Writing in your head

Suppose you were writing a book review. If you are anything like me, you would be thinking about what to write as you read the book, with actual words, phrases and even sentences forming in your head. Writing,then, is a mental activity. you have to write it down to know what you have, and also so as not to forget it, but the main work takes place in the brain.

I only point out something so self evident because I think the writing down is an obstacle for some. the student who can talk but not write, for example. I think that I could write just as well by dictating my words as by typing them or composing with pen,
When I write a poem, I think it up in my head and write it down later.


So perhaps the issue is one of memory. A working memory so weak that it can contain only a few words at a time?

Getting Better At It

If you write every day and use some form of deliberative practice, in which you think consciously about what you are doing, then you ought to be getting better at it. Writing well should get both faster and easier.

I say this because there is a common view that writing never gets easier, that true improvement is not possible, or that the first draft will always be crappy even for a good writer. This has not been my experience. I find that my first drafts are better than they used to be, and that my finished writing is more eloquent than it used to be. I still rewrite, but now I am going from good to better rather than from shitty to mediocre.

If the conventional view were correct, then writing would be unlike any other human activity, in which deliberate and intelligent practice leads gradually to improvement.

I am smarter than you

I used to think of myself as very smart. This was a mistake, because what really matters is the ability to communicate ideas, whether through teaching or writing. It helps to have ideas, of course, but there will always be people more intellectually brilliant or more erudite, with more knowledge of philosophy or theory, than me (or you, probably). Some of these smart people write books that I cannot even understand (not smart enough maybe?), but then I wonder... I am fairly smart, so a book I don't understand probably puts itself out of range of large numbers of reasonably intelligent academic readers. Academic writing is already out of range of most of the general public, who read nothing at all. It is usually too specialized to be of much interest, and also very difficult. Often it is not well-written either. It should be possible to write in a way that at least reaches the average academic reader. I'd say even the below average one. You know that half of college professors are in the bottom 50th percentile of college professors? I'd say that something that an undergraduate majoring in your own field could understand might be a reasonable standard.

Outline for Writing Workshop

This is what we decided to do for the writing workshop. My colleague and good friend Jorge are doing this together.

Writing workshop for 11/11/11

I. Time management, writing every day, etc... (JM)

II. Strategies for managing a larger project, working with advisor. (Jorge)

III. The structure of the dissertation chapter and article. Avoiding the data dump (JM)

IV. Model articles. JM and Jorge.

V. Getting publications out of the dissertation. How to publish articles (JM & Jorge).

VI. Some academic writing blogs: Get a Life PhD, Writing as a Second Language, Constructing the Academy, Stupid Motivational Tricks (JM).

http://prosedoctor.blogspot.com/
http://secondlanguage.blogspot.com/
http://getalifephd.blogspot.com/
http://constructingtheacademy.blogspot.com/

Default Settings

The default font for Word is times new roman. I change my default to palatino, which I think looks better on the screen and page. One journal required me to submit in times new roman, so I did, but I was irritated.

What are your default settings? These might be largely unconscious, so you might not even be aware of what they are. It might be the use of the passive voice: "In this essay it will be shown that..." It might be certain authorial stance, a certain length of paragraph or sentence. One colleague I had once ended every paper with a section titled "conclusion." One grad student in his dissertation introduced the name of every proper name with a qualifier: "Cultural critic Edward Said..." "Literary theorist Jacques Derrida." That was damned irritating.

I distinguish two kinds of default, functional and dysfunctional. A functional one works well for you, like palatino for me. It is a comfortable habit that does no harm and reduces the number of irrelevant choices. I know approximately how long a paragraph I like to write, typically, and I am comfortable staying with that in most cases.

Dsyfunctional defaults are those that get in the way. They are bad habits that the writer is not even aware of. In some cases, like ending every article with a section title "conclusion," there was no real harm done. In other cases, though a default can show a certain unmindfulness. Introducing every single proper name with a description of who they are is irritating, because the writer has not chosen to do so when appropriate. Maybe she was reading too much Dan Brown.*

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*The first sentence of a bestselling novel by this author is "Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery."

Do You Know Who I Am?

I've received some invitations to be a referee in my email recently. "Hey, we're starting a new on-line journal, if you want to submit articles or be a referee for us... If you want to be a referee, send us your cv."

My reaction, always, is to delete the message. Why? I have enough peer-reviewing to do already. I can publish, myself, in better journals. Being a member of an editorial board or being asked to referee a certain article in my speciality is fine, but I don't need to send you my cv to referee for you! I am an established, senior scholar in my field at an R1 institution and if you are contacting me at all to do peer reviews you should know who I am.*

The journal in question who most recently contacted me requires that their referees simply have a PhD and be college faculty. (Any idiot can get a PhD.) There is no effort to get the most qualified referees, merely a mass email sent, I presume, to many, many people. This particular journal did not seem to be scam or one that required a submission fee. That is all the more unfortunate. If someone is starting a legit journal, they should contact distinguished scholars for the editorial board, not a random group of no-name referees.

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*"Do you know who I am?" is always an assholic thing to say. I apologize for sounding like an asshole in this post. Even if you feel the urge to say that, don't say it. Ever, Even if the person who's irritated you deserves this response, you will still be more of an asshole than that person, who is simply dumb, rude, or ignorant, but is not the arrogant jerk that you are.

Socratic Teaching

The Socratic method involves some complications. Ideally, it would be the method I always used, but I find myself sometimes lecturing, sometimes doing the group activities that the students like, sometimes using Socratic questions but not doing so well with them. I think if I outline the problems I am having maybe I will find a solution.

The instructor in this method either does not know the answers to the questions or pretends not to know, or knows but isn't saying yet. The Socratic method for a discussion often becomes a guessing game or fishing expedition rather than a true discussion. Socrates himself badgered his interlocutors until they came up with his own conclusions. The Socratic method is ineffective if the results are those reducible to matters of fact. It only works when the true aim is to teach the students to think better than they do, and where the students could conceivably come up with answers surprising to everyone in the room.

Students sometimes don't have enough to say. They need the questions in advance. Even graduate students, who you would expect to be able to discuss a text just by virtue of having read it, need a lot of initial prodding or advanced preparation.

The gap between the professor and the students can be too great. There has to be way of finding a middle ground, taking the students beyond the kind of answers they would typically give by prodding them a bit.

Finally, the language issue. Students don't feel that they can express their ideas in Spanish. What they say is often unclear, simplified, or otherwise modified by a process of interior translation.