Thought Clearing

Problems with for-profit education

2011-08-01T22:39:00.000-07:00

I have a client who is getting terrible advice and direction from his academic advisors at a for-profit university. All my clients, of course, are having trouble--they wouldn't come find me if they weren't. But it seems to me that the students at for-profit schools get hit the hardest--they pay the most and get the least support, and the least useful support. I do not mean to suggest that all for-profit schools are doing their students a disservice, but I think that some are.

A for-profit school has, at best, a mixed incentive to graduate its students: every student who doesn't graduate will pay fees for the next semester. Of course graduating students helps you promote your business to future clients, but still--on the principle that a bird in the hand in worth two in the bush--for-profit schools have an incentive to keep students from graduating.

For-profit schools also have an incentive to cut resources spent on educating students to a minimum--the lower the costs, the higher the profit. Of course, to the extent that there are accreditation boards, there is a bar of quality over which all schools must pass, but there is incentive to stay as close to the bar as possible.

For-profit schools, it must be kept in mind, are intended to make a profit. That is a strong incentive which necessarily guides the decisions made by for-profit schools. There may be other motivations guiding them, but their desire to make a profit is necessarily central. And it's an aim that competes with the aim of educating people.

In public education, the aim of the school (ideally) is to educate people to contribute to the common good. Of course there may be corrupt people within the public education system who are trying to work that system for their own gain, and thus detract from the resources spent on the students, but then again, it's not as if for-profit companies are free from individual malfeasance.

I guess I would say that if you're thinking of giving your money to a for-profit school, you might well benefit from seeing if there are any public universities that offer comparable programs.

I have worked with students who did have helpful faculty at their for-profit school, but the worst I've ever seen at a real school (public, or private non-profit) is far above what I've seen at the for-profit schools. The quality of the feedback received by the client who prompted this post is really atrocious--in three rounds of submission, he has gotten useful feedback twice, but once the useful feedback was followed by direction that was absolutely indefensible from any scholarly perspective.

If you're having trouble at your for-profit school, I can help, and I'll charge less than your school.

When it rains, it pours.

2011-07-07T23:58:00.000-07:00

Sometimes things happen in groups. The old saying "bad things come in threes," comes to mind. We, perhaps, remember the bad things more readily than the good. Do good things also come in threes? or fours? or pairs?

Currently, it seems like I'm having one of those groupings with all sorts of "bills" coming due at once. Not actual bills (well, those, too, and having those contributes to the sense of lots happening at once), but occasional costs, all happening to hit at once. I had to replace my computer last week (it was 4.5 years old), and the software. And then my backpack died (it was about 9 years old). And then my glasses broke (3 years old). Then the annual auto registration is also due this month. And I was hoping to take a short vacation (which would cost extra $$ over my normal expenditures).

And I was thinking about how such basically random events sometimes all happen at once, and then we maybe feel like everything is falling apart, when it just happens that it was a random grouping of events, each of which was individually basically certain.

It's not a sign of things breaking down. It's just random chance serving up a double helping of difficulty.

Of course, when the sun shines, things are good: just as there are confluences of negative events that make for occasional difficult weeks, there are confluences of things working right that make for weeks that go by easily. We don't necessarily notice those weeks, though. I clearly remember places in Tolkein's work where he says "but stories of good times are quickly told," I suppose that's at work here: the stories of good times are more easily told. This reminds me of the value of having some practice of stating what you're grateful for or what is good in your life: if you want to remember the good, sometimes you have to work for it.

What I write about when I write about what I think about when I'm running.

2011-07-03T11:38:00.000-07:00

Among other things, I think of annoying extensions/alterations of Murakami's title (which itself is an adaptation of of a Raymond Chandler title).

What I was thinking, partly, was that I could nearly write a book out of the different thoughts that fill one run--to write them all would take at least as long as the hour or two that I was out running....but probably longer, because turning ideas into structured sentences isn't instantaneous. That assumes that I could even remember all the things that I thought about.

I spent a lot of today's run thinking about how thinking aversive thoughts can make things worse. By thinking about how difficult the thing is, the negative anticipation builds up. And this makes dealing with the thing worse. And how you don't want to remind people too strongly of the unpleasant aspects of things that they have to do.

Also considered were: the question of how soon to start exercise after an injury; what my friend was up to at the moment I passed her house; what route I was going to run; how the same group of people managed to get on the same public volleyball courts every week (you'd think sometimes some else would get there first)...there are too many people passed to wonder at every person's story.
I thought about writing, of course. I thought about how understanding other people's stories is the foundation for writing good fiction. I didn't think this then (or at least not as I remember): understanding other people's stories is the foundation of good communication, generally.

Part of what I thought about while running today was how one of the important tasks for the writer is to filter through all the possible ideas that could be talked about, and to stay focused on topic.

What I don't think about when I'm running

2011-07-01T20:10:00.000-07:00

I was out for a walk today (about 10 miles, but not yet running after falling down--almost two weeks ago now--still sore).

I saw one runner overtake another, and both of them had a look on their face like the competition meant something. Even though they were just running on a bike path.

It started me thinking about Murakami again and how so much of his relationship to running is competitive. He talks about how important it is for him to beat a certain time when he runs a marathon; he talks about how important it is just to run in races; he talks about passing other runners enough that it's clear that he likes to pass other runners. Obviously he's not so consumed with competitive fire that he can't deal with the many better runners in the world, but still...

Personally, I don't run races, partly because the whole competitive pass you/pass me thing is distasteful. The first race I ever ran in (I ran because my friend's organization was having a fund-raiser), I remember gaining on some guy near the end of the race and the look on his face as he pushed to stay ahead of me. I was just out trying to run the right amount for my body--hard enough to be working hard, but not hard enough to really suffer.

In all the races I've run, my plan was only to finish without suffering; to take the run as if it were any other run--pace myself so that I get the right workout for me. I start off slow, and let my pace increase as I feel myself get into the groove. At the end I slow down, if the run is long enough--generally the slow down comes around mile nine, if I run that far. And I basically did the exact same thing in the races I ran, too.

I was wondering, however, about the parallel to writing. Murakami's book, of course, is all about the parallel between running and writing. Because I can see that there is a possible relevant parallel: Murakami's competitive, goal-driven attitude is gratified partly by the accomplishments--like completing and publishing a book. Me, I don't have that; I just enjoy the process--which maybe explains why I haven't completed several books: I'm not really concerned with the result, so much as with the process.

In this, I think I could learn from Murakami. There's something to be said for my laid-back, no-pressure writing attitude--I enjoy writing and do a fair amount. But balance is good: there's a lot of value in the bringing a project to completion, and one wants to have the drive that finishing takes.

I was talking with a writer yesterday who has been blocked, but who said, "I've been writing, and it seems like I'm making progress."
I responded "If you're writing; you're making progress. It's not about 'seeming.'"

In the light of this discussion, I see that there are two sides to this, and in a way we were both right. I was right from the perspective of the writing process and the writer's relationship to writing. If you haven't been writing at all, and you start to write, that's making progress in your writing practice. But if your writing doesn't ultimately move towards the complete work, submitted and accepted, then one essential dimension of progress is missing.

Who is going to say a good word for you if you don't?

2011-06-24T23:22:00.000-07:00

I was talking yesterday with a fried of mine who has recently hooked up with an agent who will book him for speaking engagements. And we were talking about work and publishing and he was saying, basically, that in general, and with the agent in particular, if someone sees you out promoting yourself, that makes you more attractive to them because they know that you will help them with their work. This was, of course, in the context of publishing books and my promoting my own business.

The way he framed it was very good for me, because I am not enthusiastic about self-promotion. I want my merits to be recognized by for themselves. This is, I know, naive--there is plenty of merit out there, and the question of whose attention you catch is important.

Writers who lose confidence in their own merits often can become blocked--especially when asked to promote themselves or their own ideas.

Believe in your writing!
(And if you're having trouble believing in your writing, you should contact me because I'm excellent at helping people with that problem! <- that's self-promotion right there.)

What I think about What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Partial)

2011-06-22T07:37:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading through Murakami's book this morning, and I think what might have struck me the most was just how different our experience or running is.

Murakami closes the book with following:

I dedicate this book to all the runners I've encountered on the road--Those I've passed, and those who've passed me. Without all of you, I never would have kept running.

And towards the end he says:

For a runner like me, what's really important is reaching the goal I set myself, under my own power. I give it everything I have, endure what needs enduring, and am able, in my own way, to be satisfied.

These are, to me, alien ways of thinking about running. In my title to this post, I made a point of saying that these are only partial thoughts--I dare say Murakami may have only presented some of his ideas; some ideas, probably, were edited out as not helpful to the book as a whole. I make this point partially to acknowledge that Murakami might have other motivations than those he states here. But these two motivations have nothing to do with why I run. Really, really nothing.

Murakami, of course, runs races every year; he runs marathons every year. He runs every day. I've run in three (of about 7, 8 and 10 miles), and won't run in another race until the friend who got me to go to those, tries to get me to go to another--but my friend is doing ultramarathoning now, and I'm not interested in 50k races. My friend ran in a 100-mile race--a trail run, no less--last year (he made it something like 70 or 80 miles before he injured himself and had to quit). A 10-mile trail run sounds nice, but I'll pass on the century. And all things being equal, I'd rather run alone than in a crowd, so who needs a race?

I run for the joy of it. I run because--though there are some difficulties to enjoy--the center of the activity is the pure physical pleasure of the body working right. And the meditative nature. And--when I get off the city streets and into the the parks in the Berkeley hills--I'm out of the city, running on trails bordered by scrub (a lot of invasive broom, also native sages, poppies, grasses), or sheltered by the redwood-bay-oak woods in the canyons here.

To the extent that Murakami's book is partially a reflection on writing (as he himself suggests), I wonder what this says about the practical implications of our two approaches. Murakami, of course, publishes lots of stuff; he's famous. I don't publish lots of stuff; I'm not famous. One can easily see how Murakami's goal-driven approach would mean more in terms of practical success.

I'm a romantic, I suppose, in hoping that a process-oriented approach can also be successful. I suppose what is ideally called for is both the love of the process and the goal going hand in hand.

What I think about when I'm not running (sort of)

2011-06-21T19:40:00.000-07:00

Saturday I fell down a flight of stairs. And landed, mostly safely, on my ass. Well, I suppose on my coccyx, really. Boom. And, well, running isn't so easy right now. Walking isn't either.

The question is, though, how do you deal with this kind of thing? It's been rough for me, since I do a lot of thought clearing when I'm running. In many ways running is meditation for me--ideas pass through my head, usually without judgment, just as ideas. By the time I'm done running, I've usually gotten through some of the things that were clogging up my thoughts. And this is good, because it lets me get on to things that are more interesting and more useful and more enjoyable.

When that forced meditation is taken away, I have a lot more time to worry about things. The key to responding to this is to try to fill that time usefully otherwise. The difficulty lies in the loss of energy due to the healing process.

Writing, I find, is a useful way of dealing with similar thought clearing processes. It's not meditative in the sense that there is a strong analytical/judgmental aspect to the process of putting my ideas on paper, but in ideal circumstances, I am able to keep the judgmental aspects on the page and am free from judging the writing itself, and in this sense it allows the ideas to express themselves without judgment.

Thinking about Murakami's book, I don't recall that he really talks about injury and being unable to exercise. He talks about some injuries, but it doesn't seem in the sense that any of them really stopped him from running. He talks about worrying that an injury might keep him from running a race, but not about just the gap in a regular schedule when a common practice is dropped out. I wish I could keep up running when injured, but some injuries are not well served by use. I wonder how differently he feels when laid up.

What I think about when I think about running

2011-06-15T09:48:00.000-07:00

Still reading/responding to Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

Right now I'm doing two things: I'm procrastinating writing and I'm procrastinating running.
I usually run three days a week, and Wednesday is one of my days. Routine definitely helps. But I don't quite want to run now--10:00am--I usually run a bit later--noon--except that this afternoon I have plans so I need to finish my run earlier.

I usually write seven days a week (well, obviously I average something less because some days are lost, but close enough). I didn't write yesterday, however, so I feel a greater burden to do some writing now.

My current procrastination (I don't really count the blog as writing) is largely because of similar dynamics. I start seeing problems: running, I'm tired and I want to be fresh this afternoon. Writing: just problems in seeing how the rest of the project is supposed to go.

Murakami talks about how important it is to run every day (or almost every day); Implicit is what I've read so far is that writing everyday is also crucial.

But the everyday practice is not, in itself, enough. There's something more.

As I read Murakami, I think "I could write this well." I grant that What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is not supposed to be his best writing (or at least so I am informed by my friend who gave it to me). But still...And I don't think this is necessarily over-inflated self-assessment. It's that there is something more necessary--not just regular work, not just talent.

But I'm not quite sure how to explain the something more. I think it's something like a vision of something that you want to realize.
I guess for me, at least with running, the vision is just one of health, and this is a pretty clear vision, and not surprisingly I struggle with running less than with writing.

When Murakami talks about writing, it is clear that he writes with a specific agenda--he's going to write a novel, or he's going to write an article that has been commissioned.
For me, writing is more an exploration--I write to follow the ideas around, but then I have no vision of it being something--neither something complete, nor really something to bother sharing with anyone else (at least in part because of the incompleteness of the exercise).

The lesson I want to work on is the one of finishing a work, not just exploring it.

What I think about when I'm running

2011-06-13T21:51:00.000-07:00

I recently started reading Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which is, to some extent, a book about writing.

This post is not so much about writing--though I know that the central focus of the blog is writing. A point on writing though: some limitations make writing harder--especially limitations of focus. If I want to write about X, and I have a set task to write about Y (or, for that matter, a set context in which I write about Y), then it's harder to write at all.

Anyway, today I went running and I was thinking about Murakami. One of the things that has struck me most so far is that Murakami says that when he runs he is in a void and doesn't think at all. This seems to me amazing--perhaps a sign of his mental discipline?--for me, running is filled with thoughts. There are the mantras that I repeat when I'm tired or the running seems hard. There's the constant evaluation and re-evaluation of just how much energy I have and how much farther I want to go (I have general routes, but no fixed plan--today I wanted to run farther than usual and on different paths than usual and there was a little randomness in where I ended up). And then there's plenty of thinking about different problems and issues--usually I come up with several answers to problems in the beginning of my run, and by the time I'm home, I've forgotten almost all of them. And by the time I'm done showering and eating and rehydrating, I'm pretty much a blank slate again. Oh well. I know I had more to say about Murakami than this, but...

This blog has sat mostly idle for a few years for several reasons, but one is that I don't always want to write about academic writing--as the blog intended. I may start writing about other things as well--to help me clear my thoughts, even if I don't clear anyone else's thoughts.

There's lots more that I think about when running, but maybe I'll save that for a later post.

Clearing my thoughts

2011-04-27T21:39:00.000-07:00

Haven't posted since October 2009. Not really sure why today. Partly just to see if writing will help me focus my thoughts.

For all that I haven't posted here in a long time, the blog still gets readers on a regular basis--though most of them are looking at a single page--the piece that I wrote on a quotation of Emerson, which on its own gets one to two new visitors every day. For whatever reason that one posting gets a lot of attention.

Last time I posted, I had just sent off the manuscript of the book I was working on to the publisher. Now it is done. The book is out. My first book. Even if I was the second author.

Since then I wrote two more complete drafts of my own book--which I had been talking about in previous posts--my own book on writing.

I recently sent a proposal to one publishing house. The editor looked at the proposal, requested the manuscript, and then rejected the manuscript. I consider this a victory. I sent off a proposal, got a response, and the response was positive. Then I got rejected. But it wasn't immediate. The book proposal and manuscript have been sent to another publisher, and I'm waiting to hear back.

If you want to get published, I think you have to be ready to get rejected. I'm working on that. It's hard getting rejected. My hopes got up when the publisher asked for the manuscript. And once I got rejected, it took a lot of wind out of my sails. It took me weeks to revise/rewrite the proposal for the new publisher. Yes, I wrote the first one specifically for a single publisher, and I revised/rewrote for the second, and suspect that I will target it to each individual publisher I send to.

I don't know who is next. If rejected by the publisher I've sent it to, I don't know what publisher I would try next. Maybe an academic one? But maybe a trade house? And it's a different world between the two. Anyway...it's on my mind.

Painful waiting to hear back on something that might get rejected. I e-mailed the publisher and got an auto-response saying "out of the office; won't look at your mail until next week." So I know that I have to wait at least until next week.

OK, so I hadn't really been thinking about my own manuscript in a while, but it has been neglected while I've worked on the proposals.

I still have other work, too. Writing always helps get stuff in order--especially my thoughts. I don't know why I don't do more of it.

Phew!

