CityReads│Eight Strategies for Getting Academic Writing Done
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Eight Strategies for
Getting Academic Writing Done
In his book, The Elements of Academic Style, Eric Hayot treats writing as a process that encompasses behavioral, emotional, & institutional parameters and offers psychological support with practical suggestions for academic writing.
Eric Hayot, 2014. The elements of academic style: writing for humanities, New York: Columbia University Press.
Source: http://newbooksnetwork.com/eric-hayot-the-elements-of-academic-style-writing-for-the-humanities-columbia-university-press-2014-2/
Picture source: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-elements-of-academic-style/9780231168007
Eric Hayot, professor of comparative literature and Asian studies at the Pennsylvania State University, published The elements of academic style: writing for humanities in 2014. The title indicates his tribute to the classic writing book, Elements of Style and the goal to become a classic in academic writing.
Why read this book instead of any other book about academic writing?
let’s look at the three major types of books of this type that scholars in literary studies might be tempted to read.
Books addressing nonfiction style, especially at the level of the paragraph and the sentence, though often including a general ethos of writing as well. This category, the largest of the three, includes Strunk and White’s famous Elements of Style and William Zinsser’s On Writing Well.
Books focused on the psychological and working structures that help people write.
Some focus specifically on the kinds of problems the academic professoriate faces, such as Robert Boice’s Professors as Writers and Paul Silvia’s How to Write a Lot.
Books that cover the formal patterns and structure necessary to produce specific academic genres, such as Wendy Belcher’s excellent Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks.
The Elements of Academic Style covers ground from all three of these areas. The first part of the book, “Writing as Practice,” treats writing as a form of life and addresses the contexts and habits of the writer and the institutional contexts. It also offers some strategies for getting writing done.
The book’s second part, “Strategy,” examines large-scale structures that govern the production of scholarship in literary and cultural studies, including introductions, conclusions, structural rhythm, transitions, and so on.
The third part, “Tactics,” covers lower-level aspects of writing practice: footnotes, figurative language, diction, ventilation, and a variety of other concepts.
The final section suggests a way to think about the writing in terms of "becoming": a writer, a written work, a form of life.
Hayot’s book treats writing as a process that encompasses "behavioral, emotional, & institutional parameters."
Here is an excerpt from Chapter 3, Eight Strategies for Getting Writing Done.
1. Write Daily
This is the oldest trick in the book: accomplish psychologically difficult tasks by making them habitual. Habits mitigate much of the difficulty in the psychological choice to do something unpleasant, instead turning it into the kind of automatic behavior that allows us all to continue brushing our teeth on a daily basis.
Building habits, however, can be difficult: a 2009 study by Phillippa Lally and her collaborators at University College, London, found that habitual automaticity takes on average sixty-six days to build.
You should plan on at least two months of steady, solid self-discipline to create a new habit.
Writing every day is difficult because everyone has any number of other things to do,most of which frighten them much less than writing. The key is to carve out a very small period of time for writing each day, putting it in both your physical and mental calendars, and convincing yourself that having that time is a way of taking care of yourself.
Once that is done, you need to protect your writing time vigorously, both from others and from yourself. This means definitively scheduling this time and not moving it around or interrupting it, even when it seems perfectly reasonable to do so.
How long should you write? During the school year, when you’re teaching, thirty minutes a day is fantastic. If you manage to average slightly more than that—by writing for an hour or two, perhaps, on days when you don’t teach—you’re doing incredibly well.
During the summer or on school breaks I tend to write for three to four-and-a-half hours a day, always in a sequence of three sessions: 9:30–11:00 A.M, a break for lunch, 11:45 A.M to 1:00 P.M, another break for a snack and internet, and then 1:30–3:00 P.M. I’ve found that I can’t really concentrate for much longer than ninety minutes, and sometimes I actually can’t make it through the third session. When that happens I switch over to reading, or sometimes I just take a break.
The fact of having a pattern matters more than which pattern it really is.
