AcWriMo: what i do while drafting / what i do in revising
there is a lot that goes unsaid and untaught in the world of academic writing. i feel that most advisors/supervisors/director of graduate studies/even some first year seminar leaders take the stance of "you should already know how to do this" or "i'm sure you've learned this before". as someone who works with writers all around the world at all kinds of universities in all sorts of disciplines: NOPE. it is much more rare that i meet someone who was given a comprehensive toolkit for academic writing than someone who was given nothing. so, if you are trying to figure it all out, you are definitely not alone!
academic writing is a collection of skills that in theory, have an order of operations:
read
draft
revise
submit
but there is also a LOT of flexibility within that - some people bounce between the first three stages frequently, some pass through them with relatively equal time spent in each, and some move through it differently depending on the project, or their own brain at the time.
one thing that i do find consistently though is that i work with writers who are, consciously or not, spending a lot of time drafting (ie, generating new words) and working with facets of their writing that would actually be more easily addressed in a revision stage. what do i mean? great question!
for example, you could be writing along and you start to really notice your transitions (or lack thereof). maybe an advisor gave you feedback on another draft about transitions, or you saw a twitter thread about them, or someone mentioned them in passing - but you're thinking about them in an early-ish draft stage. so you spend a lot of time learning about transitions (here's one of my favorite resources on them!) and you spend a whole day crafting the transitions for a section of your new chapter.
now, there's nothing wrong with that! sometimes it feels good to practice a skill or go deep on a new facet of your writing but also, you might have just spent a bunch of time creating the world's most beautiful transitions only to complete restructure that chapter in a few weeks, and have to redo them. it's not that you should NEVER work with your transitions, but rather that there are more and less efficient times to do so.
so here is a very rough, moderately personal list of what skills i tend to focus on in early draft phases, and what i tend to do in later revisions! feel free to take what works and leave the rest, but the aim here is to be explicit so you can check your own workflow and see if there's anything you want to experiment with!
things i do during drafting (mostly)
freewriting
rough restructuring (taking big chunks and rearranging them)
trying to figure out WHAT i'm trying to say
figuring out the scope of what does and does not belong in what piece i'm working on
things i do during revision (mostly)
checking on accuracy of quotations / facts / etc
argument (how strongly am i arguing something, what kinds of arguments, etc)
transitions
sentence structure
writing the introduction and conclusion
writing abstracts
checking for flow
most of us are not used to revising work even once, much less multiple times so that balance can feel really off if you're not used to it! but revision is where a bulk of the work to take a piece from "some thoughts about something" into "a cohesive argument" happens! and more people should talk about that.
AcWriMo: a river, not a bucket
a question that has come up a lot in my one one one sessions lately is how to get through all the reading. and how to make choices about what to read at what time. even more acutely, i’ve come to realize the pressure that having a "to read" pile at all can present.
there are two ways to approach a problem like "i have too much to read":
filter out the list to determine the best things to read
rearrange whatever you need to to just.....read it all, even if it increases as you keep going
and a lot of my own advice in this community is about the first suggestion - how to find and identify the most important things to read. and so we do that, and we reduce the pile a little bit, but what happens when everything there will probably be useful and you still can't read it all? but then i came across this blog post by oliver burkeman (of a very good, if a little heavy, productivity book called four thousand weeks) and this passage really resonated:
Unfortunately, most advice on productivity and time management takes the needle-in-a-haystack approach instead. It's about becoming more efficient and organised, or better at prioritising, with the implied promise that you might thereby eliminate or disregard enough of life's unimportant nonsense to make time for the meaningful stuff. To stretch a metaphor: it's about reducing the size of the haystack, to make it easier to focus on the needle.
