Today is Mardi Gras.
One thing that can get lost in the focus on finishing a piece of work is the need to be able to put it aside for a time. Focus is a good thing, but too much of a good thing can be a problem. Sometimes the right thing to do is to rest; it's good to take some time off from your work. Of course this is said in the context of assuming that you are actually working.
But there are a couple of levels to this: the practical level and the emotional level. On the practical level, one needs to make progress and get work done. If one hasn't been getting work done, then there is some value in sticking to the project with the intention of getting work done. But the emotional level is different. Even if you haven't been getting work done, the constant pressure we put on ourselves is work of a sort, and it's good to take a rest from it. By setting aside time to celebrate, we open emotional space in our lives. Ideally, of course, we're diligent and then when it's time to celebrate we can put aside our work with a clear mind and a sense of satisfaction. The ideal is difficult to reach, however: diligence is easier said than done.
Ideally, we find a balance between diligence and celebration that enhances our sense of self-worth and our enjoyment of the world. There is a real role for celebration in our lives: if nothing else, celebration is something to look forward to. Enter into celebration with enthusiasm and joy, and then, when the celebration is over, you can return to your work with both diligence and a fresh mind.
And a fresh mind is important to writers--it's good to be able to look back at what we've done most recently and assess how well it works in our larger vision of what we wish to accomplish.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Monday, February 4, 2008
Speaking of feedback...
...I'd love to get feedback from people who look at this blog. Are any of the people who read this actually involved in writing dissertations? In writing anything? Is the blog useful?
When I look at the traffic on the blog (and there's not much, I must admit), it seems to come from odd sources--usually search engines using search phrases that hit my article titles--which makes me wonder about the targeting, because my titles do not often say anything about writing or dissertations. I get a lot of hits on "act confident" and on "trade-offs and opportunity cost"--neither of which are limited to the world of writing.
So if you read this and find it interesting, I'd love to hear. Please e-mail or write a comment. Thanks!
When I look at the traffic on the blog (and there's not much, I must admit), it seems to come from odd sources--usually search engines using search phrases that hit my article titles--which makes me wonder about the targeting, because my titles do not often say anything about writing or dissertations. I get a lot of hits on "act confident" and on "trade-offs and opportunity cost"--neither of which are limited to the world of writing.
So if you read this and find it interesting, I'd love to hear. Please e-mail or write a comment. Thanks!
Managing People
On the subject of gatekeepers...
So, you have a dissertation that you want to finish. You have professors that you want to please. And you have professors that may frighten you, or at least set you on edge. Professors are often supportive, but to often they're not.
I just got an e-mail from a client who had written to her professor with some new work she had just completed, about which she was excited, but which indicated work that she still had to do. The professor wrote back asking: "how much of this have you done?" Her initial response was negative: "Damn it, can't he appreciate what I did?" And wouldn't it be nice if we did get appreciated for what we have accomplished? But she was able to refocus on what she wanted to get out of the relationship (which, at this point, is to get her dissertation signed), and look at what the prof was asking, and she responded with the information the prof wanted and with a schedule for finishing what was not done. I think this is the right response: try to give your professors what they want. Try to set up a feedback loop where you and your professors are working to get on the same page to finish your project.
It's pretty certain that your professors want you to finish your degree--it looks good on their record when their students graduate. So, in a way, the idea here is similar to what I was talking about in my previous post about working with an editor: try to understand the professor's motivations, but don't take the comments personally. Just try to respond with good answers. You want to remain true to ourself, but to the extent that you're remaining true to yourself, you want to give your professors what they want, too. Create a win-win situation, if possible (and please excuse my use of that common buzz phrase).
When someone gives you a hard time, you have (in the abstract, at least) a choice between an emotional reaction and a reasoned response that helps you move towards the goals that you have set for yourself. You didn't get what you wanted from some person? What can you do in the future that will help you get what you want down the road?
If you let your relationship with your professor become adversarial, it will make your task harder, and will interfere with reaching the goals that you have set for yourself. If you can take your professor's difficult responses, even if they're insulting in some way, and respond to them in accordance with a plan that helps reach your goal, isn't that optimal? Why let the emotional response, and, perhaps, the petty angst of some professor standin in the way of the goals that you want to reach for yourself?