Another advantage of writing to a rule each day is that it frees you, psychologically, from one of the more difficult forms of anxiety in our profession: not knowing when it’s ok to not be writing.
2. Make Small Goals and Meet Them
Whether you choose to write for a time or to a word count, you will sometimes not reach your goal for the day. Unmet goals don’t create habits.
You absolutely need to focus on giving yourself small, easily achievable goals. Don’t plan to write four pages a day; don’t try to write eight hours a day (or two hours a day when you’re teaching). Focus on the slow and steady. Your job is to making meeting goals a regular part of your life, to become a goal-meeting person
For about eight years I gave myself word-count goals, but I’ve since stopped focusing so much on counts because it was making me nervous. In summer I still aim for around two pages a day, and on days I reach that aim early I sometimes call it quits to celebrate. I essentially have two goals: two pages or three sessions of writing, whichever comes first.
So you should try to forgive yourself immediately if you fail to meet a daily goal. You cannot allow small lapses in habit-creating behavior to alter the general structure governing your work process. Look forward: if you can’t eliminate your guilt by forgiving yourself, concentrate on meeting today’s goal, and feeling good about doing so.
Above all, don’t add today’s “gap” to tomorrow’s task, which makes your habit-creating pattern that much harder to begin.
Those extra pages have a way of spiraling out of control, leading to a day when, faced with the idea that you have to “catch up” by ten pages or so, you simply give up and eat a bag of Doritos instead.
Making and meeting small goals also determines the kind of relationship you have with yourself. I don’t want to live in a world in which some part of me regularly punishes another part of me for not behaving well.
Knowing what I am and am not capable of helps me set goals that I can reach, and creates a pattern of self-motivation and self-reward.
3. When You'Re Stuck, Keep Writing
Of course, you will get stuck. You will get stuck on a macro level, when after three or four months of work you lose faith in your article or chapter and fear that you may need to start over. And you will get stuck on a micro level, having days where it feels like you’re going backwards, or ones when you simply can’t write anything at all.
The solution to both problems is the same: keep writing. Many micro-level problems can be solved by opening up a new file and freewriting for five to ten minutes. Freewriting is typing or handwriting, nonstop, whatever comes into your head.
Often over the course of ten minutes you will write your way into a solution, or find that at some point your prose switches over from “free” to focused and engaged, For less serious problems, you may simply want to force yourself to sit at your desk for just a bit longer.
First, go back and reread everything you have. Initially you may simply want to do this as a way of revising and rethinking, so that you spend your time reworking sentences and paragraphs, adding or removing metalanguage, and seeing more clearly the structure that you have so far. At some point you may want to create an outline of the work you have, describing as clearly as you can to yourself the logic of your argument and the organization of its evidence. Then spend some time writing a description (in sentences) of the outline of your piece, discussing the ways in which what you have sets up later parts of the structure, or creates promises and obligations to fulfill.
If you are still stuck, a good second approach is to have a friend, colleague, or advisor read your work and talk the problem through.
Above all, do not give up. Two especially pernicious fantasies lie at the root of many forms of blockage: the idea that you are supposed to get everything right the first time around, and the fear that you have somehow reached a limit (of ability) beyond which you cannot pass.
4. Avoid Virtuous Procrastination
The most common form of virtuous procrastination for well-meaning academics is teaching: I can’t write, because I have to prep for class; I didn’t work today, because I had so many papers to grade. And so on.
The special appeal of teaching as a form of procrastination stems from three things: its capacity to make us feel knowledgeable and powerful; its virtuous service to others; and the institutional inexorability of its weekly rhythms. Writing by contrast makes us feel weak and afraid; serves only ourselves; and is not, on a weekly basis, the subject of any institutional demand.
That teaching and writing are both parts of the general academic “job” makes it easy to shift effort and justification from one to the other.
But this apparent fungibility conceals the deep emotional differences between them. It is because teaching is so much easier than writing that we choose to do it instead.
Do a good, decent job in the classroom. No one ever got a Ph.D. for teaching well. The same advice holds for faculty on the tenure track. The temptation to use power and strength in the classroom as compensation for feelings of weakness or inadequacy on the page is no less strong. You absolutely must especially resist the impingements on your writing time created by department meetings, student advising, or informal chats with colleagues.
