Writing and Reading Philosophy, Iaan Reynolds

The syllabus here is from my second time teaching “Writing and Reading Philosophy” (PHIL 2400) this past spring at Utah Valley University. At a moment when large language models seem to offer students a quick solution to their anxieties about school work—but this “solution” is shown to lead to declines in students’ writing, reading, and critical thinking abilities—I found it so significant that my department decided to include a class dedicated to “old fashioned” philosophical reading and writing as part of its major core. This context makes the class particularly enjoyable to plan and teach, because I get to see students develop their philosophical skills and confidence in a way that they hadn’t thought was possible.

The idea guiding the class is simple: students will become better at writing and reading philosophy if they practice often, with plenty of feedback and opportunities to reflect on the process. With this in mind, and recognizing that students taking the course would ideally be in their second year of philosophy, I built a syllabus emphasizing frequent and short reading and writing activities. The rest of this post will walk through the parts of the class that were repeated each week.

Weekly Reading and Lessons

During the first of two weekly meetings (I’ll refer to a Tuesday-Thursday schedule), the class began by reading a shorter piece of writing (1-2 paragraphs) that I chose for the day. I tried to use excerpts that demonstrate both solid philosophical writing and the diversity and breadth of the philosophical tradition (in no particular order, this past year we read Berkeley, Simone Weil, Plato, Audre Lorde, Iris Murdoch, George Eliot, and more). After a short discussion of the text and a reflection on reading strategies, the Tuesday class session turned to a lesson on one aspect of philosophical writing and reading. Earlier in the semester, these lessons built on the reading discussion and went into more detail regarding annotation and note-taking strategies and the importance of writing early and often about what we are reading. In the middle of the semester, the lessons zoomed in on sentences, paragraphs, and multi-paragraph arguments, aiming to help students see—and learn to avoid—common issues occurring at each of these levels. Later lessons dealt with more complex tasks like articulating a philosophical problem and thesis, as well as planning, working on, and returning to longer writings.

Weekly Writing

After the Tuesday class, students had until the end of Wednesday to turn in a weekly writing exercise. This low-stakes assignment had them write two paragraphs about the Tuesday reading: one that reconstructs it, and one that evaluates it in some way. We spent a lot of time early in the semester talking about what makes for good reconstructions and evaluations of philosophical arguments, and a detailed handout on these two steps helped students orient themselves towards these two tasks. Students have given me the feedback that having to quickly write two paragraphs about a complicated reading helped them get over their anxieties about starting writing. Perhaps most importantly, the fact that students worked at this one task each week allowed their knowledge of the relationship between reconstruction and evaluation to become more complex. Later in the semester, I would sometimes overhear friendly philosophical debates on aspects of philosophical writing, for example about whether a reconstruction can ever be perfectly faithful to the text, or whether every reconstruction is also an evaluation.

Writing Workshop

On Thursday morning before class I would grade the weekly writing assignments on a five-point scale and choose two to serve as anonymized samples for the day’s workshop. The entirety of Thursday’s class was then dedicated to a writing workshop, focused on both formal features of each of the two assignments we were workshopping, as well as the way they dealt with, conveyed, and evaluated the content of the Tuesday reading. For each text we analyzed, we followed three steps:

1. Appreciation: What is the text doing that works?
2. Criticism: What isn’t working as well?
3. (Self-)Reflection: What can I learn about my own writing from the appreciations and criticisms that have been offered?

After two semesters teaching the course, I think that the key to this aspect of the class is to model respectful critical feedback during the workshops and to encourage students to do the same. While students are sometimes nervous about their own writing being chosen for the workshop, they often reflected that considerate criticism helped them understand their own limitations and think creatively of strategies to address them. The emphasis on self-reflection also created an environment where we recognized that the problems we notice in others’ writing are often those we find in our own. At my students’ suggestion, one change I plan to make next year is to allow students whose papers have been workshopped to re-work their weekly writings with the class’s criticisms in mind.

Conclusion

In our conversations at the end of the semester, my students were in near universal agreement that their writing had improved through consistent, low-stakes practice. They shared one important criticism, with which I will close: while the short format readings and writings helped them look at short texts and quickly start writing about them, and while their other upper-division courses gave them opportunities to practice longer writings, some would have liked more chances to read and write longer texts. We did some of this throughout the semester, but a few more chances to look at lengthier arguments certainly would not have hurt. And hopefully, after having strengthened their fundamental skills in this class, students will have more chances to apply these skills to longer arguments in their future philosophy courses.

Thanks for taking the time to check out my syllabus! Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about designing your own class on philosophical reading and writing, or if you have tips from your own experience about how to improve this course.

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