How and Where I Write: Interview with Dr. Richard Rankin Russell

For our first installment of the “How and Where I Write” series, BearTracks sat down with Dr. Richard Rankin Russell, professor of English and the English Graduate Program Director. Dr. Russell’s areas of expertise include Modern and Contemporary Irish literature, though he began his graduate career studying the literature of the American South. Dr. Russell earned his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has been on the faculty at Baylor since 2001. He has published numerous books and articles, most recently his book Seamus Heaney:  A Critical Introduction, published in 2016, but he has a new book entitled James Joyce and Samaritan Hospitality coming out in November 2022 through the University of Edinburgh Press. It was a pleasure to converse with Dr. Russell about his writing habits and wisdom; we hope you enjoy as well!

BearTracks

Where do you like to write? Your office, at home, coffee shops, outside? Where is your chosen place to write?

Dr. Richard Rankin Russell

I cannot write at coffee shops and not usually in my office. I can edit, and I’m doing edits now on a book in my office, but I have a study at home. And I write on my grandfather’s desk from the furniture store that my family had started in Paris, Tennessee where I grew up.

BT

That’s really special.

RRR

I write there, and it’s usually late at night into the early morning, just as I did as a graduate student with my dissertation, and now with kids, that’s when the house is quiet.

BT

So you’re a total-silence-when-you-write person?

RRR

Yeah, or maybe classical music in the background, but yeah.

BT

I’ve recently discovered, I think, Miles Davis is going to be my go-to writing music.

RRR

Miles is good. I’ve got on repeat a five-album series by Wynton Marsalis, just instrumental jazz; it’s really good and bluesy.

BT

Yeah, something about the rhythms just kind of keeps the energy up; it’s good. Do you still acquire lots of books as your career has progressed or has the pace slowed somewhat as you’ve gone on?

RRR

I’d say the pace has slowed somewhat. I’ve been really consciously trying to give books away lately. I’ve got a lot of books in here, except for Irish literature, which takes up close to this much at home in my study. I’ve slowed down some on book acquisition, because I think I have enough but still like to get authors I like.

BT

How do you capture your research? Are you a notecard person, a journal? Do you keep a document on the computer? How does that process work for you?

RRR

I mark sections in books in pencil and with bookmarks, and I have those piled around me. I write directly to Word documents now and edit as I go, but I definitely have scattered written notes around me in those books.

BT

Do you immediately start writing on the computer or do you do anything beginning with longhand, just to get thoughts down?

RRR

I try to do a little bit of that. Maybe on a legal pad, a little bit of flow, but I’ve also done that directly to the Word file, and then I just go. I’m kind of a spur, or jag, or streak writer. I don’t believe in the hour-a-day writing thing, because when I write, I really write, and I’ll go for four or five hours at a stretch. That’s the only way I can get anything done. That’s why I have to carve out that time at night, and that’s harder than it used to be, to stay up until one or two.

BT

I take it you’re a marginalia person?

RRR

Oh yeah, absolutely! And I do write in library books – in pencil!

BT

I told that to someone once, I also dog-ear library books, and they were appalled; it was like I had just denied the divinity of Christ or something. I see it as a gift for future readers, but maybe I have too high an opinion of myself!

RRR

Haha! Yeah, absolutely, exactly! They’ll be interested in our marginalia, I’m sure they will!

BT

Do you ever read digital books?

RRR

No. The only time I ever read them was after back surgery when [my wife] had The Hunger Games trilogy on her Kindle. And I read the whole thing. It was very odd, let me tell you.

BT

What is some good advice you’ve received on writing?

RRR

Hmmm. One piece that comes to mind comes from my dear friend Dr. Fulton, down the hall, who, when I came here, said, “I know you want to get your dissertation published but try to think several books ahead.” I was like, What? That sounds impossible. I think, if you’re in a research position, you want to get your dissertation published, and you don’t think how that book is going to connect to your whole intellectual profile, but you should. And his saying that one time, in his Fulton-esque way, helped me to think that way, and I feel like my career has had some intellectual integrity because of that, and it’s arisen organically because of that comment.

BT

Do you feel like that also took some of the pressure off of individual works in a certain way because there was that holistic viewpoint?

RRR

I think so. And it also stems for an unfortunate bad habit I have, which is whatever the written version of logorrhea is. I tend to write too much, so this book here that I’m doing revisions on, this book on Brian Friel, that was a dissertation chapter originally. And I took that and got an article or two out of it, and then, I just really loved Friel, I ended up working it into a book. So the advantage of writing too much is that then you can send signals to yourself in a given project, “There needs to be work done on this!” And then you can do that work later.

The second [good piece of advice I’ve received], I had a friend in graduate school – I’ve never forgotten what she said – she said, “Think about you’re writing to an intelligent but ignorant child.” Ignorant, you know in the best sense of the word, meaning not knowing the field, but intelligent. So that’s been helpful to me to think about audience in that sense.

BT

What do you think your best piece of written work so far, or perhaps the piece of work you’re most proud of?