Set yourself free of emotional dependence on their support, and work to find a reasoned response that helps you achieve the goals that you have set for yourself.
So, you have a dissertation that you want to finish. You have professors that you want to please. And you have professors that may frighten you, or at least set you on edge. Professors are often supportive, but to often they're not.
I just got an e-mail from a client who had written to her professor with some new work she had just completed, about which she was excited, but which indicated work that she still had to do. The professor wrote back asking: "how much of this have you done?" Her initial response was negative: "Damn it, can't he appreciate what I did?" And wouldn't it be nice if we did get appreciated for what we have accomplished? But she was able to refocus on what she wanted to get out of the relationship (which, at this point, is to get her dissertation signed), and look at what the prof was asking, and she responded with the information the prof wanted and with a schedule for finishing what was not done. I think this is the right response: try to give your professors what they want. Try to set up a feedback loop where you and your professors are working to get on the same page to finish your project.
It's pretty certain that your professors want you to finish your degree--it looks good on their record when their students graduate. So, in a way, the idea here is similar to what I was talking about in my previous post about working with an editor: try to understand the professor's motivations, but don't take the comments personally. Just try to respond with good answers. You want to remain true to ourself, but to the extent that you're remaining true to yourself, you want to give your professors what they want, too. Create a win-win situation, if possible (and please excuse my use of that common buzz phrase).
When someone gives you a hard time, you have (in the abstract, at least) a choice between an emotional reaction and a reasoned response that helps you move towards the goals that you have set for yourself. You didn't get what you wanted from some person? What can you do in the future that will help you get what you want down the road?
If you let your relationship with your professor become adversarial, it will make your task harder, and will interfere with reaching the goals that you have set for yourself. If you can take your professor's difficult responses, even if they're insulting in some way, and respond to them in accordance with a plan that helps reach your goal, isn't that optimal? Why let the emotional response, and, perhaps, the petty angst of some professor standin in the way of the goals that you want to reach for yourself?
Set yourself free of emotional dependence on their support, and work to find a reasoned response that helps you achieve the goals that you have set for yourself.
Working with an editor
Editors often have positions in which they are the gatekeeper--the one who decides whether a piece will get published or not. But that's not the case for someone working on a dissertation. The dissertation process is not set up to include editors. The gatekeeper's role is taken by the faculty committee which has to sign off on the work.
So some dissertation writers hire an editor--indeed, some schools require hiring an editor (I think the University of Phoenix is one such, though I can't, on a cursory search, find a reference to that). Some dissertation writers hire me, others express an interest in hiring me.
I wish I'd hired an editor for my dissertation despite the cost--from the research I did when writing, I figured the cost would be two to four thousand dollars. I balked at the price then, but I would have profited from it in the long run. Although I write well enough--at least I edit well enough--it's hard to get your own documents as clean as would be best. When you're too close to a piece, it's hard to see it clearly enough to pick up the minor errors that would be easily found in someone else's work.
But the key, and what I really was thinking of when starting this, is to remember the nature of your relationship with your editor. Editors want good work. When they're a gatekeeper, that may cause rejection. But when you hire an editor to help you improve your work, the only thing they're interested in is getting your work to be accepted--that is the measure of an editor doing a good job. For professional reasons, a freelance editor wants your work accepted almost as much as you do.
Which brings me to a point I cover time and again with my clients: comments and suggestions are coming from a motivation of helping you get your work accepted. If an editor says that he or she has found a weakness, the point is not to complain or to make you feel bad; the point is to help you find a way to strengthen the work.
At the same time, the editor is not necessarily an expert: it is unlikely that the editor knows the subject as well as you, so comments from the editor ought to be viewed as suggestions to be tested against your own knowledge of the work.
It's also worth noting that editors are unlikely to be making personal critiques: it's not the point to tell the client they're wrong or that they're incompetent or whatever. The point is to help the client appear in the best light when their work is read by the people whose job it is to judge the work and decide whether it is good enough for a dissertation, or for publication.
