Writing Habits

Profgrrrl (and New Kid) writes about, well, writing. Specifically, the personal habits that surround and enable writing. Me being me, how can I fail to respond to such a prompt? The problem is, though, that it has been a long time since I've done the kind of writing she's describing. It wasn't part of my teaching, and most of the writing I did while doing the visiting professor circuit was reconfigurations of existing work, which I consider more a matter of editing than writing. Yet I presume that I'll need to write seriously again at some point, so perhaps it is still worth thinking about the process.

I tended to have two modes while doing research-based writing. There was the brain-dump mode and the clean-up-the-mess mode. Oh, and perhaps two additional ones, though I think of them as more prep-and-tidy work than actual writing. These would be "outlining" (I'll explain the scare quotes in a moment) and citations.

Okay, the "outlining" stage would be when I would try, after mulling around the materials, to think of a coherent framework for the ideas to come, and use Word to create an outline. (Yeah, yeah Word-haters, I'm not that fond of many aspects of the program myself (Die, Clippy! Die!), but two things it does superlatively are (a) outlines and (b) customize keyboard commands. Nothing else I've tried works half as well at those two things. ANYway...) I call it "outlining" because I would rarely end up following it properly. A checklist might be a better description; it was a way of reminding me which parts of my argument needed more elaboration. This was supplemented by headers in red, or bold, or underlined, depending on how much I thought I would need reminding.

The brain-dump stage -- which did not necessarily follow after outlining -- often it preceded it -- is just what it sounds like. I'd sit at the computer and just write as much as I possibly could before getting mentally tired. This worked best when I'd taken the time to thoroughly read and digest the material first; the worst thing was trying to construct an argument while simultaneously paging through several sources to remind myself of what I was talking about. Of course, I did both.

The clean-up-the-mess stage was also what it sounds like. After doing my spew-on-a-page thing, there would inevitably be a lot of odd phrasings, awkward sentences, half-developed ideas, weird organization, etc. This follow-up stage would involve lots of printing out of drafts (somehow I think better when I can mark up a page by hand) and lots of red ink and swooping arrows and circles and marginal notes, followed by revisions, rinse, repeat.

The final, rather loathsome stage was making sure that the endnotes were all done properly, were thorough, had their formatting and citation references in the right style, and so on. Lots of running back to the books and computer notes at this point (being able to search by keywords was a godsend), especially since during the previous two stages my citations tended to be of this variety: "(1) Worster here. Maybe chapter on dams? (2) Ickes letter. October, complaint about flu. Which box?" An aggravating factor is that I am ridiculously anal about things like periods and wanting all the formating in a 400+ page document to be exactly alike.

Then there are the odd little tricks that got me through long writing days. The use of yellow legal pads and black felt tips to get me writing when I was utterly blocked. The long walks to enhance digestion of material and rethink difficult passages. The repeated printing and scribbling on of drafts. The occasional talking out loud to myself (reserved for the most knotty of problems). The incessant multi-tasking to keep me from collapsing into the boredom of frustration. The going to the library and staking out a carrel with nothing but me, a book and the computer to force me to concentrate and get something done.

I also discovered that there was a clear circadian rhythm to the writing process. Mornings until about 10am were good for concentrated, focused, intent work. Afternoons were good for revisions. Late evenings were good for wild spates of creative but disorganized thought and late nights were good for obsessive detail revision (but not good for my sleeping habits or sanity). Lunch time was stupid time, and hunger was a guarantee of distractability.

Compared to all that, writing for the blog is a dream. Yeah, there is some pre-thinking, especially for the more complicated entries, but that can be done during my commutes to and from work. Revision is limited, since the ideas aren't hideously complicated, I'm not interested in impressing anyone with the glory of my prose, and I'm not worried about getting things wrong and having the misquoted scholars coming down on me later. There are no citations except the "c/o" links, and that's merely a matter of cutting and pasting a URL and some HTML. And, best of all, there is instant feedback in the form of comments from y'all. Yay blogging.

(Addendum: I was struck by the tone of a number of comments in response to Profgrrrl's post to the effect that they had "bad" writing habits in that they didn't use outlines, didn't write in a methodical, ordered, scheduled way, etc. I have to say, as a former writing teacher, that I saw this sort of self-denigrating attitude a lot, and there is absolutely no reason for it. Different people write in different ways, and no one way is The Perfect Way. What counts in the end is that your ideas are clearly presented and understood. How you get there is irrelevant, and just because your high school teacher insisted on outlines doesn't mean that they are appropriate or suited to your style of writing. Remember the lesson of the five-paragraph essay?)

Comments

[yami]

The third Word does is the EndNote plugin... an absolute dream for getting the formatting correct on a million zillion citations - or at least once you've gotten it working, which is a dicey task.