2009-10-29T08:08:00.000-07:00

It's been ages since I posted here, and who knows when I'll be doing it again on a regular basis--probably not for a while, I don't think...

I just sent a manuscript off to the publisher, fulfilling the main part of my contractual obligation (still have to do an index), but it's on its way.

My book: The Universe of Design: Horst rittel's Theories of Design and Planning. I'm credited as second author, but really I'm third author after the titular Horst Rittel and the listed first author Jean-Pierre Protzen.

This is an academic book, no question. It is, in many ways, very abstract and philosophical. But this abstraction has immediate relevance to our day-to-day lives, and especially our lives as acting, thinking people trying to make plans for a better life for ourselves or for others.
This book discusses the process of design, which, in the sense used in the book, is a process in which we all engage sometimes: we may not be planning a whole city, we may only be planning a menu for the week, or planning a budget. But we make plans that we use to help us solve our problems. As members of a democratic society, we are also called on to contribute to or evaluate plans for our society. We all engage in planning and design.
The book examines the nature of problems: design problems are "wicked": they are not easily defined, may be understood in many different ways, and any attempt at a solution counts significantly--we cannot attempt a plan without repercussions (e.g., if we plan a menu, buy the food and cook it, we have paid the costs of the meal in effort and money no matter how palatable the food may be).
The book also discusses the processes of design, the reasoning of designers, the use of rationality and other conceptual tools for design, and reasons designs/plans fail.

It's due out in six months or so, assuming no problems in the process.

49,000

2009-07-09T23:03:00.000-07:00

If I were to cut this draft short at the 50,000-word, reduced goal, then I would be almost done. So, I'm starting to write and engage with the project more from a sense of "how do I complete this draft" rather than a sense of "what else can I say to make this cover all the issues that I think are important?"

I'm over 49,000 words tonight, but I know that a bunch of my recent additions will either be cut or necessitate cuts in the main text.

47,000

2009-07-08T23:41:00.000-07:00

making a little progress...
writing right now, but got over 47,000 words and looked at the clock and wanted to post a blog before midnight, so I officially only missed one day since my last post.

some days, not so much

2009-07-06T23:41:00.000-07:00

I struggled for hours with writing today. And to little avail. I console myself by remembering that there are bad days sprinkled in with the good (or vice versa, depending on how things are going), and that the bad days are often days when I'm struggling with important issues. Things were very productive in early June, not so much lately, but at least I put in the time.
I wrote a few hundred words and considered the elimination of significantly more.
My word count is still 46,000+, with about 4000 words to get to my low-end goal of 50,000, and 14,000 to get to my initial 60,000 word goal.

Problems, problems

2009-07-05T23:32:00.000-07:00

It's funny how the problems shift.

About ten days ago, I was struggling to get writing done and thinking that I should just cut the draft at 50,000 words.
Today I got to 46,000+, and suddenly 50,000 almost seems like it won't be enough. I feel that there must be more than 4,000 words of material left. Not that I can actually think of it right now.

In any event, with the reduced goal of 50,000 just a short jog up ahead, it's funny how my sense of the problem shifted. Of course, it's not a problem at all: the 50,000 word goal is not a limit; I can go over if I want.

Whatever; for now I just want to keep on plugging so I can put the complete draft together, and then step back a little and try to see how the whole thing hangs together.

Getting back on the horse (again)

2009-07-04T08:56:00.001-07:00

What's to do when circumstances keep one from a project? Berate yourself? Or get back on the horse?

In June I was cruising for a while, writing very productively--if I had kept that pace, I would have reached 60,000 words by now. I didn't. Should I hang my head in shame? Should I spend time lamenting what was lost? I don't know, but those don't seem like they will help me finish the book. If I spend time lamenting what was lost instead of working on the book, won't that give me something to lament in the future: the hours I spent lamenting instead of working?

So I want to get back on that horse every time I fall off, as quickly as I can.

I'm over 44,000 today (thanks, partly, to finding 1000 words I wrote years ago that will suit).

It may not be graceful, but I'm riding again.

Getting back on the horse

2009-06-25T22:46:00.000-07:00

It always helps to get positive feedback and support...thanks!

I fell off the horse about a week ago, and didn't get any real writing done until tonight, and I'm just getting back into the same sense of knowing what I want to work on that I had last week.

The last three days I have spent some time with the book, but not actually writing--I did almost cut a thousand words though--may still; I'm undecided.

Tonight, I did some writing.
The word count is now at 42,000, though as I say, I'm looking to cut about 1000.

Still...just trying to get back to it and not let setbacks set me back any more than necessary; the lost time is lost, why lose more regretting it?

40,000

2009-06-16T23:48:00.000-07:00

still rolling nicely.
Don't want to jinx it. But it's nice to recognize that it goes well, sometimes, and when it does it's not a burden to write.

20,000 words to go.

Sometimes I feel like it's dragging and I have nothing to add anymore, then I'll come across something that I want to expand, or I'll have a sudden idea that I can expand on some, and suddenly (that is to say over the course of a few hours), there's 500 or 1000 words.

39,000

2009-06-15T22:47:00.000-07:00

Getting monotonous, I know.
I'm spending most of my writing energy on writing.

I'm glad to get 1000 words a day for the last few.
I'd love to get more. I'm almost 2/3 of the way to my planned length.

38,000

2009-06-14T22:00:00.000-07:00

It feels good when you're making progress!
I look forward to having a complete draft soon--July sometime, if I keep making good progress.

37,000

2009-06-13T22:25:00.000-07:00

I'm sure the monotony is infuriating--except that no one is reading anyway.

I got to 37,000 words in my draft. 23,000 to go. Only 13,000 if I cut it at 50k.

35,000+

2009-06-12T23:58:00.000-07:00

I spent Friday night writing, and have cranked out some words.
Now nearly at 36,000--may perhaps make it there before going to bed tonight, but I wanted to post today, especially to get my sense of momentum going again after a slow start in June.

Maybe I'll start counting down now...25,000 to go.

33,000

2009-06-11T23:26:00.000-07:00

So I missed about 10 days of reporting on my work. And didn't do that much writing, but I have gotten the draft to over 33,000 words. Fifty-five percent of the way there...
At a thousand words a day, I could do it by early July. I don't think I'll manage a thousand words a day, but you can dream...

Set clear goals

2009-06-01T21:50:00.000-07:00

I'm at 31,000 words now.

I was talking with a writer who said "I want this section to be 10 pages."
I asked what would go into the 10-page section, and she mentioned three main sub-sections. I asked her how long each subsection would be, she said "five to seven pages." This doesn't add up. And it's a good recipe for spending time writing and coming up with something that is not well focused, because you weren't sure where it would start and end.

Right now I'm having a bit of trouble imagining how I'm going to fill in the remaining 29,000 words to get to my goal of 60,000. But I also have one section that has gone over the estimated length. I imagine that, given time, I could write more than I estimated for each individual section. The key will be to keep it focused and cohesive.

only 29,000 more to go...
and then I can start the second draft.

30,000

2009-06-01T00:10:00.000-07:00

Half the planned size.
60% if I cut the original plan down to 50,000 total.

Maybe a month or two to a complete draft?

29,000

2009-05-31T09:32:00.000-07:00

just over 29,000 now.

I'm having trouble seeing the whole project. I'm also wondering whether I really need to be striving for 60,000--it seemed such a nice, optimistic number, but does it really suit my subject? Most of the books similar to mine seem to be maybe in the 40-50,000 range.

irregular blogging, but some regular writing

2009-05-30T21:43:00.000-07:00

I am managing to stay with the project, though the last three days have seen only minimal progress.

I suppose it's reasonable at some point to take a short break, but I want to keep it moving--otherwise the project won't get done.

At the same time, I know that projects just take a long time to develop. I have a book in proposal to a publisher right now (I'm the second author) and the commissioning editor was talking about how if we get a contract going this summer, we can hope to have the book out next May. She was surprised to hear that we actually have an almost-complete draft, and as best I can tell, we are ahead of the curve in terms of actually having things when we say we'll have them and not creating delays. And this with a project that has been in the works for about two years, with two of us working on it, and funding to support the effort. Thus I need to be cool about the fact that I'm on a second draft (no complete first draft yet) of this project which is in its second year, and I still only have a half-draft. As long as I keep plugging, there will be a complete draft.

The sooner the better, but no panic.

27,000

2009-05-27T09:50:00.000-07:00

with about 600 words this morning, my complete draft is now at about 27000 words--almost half the way there. And I haven't even started adding in the material that I decided to add back in when I changed my mind about who the audience would best be.

still moving...

2009-05-26T23:58:00.000-07:00

another 300+ words...not fast progress, but at least I'm still with it. It's growing slowly but surely.

A few hundred

2009-05-25T23:38:00.000-07:00

struggling with major questions--can't decide on what audience to aim at, and not sure which audience would be better overall--partly because the idea of what is better overall is complex, and partly because the main concern in my wish for better overall is largely based on what audience will buy more books, or at least, what audience will appear as a more likely market to a publisher--because it seems to me that getting the book published would be pretty neat.

Despite that struggle with major questions, there are still some parts that Ican work on--and I managed about 600 words.

minor work

2009-05-21T23:27:00.000-07:00

today and yesterday, I did some excavation of old notes trying to find pieces that fit into the new vision of the book. I found some.

My total draft is now at about 25,000 words--slightly less than halfway there.
It gets hard at this point to keep the project moving. It's hard to keep in mind all that has been done and all that is wanted, and to keep focus on the different aspects as well as the overarching goals.

Frustration sets in here, too.
It's nice to have the record and to be able to look back and see that eight days ago, the draft as at 17,000 words. Seeing progress helps deal with frustration.

making progress

2009-05-19T23:02:00.000-07:00

I didn't get a ton of writing done today, but I did get some.

At latest count, my current draft is 22,000 words, or about a third of the way there.
Right now it's feeling pretty hard to find more words.

Is my estimate of 60,000 for a target too ambitious?
It's too early to tell.
When I get to 40,000, then I might be able to make a better judgment, but even that seems like a long way away--another 18,000 words--weeks of work. At least one week, if that week is very productive--but it's a rare week that I can average 3000 words a day.

Best not let that daunt me: push on.

I did get evidence that my writing will get a decent reception in the publishing world--at the least, the book that I have been working on editing and annotating (as the second author/editor, behind my former dissertation chair), is getting very positive treatment from the commissioning editor at the publishing house that we submitted to. She wrote and said "Unusually, there were no suggestions from the reviewers for any changes, so I feel very confident that my Publishing Board will be as enthusiastic about the book as I am." I don't think an author can ask for much better than that.

And this is all the more reason to push on, so that this book can get a similarly good reception. I hope it can. But it's 38,000 words and a proposal away from that.

notes

2009-05-17T22:50:00.000-07:00

today I pretty much just wrote about writing. I didn't write hardly anything that I have any intention of using as part of my book, but I did write 500+ words about what I want to write and asking questions about how I want to structure it.

not actual writing...

2009-05-16T09:26:00.000-07:00

I did spend about 40 minutes with my book this morning, and excavated a good 430 words from an old draft. It's not actually writing, but...

It can be a matter of some despair to see how little of an old draft is usable...a lot of effort went into those old words. But the framing of the work changed, and with that, whole sections simply need to be completely rewritten--or rather most of the old work is no longer usable for its words, only for its ideas.

Day off to celebrate (and do other work)

2009-05-15T19:37:00.001-07:00

Today I was distracted by a letter from an editor at what I hope will be my publishing house for a book I'm working on (as second author):

"I thought I would send the two reviews I have received on to you.
As you can see the feedback is overwhelmingly positive and it is clear that there is a real gap in the market for a work of this kind. Unusually, there were no suggestions from the reviewers for any changes, so I feel very confident that my Publishing Board will be as enthusiastic about the book as I am."

And then I was told that another book to which I contributed a chapter will be out in June.

And with all that, and some work to do for other folks, and a birthday party for my friend, somehow it feels pretty easy to skip the other book for a day.

Which probably isn't the best excuse...

500+ words

2009-05-14T22:30:00.000-07:00

pretty good--a spate of late night writing and some excavation.

Working on envisioning the entire structure, but trying to figure also, what to add, detail-wise, to get to my overall goal of a 60,000-word draft.

My total draft right now: just under 20,000.
The other 40,000 seem pretty far off.

moderate productivity

2009-05-13T23:15:00.000-07:00

Maybe 500 words; a little more excavation.

Also, I did more work defining the aim and the intentions for the structure. I'm currently aiming at about a 60,000-word draft, and I have currently about 17,000. In other words, I've got a lot of writing to do to get to the complete draft that I'm imagining. All the more reason to focus my efforts more intently on trying to write, and on committing to getting writing done regularly.

keeping moving...

2009-05-12T11:21:00.000-07:00

I managed to get in a not-so-quick 450 words this morning. Wish I had time for more.

Excavation and archaeology

2009-05-11T09:26:00.000-07:00

One big problem I have as a writer is actually using what I write.

I take it for granted that things need to be revised and rewritten. And I often write things that I don't like. And I often get stuck on a project because I wrote something I didn't like.

And what gets lost is that the project may also have some good writing in it. Sometimes I have to go back and see what I wrote and discarded to get back some of the good ideas that motivated me as I worked in the past.

This morning I did a little of that. Having not written for a few days, I put writing at the top of my priority list this morning. But on starting, I found myself considering issues that I have written about before. So I went excavating. I don't know that it was faster than just writing might have been, but I found about 2000 words that I could reuse without much revision.

Two days, no writing.

2009-05-11T00:16:00.001-07:00

But I am still committed to the project, and I recognize that the project is much more likely to stall if I don't jump right back on it.

But I'm tired now.

Another slow day

2009-05-08T20:06:00.000-07:00

But I managed about 150 words.

just more than 100 words today

2009-05-07T23:46:00.001-07:00

managed to get back to it just before midnight.
At least I got something done.

today's progress

2009-05-06T23:52:00.000-07:00

limited...but I wrote about 200 words.
Struggling to keep the project moving and not let distractions stop me. And not let fear stop me.

Keeping the momentum

2009-05-05T22:04:00.000-07:00

So I didn't do much writing yesterday, and only in the last minute did I get to some today--not much--about 100 words, and I think that will be all.

But remaining committed to trying to realize a goal--in this case a book--is necessary for any project that takes a long time. If you can't stick with it, you won't finish. And I personally want to finish this project, not just let it slip into the background.

weekend

2009-05-03T23:07:00.001-07:00

Didn't make a ton of progress this weekend; felt low; struggled with feeling like my writing isn't worth the effort.

But I did make a little progress. And, for all that I'm feeling bad about what I do write, I feel worse when I don't write. 200 words today. Very little, but more than nothing.

decent day today

2009-05-01T23:49:00.000-07:00

over a thousand words, and feeling like I have ideas.
Feeling a little bit lost about structure, but trying to plow ahead to get to a draft that feels complete.
Some of what I have written tonight, I'm not sure how it fits into the structure yet, but I see it as being crucial to the discussion...

The exploration of the ideas and the possible orders in which they could be presented--it's a little mind-boggling...

In the draft I started last week, I now have 8000 words, but I'm entering the danger zone where I'll have gotten far enough in that the problems I face are difficult to answer, and I need to be able to stick with the project. Eight thousand words is easy enough, especially if they're not entirely coherent. But extending that by a factor of seven? Oy. That's a lot more to keep in mind and to see as part of a coherent whole.

missed a day, but got it going again

2009-05-01T00:54:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I didn't get any writing in,
but I managed to get about 700 words today--late in the day (well, it's really tomorrow already, but I'm counting it as today).

I feel like the project is still moving forward, and I have ideas on how to proceed.

managed to get in a few words before bed

2009-04-28T23:11:00.000-07:00

Another day without much chance to write until night, but I managed to sit with the computer and write 280 words before giving in to the lure of my bed.

yet another slow day

2009-04-27T22:13:00.000-07:00

maybe 400 words today...but still plugging.

Another slow day

2009-04-26T23:19:00.000-07:00

I didn't get a chance to start writing until 10:00pm, but have managed to punch out 600 words. Still feeling OK about the basic structure, though, also feeling a little more uncertain about where I'm going. Which is not good--hopefully I will be able to make this stick together as I get deeper in.

Saturday in the park

2009-04-25T22:01:00.000-07:00

There was an Earth Day celebration in the park today, and I didn't get much work done, but I did just come in and write a couple of sentences (82 words) for my book, and maybe I'll write a few more tonight. But even if I don't, at least I got to it.

yesterday

2009-04-25T08:46:00.000-07:00

yesterday, I didn't make a record of what I accomplished writing--but I did manage to write about 300 words--not the most productive of days, but I got something done.

progress: minimal writing; work on structure

2009-04-23T22:22:00.000-07:00

I did some writing in the morning, but struggled to get words on the page and to keep from reworking what I did yesterday.

