When I became interested in dog training, I borrowed or bought all the books I could find and read them. And what I read had an odd, but oddly familiar, quality: while the books contradicted each other in general and specific, and rarely had grounding in anything other than personal observation (if that), almost all of the books presented their specific recommendations with equal, and equally false, certainty. If there was only one right approach, and that approach was so obvious to a reasonably perceptive person, then why was there so much disagreement among apparently reasonable people? When I was going to become a parent, and bought and borrowed as many books as I could read on parenting, I found the same odd combination of presenting information as though only benighted idiots disagreed with considerable disagreement among people of intelligence and experience. The only thing on which they seemed to agree was that there was a right approach, even if there was no consensus as to what that approach was.
This logically contradictory state--a field that actually had considerable variation in opinion, but filled with texts that acted as though their advice was the only possibility--was familiar to me as a writing instructor. Having read and reviewed a number of textbooks, I was long struck with how few were based in empirical research, and the tendency to insist on one approach to writing. Sometimes there was consensus, and sometimes there was research, but the consensus and research didn’t generally match up. For instance, in writing instruction, it remains commonplace to insist that students begin each paragraph with their topic sentence, although Richard Braddock, and others, long ago demonstrated that published writing doesn’t always have topic sentences at the beginnings of paragraphs. The same could be said about our insisting on funnel introductions, what we (inaccurately) call the “thesis statement” and where we insist it be placed, attitudes toward passive voice, and models of reading.
That isn’t to say that the commandments were necessarily always wrong, but it did seem to me that they were wrong to be given as commandments. Funnel introductions are excellent for standardized tests, ending the introduction with a thesis statement is a good strategy for much student writing (assuming one really means “thesis statement” and not topic sentence or partition), passive voice is necessary in the sciences but easily overused in the humanities, so there are circumstances in which the advice is good, but also ones in which it is bad. I was reading books on dog training because I had two dogs—one mostly Great Dane and the other mostly Malamute. Many dog training books insisted on establishing dominance over one’s dogs through, among other things, issuing commands in a deep voice while one’s feet were firmly planted. This was excellent, even absolutely necessary, advice for the Malamute (Hoover), but it made the Dane (Chester) slink off and try to hide on the couch. It was a terribly ineffective way to train him.
The conclusion to which I came was, despite books’ tendency to insist that all good people used their specific method and no other, that one needed a dog training method that worked for the temperament of the dog one was trying to train. It was a little confusing—to plant my feet to give Hoover a command, and then relax my stance to give a command to Chester—but it worked.
And it made me a more productive writer and teacher, something I will try to explain in the course of this book. The way that I work with students on writing comes from that same conviction about method being context-dependent, several times over: what constitutes “good” writing (that is, good writing products) varies from one rhetorical situation to another; what enables “good” writing (that is, one’s writing process) similarly depends upon the author, project, and rhetorical situation.
People who find themselves with writing blocks—which, like dogs, come in all sorts of breeds and combinations—often engage in a tremendous amount of negative self-talk (to put it politely), but, it seems to me, have trouble seeing the problem as the consequence of a writing process that used to be appropriate and no longer is. They wouldn’t have that process if it had never worked, or they wouldn’t be in graduate school or the tenure track. Faculty who cannot write that second book, or revise their dissertation into a first book, graduate students who cannot write a dissertation—all of those are people who are successful writers. They wouldn’t be in the position of people who are trying to write a dissertation or book were they not.
But the problem of people who have been successful writers and then find themselves unable to get an adequate amount of writing done is significant. Some studies report a 50% attrition rate in graduate programs (Nettles and Millett, Gardner), much of that attrition happening at the moment that people who are successful writers of seminar papers need to write a dissertation. The problem does not end if students manage to write a dissertation—although there are not reliable figures on the issue, the reasonable inference is that the major reason that assistant professors are denied tenure is failure to publish within the five year “probationary” period (to produce a book in what are called “book” fields, or an article or two per year in “article” fields). And quite a few faculty members get stuck at the Associate Professor rank, having published enough for promotion and tenure, but never producing a second book (or comparable number of articles) to be promoted to Full Professor.[1]
In the various cases I have known along those lines—students who never managed to finish a promising dissertation, faculty who did not produce a book in time, or were unable to finish their second book—it was never a case of dimwittedness, cupidity, laziness, or any of the other moral failings to which we (and they) too often attribute that failure to thrive. It certainly isn’t accurate to call them “unproductive” especially since I have seen entire Departments in which the heaviest service was carried by Associate Professors. The people I have known who have stalled in terms of their ability to get published are often very hard workers, with work sometimes spilling over into every possible minute, and often stressed to the edge of endurance. Laziness would be much more fun.