[Rana]

Would you believe I never used EndNote? Wanted to, intended to, but never got around to buying and installing it. And now my computer is too old and memory deficient to handle the new versions (and, more to the point, I'm not doing anything that would justify its purchase, let alone the computer upgrade *sigh*).

[Jimbo]

My writing is more or less like yours, except I always skip the outlining phase. Or maybe I just make the outline in my head. But my outline always lacks what I think is most important to outlining: hierarchy. Instead I tend to work with a series of points and use my writing to try to figure out how these points go together.

Your description of brain-dump followed by editing fits me to a tee. I usually add one stage. I run through the brain-dump and mark the various paragraphs by theme and then work those into coherent sections. What I'm always aiming at is what I call a continuity draft, a draft that takes the idea from some sort of beginning to some sort of end. Only when I can do that, can I really begin to edit, that is, decide what actually belongs in this paper and what can go.

On Endnote and Word: Endnote 7 does not communicate effectively with Word 2001 for Mac System X. I've had more crashes since I started using it. Moreover, the new version of Endnote is not very smart about knowing where you want your reference inserted. When you try to edit the entry to add a page number, it invariably takes you to the wrong place in the document. Finally, I haven't found a way to manually insert formatted endnotes using Endnote the way I could do with the older versions (command-K). This is very annoying when you want to format your footnote in some way that Endnote does not think appropriate.

jwb

[Another Damned Medievalist]

I admit, I still begin everything on three legal pads. One for outlines, one for text, and one for notes. I like the tangibility of actually writing, rather than typing, and I find that there's less mess. Once I've gotten a bunch done, I can change modes.

I don't really know how to take notes, though. Never got the notecard thing. Sucks for me.

[sappho]

Have to comment on outlines. I think that a lot of people for whom writing/scholarship was a joy rather than a job start by not using outlines. In college my preferred method for writing a paper was a stack of the books I'd consulted/notes I'd taken on one side of the typewriter (yes, I am old, no computer till I dissertated) and a stack of paper on the other side. I plunged right in, typed till it was done, did maybe one revision and that was it.
Later, in grad school, it became less and less enjoyable. Writing for publication/possible publication drove me to outlines. In some fields, the preferred structure for a paper is pretty rigid, an implicit outline.
My guess is that while the five-paragraph theme is disparaged by those who think everybody has a creative writer burning within, it's not all that bad--or that uncommon (I bet that a lot of journal articles could be divided into a similar structure.), and I sometimes wish that those I work with who can't seem to structure a simple memo weren't afraid to use it.

[Rana]

Oh, I don't disagree that the 5-para form can at times be useful. It just gets tiring trying to wean students off of it, particularly when they are attempting to write on a topic that will span 10+ pages and should involve more than three examples and one thesis. It's really painful reading their attempts to shoehorn all that into five paragraphs!

Ditto on outlines; I don't disagree that they are useful for structuring a paper; it was that I found that for myself (and most of my students) it was more effective to impose an outline after the fact (sort of like what Jimbo's describing) than to try to write to one (which seems to work okay for those who can pre-frame their argument before writing, but frustrates those of us who don't figure out our full argument until the writing and editing begin). I definitely agree that more people need to learn how to write something coherent! (Gods, government form instructions are a nightmare!)

I like the idea of a "continuity draft" -- my final goal is to have a smoothly unfurling argument in which each part logically progresses from the preceding part, until you reach the end. Sometimes I'll end up with several sub-arguments (I love sub-headings) but the "flow" is present in each section and the sections are themselves intended to build or complement the others.

Unfortunately, this is one of the harder things to teach; I found that having students diagram the flow of thought in their papers and others' (using pictures like triangles and hourglasses and circles surrounded by other circles with connecting lines -- that sort of thing) helped. It certainly helped me think about my own writing!

Good to know about EndNote -- should I ever have cause (and money) again to need it.

[JM]

So, I don't have bad writing habits. Check. I feel validated! :)

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Yeah, this all sounds very familiar to me, too! Your brain-dump method, Rana, and Jimbo's marking up of the themes are key for me.

And I'm with ADM - I suck at taking notes. I used notecards for my senior thesis in college (I think I finally threw those notes away in my last move), and I remember it working REALLY well, with a lot of glorious opportunity to shuffle notecards around and reorganize ideas that way. Haven't touched notecards since (and that was 13 years ago!)

I like your point about there being no One Right Way to write, Rana - I believe that, but I still persist on occasion in thinking that my own way is "weird" and inefficient (well, I bet it could be MORE efficient...).

[Rana]

Eh, I think efficiency during the writing process is overrated; I think that the more that we mull over the ideas and thumb through our notes, the better the final result.

Notecards, though... I have strong thoughts on these

Maybe I should move these thoughts into a post of their own...

Done.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Yeah, I agree about mulling things over leading to a better result; sometimes I just wish that my own timetable and my institution's/profession's timetables meshed better...