RRR

That’s a good question. I really like this book, the Seamus Heaney Region’s book, that won the Cleanth Brooks-Robert Penn Warren prize. I really felt like I got a lot in there.

But I’m maybe most pleased with a piece a lot of people don’t know about, which was a piece in Five Points on the Emmett Till lynching in my father’s home county. So I worked up a piece that’s part memoir, part literary criticism. Long story, but these photographs [in the piece] are from a friend of mine, Maude Schuyler Clay. His body [Emmett Till’s] washed up on her family land. I got to know her when this was done. I loved doing the literary criticism with the Hughes poems and the blues, and thinking about what it was like for my dad growing up where we go now every summer, learning about this horrible thing. But then, when I got to meet Maude, I realized that her first book of photographs ended with this, which is to his [Till’s] memory, and then, fairly early on as we talked, I realized that my grandmother was her beautician, her mom’s beautician, and her grandmother’s beautician. My grandmother ran a beauty shop in my dad’s house where he grew in the Delta. And she retired when she was 87, so she ran a beauty shop for over 60 years, so all the women in the Delta came around. So it’s not a straight academic piece, but that I think is an important for me, thinking about my family history, thinking about literature as power to remember such atrocities, but it’s hopeful too, because the Hughes poems are Christian, and there’s a lot of good things that have come out of that. So that’s been really important to me.

But I’m really excited about the Joyce and Good Samaritan book that’s coming out.

BT

Congratulations on that! I saw your email yesterday.

RRR

Thank you. That’s been important for me thinking about how literature is not some ivory tower pursuit, but it’s generative, and it can include us all as potential readers and rescuers of others.

BT

Very nicely, succinctly put. Would you name a few favorite authors from your field of study?

RRR

Oh my goodness. I’d have to put Yeats and Joyce up there near the top – and Heaney, for sure. Goodness. I love Virginia Woolf. I love George MacKay Brown. There’s so many.

BT

How about critics?

RRR

Oh. I really like Rita Felski. I really liked Denis Donoghue’s work. Those two are great. I’ve really been influenced by Helen Vendler, I think she’s one of our great living critics, and then I’d say Christopher Ricks as well. Also one of our great living critics. The biggest of all would be my own advisor, Weldon Thornton, who passed away last year on July 15th. I love that combination of rigor and close reading, but also reaching outside the text at hand.

BT

Okay, final question. And this one’s the mean one. What is a book you should have read by now but haven’t?

RRR

That’s a good question. It would have been, before this year, Dante, but I’ve read two thirds of it now. Oh goodness, there’s so many. Oh, let’s put The Aeneid. That’s a big omission on my part; everyone’s got them. People used to play that game, like, literary critics, and there’s a story that went around. Someone finally said, “Hamlet, I haven’t read Hamlet.” They laughed him out of the group.

 

This interview was originally published on Baylor’s Graduate School blog, BearTracks, and can be read here. 

How and Where I Write: A Series

Well, we’re back from Spring Break, which for grad students doesn’t mean living it up on a Florida Beach. It probably meant checking on your lab mosquitoes, editing a thesis chapter, catching up on grading student essays, or trying (we repeat, trying, not necessarily succeeding) to get ahead on class readings. But we hope you did something fun, too; like getting In N’ Out or a massage or reading for fun. Don’t think about how lame that makes you sound.

Our final series for the semester begins this week. Last year, Assistant Dean Beth Barr did an interview with Christianity Today entitled “How and Where I Write.” You can check out the interview here. We thought it was a fun idea, and since she’s one of our deans we thought we’d plagiarize all the interview questions and do our own series. 😜  Not that we advocate for unethical scholarship, of course, but the editors here at BearTracks would argue that we have some limited copyright access to Dr. Barr’s material. It’s definitely in her contract somewhere.

So be on the lookout. Starting next week, we’ll be posting interviews with various professors and graduate students from across the disciplines, asking them a number of questions about their ideal writing conditions, their growth as writers, and some embarrassing writing/reading admissions. And it won’t just be from an academic standpoint, either. We have a number of students and faculty who publish outside of the realm of academia, and in the current job market, we thought you’d like to hear from them too. We’ll still have the occasional post on time-sensitive resources, awards, and opportunities here at Baylor, but we look forward to sharing writing stories with you for the rest of the semester.

Drop a comment below and let us know some questions you’d love to hear put to faculty and/or graduate student writers!

This post was originally published on the Baylor Graduate School blog, BearTracks, and can be found here.

Book Review: Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction, and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life by Bonnie Friedman

by Kristin Huggins, Consultant

Bonnie Friedman is a novelist. From the very first pages of this book, it’s apparent she has spent countless hours living in this creative headspace. Her descriptions bloom into metaphors, and those metaphors are rife with brilliant, complicated allegorical truths of writers and the difficulty of writing. It’s all very literary, if you please.

But what Bonnie speaks to with utmost clarity is that writing is nuanced. It is hard. It can make you question your sanity not only as a professional but as a human being. Through this book, Bonnie anchors these challenges in a way that makes you feel connected with all writers, no matter their proficiency or discipline. That we are not alone in this process.