There's definitely a role for such techniques; but in the end, the only way to deal with a too-many-needles problem is to confront the fact that it's insoluble – that you definitely won't be fitting everything in. (Of course some such problems, where just scraping a living feels impossible, demand political solutions too – a topic for another time.) It's not a question of rearranging your to-do list so as to make space for all your "big rocks", but of accepting that there are simply too many rocks to fit in the jar. You have to take a stab at deciding what matters most, among your various creative passions/life goals/responsibilities – and then do that, while acknowledging that you'll inevitably be neglecting many other things that matter too.
his reframe for this problem of "too many needles" (too many things, all important) is to think about your to read pile "like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it)."
so many of us treat a LOT of things in academia (and life) like items in a bucket - we pick up articles and projects and tasks and ideas and put them in our bucket and then set about working very hard to make them all reality (empty the bucket). so instead of clearing our to read tags, the river approach suggests that we instead think about reading what feels most important, at the time, with the information we have. and then if the information changes, and we need to read something else, we do. you can apply this to projects in your pipeline, ideas for your chapter in your idea notebook, or even all the tasks you feel like you could or should be doing day to day. the goal is not to do all of them, and feel the ever mounting pressure when we can't because we cannot control time or space. the goal is to choose with the best information we have in the present, and not take on the guilt that comes with not being able to do everything - a genuinely impossible task.
accountability doesn't mean always doing what you say you will
When I say "hold yourself accountable" - what do you think of? Do you imagine a system of unyielding deadlines wherein you must always deliver by that date or no one can trust you? Is it that every word you say becomes a contract that you must abide by, no matter what the situation?
That's certainly what my (recovering perfectionist) brain often imagines. But, this has been an excellent season to relearn that accountability is actually much more generous than that. Dictionaries define it as "expected or required to justify decisions." To be accountable is to answer for the decisions you made - not to deliver flawlessly, but to be able to explain the whys and hows of what happened.
Say for example, and this is for sure a completely made up example and not something that happened to me recently *wink*, you sat down to work on a project, and instead you got a notification that you needed to update your operating system. So you pressed update, and walked away while it ran, and before you knew it, it was four hours later, and you had gotten a solid nap in, and made some really delicious soup, but also you did not do that project. You feel bad about it. People were waiting on it, and those people cannot eat your soup or benefit from your nap.
This person, who is definitely not me, could just keep avoiding the project, or work really hard on it and ignore all the other things that also need to be done and are time sensitive, and get really behind on everything else, or take another nap to avoid thinking about anything. And in a really punitive way of thinking about "accountability", all of those fit because they are some way of avoiding, overcompensating, or punishing oneself for not doing something when you said you were going to do it.
But in a more generous model of accountability, it's about saying:
What happened? I walked away, got distracted, got wrapped up in other things, and crashed because I am really easily distractable, and tired right now.
What decisions did you make? What are the consequences? I made the call to update the computer, and then everything else sort of flowed from there - not nefarious or even consciously procrastinating! But the consequences are now that I'm behind.
What needs to change on a system level? Nothing systemic, really - a perhaps avoidable but also understandable sequence of events. I could get better about setting phone reminders when I walk away from my desk, and maybe prioritize some sleep.
Who needs to know about the changes? Should email that person who is waiting on the project, let them know what happened ("I'm sorry, this fell off my plate and I won't be able to get it done by x - if I get it to you by y, will that overly complicate the timeline. If it does, I can prioritize it and have it by z, just let me know. Thanks for understanding - there's a lot to juggle right now."
What, if anything, do you need to implement moving forward so that the new plan is viable? I might want to make a reminder to check in at the end of the day - if other things are going to be delayed, an earlier heads up will probably be better.
It's a dance between self-compassion and accountability , I can both understand what happened and also make changes to not repeat patterns I don't want to repeat. But accountability doesn't mean "I have to always deliver things exactly when I say I will" - it just means that I am responsible for the decisions I make, communicating when things need to be communicated, and making changes when things need to be changed. It's not an end-state - this isn't a "I use pom timers and now I'm always accountable to everyone all the time!" thing. This is an evolving practice - building in enough places to be self-reflective, and practing enough self-compassion so that we can learn from ourselves without it being a punishment-based thing.