It may help to think of the editor as a surrogate audience: if you have an editor who interprets your work in a way that you find problematic, it behooves you to address that the question, because someone other than the editor might also read the work in the same way.
Editors can be fearsome gatekeepers. But if you've hired an editor to help you finish your dissertation (or other project), that editor is there to help you. By trying to learn from the editor and by trying to understand why the editor comments as he or she did, you stand the best opportunity of profiting from you work with the editor.
So some dissertation writers hire an editor--indeed, some schools require hiring an editor (I think the University of Phoenix is one such, though I can't, on a cursory search, find a reference to that). Some dissertation writers hire me, others express an interest in hiring me.
I wish I'd hired an editor for my dissertation despite the cost--from the research I did when writing, I figured the cost would be two to four thousand dollars. I balked at the price then, but I would have profited from it in the long run. Although I write well enough--at least I edit well enough--it's hard to get your own documents as clean as would be best. When you're too close to a piece, it's hard to see it clearly enough to pick up the minor errors that would be easily found in someone else's work.
But the key, and what I really was thinking of when starting this, is to remember the nature of your relationship with your editor. Editors want good work. When they're a gatekeeper, that may cause rejection. But when you hire an editor to help you improve your work, the only thing they're interested in is getting your work to be accepted--that is the measure of an editor doing a good job. For professional reasons, a freelance editor wants your work accepted almost as much as you do.
Which brings me to a point I cover time and again with my clients: comments and suggestions are coming from a motivation of helping you get your work accepted. If an editor says that he or she has found a weakness, the point is not to complain or to make you feel bad; the point is to help you find a way to strengthen the work.
At the same time, the editor is not necessarily an expert: it is unlikely that the editor knows the subject as well as you, so comments from the editor ought to be viewed as suggestions to be tested against your own knowledge of the work.
It's also worth noting that editors are unlikely to be making personal critiques: it's not the point to tell the client they're wrong or that they're incompetent or whatever. The point is to help the client appear in the best light when their work is read by the people whose job it is to judge the work and decide whether it is good enough for a dissertation, or for publication.
It may help to think of the editor as a surrogate audience: if you have an editor who interprets your work in a way that you find problematic, it behooves you to address that the question, because someone other than the editor might also read the work in the same way.
Editors can be fearsome gatekeepers. But if you've hired an editor to help you finish your dissertation (or other project), that editor is there to help you. By trying to learn from the editor and by trying to understand why the editor comments as he or she did, you stand the best opportunity of profiting from you work with the editor.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Confidence and Ignorance
There's an interesting blend of confidence and ignorance that comes from a place of wisdom. It can be a useful position to take in oral exams and in writing.
I'm thinking about Socrates (or at least Plato's Socrates) who, in many of the dialogues, initiates his position by claiming that he is himself ignorant in some way. A very general position of Socrates is that he starts dialogues from the position of the questioner: he asks another to explain a thing that he does not understand (or claims not to understand). This sort of questioning does not come from a place of insecurity, but rather from a place of having his own strong and clear idea of what he believes, and yet recognizing that he does not know everything.
Academic situations beg for this sort of behavior. Certainly you, the student, have learned many things, but this does not mean that you're expected to know everything. An excellent position to take is the willingness to admit the gap in your knowledge, but then to supplement this with the insight that you can bring to the question.
In writing this may mean recognizing a gap in your scholarship, or a gap in your theory, but excusing that gap because of natural limitations of time: one cannot, after all, be expected to study everything, nor to discuss everything in a written work. One has to choose boundaries to limit any work, and these boundaries ought not be viewed as faults--though they can be viewed as such--rather they ought to be viewed as the natural limitations under which we all work. And yes, you can embrace the position that you ought to know more about the subject without actually knowing more or even promising to learn more in the immediate present.
In an oral exam this may mean admitting ignorance and then attempting to deconstruct the unanswerable question in terms of what you do know: "I don't know the precise answer to the question you're asking, but here's how I would handle the issues it raises."