Here are the main takeaways from this text:

First: Writing is terrifying, even to those who love it. In my undergraduate (and even graduate) coursework, writing was a task I studiously avoided at all costs. I felt that because I was not one of the blessed (i.e., an English major), I was not qualified or gifted enough to write with any authority. Bonnie takes this twisted, albeit common mentality and slaps it out of the air. “We are afraid of writing, even those who love it. And there are parts of it we hate. The necessary mess, the loss of control, its ability to betray us, as well as the possibility that what we write may be lousy, it might just stink…” (pg. 15). In this, Bonnie assures all who come to the altar of writing that each of us will face barriers and challenges. The fact that we hate parts of the process does not make us any less of a writer or devalue our work.

Second: Accolades and theoretical frameworks count for nothing in the face of a writing deadline. Writing doesn’t care how many post-nominal letters follow after your name. Writing doesn’t care how many classes you’ve taught as a TA. Writing doesn’t care how brilliant your theoretical framework is and how it perfectly situates your research questions within your qualitative study. It is the Great Equalizer. “Phi Beta Kappa counted for nothing here. One of the finest writers was a shaggy man without college who said he slept in a tent pitched in his living room… He spoke his stories into a tape and he paid a secretary to type them” (p. 51).

Third: More words do not equal a better manuscript. This is a particularly hard pill to swallow. When you finally dip your toe into the writing waters and are surrounded by more experienced, bigger fish, all you hear are “writing sprints”, “word count checks”, or “hitting your daily word goals”. It seems obvious that better writing is synonymous with more words. False, cries Bonnie, who also fell prey to this addictive mindset: “I wrote the same thing over and over because I didn’t trust it had communicated. And I thought, the more words the better. People read because they enjoy reading. Wouldn’t they enjoy reading more words?” (pg. 50). This hits at the crux of the issue: trusting in yourself as a communicator and trusting that your words do the job justice.

At times, this book can be difficult to get through as an academic. While Bonnie’s writing is beautiful and fragile and lyrical, this is not the traditional academic way. After all, aren’t we expected to present our writing with a prodigious level of conciseness, wrapped with a bow of footnotes, in-text citations, and proper indentations? Get to the point. What is the problem? Who is your audience? Too much fluff here. Take these four sentences and say them with one.

However, Bonnie would encourage you to step outside your academic context and see writing for what it truly is: the effort of humanity to communicate with one another despite fear, envy, or doubt. Embrace the imperfections, and let go of the all-consuming inner narrative that tells you you’re not good enough.

Happy writing, dear readers.

Instrument Hunting: How Ed.D Students Can Find a Dissertation Instrument without Losing Their Minds

by Alicia Briançon, Consultant

Photo by Elisa Ventur on Unsplash

Trigger warning: If you spent weeks trying to find the “right instrument” only to find out it doesn’t exist (like me), then this may induce feelings of anxiousness. 😫

Let’s set the stage: You are typing away into the night to develop your purpose and problem statements for your dissertation and decide that the magic answer to your research design question is, “Yes, absolutely! This is going to be a quantitative study.” Awesome! You meet with your advisor and tell them the news and you think you’re going to just create your own because what you want to measure doesn’t quite exist already and you’re sure you can validate an instrument, because, to quote Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, “What, like, it’s hard?” You’re already knee-deep into your rigorous doctoral program and feel confident in your abilities. While meeting with your advisor, they explain that creating an instrument is in and of itself a “completely separate dissertation.”

By this point, you are feeling slightly defeated, but as we know, academia is a series of high and low points, and this too shall pass. So, where does one find an instrument? Good thing we have the Baylor library and expert librarians!

First, you need to determine what exactly you want to measure. This may seem simplistic in nature, but it is necessary. In the Ed.D program, we are encouraged to select an instrument before tackling other portions of our paper because it is central to the data design and data collection. In some respects, the instrument frames your entire dissertation. It can be helpful to see what other researchers used the same test or instrument in determining how you will apply it to your own.

There isn’t a formal process for finding the “perfect instrument.” However, the library commonly recommends two databases as starting points, which are APA Psych and Education Resources Information Center (ERIC). The easiest way to find these databases is by searching by keyword under the databases tab on the Baylor University Library Website.

It is best to start with a broad topic and narrow it as you continue. Interestingly, there are three different versions of ERIC, but EBSCOHOST has advanced features and is education related. After scrolling down the page on the right-hand side there is a box titled ‘publication type’, and as you scroll you will see ‘test/questionnaire.’ Or, under EBSCOHOST you can put the name of the test in quotation marks with no other limitation and the exact name will be searched in all metadata.

Yes, you can use OneSearch to investigate journals, dissertations, books, e-books, etc., but there are less advanced searches with this path. It is your choice, though!