I managed to add a little beyond what I had so far--about 400 words.

Not much, but at least I feel like I still am in the right direction--this seems like a good place to start.

today's progress

2009-04-22T22:08:00.000-07:00

My title may become a common one as I use the blog to report on my day's progress.

I revised my overall structure--found some refinements that will help me reuse old material.

I looked through old material--there's definitely useful stuff.

I wrote about 1000 words on the beginning of hte new structure (the beginnings get written and rewritten more than any other thing I work on.

since last I wrote

2009-04-21T23:34:00.000-07:00

I wrote about 1500 words, and had a major crisis over structure and am working through alternative structures that might support what I've written better than the structure I have now.

I'm not afraid of writing more, but if I keep changing the structure, I'll never finish...

Where I am now

2009-04-21T07:58:00.001-07:00

The current version that I have been working on this last week or so is about 7,000 words right now. I have an old version that is about 27,000 words but is based on some ideas about presentation and writing that are no longer being used (I have changed ideas about what audience I want to reach).

I don't feel very happy with my current version, either--I don't have a strong sense of structure for the ideas I want to express.

Nonetheless, I press on, because that is the only way that it will get any better. For now, I just need to stay with the project long enough to shape a complete draft of the appropriate size that is consistent and coherent within its own chosen purview.

So, really, my touchstone is the 7,000-word draft that I have right now.

A new phase

2009-04-21T07:46:00.000-07:00

I haven't been writing here much.
Mostly I've been trying to take the ideas that I was sharing here and cast them into a book. Partly it was because I felt like I was repeating myself--I only had a few hundred posts worth of good material...this would be the place to type "lol," I think.

It's not that I don't want to continue to share my ideas, but the book project itself takes away the time I could spend writing the blog.

But I have been erratic with the book project--I started working on it almost a year ago, but have kept letting long gaps of time come between efforts, and then what I have written no longer seems useful, or at least needs rewriting.
Of course, the flip side of this is that I have written multiple drafts.

Anyway, my current plan is to push for a complete 50,000-word draft that I can then use as the basis for a proposal for a publisher.
To that end, I'm going to keep tabs on my progress.

Forests and trees (once more unto the breach)

2009-03-18T09:47:00.000-07:00

I've been writing a fair about lately, but not so much in the blog. Partly this is because I've been finding it hard to find things to write about that I haven't written before.

One thing I've been thinking about doing, is to look back at my past posts and maybe do some digests or archives or indexes--something that would help look at the past writing.

I've written about forests and trees in different ways.
Recently I was thinking about how, in a way, the written object is just another tree in a larger forest. As I write, I see that that metaphor will work in (at least) two ways, but I will focus on just one: the written object, is only part of a larger process or program ("partial fulfillment of the requirements").

I had a query from a writer: "Can you help with my dissertation?" I asked to see the dissertation and to have some explanation of the situation in the program: what was the relationship with the committee? Had anyone read the draft? What kind of work was called for?

Any written work serves an audience. We have to see and imagine the work with respect to the audience. The work is just one tree in a forest of discourse, if you will.

I have previously talked about forests and trees with respect to seeing the scope of the entire written work, and not focusing too much on any specific part, especially not without showing how that part relates to the others. For example a single chapter is very different when conceived in a vacuum as when conceived as serving a specific rhetorical purpose within a larger structure.

We can see a different level of forests and trees: just as a paragraph belongs in the context of a section of a work, and a section belongs in a chapter, and a chapter belongs in the work entire, so, too, can we see as the specific work as belonging to a larger collection of discourse. It needs to fit within that discourse.

To shape your work to suit a specific discourse or a specific audience is not the same as selling out. I'm not talking about being a Marxist and saying "I think Marx is all wrong," just for the sake of getting your necessary signatures. That's selling out. I won't rule out the possibility that selling out is a wise choice, but it's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is you having an idea, and also someone that you want to explain the idea to, so that they understand what you're talking about. Would you try to explain that idea to all people in the same way? Of course not.

Your written work is going to be placed into a context--a forest. And that context is not limited to a context of the ideas being explored. The context includes the practical considerations of filing a dissertation, of writing and revising one, of working with the committee to move towards cooperation and completion.

When you, as a writer, engage in writing, it can be very helpful to consider where in the process you are, and what the steps you are going to take will be. It can help focus effort. An obvious example is with feedback: you have a draft that you have to revise. Do you have any feedback yet? If not, then one kind of revision is appropriate. If you do have feedback, of course, the revision should be guided by the feedback you have.

The dissertation does not stand alone. To say only "I need to work on my dissertation," doesn't recognize that there is a context in which you are working: what kind of work, for whom, and to satisfy what end?

This pragmatic view--it must be noted--is characteristic of the lives of many who are considered great artists. The Van Goghs of the world, whose greatness is acknowledged despite the creator's lack of ability to promote it him/herself, are rare. More often one finds the Picassos, the Hemingways, etc. who pursued publication, who found editors to publish them, who completed work, etc. Who, in short, managed the practical aspects of the process.

The notion of a "pure" academic work that just presents the truth and is therefore universally applicable, is nice but it's naive. Whatever the "truth" in question, it would have to be presented differently to a child than to an adult, differently to an atheist than a fundamentalist, differently to a Marxist than to a post-structuralist. Different people understand the world, and words, in different ways. If you assume that all people will respond the same way to all words, then you will be surprised often. Instead, see that your writing fits into a context, and then let that context help guide the decisions you make.

Sometimes it's not as bad as you imagined

2009-03-14T21:20:00.000-07:00

I actually read an article on the internet some time ago about how our anticipated responses to events are often very different than our actual responses--I wish I could remember the details, it seems like it would be nice--right about now...

speaking of things I read that I've lost touch with--there was an article on doodling and how it can actually help you remember--I was thinking about that while listening to some music and editing. But I digress...

Sometimes it's not as bad as you imagine. Once I was working with a writer who was hoping to get re-admitted to his program. The first step was to submit a draft for his thesis (it was all he had left). We worked together to get that draft together. As of the last draft I saw, I thought he was on the right track--he made one revision after I last saw it, and submitted it. One of his professors expressed willingness to accept the draft as thesis, unchanged. Sometimes things are just easier than you would expect.

I had a similar experience recently--but I don't want to tell that story until a little more of it has been written.

Still, it's a nice thing to remember. We often anticipate great difficulty or stress, but it is the anticipation that is the real problem; when the moment arrives, it is not as difficult as we feared.

As writers many of us get paralyzed with fear at the response we might get--"Oh, my advisor doesn't like Marxists, so if I use this theorist I'll get in trouble"--If you let that fear stop you from writing what you believe, then you're in much greater trouble, because it's damn hard to write what you think, and it's even harder to try to write what you think someone else wants you to think. And, it's not as bad as you think: if you have used a theorist carefully and elegantly, even a professor who disagrees with that theorist should be able to see the value in the argument. It's true that there are professors who will not accept work that they don't agree with, but I think it's more often to find professors who will accept work as long as it is of sufficient quality.

If we can tell ourselves "Sometimes it's better than I imagined" or at least "sometimes it's not as bad as I imagined" we can write more effectively.

And that creates opportunity: the chance of something good happening is much greater when you risk that possibility and risk the rejection that goes with it--as the old saying goes: you can't win, if you don't play.

And sometimes even the worst result that you imagined, isn't as bad as you expected: your work gets panned, but maybe you understand why and you see how to move forward from there.

So write. And if you find yourself worrying about some bad outcome, think of the writer I worked with: sometimes they actually like the work that you did. Think about that possibility, and get to work thinking about the work, rather than sitting fearing the worst that is yet to come.

One cookie now or two cookies later

2009-03-04T20:21:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was talking with my friend about some difficult issues he was having related to raising his son, and in particular with respect to a complex decision where there are clear pros and cons on either side of the equation. On a certain level, of course, it's laughable to ask me about raising a child, since I've none of my own. But philosophy is philosophy; some wisdom is always worthy.

When we were talking, I was thinking of him and his son just as people like those I often help--which is to say graduate students. He's a smart guy, but his son is eight, so you can't quite talk through ideas the same way with an eight year old. "But there has to be a simplified parallel that he would understand," I finally claimed.

And there is; it's a classic one. I think that Daniel Goleman's book Emotional Intelligence says something to the effect that those who, as children, choose two cookies later over one now, tend to be more successful as adults--successful in most measurable dimensions, in terms of career, social life, etc. I don't know if Goleman's assertion is true, but it is clear to me that the one cookie now vs. two later is a model for many of the things we face in life.

My friend was concerned with some issues of social responsibility, but also with his son's social community, too. He felt a conflict between large-scale social responsibility, and a desire to care for his son and to give him opportunities. Two different value systems were coming into conflict.

As I was out running today, I was thinking that the one cookie now vs. two cookies later paradigm is a good one for talking about the complexity of issues, and for showing how we can be faced with questions whose answer is not clear, or which inevitably involve some sort of compromise.

Suppose you're offered one cookie now vs. two later. One good first question might be "how much later?" If you only have to wait one minute for the two cookies, it seems like a no-brainer. Similarly, if you are going to wait a decade to get the two cookies, it seems pointless not to take the one right now. Somewhere in between these two extremes, we might logically presume that there is a point where it is hard to decide.

In exploring the complexity of the question, we can also note that the reward offered for waiting (the two cookies) can be altered--maybe it's three cookies later, or ice cream and a cookie later instead of just a cookie now.

These are terms, I think, that an eight year old could understand. On the other hand, getting an eight year old to see the point, and to accept it may be unlikely. After all, this is difficult for adults to manage.
Some decisions are like the one cookie now vs. two cookies in one minute decision: it's easily made. Most are not.

When we're writing, or when we're managing a project, or when we're trying to decide whether to support an institution (like my alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley), we're faced with questions that are much more closely balanced. Yes, the University builds weapons of mass destruction; it also harbors and supports some very good progressive thought. Yes, the university sports programs are problematic in many ways; they also do some good, and buying tickets to one game won't really make a difference. Yes, you want your son to be able to have communal activities with friends, including ones that you enjoyed as a youth; you also want your son to be able to make socially responsible decisions that promote peace, justice, etc.
Or, to take this out of the realm of my friend and into the realm of the writer: we might offer this similar paradigm:
shitty draft now vs. good draft later. How long do you wait for the good draft? A shitty draft now may be far superior--if, for example, you have been told you must submit something immediately or be dropped from your program. Sure, at such a moment it would be nice to have a good draft, but often we feel that the draft we currently have is a shitty one.
The answer is never clear. Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy, once wrote that a bad letter in good time was better than a good letter late (though he said it more elegantly than my awkward paraphrase, I have lost the original quote and the reference to my source--I think it was from a collection of his letters). But if you submit a bad draft to a publisher, you may be rejected out of hand, hurting your future chances, while waiting longer would have meant a better reception.

Sadly there is no clear answer to many of the problems that we struggle with (which may help explain why we struggle with them). I believe that the more clearly we can see what is involved in choosing the different alternatives, the better we can make a choice that will serve us well.

Well, the logic sounds ok, but I wouldn't want to try to convince anyone of the wisdom herein--least of all an eight year old.

win-win

2009-03-01T11:21:00.000-08:00

This is a hideously overused buzzword, partly because it's a good idea.

A writer told me "I had to send something to my advisor. I'm not thrilled with what I sent her."

My response: this is a win-win situation. Either she likes it, in which case you win, or she doesn't, in which case the two of you agree, so you also win. What could go wrong?

I realized that this is the perfect paradigm: always turn in work that you're not happy with, and then either you get an unexpected good result, or you agree with the reviewer!

(Disclaimer: professional writer on closed course. Always write safely and obey the rules of the styleguide. Unless you're pretty sure your audience won't be upset.)

struggling

2009-02-24T22:58:00.000-08:00

Recently I have been trying to get material together for a book proposal that I am trying to submit (as second author to my former PhD advisor). And I am experiencing, in all the worst forms, the hallmarks of writer's block and procrastination.

Each time I look at what I have written, and what I know have to clean up, and I cringe. I know that it's partly just that I'm so close to the work. but it's also that I keep finding things to fix. Problems little and small, and by the time I've cleared away a whole bunch of little problems, I decide to rewrite the whole thing from scratch, thus creating a whole new set of little problems that need fixing.

I feel like I completely rewrote the cove letter something like six or seven times before I came to a draft that I stuck with and refined. But today I was reading a book that made me think that I should revise yet once again.

I'm not going to, though. By virtue of having a co-author, and a senior one at that, I have the opportunity to just trust his judgement and stop rewriting. It may be that he's wrong, but it's a good lesson in learning to let myself stop revising eternally.

Really, all I'm trying to do, as I struggle with the difficulty of letting go of my own imperfect work, is to accept the possibility of rejection ahead of time: my life does not depend on this.

As a writer--especially as an academic writer--one has to be able to withstand the blow of a rejected work. One has to be able to look at a work that is not good enough--for whatever reason it has been deemed not good enough--and to say "I can make it better." Even better is when, by learning through the feedback (even if the feedback is just bare rejection), we are able to look at ourselves and say "I can learn to improve how I handle this."

If we can do that--if we are ready to take the worst feedback we can get--then it's much easier to write.

This seems terrifying, I know. Imagine, for example, that the worst possible feedback would be for a committee to say "you should no longer be enrolled in our school." Can you imagine what kind of paper it would take to get such feedback? Can you imagine getting that feedback if you never turned in anything at all? (That's a rhetorical question: actually, if you never turn anything, you'll be more quickly asked to leave than if you're turning in almost anything moderately careful.) So if your fear is rejection, and this is keeping you from writing--struggle with that fear, but put it under you: the fear is more likely to lead to a bad result than taking a chance.

Writing and More Writing

2009-02-17T01:00:00.000-08:00

The other day I wrote about 5000 words in the day. That's maybe fifteen pages, double spaced. In one day.

At that rate, someone could feasibly write a 100-page dissertation in six days.

Of course,when I write that much in a day, I also throw away a large part of what I write. This is ok if I can keep my eye on how things add up. If I write 5000 words in a day, and then throw away 80% of what I write, I finish my 100=page project in 30 days, not 6. And if I throw away 95% of what I write, I've finished my dissertation in 120 days--one semester.

All it takes is to write 5000 words a day, and then find that 250 of them are useful.

If you were to keep every word you write, then you would only need to write 250 words a day to write a dissertation in a semester. But that would be far harder, and would probably lead to a worse dissertation, than trying to write 1000 words a day with the conscious acceptance that you were going to only use 250 of them in the long run.

As a writer, what is harder: to write one coherent, well-formed page or to write four, rambling, poorly written pages? My personal opinion and experience say that I can probably write ten times as fast when I don't care about the quality of the outcome as when I do. When I worry about the outcome, each word is a struggle. When I write, on the other hand, just to put my ideas on the page to see how they work out and to discover if there are any weaknesses, then I write easily. I may hit many dead ends; I may struggle with obstacles, but in the end I produce more.

In her book Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott titles a chapter "shitty first drafts," and says "all good writers write them."

Write and then write more. Don't worry about making it good; worry about making it express your ideas. Worry about it saying all the different things that you want to say. In whatever order it comes out. Just write. And write more. And try to learn as you go.

If you write regularly, the writing adds up. If you're too intent on getting it right the first time and therefore you don't write, you're not doing yourself a favor. Be willing to get it wrong first, and then fix it later using what you have learned.

Writing and Thinking

2009-02-15T07:07:00.000-08:00

William Germano, in his book From dissertation to Book, says "Writing isn't a record of your thinking, it is your thinking" (p. 23). I don't entirely agree, but I do think it's a valuable way to think about your project.

I often talk with writers who tell me that they're confused or that they don't know what to say. My answer to them is to write.

I don't believe that our writing is our thinking, but writing can certainly shape our thinking.

What do I think our thinking is? Generally, I follow a group of researchers who believe in "the embodied mind." In this theory it is presumed that "mind" and "consciousness" arise from our physiology, and is rooted in our physiology. Our conceptual system is then rooted in these physiological systems, and shaped by them: we understand all concepts in terms of the systems we have for interacting with the physical world. And further, we understand concepts in terms of whole domains of experience. For example, we do not understand the concept of "supermarket" without having a wider set of understandings--buying, selling, property, money, etc.--in which that concept is meaningful.

And what does this mean for the writer? Well, one thing I think that it means is that our thought--that is to say, our embodied conceptual systems--handles many ideas in combination and at the same time.
Writing, on the other hand, is sequential--one word at a time, and while language does support some degree of overlapping thought (e.g., in a double-entendre), it is basically linear and has (ideally) a unitary focus.
Writing, in short, because of its linear nature, cannot be our thinking, as Germano claims. But, it can help shape our thinking.

