In this first ever interview for The Writer’s Workshop, I spoke with Philip McCarthy, an associate professor at the University of Sharjah (UAE). Dr. McCarthy has been teaching for over 30 years in various countries, including Turkey, Japan, Britain, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates. His primary research focus has encompassed applied natural language processing, discourse science, and foundational writing. He has made significant contributions to the development of automated writing evaluation tools, including Coh-Metrix (McNamara et al., 2014) and Auto-Peer (McCarthy et al., 2021). Additionally, Dr. McCarthy co-authored the L2 writing textbook, Writing the Research Paper: Multicultural Perspectives for Writing in English as a Second Language (McCarthy & Ahmed, 2022). One standout aspect of this book is an innovative technique called the plausible question contention (PQC), which promotes cohesion in writing by generating and answering plausible questions at the end of each sentence. In our conversation, which was edited for length and clarity, we explore the application of the PQC for professional writers like teachers and researchers to enhance the cohesiveness of their writing by framing it as a conversation. We also discuss the role that new AI tools like ChatGPT can play in supporting this conversational approach to improving the clarity of one’s writing.
Jerry Talandis Jr.: One of the things I was struck by in your book was the way you liken good cohesive writing to having a conversation, not with someone else, but with yourself. However, before we get into the details of your approach, it might be best to begin by defining some key terms. What is cohesion, and how does it differ from coherence, a concept it is often associated with?
Philip McCarthy: I think that’s a great question, and I love it when people ask that. You’d think such concepts were set in stone, but in my experience, the literature is not settled on what they mean exactly. Some have spoken about cohesion being at the local, sentence-to-sentence level, while coherence is at the global level. So, the two ideas are very, very different. I tell my students that when I say cohesion, I’m going from sentence to sentence. And when I say coherence, I’m looking at every sentence as it relates to the thesis or to the globality of the text. And I then tell them, “Don’t worry about it!” Just focus on good writing and don’t worry about abstract concepts.
That’s a good point! In your chapter on coherence, you discuss one of the biggest causes of incoherency, the curse of knowledge. What is that all about?
Yes, the curse of knowledge. That’s a great question. I think with professional writers and with students, they all share this problem. It’s so difficult for any writer to separate themselves from what they know and to understand what the reader doesn’t know. This is the challenge of teaching itself. I know what I know, but I don’t know what you don’t know. And I don’t know what it is that you do know. You know the feeling, right? Putting these things together is so hard, which is why I look at writing as being this conversation.
And the most important feature in writing for me is a full stop. A full stop is the opportunity where we mentally process information. We don’t just pause for breath—we pause to process what we have just read. As we do, our minds cannot help but to generate questions and expectations and predictions for what comes next. If we’re conscious of this process, of what we do at full stops, then we can be conscious of what we need to write next. This awareness is what gets us past the curse of knowledge. Will my reader know what this means, or am I just demonstrating how smart I am? With some of my students, I’ve noticed there’s definitely the urge to “show him that I’m smart.” With professional writers, you tend to forget what it is that other people don’t know that you do. There’s almost a humility in being a bad writer.
Interesting. So, I can see that knowing your audience is key, right? Part of the decision-making involved when you’re choosing words or what to say depends a lot on who you’re writing for, the situation, and what it calls for.
Yes, that’s right.
So, this leads me to an innovative technique you’ve developed to help students enhance cohesiveness within a text. You’ve called it the Plausible Question Contention, or PQC, and it is designed to get writers past this curse of knowledge. Could you describe this technique and how it works?
Sure. What I invariably do with my students is start them off with a sentence, which I spring on them out of the blue, like: “Last week, I went to Chicago.” They look at me for a while because they have no idea why I’ve said this. And slowly, it’s almost as if they can’t help it, they’ll say something like, “Why did you go there? Or like, “What did you do?”, or “Did you have a good time?” And that’s it. You cannot help but to process the information and generate a question. So, to get past the curse of knowledge, to be cohesive in your writing, that’s exactly what you’ve got to do when you come to a full stop. That’s what your mind does, and you feel uncomfortable until you’ve done that. And there’s probably like ten other questions you could reasonably, plausibly, put out there. So, the object isn’t necessarily that you come up with the best question, although that’s great if you can. To be cohesive, you just have to at least answer a plausible one. It doesn’t really matter which one it is, as long as it’s plausible. Because when the reader reads the next sentence, the information will be easily processed because it is the answer to a plausible question generated from the first sentence.
So, imagine, if you had a high-speed camera that could capture at a million frames per second, what’s going on in your mind as you’re about to write that next sentence. Imagine you could see all of these questions popping up as they come to you, and then the one you end up going with as you continue to write. If we could really slow things down, we’d see that we’re constantly and naturally generating and responding to questions as we write. With this PQC technique, we’re essentially making a largely unconscious process conscious. By putting active attention on the decisions we make when writing, even sentence to sentence, we’re able to bypass the curse of knowledge. Am I understanding it correctly?