According to Amy James, the Director of Information and Instruction at the Baylor Library, “Many times, students know the name of the test in an article but can’t find the actual instrument, which is vital to your research. It is not enough to find an article that mentions your instrument of choice.” In the Appendices, you will have to include a copy of the real thing. It is rare, occurring only three times in three years, but if the instrument isn’t found internally then Dr. James goes to Google to hunt it down. Sometimes, the author will let you use their instrument for a small fee or ask that you attend accreditation training. There are benefits to this avenue if you plan on conducting additional research in the future. Also, it looks really cool on your CV and LinkedIn profile, right?!

I asked James if the reason why the instrument can’t be found is if the original author wants to make a profit or the instrument is just very new. She said, “it could be because the instrument is new, or it isn’t part of the current library paid package.” Again, while this is atypical, it is still good to know all the possible outcomes.

Know that you can always place a request with OSOFast, the interlibrary loan request system, which will search other institutions. The sky is the limit. OSOFast requests are sometimes addressed internationally too.

The moral is, don’t panic if you don’t know how to find an instrument. Now, you have some basic first steps and an entire library ready and willing to help you with your research goals, including finding the best instrument or test.

Writing the Literature Review: The QuiltWork Method

Photo by Dinh Pham on Unsplash

by Kristin Huggins, Consultant

It is highly unusual to meet someone in academia, be it a student or professor, who genuinely enjoys the prospect of writing a literature review. Thesis, dissertation, journal article, program assessment – the medium matters not. The quintessential literature review has a singular way of unifying individuals across all disciplines and all levels of research. Someone whispers its name into the bleak unknown. All hold their breath in response, hoping it will pass over their doorstep like an academic Angel of Death.

Despite your feelings on the subject, all graduate students must write an exhaustive, cohesive literature review at some point in their academic careers. While daunting, this task need not be completed at the expense of blood, sweat, and tears. Finding an effective writing method can easily reduce your writing workload (and subsequent anxiety) from an Everest into a molehill. Or several molehills, in this case.

 

Enter the QuiltWork Writing Method.

The QuiltWork Method was born as an act of desperation while deep in the throes of writing my first dissertation draft. With deadlines looming and candidacy standing in the shadows of the doctoral guillotine, I knew that a linear approach to writing my literature review wouldn’t get me there fast enough. My topics were too broad, my sources too interdisciplinary – I found myself missing key points in articles that had already been “assigned” to other sections of my review. I was trying to create a blanket with one fell swoop, by synthesizing all of the scholarship of my topic at once. And it wasn’t working. I needed to instead step back and approach the literature review the same way my grandmother approached her sewing projects: one square bit of fabric at a time.

So I stopped. I saved my work. And started from scratch. Here was what I tried instead:

Step One: Write an Outline. It doesn’t matter if you rewrite this ten times over. Get an outline on the page. What are the main sections of your literature review? Are you following a narrative model (broad to narrow topics) or a systematic model (individual topics that together form a cohesive argument for your study)? Start there. Every project, no matter how small or large, needs a vision (or a Pinterest board).

Step Two: Prepare your Word Documents. Open a series of blank Word or Google documents. The number you open should match the number of literature review sections you outlined in Step One. If you are working on a small laptop, you may also consider keeping them minimized until needed to maximize screen efficiency. Do not include your Introduction or Conclusion, since these will be written once you’ve completed your Literature Review.

Step Three: One Source at a Time. Unlike a traditional linear writing process, you are no longer trying to spin paragraphs out of thin air. With QuiltWork writing, you go through each source one by one and read for key points and quotes. As you come across these points in your reading, open up the word doc that represents that literature review section and write. How is this relevant to your study? What does this remind you of? Do you need this quote? Be sure to include the full citation at the top of the blurb before you begin, and place in-text citations throughout. This will alleviate many headaches later when you patch these quilting squares together.

***Note for Step Three: If Source #1 has a point that works for Section A and Section D, place it in both! Isn’t the purpose of a literature review to provide an exhaustive, synthesized perspective of the existing scholarship? This method encourages this idea of scholarly flexibility, acknowledging that one source can be used in many different ways if given the right lens. Many times, I found that one source possessed data that could be applied to nearly every section in my literature review!

Step Four: Rinse, Wash, Repeat. Continue to repeat Step Three with every source you have. That’s right – every single one. Eventually, you’ll begin to make connections. Your documents might take on a note of free flow synthesis without you even realizing it.

Step Five: The Inquiry. Once you have worked through a large portion of your sources, I would recommend going back through each document and asking these questions: Which ones are filled to the brim with pages and pages of content? Which ones are still lagging behind? Do you need to shift your focus and feed the smaller ones with new sources? How many quotes have you found for each section? Do you need more? Less? Have you included citations for all of your work? Go back and check each one before moving on. These questions will guide you as you begin to refine your sections into veritable reservoirs of empirical evidence to support your study.

Step Six: The Great Gathering. You now should have 3-5 documents filled with quality content. At this point, you may see themes emerge in these documents. Identify the themes and work to craft stellar topic sentences out of them. These topic sentences are the seams that will bind the writing you’ve already accomplished.