One aspect of our thinking is that our ideas are accepted unconsciously: we do not, for example, consciously consider all the different ideas, theories, practices and systems that make such a thing as a supermarket possible (much to the despair of the poor carbon-filled atmosphere)--we don't explicitly think: "Gee, this market can only exist because we have an idea of private property, and we have an idea that the most efficient society will be specialized, and that the most efficient way to grow food is on big farms a long way away from the people, and to then ship the food a long way to those people"--we take these for granted.
And this is fine: if we had to consider the full detail of every action we take, we would become paralyzed.
But, this lack of definition is a great hindrance to the writer, and at the same time, it is exactly what the writer is attempting to overcome. Our writing is not our thinking, nor a record of our thinking, but a product of our thinking whose creation forces us to refine our unconscious, synchronous conception of the world into a conscious, sequential explanation of the world, which is then open to the examination--whether theoretical or empirical--of other scholars and researchers.

Writing is not identical with thinking, but to write, one is forced to make conscious and explicit what has been unconscious and implicit. And this process often reveals that our unconscious reasoning doesn't live up to the standards we set for our conscious reasoning.

Writing shapes our thinking; it refines it and tempers it. It challenges our thinking to achieve a high level of consistency and clarity. It forces us to understand our subject better than we did when we were just reading.

A parallel I often find useful: most graduate students have had the experience of teaching and have discovered how much more they learn about their subject when trying to teach it, and how trying to teach a subject they thought they knew well challenges the limits of their understanding. Writing, and the experience of writing are much like the experience of teaching: you may think you know, but when you sit down to write, the blank page is much like the bright, inquisitive student who stumps you with a question. Writing, in a way, is teaching--just to an audience who will only read your words.

So, if you're writing and you find yourself confused: this is natural; this is the process of writing. The solution is to keep writing. What confuses you? In what way are you confused? What problems are cropping up for the other ideas that you're using? By writing, you seek to find answers. Sometimes you will find an answer, and sometimes, to be an honest scholar, you will have to admit that there is a question for which you have no answer.

But still, the way out is to write.
Write to structure your ideas, to test them, to expand them. Write with the expectation that it will not turn out exactly as you expect. Write with the expectation that writing will force you to learn something new, or understand something more deeply.

Bracing for Feedback

2009-02-10T09:16:00.000-08:00

A writer wrote to me:
> Ok, I'm tired and I'm probably being a little reckless here, but I ended
> up finishing some changes to ch3. Finished enough, that is. I cut out
> the entire section on the _______. It was a tough decision
> to do, but the chapter had already exceeded 31 pages...
> I went ahead and sent ch1 & ch3 to My chair.

I wrote back:

Hi Writer,

congratulations on sending off drafts!
Perhaps you were a little reckless, but we need to be able to take risks. There's no certainty in life.

What you have done is done. There is any range of possible outcomes. The thing to do now is to make plans for the future. Focus on what you can do.

In your case in particular, one set of plans that you may not be making is how to manage feedback. Of course making plans to manage feedback is difficult, because we don't know what the feedback will be. Still, there are things we can do to prepare ourselves. We can consider the range of possible responses and develop general plans depending of the rough outcome.

More importantly, we can step back and look at our work with a critical eye and say "what is a critical reader going to say, and do I think that response is important?" What are the different criticisms, and how can you plan to meet them?

Hypothetical responses:
1. You need to clean up your writing!
response to 1: I'm planning on hiring a proofreader.
2. Your argument is weak (generally).
response to 2: Could you give more detail on what you mean, and what kind of weakness?
3. Your argument is missing XYZ data.
response to 3: could you explain why you think that would further my general purpose of stating ABC?

There are any number of responses, of course, and it would be easy to get lost thinking about negative responses that you might get ("gee, you're stupid", "never talk to me again," or whatever insult), and get emotionally distraught from that process.
But if you think about the response that you would make, that can help defuse the emotion. On the one hand, what kind of response does one make to an insult? On the other, if you have planned a response--like #2 above--that places the onus of explaining the insult on the other person, you can turn the tables on them. Act as if it isn't an insult and ask for further definition and clarification.

Anyway, we've all _got_ to be a little reckless sometimes. Take the chance that the work that we could work on more is going to at least speak to the reader enough that they see the spark that makes it fly.

With your chair, stay on message: For your part, keep in mind the main point of the dissertation, and how it manifests in each piece. And in response to any comment of his, remember you can always say "how does that help me explain my main point? Can you clarify how you see that working?" This response should be practiced and used particularly in the context of any emotionally difficult response.

But most of all: remember to be kind to yourself. And celebrate getting two chapters sent out. No matter what the response, being able to write, wrap up and send off the two chapters (with all the flaws that every writer sees in the work going out), is a matter worthy of recognition and celebration.

Congratulations!

best,
Dave

Synopsis:
1. No guarantees exist. We always take a risk when we put ourselves out there--whether submitting a draft or looking for a job or asking for a date, we might get rejected. But the risk has to be taken because the paralysis is actually worse than the rejecion.
2. any rejection of our effort is evidence helping us refine our effort; if we cannot understand the rejection, it is worth our while to ask for additional clarification (especially in the context of dissertation advisors who have an actual responsibility to provide _useful_ feedback).
3. We can plan our responses to help focus our efforts and our energy during the periods of waiting for feedback. This helps us from being overtaken by anxiety.
$. It's hard to complete a draft! No matter what, that is worthy of acknowledgment--even if you have to go back and rewrite that draft (which is pretty much what an experienced writer expects to do with early drafts any way).

A question of focus

2009-02-07T22:06:00.000-08:00

I was thinking about a writer who likes the theories of a particular author, except that there is one part of the theory that bothers her.

I was thinking, in a parallel way, about how we handle anger.

Riding my bike today, I witnessed a man losing his temper at some mechanical failure of his bike.

On the one hand, I believe that emotions are real and that we do not make our lives better for trying to bottle them up. When we are angry, it is not inappropriate to feel the anger--the anger is an action signal--a sign that we want to change things and that we should take action to make change.

But as each moment passes, where do we focus our attention? The event that bothers us has occurred; the author has written the part of the theory that bothers us. Where do we focus our attention? On that which has gone wrong (in the past)? Or on that which is yet to come and that which we can still shape?

I was walking with my friend at the civic center park in Berkeley and a bunch of kids on skateboards passed, weaving between us and some mothers with their babies in strollers. My friend yelled at the kids to be careful. We went and sat down, and he was still fuming.

I understand the reality of emotions as not just passing instantly. They are physiological and the physioloigcal state of anger or fear doesn't just pass quickly. But that being said, he had a choice: to focus on that which had angered him or on something else.

I'm not saying that I know what the right answer to that choice was. I'm not sure that I believe that there is a right choice. But it is a choice. I think it's a choice that depends on what we think is important.

At any moment we are faced with many different choices of what to focus on--we can focus on what has happened to us in the past, any of many things; we can focus on what is happening to us in the moment, again, any of many things; and we can focus on the future, which yet again presents many choices of what to focus on.

Is there some rule that says that we must focus on the injustice that is most present in our consciousness? Is there a rule that we must focus on the aspect of the theory that bothers us? Is there a rule that says that we must focus on the problem?

I don't think so. We can look past the injustice to what we will do to prevent such injustice in the future, or to what we will do, if we will not act to prevent it. We can look to getting revenge or retribution, rather than just focusing on what happened before. We can focus on getting back to where we were before the problem.

We can look at the theory and abstract the parts that we like without having to accept the parts that we don't Thomas Jefferson's claim that all men are created equal is a claim that has an abstract meaning that each person can respect (at least if we interpret it to refer to all humans). The fact that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, and might not have even considered them people, is a difficult, unpleasant fact. But it does not mean that the ideal that he recommends is any less beautiful.

If a problem exists, must we deal with that problem? Or can we strive to make proress in other ways? Sometimes, of course, there is a problem that requires immediate attention, but what about problems that do not? Can we not choose to focus our attention elsewhere?

Our lives are complex and filled with many competing demands. We do not want to shirk responsibility, but are there not times when we can choose to look at something other than the negative things that are presenting themselves?

Progress can come in many forms; progress provides new resources and new opportunities. But if we focus on what has gone wrong already, on that which we cannot fix, on the fact that some imperfection exists and we need perfection, then we will be stuck.

"In partial fulfillment of the requriements for the degree of..."

2009-01-27T08:14:00.000-08:00

This phrase can be found on the title page of dissertations and theses.
As a book I was reading recently (Making the Implicit Explicit by Barbara E. Lovitts) suggests, this should indicate that the dissertation is not standing alone as the factor on which the candidate is judged.
And if signing off on the dissertation is the last hold the committee has and is equivalent to granting the degree, then it might be presumed that the faculty actually vary their standards for what is acceptable as a dissertation depending on their assessment of the worthiness of the student. (the logic here, if not derived from Lovitts, was certainly sparked by what she was saying.)

One could make an argument that this is ethically wrong, and that all dissertations should be held to the same standard. But I'm not sure that there isn't a good argument on the other side, too.

It has long been my opinion that this might be operating on an unconscious level: if your committee believes that you are capable of doing good work, then they will be predisposed to focus on the strengths of the work. If they believe that you are not up to snuff, they will look for problems. This kind of unconscious dynamic works in all of us.

This suggests that you can profit by taking actions that convince your readers of your worthiness; this includes work on the dissertation, but is not limited to such work. It is a point worth strategizing: what can you do that would make the committee believe that you are ready as a scholar?

I recommend Lovitts' book to any dissertation writer who wonders what the dissertation is supposed to accomplish and how they will be judged. I don't think it provides absolute answers because each professor is different, but I think it provides very good general direction.

Champions

2009-01-25T22:05:00.001-08:00

I was watching a little of the television broadcast of the Australian Open last night and saw an interview with world #1 Jelena Jankovic, who had just lost. Jankovic was very courteous, giving a great deal of credit to her opponent. Seeing the interview made me think of what I had read of Jankovic--that she is extremely courteous, and that she also might not be quite the competitor that the really top players are--that what keeps her from really dominating is her head. By contrast Serena Williams is known for being ungenerous to her opponents in losses--she has the reputation for blaming a loss on her own play and not giving credit to her opponent.

Along these lines I was thinking about the figure-ground reversal I had recently discussed and the general success that we can create in our own lives.

Serena Williams is known for her competitive will--for her ability to play even better when the competitive stakes grow, and for her unwillingness to lose. How strongly is that competitive will related to her belief that it is her play that determines a win or loss? Is it easier to rally against an opponent if you think "wow, s/he's really good, maybe better than me" or "well, s/he's good, but if I were playing my game, s/he wouldn't have a chance"? It seems to me that one is much more likely to succeed if one believes that one can exert one's will to succeed.

When we view our projects, when we get discouraged, is that not a type of perspective in which we are surrendering our power?

If Edison was right in suggesting that genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, doesn't this imply that we have to continue to believe in the validity of the inspiration through extensive struggles? We have to believe that the power to succeed lies in us.

Or, perhaps, we need to act on the premise that the power to succeed lies in us. Many writers struggle with believing that their writing is good enough--the emotion of belief may be hard to create, but we can still logically think through: "what would I do if I believed that I had the ability to finish?"

The character of plans made by one who is confident are radically different than the plans made by one who is expecting defeat. Different plans lead to different results. In addition to the emotional boost that accompanies confidence is also the difference in plans. I wonder whether the plans of the optimist might be more focused on the strengths of the individual, and thus will focus attention on the places where the richest opportunities are to be found?
How much does the pessimist look at weaknesses and thus make plans that fail to take advantage of places where the strengths lie?

Bootlicking and Buddhism

2009-01-18T20:14:00.000-08:00

Actually, I don't really know that Buddhism is what I'm going to talk about. But I was thinking about the difference between the internal world and the external world and what we create in those spheres.

By the internal, I mean our minds and bodies; by external, I mean all that stuff out there. Looking at the world with such ego-boundaries is not, I suppose, too Buddhist. But anyway...

I was talking with a friend who was angry at someone. This person had wronged him, by pretty much any standard of how people would judge the matter, but not exactly a grievous crime--certainly he was hale and hearty to tell the tale of how he was wronged. Now I've been wronged (and I've wronged others, too--nothing grievous, I hope), and I've been angry as result. It doesn't feel good. And I've been able to rekindle anger for old wrongs, too; that doesn't feel good either.

What I've been working with is too focus my attention on those things that provide me with the greatest opportunity to move forward. This means, on the one hand, not focusing my attention on the wrongs that I've suffered, and on the other, not necessarily airing my grievances against difficult people.

Which brings me to the first world of my title: bootlicking. When I was talking with my friend, I was thinking about a writer I've been working with whose chair makes snide comments and tends to obstruct the process--like the time she said "I'll submit a draft in two weeks; when do you think you'll be able to give feedback" and he said "in three months." Hopefully you will never have this kind of problem, but should you, what is the effective response?

For the long run it seems to me that the more important response is the internal one: what response protects your health and your ability to work? The response that looks to the future, the one that avoids the stress and anger, is the better.

What does this mean about the external response? It means that one is clear about what one is trying to get, and one tries to avoid getting caught up in proving that one is right. It's not that an injustice might not have occurred; it's just that that proving injustice, or discussing injustice places attention on things that rightly generate anger and stress. This means that responses to injustices are framed with equanimity and courtesy, and thus might appear to be bootlicking.

It should be noticed, of course, that there are times when an injustice must be addressed. A chair, for example, who regularly refuses to give feedback sooner than three months, and who does not want the writer to show the drafts to other readers until he has seen them, is obviously creating obstacles that need to be addressed. Something would need to be done to changes the feedback schedule, to get timely feedback. But even if action is needed, where does one direct one's attention? On the injustice? Or on finding a solution to the injustice?

The writer in question whose chair said that feedback would not be forthcoming for three months, submitted a draft on the schedule she had proposed. She ignored what he had said about schedule and just courteously requested feedback as quickly as possible; her chair apparently has promised feedback within six weeks, not three months.

Warmups

2009-01-11T23:22:00.000-08:00

I was thinking about writing as a practice, and as an exercise that builds ability even as you use it. I was thinking about the athletic metaphor and ways in which an understanding of athletic processes can shape understanding of similar aspects of writing. I was also thinking of music as another metaphor.

For both music and athletics, when one begins the exercise/practice, one begins with a warm up. No musician would begin a practice by trying to master the most difficult passage in her/his repertoire. No athlete would try to perform at the highest level without warming up first. But we sit down to write and expect to be able to write instantly.

There are differences between writing and athletics or music that might lead us to reject the need for a warmup: writing is not physical--you can't pull a muscle by writing too hard right away.

This is true, but isn't it also true that if we sit down to write and nothing happens in the first fifteen minutes we get frustrated? What if you had a writing warmup before you start in on the real work--a period in which you began to get used to the general process of putting your ideas in words, and the focus on your writing that is necessary to work on it.

Warmups should be easy; they should be done for the experience of doing them, not for the outcome--a musician plays scales not for the sake of playing the scales, but because the scales are a relatively easy way to begin the process of warming up the muscles and nervous system.

What could a writer use as a warmup? Almost anything--a list of things to work on after your writing period is over, or a list of things to work on during your writing period, or a note to a friend or anything that might be drawing your attention that you can work on for fifteen minutes as an attempt to get settled into the desk chair and into the writing state. You don't want to get absorbed in something that will take too much time, but if there is something distracting you, writing it down as something to return to when you're done with the writing might be one way to put it out of mind for the period of a few hours in which you're writing.
Writing something easy related to what you're working on might be a reasonable warmup, but you don't want it to be something that you're placing too much stock in--the warmup has to be easy to write--something that is free from judgement, something that is about getting started more than it is about production.

Books on writing

2009-01-09T17:59:00.000-08:00

Have you ever read any books on writing?
Any books on dissertation writing?

Did they help?
What did you like about them?
What didn't you like?

I'm curious about books on writing. There are a lot of them; some of them are pretty good; some aren't. I haven't read that many, but it's my intention to read more and I'm just looking for recommendations.

I'm engaging in something of a research project. Partly I want to see if I can learn something new. Partly I want to see whether there are other people out there who are looking at the process the way I am. If there aren't, then there's a place in the literature for anything that I see that others don't. So I have to do my research.

I'm exploring the obvious channels--Amazon--but also wondering which are particularly good. There are too many options and I want to try to cull the best.

Figure-ground reversal (for real)

2009-01-04T19:24:00.000-08:00

The basic phenomenon of figure-ground reversal is one in which there are two distinct ways in which to see an image. In famous examples, the same image can be seen in two different ways. For example we might see a vase, or we might see a pair of facing profiles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cup_or_faces_paradox.svg

Whatever we see, we see it one way at a time. We may be able to see the image in both ways, but we switch between them; we don't see both at the same time. I won't attempt a neurological explanation, but I don't doubt that there is one.