AcWriMo2020: revise on purpose
so much of what i support clients with in the world of academic writing is normalizing a longer writing process. so many people go to grad school, in part, because they’re good at writing. and when the writing product changes from a 20 page term paper to a 200+ page thesis, it can seem like everything you knew before doesn’t work now, and you are, in fact, bad at writing.
and usually, it isn’t that the client is bad at writing - it’s that they’re not used to writing in an iterative way, and they almost always have no real experience with substantial revision. sure, they might have proofread a paper a time or two, or cleared up some unclear sentences, but they’ve never substantially reworked a piece following feedback.
and if you are used to writing pretty complete drafts and only lightly going over them for minor errors, it can be completely bewildering to sit with a sh*tty first draft, or a draft that needs substantial work, and know what to do next. how do you take a pile of incomplete sentences and turn it into something readable? how do you complete rework an argument without starting over?
the answer: you revise.
there are as many ways to revise as there are to write, but here are a few of my most favorite/useful techniques, and a few reminders to help ground this process:
in order to revise, you have to know what you’ve already written. i like to go back and annotate my work like it was a piece by a stranger - i’ll ask questions in the margins, highlight the main point of paragraphs, maybe even make an outline of the ideas and the order that they’re presented. people often skip this step - and it really helps to get this overall view before you start to do any big structural changes.
take all the topic sentences (first sentence and/or most important sentence) in each paragraph and reorder those into a better/different flow. can be less cumbersome than moving around whole paragraphs.
know that it might take SEVERAL passes of revision. i often ignore all the mechanical things (grammar, sentence structure, spelling) until my last few passes because if i move everything around, i usually end up rewriting things anyway.
do targeted revision passes: this one checks for subject verb agreement - this one focuses on transitions - this one i’m focusing on clearing up my argument. this can help when you feel overwhelmed with all that needs to change in a draft.
change the font style and size when doing a final pass to check for typos. this can move the words around on the page and help you see it with fresh perspective.
use the read aloud function in your browser or word processing function to check for any sentence weirdness.
use the “save as” feature to save different versions (and use a consistent file naming system!) and help yourself keep track of what changes have been made.
but most, most important:
revision is part of the writing. budget time for it. budget energy for it. it takes a lot of brain power! there are so many decisions to be made! so make sure you’re giving yourself credit for it, and not internalizing the fact that you are revising as punishment for being a bad writer. it isn’t. it’s what makes good writing great.
AcWriMo2020: get feedback on purpose
I signed up for a writing group through the university writing center on a whim - I was cleaning out my inbox, a nearly obsessive form of procrastination for me, and saw the notice that groups were forming soon. It was the fall of my fourth year (of a five year program) and I needed some motivation. I had a draft of my prospectus that needed polishing, a schedule that was becoming more and more freeform as I advanced through the degree, and more and more pressure to research, write and publish as much as possible. Though it went through several permutations, my writing group was one of the most persistent, helpful, and supportive spaces through my candidacy. But most importantly, it taught me how to get feedback on purpose - and how to find the feedback I wasn’t necessarily getting from my advisor. Here are my best tips for finding, running, and tweaking a writing group!
If possible, let someone else do the organizing. Many universities, departments and student groups offer writing spaces. If you're nervous about putting your writing out there, joining a pre-formed group, or bigger, more established program can feel more comfortable that connecting with a close peer or colleague.
Interdisciplinary groups can be amazing! I was initially very skeptical that my group would be able to offer me anything, because the members were so far away from me in a disciplinary sense. But actually the insights of their Cultural Anthropology and Early Judaic studies trainings were incisive and thought-provoking. Because they weren't as familiar, if at all, with the literature and conversations I was referencing, they were relying on my writing to understand my topic. Any problems I was having concisely or clearly conveying my ideas were much more apparent to their fresh eyes. Colleagues can often read between the lines and fill in details or context that you have not included, leaving you thinking that your argument was clearer than it actually was. My writing group challenged me to be more judicious with my secondary literature (do you really need this to support your argument, or are you just name dropping?) and more forthright with my own contributions, and my work was stronger for it.