 

At this point, you will find yourself edging closer and closer to writing a traditional paragraph. After you’ve completed Step Six, take the leap! You now have a clear idea of what you want to say in each section, which sources are key contenders in these debates, and how you plan to synthesize these works across the various sections of your literature review. You may now commence with sewing your quilting squares together to form the Great Blanket.

I do not profess to be a great seamstress, nor do I consider myself a great writer. But this small writing hack, created out of desperation and fear, allowed my brain to finally put words on the page. And as many of you know, getting words on the page is perhaps the biggest challenge of all.

You can do this. You can write this. How do we quilt a blanket? One square at a time.

Happy writing to you all!

5 Things You Can Do Right Now to Set Yourself Up for Successful Writing Habits

By Jasmine Stovall, Consultant

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

More often than not, the hardest part about writing is not necessarily the writing itself, but rather the act of simply getting started. Typing just one sentence, one bullet point, or even one word on that blank Word document can break the procrastination barrier and open the flood gates of productivity. Second to starting, is finding the time to start and consistently making the time to continue as the semester picks up. One way to combat the hurdles of getting started and keeping going is to start early. Here are five things you can do right now to set yourself up for successful writing habits:

 

1. Figure out your writing style: One of the best ways to figure out your preferred writing style and environment preferences is to spend time writing and getting to know yourself as a writer. Experiment with writing alone, writing with a friend, or even a group of friends, in informal and formal settings, like a departmental writing group. Also, try writing in different environments (e.g., at home or a coffee shop) as well as during different times of the day. This will allow you to get a better understanding of your likes and dislikes. You can then use this information to set up a schedule and create an environment that will allow you to be the most productive.

2. Assess your schedule to get an idea of when and how writing will fit into your routine: Before the semester begins and your Outlook calendar fills up with meetings, seminars, teaching and other outside of class/research obligations in what seems like the blink of an eye, spend some time assessing your schedule to determine where you can schedule in writing time at your ideal duration and frequency. Then, write it in and set it in stone. Set expectations for yourself (and your writing partners, if applicable) and be protective of your writing time. If you do not take it upon yourself to prioritize scheduling writing early on and treat it like a class or any other non-negotiable obligation, it will likely fall by the wayside and never get the time that it deserves or the time you desire to devote to it. Before you know it, you will be halfway through the semester with no real, consistent writing routine and finding yourself looking for ways to fit writing in when it is convenient rather than making it a staple in your weekly schedule to help hold yourself accountable. This is especially important if you plan on writing solo.

3. Establish short-term and long-term goals: One of the most valuable pieces of advice I have ever received regarding large projects, or just feeling overwhelmed with tasks in general, is to think of the project as a big picture and divide your tasks into puzzle pieces of said picture. In other words, breaking larger things down into smaller, more manageable tasks put together over time will allow you to work on parts that will ultimately create a whole and hopefully reduce the feeling of overwhelm in the process. I am a firm believer that the same concept rings true for writing, especially for longer documents such as theses, dissertations, and research proposals. For some, breaking down the big picture writing assignment into puzzle pieces can look like planning ahead. Remember, write your purpose in pen and your plan in pencil. Life happens, so allow yourself to be flexible, but never lose sight of the goal. For others, puzzle pieces make look like setting milestone deadlines with themselves and/or their advisor to keep them on track, hold them accountable and ensure steady progress. This can help make the big picture seem less daunting if you are submitting small parts of a whole at regular intervals. Depending on the nature of your project, these deadlines may be weeks, months, or even semesters in advance. Finally, puzzle pieces may look like breaking down a document by chapter, or even by writing stage. For example, planning to have chapter one submitted by this date, or have a brainstorming session by this date followed by a rough outline by this date, and so on. Regardless of what the puzzle pieces look like for you, the key to successfully assembling your puzzle lies in goal setting. So, set a deadline (long-term goal) then work backwards by setting your milestone deadlines (short-term goals) to keep you on the trajectory of reaching the long-term goal within your desired timeframe.

4. Make a list of resources: Having a resource list handy in times of high stress writing can make all the difference. We often do not realize how many resources we have available to us as graduate students and waiting until you are in dire need typically is not the most conducive time to start looking. Being proactive in seeking out what is available to you beforehand, even if you do not need the services in that moment, will make for a smoother, more expedited process should a problem arise. This way, if/when you do find yourself in need of assistance, you already know where to look. Your resource list can consist of writing resources such as the GWC, or otherwise (e.g., Baylor Counseling Center, OALA, GRC, Career Services, etc). There are several factors that contribute to successful, productive writing, which can vary between individuals. Taking some time at the beginning of the semester to personalize your resource list will allow you the best chances of showing up to the computer as your best self to produce your best work.

