Happy New Year! Celebrate something!

Happy New Year.  Thanks for reading.

The new year is not a holiday that I find particularly inspiring.  Yeah, sure, by some quirk of history, the annual calendric change of year has come, now, in the winter, instead of at any other time of year, but why? Other calendars have their new year at different times—there’s nothing special about this day—it's not marked by any celestial event (solstice, equinox, etc.), not marked by any notable historical event, etc. 

But in thinking about what to write today, it occurred to me that the issue of celebration is one worth mentioning, especially because this time of year can be emotionally challenging for many people.  Granted the holidays have mostly passed, so the emotional minefields relating to family and social gatherings have passed, but for many writers who are stuck, it can feel particularly distressing, as it’s entirely possible that weeks have passed without getting much work done while dealing with holiday travels, etc.

With a new term looming, this is a time of year that many dissertation writers are thinking that they need to get a lot done before they see their professors at the beginning of the term, which can be extremely stressful for those dealing with writer’s block.

When emotional burdens grow, it’s easy to become focused on difficulties. With an approaching term, it does make sense to focus on what you want to write, and all that needs to be done to get ready for a new term.  At the same time, if you’re stuck—if you haven’t been making good progress in your writing—if you’re procrastinating or feeling lost—that pressure to focus on what you have to do can turn into a focus on all that you haven’t done, which is only a step away from the emotional torment of self-doubt and self-denigration. And that’s a pattern that you want to break.

Celebration helps break the pattern. It turns your attention away from the difficulties and away from a sense of failure.  Focusing attention on positive things can have a positive impact on emotional state.

I’m writing this in the context of New Year’s celebrations, but what I’m really encouraging for the blocked writer is to celebrate little things that matter more: celebrate every bit of progress that you make. As the deadlines loom, and the period of unproductive efforts extends, celebrate every little accomplishment.  If you write one word, celebrate that.  One word may be far less than what you need to write every day, but, it’s infinitely more than nothing. Whatever you do, focus your attention on that little accomplishment. I’m not saying you should rest on your laurels after writing a single word, but if you haven’t been writing, you should celebrate that one word as improvement. Maybe you can write one more, and celebrate that. And maybe that becomes a series.

Focusing on and celebrating your accomplishments, even if small, focuses your attention on the task at hand—looking at what you have done is a valuable clue as to what to do next. It takes the focus off of you and off your perception of failures or regrets about what you could have done.

Habit plays a crucial role in writing. If your habit is to focus attention on what you wanted to do but didn't, that draws attention away from the tasks at hand and feels bad, too. If your habit is to focus on what you have accomplished—however little—it keeps your attention directed on the work that you still hope to accomplish and it feels better.  Both habits—that of focusing on what you didn’t want to do and on what you did do—are equally true, in the sense that they both focus on your actual personal history. “I wrote 500 words! Whoohoo!” may be just as true as “I wanted to write 3000 words. Darn!” But, in terms of a writing process, which perspective is more likely to help you work tomorrow? Which directs your attention to issues that you need to write about?

To some extent, habits of mind are subject to conscious control.  Humans definitely get stuck in habitual patterns that are hard to break, but what are you going to do about a habit that you dislike and that causes you difficulty? Isn’t it worth some effort to change the habit? A regular conscious effort to celebrate your accomplishments can become habitual, helping you write more easily. It requires practice, and change comes slowly, but practice eventually makes a positive difference.

As an exercise, write down what you did accomplish, and compare that to your worst days. “Today, I wrote one word, which is better than my worst day!” It’s an exercise, so it may require some effort. Do it, even if it feels ridiculous. Do it often. It only takes seconds to say "I wrote a sentence; I'm going to celebrate that as more than nothing." Change only comes with practice, so letting skepticism stop the practice will prevent the practice/habit from forming. People can develop positive habits through regular practice. It takes effort, but the effort pays off.  Practice celebrating.

For whom are you writing?