What has struck me about people who are struggling with writing—and I write as one who is in that category and who has paid the cost for it—is that the situation was not one of any kind of moral failing, but a combination of a newly ineffective writing process, inadequate understanding of new genres and rhetorical tasks, and self-hobbling time management strategies.
It is not that the person cannot produce good writing, nor that they have bad writing processes, but that they have a relatively rigid approach to writing. They have a method, and they keep using that method, even when it isn’t working for them. In other words, my experience talking to and working with scholars who are struggling to get writing done is that they are much like the undergraduate students with writing blocks that Mike Rose described many years ago: whereas he expected that their writing blocks came from knowing too little about what and how to write, he instead found that they knew too much. Their “rules” for writing were potentially good rules—grab your reader, get your introduction really tight before you try to write the rest of the paper, have a thesis before you write—but the students weren’t always clear when they should ignore those rules, or what to do if the rules didn’t apply. The rules weren’t harmful, but the students’ commitment to them was.
But the rules had enabled them to produce good writing at some point, and continued to work in some circumstances—hence their resistance to trying new methods. It’s as though they kept planting their feet and acting dominant with the Dane because it worked with the Malamute.
It seems to me that something similar happens with scholars whose previously (and still intermittently) effective writing processes, generic understandings, and time management strategies are inhibiting their ability to finish the dissertation, book, or articles: they have trouble imagining that they may need to develop a new approach since the one they are using has worked so well in the past and continues to work in other circumstances. I will take each of those closely related issues in turn—generic understandings, writing processes, and time management—but here I want to make my point by a brief discussion of time management strategies.
Time management gurus emphasize the need to distinguish tasks that are pressing (sometimes called “urgent”) from ones that may be more important in the long run but with no immediate pay-off or disaster (“important”). Scholars on procrastination call the first kind of task or activity STR, since they provide Short-Term Rewards (also SS), and the second kind LTR since they provide Long-Term Rewards (also LL). Some time management strategies (such as the very effective and popular Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) involve having people label tasks and activities in four quadrants:
| | Important | Unimportant |
| Urgent | | |
| Not urgent | | |
What people will often discover is that they spend most of their time working on tasks that are important and urgent, delaying the important but not urgent tasks until they become urgent. So, for instance, a student will delay writing an end-of-semester paper that counts for a large percentage of the grade (making it more important than quizzes) till the deadline is looming. This strategy is generally condemned, and perhaps it should be, but it’s awfully effective for undergraduates, and even for the coursework part of being a graduate student. As I will discuss later in this book, there are actually lots of good reasons that people have for doing so—procrastination is not necessarily a bad time management strategy.
In fact, it’s precisely because it is so effective and has its own rewards that people stick with it. Students have been told to start their papers early, but often don’t have the time or knowledge necessary to do so—the classic end-of-semester research or seminar paper typically depends upon information or skills imparted toward the end of the semester, so starting early may be impossible. Under those circumstances, students have no choice but to leave the important/not urgent task of seminar paper-writing undone till it becomes important/urgent.
Psychologists and psychoanalysts who write about procrastination tend to emphasize its role in the imposter syndrome. Rose Fichera McAloon describes her undergraduate writing process:
I was terrified of criticism, of being unmasked as a fraud, of being stripped of my self-esteem, of being irreparably crushed. I wanted to write the papers, fuss over them lov- ingly, craft them to perfection—but would not and could not. They were always written in a slapdash way, never reread for content, and turned in with the hope that a miracle would happen and that I would beat the odds once again. It mostly worked. (239)
There are other reasons that people are drawn to tasks only in the important/urgent box, and those attractions are a major factor in procrastination—it makes life more interesting, since one is always in a crisis; since some tasks become irrelevant before they ever become urgent, it’s an easy way to prune one’s “to do” list; it enables the perpetual procrastination of boring tasks like exercise—so that method of time management can have rewards. The problem is if we use that strategy at all times and in all circumstances.