5. Find (and use!) a citation manager: Graduate students and faculty alike make the claim that citation managers are a game changer, but it was something that I didn’t come to truly believe until I tried one myself. Trust me, to say that it is a game changer is an understatement. Experimenting and familiarizing yourself with a citation manager early in the semester will ease one of the many, if not the biggest, potential headaches of writing, especially when it comes to documents such as literature reviews. There are several options for citation managers, such as Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote and Citation Machine, to name a few. The options exist and they all serve the same purpose, so your only responsibility is to find one that suits you best based on your preferences and project goals. It is important to note that Baylor and/or your department do support memberships for many of these services and provide how-to workshops for beginners as well as those just needing a refresher. These workshops would make a great addition your resource list from tip #4. For more information on using citation managers, click here. Also keep a look out for upcoming GWC Zotero workshops!

 

Writing is not a task that comes easy to most. While the act of writing can be scary, sometimes even the thought of getting started can be even scarier. Hopefully, these five tips will be helpful in easing some of the anxieties surrounding writing and how to juggle it with the multitude of obligations we commit to throughout the semester as graduate students. The earlier in the semester you begin these things, the more ready you will feel to not only start writing but keep writing.

 

Systematic Strategies for Humanities Research-Paper Writing: Part Two

By Sørina Higgins, Consultant

Welcome back! Presumably you’re here because you developed a smashing good Research Question, surveyed the field, downloaded way too many articles, and ordered a bunch of books via ILL. Now you’re ready to really dig into the research. Here again are some strategies that you might find helpful for that whole process.

  1. If you haven’t done so already, you’ll want to figure out a note-taking method that works for you and stick with it throughout the whole process. If you’ve got one that worked all through undergrad, you might need to update it, or it might be just fine and you can stick with it. Whether you add notes in Zotero, hand-write summaries on paper, put stickies all over books, highlight printed documents, or type your thoughts into a file or cloud, just be consistent. Make sure your system allows you to search for what you need and to keep track of what you have and have not read (because you will forget). Always cite using Zotero as you go; researching, writing, and citing are one activity. Do them simultaneously until that becomes an unbreakable habit.
  2. You probably want to read through your primary sources first (maybe in chronological order), taking detailed notes and citing as you go. This way you’ll develop your own impressions and thoughts about the primary sources first, giving you something to work from when you get to dialoguing with other scholars.
  3. At some point soon, either now or after doing your secondary research, sketch a rough outline, then develop it into a Fat Outline as soon as you can. Keeping adding to your outline as you learn more. Use Microsoft Word’s hierarchical headings for easy navigation and later re-organization. I like to type my Research Question in red font the footer as a constant reminder; this helps keep me from going down rabbit trails. Or that’s the theory anyway.
  4. Skim through the relevant secondary sources in reverse chronological order, taking notes only on anything that directly answers the Research Question. Stay focused. Reign in your curiosity, training it just on the one task at hand. Cite as you go! You’ll probably need to rework your question once you find out what other scholars have already done. Don’t be discouraged if you need to shift your focus altogether. Don’t overdo this stage of research. It is quite literally impossible to read all the scholarship on any subject now, even an extremely narrow one. Read abstracts to determine which sources will be relevant, then speed-read those that are both totally relevant and quite recent.
  5. Take notes and cite as you go, using Zotero. Rework your outline as needed, saving under a new file name or number each time you make a major change (that way you can revert to an earlier version if you change your mind). Keep adding “fat” to your outline: quotes, notes, evidence, and so forth that you plan to use, in more or less the right order. Cite as you go.
  6. When your Research Question is answered, you can formulate a draft thesis, then get into the real “writing” stage (it’s all writing, but this is when you can finally turn on the caffeine drip, get into a groove, and type away for hours on end like a Shakespearean monkey). Be sure to get up and move around every 20 minutes, drink enough water, do lots of stretches, and look out the window regularly.
  7. I recommend writing the “close-reading” passages first, where you directly gloss your primary sources. These should be the heart of your paper, and writing them first has many advantages. Doing so will give you an idea of how long they will be, so that you can tighten or loosen your scholarly framework and contextualizing sections as needed. You are also most likely to develop an original argument when you read the scholars before writing but then write your close reading passages first, with the scholarly conversation in the back of your head. You may want to revise your thesis after drafting the close-reading passages.
  8. Write and rewrite and rewrite! Turn all your rough notes into nice U-shaped paragraphs. Pay attention to transforming outline points into really strong topic sentences. Cite as you go. Save each major change as a new file. I like to type directly into the outline, preserving the headings for easy navigation and re-organization later. I also use various font colors to indicate material that’s more or less complete, and I put an *asterisk next to anything I need to go back and fix later; this makes it easy to find with search features. Develop methods like these that work for your brain and save time later. Of course, keep up with your Zotero citations as you go.
  9. See if you can finish at least two days before the deadline so that you can take the paper to the Graduate Writing Center, get a colleague or two to comment on it, maybe even have the professor comment on a draft, and then revise thoroughly.
  10. Always print out the paper and proofread once on hard copy before your final edits.

