The part of Knight’s article that impressed upon me the most was his emphasis on habitual private writing. Every November for the past 8 years I have signed up for NanoWriMo, a literary project wherein one vows to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. The values of this project are enthusiasm and perseverance – quantity is at the forefront of expectation and quality merely an afterthought. It is a liberating exercise that forces the writer to abandon all pretensions of perfection; there is no time to tweak endlessly, and it soon becomes apparent that fear of mistakes and productivity are mutually exclusive.
Knight explains that the lecturers who publish the most are the ones who write almost daily, whereas the ones who publish the least are those who wait for clear blocks of time. In reflecting upon my own work habits, I can see that I have often fallen into the latter trap of misguided perfectionism leading to deleterious deferral of action. It will be my goal this semester to finally shed my bad habit of waiting to write. Indeed this blog itself will be a measure of success.
I'm always curious, not just about the writing habits of prolific, effective academics (and writers), but about their annotating habits as well.
ReplyDeletePartly because of my (over)consumption of free software "tools" in the everlasting drive to write more, I've found some fairly useful writing aids... and filtered out some fairly useless ones.
Because I claim to be a reluctant user of Google's integrated app system, yet usually try everything our never-evil overlords release, I quickly signed on to Google Notebook when it made its debut. It has, unfortunately, been discontinued, but is still accessible to anyone who set up an account. I find it far less cumbersome than Google Docs, more robust than Google Tasks, and better suited to researching than Google Wave (like notebook, a "failed" Google experiment). Used in conjunction with Zotero and a few other tools, it has become an indispensable research aid for me.
My own habits usually include some variation of the following:
1) Read almost everything in a .pdf viewer - usually Acrobat or Xournal. This way, I can annotate while I read in a way that is fairly unobtrusive, and yet easy to edit when I'm finished. If this means I have to scan books to get .pdf copies, so be it.
2) Make notes in Google Notebook. I can organize my notes, drag them around, add links... and still access them anywhere, including on my phone.
3) If I know I'm going to be looking at lots of web pages, the Diigo toolbar is the only one I've found to be worth using (and it can, of course, be turned on and off). It has a rich set of annotation tools that are helpful to anyone "scanning" lots of pages.
I'm outlining my reading/annotation/writing habits here for two reasons: first, I had a conversation last week with a fellow student - Marie-Eve Belanger - who just defended her thesis on Friday. Her topic had to do with annotation practices of PhD students. Anyone interested in this area might try finding her on the iSchool directory, or over at the Critical Making lab.
Second, I think annotation is a crucial part of the research-writing process. Effective annotation helps one avoid simple paraphrasing by enabling the taking of "simple" notes that can later be expanded once the reader has a full understanding of the piece they've read. For those of us with short attention spans... more hypertext than static text... proper annotation can be a real breadcrumb trail when
trying to go back over a few hundred, or thousand, pages of reading.
lydia - i've heard of these events - huge kudos to you for being so committed. I felt the same about Knight's chapter when I read it - and feel the same about the importance of writing, as a practice and as a tool for thinking, planning, researching, etc. etc.
ReplyDeleteoh so true gbby - thanks for sharing this. i take my own notes in Endnote, which I also use as my primary reference database, because of the "Cite While you Write" feature...in my opinion an absolute must for managing enormous documents (i.e. thesis). It doesn't help much when revisiting the text, but it's wonderful to have immediate access to your notes when thinking - "should I cite so-and-do? what was it they said about this, and what did i think about that??" Or, if you need to remember who it was that used that particular example you liked so much (the notes are searchable, though sadly only at a very basic level).
i think i like your system better, though, esp. if you can transport everything so easily.