Sometimes, of course, a questioner will expect you to have precise knowledge. Confident in your inevitable ignorance about some subject will not suffice to satisfy a questioner who insists that you know the precise answer. But for most cases, it is not the precise knowledge that will make the difference so much as it is the ability to use information and knowledge and questions in a meaningful way. The wise person, after all, is aware of the limits of knowledge--both personal and in the abstract. We cannot know everything.
The late Horst Rittel, a professor of Design Theories and Methods at the University of California, Berkeley, argued that there is a symmetry of ignorance: no one knows what information is necessary for the completion of a project. This applies to writing projects: when you start a writing project, you do not know exactly what information will need to be included (at least not if it is a big project) in the writing.
So, in short, be confident in yourself by accepting the limits of your knowledge. By acknowledging the limits, by being aware that we all are limited, you can enter the place of ignorance without fearing that ignorance is necessarily a failing. Sure, we all want to learn more, but no matter how hard we have studied, and no matter how long we have studied, we still will not know everything.
This should not be taken as a reason to stop trying to learn more or to get a better understanding of the scholarship in your field, but it is a reason that you need not fear gaps if you have been diligent in your efforts.
Beyond this question of the breadth of our knowledge is the question of what we do with it. My experience has been that some people have a far greater familiarity with a great body of scholarship than others, but that this familiarity does not guarantee using the material in a productive fashion.
I'm thinking about Socrates (or at least Plato's Socrates) who, in many of the dialogues, initiates his position by claiming that he is himself ignorant in some way. A very general position of Socrates is that he starts dialogues from the position of the questioner: he asks another to explain a thing that he does not understand (or claims not to understand). This sort of questioning does not come from a place of insecurity, but rather from a place of having his own strong and clear idea of what he believes, and yet recognizing that he does not know everything.
Academic situations beg for this sort of behavior. Certainly you, the student, have learned many things, but this does not mean that you're expected to know everything. An excellent position to take is the willingness to admit the gap in your knowledge, but then to supplement this with the insight that you can bring to the question.
In writing this may mean recognizing a gap in your scholarship, or a gap in your theory, but excusing that gap because of natural limitations of time: one cannot, after all, be expected to study everything, nor to discuss everything in a written work. One has to choose boundaries to limit any work, and these boundaries ought not be viewed as faults--though they can be viewed as such--rather they ought to be viewed as the natural limitations under which we all work. And yes, you can embrace the position that you ought to know more about the subject without actually knowing more or even promising to learn more in the immediate present.
In an oral exam this may mean admitting ignorance and then attempting to deconstruct the unanswerable question in terms of what you do know: "I don't know the precise answer to the question you're asking, but here's how I would handle the issues it raises."
Sometimes, of course, a questioner will expect you to have precise knowledge. Confident in your inevitable ignorance about some subject will not suffice to satisfy a questioner who insists that you know the precise answer. But for most cases, it is not the precise knowledge that will make the difference so much as it is the ability to use information and knowledge and questions in a meaningful way. The wise person, after all, is aware of the limits of knowledge--both personal and in the abstract. We cannot know everything.
The late Horst Rittel, a professor of Design Theories and Methods at the University of California, Berkeley, argued that there is a symmetry of ignorance: no one knows what information is necessary for the completion of a project. This applies to writing projects: when you start a writing project, you do not know exactly what information will need to be included (at least not if it is a big project) in the writing.
So, in short, be confident in yourself by accepting the limits of your knowledge. By acknowledging the limits, by being aware that we all are limited, you can enter the place of ignorance without fearing that ignorance is necessarily a failing. Sure, we all want to learn more, but no matter how hard we have studied, and no matter how long we have studied, we still will not know everything.
This should not be taken as a reason to stop trying to learn more or to get a better understanding of the scholarship in your field, but it is a reason that you need not fear gaps if you have been diligent in your efforts.
Beyond this question of the breadth of our knowledge is the question of what we do with it. My experience has been that some people have a far greater familiarity with a great body of scholarship than others, but that this familiarity does not guarantee using the material in a productive fashion.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Be Prolific...