George Lakoff speaks of "biconceptualism"--the ability to use two different views of the world--which is a similar concept, but not visual. We can explain situations in different ways--for example, how does one respond to an enemy or one who has wronged you? The Bible says both to take retribution (an eye for an eye, etc.) and to treat that person with love (love your enemies). We can take these as two different models on how to deal with the same problem: we don't want someone to hurt us and ours repeatedly, so what do we do? The hawks say that the answer is to go to war; the doves say the answer is to seek other means to reduce the aggression.

So working with a writing project (or any project, really) one of the questions we're faced with is how to look at the situation: what view are we going to use. The examples above, and other simple examples, use binary comparisons, e.g., is the glass half full or half empty? But as a matter of practice, there are any number of different views that one can take of a subject. Horst Rittel, late professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, argued that many problems that we face can be described in many different ways--"there is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem," he wrote--a wicked problem being what he called problems that did not suit the rationalistic problem-solving techniques of his time (I'm digressing a little here).

Think of what it means if there is no definitive formulation to a given problem. What if the problem is to get a dissertation done? Well that's one very general formulation. More specific formulations would be "to convince your professors that you're done" or "to write a great dissertation on my topic of study." These two formulations are distinct, though not mutually exclusive.

The other day Sarah asked for common flips that might occur to grad students or researchers. I mentioned one example: the flip between seeing the project as an expression of your own interests and your own wisdom, and seeing the project as an attempt to say what is necessary to please the professors.

Another flip might be between having too much research material and having too little. This, I think, afflicts a lot of people in the literature review sections, or in their work if they don't have a clearly defined research agenda, or if their project is open-ended, as a project in literature or history might be. At one moment a person can be saying "I have so much material that I have to read and organize that I'm overwhelmed." The next moment the same person might say "I need to do more research." Admittedly, these are perspectives that might reasonably co-exist--sometimes we do have too much material to handle and still have to acquire more, if, for example, a professor requested more--but from a pragmatic point of view, we can only act effectively on one of these perspectives at once: either we can try to get a better handle on the material we have, or we can try to gather more. Both courses might be productive, but vacillating between them is not.

I don't know that I can think of other specific perspective shifts that might be common to the graduate student writer, but I think that the writer who learns to deal with these shifts, and learns to manage the different perspectives is well-positioned to respond to the myriad different demands of the long-term research project.

Figure-ground reversal

2008-12-31T17:51:00.000-08:00

This by way of a promissory note to responding to Sarah's comment yesterday. I actually had two separate responses of ideas. I forgot one. The other is about flipping and the general phenomenon of figure-ground reversals. I hadn't really thought about this phenomenon in the context of graduate studies, but I actually had one experience with it on the phone yesterday with a writer who--in the same phone call--told me about how her work was good and done for a purpose that she saw that was entirely unrelated to her professors, and she also told me how her work was done only to please her professors (she doesn't get a lot of support).

Anyway figure-ground reversals: seeing the same image in two different ways. I'll try to remember the other comment, too.

Happy New Years!

Taking Action

2008-12-30T02:35:00.001-08:00

I was thinking about Sarah's situation, which I described in the previous post. And about her response. And what I wanted to highlight the most is that the effective thing to do is to choose to take action and to focus on that action. By taking action and focusing on the activity we do the most to alleviate any pressures for two reasons: 1. we are acting to remove some of the source of pressure (presumably we will choose to act effectively), and 2. by focusing on the specific action, we focus on what we can do, thus getting away from the negative emotional states created in the sense of being overwhelmed.

The thing that struck me a lot about Sarah's comment was that she said that I ahd given her good ideas for what to do, but that she had forgotten them. On the one hand, this is evidence that the emotional state is improving, which is a good thing. On the other, having a sense of specific actions that can be taken to alleviate the stress is also a good thing to do, so it worries me that the specific ideas were lost. And on yet another hand (for those of us who have more than two), there's also a sense that what I really wanted to communicate was an approach to problems: it was not the specific suggestions themselves that mattered, so much as the idea that when feeling overwhelmed, the appropriate response is to make a plan of specific actions and to focus on them.

And what we're looking for is to improve the situation: we want to move in the positive direction--we want to make our situation better. It's not so much that I'm hoping to entirely banish any feeling of being overwhelmed--it's not like I can make the problems themselves go away, and having an injury--for example--will naturally contribute to difficulties in keeping up with the demands of a busy schedule. What I'm hoping for--and what I suggest seeking is more the sense that we can do something to respond, then to banish the pressure put on us by the situation. Or, to rephrase (redundantly, I suppose): it's not about eliminating the pressures that come from having problems to resolve; it's about creating better and more effective response patterns so that even if we feel the pressure of many competing demands that we may not be able to successfully fulfill completely, we feel like we're making some progress in the battle, rather than feeling helpless. It's not a problem to feel swamped, if we also feel like we're able to swim.

It's hard to look back at our past and say "I did this thing poorly" without also getting stuck in some sort of negative cycle--because when we see the thing that we don't like in our past, as long as we remain at that level of analysis, we're creating more negative emotion. Only if we ask "how can I change that old result?" and "how can I create the future I want, instead of repeating old results?" are we switching our focus to the positive possibilities for the future. By practicing looking forward, we reduce the negative emotional impact of studying the past patterns of behavior that created results we didn't like.

Combinations

2008-12-29T00:39:00.001-08:00

I was talking to a writer who was feeling overwhelmed.

"I'm starting a new chapter, and have a lot of material to manage; I also have issues managing my work space; I also have a trip to take; and, oh yeah, I also have an injury."

Well, that's a classic description of being overwhelmed: to be drowned beneath a mass.

Combinations of problems are made more difficult because each problem demands attention, and each has negative impact on emotions. The fact that all the problems demand attention also tend to take us away from the most efficient way of dealing with the problems: one at a time. We can't do everything at once; no matter how good we are at multi-tasking, the truth of the matter is that we work more efficiently if we can concentrate on one thing for an extended period. Partly we will work more efficiently because we will spend a smaller proportion of time switching between tasks, and partly we will work more efficiently because our attention being focused on one task, and being able to deal with that one task will give us better emotional stability to assist us as we try to deal with all tasks.

Feeling overwhelmed by problems that are not life threatening is something different than literally being overwhelmed by e.g., a tidal wave or a horde of hostile soldiers. Although, perhaps even in such situations the best strategy to keep from being literally overwhelmed is to act as efficiently as possible to stem the onrushing flood.

Problems in our personal lives ought to be dealt with as a doctor in an emergency room does triage: which problems demand the most immediate attention?

So, here was my general plan for trying to manage feeling overwhelmed: first you take an overview of the situation: what problems do you have in the moment? Then you prioritize: how are you going to schedule and allocate time to each problem? And then, only once you have gotten an overview of the situation, and made a plan for how you will address the situation, only then will you take action on any specific problem.
I recommend this course of action as a general schema for dealing with large problems or complex problems. It is useful in that, when feeling overwhelmed, it gives one specific general steps to follow, and having a plan of action can help focus attention and calm one, rather than letting the negative emotional impact of the competing problems drag you down. And though it suggests specific steps to take (1. take an inventory of problems; 2. prioritize; 3. schedule; 4. act), it is not highly restrictive and is generalizable to all situations, with the possible exception of split-second decisions. We can adjust the effort we invest in each step to the situation at hand. If the issues that we face have to be handled in a matter of minutes (e.g., a quiz in class, or even a difficult question in an interview), we simply allocate less time to each task: in the quiz we might allocate one minute to looking at the questions and getting an idea of which ones will be hard and which easy, as well as which ones will be most valuable; in the interview we might take a few seconds to think through the different parts of the question and try to assess which are of greatest concern to the interviewer. If our time is short, then we keep our initial overview short, but we can still benefit from it.

By breaking down the combination of problems into a set of discrete steps, we most effectively respond to situations. And the same breaking down of the situation into separate parts and separate steps, and focusing on one step at a time, we can most effectively counter our emotional sense of being overwhelmed.

This is hardly news, right? The idea of planning first and acting second is hardly a surprise. But we have to remind ourselves of its value when we're feeling overwhelmed. And we have to remember that it is a behavior that can be carried out at different time scales.

Framing effects, reason and planning

2008-12-27T22:33:00.000-08:00

Nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman, along with his primary collaborator Amos Tversky, and many colleagues showed that we do not always reason "logically".

For example, a patient faced with a life and death decision is more likely to choose a treatment that has a 90% survival rate than to choose one that has a 10% fatality rate. But, of course, a treatment plan with a 90% survival rate has a 10% fatality rate: the two are identical. The only difference is in the framing: one is framed in terms of life (which is positive and desirable) the other in terms of death (undesirable).

In terms of motivating ourselves, and in terms of doing good work, I think that results of this sort emphasize the importance of choosing positive framings for how we see our project. The same project can be both boring (during much of the work) and exciting (at the moments when the work comes together and progress is made), etc. How we choose to frame it can affect our plans with respect to the work, and can affect our mood, and therefore our ability to work (at least to the extent that I believe that we work better when we're in a good mood).

We want to work on building a positive framing for how we see the project and for framing the project outcome, and let that serve as the primary focus. We want to be able to plan for the worst cases, and we want to have the ability to respond to unexpected obstacles--we don't, in short, want to be naive, imprudent or impetuous--but generally we want to focus our attention on what we are trying to create and how we are going to bring that into existence. We want to frame our analysis of our past behavior and results in terms of how we can learn to do better in the future. Such framings are more likely to contribute to active plans and less likely to create negative emotional drag.

There isn't just one way to look at the world. The same thing can be seen in different ways: the glass is half full and half empty. What the results of Kahneman, Tversky and their colleagues show is that the two different framings have an effect on plans (and on emotions, too, I speculate, though I don't know if that is a reported result). That is to say that if someone tells you "the glass is half full" you are likely to make a different decision than if someone tells you "the glass is half empty;" the fact that you make a different decision is indicative of a potential emotional effect of the framing.

Why Do We Cite Papers?

2008-12-19T10:36:00.000-08:00

A writer sent me a link to a page written by a professor of software engineering, Jeff Offut, at George Mason University. I know nothing about this person beyond a very brief perusal of his website. He's actually got a number of articles related to writing a Ph.D.; I've only read this one that I include in this post.
I don't necessarily endorse or agree with his positions; but that doesn't mean there's nothing valuable.

OK, so here's what he says:

Why Do We Cite Papers?

Excerpts from a conversation with a PhD student in 2005.

First, definitions.

A reference is the publication information about a paper. It should have enough information for a reader to find the paper.

A citation appears in the paper and points to the reference, which is usually at the end of the paper.

When a paper does not cite a key reference (or several), there is a concern. There are actually several possibilities:

1. The references should be there just as a matter of record.
2. The references tell the reader that the author knows the field.
3. If the author does not know the key papers, he or she may well be making mistakes in the work. There are at least four categories of mistakes:
1. Repeating work that was already done
2. Finding solutions to problems that are not as good as already published solutions
3. Finding solutions that are less complete than previously published solutions
4. Going in the wrong direction

If the author is lucky, then the only issue is number (1). Issue (2) will make it harder to get the paper accepted, for example, if the reviewer doubts that the author is sufficiently prepared to work in the area. If the problem is (3), the paper should not be published, and if it is published, it makes the author look dumb and the conference or journal irresponsible. If references are missing but the work is still sound, the paper should be accepted and the author should be told of the missing references. That is, a lack of references in and of itself should not be a reason for rejecting a paper.

Of course, I have omitted an all too common issue: The author omitted one of the reviewer's papers and missed the chance to stroke the reviweer's ego. Judging a paper on whether it makes our egos happy is unscientific and unprofessional. The fact that software engineering authors have to worry about it is an unfortunate comment on the lack of maturity of our field.

Except for the last point, which I would only consider in a sticky political situation, there is basically no overlap between his reasons and mine. Which is not to say that his reasons aren't important...
Why I cite:
1. to give credit where credit is due, and
2. to use the work of other researchers to explain my position.

Defining personal space

2008-12-15T23:27:00.000-08:00

Just some random musing--I don't, at least as I start writing, have a conclusion.

A writer told me that I had been helping her set boundaries, especially with her committee, and that it was helping. Which seemed odd to me, because I couldn't remember ever talking about setting boundaries with her. I do remember talking a lot about having a sense of purpose, about believing in herself and her bringing out her own voice and about tapping in to the things that she felt most strongly about, and then to use that to tell her committee what it was that she wanted, and to use what they gave back as much as it was useful to her and not to get stressed about the parts that weren't useful, but just to stay focused on her own sense of purpose.

I understand, in retrospect, how these things can be seen as boundary setting issues.

But I guess I was thinking of them in a different way. We can define spaces--actual or conceptual--in two ways: in terms of distance from some central point(s), or in terms of boundaries. These can accomplish the same thing, but they don't act quite the same way.
Sometimes we have clearly delimited boundaries--between nations, we find rivers often are used to determine boundaries; a vegetarian sets a clear boundary between what will be eaten (everything but meat) and what will not (meat); religious fundamentalists tend to set strict boundaries.
Sometimes boundaries are not so clear: where is the clear line between music that is too loud and music that is not? Where the line between a photograph that is over-exposed and one that is not?

I like to think in terms of centers--in terms of principles--more than I like to think in terms of boundaries (though, as I say above, both are useful). Boundaries limit our ability to adapt and negotiate. I feel like when I'm focused on the central issue that I'm concerned with, then I can allow various changes in the periphery without sacrificing the central principle that is important to me. When I have a boundary set, it's harder to give it up in a compromise, even if that compromise allows me to attain a central goal.

To choose a stark example, we might look at the biblical commandment "Thou shalt not kill." This is defined in terms of a boundary: there is a clear line marked--the line between killing and not killing. The guidance derived from this boundary is clear. But that clarity can be problematic: what if you are faced with the option of killing one person to save the lives of hundreds (or thousands or millions...)? The boundary definition creates a dilemma: death will ensue, and to some extent one will be responsible, but the boundary rule pushes one towards allowing the individual to live. We can recast the same idea as a principle: strive to preserve life. This principle sets no boundary, and in the case described above, it clearly guides the user: one life is taken to save others. Perhaps this is a bad example, because the question is very tricky and loaded. Obviously this is the sort of justification that the Bush administration used to justify torture: "well, we don't want to do it, but our higher principle excuses it."
Nonetheless, I still find it powerful (without being reprehensible) to work from principles. In the case of the writer I was talking about at the beginning of the post, all the things that she saw as being a matter of setting boundaries, I saw as a matter of her developing a good understand of her core principles and her trying to apply them. She's thinking about it in terms of setting boundaries that keep her from accommodating her committee when it serves her ill; I'm thinking about it in terms of her clearly identifying what she wants and then clearly asking for what she wants to get from the committee. I guess I like being able to see it both ways and to think about it both ways.

I guess, also, I'm a little disturbed when I see how the use of reasoning from principles, instead of boundaries, can allow terrible justifications. But the flip side is that boundaries are also used to terrible ends--such as the boundaries set by certain cultures that allow the exploitation or destruction or oppression of another culture (e.g., the clear boundary that defined Jews in Nazi Germany, or the clear legal boundaries that defined who was "colored" and where "colored people" were allowed to go in the Jim Crow laws of the US).

Well, both ways of looking at things can cause problems, I guess, so it's best to understand how we can define spaces--in our lives and in our discourse--in two different ways, and having those two ways helps greatly.

Another thought: it had been kicking around in my mind, but hadn't popped out. How are categories defined? What makes a category? How is membership in a category determined? The classic, rationalist view is that categories are defined by a boundary, but cognitive science research (esp. by Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues) shows that conceptual categories are often structured around a central prototype (a model, paradigm or exemplar) and not defined by boundaries. Studies of semantics show that the usage of words is typically defined in terms of central models that are then extended to new meanings (cf. Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things). So, in terms of how we think about the world (and in terms of how we might want to set up an argument about the world), we need to understand the difference between defining concepts in terms of boundaries or in terms of centers/prototypes.

I'm not going to try to draw this together into any meaningful conclusion.

Dissertation writing books and related stuff

2008-12-11T15:03:00.001-08:00

A friend pointed out to me an article that looks at dissertation-writing self-help books:

The Failure of Dissertation Advice Books: Toward Alternative Pedagogies for Doctoral Writing
by
Barbara Kamler and Pat Thomson
Educational Researcher, Vol. 37, No. 8, 507-514 (2008)

The research is basically looking at the genre as a genre, so, not surprisingly, they make sweeping generalizations, but that's necessary for research anyway: even when we study a singular case (i.e., a case study), we have an eye to what that case can teach us about other cases. Freud's case studies, of course, provided the foundation that produced claims like "men face the oedipal complex; women have penis envy." I don't like careless use of generalizations, but I also recognize the necessity of being able to generalize (In his story "Funes the Memorious," Borges writes "To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions.")

