On Writing a Paper | Tomoki Kamo, Dean of the Faculty of Policy Management
2022.04.12
To all new students, you must be spending some hectic days with the entrance ceremony, kick-off lectures, and course registration. As one or two months pass and you settle into university life, you will find more opportunities to express your own ideas.
These expressions can take various forms, such as oral presentations, papers, or creative works. I believe that many of them will involve "writing." Writing a paper. I want you to think about the meaning of writing a paper.
The international political scientist Masataka Kosaka (1966) discusses "writing" as follows: "To 'write' is to clarify one's own position and therefore to commit oneself." These words are found at the beginning of the preface to his book "International Politics." Kosaka continues:
"But now, as I reconsider international politics in general, it not only confirms my previous arguments in principle but also compels me to think more deeply about what had been ambiguous until now" (Kosaka 1966, iii–iv).
According to Kosaka, it is through "writing" that we verbalize the vague ideas that exist in our minds. As a result, our thoughts become clearer, and we can firmly confirm our own positions.
This suggests that clear thinking is born from writing. Without writing, your scholarship will not deepen.
What is scholarship? By complete chance, I once contemplated this question through an encounter with a certain book when I was an undergraduate student. It was a book assigned as required reading for a seminar in another faculty. Let me quote a passage from it, though it is a long one.
"But in the scholarly world, everyone knows that a scholar's work will be outdated in ten, twenty, or fifty years. That is the common fate of all scholars. And this is the very meaning of scholarly work itself. ... This is because a work that is 'fulfilled' in a scholarly sense is one that raises new 'questions,' and it desires to be 'surpassed'—to become outdated—[by later work that answers those questions]" (Weber, trans. Nakayama 2009, 187) (Note).
This idea of scholarship "desiring" to be "surpassed" and "to become outdated" was very fresh to me. At the time, lacking the ability to read through the book on my own, I tried to understand it with the help of a senior student from another faculty.
This senior student also told me the following: In order to surpass something, you must read many related papers and increase your knowledge. However, there is an etiquette that you must always observe when doing so.
Thus, I was taught how to cite sources and add notes when writing a paper. The senior student also stressed to me that being meticulous with citations and notes is the beauty of a paper, and that neglecting this would lead to the irreversible disgrace of plagiarism. To plagiarize another's paper, they said, is not only to harm its author but also to debase oneself.
When you try to "surpass" something through the act of writing a paper, I want you to treat your subject with respect. Only then will your own papers, in turn, be surpassed with respect in the future. I believe this is how scholarship progresses, little by little.
Throughout your university life, you will be blessed with many opportunities to express your own ideas. For this reason, please do not shy away from writing papers. And please also learn the etiquette for writing them. A rich student life surely lies beyond that.
Note
The translation the author read at the time was Max Weber, trans. Kunio Odaka (1980), "Science as a Vocation," Iwanami Shoten.
References
Kosaka, Masataka. 1966. "International Politics: Fear and Hope." Chuko Shinsho.
Weber, Max. 2009. "Politics as a Vocation, Science as a Vocation." Translated by Gen Nakayama. Nikkei BP Classics.