...Then you can throw away everything that you don't like an you'll still have something left over. That's the advice a friend gave me today. We were talking about writing music, but it's a principle that surely holds for all creative endeavors. Not every attempt will turn out to be good.
How many bad light bulbs did Edison make before the one that worked? By going through the motions of creating, by making the honest effort, we learn something. We may not learn enough. But writing, as I've said before, is a process by which we learn, and so every time we make a serious effort to write something down, we learn something valuable. Very often, the valuable lesson is that we haven't got it right and that what we did try isn't going to work. But that doesn't mean it's not a valuable lesson. It may well be the most valuable lesson we can learn at that moment. Learning what won't work is not to be dismissed as negative learning: it is still an increase in our understanding of what we're doing.
Yesterday I was working with a client who was complaining that when he wrote things down they didn't work. He was just starting to refine a general topic idea into a more serious, and more carefully thought-out proposal draft. But he was getting so frustrated--we would talk about the ideas, and we'd start to get some semblance of a form, and he'd want to stop and write it down. But shortly thereafter we would also see that what he had just stopped to write down wasn't going to work in some way, too. The key, I kept emphasizing, was to work on clarifying the ideas in his head--to start to try to refine and tease out the structure of the argument that he was using, so that instead of just talking around a topic and instead of just talking around a research question, he had some sense of how that research question fit into a larger body of theory and how to turn that somewhat-general research question into an actual research project. It doesn't come easy. The different ideas surrounding a topic are myriad and their interplay is complex. Working out the ideas is a necessary first step, but even then, once you've gotten an idea of what the ideas are, you still have to try to get that down on paper and that's a whole different task. After all, the ideas in our head aren't matched in form with the ideas we put down in a paper--for one thing, the ideas in our head are present and interacting simultaneously and the ideas we put down on paper have to take a specific order. If you're dealing with, for example, three different ideas and their interaction who's to say what the right order to put them on paper is? In our heads the three may all follow from and lead to each other.
So what do we do? We try to find one specific expression of putting them on paper. And then we try another. And another, and so on. In the process we refine our ideas about the concepts, and also we refine our ideas about how to present those concepts in a written form. We can't do it without trying. Sure, maybe there are some people out there who can get it all to come out right on the first try, but what proportion of the population is that? Many who have been successful have tried, and tried, and tried, and thrown away one draft after another until the final moment when they found the one that works. Therefore, be prolific--it provides you with the opportunity to throw away what isn't working because you'll find something that is working.
How many bad light bulbs did Edison make before the one that worked? By going through the motions of creating, by making the honest effort, we learn something. We may not learn enough. But writing, as I've said before, is a process by which we learn, and so every time we make a serious effort to write something down, we learn something valuable. Very often, the valuable lesson is that we haven't got it right and that what we did try isn't going to work. But that doesn't mean it's not a valuable lesson. It may well be the most valuable lesson we can learn at that moment. Learning what won't work is not to be dismissed as negative learning: it is still an increase in our understanding of what we're doing.
Yesterday I was working with a client who was complaining that when he wrote things down they didn't work. He was just starting to refine a general topic idea into a more serious, and more carefully thought-out proposal draft. But he was getting so frustrated--we would talk about the ideas, and we'd start to get some semblance of a form, and he'd want to stop and write it down. But shortly thereafter we would also see that what he had just stopped to write down wasn't going to work in some way, too. The key, I kept emphasizing, was to work on clarifying the ideas in his head--to start to try to refine and tease out the structure of the argument that he was using, so that instead of just talking around a topic and instead of just talking around a research question, he had some sense of how that research question fit into a larger body of theory and how to turn that somewhat-general research question into an actual research project. It doesn't come easy. The different ideas surrounding a topic are myriad and their interplay is complex. Working out the ideas is a necessary first step, but even then, once you've gotten an idea of what the ideas are, you still have to try to get that down on paper and that's a whole different task. After all, the ideas in our head aren't matched in form with the ideas we put down in a paper--for one thing, the ideas in our head are present and interacting simultaneously and the ideas we put down on paper have to take a specific order. If you're dealing with, for example, three different ideas and their interaction who's to say what the right order to put them on paper is? In our heads the three may all follow from and lead to each other.
