The way to grow grand
is not: to demand.
In life's every field
you are what you yield.
— Piet Hein
Researchers write. As a Ph.D. student, your success will be determined by your ability to write publication-quality papers. Research that hasn’t been written up might as well have never happened. Writing doesn’t happen magically. Good writing doesn’t happen in binges the week before the deadline. In this class, you will write every day. A little at a time. 200 words per day. Schedule it so that it happens.
For some parts of the course, the instructor will provide prompts that are in keeping with the goals currently being discussed in the course. These prompts are requireed, but you don’t have to be limited by them. You might complete the required prompt over a couple of days, and then take the writing into topics you are exploring independently.
All writing should be research related. But the genre of the writing is up to you. Since you have to write papers anyway, our first recommendation is almost always to identify part of a paper that you can write---and then go ahead and draft it. Some ideas include the following:
- Write up a methods section for a study you have done (or even better, for a study you want to do)
- Write segments of a literature review (synthesize a set of readings about a related topic and reflect on what they tell you as a whole; what do these papers, together, suggest is an important next step for future research?)
- Write the motivation for a paper (what research topic do you think is interesting and why should a reader care?)
In this class, you will post your ongoing writing log in a file bearing your name in the “Daily Words” folder in Google Drive. Note: We highly recommend writing in a local application first and copying the text over so that you have a backup. There are advantages to keeping all of your text in one searchable file or archive. We know academics who do this successfully via a local or private WordPress blog. This way, each entry is dated and potentially tagged. Resources can be linked. But the entire blog is searchable. There are many options; just find a method that works for you.
For the purposes of submission, please start each entry at the top of a new page, so that I can clearly see the work done each day. Note that each week requires 5 days a week of writing. Please NUMBER, DATE and TIMESTAMP the entry. The numbering and date is for me. The date and timestamp are for you, to help you discover what kind of habits work best over the practice of this of 15 weeks. You may take advice from the How to Write A Lot book. We will also discuss habits in class, and share among our group when we are best at generative writing and when we are best at revision writing (the way I, LP, divide the writing tasks that face me). For the artificial but nevertheless important function of my checking your work for the purposes of the class, if you are revising material as part of your daily writing, create a new entry, with the reworked material. Most of the time I want you to use your writing time for what I call generative writing (that is, brand new writing), because, well, that is the place we must always start, even though revision is just as important a skill to develop. But there will be times in your life and in this class when “revision” writing is something valuable to take on and should “count” for the purposes of daily writing. Please make a new entry so that I can clearly see the work done that day. If you find yourself excessively revising/editing beyond what I direct in the syllabus, rethink your strategy and return to the habit of creating new writing.
Daily writing is all about process, not product. In this class, your daily words will *never* be evaluated on their ‘quality,’ only that you did it. 200 words a day. No judgement. No excuses. Just write.
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LP’s definition of writing: I type out some words that are a vague approximation of what I think I might mean. I will hate those words and so I won’t want to write them in the first place, but I write them anyway, reminding myself that essentially none of these words will make it to the final published copy. The first draft is completely awkward and horrible and I’ll wonder how I wrote anything ever before. I also must remember that I estimate that “generative writing" takes probably no more than 10% of the time it takes for me to create a publishable work. The other 90% of my writing time is comprised of revision.
It turns out that writing is not fundamentally about conjuring up words out of thin air. Writing is fundamentally about high-frequency revision. However, if writing is 90% time revision work, why in the heck would you want to expand your generative writing sessions into an endless, time-consuming, fraught experience? Why take 5 hours for something that you could generate in .5 hours? It’s better to have .5 hours comprise your 10% of generative writing than 5 hours!
WRITING = REVISION. (Isn’t that a great word, re-vision? To see and see and see again?)