The 400th Post

After deciding that I would start blogging again, I noticed that my next post (this one) would be the 400th that I published in the thoughtclearing blog. It’s a neat milestone. Because I have not been putting effort into the blog, it’s a somewhat anti-climactic goal. If I had reached this goal during a period of writing regularly, I would be more attached. I didn’t really have any particular subject in mind for a new blog post—I had several possibilities, but because it this post was to be the 400th, I thought about reaching milestones and setting goals.

Generally I believe in setting goals, and often I believe in setting extremely ambitious goals, and then not worrying about it if you don’t make them. Sometimes, however, it’s better to set goals that you can and will keep. It’s dependent on context. There was a period where I tried to publish a post every day—that was a pretty ambitious goal—and I didn’t make it. In 2008, I posted 285 times in. a year with 366 days (78%), or a bit more often than three times every four days. Looking back, I'm satisfied with that. I could focus on not having written every day, but instead, I focus on the writing that I did--I think I wrote some nice pieces. And I also focus on the benefit I received from that practice of writing. Did I meet my goal precisely? No. But I think that I got a good outcome.

Right now, in restarting this blog, I have to decide what my goals will be. In my previous post, I said once a week, and that seems right to me. Posting or trying to post every day took a lot of attention, and I want to work on projects other than just posting a blog. In setting my goal, I think I should specify which day in the week I will post, otherwise the once-a-week goal isn’t clearly defined-—when does a week end? So I think I will aim to post on Mondays. I suppose that leaves me room to publish on Sundays, but the aim is to have one post for each Monday, starting with today, Monday June 26, 2017. With that schedule, I’ll reach post #500 in a couple of years—sometime in late May or early June in 2019.

With persistence and luck, I’ll get to post 500. But who knows? Goals are good, and this one does not seem onerous to me, but sometimes we need to adjust goals. Sometimes we find better goals; sometimes fate intervenes. I don’t know what the next years will bring that might lead to my abandoning a goal of posting every week. What’s important in the long run is that I have goals that focus my efforts and use my abilities effectively.

If I were looking for a lesson in this post, I would focus on how goals are most valuable for focusing effort. They are a great tool for looking to the future. But goals can become an unnecessary emotional burden if they appear to grow distant. If a goal slips out of reach, turn your focus to setting a new goal. Focus on the accomplishments you have made, and look to the future. Let the goal guide you; don’t let failed goals weigh you down.

Ebbs and Flows

Years ago, I kept this blog on a regular basis, but left it off after about 350 posts, and deciding that I wanted to put my energies into another project--writing a book. Over the years I have occasionally posted, but not in any regular fashion. It's almost a year since my last post. Despite the gap in time, the blog persists, however, and in one somewhat surprising flow, I received two thoughtful, non-spam comments on a post on a famed Emerson quotation in the last month. Given that the post is over nine years old and has gained a total of nine comments, this is a surprise. That one post has actually accounted for a large proportion of the blog's page views over the years, which is another surprising flow. It seems to me that the post has no special merit compared to the other posts--it's not the worst, surely, but I wouldn't have thought it the best, either. And it seems like a subject that many would have written on, so it's a little surprising that it somehow got picked out by the search engine gods/daemons rather than some of my other stuff on less common topics.

Anyway, I want to thank the commenters.

Also, I've been thinking about maybe blogging somewhat more regularly--perhaps once a week, rather than almost every day as I did years ago. Years ago, I stopped blogging to write books, and since then I've been second author on one book, I've self-published another, and have another well along, and another one or two sketched out. Not exactly prolific, but more than nothing. I hope that returning to blogging may help me reach more people, thus promoting my services and my book(s).

If you're reading this, are there any questions you would like to ask? Please leave a comment or email.

Using Feedback Effectively: Book excerpt

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

A good writing practice—a habit of coming back to work on your project regularly—is the foundation of good writing. One of the biggest challenges to many writing practices is to keep going after receiving difficult feedback. And perhaps an even bigger challenge is the fear of receiving feedback, which often contributes to writer’s block. If you’re submitting to a publisher, a journal, to your dissertation committee, or anyone else who might provide feedback, it will help if you feel like you can use the feedback you get effectively.

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

To get the most out of feedback, you want to respond as un-emotionally as possible. Step back from your work and consider the quality of the feedback and try to understand what you can get out of it. Not all feedback is equal. Some will help; some will not. Some is appropriate; some is not. Being able to recognize which is which, and what to do with what you got, are valuable skills. This is one aspect to trusting yourself: be willing to evaluate the quality of the feedback you receive. The feedback you get reveals how someone responded, which is a combination of their own issues and the issues present in the draft that you submit.

Central to using any feedback is to distance yourself from your work, and to distance your work from their feedback. You want to respond as objectively and analytically as possible. At the very least, you don’t want to let an emotional response of anger or dismay lead you into imprudent action. If the responses you got are unpleasant, try not to focus on how you’ve been misunderstood, instead focus on the question of how to change your paper so that you get better responses in the future.

The first level of distancing is to remember that your project is a work in progress, and flaws in the project are not reflections of your ability, but merely roughnesses in the project. There is a reason editors exist, after all: even the best writers benefit from help. If the work you have created has problems or is rough, you can fix it or get it fixed!

The second level of distancing is to remember that audience response is not just a product of the work but also of the audience. Great works have been rejected by audiences. Sometimes rejection is due to the blindness of the reviewer, not the failure of the creator. There are any number of failures of an audience, many of which can be alleviated by a good cover letter [a subject discussed in the book’s preceding section]. But regardless of the cover letter you might have sent, the feedback you get might be of poor quality due to the reader. Maybe they were busy, maybe distracted, maybe grumpy or ill. Regardless of who made the feedback, you can always ask: “Is this feedback suitable to the work? Does this feedback address important issues?” Trust yourself to judge the feedback you get. Not all feedback will be useful, and if you don’t get in the habit of testing the worth of comments, you will be at the mercy of bad feedback.

People make mistakes; some feedback is just plain wrong. You have to be willing to challenge obvious errors. Other times, the feedback isn’t wrong, but it is off-base. I worked with a writer who was trying to feel out the main theme of her dissertation when she offered a first version of a chapter draft to her advisor. The feedback that she got was a few comments on sentence structure, which led her to focus her attention on sentences of that sort, which led to her spending a couple of frustrating days trying to rewrite a draft only to discover that she was still faced with the same concerns of trying to find her story. A more confident writer might have looked at the same feedback and said “sure, but that’s not my concern now.” And in such a case, a writer might decide to make a more specific request for feedback, saying something like, “Yes, I appreciate your suggestions about the sentence structure. Thank you. I was also wondering about these issues, . . . and I had questions about . . .” Responding to feedback gives you an opportunity to please your professors or reviewers: you say to them, “See how these changes incorporate the suggestions and corrections you have made?”

Learn to evaluate the feedback you receive. Be willing to challenge it, and also be willing to learn from it. If you can sort the good feedback from the bad, you’ll be in a better position to improve your own writing.

Feedback loops: book excerpt

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

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

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

The Downward Spiral and the Upward Spiral

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

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

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

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

Aim for Brevity

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

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

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

Aim for Brevity

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

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

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

If You're Stuck, Write About It

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

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

If you’re stuck, write about it

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

Some of the questions you could address:

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

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

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

Sweet New Reviews of My Book

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

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

Here's one:

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

And here's the other:

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

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