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Notes from a Writer’s Desk: A Taxonomy of Writers

“It is good to have hair-splitters & lumpers,” Charles Darwin wrote in an 1857 letter to his closest friend, the British botanist and explorer Joseph Dalton Hooker. Darwin was characterizing—and caricaturing—two extreme approaches to the classification of plants: the “hair-splitters” create new species for every specimen they find, while the “lumpers” group all similar specimens into one big, baggy species. “Splitters” quibble and qualify; “lumpers” overgeneralize. “Splitters” see many small things where “lumpers” see one big thing. But then, as Darwin suggests, the scientific community ultimately needs both.

Darwin’s intellectual taxonomy applies well beyond the botanical. Thinking about the splitters and the lumpers can also help us understand what happens when we think, argue, and write. Some version of the splitting-lumping problem plays out within every scholarly field, and even within our own writing. After all—and here my own inner hair-splitter seizes the wheel—it is not that we are either splitters or lumpers; or at the very least, it does not have to be this way. Like plants straining towards the sun, we certainly each have our own, spontaneous intellectual tropisms. But good writing slides along a “splitter-lumper” continuum. And if “hair-splitting” and “lumping” sound like pitfalls, intellectual potholes to avoid along our writerly journeys, we can also turn these terms the other way around: splitters have a knack for nuance; lumpers can perceive patterns in chaos.

So maybe hair-splitters and lumpers are like two shoulder angels, each whispering in a proximal ear. Each one has her special powers—and, of course, her weak points. Each has her place, her moment. Our “splitter angel” sees the world in pixelated close-up. She likes to deconstruct, complicate, and complexify. She is comfortable in chaos, and her palate includes every shade of gray, from slate to charcoal to smoke. Perched on the other shoulder, our “lumper angel” has a gaze that softens distinctions to reveal larger unities and cohesive patterns. This angel prefers order and structure over atomic chaos, and she paints in a limited palette of bold primaries. She proffers a view of the proverbial forest through the trees (unlike the splitter angel, who can tell the willow from the redwood).

If you find yourself struggling with one or the other of these angels, you are in good company. At the outset of his now-classic essay about Leo Tolstoy, titled The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953), the philosopher Isaiah Berlin quotes a line from the Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” From this gnomic parable, Berlin deduces two kinds of artistic and intellectual temperaments: the hedgehogs, who relate everything to a single central vision, and the foxes, who tend to adapt themselves to an ever-changing set of experiences. Berlin argues that Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but that he wanted to be a hedgehog. Had Tolstoy been a botanist, Darwin might have called him an incurable hair-splitter who believed in the supreme value of lumping. Tolstoy’s hedgehog-loving foxiness serves as a reminder to us all—whether you feel like a hedgehog, a fox, or a monkey with a typewriter—that good writing so often involves a hybridity.

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