Feedback and Safety

The people I work with are usually having trouble writing (which goes without saying, I guess).

One way to get writing moving is to get feedback. But feedback can be tricky; in particular giving work to professors can often result in very painful feedback. And, in general, getting feedback is to open oneself to rejection.

This can create negative emotional states in a writer, and can lead to writer's block.

Part of my strategy to assist people is to create a solid, positive feedback loop which is still able to effectively critique work and guide efforts in the improvement of that work. This can include discussion of how to respond to my feedback, and what is intended by my feedback, and general purposes of feedback, as well as ways of responding to criticism.

One reason for this is to help the reader find a space in the project where negative emotional energy does not gather, and therefore the writer feels safe submitting work to me, which allows me to work as an editor.

Another reason for this is to provide the writer with a model for responding to criticism that can be applied when criticism is less carefully planned. Or even if it gets nasty.

This is not just a process of saying only nice things about a work; if I don't challenge the weaknesses of a work, I lose the opportunity to guide the writer's effort to the areas where that effort will be most efficient, and it's generally harder to improve on what is already strong than it is to improve on what is weak--you can always (or at least) delete a weak section, thereby improving a work as a whole.

This is a crucial skill for a writer: to be able to use editorial critique in an effective manner, to be able to distinguish the important critiques from the mean spirited attacks, and to be able to distinguish which critiques are on the mark, which just slightly off the mark, and which are off target.

One way to think about feedback is as the response of a reader--if you don't like the response you got, then you know that you want to modify what you've written to change the response.

Marketing Strategy (continued)

What we intend does not always happen. We say one thing, but something else is heard. Partly this is a matter of context: we all contextualize things differently, and interpretation depends on context.

Anyway, yesterday I was writing about conflict of interest and marketing strategy because I had been asked a question that verged on asking about something about which I had a conflict of interest (though the actual question was carefully worded so as to avoid involving my conflicted interests). And that question prompted some ideas that led to my writing yesterday's post on Marketing Strategy and Conflict of Interest.

Which prompted a response I had not expected, intended or hoped for. For which reason, today I'm going to write a little about my basic principle for marketing.

I think I have good ideas.
I think that some of the good ideas that I have can be productively shared in a general way so that someone I never met can benefit from them.
I think that some aspects of a writing project are so specific that no general advice can cover them, but they are things where a keen, critical eye and an insightful reader and listener can provide profound assistance.

My strategy is as follows: by sharing what I can (e.g. through this blog, or the few tips on my website--www.thoughtclearing.com--which were the germ of this blog) I hope to demonstrate value. And thus convince people to pay me (this, I said yesterday).

My strategy, however, is not to try to force people into working with me through teasers or other hard-sell tactics. I'd rather have a bunch of people benefit from my blog and some of them choose to work with me than have only a few people read my blog, but all of them feel obligated to work with me.

This blog is free. I'd like it to help as many people as possible.
Good results of my marketing efforts (in increasing order of goodness):
Someone reads this and finds it interesting.
Someone reads it and finds it useful.
Someone reads it and finds enough that they're motivated to write to me to thank me for my efforts.
Someone reads it and finds it interesting enough to share with their friends.
Someone reads it and shares it with friends and writes to me, too.
Someone reads it and finds it interesting enough to decide to work with me.

All of those are good results. (There are other good outcomes, but they're basically obvious modifications of the results above.) I like helping people; it's nice on its own. Helping people for free doesn't pay the bills, otherwise I wouldn't bother to charge for my services at all. For better or worse, however, the US is a capitalist, market economy and if I don't get some money, I can't participate in neat activities like eating food or having a home.

But money is not the only value.
If you read this blog and it helps you, you are welcome to the assistance for free. You are welcome to all of the ideas; please, of course, respect the copyright, but read at your pleasure. Enjoy! (And I do mean you!)

Marketing Strategy and Conflict of Interest

Being as that I support myself by providing services, I want people to engage my services.

In an effort to get people to engage my services, I engage in marketing practices. I try to put my name out there in a way that will interest people and will convince them that my services would be a good investment.

There are, of course, different ways to do this.
For my part, among other things, I have chosen to write a blog that addresses issues that my clients work with, and that I work with in my life as a writer. My thought is to give people real ideas and real assistance so that they believe that my services will be of worth. If you've found material in this blog useful, then you have reason to believe that I can help.

But this strategy has a potential negative impact: people might find my free assistance to render paying for services unnecessary. Or it may lead one to think that my suggestions are a useful supplement to working with a different person.

I couldn't do it any other way, though. Every road has a risk. I look at websites of other writing coaches sometimes. I found one that had "tips"--it had four different "tips", each of which reduced to "If you have a problem in realm X, you should hire us." I couldn't do that; it doesn't seem convincing to me.