They make four main complaints against the genre as a whole; the books:
1. support/create an expert–novice relationship with readers,
2. reduce dissertation writing to a series of linear steps,
3. reveal hidden rules, and
4. assert a mix of certainty and fear to position readers "correctly."

I think the article was interesting, and if you're out shopping for a book on dissertation writing, it's worth the read, just for thinking points on what to look for.

Personally, I find it hard to avoid three of the four points in expository writing.
1. It is presumed that the author knows something that the reader doesn't. The point of expository writing is to reveal something important that may not have been seen before, e.g., the results of research, or an insight from introspection/theoretical development (in, for example, mathematics or philosophy).
3. It is presumed, as above, that something hidden will be revealed, and inasmuch as that which is revealed is presumed to be "true" or at least supported by good research, we are presumed to take it into account in future behavior--of course often the knowledge won't have an impact on future behavior but it may, in the right circumstances (e.g., research that classifies widgets in some manner will implicitly set up a structure that other research on widgets should use).
4. Assert a mix of certainty and fear: well, maybe expository writing doesn't explicitly play with this as much as the self-help genre does, but following the premise that an expository work is arguing for a specific description of how the world works, it necessarily carries with it some threat of bad things following from not following the author's view (e.g., to follow up the previous example, the widget-researcher who fails to use a "true" classification scheme will ultimately create useless research).

To a lesser extent we can find something like #2 in much expository writing, too. #2 is too specific--but if we replace "dissertation writing" with "operation of systems (whether prescriptive or descriptive)" for the sake of generalizing--we find that this claim is basically that we are attempting to explain how things work or how to accomplish things: we reduce the complexity to a set of instructions that the reader can (hopefully) follow.

So, without meaning to impugn the authors, who are writing expository work and therefore cannot avoid three of the four things they decry, here are examples from the article:
1. They position themselves as experts by virtue of both their theoretical apparatus and their described methodology.
2. (this one doesn't easily fit)
3. They assert hidden rules (which are, in this case, the inverse of the points they decry), and
4. They assert that there is a possibility that dissertation-writing books that do not follow their rules may do harm, and they contrast this to their authority as researchers (fear and certainty).

That being said, I think I agree with their basic points, especially point 2. One of the main theoretical premises of Horst Rittel about the design process was that it cannot be reduced to a series of steps. In my work as a writing coach, that is one principle that I believe in strongly.

As for the other points:
1. It is important--fundamental, in my view, that the researcher understand that the dissertation is about developing their own voice (as my many posts labeled "your voice" will attest). Therefore, the researcher has to learn that to make the dissertation work, they have to start asserting their own voice and following their internal guidance, rather than looking for an outside guide. After all, the dissertation is partly about being able to guide yourself through a major research project--that's supposedly what makes you eligible to be a researcher yourself.
2. We don't want to reduce processes to a simple set of steps for many reasons that I'm not going to discuss here.
3. Aspiring researchers and writers don't want to simply follow someone else's guidance--they want to test the ideas and see whether they work--it's not about following someone else's rules (as discussed in point 1), it's about learning to make your own.
4. All people should balance caution with boldness. We neither want to be so cautious that we are paralyzed, nor do we want to be so bold that we are rash or reckless. I'm not sure that any writer who wants to convince the reader of something is free from the implicit "if you don't believe me, your life will be worse." A self-help writer whose aim was to help people be fearless might write a book that never mentioned fear, that only looked at the results of studies that looked at how to improve courage and talked about techniques to promote courage, and still have hanging, unspoken in the background the fear-inducing "if you don't do as I say, you will be fearful."

Controlled Experiments and Discoveries

2008-12-10T14:28:00.000-08:00

Knowledge advances in two ways: intentionally and by accident (and these are, by definition, mutually exclusive: that which is not intentional is an accident, and vice versa).

It's worthwhile to understand what it is that constitutes knowledge and research, because having that fundamental understanding gives us the greatest opportunity to learn from the data we have.

I had considered titling this post "Found Art" because some of research is largely "found art": that which was discovered serendipitously, but was, perhaps, thought refuse.

But the motivation for this post was talking with a writer who had attempted to run an experiment, and the experiment failed. "I should try something else," he suggested. But I'm wondering what could be found in the wealth of data generated by what he did do. It may not be that the failed experiment will provide a gem of information, but it might provide valuable insights that will guide future research.

Controlled experiments are one of the paradigms of research--it is intentional research in its most extreme form: possible outcomes are limited as much as possible to that which can be accurately measured.

In the laboratory a great deal of control can be exerted to limit different kinds of variability. That kind of control cannot be exerted in the field. And so controlled experiments may break down for various reasons beyond the control of the researcher, eliminating the possibility of getting the results that had been desired and intended.

In the field, however, if you are documenting the process extensively, even a failed experiment will generate masses of data that can be processed and analyzed for insights that were missing when the experiment was set up.

The first place to look is the failures. Your experiment failed because of record-keeping lapses by the participants? What does this teach you about setting up an experiment that will work in similar conditions? Does this suggest a failure to engage in the experimental activities? Why? What can the failures of the experiment teach about setting up an experiment to study the issue that motivated the original study? The failures, in some cases, may tell you about the very thing that you're testing, too. Do they indicate any results that would indicate that there are problems with the general premises under which you are operating?

Careful examination of a "failed" study can be quite valuable because of all the data generated--it simply requires one to look at the data in a different way--to see it through different eyes--to see the urinal as art.

Boiling water and the complexity of our actions

2008-12-05T00:22:00.000-08:00

Once I was a TA in a basic computer course (back in 1995); one exam question (or quiz or homework) asked students to write "pseudo-code" for boiling water ("pseudo-code" being a sort of plain-English description of an algorithm).

The expected answer was something like
Get a Pot
Fill it With Water
Put it on the Stove
Turn On the Stove
Wait

And that is a basic level description of what we do. But there's far more complexity there. The reason I write this is as a follow up to the previous post about research questions: we have basic ideas about the world, but when we examine them, we find that they open up into great complexity.

This sort of thing happens with computer programming, too, and that was the problem a lot of the students had with moving from five lines of pseudo-code to a working program--they just didn't recognize all the little details that are worthy of attention. Similarly, when we're looking at an assertion, we need to recognize all the details that are worthy of attention and examination.

Let's take a brief look at the pseudo-code. The first step: "Get a Pot."
Easy? Yes, it's easy if you have a pot, or know where to get one. Let's say you have a pot that you intend to use and it's in your kitchen. Then "get a pot" requires first going to your kitchen, which itself may not be trivial, if, for example, you're out running errands. You have to go home, then once home you have to go to the kitchen. Once you have gotten to the kitchen, you have to find the pot. This may be easy if your kitchen is well-kept. But maybe the pot is already in use--then you have to find an alternate pot. Or maybe the pot is dirty, and you have to wash it. Or maybe the pot isn't where you would expect it because the friend you had over for dinner the previous evening put away the dishes. Once you've gotten the pot and it's clean and ready for use, then you have to fill it with water. Again, we can find complexity here if we look for it. We need to have running water, we need to keep the pot oriented in the right direction, we need to keep it still, we need to support its weight, etc.

We want to look at our assertions at this level of detail, and then the research questions will start popping out at us.

Research and Research Questions

2008-12-04T23:40:00.000-08:00

Some research--or at least some important discoveries--are not made as the result of a specific research question. We might imagine Newton under the apple tree: the discovery of an idea that appears through the data. Similarly we might imagine that Darwin had no interest in evolution, but was only cataloguing the creatures he observed in his travels.

Such research need not be driven by a question; it comes about serendipitously. And that is somewhat problematic when there is an expectation to publish, to complete research projects and write them up. Can we just wait for a discovery to come to use as we peruse ever more data? That depends on what you want your life to be.

However, if your goal is to finish a research project so as to get a degree or to get published, then it helps to have a research question.

Research questions shape a work and guide it. They provide the focus. Any question could be a research question, but some are better suited to study than others.

A research question comes from a way of looking at the world. It starts with a basic perspective. We each have a fundamental, mostly unconscious set of ideas about how the world works. This then shapes the way we interact with the world and the questions we will ask of it.

We might, for example, believe the Christian creation myth, and set off on a journey to discover and document the many different species that survived the flood on Noah's ark. This would all be consistent with a desire to know all of God's creation that it might be celebrated. Our research question in such a case might be "are there any creatures that have not been documented yet?" or "how many undocumented creature can I find and document to the greater glory of the Lord?" These research questions are unlike the questions that are asked in most universities in America, but they are consistent within a certain world view. In much the same way that the questions asked at a secular university are consistent with their own world view.

Whatever your world view, it is the place from where you start: "I believe the world operates this way," you assert. Usually we have a number of assertions about how things work: "the sun will rise tomorrow; water will run when I turn the tap; e=mc^2; the sperm fertilizes the egg; drinking too much alcohol will make me sick; etc." We have a whole world of assertions; each of us has slightly different ones. Some of them we accept without question, and some of them we're curious about.

We might believe "Process X will improve the quality of my work." It's of obvious value if it's true. As a researcher, it is appropriate to be skeptical. Is this assertion true? And that becomes the research question that you test. The first place to look for answers, of course, is in the literature. Has anyone else asked this question? If so, what was their answer? If not, has anyone asked similar questions? Perhaps no one has asked "will Process X improve work in my field (let's call it 'field A')?" but someone has asked "will process X work in field B (which is related to field A)?"

By starting with what you believe, and testing what you believe, you can move into the logic of your area of interest in search of a question for which you want an answer but which there is no answer to be found.

Maybe you found someone, Dr.Q, who said "Process X will improve work in field A," but their argument was only theoretical, and they had never tested it. This then becomes an assertion that is in need of an empirical test, so you can set up a study to see if it will work in your field.

Maybe you also found someone who said "Process X works in field B if you make adjustments 1, 2 and 3." One thing you could do is to say, "I want to test process X in field A, as Dr. Q suggests, but I want to make adjustments 1 and 2 because of the similarity of fields A and B." Or you could say "I wonder whether the conditions that require adjustment 1 in field B also hold in field A, and if so will adjustment 1 suffice in field A?"

The examples should be viewed as examples of ways of thinking and asking questions. The premises and assertions used as examples could be replaced by any assertion or premise. Once we have a premise, we can start to look at whether it is true, and what reasons we have to believe it, and we can then go from there.

What is Research?

2008-12-04T00:19:00.001-08:00

Research can be construed in many different ways, but one way to look at it is the exploration of hypotheses: we believe the world works in a certain way, but we don't know for sure, and we want to test that hypothesis.

So we might, to choose a culinary analogy that may not hold up, for example, have a hypothesis that tofu and pomegranate would go well together in a raw salad.

We may have reasons to believe this--we may, for example, have read a review of restaurant that served such a dish, or we may have read a cookbook that suggested that the flavors would work well together, or we may have read some chemistry/biology textbook that leads us to believe that some chemicals in the two would combine well. We have reasons that we believe the hypothesis. To the extent that such reasons are supported in published literature, and that our idea came from reading the literature, we can add such elements to our literature review. But presumably there is not such a preponderance of evidence to suggest that the exact thing that we're studying is certain (e.g., there are no reports of a tofu-pomegranate salad craze in major metropolitan restaurants, or other indication that our hypothesis has been extensively tested).

In order for us to be doing research, we have to be testing something that is at least in question. As far as empirical science is concerned (whether social science or hard science), a hypothesis, no matter its logical antecedents, is worthy of empirical testing if the given empirical test (or one substantially similar to it) has not been executed. The fact that theory suggests that something will happen is no guarantee that it will.

Things are complex. It's simple to say something about preparing tofu and pomegranate, but that hides a great deal of potential complexity, and potential difficulties. To make up an example, it might be the case that tofu and pomegranate go well only with a third ingredient, but that ingredient is rare, or expensive, or hard to work with in some way, making practical execution of a dish infeasible, even if the theory suggests that it should work.

The scientist looks for this complexity within the simpler statement.
"Tofu and pomegranate will go well together" is a simple hypothesis but it suggests more detailed hypotheses and issues: will they go well together when fried? when raw? when boiled? when mixed with vinegar? Will any problems crop up? What will be done to find out? The scientist looks at the simple hypothesis and asks detailed questions about how that can be true. And the starting place for that exploration is intellectual: what do you know about the situation? what are the important ideas that define the situation? what kinds of theories shape your understanding of the situation? what kinds of questions can you ask about the situation? What details are pertinent? Where do theory and practice diverge? And what is the impact of that divergence? If you're attempting to import a theory or practice from one type of endeavor to another, what differences are there going to be? For example, maybe one heard that pomegranate and chicken was really good, but was vegetarian, so thought of pomegranate and tofu instead. What reasons do you have to believe that the translation will work? What reasons do you have to believe that the translation won't work?

Looking at hypothesis with a critical eye looking for detail, many different questions and ideas and possibilities arise. Practically speaking, each needs to be tested individually. So if you start with a general question, you're looking to find a specific aspect of that question that you can test. If you think pomegranate and tofu will work well together, but that they'll need to have some sort of seasoning, then you'll try preparing some with one set of spices/flavors, and you'll see if that works, and then you'll test with a different set of spices/flavors, and see if that works. You won't throw all the spices in at once, because then all you get is confusion. So with a question that can be fragmented and broken down, you want to seek the different questions that could contribute to answering the main question, and look to answer one of those more detailed questions.

But whatever you're going to do, it starts with your looking at the world and putting forth a hypothesis: "I believe the world works this way," you say to yourself. For example "I believe pomegranate and tofu would taste good together," or "I believe that method X, used in field A, will also be useful in field B, despite some differences between those fields."

You start with having an understanding of how the world works, and an idea that it will work in a certain way. Then you look to see what evidence you have to support that view. If you think the evidence is overwhelming that the view is true, then it's not an interesting research question--but if there is doubt--perhaps there are people who believe that it isn't true, perhaps you doubt yourself; it doesn't matter where the doubt arises--then there is a viable research question: you believe the world will work in a certain way, and then you want to test that idea, and you try to find a way to test that idea. It all starts with how you understand the world and your exploration of the places where you are uncertain and curious.

Setting Priorities

2008-11-30T23:57:00.000-08:00

It's important to get priorities right. And it's important to know when to shift priorities. I haven't been blogging mostly as a conscious choice to put my effort into other things--some other writing that I'm struggling with. In a way blogging has become a little too easy to be a challenge. Given the standards I demand from myself in blogging, and the general scope of the work, it's a lot easier to blog than to engage in more serious written endeavors--especially those that are longer than an average blog post.

If we don't set our priorities well, and then choose to act on the things we believe are important, and if we cannot see that priorities shift over time--as the Bible says: to everything there is a season--then we get ourselves caught in a difficult spot. If we don't prioritize our work early enough in the life of the project, then we get caught at the end with a crisis as we attempt to make up for the lost time. At the same time, it is also necessary to make sure that we do not prioritize our work too highly, especially in the early and middle stages of a project, because we don't want to drive ourselves to burnout that causes us to lose traction at the precise moment that we need a burst of energy to finish off a project.

It is a delicate balancing act, and an unstable one--because work and rest/play are mutually exclusive (to some extent), the priorities have to shift back and forth. To the extent that we love our work and think that it is important, that allows a closer connection between work and play: when we really love our work, it can be deeply enjoyable and rewarding. But still, the careful balance must be maintained: variety is the spice of life, as the saying goes, and if we do one thing to the exclusion of all other things, then we increase the chance of burning out.

Losing its Luster

2008-11-23T22:58:00.000-08:00

When we have something that we're working on for a long time, it can begin to lose its luster. What seemed interesting when it was new, becomes less interesting as its familiarity increases.
I've been facing that with this blog recently; I just haven't felt like I had something new to say that I really wanted to say. and I haven't felt like I had anything that I really wanted to say that I wanted to try saying again in a new way...or at least not in a new way in this blog.

But what to do when it's your dissertation project?
The key, it seems, is to keep the project seeming new by learning constantly. That may not seem to be likely or possible with something that you have been working on consistently for a long time, but realistically, we can learn something new, even about the familiar if we are seeking new insight and new wisdom.

When you're an academic and a writer, there are any new things to learn. The do not always lie in the plane that one expects: when writing a large project, for example, one can learn about the subject itself (as expected), but one can also learn about managing projects and about writing, not to mention the possibility that we can learn about ourselves and learn to better control our emotions and our thoughts so that we can be more productive, and so that we can gain the greatest value from those abilities that we have.

None of these things are easy to learn. Indeed, learning is usually associated with some level of difficulty--without difficulty are we really learning, or are we just storing a little bit of new information? But it is in the learning that we can see the project in a new way, and through that new vision, we can find a new spark of interest--or even we can begin to find some of the luster that was lost as the project became familiar.

