“Madman—Architect—Carpenter—Judge” Paradigm for contestants in the individual writing contests of the press conferences (district, division, regional, and national)

Index of topics: A. “Madman—Architect—Carpenter—Judge” Paradigm aka “Flowers Paradigm”; B. How can you as a contestant in the press conferences’ individual writing contests make use of the “Madman—Architect—Carpenter—Judge” Paradigm to start and complete your entry within the allotted time?

During the training sessions before the press conferences (district, division, regional, and national), some schoolpaper advisers tell their students who will join the individual writing contests to practice writing and finishing their entries within one hour. The problem is that these schoolpaper advisers do not provide their students with any kind of strategy for writing and finishing their entries within one hour.

What usually happens during the training (especially for those joining the editorial writing and column writing contests) is that, based on current events, the schoolpaper advisers and the students guess what possible topics the speaker/judge could give during the contests. The students then research these possible topics and write their editorials or columns. Sometimes, the guesses turn out to be accurate; sometimes, they turn out wrong.

“Madman—Architect—Carpenter—Judge” Paradigm aka “Flowers Paradigm”

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Dr. Betty S. Flowers is a former Professor of English and Director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library at the University of Texas. In her 1981 article titled “Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge: Roles and the Writing Process,” Dr. Flowers advises her students on how to get unstuck when they find themselves either unable to start writing or to continue writing. She says that writer’s block happens because the two competing energies of “madman” and “judge” clash with each other.

“What happens when you get stuck is that two competing energies are locked horn to horn, pushing against each other. One is the energy of what I’ll call your ’madman.’ He is full of ideas, writes crazily and perhaps rather sloppily, gets carried away by enthusiasm or anger, and if really let loose, could turn out ten pages an hour.

“The second is a kind of critical energy-what I’ll call the ’judge.’ He’s been educated and knows a sentence fragment when he sees one. He peers over your shoulder and says, ’That’s trash!’ with such authority that the madman loses his crazy confidence and shrivels up. You know the judge is right-after all, he speaks with the voice of your most imperious English teacher. But for all his sharpness of eye, he can’t create anything.

“So you’re stuck. Every time your madman starts to write, your judge pounces on him.

“Of course this is to over-dramatize the writing process-but not entirely. Writing is so complex, involves so many skills of heart, mind and eye, that sitting down to a fresh sheet of paper can sometime seem like ’the hardest work among those not impossible,’ as Yeats put it.

“Whatever joy there is in the writing process can come only when the energies are flowing freely-when you’re not stuck.”

Dr. Flowers says that in order for writers not to get stuck, they must separate the two energies (aka personas or characters) of the “madman” and the “judge”:

“If you let the judge with his intimidating carping come too close to the madman and his playful, creative energies, the ideas which form the basis for your writing will never have a chance to surface. But you can’t simply throw out the judge. The subjective personal outpourings of your madman must be balanced by the objective, impersonal vision of the educated critic within you. Writing is not just self-expression; it is communication as well.”

“So start by promising your judge that you’ll get around to asking his opinion, but not now. And then let the madman energy flow. Find what interests you in the topic, the question or emotion that it raises in you, and respond as you might to a friend-or an enemy. Talk on paper, page after page, and don’t stop to judge or correct sentences. Then, after a set amount of time, perhaps, stop and gather the paper up and wait a day.”

Dr. Flowers then introduces two other energies (aka personas or characters) into her paradigm — the architect and the carpenter:

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“The next morning, ask your ’architect’ to enter. She will read the wild scribblings saved from the night before and pick out maybe a tenth of the jottings as relevant or interesting. (You can see immediately that the architect is not sentimental about what the madman wrote; she is not going to save every crumb for posterity.) Her job is simply to select large chunks of material and to arrange them in a pattern that might form an argument. The thinking here is large, organizational, paragraph level thinking-the architect doesn’t worry about sentence structure.

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“No, the sentence structure is left for the ’carpenter’ who enters after the essay has been hewn into large chunks of related ideas. The carpenter nails these ideas together in a logical sequence, making sure each sentence is clearly written, contributes to the argument of the paragraph, and leads logically and gracefully to the next sentence. When the carpenter finishes, the essay should be smooth and watertight.”

Dr. Flowers finally advises her students to let the “judge” put the finishing touches to their writing:

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“And then the judge comes around to inspect. Punctuation, spelling, grammar, tone-all the details which result in a polished essay become important only in this last stage. These details are not the concern of the madman who’s come up with them, or the architect who’s organized them, or the carpenter who’s nailed the ideas together, sentence by sentence. Save details for the judge.”

The LinkedIn article “Build the Flowers Paradigm: Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge” summarizes the paradigm:

“The Madman dreams up wild ideas. The Architect plans how to execute them. The Carpenter builds (writes). The Judge edits.

“These are necessarily sequential. A writer needs to stifle any appearance by the Judge during the Madman phase and needs to keep the Architect at bay while the Carpenter is building.”

Bryan A. Garner popularized the Flowers Paradigm in his bestselling book “Legal Writing in Plain English.” (Garner is the editor of the prestigious Black’s Law Dictionary and the co-author of two books with the late US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.)

For more information about the “Madman—Architect—Carpenter—Judge” paradigm aka “Flowers Paradigm,” please read the following:

The 4 Hats Writers Must Wear: Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge

Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge: How to approach legal writing

How I Improved My Writing with the Flowers Paradigm: A Guide for Lawyers and Those Who Write

Steps to Better Writing, Part 1: The four stages of the Flowers Paradigm

Kill Writer’s Block with Madman Architect Carpenter Judge

Novelist Spotlight #14 Betty Sue Flowers and the Madman Method of writing

Beating Writer’s Block: The Flowers Paradigm

How can you as a contestant in the press conferences’ individual writing contests make use of the “Madman—Architect—Carpenter—Judge” Paradigm to start and complete your entry within the allotted time?

In the article “Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge (Getting Unstuck),” the author discusses how he applies the Flowers Paradigm to how he writes:

1. Generate: Unleash your energies and generate as much raw material as you can. [Madman]

2. Organize: Select the most promising chunks and organize them at the conceptual level. [Architect]

3. Refine: Drop down a level and refine your work’s overall logic, clarity, and flow. [Carpenter]

4. Polish: Get down to details and final polishing only after you’ve progressed through the first three phases. [Judge]

Whatever individual writing contest (news, features, editorials, columns, sports, or sci-tech) that you’re joining, you can divide the allotted time into the paradigm’s four stages. For example, after you’re given the topic for the writing contest:

Madman (12 minutes): Brainstorm and write down in any order whatever comes to your mind in relation to the topic; you don’t have to write in complete sentences.

Architect (10 minutes): Choose from whatever you have written down, group the related items or ideas, and organize them into paragraphs, without paying attention to sentence structures.

Carpenter (17 minutes): Develop your sentences so that they flow from one sentence to another [cohesion] and that they contribute to whatever you want to say in each paragraph and in your entry [coherence].

Judge (5 minutes): Check your entry as to “punctuation, spelling, grammar, tone-all the details which result in a polished essay.”

Final stage (around 16 minutes): Use your remaining time to turn (write) your rough draft into your final entry.

Note: You can vary the time that you spend for each stage of the paradigm depending on the total period of time alloted by the contest committee.