No Horizon

I went to bed last night without knowing what I was going to write about this morning, which means I have disregarded what I call "the minimal planning horizon". And, sure enough, I have now spent a solid half hour poking around on the internet, more or less aimlessly.

I started with Bob Sutton's post about Kanye West's VMA incident. I followed the link to Sasha Frere-Jones's post, which led to Choire Sicha's post (because "I don’t think people should be sending Choire hate mail because he happened to have an idea, rather than an emotion, about a video awards show," is a great sentence) and then on to the examples of "terseness" he celebrates (Kelly Clarkson and Trent Reznor). I then zapped over to Language Log and learned what a PHB is after following the link to this post, which also has a pretty good analysis of the trouble with "management": "Making management a profession was arguable; the associated notion that you could manage workers with no understanding of what they did was a disaster."

Like I say, I went to bed last night without knowing what I was going to write about this morning. That's rarely a good idea. It wasn't this time either.

Dividing Your Time

The other week, it seems, I told one of my writing process groups that it was okay to count the time spent making powerpoint slides for seminars and classes as "writing time". I don't know how I got trapped into saying that, but it does raise an important subject, namely, that of categorizing your tasks.

Needless to say (I hope), it is not sufficient to use your calendar to distinguish only between "work" and "play" (or what some people call "life"). At work, as an academic, you need to distinguish, minimally, between the time you spend doing the three main kinds of work you will normally do: research, teaching, administration. But that is not enough; the confusion arose because writing can play a role in all three kinds of activity. So let's be clear: your writing schedule is a way to ensure you have time to produce publishable prose.

In your calendar, you should block off the time spent teaching as well as the time you spend preparing for class. This includes any writing that you might do to that end, which then does not count as "writing time". Your real writing time should, of course, also be scheduled, preferably so that you write every day (you take weekends off, of course), starting at the same time, and writing at least half an hour and at most four. Make sure you have at least one three-hour block to devote to your writing every week.

You should also leave time for administrative work. Since you do much of this "on the fly", you may find it useful to leave it blank in your calendar at first, then booking in tasks and meetings as they become concrete. If you can stay disciplined, writing only when you have scheduled writing time, and thinking about your classes only when you've scheduled time for that, then administrative tasks should be able to fill the rest of your day in a natural way.

Other tasks that will obviously be booked into your calendar: research seminars and conference participation. The writing you do in preparation for these things will usually count as real writing time. This is because such prose can, at least in principle, end up as published work.

What about writing research proposals? I think you need to distinguish between the prose component of such applications and filling out forms. The important thing, thereafter, is to make sure that you don't define writing tasks in such a way that you can "stick to your schedule" without writing research papers (and book chapters, if you like that sort of thing). If you do spend some of your writing time working on research proposals, make sure that it is explicitly marked in your calendar. You should be able to see at a glance whether or not you are actually leaving time to write for publication.

There are many different ways to classify your activities. Just make sure that your way of doing it keeps competing interests distinct. A writing plan forces you think explicitly about how you are dividing your time among activities that normally compete for it. This allows you to protect the time you need to keep your commitment (to yourself) to get what you know expressed in writing and into that all-important conversation with your peers. Vaguely defined blocks for "research" (or even "writing", if not specified further) is often not enough to build the habit of productive academic writing.

Hyper-focus Hocus Pocus

Bob Sutton recently assured the blogosphere that he is in good health. He had been receiving worried emails because he hadn't posted in almost a month. Here's his explanation:

The reason I have not been posting is that I have been hyper-focused on getting a complete draft of my next book done. For better or worse, when I get close to finishing something like that, I get so obsessed that I don't even realize how much I ignore other things.

I'm glad he qualified the strategy with "for better or worse" because there are real downsides to this approach to the final stages of a writing project.

Note that there is a difference between letting a manuscript occupy increasing amounts of your attention as you get closer to completing it and getting "so obsessed" that you begin to ignore other things (that you value) without realizing it. A writing plan can easily accommodate the former. The latter suggests the absence of a writing plan. Planning is the means by which you consciously (so that you do realize it) prioritize your activities. If you know you will think only about your book for a month, plan not to blog.

Likewise, in periods when you've got things to do that you can't ignore, don't plan to enter this "hyper-focus" mode. That means you should keep your deadlines (and ideally, this does not just mean your editor's deadline) away from periods in which you are doing a lot of teaching or fieldwork. In short, use planning to prioritize your attentions, don't focus on one thing to the detriment of others.

That said, writers need and deserve a bit of a magic circle around their work. Sometimes they need to allow themselves the luxury of dropping everything and immersing themselves in a particular text. They need to sit silently at dinner, brooding on their sentences, and take long walks to try to get things to fall into place. During this time, their friends, family and acquaintances might well ask them whether they are "feeling all right". In the olds days, this was called "melancholia" and was a perfectly accepted (if temporary) state of mind. Maybe "hyper-focus" is a fitting magic word. Invoking it secures a bit of space, a freedom from interruption, and a certain amount of license for anti-social behavior (like not blogging, or, I guess, updating your Facebook profile). It even rhymes with hocus pocus.