TL;DR: Figure out your note-taking style and take notes accordingly. If it’s helpful to you, try creating an outline from your notes. Skim through secondary sources, pulling (and citing) only quotes that apply directly to your research question. Use Zotero! Once you have a “fat outline” going, formulate a draft of a thesis statement – now we’re getting to the good stuff! Give yourself lots of time to write, but also take frequent brain breaks. Keep using Zotero! Start with your close reading section first – it will give you confidence and direction. Write, rewrite, and rewrite again! More Zotero! Keep track of sections you need to return to later. Try to finish your draft with a few days of buffer so you can send it to the Graduate Writing Center. Do one final proofread on a printed copy of your paper before submitting. Celebrate and take a deep breath!

 

I know I haven’t included much advice here about the writing itself—the quality and content of your writing, I mean—but that’s a slightly different topic. Hopefully these suggestions about the logistics and timing of the process have been helpful. What have I left out? What have I included that you can safely skip? What’s different in your specific field? Comment below!

Systematic Strategies for Humanities Research-Paper Writing: Part One

By Sørina Higgins, Consultant

via GIPHY

Hello, fellow grad students in the humanities! It’s just about time to start thinking about those big end-of-term papers you’ll write for most of your grad classes, those 20- to 30-pagers that hover somewhere between an exhausting school assignment and the draft of a professional article. Well, here are some suggestions for you to consider applying to the process of researching and writing those seminar papers. Hopefully these ideas will be useful for you whether you’re about to write your first one or your last one ever. Either way, congrats! This is a big deal; you’re about to produce some original research to add to the scholarly conversation, and it’s a chance to really dig into doing what you love, the thing you came to grad school for. I’ll try to help smooth the way here so that you don’t have to figure out the research process for yourself. And feel free to add additional strategies in the comments below!

First, plan ahead. Set aside a day well before the deadline (at least a month; six weeks or two months is better) in order to start preliminary research and order books. Don’t panic; you needn’t begin writing the paper at this point, but you do need to provide enough lead time for getting materials through interlibrary loan, and you probably want to at least glance over the most relevant and/or recent scholarship to make sure someone else hasn’t done exactly what you want to do. At this point, you can do a few of the steps below. You don’t need to do all of them now, and you can probably get away with never doing some of them, but the more of this background research you complete early on, the smoother the writing process will be and the better the final product.

  1. Choose authors, texts, themes, time periods, events, or issues of interest, as relevant to the project and your field. Make sure to read and reread the assignment prompt carefully and ask your professor for clarification if needed. But here’s something to consider: I don’t think “choosing a topic” really works for serious research. Instead, I recommend picking a field of interest, narrowing it down considerably, and honing your focus until you develop a Research Question.
  2. Crafting your Research Question is an important step that many inexperienced scholars omit or rush past. The better your initial Research Question, the more successful and less stressful the whole process will be. There are lots of reasons for this: Your question guides the type of research you’ll do, what sources you’ll investigate, the kind of research design or method you’ll employ, even the scope and structure of the paper. So don’t “pick a topic”; take the time to develop a truly workable question instead. There is lots of advice available about the characteristics of good and bad Research Questions; here are a few I’ve found particularly helpful. The question must be researchable by you and must fit into the rest of this semester—so there probably isn’t time for extensive field work or archival research. It must be a fact-finding question, not an ethical or interpretive question at this stage. It must be a question to which you do not currently know the answer, but which has high stakes for your field. Take your time on this step, consulting with faculty or advanced students and browsing around in publications in your field.
  3. Okay, once you’ve drafted a solid Research Question, it’s time to start the initial research. See if there is a recent “state of the field” article, bibliography, or some other resource that covers what’s being published right now in your area. If you don’t readily find such a thing, ask the professor to recommend one. The more focused this can be on works that potentially answer your Research Question, the better. Even just reading through the titles of the most recent articles and books in your field can give you a sense of what’s being done now and what the current concerns are.
  4. For studies involving literature and other print-heavy fields (English, Theatre, History, Religion, American Studies, Music, etc.) it’s a good idea to find the best, most recent bibliography of your target authors’ works and to find out which are the official editions of these authors’ works. You can usually discover this by looking in the latest issues of the top journal(s) in this field. If you don’t readily find out, ask the professor which ones are currently the most acceptable. It would be a shame to write your whole Thomas Malory paper, say, using Vinaver only to find out that your target journal—or worse yet, your professor!—favors Field. Horrors.
  5. Now you might want to compile a list of the relevant primary sources in chronological order. Hopefully this already exists, in the form of a handy bibliography. But if not, make one yourself—then narrow it down. There’s no way you’re going to read all that in the next few weeks. No, seriously. You won’t.
  6. Similarly, compile a list of the relevant secondary sources, but in reverse chronological order. While you’re at it, do a quick check to find out what your professor has written (if they haven’t already assigned their Complete Works to you in their seminar. Yup. It happens). Do they have anything relevant on the subject? If so, be sure to read it and cite it if possible. Anyway, back to this reverse chronological order thing. See, the idea is that you’ll want to have a general sense of both what’s hot in your field and also what the classic, game-changing, most-cited academic works are. If you start reading (skimming, really, or maybe even just reading abstracts) with the newest stuff, you’ll accomplish that first goal of seeing what’s hot right away, and pretty soon you’ll start seeing certain Names repeated over and over. Those are the Founding Folks of your field; get their works. Have a glance inside. Cite them a teeny bit. That’s cocktail party cred right there.
  7. Take a breath. What have you learned? Do you get a sense of the most pressing concerns in your field right now? Do you need to revise your Research Question at this point? Take a break. Let it all settle for a while. Then come back and cut your lists in half. For real. You still won’t read all of that, so cut out whatever is not absolutely necessary, and then some of what’s left. Now acquire the rest of it. Check books out of the library, order things via ILL, download or print articles, and that sort of thing. Somewhere in this initial researching phase, make an appointment with your subject-area’s liaison librarian to get assistance with locating anything you’ve missed or with filling in gaps.
  8. As you work on this initial research process, put everything in a Zotero folder. Researching, writing, and citing are one integrated activity, so always keep track of sources and citations as you go.