It's an interesting conundrum. I believe in my own abilities. But conflicts of interest are insidious: they may work at levels we can't easily analyze. This is why judges are supposed to recuse themselves in the case of conflicts of interest. It's well and good to say "Sure, I have a conflict of interest, but I'll still judge the case on its merits." But practicing that is hard. And it can be hard for others to trust that decision.

I'm writing this partly because a client of mine asked my opinion on hiring the services of someone who is essentially my competitor, and giving a good answer requires my recognition that I have an interest in the matter as my client's budget is limited. I intend to do my best to give an honest answer, but the conflicting interest is present.

Iteration (2)

Iteration doesn't only occur in the writing. There are many aspects of a large project that you can return to as you work through it.

Any project that involves significant learning will lead to new perspectives that force revisiting old ideas and old decisions. It is not unlikely that you will have refine/redefine your terms, redefine your method, redefine your conclusions, and so on. Because you are learning, you are subject to the ideas that you come to value. We would need much less iteration if we never learned anything at all--we could simply do things exactly the way we did them previously. But that probably won't work for writing a dissertation.

Iteration

The writing process is a learning process. As such it involves some degree of repetition.

In other words writing and rewriting. It probably won't work out right on the first draft--at least not if it's long. It's hard enough to get something to work out as a first draft when it's only a few hundred words. If it's thousands of words, or tens of thousands, or even a hundred thousand, getting it right on the first try is going to be a lot more difficult.

I think I write most efficiently when I just dive in and don't fear having to rewrite. It helps that I no longer worry about rewriting. The more practiced I become as a writer, the easier it is for me to formulate a good plan for works large or small, and the easier it is to write a decent first draft. But it's also easier to simply scrap a draft and start again from the blank page.

Another iteration. The next iteration does not need to scrap the ideas of the previous iteration, but it can build on them and refine them. It need not scrap all the words of the previous draft, but ought only take those that suit the new vision--but honor the new vision, not the old words.

I think there might be some kind of freedom in planning on having to rewrite. It means that you can get the ideas down in a rush without worrying about getting them down perfectly. Your intention is to refine a work. Therefore, this is a sort of permission to make mistakes, which often frees up the perfectionist. There's also a certain inevitability: if you know you have to rewrite, you have to start by writing and so you can resign yourself to a lengthy task rather than resisting with the hope that somehow it will become easy. It won't.

The irony is that by embracing the work, the project becomes easiest. If you're writing quickly and freely, often you can produce better work than when you're trying to get a perfect draft. I can't prove it, but I think that by embracing the idea that a lot of work must be done, you reduce the amount of work that you actually have to do because you work better when you're not resisting the work.

In short, get ready to do it again.

The Blank Page (2)

I repeat myself when under stress.

I was trying to think of something worth writing this evening, and I was faced with the blank page, and for a moment was intimidated by it. Then I thought "ah, but I can write about the virtues of the blank page." Then I check and found that I had already previously written most of what I was thinking of writing: that the blank page is an opportunity and that it problems are mostly in how we see it.

The blank page is an opportunity--it does not restrict at all what we might do. And this freedom can be difficult: too many options makes choosing difficult.

One thing in particular that I like about the blank page is that it can play a wonderful role in helping one organize your thoughts. The blank page doesn't impose any previous way of thinking on you: you can start afresh, using all you learned as you worked to lay out the basics of whatever you're thinking about. And that may bear similarities to what you've said in the past but still it may have subtle (or not so subtle) differences of significance.

Putting an idea down on a blank page can be a great way to test an idea. So what if you decide that you're going to scrap what you wrote on that blank page? You can't live in fear of writing the wrong thing: then you'll write nothing. So take that blank page and fill it with a new idea--see if the idea makes sense--use the page to express yourself on some subject or another.

A Good Argument (2): generalization

One thing that endlessly frustrates me in arguments is the use of quantifiers and appropriate generalization.

Generalization is necessary. We can't think or operate without it.
If we couldn't generalize, we couldn't function. We couldn't recognize food or people or friends. We generalize from specifics to future situations--this is something like the sense in which the pragmatists say that knowledge is what works--we eat one tomato, and we generalize that experience to other tomatoes, allowing us to eat them.

But generalizations can become problematic when used carelessly. Obviously this is true with the type of generalization known as a stereotype. But similar generalizations pervade scientific thought and are both necessary and perilous.
We want to be able to make generalizations that can predict (and thus guide) behavior; but situations are not always similar--and who is to say how a minor factor affects predictability?

We, therefore, ought to be careful with our generalizations and our use of quantifiers: there is a huge difference between claiming "All members of a class have property X" and claiming that "Members of the class are commonly observed to have property X."

Or, to use a well-used example: we may observe many white swans without observing any of other colors, but this does not mean that we know that all swans are white. Saying "All swans are white" is but waiting for one example to be shown wrong. Saying "many swans are white" cannot be disputed if you have observed these swans.

A good argument understands and utilizes the proper level of generalization.