It seems to me that students in the humanities, even successful ones, have a fairly truncated writing process: they read the necessary material and think about it until they have some brilliant insight. Sometimes the brilliant insight precedes the reading, as when a student wants to argue for a particular position and then goes off in search of the research to support that insight, aka “thesis.” Once s/he knows her thesis, s/he writes a paper that supports it; the writing process and working with the evidentiary materials probably lead to a more nuanced thesis than s/he had initially (hence effective writers often write their introduction last). The paper generally has the form of a summary introduction (one that summarizes every point in the paper, ending with a clear statement of the thesis), supporting evidence, prolepsis, summary conclusion, speculative conclusion. Regardless of the form, the process is, I would suggest, the real problem: you never start writing until you know exactly what you want to say.
With such a writing process and product, panic can be an effective stimulant. In addition to keeping one awake, it helps to silence the voices of self-doubt and self-criticism that might make writing difficult. Time becomes an active participant in the writing process—it’s time that forces someone to commit to a thesis (silencing the voice that seductively promises a more brilliant insight if one just read some more or thought about it more or played one more game of solitaire or watched just a little bit more TV), that forces one to start writing (when the same voice promises that this time the muse of scholarly writing will appear if one gives her time), that forces one to polish what one has written instead of start over entirely, and that forces one to turn the paper in (when one’s critical voice is listing every aspect of the paper that could be improved with more time). Every once in a while, of course, time drives the bus into a ditch, and one has to request an extension, but teachers are forgiving of bright and promising students, and so the panic-filled journey is extended for a few days, weeks, or months.
As stressful as this process is, it is also exciting (one of many benefits), while giving one an obvious and straightforward excuse should the product turn out to suck: it would have been better had I started earlier. Letting limited time (which really means time-induced panic) drive the bus gets one places as an undergrad, and even works fairly effectively through coursework in graduate school. But, as the deadlines extend, such as preparing for one’s qualifying exams or writing a prospectus, the ability to pull the chestnuts out of the fire at the last minute without third degree burns gets harder and harder. Because the bus can’t go without the driver, people dependent on panic to drive typically either delay writing until dangerously close to various deadlines or learn to work themselves into panics over earlier deadlines. Panic is still at the wheel, and stress is one’s constant companion.
Assistant professors can similarly keep themselves in a constant state of panic or delay writing till the tenure axe looks dangerously close to dropping. But quite a few simply can’t maintain that level of panic, and an unhappy number of assistant professors find themselves with delays outside of their control—illness, a dilatory press, hostile readers for a press, poor mentoring—and the axe falls.
And here I should explain something about this narrative—it’s hard to find the right words. It’s inaccurate for me to say “begin writing” because people with severe writing blocks in regard to their scholarly writing are often writing a tremendous amount. Sometimes they (we) are writing the wrong things—reports for one of our (too many) committees, long comments on student papers, blog entries, salvos in internet wars, talks and articles tangential to our main projects. And sometimes they (we) are writing the right things wrong--overly ambitious books, books or articles with no existing publishing venue, the same piece of writing over and over and over till the prose glistens. I have seen supposedly “unproductive” scholars whose writing was beautiful, and signified tremendous time commitments. Sometimes it was unsubmitted, and sometimes there was simply too little of it. Either way, the glistening prose alone did not earn them tenure.
My goal, in this book, is to describe different ways of thinking about the three issues that seem to get in the way of scholars completing their scholarly work: the generic conventions of scholarly writing (which are not quite what students are often told they are); various writing processes; and time management (or why procrastination is not a moral failing). I don’t want to be understood as replacing one set of rigid rules with another—I doubt there is anything I say that applies universally—but instead to give writers more options.
[1] See Judy Touchton, Caryn McTighe Musil, and Kathyrn Peltier Campbell. A Measure of Equity: Women’s Progress in Higher Education (Washington , DC: The Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2008).
No comments:
Post a Comment