Different writing groups can serve different purposes. During some summers, my writing group was just people with whom I gathered to write, never sharing drafts or talking through our work. I also had incredibly focused writing workshops with graduate students in my department, where I had to articulate how and why this fit into the larger field. I often showed rough drafts to my interdisciplinary group, as they weren't close colleagues and I could feel more comfortable sharing less polished work, and full chapters with my graduate student colleagues before they went to faculty members. Having multiple spaces pays off.
Be clear about what you need. When sending my drafts to my writing group, I took care in the email to explain what I needed my writing group to do. Sometimes I needed help understanding if the sections flowed together, after putting together a month's worth of free writing. Other times, it was more helpful to ask if the argument was clear and well supported. I most of the time instructed that they ignore copy-editing tasks, unless the errors were glaring and felt so inclined - I had other places and resources for that, and I wanted feedback on the ideas. But nothing is more frustrating that spending time carefully rearranging sentences for flow and style only to find out that this was a very rough draft and the writer wanted feedback on structure. Clarity can make sure that you're getting what you need, and respecting your group members' time.
If possible, record your sessions and the conversations. I am a person who needs to "talk it out." I loved seminar spaces and the chance I got to explain my thinking, as I am often much more concise and compelling in person than I am in writing. I got in the habit of recording (with permission, of course!) my writing groups, where we discussed my ideas and writing. I usually didn't transcribe those conversations, but would play the back as I was editing or going through and processing their feedback, because often there were important phrases I said that I wanted to steal from myself. Capturing that verbal processing was essential to making the best use of those meetings.
Ask others to restate your argument. After a sprawling conversation where my group helped me to hash out the main points of a chapter's argument, my group member had the foresight to take a few minutes after the meeting and write down her version of my argument. This was incredibly useful for me, as it gave me a chance to see the space between the argument in my head and how it was communicated. Even if it is just verbally, or in the margin notes, this can be a useful tool for writing in the early stages.
And here is a fun set of questions to use with your writing group, writing partner, or even with yourself to guide the kind of feedback you’re looking for!
Questions to ask your feedback partners (or yourself) to pay attention to!
Argument:
Is my argument clear? Can you follow it?
What do you wish you knew more about? Less?
What parts of my writing are most compelling? Least?
Is my intervention clear?
If you had to summarize my argument in two or three sentences, what would you say?
Field:
Do you understand how my research builds on our field?
Is it clear how I’m using field-specific terminology?
Is my intellectual lineage (who influences my thinking) clear?
Do I make my intervention clear without being cruel or overly accommodating to other scholars?
Am I missing any key citations or movements in our field?
Do I explain each secondary source or concept in relationship to my argument?
Copy:
Are the sentences clear and easy to read?
Are there any words that don’t seem to mean what I think they do?
Is my tense consistent?
Are my citations formatted in a consistent way?
The more you can specify WHAT kind of feedback you’re after, the more useful the feedback (hopefully) will be! Knowing what you need to help you see your writing clearly can be a hard skill to master, but once you do, it’ll serve you for a long, long time.
AcWriMo2020: draft on purpose
Most of the clients that come to me know how to do the later stages of drafting pretty well - taking a skeleton of ideas and expanding it into something more complete. But what is harder to wrap grasp is how to do something earlier in the process - how to write messy, write sloppy, write on purpose even when you aren’t quite sure what you want to say yet. I find that the earlier in the process you start to write, the more you can work with something concrete, instead of wrestling with it all in your head.