 

TL;DR: Read, read, read! Come up with a research question, rather than a research topic; the narrower, the better. Know the foundational texts related to your question. Check out the bibliography of related article from a journal that you really like. Compile a list of primary texts you need, then narrow to the essentials. Do the same with secondary texts, but prioritize by the most recent scholarship. Do preliminary searches and skims, then revise your lists again. Keep track of everything in a Zotero folder.

 

Tune in next week when we talk about actually beginning to write!

Book Review: How to Write a Lot by Paul J. Silvia

Greg Barnhill, Consultant

Are you a binge writer? I am. I’ve been a binge writer all of graduate school. That writing strategy, while manageable for a seminar paper perhaps, can only take you so far, as I’ve found out with my dissertation. A dissertation or thesis is professional writing, no matter what field you’re in. It’s your way of showing your professional credentials. And how do professionals go about their work? Well, that’s what Paul Silvia’s How to Write a Lot will tell you.

The thesis of Silvia’s book is quite simple, and everything revolves around it: “Prolific writers make a schedule and stick to it” (p. 12). “Don’t quit before you start—making a schedule is the secret to productive writing” (p. 15). “Successful professional writers, regardless of whether they’re writing novels, nonfiction, poetry, or drama, are prolific because they write regularly, usually every day” (p. 27). Everything that follows in Silvia’s book comes as motivation for and reflection upon the writing that a writer has scheduled, since she is a professional writer and approaches writing like a job.

But wait—graduate students are not professional writers, are they? Think again! The writing you do as a graduate student is part of your career, whether a prelude to future research or a teaching career (or an alt-ac career), or even the starting point for professional contributions within specific professional organizations and journals. If you are a graduate student, then you are already a professional writer of a specific sort. Becoming a successful and prolific writer in your professional field, according to Silvia, involves adopting this point of view and allowing it to change your outlook on writing.

Practical Tips

Silvia provides (at least) two helpful discussions for all writers. First, he dismantles common “specious barriers” to writing that will keep one from actually doing it. Second, he offers several practical motivational tools that are oriented toward the main goal of making a schedule and sticking to it. Whatever one does, one must never give up on keeping a writing schedule, no matter how good things are going. “Rewarding writing by abandoning your schedule is like rewarding yourself for quitting smoking by having a cigarette” (pp. 44–45). Silvia’s suggestions in the first few chapters are immensely practical, so much so that I found myself instantly jotting down how I could work the exact plan that he lays out for his readers to follow. A few highlights:

  • Ruthlessly protect your writing time: no meetings, no email, no news, no phone. Do not schedule over your writing time.
  • Create a concrete goal for each writing time, usually during the first few moments of your scheduled writing time.
  • Create a spreadsheet to monitor your writing progress, which has various motivational benefits if you stick to your schedule.
  • Create a list of your writing projects and prioritize which ones you should tackle first. This helps to not feel overwhelmed. Silvia makes suggestions about how to prioritize.

While the latter half of the book may be most helpful for others within the discipline of Psychology in particular, it is nevertheless worth reading by all academic writers for insights into Style, Writing Journal Articles, and Writing Books (Chapters Five, Six, and Seven). Silvia has a word of encouragement for those trying to get published: “Researchers who publish a lot of articles receive a lot of rejections” (p. 99). In Silvia’s view, it simply comes with the territory of voluminous output. (Since you’ve been writing every day, right?)

So, with summer underway and, most likely, a different sort of schedule ahead in the coming months, will you follow Silvia’s advice and make a writing schedule? When and where will you write? What rituals can you create to get you to that time and place and keep you writing every day? How will you track it? How will you reward yourself for sticking to it? Rewards should come not only for obvious milestones (a conference or article acceptances, perhaps) but simply for doing the job itself consistently. Writing is indeed difficult, but Silvia suggests taking an honest look at how you are setting yourself up to succeed or fail at it. The most valuable contribution of Silvia’s book is the way it leads to greater self-reflection on how I might move past my own binge writing to become a pro writer.