So what do we do? We try to find one specific expression of putting them on paper. And then we try another. And another, and so on. In the process we refine our ideas about the concepts, and also we refine our ideas about how to present those concepts in a written form. We can't do it without trying. Sure, maybe there are some people out there who can get it all to come out right on the first try, but what proportion of the population is that? Many who have been successful have tried, and tried, and tried, and thrown away one draft after another until the final moment when they found the one that works. Therefore, be prolific--it provides you with the opportunity to throw away what isn't working because you'll find something that is working.
Friday, February 1, 2008
For the literature review: Organize your thoughts first
Writing is a process through which you begin to understand your subject better. But that doesn't mean that you don't need to spend a little time trying to organize your thoughts first.
This is especially so when you're trying to figure out what to do with a literature review. Commonly I speak with people who can't get their literature review right because they're spending their time reading article after article, and always saying that they can't figure out what to write because they need to read another article. That's not how it works.
You have to start with trying to explain what your idea is--that's the point in writing anyway, to show what your ideas are--even in a literature review chapter.
If you take time to set your ideas down--write an outline, or an abstract, of the main ideas that you want to express--then when you write, you write with a purpose. As a result your writing has coherence, direction and focus.
If you do not set your main ideas down, but instead try to write some abstract general discussion of your general topic, then you lose focus and you lose direction. Instead of writing to your own purpose, you end up trying to sequentially report on one study after another. And every study that seems good needs to be included, and there's no clear boundary on what level of detail is necessary. Thereby you lose coherence, direction and focus.
If you have a plan for what is important to you, then relevance to your specific project is a very clear guide to which studies are discussed in detail and which can be passed over in a sentence.
Literature reviews are perhaps the worst trap if you haven't taken time to organize your thoughts and make a plan for what you think is important. In a literature review chapter you're supposed to be showing familiarity with the general literature on your subject--but in reading different studies, you can end up following the ideas of those studies if you don't already have your own set purpose. And that's a problem because usually each study has its own point of view, so if you're following, you flit from idea to idea. Only by trying to commit to your own understanding and explanation of the ideas, do you get to settle on the one view that gives coherence to you work. And then, the whole academic discourse takes a new shape in the context of your own personal perspective, and your personal perspective then takes shape as you test it against the other ideas in the literature.
So organize your thoughts first, then write about what other people have written.
This is especially so when you're trying to figure out what to do with a literature review. Commonly I speak with people who can't get their literature review right because they're spending their time reading article after article, and always saying that they can't figure out what to write because they need to read another article. That's not how it works.
You have to start with trying to explain what your idea is--that's the point in writing anyway, to show what your ideas are--even in a literature review chapter.
If you take time to set your ideas down--write an outline, or an abstract, of the main ideas that you want to express--then when you write, you write with a purpose. As a result your writing has coherence, direction and focus.
If you do not set your main ideas down, but instead try to write some abstract general discussion of your general topic, then you lose focus and you lose direction. Instead of writing to your own purpose, you end up trying to sequentially report on one study after another. And every study that seems good needs to be included, and there's no clear boundary on what level of detail is necessary. Thereby you lose coherence, direction and focus.
If you have a plan for what is important to you, then relevance to your specific project is a very clear guide to which studies are discussed in detail and which can be passed over in a sentence.
Literature reviews are perhaps the worst trap if you haven't taken time to organize your thoughts and make a plan for what you think is important. In a literature review chapter you're supposed to be showing familiarity with the general literature on your subject--but in reading different studies, you can end up following the ideas of those studies if you don't already have your own set purpose. And that's a problem because usually each study has its own point of view, so if you're following, you flit from idea to idea. Only by trying to commit to your own understanding and explanation of the ideas, do you get to settle on the one view that gives coherence to you work. And then, the whole academic discourse takes a new shape in the context of your own personal perspective, and your personal perspective then takes shape as you test it against the other ideas in the literature.
So organize your thoughts first, then write about what other people have written.
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