One of the most powerful tools in my writing arsenal is free-writing. Even after years (and honestly more than a few therapy sessions) digging in to why I feel anxious about writing, I've discovered that lowering the stakes helps me be much more productive. The more I focus on writing well, writing clearly, writing academically, the more I freeze up and don't write anything. But if I just commit to writing a sh*tty first draft, if the only thing I have to do is get words onto the page, then I feel much (but not totally) more comfortable with the whole endeavor. I used to be able to write very good first drafts of undergraduate, and even MA level papers - just a read through and they were ready. That isn't true of my PhD writing, and it isn't true of my professional writing. My first draft is usually one of four or five total drafts, with lots of feedback from other people along the way. So the first draft doesn't have to be 95% of the way there, just 20 or 25% of the way!
But making that switch in my mind was different than actually teaching myself to write a sh*tty first draft. It was a skill I had to develop, to let myself write more freely without editing as I go, without judging the work as it develops. Here's where free-writing comes in. This looks one of two ways for me:
1) I open up a blank Google doc, Scrivner file or Word doc and just start typing. When I'm in this flow, I type stream of consciousness thoughts, usually starting with how much I hate writing and how bad I am at it and how it will never end and I'll be working on this stupid draft for the rest of my life. Eventually, even my brain tires of writing about that, and I switch to narrating the task I'm setting down to do:
Today I'm going to write about how this newspaper article from 1934 records the unsanctioned screening of amateur footage taken from near the JESSE JAMES set. This is important because this proves that people saw the footage of the accident on set, and that it really did contribute to the backlash against the film, despite the studio's assurances that it was a non-event.
I usually don't use this writing directly in my draft but it does help me clarify my plan for the day, limit the scope, and transition my brain from "kicking and screaming tantrum about the idea of writing" to "slightly more willing participant in the writing process."
2) If I'm already feeling pretty warmed up, or if I've completed step 1), I move on to some of these writing prompt questions. Again, the text of these don't always make it through directly into the draft, but sometimes it does! But starting from these high-level, authorial reflection questions definitely helps me narrow down my contribution, instead of just narrating my research or my findings.
What is the most interesting thing about the research?
What was my most unexpected finding?
If I was teaching this source/study to an undergraduate, what context would they need to understand it?
How are my ideas different from the scholars who have looked at this topic/phenomenon before me? How are they similar?
Who will benefit from the research I've done?
What was the most difficult question to answer? What was the easiest question?
What Big Ideas in my field does this relate to?
What made me decide on this topic in the first place? What's interesting to me about it even still?
What questions do I still have about my work so far?
A pom or two answering these questions, and I'm usually ready to start working more formally on my writing: expanding my outline, filling in sentences, editing what I've previously written. But giving myself a chance to write in a low-stakes way, play with the ideas, and then move on to a first, or fifth, draft gives me a chance to get used to the physical action of typing, the headspace of writing, and sometimes even lets me tap into the fun and excitement of generating new ideas and putting them in a place where people can read them.
AcWriMo2020: read on purpose
Reading effectively in an academic context is a skill. Practicing it often can strengthen it, just like any other skill. But keep in mind that reading widely (fiction, academic work in other styles, non-fiction, journalism) can also do wonders for your writing style, and connection to the world. Academic reading is not the only reading that counts.
BUT! Even the most well-read academics read for a purpose. There is no shame in reading selectively (only a few articles) or in part (not the whole piece) to get what you need from it. Falling into the trap where you believe you must read every single word of every single piece of relevant material is where your reading habit can really fall of the rails. Get good at critically reading - reading only what you need, and making those notes and the original piece easy to find if you need it again.
The good news: focus on your workflow.
But the good news is that more so than writing or grading, there are a lot of places to streamline your reading workflow, and use tools to your advantage. So rather than piling on a heap of guilt about all the reading you haven't done (we all haven't done enough! it's a hallmark of academia! you will literally never catch up - which is a cold hard truth of this week) take some time this week to audit your reading work flow, and then begin to build your reading habit bit by bit.
Here are the four major steps in any reading workflow. I'll break them down one by one, presenting strategies and tools along the way.