In a way the academic writer should have an easy time learning new things--that is, in fact, the purpose of research--to learn. What a shame, then, that so many academic writers have lost sight of the reasons that they began their projects.

I got a card from a writer recently that said "we've been working together for a year now; thank you!" There was a part of me that was a little embarrassed, because I thought when we started working together that she had a good chance of finishing within a year, and she thought that there was no way that she could bear to work on the project for more than six months longer. But that's an incomplete story, too. Her aim is now finishing in the spring, and she's confident that she will. Because the project has regained the luster that she had once seen. Instead of facing the project with resentment for the work that needs to be done, as she did when we began working together, now she is excited about the project, and almost every time we speak she tells me about some additional work that she wants to integrate into the project. To grossly simplify, I attribute this to the fact that she has come to find a deeper appreciation for the value of her own work--not just for what she hoped to accomplish with it, but also she sees the depth of her analysis and how that analysis fits into a larger academic discourse that connects her with other writers. One key during the process was that she found (at least) two writers whose work helped her see a new value in her own work--a value that was new to her.

Projects lose their luster; that's natural. As the saying goes: variety is the spice of life. And where there is little variety, there is bland boredom. With a large project like a dissertation, we cannot introduce variety into the project by changing the project itself, so we have to seek a finer-grain of variety--we can see the change of our own ideas as we develop in our sophistication of both thought and expression (the two are not unrelated).

A Vision of the Future

2008-11-18T20:52:00.000-08:00

I didn't write that title thinking about visualization, but it came to mind as I thought about how to open the blog entry.

It's important to have a vision of what you're trying to accomplish. With a vision, you can make a plan, and with a plan, you can move most efficiently towards achieving what you want to achieve. Without a vision of what you want to accomplish, you're waiting at the whim of fate. This may work out well, but it's not something you have a lot of control over.

The idea of visualization is related to the need for a vision. Athletes often improve their performance through visualization exercises--visualizing their performance in the optimal form helps them bring that optimal character to the real performance. This can be seen as being much the same basic process by which a vision of the future can help all of us: the vision is a model on which we can work, which allows us to guide and refine our efforts to their best effect in our search for our goal.

Swiss philosopher Ferdinand Gonseth wrote a fable that my former dissertation chair, Prof. Jean-Pierre Protzen, of U.C. Berkeley, wrote an article about. In that fable, whose purpose is to question decision-making processes, one character asks another "would you let the dice decide"? This seems like the crucial question with respect to the desire for a vision: are you going strive for something that you want, or are you going to allow yourself to accept whatever the dice serve up? As Protzen points out, we think (we hope) that we can do better than simply letting the dice decide.

Having a vision for the future that you wish to achieve is not necessarily a loss of freedom: having a vision for the future that you want does not mean that you can't change your vision whenever you wish, it just means that you will more effectively pursue whatever vision you have chosen to pursue.

Stuckness and Persistence

2008-11-16T23:33:00.000-08:00

I preach persistence a lot. It's important to be able to push through difficulties to get beyond them. But that doesn't mean that one wants to be blindly persistent at all times.

I was talking recently with a writer who was stuck, and not writing. In our meeting, I was stressing the importance of trying to write, and of starting to write. He wanted a method by which he could organize his collection of articles. "There are many different ways to organize materials," I said, "but none is definitive. What's important is to start writing." This answer was unsatisfactory to him, and he insisted on talking about how to organize his articles. I told him that had never seen a book on writing dissertations that talked about how to organize the research materials, and that every book on writing dissertations that I have seen talks about how important it is to start writing, and how starting writing begins a learning process that allows you to organize your thoughts and your ideas about material. This too was unsatisfactory. "I want a simple solution to organizing my material," he insisted.

A week later he wrote to me. "I'm still stuck. I haven't been able to organize my material, so I haven't written." I suggested again trying to start writing--however imperfect that writing might be. Again that suggestion was dismissed.

I know that everyone has a different way of working, and I recognize that having well-organized research at your fingertips can be helpful. But I also recognize that if you're stuck, trying something new can be very effective and very useful to helping move forward.

Albert Einstein reputedly defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If you keep working on a project and you keep getting stuck on a specific task, isn't it worth trying to approach that project from a different perspective? Doesn't it make sense to try a new angle from which to look at the project?

Persistence need not manifest as blind repetition of the same attempt. That may be simply stubbornness. We need to be able to learn and adapt--which are, in fact, some of the primary characteristics of basic intelligence--to be able to learn and adapt.

Edison was persistent, but he also knew that he had to try something new each time. Each failed lightbulb was a way not to do things. Maybe the tasks and methods of writing that lead you into stuckness are ways not to write.

When you're learning to play a musical instrument, or when you're trying to master an athletic skill, blind repetition is often necessary, and the repetition will lead to different results: you just get better and better at the skill you're trying to develop, if you're practicing diligently and your muscles and brain start to wire together new skills. The body learns to perform an action more smoothly and easily. I was giving a friend a guitar lesson yesterday, and I was stressing the importance of playing a given chord change over and over until the motions became smooth and even. With practicing a guitar, this works: playing the chords over and over, leads to different results over time; the practice leads our playing to become smoother and more facile. If repetition is leading to different results and you can feel those differences, then it hardly fits Einstein's definition of insanity, because the change comes, and so it is reasonable to expect--at least for a while--that doing the same thing over and over again will lead to different results.

But then again, those learning curves have their terminus as well. One does not infinitely improve as a musician or athlete, and the practices and exercises that get one to a given level of skill will not necessarily take one beyond that level.

A summary of my thoughts: persistence is important, but one needs to differentiate between persistence that is building skill and ability--useful practice and repetition--and persistence that is stubbornness--an unproductive practice in which one is stuck and not developing. One needs to be persistent, but one also needs to be able to change the angle by which a given project is approached, so that one is learning and adapting, rather than simply trying the same thing again and again, expecting different results.

Three hundred posts

2008-11-14T23:36:00.000-08:00

This is actually my 301st post on this blog. That strikes me as a big number. And for the most part, all of it has been done in easy, convenient moments when I didn't have to sacrifice anything except a few minutes of sleep to write.

It's a worthy testament to how volume naturally results from a regular practice. I grant, of course, that the 301 pieces that I've written don't cohere like a good single large work should, but the principle is similar. Over the course of 10.5 months, I've probably written something on the order of 300 pages in my blog, and I imagine that I could take those pieces and fit them together into some sort of larger work, just because they were all part of my general desire to think about writing.

If you want to write--if you have a writing project that you want to complete--then writing regularly will get you there in good time. If you keep at it day after day, the pages start to add up, and you suddenly have good volume. If you're working each day to contribute to a coherent piece, you might not write as much as if your efforts were unconstrained, but then a dissertation (or book) has no need to be 300 pages--some dissertations, maybe, have such a need, but many do not.

Estimates

2008-11-10T23:12:00.000-08:00

Learning to estimate how long projects take is a useful skill. It's difficult, too. But it can help a lot (and there is also an associated skill of finishing a task in the amount of time provided).

I was talking with my friend Eve, who had been asked to edit something for a friend/acquaintance. The proposed budget: $200; the project: 400 pages. The friend was asking Eve to edit each page for $0.50. Which may seem generous; I agree that $200 is a lot of money. Except how fast do you read? Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that you can read a page of text in a minute. That's sixty pages an hour, or $30/hr. Which isn't a bad little wage. I don't read 60pages/hr. At my fastest--easy reads--I read maybe 50 pages an hour. That's just reading. When I'm editing I go slower still: it's necessary to read closely, and to figure out how to fix sentences whose meaning is unclear, and to fix any minor errors. At my fastest, when proofreading a well-written document with few errors, I might edit about 12 pages an hour. Proofreading is painstaking work--in the sense that one should take pains to get it right: the point of proofreading is to eliminate errors; it cannot, therefore, be done in a lackadaisical manner. Twelve pages an hour--that's $6/hr at $0.50 per page. Now Eve may be willing to take the project as a labor of love, but that's not a very generous offer to your friend to offer them $6/hr for a project that takes skill, care, and would take over 30 hours of work. I'm not suggesting that the friend is uncaring, but just that they weren't making a very good estimate of what the project would take.

Another example. I had a sobering exchange with a writer recently. He approached me with a week before his deadline, and there simply wasn't enough that I could do in a short time. The biggest issue was a concern with some of the content. With only a week there was no time for any give and take between the two of us. Especially (even if one were to assume that I worked instantaneously) if I had any questions that he needed to answer. There were--both matters of content and idea, and of execution--for example, there were many reference citations in the text that were not made in the reference list. He had estimated that a week would be enough for an editor to work; I can do a lot in a week, but he had not made any estimate for any work that he might have to do in response to what I saw (like the need to fix missing citations).

A related issue is that of getting feedback from professors--a notoriously difficult task. If we have a big draft and if we want detailed feedback, we have to realize the effort that we are asking from our professors. A short dissertation might be 100 pages. To read it closely might take four hours. To write comments and feedback could take another hour. That is not a request to make lightly of your committee, even if they do owe it to you to give you good, clear feedback on your work. It is important to correctly assess what you are asking of them in order to have reasonable expectations of what you can get back. And what if your draft is 200 pages? Or, like my final drafts, over 300? I respect tremendously the work of my dissertation committee--Professors Jean-Pierre Protzen, Eve Sweetser and Greig Crysler--who all read three drafts, and commented copiously during the last six months I was writing. I appreciated and marveled at it then, but now, having worked as an editor, I respect the effort even more. If they were working twice as fast as I do, they were spending six to ten hours on each draft. Adding in the other help they gave me in the final semester, I would estimate now that each gave me almost 40 hours of time in the course of twenty weeks.

It's important to estimate the effort that goes into tasks, not only to help us manage how we work with others, but also to help us manage our own work. If we have unreasonable expectations of ourselves, that can be as harmful as having unrealistic expectations of others. Writing is a difficult process, and one during which you learn a lot about what you're trying to write about. Usually you learn so much that at the end you'll look askance at what you wrote in the beginning. That's not a problem--that's an opportunity to grow. But if you haven't given yourself time for that, then you're going to get into trouble.

I had an inquiry once from a writer: "I can only work with an immediate deadline; I have to write my entire dissertation in six months." Is that a realistic estimate? Can that plan of action work? It seems to me that estimating that you can finish the whole dissertation in six months, when you can only write on immediate deadlines is a naive plan. Wouldn't it be better to estimate accurately: "If I don't change how I work, so that I can work regularly without an immediate deadline, I won't be able to finish in the six months I hope?"

Good estimating plays a key role in making good plans. Whether estimating the needs you will face, or estimating the help that you can get from others, if you can realistically assess what needs to be done and how long it will take to do it, you will be far more likely to get your project done and far less likely to suffer the emotional strain of unpleasant surprises and frantic attempts to make the final deadline.

Start Writing; Stop researching

2008-11-07T00:14:00.000-08:00

One of the classic procrastination patterns is the "I haven't gotten my research done" ploy.

It's a trap; it's deceptive, comforting, perhaps--"If I just read this book and those articles, then I'll be ready to write; If I can just organize my research materials, then I'll be ready"--ah, that bright and shining future, where you know enough to start writing!
It's a trap. It's a painful, unproductive pattern.

The hard part about writing--which is also the valuable part about writing--is the part that's not like reading. The hard part about writing is in making something that works. It is in organizing your thought. The hard part about reading is in trying to observe what is there. It's completely different.

Writing is like speaking: it comes from inside your head.
And that means that you have to expend energy to organize your thoughts. And to find words to represent those thoughts to share with another person. We struggle with this all the time; there are a whole slew of stock phrases that relate to this precise struggle--"I'm speechless; I couldn't find the words; there aren't words to describe..." and so on. The battle with writing is to find your own words. It won't happen while you're looking at other people's writing.

Imagine:
In the dead of night, you're woken by strangers who pull a hood over your head, bind you hand and foot, and take you away.
When they take the hood off your head and the bindings off your wrists, you're seated at a desk with a pen and a pad of paper.
"Describe your dissertation project in 350 words (give or take 50), or you'll never see your family again," they say.
What do you do? It's obvious what you do, and realistically it takes you a couple of hours at most because it just doesn't take that long to write if you focus on it.

The knowledge is already inside your head. You studied for years to get to the point where you're being permitted to propose a dissertation. Use that knowledge. Trust yourself. Put away the freakin' books an articles and trust that you learned something from all that reading you've been doing.

Imagine:
You're home for Thanksgiving and a subject related to your topic comes up. Maybe you're writing about something--anything really: history, physics, engineering, designing musical instruments, raising pets, making crepes; it doesn't really matter what--and something related comes up in conversation. Don't you know relatively a lot about your subject? At least compared to the non-specialist?

You've got to write. Writing is like teaching: it forces you to learn again and in greater depth, the subject you have been studying. When you read, and when you learn, you can rely on intuition and ideas for which you have found no expression yet. When you write, you have to struggle to make explicit the intuitions that have previously guided you.

If you do some writing, that doesn't preclude doing more reading later. But if you say "I can't write until I'm done reading," then writing is precluded until you're "done."

Feedback request

2008-10-31T19:37:00.000-07:00

I happened to be looking at statistics for traffic on my blog, and I noticed that yesterday one single visitor read 23 pages of my blog. If you were that reader, I would love to hear from you. Thanks!

It's nice to think that someone finds what I write interesting. Reading 23 pages is more than just a passing interest. It would be great to hear what you liked, and what didn't work as well.

Halloween Costumes

2008-10-28T22:20:00.000-07:00

It's a little early for this post, perhaps. Having been invited to a party Halloween, it is necessary to consider a costume, and I was thinking of what I might do when it occurred to me that this is something to consider as a writer.

Not what I should wear for Halloween, but the whole concept of wearing a costume. What if you were to think of your dissertation as something of a costume? It is not you and yet it is. On Halloween you go out and your friends recognize you, and yet you're also someone else. It is easier to act the fool.

The Halloween costume is a celebration, and one on which many invest a great deal of energy. But because it is a celebration it does not seem onerous. So we might wonder whether, by looking at our writing as a sort of costume, we might be able to enjoy the exploration and even enjoy making a fool of ourselves.

It's crucial for the writer to be able to try on a costume and then just as quickly throw on another if the first didn't work. If you can write and rewrite, then you will be able to produce good work.

It's also crucial to be able to see the writing as separate from you. The costume hides the identity, and in so doing turns the criticism into an attack on something that is not you. Borges writes a little parable "Borges and I" in which he discusses the distance between himself and the figure that manifests on the paper.

We need not be too tied to our writing. We can it hold it in a gap between us and the world, and this gap--this distance between us and the work allows us to see what others think of the work without worrying that it is a reflection on us.

A final note: it seems to me that the costume and the writing are both a chance to celebrate your own voice and to celebrate your own imagination. Explore the possibilities; take chances. Being repressed doesn't make a better costume or a better piece of writing.

Feedback and Flow

2008-10-26T22:55:00.000-07:00

I've been slowly making my way through Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

He talks about how important it is to have immediate feedback to get into the flow state (the flow state is the state of deep concentration that Csikzentmihalyi identifies as the common element in different reports of optimal experience). He talks about how the tennis player knows immediately (almost) whether the shot is in.

But does the dissertation writer have any such immediate feedback? Obviously, at one level, no: the dissertation writer depends on the professors who will ultimately sign off on the dissertation.

On another level, every writer has feedback: is there anything on the page? how much is on the page? is there anything useful on the page? Writers also have the experience of writing--are we engaged? are we focused or wandering? Those experiences themselves can tell us how we are doing.

Often I write something, or rather, I start to write something when I don't really know what I want to say and I'm just saying something for the sake of writing. Often, at such times, I am not focused and my attention is wandering; often my topic is something that I think might be interesting but don't know how to discuss. But as I expend effort to continue to engage with the writing, I begin to find greater concentration, and often I begin to find a greater sense of what I could say, and this helps me focus more: the actual process of writing helps me gain focus. Each word that I put on the page is something to reflect on, and I try to add to it, to refine it. In this way I have continual feedback that helps me focus my attention and move closer to both a coherent written form and to a sense of flow. But, though I strive for such coherence, and find it a nice challenge to see if I can manage to bring coherence into a single, completely unrevised draft, I have no expectation that I will get such coherence on the first draft. Or the second, for that matter. By the third, maybe, but...The more easily that you can write the first draft, the more time you have to revise, and the less intimidating it seems to have a revision ahead of you. If you have a day where you write very productively--you write a good ten pages, perhaps, or more,--then it's much easier to believe that you can have other such days, and so writing becomes that much less intimidating (and therefore that much easier).

