Feedback loops: book excerpt

I had an opportunity to post an excerpt of my book on the Textbook and Academic Authors Association blog (http://blog.taaonline.net), and I'm reposting it here because I can (formatting altered).

A good writing practice is the foundation of good writing. A good practice is built on regular action, and depends on the ideas or perspectives that lead to effective action. When faced with a large writing project, it is important to look at the relationship between your work practice and your emotions. Today’s actions influence tomorrow’s approach to the project, and work today can make it easier to work tomorrow.

The following is a slightly edited excerpt from my book, Getting the Best of Your Dissertation: Practical Perspectives for Effective Research:

The Downward Spiral and the Upward Spiral

The projects upon which we work have emotional impact: when things go well, we feel good; when things go poorly, we feel bad. In working on an extended project, this emotional dynamic can be crucial, especially with respect to self-reinforcing patterns of feedback.

It’s pretty easy to get stuck in a downward emotional spiral. If something goes wrong and we miss a goal, then we feel bad. And, feeling bad, it can be hard to get started on work, which impedes progress. Each day that passes without making good progress contributes to the sense that we are stuck and to doubts as to whether have what it takes to finish. Further, each day that we don’t make progress is another day that we return to the same ideas—and so instead of facing fresh ideas and fresh problems, we keep coming back to the same thing, which contributes to a sense of drudgery and frustration. And with each passing day of frustration, the emotional distress and sense of difficulty can increase.

On the other hand, it’s possible to initiate an upward spiral. If we get a piece of work done, we often feel good at having made progress, and this progress boosts our confidence to take the next step, which makes that next step easier, thus boosting our progress further, thereby reinforcing our confidence. The more momentum we have on an upward spiral, the easier it is to keep moving past some non-research interruption, or past some research-related difficulty. And, the more progress we make, the more we are working with fresh ideas. If we have been making progress and feeling good about it, and if our interest is high because we are engaged with fresh ideas, then we are more likely to want to get back to work after being interrupted. And if we’ve been working regularly and making progress, when we discover some error in our previous work, it feels less important, because of our general experience of making progress.

It’s easy to get into the downward spiral—after all, it doesn’t take much energy to do no work. There are, however, costs to not making progress. The most immediate cost is the emotional burden of not making progress. But in the long run, financial costs and interpersonal costs also become significant. Financially there are fees to paid, as well as loss of potential income. Interpersonally, lack of progress can strain relationships with professors, colleagues, family, and friends. The downward spiral is easy to start, but the long-term costs are high. The upward spiral is harder to start and keep going. It requires constant effort to keep making progress. But progress has its rewards, so although the upward spiral has a high cost of entry, the return on the investment is high enough that the benefits outweigh the costs.

Aim for Brevity

I had an opportunity to post an excerpt of my book on the Textbook and Academic Authors Association blog (http://blog.taaonline.net), and I'm reposting it here because I can (formatting slightly altered).

A good writing practice is the foundation of good writing. A good practice is built on regular action, and depends on the ideas or perspectives that lead to effective action. When planning a writing project, one effective idea is to aim for brevity: keep your work short.

The following is a slightly edited excerpt from my book, Getting the Best of Your Dissertation: Practical Perspectives for Effective Research:

Aim for Brevity

Pragmatically speaking, it’s usually less work to write a shorter draft. I suggest aiming your drafts—especially early drafts—at a fraction of the expected total. There are five additional reasons to keep your draft targets short:

1. If you write a short draft and it’s accepted, then you have moved more quickly toward completion.
2. It’s typically much easier to add material to a short draft than it is to remove material from a draft that is too long. When adding, what is needed is to find a place to insert the material, which can often be done without significant revisions to the rest of the draft. When removing material, however, it may be necessary to rewrite large portions of the work in order to remove material that is intertwined with the larger body of the work.
3. In my experience, it is much more common to over-shoot a length target than it is to come in under it.
4. There is greater psychological ease in aiming for a shorter target: it is both easier and less intimidating to work on a shorter paper.
5. It’s better to be brief and leave your reader wanting more than to overwhelm your reader with material. If nothing else, a short work gives your reader fewer opportunities to find that you have made a mistake. In general, the absence of some specific issue from a well focused work is less likely to cause a reader to doubt your abilities than an overabundance of material that is only tangentially significant.

More could be said, but an argument in favor of brevity should be short!

If You're Stuck, Write About It

I had an opportunity to post an excerpt of my book on the Textbook and Academic Authors Association blog (http://blog.taaonline.net), and I'm reposting it here because I can (formatting slightly altered).

A good writing practice is the foundation of good writing. A good practice is built on regular action, and depends on the ideas or perspectives that lead to effective action. When faced with a large writing project, it is important to keep working and to keep writing when stuck. The more regular the practice, the more effective it will be. One way to keep writing is to have something to write about when you’re stuck. The following is a slightly edited excerpt from my book, Getting the Best of Your Dissertation: Practical Perspectives for Effective Research:

If you’re stuck, write about it

If you’re ever wondering what to do next, and this uncertainty is keeping you from making progress, write about it. Write down what you’re thinking about. Write down the problems you face. Write down things that you could do. Write about what you do want to do, and why. Write about what you don’t want to do, and why. If you’re having conceptual difficulties in your work, practice writing them down.

Some of the questions you could address:

• What are you stuck on?
• What is the main issue?
• What is one specific problem you’re faced with?
• What are possible approaches to that problem?

These questions can be applied in almost any situation. Can’t decide which book or article to read? Write about the works that you’re considering—what’s good about them? What’s bad? What parts of it agree with the work you’ve already done? If you do this, you’ll have a written record of the book that you may be able to use later, but more importantly it will help you focus your attention on possible next steps with respect to that work.

When you’re stuck, writing about your “stuckness” is a warmup practice: it helps you find ideas and get moving without any of the pressure to get things right. The point is not to create something that you share with others, so don’t worry about its quality or what others would think of it. Use it to tease out different possibilities and find useful steps that could move your dissertation forward. Such writing has the added benefit of practicing writing and helping you develop your writing skill.

Sweet New Reviews of My Book

To my great satisfaction, my book (Getting the Best of Your Dissertation) was read and appreciated by a professor who liked it so much she wrote me a review both on goodreads and on amazon.

I'm putting the two texts here, because I like seeing them together, and realistically, after working as hard and as long as I did on this book, it's really pleasing to read a few compliments on my efforts.

Here's one:

As an advisor to many doctoral students past and present, I am delighted that Dave Harris wrote this invaluable book! It provided immensely helpful strategies for thinking well about one's dissertation, and living well during the process of researching and writing it.

And here's the other:

As a professor at a research university, I'm always on the lookout for books that could help the graduate students I mentor-- and this one is uniquely helpful. The philosophical, psychological, and project-strategy aspects of dissertation-writing on which this book centers are essential, but are rarely addressed in other guides to dissertation-writing. I hope all the masters and doctoral students I mentor will read this book because doing so will not only greatly improve their theses/dissertations, but will also save me many hours of advising. *Getting the Best of Your Dissertation* will be immensely helpful for graduate students in every discipline and field of study! After reading the book, I was delighted to learn that Dave Harris also offers dissertation coaching and editing services. See thoughtclearing (dot) com

I couldn't ask for better than that. I mean there's even a plug for my business and mention of my website. Thank you, Professor Foot! And here's a link to my book: Getting the Best of Your Dissertation