This blog is intended to be aimed at academic writers, especially those who are struggling.  A lot of the time, however, the subjects that I most want to write about are more political topics.  These considerations are in tension.  This post grew out of that tension. What’s on my mind is politics, and particularly a subject of constant concern to me — the frequent GOP-led attacks on institutions that do research, a group that include not only colleges and universities, but the journalistic media, and U.S. intelligence agencies, and non-partisan governmental offices. But as I was starting on possible essays, I was wondering whether that interest suits my intended audience. And I was thinking about negotiating the gap between what I want to talk about and what I want to say for my audience. 

This moves, I suppose, into the realm of rhetoric—a subject for which I have a great deal of respect, but on which I have never done much formal study. How does one motivate your audience to get the result that you desire?  One place to start, obviously, is with talking about something that your audience wants to hear.  In a way, that’s the only place you can start. If your audience doesn’t find your first sentence interesting, they may not go on to your second. And  if the second is not interesting, they may not go on to the third, etc.  Or if they do go on, moving from one sentence that doesn’t interest them to another, they hardly are likely to respond to the work in a positive fashion.

But trying to talk about what someone else wants is a cop-out, a rejection of the principle of telling the truth. Or is it? The answer is that it can be but isn’t necessarily. It depends on how you approach it. If you say to yourself: “I’ll say anything just to get the work approved; I’ll lie; I’ll ignore my own beliefs,” then, yes, that’s a cop-out. If you say to yourself: “I really want to talk about X, but my reader wants Y, so I’ll start with Y and see if I can bring the topic around to X,” that’s not a cop-out. That’s a rhetorical strategy.

Part of the job of the author is to convince the reader that the work is well reasoned, carefully thought out, carefully developed. If you think that X is important but other people think that Y is important, then your job as a writer is to show your readers why X deserves mention. And if you can only convince your readers by talking about Y, then that’s the place to start.

Many writers get stuck because they want to talk about X and they know their audience wants to talk about Y.  If you’re facing such a situation, you might ask yourself whether there is any way to start the discussion with Y and move to X.  This cannot always be done, of course, but if you can’t do find a connection between X and Y, you should ask yourself whether you have the right audience.  There are some barriers that cannot be overcome, but it can be easy to hold too tightly to your chosen point, and thereby miss good opportunities for sharing your ideas.

The gap between what you want and want the audience wants may shape the discourse, but it doesn’t necessitate a corruption of the crucial ideas.  The fact that discourses can be adjusted to suit audiences does not mean that all discourses are distorted by the desire to reach an audience. 

So for whom are you writing? What do they want to hear? And what do you want them to hear? How can you bridge that gap?

Video: what do you do if your dissertation starts to feel meaningless?

Here's my second video. I'm planning to do one each week for a little while to increase my presence on the web.

Here it is.

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Ideas, words, and lexical flexibility

Recently, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an arm of the federal government, was reportedly ordered by the presidential administration to stop using seven words. This report sparked this post on ideas about writing, communication and research. I am particularly interested in the relationship between words and ideas or between words and things in the world, and the gap between those two things, which is an issue of crucial importance for academic writers.

The alleged censoring at the CDC has been disputed by the head of the CDC, and the New York Times suggested that the purpose of the directive was not to ban words, but rather to have a better chance at getting the budget approved by Republicans.  This puts a different view on things, and suggests the possibility that the people who spoke to the Washington Post in the original report might have misunderstood the purpose of the instructions.

But the accuracy of the report and the political implications and interpretations are not my interest here.  My concern is for the gap between ideas and words, an issue of importance for academic writers, because it can cause problems.  In particular, many people get lost in semantic issues: what does a given term mean to different people?  Different word meanings might be a good focus for research if you’re a linguist. But if you’re not a linguist, you can spend a lot of time and effort discussing and debating the various definitions of a given word without making any real progress on your own work.  

Words mean different things to different people and they take on different meanings over time—they refer to different things. And this is the key: there is a gap between the words used to describe a thing and the thing itself.  Changing the word doesn’t change the thing.   This is clear in differences between languages: English says “the sea” and French says “la mer,” but they’re both referring to the same thing.