Yes, yes, yes. Exactly.
How would you recommend a professional writer to utilize this sort of technique?
Well, when you have a conversation with your writing, and you generate plausible questions based on something you’ve written, ask yourself, “Which is the most interesting one? Which one do you think my audience most needs to know? Which one relates most to my thesis?” In the course of reflecting on these questions, you’ll see where you can go with your narrative and where you cannot go. This will enable you to choose your next sentence. As for the 3rd sentence, you have to bear in mind that there are two sentences that have come before that you now have to reconcile.
I see. That’s very practical. It strikes me that the PQC technique is one possible antidote to long and windy writing.
Yes, exactly. If your sentence is so long that you can’t generate a question, then your cohesion has been lost before you even get to the full stop. That’s why these long and winding sentences are not helpful to anyone. If you can’t generate the question, neither can your audience. You’re not going to be cohesive. Go back and fix your pre-question.
Also, for professional authors, I can see the PQC as helping with moments when you get stuck with writer’s block, of not knowing what to write next. By generating plausible questions, you give yourself options and ideas for possible ways forward.
Yes, exactly.
These days we have access to new generative AI tools like ChatGPT, which could be a way of generating these types of questions. What do you think about that?
Yeah, that would be such an ethical and productive way of using AI. It’s just sitting there, very happy to be a conversation partner. If you type in some text and ask it to generate plausible questions about what could come next, then you’re not asking it to generate text for you, which allows you to avoid ethical plagiarism problems. If we set it up so that instead of generating the answers, it generates the questions, then you, as the writer, can sit back and realize, “Oh, yeah, that’s a good idea. I want to write about that next,” and you’ll be the one writing, not the AI.
I can imagine how especially powerful this can be for novice academic authors, such as a teacher who’s preparing their first paper for publication on some classroom research and perhaps is feeling quite overwhelmed, or for authors for whom English is not their first language. With ChatGPT, they could write a prompt like, “What are some possible plausible questions that could follow on from this sentence or paragraph?” GPT would then list a bunch of questions from which the author could generate further ideas on what to write next.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, even if all you’ve got is a topic, you can generate questions from that. Then you can build your thesis and then generate questions from that. ChatGPT will endlessly sit there generating things that it doesn’t know yet, but it would like to know based on what you’ve written. It’s back and forth, question and answer, just like a conversation.
Yes, that’s right. So that’s pretty cool. By generating questions after each sentence or each section and moving on step by step, it’s a really interesting way of going about the writing process. Finally, you also mention in your book some specific techniques for fixing cohesion issues. Could you elaborate on those?
Yeah, there are three things that are going to help you most with that next sentence: recycling, transitionals, and this + noun. For example, if you write, “The role of music can be helpful in therapy,” words like role and therapy can be recycled in the next sentence. Students are so often taught at lower levels to not repeat words in a sentence, but they can be repeated between sentences to enhance cohesion. There are also these wonderful transitions, such as however or in addition that tell the reader exactly what’s going to come up in the next sentence. Similarly, you can use this + noun, as in this problem, this solution, or this issue to take what has gone before and lead it forward. So, these are some specific words that can help authors as they go about answering the questions that have been generated.
Okay, to wrap things up, we’ve got the problem of the curse of knowledge; how that contributes to a lack of coherence in writing; and the PQC as a way of moving beyond this situation by generating plausible questions after each full stop, which enables authors to think more clearly about the choices they’re making as they go about expressing their ideas. AI tools like ChatGPT can be called upon to facilitate this conversational process. Finally, we have specific cohesive devices and strategies such as recycling, transitionals, and this + noun, which are common ways of building cohesion. Anything else to add?
Just to emphasize that again, if your sentences are so long that you can’t generate questions from them, then your cohesion has been lost. If you can’t generate the question, neither can your readers.
References
McCarthy, P. M., & Ahmed, K. (2022). Writing the research paper: Multicultural perspectives for writing in English as a second language. Bloomsbury Academic. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350164192
McCarthy, P. M., Al-harthy, A., Buck, R. H., Ahmed, K., Thomas, A. M., Kaddoura, N. W., Duran, N. D., & Graesser, A. C. (2021). Introducing Auto-Peer: A computational tool designed to provide automated feedback for L2 writers. The Asian ESP Journal, 17(5), 9-43. https://www.asian-esp-journal.com/volume-17-issue-5-june-2021/
McNamara, D. S., Graesser, A. C., McCarthy, P. M., & Cai, Z. (2014). Automated evaluation of text and discourse with Coh-Metrix. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511894664