Just don't, if you'll pardon it, believe your own hype. Don't begin to romanticize your obsessive process or your disregard for other things. Like all magic, it's a trick. There is a more natural, more efficient, and less dramatic process that could explain how you completed your manuscript too.

A Paper Needs a Process

A good writing process does not just make you a more efficient writer; it can also also make you a more effective one. Your writing process determines the quality, not just he quantity, of your writing. Planning your work, after all, forces you to do specific things with your text in a predetermined order. If you don't have a plan, important tasks can remain undone.

One thing that I've become sensitive to lately is the question of whether a text has been subjected to the discipline of the "after-the-fact outline". If I were teaching undergraduate composition, I would spend a lot of time on this step in the writing process. It would be a fixed assignment, and one that the students would be graded on separately.

I'm beginning to suggest the after-the-fact outline instead of trying to line-edit a text. And I think that in the future I'm going to suggest that the author send me the outline instead of the first draft of the paper for general comments. I also think colleagues should exchange such outlines, rather than full drafts, for comment more often.

An after-the-fact outline is simply a series of sentences, each of which represents a paragraph in the current draft. You make the outline by reading each paragraph in the draft and summarizing it in a single sentence. It should be possible to do this simply by choosing the paragraph's key sentence. You end up with 25 or 30 sentences that mark the progress of the argument of your paper.

It should be obvious that such an outline gives you an overview of your argument. But is also gives you a simple way to reorganize it. You can move the sentences around and rewrite them to fit into new sequences. You can write new sentences to mark place where you need to fill holes in your argument. You can remove sentences that aren't needed. When you have completed this step, i.e., when your after-the-fact outline is done to your satisfaction, all you have to do is "flesh out" the skeleton, bringing each whole paragraph back where it now belongs.

You then need spend some time with each separate paragraph to get it to support the claim in its key sentence. If you spend 20 or 30 minutes with each paragraph, you will need about 10 hours (roughly three writing sessions) to get through the whole paper. It is my sense that those hours are often just what the paper needs.

Reading and Writing

One of my readers writes to ask me about how to organize the process of writing a literature review:

In a writing literature review, one cannot necessarily read one book and write, read another book/article and write, and so on. Because the literature review needs to be both expansive and inclusive, because it needs to be coherent and to connect all the dots, it would be almost impossible to start writing without having read most of the books on the topic in advance.

But, it seems that I take this step to the extreme by not writing anything at all before finishing all the readings. By the time I finish all the reading, I would have forgotten most of what I have read earlier. And so I would likely be faced with the same situation as before: the blank pages and the list of the books to read.

Could you tell us, then, how we can start writing and reading at the same time and build on each instance of writing for our final product?

I'm grateful for the question, which raises a very a general issue. One of the barriers to writing is the assumption that all the legwork has to get done before you can commit anything to the page. Whether we are talking about a literature review, a theory section, or the presentation of results, authors sometimes imagine that they have to do all the reading, thinking, or observing first.

Sometimes I think people should turn this problem entirely on its head: write the whole literature review before you've done any of the reading. That is, write a literature a review about what you expect to find in the literature before you go and read. Then use your readings to correct your preconceptions, seeing the actual writing of the review as a (somewhat radical) act of editing. The point of this exercise (which you are free to take as merely a thought experiment) is to draw attention to the knowledge that is implicit in already having the list of readings. If you know what you have to read, you already have a great deal to write about.

A literature review is not just a survey of everything that has been published on your topic. It is an argument for the need for your study. A literature review is not so much about what has already been done as it is about what remains to be done. There is a sense in which it does "need to be both expansive and inclusive, coherent, and connect all the dots", but it is much more important that it have a focus. And the work of establishing that focus, of defining your perspective, offers a fitting writing task in the early stages of writing the review.

One thing that should strike us about this reader's question is the assumption that it is somehow more "possible" to go ahead and "read the most of the books on the topic in advance" than to write the review. It assumes that "the list of the books to read" is somehow given. But making the list itself offers a specific research problem, one that can be described in advance of knowing what you find.

Also, the list needs to be prioritized, and your reading needs to be put into a schedule. You only have a finite amount of time to complete your reading, and you need to decide when that part of the work has to be done. So you need a much more specific strategy than "read everything on the subject in advance". Again, since this implies that you have a bunch of reasons for reading and rereading specific texts in a specific order, you also have an argument to present to your reader. Once you know why you are reading, you have plenty of things to write about. Spend your writing time (which should also be scheduled, of course) describing those reasons, working through the problem that guides your reading.

