Editor’s Note: In the “Are You Working?” series, a Ph.D. and academic-writing coach answers questions from faculty members and graduate students about scholarly motivation and productivity. This month’s questions arrived via Twitter and Facebook. Read her previous columns here.
Question: What do you do when you come across so much secondary literature related to your research topic that you are simultaneously excited — at the possibility of your work being further informed and refined — and completely overwhelmed? Like you’re in an ocean of sources and potential references, and you do not know where to start or even how to get organized to a functional level?
Signed,
Where’s My Boat?
Dear WMB,
The good news is that you’ve already got a keen self-awareness that you’re overwhelmed. Many of the academics I come across have yet to even recognize that they’re in the ocean at all, so rushed are they to cross it. Rest assured, this is a common problem among academics — plaguing everyone from graduate students to newly tenured professors to ... well, it doesn’t generally affect the super-eminent professors because, at some point, they just start citing themselves.
However self-indulgent some late-career work can be, I’d still recommend that you start thinking more like a senior eminence and less like a third-year graduate student. Other literature in your field is a gift, always, but it is a gift that you get to choose to accept — or not. Your secondary sources work to inform your own piece of writing, but don’t contort your argument to write in submission to them.
The absolute last thing you should try to do is read, respond, and incorporate every potential secondary source. That’s impossible. Instead, I suggest a strategic approach.
Keep in mind as you read and write, you’re walking a very tenuous line here. The parts of your paper devoted to a literature review will be boring for literally everyone except the scholars you cite, for whom your citation will be a major thrill or potentially a great outrage (if, as happens sometimes, they do not agree with your take on their work). Second to them comes the scholars who will expect to be cited but did not make your cull. They will be hurt beyond belief by the omission — and also, according to the immutable Murphy’s Law, will be the exact individuals your editor chooses as peer reviewers.
In order to traverse this hazardous landscape, I recommend a tiered approach:
- Have a dialogue with your subject matter and primary sources first, with nobody else’s voice in your head. Do a very close reading — or data analysis, or whatever it is that your discipline has people do — in as much of a vacuum as you can. Sketch out a primordial narrative about how you see a potential argument. Leave notes to yourself in brackets: “add arguments from secondaries to bolster or foil here.” But do not — I repeat, do not — look at the secondary canon yet.
- Once you’ve got your own preliminary “red thread” unspooled, now it’s time to think a bit harder about what other people in your field have had to say. You’re going to do multiple passes through secondary sources, but your first pass should come from two categories of scholar: the ones you want to read and the ones you know you should read.
- To start your secondary reading, choose five to six sources. For the “shoulds,” pick two to three books or papers by big-name scholars in your field that have come out recently (in academese, that means “within the last five years”). For the “wants,” choose two to three emerging scholars whose voices deserve amplification. Hopefully even if you’re a misanthrope like me, you’ve cultivated some friendships with same-level or junior-level kindred spirits, and you will amplify and improve one another’s work for the rest of your careers. (If you haven’t cultivated a network yet, now’s the time to start.) Do a rigorous read of these five to six sources, extracting quotes and writing down responses (100 to 200 words each), many of which will work themselves into those handy bracketed spots on your manuscript.
- Next, look at who your headliners are reading and citing. Do the big-name scholars keep quoting the same people? (It’s important to see just how insular your field might be.) Take note of their top three or four most-cited sources, and add those names to your bibliography. Now check out who the “emerging voices” are citing. Chances are, someone your sources are citing will be one of your peer reviewers — which is why it’s best to check out their top most-cited names, and who those few folks are citing.
- Once you’ve done a few rounds of bibliography mining, you should have at least 30 to 50 usable sources that together will form your core secondary support.
- Eventually, most of these sources will make it into your manuscript. But as you go, you will still draft paragraphs that raise questions in your mind that provoke a re-engagement with “the scholarly conversation.” At that point, it’s time to do another pass through the literature, and do another order of bibliography mining to fill out your footnotes.
- Effectively, you will have both surveyed the critical landscape in your discipline (a sincere participation in the conversation) and put the odds of citing, and thus appeasing, peer reviewers in your favor (cynical, but also true).
Follow this tiered approach, and you will know that you did your level best to engage with the literature in your area in a responsible and productive manner — minus the stasis that comes from attempting, unsuccessfully, to read everything. Likewise, rather than feeling pressured to adjust your work to another scholar’s, you will be reading each potential source in a way that asks a more relevant question: How can I interact with this material in a way that works for me?
Question: I just can’t finish my work. I get the first 90 percent of a chapter done and then the last 10 percent seems to unspool into chaos. How can I stop being afraid to call a piece of writing “done”?
Signed,
Are We There Yet?
Dear AWTY,
My best guess: This is a fear-driven phenomenon. When something’s almost done, that means that other people will read it soon. And the minute you start writing with the dreaded “Reviewer 2” in your head, the free-floating spores of self-doubt find a host and, before you know it, your entire project is covered in hairy black mold like that mess my cat left under my daughter’s bed last month (yes, I’m still traumatized, thanks for asking).
Now suddenly you’ve got to start the whole thing over again. Woe and despair, right? No! Your fear of harsh critiques — and you’ll get some; it’s the academic way — is distorting your view of your work and making said work into an unsafe place for you to inhabit.
So how do we stop this cycle?
With trickery and deceit, obviously. Your brain tricked you into this, so it’s time to trick your brain out of it.
If your uncooperative noodle doesn’t want to get this work to 100 percent, then tell it — convincingly — that you don’t have to get it to 100 percent. Make the goal 90 percent, or even 80. That is, leave one or two problems in the piece untouched. Let the work rest and go do something else for at least a week.
Once back at it, read through what you’ve written with fresh eyes. Chances are, solutions to those few problems — which you are now viewing as separate and not something that compromises the entire project — will manifest themselves to you. Resolve them to about 80 to 90 percent, and leave the work again. Repeat this a time or two more, and your project will be very, very close to done — meaning ready for you to send to a friendly outside reader to take a look.
Once that friend has sent you a list of suggestions, view them myopically (that is, without allowing these individual concerns to hurtle you into the weeds), resolve 90 percent of them, and come up with a footnote that doubles down on the 10 percent you didn’t fix. Then take a deep breath, proclaim the work “done enough,” and submit it to a publisher or journal. The worst-case scenario is that Reviewer 2 will zero in on something you already know is there.