For a writer, it is important to keep this gap in mind. Academics, particularly, want to keep their attention focused on the thing: what is the idea that interests you? What is the thing in the world that you are studying?  How can you describe that thing?  

There are different ways to communicate any given idea—not just by changing language, but by changing the mode of expression. And these different modes of expression have different impacts on different audiences.  At the obvious level, a presentation in languageX will only reach people who speak languageX. At a more subtle level, different ways of expressing an idea in a given language can impact audience acceptance.

The CDC instruction to avoid certain words can be seen as guidance for how to present ideas so that they will be accepted by the people who have to review the presentations.  If a reader is likely to respond badly to the word “evidence-based,” then there is a good reason to try a different word or phrase to present the same idea.

Writers (and orators) want to consider their audience when crafting a presentation: what kinds of expressions will the audience hear? What kinds of expressions will the audience reject?

When practicing writing, try to open up the gap between the ideas that interest you and the words and expressions you use to express those ideas. What are different words that you can use? What are different phrases or expressions?  By exploring different ways of expressing the same ideas, you increase your expressive palette, and increase your ability to reach different audiences.

My first video

A friend suggested that I make some videos for promotional purposes.  This is my first. It's definitely rough, but it's a new medium to me.  If I make more, I hope that I'll smooth things out.

Here it is.

One of the first things I'd like to figure out is how Youtube picks the thumbnail image--what it shows me is not what I would want--it's not the opening title, or the closing--it's in the middle somewhere, where I'm speaking and my mouth is open and I think I look a bit frantic, even though I didn't get that impression watching the video.

Linguistic subtlety and grammar

In my previous post, I was talking about the importance of proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling—trying to recognize the great value of good command of these conventions that help facilitate communication, while also trying to keep focus on the ideas, not the formalities. Basically the argument was that errors in convention don’t matter if they don’t interfere with the communication of ideas (and that people who complain about errors in punctuation and grammar are often annoying when they over-emphasize attention on minor grammatical points at the expense of the ideas being communicated).  

Language is, or at least can be, extremely subtle in expressing significant difference, and the attention of the reader would be well spent exploring the subtleties, where the important difficulties lie, rather than attending to conventions.  

To reiterate the importance of punctuation, grammar, and spelling, it should be noted that the conventions themselves contribute to the subtlety—presence or absence of a comma can often have a significant influence on the meaning of a sentence, for example.  

But there are also times that the crucial questions are not problems with grammar, but rather small linguistic differences that are crucial to differences in ideas.  The Roman Catholic Church has recently moved to alter the Lord’s Prayer.  The change is linguistically minor, from one phrase that is grammatically sound to another phrase that is also grammatically sound.

The traditional English phrasing was “lead us not into temptation,” and the new recommended phrasing is “do not let us fall into temptation.” The conceptual difference of interest to the Catholic Church is the difference, roughly, between the Pied Piper and a lifeguard—the difference between actively luring people and aiding only when people go too deep (metaphorically). 

For me, such linguistic differences and their influence on the concepts being described are harder to notice when I’m focusing my attention on grammatical issues. And I definitely notice that people who are spending their time correcting grammar, and proving how well they know grammar, often miss the point of what is written. I remember once seeing a professional writer make a comment about the difference between US and UK conventions regarding use of the words “that” and “which,”  and someone responding “the rule is easy: here’s how you use ‘that’ and ‘which’…” Yup, you’re real proud that you know that grammatical "rule," but you totally missed the point about how that “rule” isn’t actually a rule, but rather is specific to the US context.  (Actually, even in the US context, that "rule" is often viewed as a suggestion--see what The Elements of Style has to say about "that" and "which.")

In short, the important stuff in writing isn’t the grammar. The ideas are what matter; grammar is only important as a tool to help communicate. And people who focus on grammar and miss the actual ideas are annoying.