So I'm still not sure whether Blogosphere has fully accepted my apology, but as a show of good faith, I plan to do a series of posts on writing lessons learned during my bloggy absence.
The first--what I learned about writing in general from my Big Nasty PhD Exams (which I passed, by the way--woohoo! I'm ABD officially!).
Okay, so as I think I explained a few months ago, my exams consisted of 20 hours' worth of written exams in the period of a month on a variety of subjects related to courses I'd taken, followed by a 2-hour defense of what I'd written.
As it turned out, most of my exams were 2-hour in-house exams, which meant that on Mondays and Wednesdays, I studied for a particular question during the day, then from 3-5 p.m., came into the department and wrote on a laptop as fast as I could for 2 hours.
From this, I learned that I could create 7 nearly-coherent pages of prose in 2 hours. A valuable lesson, indeed. I'm pretty sure I can repeat this project in other academic and non-fiction writing circumstances, now that I have this skill. In fact, I'm thinking about using a "write a bunch in two hours several times per week" strategy for drafting the early stages of my dissertation.
The only downside? If you have to add citations, it can be a royal pain to go back in and add them afterward, as I learned when I tried the same strategy for my take-home prelim. So if I do this with my dissertation, I'm planning to have all my references pre-loaded into Zotero and clear in my head, ready to pull in clearly, BEFORE my 2-hour sessions begin.
I do like this idea, though--I think it would work better for me than the also-interesting "write a page a day" strategy mentioned by a colleague. See, with research and editing rhythms, it doesn't always work well to write something every single day. If I plan to do two or three 2-hour sessions per week (more if I'm feeling inspired), it will get a lot of pages out there, leaving me lots of research and editing and simmering time between. I think it just might work, both for the upcoming dissertation and in the future for other potential non-fiction drafting.
Woohoo! The Big Nasty Exams have both been successfully completed, AND have given me another writing skill. This is a beautiful thing.
Showing posts with label editing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label editing. Show all posts
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Day almost-12 (And All Seems Well)
So I gave up on trying to fulfill the word requirement entirely with new words--too much revising to be done just now for that to work. I am pleased to report, however, that in combining both new words and revised pages as my scoring system had originally envisioned, I am more than half-way toward my goal when I'm not quite halfway through my allotted time.
Furthermore, as I explained over at TextFIGHT, my academic work has successfully cleared the way for back-burner creative projects to fester and emerge from my subconscious, a process that delights me tremendously. During the semester, any use of spare mental real estate for anything not paper-related or rest from paper-related thoughts is a strong victory. I'm mostly enjoying the academic papers I've been writing, but it's incredibly refreshing to have creative projects shake that head space up from time to time.
9 a.m.
Just noticed I keep forgetting to put the totals somewhere other than the sidebar. Here 'tis:
Furthermore, as I explained over at TextFIGHT, my academic work has successfully cleared the way for back-burner creative projects to fester and emerge from my subconscious, a process that delights me tremendously. During the semester, any use of spare mental real estate for anything not paper-related or rest from paper-related thoughts is a strong victory. I'm mostly enjoying the academic papers I've been writing, but it's incredibly refreshing to have creative projects shake that head space up from time to time.
9 a.m.
Just noticed I keep forgetting to put the totals somewhere other than the sidebar. Here 'tis:
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Off Again...and the Unfortunate Effects of Transcription
In the spirit of the goals I mentioned yesterday, I'm off to take a real vacation, complete with relational time, for the next 10 days before school starts. I'm taking a little bit of fiction editing and my journal with me, but I'm leaving most of my writing life behind. I'm not going to stop myself from doodling out ideas for new or current creative projects, but the place I'm going is unrelated to any current project, which is a good thing.
One thing I'm hoping this vacation will do for me is to re-set my editorial eye. See, I've been transcribing and/or analyzing transcripts for a good chunk of the summer. This job has taught me that if one wants to keep one's editorial and proofreading senses carefully in check, one must not spend much time transcribing and analyzing literal transcripts of audio files.
I discovered this effect when noticing, a week after I'd handed it in, that the paper I turned in for my summer independent study was rife with editorial errors my proofreading eye would have caught much sooner before said transcription work. I didn't have a huge amount of time to do a final proofread of that paper, but before this summer, I never would have left this many errors in it. When I went back to it a few days later, the English MA self within me recoiled in agony.
It makes sense, when I think about it--the act of transcription forces your eye to check for accuracy, not sentence structure and grammar, and the act of non-conversational-analytic transcription analysis further trains your eye to actually skim past the grammatical errors. So it's a good thing I'm taking a 10-day break from transcripts.
Anyway, I scheduled posts while I'm gone so I wouldn't feel too tempted to post--working ahead isn't usually a bad thing, especially when it contributes to the guilt-free-ness of time off. ;) The posts should pop up approximately every other day. I'm sure I'll be checking for comments occasionally, and filling in the blank days with extra posts if I really get inspired.
One thing I'm hoping this vacation will do for me is to re-set my editorial eye. See, I've been transcribing and/or analyzing transcripts for a good chunk of the summer. This job has taught me that if one wants to keep one's editorial and proofreading senses carefully in check, one must not spend much time transcribing and analyzing literal transcripts of audio files.
I discovered this effect when noticing, a week after I'd handed it in, that the paper I turned in for my summer independent study was rife with editorial errors my proofreading eye would have caught much sooner before said transcription work. I didn't have a huge amount of time to do a final proofread of that paper, but before this summer, I never would have left this many errors in it. When I went back to it a few days later, the English MA self within me recoiled in agony.
It makes sense, when I think about it--the act of transcription forces your eye to check for accuracy, not sentence structure and grammar, and the act of non-conversational-analytic transcription analysis further trains your eye to actually skim past the grammatical errors. So it's a good thing I'm taking a 10-day break from transcripts.
Anyway, I scheduled posts while I'm gone so I wouldn't feel too tempted to post--working ahead isn't usually a bad thing, especially when it contributes to the guilt-free-ness of time off. ;) The posts should pop up approximately every other day. I'm sure I'll be checking for comments occasionally, and filling in the blank days with extra posts if I really get inspired.
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