None of this is intended to be dismissive or contemptuous of teaching. Don’t make teaching a substitute for writing, against using teaching as an excuse not to write, and against letting teaching fill all your available free time so that it feels like you literally cannot write. If you can manage not to do that, and if you can build some good habits around your writing practice, you will enjoy your teaching more because you will know that it is not keeping you from meeting your other professional goals.
Beyond teaching and housework, the other major form of virtuous procrastination involves caring for children and other family members. Here the warning is, again, not to neglect doing these things, but to avoid doing them as substitutes for writing.
But your goal need not be never to procrastinate. Instead, it should be to get slowly better at recognizing the patterns of your own virtuous deferrals and to catch them within days or a week instead of letting them stop you up for months.
Today, a decade and more since my graduation, I still procrastinate. The difference between now and then is that I catch myself sooner and faster, and have developed habits that allow me to quickly return to positive, productive writing practices.
5. Make Fear An Ally
Most people imagine that their goal is to stop being afraid of writing. I argue any writing that aims to be great or even good will be by nature frightening, because it challenges you to do your very best work and forces you to acknowledge that your very best work may not live up to your most ambitious vision of yourself. Fear of writing is therefore inevitable. Your job is to manage that fear, not destroy it.
Such fearless writing would be writing that wasn’t learning anything
Successful academics are not always the smartest ones in their cohorts. They’re the ones who manage that anxiety well, who learn to live with their fears and continue, despite everything, to write.
6. Start Poor, Finish Rich
Many books on style will tell you to be concise and avoid jargon. Don’t use two words where one will do; replace long words with short ones; trim the fat; make your writing simple and direct. You should not, and cannot afford to, worry about concision when you are just starting to write. The time to worry about concision comes when you can afford it.
Cutting ten pages from a twenty-page manuscript is a disaster; cutting fifty pages from a 210-page manuscript no big deal. If you cut and prune too early, you’ll slow yourself down, and you’ll lose out on the chance that one of your loose or wordy paragraphs will turn out, in hindsight, to contain a crucial new idea.
Psychologically, a dangerous pattern can emerge around cutting, in which it becomes a form of abnegation or self-denial. People caught up in this pattern can end up seeing their entire career as a series of failures to live up to their best dreams
Maybe some of your writing is no good; maybe you won’t be read in a hundred years. But you are almost certainly not the best judge of either your writing or the emotions that come with it. Part of building a good writing practice is recognizing that fact, being suspicious of your emotional states.
When you write without knowing exactly how things will turn out, you will be learning as you write.
It’s therefore important not to censor lines of thought in the initial stages, especially when you have so little writing done. Follow your ideas where they take you, then return to what you have written and think about how it hangs together,how it might be structured and organized so as to function as a single, coherent whole.
7. Treat Revision(and Even Research) As Writing
It does not make sense to think of writing and revision as separate processes.
Revision is not something that happens after writing. It constitutes the core of the dynamic writing process.
Everyone who’s spent time paging through documents knows that some of your best ideas can come from browsing, reading, or taking notes. So you may want to develop a habit pattern that includes research as part of the general act of “writing”.
8. Take This Advice!
Following this advice regularly is hard. If it takes two or more months to automate a habit, which means two months of the serious exercise of willpower and discipline, with frequent opportunities to backslide, to get caught in emotional traps, or to have life get in the way.
On my most recent first day back, I started with the gum, played Freecell for an hour, wrote for forty-five minutes, and collapsed in exhaustion. It took me a full week to get back to normal. And that’s after fifteen years of relatively continuous practice. So I know how difficult all this can be.
The only advice I can give you is to trust yourself enough to try it, and to never let small lapses stop you. Be good to yourself; befriend your anxiety and fear. It does, in the long run, get easier.
Related CityReads:
15.Academic Writing: How to Write a Lot?
16.Writing Lesssons from Stephen King
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