All good readers are really re-readers, said Nabokov. And a literature review is not a summary of all the studies on your subject that have been done so far; it is an argument for the relevance of your study. At the very beginning of your research you probably did some unfocused searches through the literature and got a sense of the contribution you wanted to make. A literature review is a systematic re-reading of the literature that gives you a basis to make the case for your own relevance.

PS: Ezra Zuckerman's radical formulation of the basic idea in this post is worth noting: "Never write a literature review" (PDF here).

Palinurus

We cannot think if we have no time to read, nor feel if we are emotionally exhausted, nor out of cheap material create what is permanent. We cannot co-ordinate what is not there.

Palinurus

Palinurus was Aeneas's pilot, who fell (or jumped) overboard and washed up on the shore, where he was robbed and killed and, unburried like Elpenor, doomed to wander the earth until his shipmates erected a proper monument to him. But that is in many ways another story. Palinurus was also the pseudonym of Cyril Connolly when he published the minor post-war classic, The Unquiet Grave, about an editor grappling with "the core of melancholy and guilt that works destruction on us from within", which, properly speaking, is also another story.

I want to talk about an experiment in writing process reengineering. At the end of this month, I will be accepting applications from researchers at the department who want to subject their writing process to a somewhat rigorous programme of discipline. It is an attempt to establish a social context for the Sixteen Week Challenge.

My aim is to get people to vizualize their year as oscilating between periods of intense intellectual excitement and gentle mental recreation. The latter includes both rest and "lateral" inquiry, i.e., unstructured creative work. A Palinurean year starts with a Christmas break, passes through a 17 week writing semester (interrupted by a one-week Easter break), followed by a 14 week "easy living" summer, and then another 17 week writing semester.

In order to make this possible, authors will have to define their writing projects explicitly, first in terms of an outline:

And then in terms of a writing schedule that derives from this outline.

There should be one outline and one schedule for each project. Writers then imagine each week as fourteen half days (morning and afternoon):

And they make a realistic plan about how to use those halfdays to realize their writing projects. Note that the red area is the writing time. There should be a maximum of five of these per week.

The blue circled area holds a place for a weekly meeting to discuss the writing process with other members of the group. Like I say, the researchers at the department will be encouraged to sign up by the end of May for the semester beginning at the end of August. That means getting the planning done well before the summer begins. A number of PhD students have expressed interest in running something similar. The idea, in either case, is to establish a "there" to coordinate.

A Visiting Card

On Friday, at the department's monthly brunch meeting, I will be presenting an ambitious idea I call Writing Process Reengineering. I have written about it before and I am grateful for the feedback I have received. It is related to the Sixteen Week Challenge, for example, and one of our work-life balance researchers has cautioned me not to leave it as an individual self-management project (which will only cause stress). In this post I want to say something about how to make publishing an integrated, social part of the department's intellectual life.

If writing really were a purely individual matter, there would be little a department head or research director could do to "support" the process. Just giving researchers more time is unlikely to affect written output (mainly because of the truth of Parkinson's Law). On the other hand, research managers don't have time to micro-manage writing processes in the manner I am going to suggest. Enter the middleman.

I am happy to be a specifiable feature of the writing process at our department. All the researchers and PhD students have access to the Resident Writing Consultant (a title I bumped into in this description a similar function in a law firm). Hiring someone specifically to support the task of presenting research in good English is a good way to send the message that publishing is important. It is not just a demand to produce deliverables; it is an allocation of resources to the end of increasing production.

Writing Process Reengineering (WPR) takes the function of the writing consultant to a new level. It is of course an (only half ironic) allusion to Business Process Reengineering (BPR), an infamous consulting product from the 1990s. It was seen by many as a revival of Taylorist ideas, i.e., "scientific management". Indeed, the idea of the "scientific management of science" resonates nicely with Steve Fuller's idea that philosophy of science should be realized in science policy, and should be based on the scientific study of science.

An in-house editor, glorified as a resident writing consultant, is in a great position implement a variety of collective projects to foster academic publishing and build writing competences. At the brunch, I will be presenting something I am calling Project Palinurus, which will hopefully run every semester, bringing together a group of about five researchers who want to discipline their writing process.

Like BPR, the important thing is to define your goals and clarify your resource situation. How many papers do you want to submit to which journals over a given sixteen-week period? And how many hours do you have to devote to that project? You then work out a realistic process by which to achieve your goal under the constraints specified. This takes a little bit of planning and a lot of discipline. It is selling the planning part that is difficult, at least in my experience, and that will be my challenge on Friday.

A department can encourage process management among its writers by offering incentives. These could take the form of reduced teaching load for those who commit themselves to well-defined writing goals to be realized through explicit plans over a specified sixteen week period. These "first class researchers" (shades of Taylor!) should meet once a week to share experiences and remind each other why they are doing it. As I have said before, I am firmly convinced that a significant benefit of hiring an in-house writing consultant consists of a Hawthorne effect.

