Flourish:
An Electronic Newsletter for Scholarly Writers
October
2006
vol.
2, no. 10
I was thinking yesterday about how
important it is to stop writing on the computer sometimes.
Although computers facilitate the drafting and editing process,
they frustrate the structuring process. Something about
a computer screen helps us to see problems with individual
words and sentences, but prevents us from seeing solutions
to structural problems. Fortunately, the solution is easy.
Print the article out!
I often find that, when I start feeling overwhelmed by a
piece of writing, printing the article out and reading it
with a pen in hand makes the way through clear. I can much
more easily see what paragraph needs to move where, what
paragraph needs to go next, what paragraph needs to be deleted,
and what paragraph needs to be restuctured around the argument.
I don’t know why a print out helps to make such problems
visible, but it does. So, if you find yourself spinning
your wheels at the computer, try going analog!
On
Neuroses and Hang Ups
Flourish reader
Angela Jamison kindly forwarded the following classic article,
written in 1966, which starts as follows:
“All of us involved in graduate education have watched
the agony of many students choosing a dissertation topic,
getting ‘hung up’ in the middle of the project,
stopping work in black despair. And we have watched either
ourselves or our colleagues refusing to send a paper to
a journal editor in order to ‘perfect’ it—and
then sitting for days in front of the paper doing no perfecting,
in an impotent anxiety stupor.
"Most of us also have had bright daydreams of universal
acclaim, of the non-existent book review that starts: ‘this
is a great book,which will revolutionize the discipline
…’ And we have had the conviction, in dark moments,
that all our efforts are play-acting for the petty rewards
that universities dispose. We have known people, or are
people, who are excellent scholars who never manage to finish
anything. We have seen brilliant cocktail-party sociologists
or biologists be let go for ‘not producing.’
"In short, we have seen every conceivable neurotic
symptom interfere with our own and others’ research.
In hardly any other profession do neurotic problems incapacitate
so many people such a large part of the time. I would guess
that such mental health problems add an average of a year
to the Ph.D. program, mostly in the dissertation ‘hang
up.’ Even among those who get a research degree and
are recommended for scholarly promise to leading univerities,
a very large percentage of assitant professors fail to do
enough to justify keeping them on. Those who have already
done research quite often cannot do it again.
"What is it that a person has to do to produce new
knowledge? The crucial peculiarity of research is that one
has to choose an objective for onself, and motivate onself
by that objective alone. Only rarely does someone else choose
the objective, and even more rarely is there a series of
definite obligations to deliver results by specified dates.
Creative scholarship would not give the desired results
if arranged as a job with specified obligations. But this
means that only a person’ own conviction that the
result will be worthwhile is available as a motivation.
[This] … is a weak reed to sustain a year or two of
drudgery. There is … little short-term reward ….
to sustain the effort.”
Arthur L. Stinchcombe, “On Getting ‘Hung Up’
and Other Assorted Illnesses: A Discourse Concerning Researchers,
Wherein the Nature of Their Mental Health Problems Is Discussed
and Illustrated,” Stratification
and Organization: Selected Papers, ed. by A. L.
Stinchcombe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986,
pp. 271-281.
Resources
Good books about
the process of academic writing and being a professor are
available through a number of presses. Check out some of
my favorite series:
Sage
Publications
