strengthen the main idea in your introduction. If you are truly rigorous here, you might even talk yourself out of your initial argument. Don’t shy away from this, but rather embrace the chance to mature as a thinker and reset the tack of your piece.