In order to get your writing to generate immediate feedback, you need to write something. Let's, for a moment, just think in simple terms. If you're writing and you're struggling to write, and you write a sentence, isn't that a decent feeling? At least for a moment you can say to yourself "ah, I've written that sentence." And if you can write a whole paragraph, you can say "yes, I've written a whole paragraph," and so forth. So it's a good idea, if you're having trouble writing something, to just write anything. See how it looks on the page. See what could follow it; see how it could be built up. Put words on the page.

Sometimes I wipe away what I've written, but if you're struggling to write, you want to get words on the page. I have no trouble filling a page or three (in a blog, certainly, where it's a one-shot deal, and I won't usually even go back to clean up the typos and errors that come from changing my idea in mid-sentence), so if I wipe away a sentence or paragraph, or even page, it's no big deal. But if you're struggling, put words on the page. Give it a try. If you write a first sentence and say "that doesn't work", instead of erasing it, ask yourself, what would have to go with that sentence to remedy the error, and write that. Put words down on paper (or computer).

We have our best experiences when we're working hard, or so at least Csikzentmihalyi reports from his studies of people reporting on their optimal experiences. So how can we create a situation where we're working hard and that work becomes an optimal experience?
Csikzentmihalyi may give suggestions on how to achieve flow--I haven't finished the book--but, if flow states are characterized by concentration and by feedback, we can see that writing is a situation where those conditions apply, and it certainly takes effort. If we want to find flow in writing, the implication seems to be that we want to actually put words on the paper, because these will help us focus and will give us feedback.

Make mistakes. They give you feedback. If you make lots of mistakes, you can write several sentences in a minute. If you try to write a perfec sentence, you can wait hours with no result. Make mistakes, get feedback. Look at the words on the page and say "how do these help me write the next sentence?"

Conceptual Change

2008-10-24T23:02:00.000-07:00

"Problems cannot be solved by the level of awareness that created them." This quotation is typically attributed to Albert Einstein. Wikiquote has no attribution for it.
A similar thought, also attributed to Einstein is
"Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different result."
Wikiquote attributes this to Rita Mae Brown, from Sudden Death, Bantam Books, New York, 1983, p. 68.

I've been struggling with changing my patterns of thinking. I was working on a project recently and kept running up against blocks that I have run up against time and time again. My challenge has been to rethink my response to the blocks and to re-imagine the very nature of my work. If I don't change how I respond, I'll end up with similar results to those I've had in the past.

This is the coach's challenge: how does a coach get a performer to perform more effectively? The answer: get them to do things differently. For me, what I typically work with is trying to envision the project in different ways, and to see the different spaces in the project that can be effectively approached with useful tools.

This is, I suppose, partly a left-over of what I learned in my Ph.D. program, which had been set up by Horst Rittel, a design theorist--that is to say, a philosopher who studied the process of design. Rittel argued that there were basically no simple, easily defined steps in design processes, and that there were no grand schemes to follow to guide the designer to his/her goal. Instead the designer had to work towards an uncertain goal, one that shifted as the designer came to see new aspects of the problem, and the best one can do in terms of applying methodologies, or specific techniques, was to find places where those techniques could be used to forward the project without assuming that they would lead to an answer.

Because I don't think that we can prescribe methodologies very well, and less so, the larger the task, I tend to try to look for ways to re-envision the task at hand so that it can be seen as a series of smaller related tasks.

At the same time, because there is no over-arching methodological framework to guide the designer/writer, it is important for the writer to seek an overarching vision of the project's goals, to provide the framework to guide efforts.

I had a writer once tell me: "I'm stuck, but I only have six months to finish my project, so I don't have time to learn to work any differently." But I think that kind of thinking eliminates the chance that I can really help: I can't force someone to work with a whip. I can't even entice them to work with kindness and positive support. What I can do is help the writer see the project differently; I can help a writer see positive opportunities to develop his or her interests and abilities.

Having said these things, I now have to go back to the paper I'm writing, lest I let the momentum slack (thus falling into one of the traps that I fall into). And I want to jump into the revision (the third complete rewrite of the 8 pages since Wednesday) before I start to think how hard it is to revise.

Memories

2008-10-22T21:05:00.000-07:00

A writer wrote to me:
"well, I have to say, this is the first time I've been excited about this damn intro ever. "

The first thing I did in writing back was to emphasize this. But I want to emphasize it more, because we can use this kind of thing as a tool to help us.

What I think is important here is that this writer's excitement was coming from a place of struggling with the work, from having someone (me) challenging the presentation and demanding (suggesting), and from putting in a lot of effort rewriting: "I decided to take a risk, and reorganize a few things."

As I noted, a few days ago, when talking about the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, if we can get through the difficulty of getting started, we can have what are the most exhilarating experiences of our lives.

When we do have such experiences, it's worthwhile to remember them. Not that we won't, but if they're fresh and we set them in our minds as examples of what happens when we're willing to work through the difficult spots, then we have more positive motivation to help pull us through the difficult spots.

I was talking with another writer today and she was telling me about all that she had to do, but her spirits were high, so all that she had to do was viewed largely with excitement and positive anticipation. She's finding that she's accomplishing more and it feels easier because she is able to connect with the excitement that comes with her growing understanding of all the different aspects of her project.

So, when we have one of those moments of elation, it's worth taking a moment to remember the effort that brought us to that moment--to inscribe more deeply in our brains the connection between the effort and the payoff.

Most of us have a pretty strong inscription in our brains that work is hard and onerous. And most of us can remember some of the non-emotional rewards that come from work (money, recognition, signatures on the dissertation signature page, etc.), but do we remember the very real sense of elation that comes from engaging to the limit of our ability?

If we feel one of those moments of real excitement, it's worth taking a moment to look back and see what got us to that point.

Structural Thinking

2008-10-20T22:09:00.000-07:00

I met a young woman, an undergraduate at Cal, and asked her what she was studying. "Rhetoric," she said, sighing, "a completely worthless degree." I was obliged to disagree.

What is rhetoric? "The art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing," says one dictionary; "the study of the elements used in literature and public speaking, such as content, structure, cadence and style," says another. In short, it is the study of how to effectively present ideas, distinct from the question of whether the idea is good or not. This has led to rhetoric getting a bad rap--"language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience, but is often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content," says the first dictionary; "affectation or exaggeration...unsupported or inflated discourse," says the second.

Bad rap or not, we have to learn how to think in these terms. the five paragraph essay that they used to teach in elementary school or junior high--that gets a bad rap now, too. But it is an elegant example of basic rhetorical principles. You have an opening paragraph that introduces the idea to the reader, you have three examples, and you have a conclusion that ties everything up. This is, in simple form, the basic structure of a lot of really effective speaking and writing. Yes, there are those who wish to create emotional effects of surprise or blind enthusiasm who might not wish to present material this way, but as academic writers we want to follow the basic paradigm: introduce the ideas, give details/examples that develop the ideas presented in the introduction, and then wrap up the discussion by summarizing the main points and talking about what the point of the whole exercise was--what you take moving forward.

Whether talking about a paragraph, a section, a chapter, or the whole work, we can always use the same basic paradigm for thinking about how we are presenting our ideas to an audience. We can always rely on the template:
First I introduce the ideas I discuss in this [paragraph|section|chapter|dissertation]
Second I present materials that develop the ideas of the [paragraph|section|etc.]
Finally, I draw conclusions from the material I presented in the [paragraph|etc.].

At the level of the academic writer, with the scope of the dissertation, there are certainly structural liberties one can take, if one is a confident writer. But if one is struggling to write, using a worthy template can help simplify the problem--by simplifying the rhetorical aspect of the argument, one can focus on the logic, theory and analysis and use of data.

Thinking about the rhetorical aspect--how do I present this to an audience? how do I draw the audience in? how do I ensure that they will follow me where I want to go?--can provide an extra angle by which to help organize material. Sometimes ideas don't organize themselves in linear forms--for example some ideas face chicken-and-egg problems: you can't understand one without understanding the other, so which do you present first? A template can help somewhat, if you think of it as a way of imposing order on the ideas--an additional order that doesn't exist in the ideas themselves, but that serves your rhetorical purposes.

For example, when presenting material that has the aforementioned chicken-and-egg problem, you can think in terms of roles. Suppose you have four parts to the main idea. you can impose roles on the ideas: one part is presented first an an introduction: it defines ideas and sets up the rest of the discussion. The second part will still do some defining of ideas, but it will also start to go into greater depth; it presumes familiarity with the basics (provided by the first part), so it can look more at complexities; the third part then begins the process of closing up the argument: it brings out the details and the full depth of the argument, so that all the main detail and complexity of the has been brought out before the final section. The final part (of this hypothetical four-part idea) is used to summarize and conclude; what details you discuss of the fourth part of the idea can be used to bring together the details from the other parts to highlight the points that you want to make.

Ok, I've obviously simplified this example. There may not be four parts, and they may not want to work the way I've described, but whatever you write can follow the simple elegant template of introducing, giving details, and concluding. This template provides a way to think about how to communicate with your audience. If you can see a way to use it, it could make writing easier.

You may be saying something like "oh no, something else to think about; this just makes it more complicated. I don't have time for this." On one level that's like saying "I don't have time to look in the rearview mirror when driving": the consequences may not be as dire, but it's something you have to think about to write well. On another level, even though it may seem like it makes it more complicated at first, I believe that it helps simplify the project: by looking at the work from the additional perspective, by adding additional conditions to satisfy, you limit what the final piece will look like, thus giving you better direction and reducing the number of possibilities that you need to consider.

In order to effectively communicate our ideas--which is our goal in writing--it helps to think of the rhetorical aspects: how is the work going to be presented? By thinking about the role structure will play in communicating our ideas to an audience, we can give ourselves valuable guidance that will help organize our writing.

Quantitative and Qualitative (2)

2008-10-20T09:55:00.000-07:00

Quantitative studies are studies that rely on counting and measurement...they rely on numbers. So if you want to do a quantitative study, you have to have some idea of what you are going to count or what you're going to measure.

Qualitative studies could be seen as any study that is not about counting, and not about applying numbers to things. It makes sense to look at this as an examination of the qualities of things, but qualitative studies can also operate in the same logical context as quantitative studies, if the qualitative study is viewed as an opportunity to examine possibilities (see my previous post on this).

The questions asked by quantitative studies and by qualitative studies are different.

Here are some quantitative questions.
"How many are there?"
"How often does this occur?"
"Are these measurements correlated?"
"Which occurs more frequently?"
"Is the rate of occurrence stable or changing?"
"How do these groups differ for a given measurement?"
"What are the likely results of an action, and what are the likelihoods/probabilities?"

Qualitative questions:
"What is it like to do X?"
"What are the experiences of group Y?"
"What are the perceptions of group Y?"
"What are the characteristics of group Y?"
"What has occurred?"
"What are possible consequences of that action?"
"What are different ways that Z can be interpreted?"

Share the wealth; share the love

2008-10-18T01:07:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

I put a fair amount of effort into writing this blog, and every now and then someone writes to tell me that they find it helpful.

Firstly, I'd love to hear from you. Let me know what is useful. Let me know what could be improved. If you've got a critique, I may not agree, but it's helpful to know what you're thinking.

Secondly, If you find this blog helpful, tell a friend. The value of what I have to say isn't lessened by being shared among more people. To me, it's gratifying to know that people are reading this, and the more the merrier. If the effort I have put in is helping you, then maybe it could help more people, too.

Also, I just started another blog. When I mentioned it the other day, inviting people to read it, I had unwittingly set it up so that no one could read it. I have fixed that, I believe, so check it out.

Thanks for your time and your interest.

Do you have to force yourself to work?

2008-10-17T23:32:00.000-07:00

I was talking with a writer this morning and he said to me something like "I have to force myself to work on this." This seemed to me problematic in some ways, though correct in others.

He brought up the analogy of working out: "When you're working out regularly, you don't need to force yourself because you almost have to work out; it doesn't feel right if you don't; but if you've had a lay-off and have to get back into it, it can be hard, and you do have to force yourself." This I liked much better, because it contains an important element that the first statement didn't. In this statement there is the recognition of and focus on the good that comes along with the investment of effort. And this is the key.

My yoga teacher told the class something to the effect of: "At the moment of greatest difficulty, something beautiful is waiting to be born." The idea being, I think, that it is through the difficulty that we grow into new appreciations.

I just started reading Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In it he says

we have all experienced times when, instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we do feel in control of our actions, masters of our own fate. On the rare occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like....
Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times--although such experiences can also be enjoyable if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen....
Such experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur.

The emphasis on "make" is his. But this is the kind of forcing that is positive: when we recognize that in the reaching and in the stretching to our limits, there we are going to be the most satisfied. So yes, we need to put in effort, and to push our comfort zone, but if that effort is motivated by our sense that this is a route to feeling good.
Yes, he notes that there may be some sort of discomfort, but that discomfort is not certain--and once in "flow" easily put aside (at least in my experience).

So, if you're thinking you have to force yourself to work, remember the optimal experiences in your past. What are the moments in your memory that stand out as the most pleasurable? Are any of them flow moments? Are they memories of things that required effort? Can remembering how good those moments felt help you engage with the project at hand?

Quantitative and Qualitative

2008-10-16T20:28:00.000-07:00

I started talking about the vast unconscious because I wanted to talk about quantitative and qualitative studies. Yesterday I asked "what is the point of research?" To some extent the point of the research depends on the type of research you're doing.

The point of quantitative research is different from the point of qualitative research (no kidding!). But knowing that they have different points is not the same as understanding what the point of each type of research is.

Here's my take on it:
Qualitative work is a study of what is possible; it looks at the world and describes it in different ways and explores the possibilities suggested by it. Qualitative research looks at what happened, at the quality of how it happens, and at possible causal paths.
Quantitative work is a study of frequencies and probabilities and magnitudes: how often does this occur? how likely is it to happen? how large is the effect?

That's the super-condensed version. I know I'm leaving out huge swaths of detail. I like to explain it this way because there is a prejudice against qualitative data: many people take qualitative data to be "soft" or not the product of "rigorous scientific thinking." But if we look at the logic underlying Qualitative research, it is no less sound than the logic underlying quantitative research, it is simply the case that a different kind of thing is being shown. The two types of research do different things. To dismiss qualitative research is to dismiss a whole segment of logical development.

Let's put it this way: empirical research--that is research based on observation of the world--is fundamentally inductive: it takes a number of specific observations, and reasons from those to a more general conclusion: some sort of rule explaining the observations, and presumably similar observations.

So, for example, we might be observing taxi cabs in NYC. We see several, and they're all yellow. Induction leads us to propose a rule: "all taxi cabs in NYC are yellow." Induction is problematic, however, because you never know for certain: just because you observed 100 yellow cabs, or a thousand, doesn't mean that there isn't one that isn't yellow (in fact there are, or at least used to be, "gypsy cabs" in NYC--not licensed by whoever licensed the yellow cabs, but cabs nonetheless. They weren't yellow, though). We never know with certainty that the future will resemble the past: the cab we see in the future may not be like the one we saw in the past. This problem is sometimes know as "Hume's Problem."

Karl Popper's response to this problem is to suggest that instead of proving the truth of hypotheses, we focus on proving their falsity. So we take the proposition "all cabs are yellow" and we test it. If we observe a cab that is not yellow, then we know that the proposition is false. This is the basis of the null hypothesis that forms the heart of many statistical tests: we propose that there is no causal relationship, and then we reject that null hypothesis, and instead seek an alternative hypothesis--that there is some causal relationship.
Quantitative methods are typically going to focus on how likely something is to be true--so with hypothesis tests, the level of significance is the probability that the result was caused at random. If the probability is very low, then that indicates that there might be some non-random effect. A regression, too, is looking for a probabilistic assessment of causality and of the magnitude of the causal effect.

Qualitative research can be looked at, on a preliminary level, as providing both the case that disproves a rule, and the case that suggests other rules. By observing, for example, a guinea pig, we can learn that all sorts of assertions are false: for example, guinea pigs aren't always fierce. Ok that's a silly example, but take for example a slightly more realistic question--someone might assert "all murderers had a bad family life", then studying a single murderer might be sufficient to dispel that assertion. (I did say "slightly more realistic".) Where there are stereotypes, qualitative studies are ways to work against the stereotype and to show where they fail.
On the other side, qualitative work can be used to generate suggestions. Do you want to understand why people become {axe muderers/haridressers/professional golfers/whatever}? Well, a good place to start is with a qualitative study, where close work with a single individual might suggest that people become hairdressers because they were frightened by their grandfather's comb-over or something. If you have even one person who says "I became a hairdresser for reason X" then you know that at least some people become hairdressers for reason X. From there you could do a quantitative study to see how often reason X plays a role in becoming a hairdresser.
Qualitative studies can give other valuable stuff, too, but I don't want to get into it now.