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: I can’t decide how to organize my dissertation, and it’s stopped my progress in its tracks. There are two different ways I could do it — one way is more “exciting” to my discipline, and the other way will be easier for me to complete but kind of boring. I’ve made a pros-and-cons list, but it’s even. I’ve talked to my adviser, and she says she can’t make that decision for me. Can you make this decision for me?
Sincerely,
Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood and They Were Both a Dissertation
Greetings Mr. Frost,
Well, actually, you can make this decision for you. This happens so much more than you realize, and not just with graduate students at the dissertation stage. As a writing coach, I regularly work with senior tenured scholars facing the same problem. When you’re at the tons-of-research-but-little-writing stage of a big project, it’s rare for the perfect organization of the material to just jump out at you.
So that means you have a difficult decision to make:
- Do you choose the angle that you think will be easiest, and thus get the writing done faster? Seems like a good idea until you’re 100 pages in and realize you’re boring yourself, let alone any readers.
- Do you choose the (pardon my French) “sexy” topic that will get you invited to present at a bunch of conferences? Seems rock-solid, until the trends change drastically before your work is even in print.
There are always going to be as many reasons to make one organizational choice as there are to make another. So here’s what I recommend: Make both.
No, I don’t mean write two entire dissertations; that’s unhinged. What I suggest my clients do — and it hasn’t failed anyone yet — is to try what I call the Sliding Doors approach. In that 1998 movie, Gwyneth Paltrow both caught a train and missed a train, and then experienced each outcome. Do that with your writing: Make a decision in two different ways and live with each for a bit.
Spend two full weeks committing entirely to Choice A (the “exciting” angle) for your manuscript. Draft a detailed outline (if you’re an outliner), or write 500 words a day for 10 days in a row (if you’re a free-write firster). Begin to compile any additional sources you need and think about how much time it will take to go through them. Start writing where you see this argument going. Test out what it’s like to live in Choice A and think about what it will be like to continue to live with that choice for another one to three years.
And then … stop.
Take a weeklong palate-cleanse. Turn your attention to some short, discrete task (finish a conference paper or a grant application; catch up on course planning, etc). Then you repeat the same steps with Choice B (the “easier to finish” approach).
You can’t know how a particular choice will really affect you until you make it. But the good news is that, at this early stage, you really do have time to choose both options and test them out. After all, what have you got to lose if your progress is already halted? Living two different versions of your scholarly fate is an excellent use of time that you might otherwise have just spent worrying.
Question: I need to cut 1,000 words from an otherwise-done article, and I need to do it yesterday. But every time I try, I just end up seeing more and better arguments to be made, and adding words that I’m sure don’t need to be there, because they probably overwork said otherwise-done article. I am doing a very bad job at this. Help!
Sincerely,
They Said Cut, Not Add
Dear Cut,
First trim the obvious stuff:
- Get rid of all the adverbs.
- Then start in on the adjectives.
- Once that’s done, look for anywhere that you might have repeated yourself — even a little bit.
- Then look at each sentence that’s more than two lines long, and find a way to express that thought more concisely. Every word counts.
- Is there anything you’ve referred to in the singular, with an article, that could be made plural without changing the meaning? Do it.
Only when you’ve tweaked every possible sentence on the language level is it time to start making the really hard choices: Should you cut aspects of your argument, or trim references to sources? I’d start with the second (the sources), and throw anything you can into a footnote (unless the publisher includes footnotes in the word count — ugh!), or, in a worst-case scenario, limit your reference to a name drop.
Trimming the argument itself should be your last resort. But if you end up needing to do that, it’s possible that what you had to say was more complicated than was called for in an article of this length. The cuts might be better suited, in all their magniloquent glory, for another home.
Question: Tomorrow I have to prepare for class, answer a bunch of emails, and then, somehow, get 500 words written on my monograph. What’s the best order to do this in?
Signed,
Overwhelmed
Dear Over,
Do your 500 words first. If possible, get a chunk of them down before you even make your first cup of coffee. Not only does that get part of the task out of the way, it also creates an automated habit (possibly even a compulsion?) to put your own proverbial oxygen mask on before attending to anyone else’s.
This is the single hardest challenge for many of my clients — learning to prioritize their own scholarship — because so many other deadlines are more immediate. But the thing to remember is the class prep will get done because it has to. Do the teaching prep second, and save the emails until last. The emails will get answered someday — or, honestly, they won’t, and nobody will die. At “worst,” you’ll get a reputation as a bad returner of email and people won’t email you as much anymore.
