Working for about half an hour every morning, following a tight schedule and a clear outline (actually, two outlines: one for each essay), I have managed to produce two five-paragraph essays in two weeks. I have posted my journal of the process. If you plan to follow my example here, I suggest you do this as well. Just spend three minutes after you finish writing to jot down your impressions of the writing session.
The first essay runs to 887 words, the second to 1451. That's about 2300 words, or just over a quarter the length of a standard academic journal article. In fact, I have the basis of a pretty good paper, I think, whose working title will be "Composition/Decomposition". It will reconstruct and then deconstruct the concept of "rhetorical composition" (or the rhetoric of composition, if you will). In so doing, it will attempt to make one of my central arguments, namely, that writing a deconstructive text is as much a craft as writing a narrative or a case description. It will also demonstrate it.
A bit optimistally, two hours a day, for another two weeks should yield the full paper. But that will demand that I first make an outline of the longer paper, and read up a bit more. As it turns out I will need to brush up on both Derrida and Foucault. And I also want to include more current sources on composition (Grierson's is from 1944 and is useful because it is a sort of minor classic). I'm going to let it simmer in the back of my mind for a few days or weeks first.
But I am going to stick to this morning routine of writing a blog post for 30 minutes at the start of every day. I have to start jogging again, too, (I've let it slip in the darkness of the winter months), so I will soon implement a rigorous regimen of "Blogging & Jogging" every other day.
No comments:
Post a Comment