What kind of reading is it?
What kind of information will you need out of it?
What is the most efficient way to get the information out of the reading?
How will you make that information discoverable?
What kind of reading is it?
Not every piece of information you come across needs to be read to the same level of depth, or with the same level of attention. I recommend that the first step of your work flow be determining what level you'll read the piece at. Examples of the different levels include:
I only need basic facts (who wrote it, when, where it was published - things, in other words, that I can get from an abstract and citation)
I need medium level of facts (the examples used, the study design, the main arguments, who it references, who references this piece)
I need to master this text (be able to speak intelligently about its construction and contents, from beginning to end)
Making this determination early (and perhaps sorting your pieces into these piles) when you locate them can help you efficiently plan your time. Only have 15 minutes? Process a few basic readings. Have an hour? Work on a higher level of comprehension. But this way, you always have something in the hopper to read when you find yourself with a few minutes.
Can't decide what level you need to read it at? Estimate down! You can always read something again if your needs change. But you can't get the time back that you spend on carefully reading something you didn't need. You don't need to read everything perfectly, but you do need a system that lets you find information when you do need it.
What kind of information do I need out of this piece?
This is the part of the reading process that is going to vary the most from person to person, and from context to context. But here are some general questions to help guide you in setting up a system for your information retrieval.
Are the authors and their context important? (time, location, funding, other authors they're in conversation with?)
What is the main argument of the piece?
Who is the audience?
What are the main examples/case studies?
What are the major findings/conclusions/arguments?
Is the exact language relevant? (i.e. do I need to take down exact quotations or mark important page numbers?)
For example, when I was reading books for my comprehensive exams, I need to know about the context, and scholarly conversations that each piece was engaging in, with a good understanding of the overall arguments of each one. This was much different than when I was reading for my literature review, where I needed specific, case-study level arguments that would relate directly back to my research. If you're working on a systematic review, you're developing a schema for how and what to search for in each reading, but these questions can help you to build that schema.
What is the most efficient way to get the information out of the reading?
And here we come to the biggest debate in the academic reading community - reading on paper, or reading digitally. I would actually say that there are two parts of this question:
How do you want to store information that you read so you can find it again?
How do you actually want to read that information?
I would make a strong, strong push for storing information digitally, at least at the citation/PDF level, especially for articles. This of course can vary depending on how much data you're reading or what you access to in terms of storage, but for ease of referencing when you are writing, being able to access information in a searchable way is a perk of digital storage that just can't be beat.
Search-ability is also the reason that I chose to train myself to read digitally, except for large manuscript level books (which I did often scan important sections with the Optical Character Recognition, or OCR). By taking my notes and reading digitally, I made all that information part of a large data bank that I could then draw on when making outlines, writing drafts, or working with citations.
But there's also a large community of people who believe that you can more easily engage with the reading you're doing if you do it with pen and paper. If that's what works for you, and you have the resources to print things and can write in books or make notes, then go for it! But I would argue that making the majority of the notes that you create in notebooks digital so that they can be searchable for you will help to make those notes efficient and accessible.
How will you make that information discoverable?
The last step is to decide how you're going to organize all the information that you generate from the reading process. I would recommend that you have at least these steps thought through, and used if you need them!
Saving the basic citation information, for everything all the time, in citation software. Lots of people love Endnote and Mendeley but I used Zotero and loved it - especially since it was free. The important thing is that, no matter what, every citation gets saved. The earlier you start, the better!
Store the digital file. Also important - standardizing your digital file names, with Author, Year of Publication, and Title in the file name. Makes things so much more searchable! Storing them in Dropbox or Google Drive can make them accessible anywhere, or an external hard drive can give you more space. Scanning paper copies of articles with your notes can also make those accessible!
Store the note file you create. You could scan your hand written notes, or type directly into a new document for each piece of reading. The level of note detail is up to you, but having a system where you tag those notes, or include searchable key words, make these notes really discoverable and easy to use.