I should add a little self-promotion here. My department has worked out a way of offering my services, both as editor of the work of individuals and consultant to whole departments. I have put together both a one-day and a two-day departmental seminar on international publication based on my experiences. There is also a way of "retaining" my services. If you are interested, you can use the contact details in the image above, or click on the link under my name on the sidebar.

Writing and Teaching

"It was too wonderful a morning to surrender myself to the machine."
Henry Miller

Most academics will teach even if they have not had time to prepare their lesson. They will normally decline meeting and seminar invitations if they are scheduled teach at the same time. Many academics will even teach with a cold or a headache or some other physical disorder.

Writing sessions are much more vulnerable to cancellation. In fact, people rarely even put such sessions in their calendar. There is a general sense that one will write when one has time to do so. And one never has enough time, of course. How often do you cancel a writing session because you are invited to a meeting or are asked to cover a colleague's class? How often do you say, "Sorry, I'm writing at that time. Can we meet later in the day?"

Worse still, even a very strong intention to write can be overridden by a vague feeling that one doesn't quite know what one will say, or by the sunrise of a morning that is simply "too wonderful" (Miller's "machine" is his typewriter). This, it should be noted again, is rarely the case in teaching. If a teacher doesn't "feel like" teaching, or goes for a walk in the park instead, we'd consider her irresponsible. If she cancels class because she doesn't know what she will say that morning, we consider that a kind of personal crisis. And yet, if we get up one morning and are "unable" to put two words together about our research (as planned), we simply shrug it off as a lack of inspiration and read the newspaper instead.

The obvious reason for this is that we have a harder time committing to ourselves than to others. The bigger the group of people that depends on us, the more likely we are to simply show up. (We are also more likely to prepare for class than for our writing sessions, but I think this is in part because we know we will be there for the former and will therefore have to actually experience our own unpreparedness.) The solution, then, is to see your writing commitments as social obligations.

So when planning your writing, keep in mind that your published work informs the research conducted by your peers. Writing is the means by which you share your knowledge with others; it is not just a means by which you further your own career. Your writing responsibilities are as serious as your teaching obligations from a social point of view. When you sit down in front of the machine you are doing important work for the community. If you need reminding of this, try to arrange deadlines with your colleagues that commit them to reading what you've written. Or get yourself an editor like me.

Yes, it is a very beautiful morning in Copenhagen.

1000 x 8

A standard journal article is about 8000 words long. Journal articles are different, so there is no single recipe for how to make one, but it is normally a good idea to think of writing an article as a set of discrete tasks. One of those tasks, of course, is putting it all together. This morning I want to talk about the parts, not the whole.

To begin with, then, let me divide a paper somewhat arbitrarily into eight parts consisting of 1000 words each. It's never that simple, of course, but it does offer us a way of breaking the task down into manageable units. You might want to keep Kafka's thoughts on how the Great Wall of China was built in mind. You can divide your own papers differently if you like, but here is one suggestion:

1. Introduction
2. Background
3. Theory
4. Method
5. Results
6. Analysis
7. Recommendations
8. Conclusion

Obviously these won't all end up being exactly 1000 words long. But there is nothing wrong with producing a first draft that follows an arbitrarily regular pattern. You can then have a look at it and decide which parts to elaborate and which parts to condense.

Consider section two. This is where you provide some journalistic context for your work. You tell the reader what parts of the real world and its history your paper is about; it should be relatively free of theoretical jargon and it should be epistemologically unambitious. (The most ambitious section in terms of knowledge should, of course, be your results section.) You are here saying things that the reader might not know but could easily find out and will have no difficulty understanding.

It's a particularly good section to work on in isolation, i.e., separate from your theory, results and analysis. What this section says should be true regardless of what your research has discovered. An unanalyzed illustrative example—an example of the sort of thing your results pertain to—could be one element of such a section. It may be an example of the problem your research offers an understanding of, even a solution to.

By a similar token, your theory and method sections should be comprehensible (to the relevant theorist and methodologist) without any reference to your particular results. Writing them as more or less stand-alone sections is therefore a useful exercise. It will give them a particular kind of strength.

The most important reason to divide your work into chunks like this is that it gives you a straightfoward procedure for generating your first draft. It can be carried through without making a whole lot of decisions about the shape of the final product, which should really be made as editorial decisions about the drafted material (not as decisions about something in your head). A thousand words is about three pages. Most people can produce a page of prose in under an hour, three pages in three hours. So it will take you 8 three-hour sessions to produce a first draft using a procedure like this.

I am not trying to sell this as the only way to write a journal article. But it is very definitely one way. Why not give it a try?