I write often about writing, but rarely because writing is easy. It’s not! (Or, at least, not always.) I am interested in the habits, tools, structures, and small acts of persistence that make scholarly work possible: whiteboards, spreadsheets, notebooks, outlines, research questions, ugly drafts, editing horizons, and the slow conversion of scattered evidence into argument.
Some of the posts gathered here are practical: how to manage bibliography, structure an article, restart a stalled draft, or move from draft to done. Others are more reflective: why little details matter, how historical knowledge grows, and why scholarly work so often depends on patience, repetition, and the willingness to keep returning.
I use “process” broadly here. Sometimes it means workflow: files, lists, spreadsheets, calendars, and systems for not losing one’s mind. Sometimes it means method: asking better questions, reading sources against the grain, or letting evidence reshape the argument. And sometimes it simply means the emotional weather of scholarly life: momentum, frustration, avoidance, delight, and the small miracle of getting words onto the page.
Want to read more? Start here:
Sooner or Later It All Gets Done: How History Emerges from Small Details
A good entry point for this theme: slow scholarship, archival patience, and the way historical arguments emerge from many small observations. This post is about the scholarly value of “lots of little details,” including the kinds of clues earlier indexers may have ignored. It also contains one of my most reliable research truths: every day a little progress.
The Whiteboard Where Big Things Live
A post about externalizing thought: getting large projects out of the head and onto a surface where they can be seen, moved, questioned, and reorganized. Whiteboards are not magic, but they are very good at making intellectual sprawl visible.
The Editing Horizon: Shaping the Argument First
A post about choosing the right editing task for the moment. Not all revision is the same: argument-checking, structural revision, and sentence-level polish require different kinds of attention. This one is about letting elegance wait until the argument knows what it is trying to say.
From Draft to Done
A post about the middle and late stages of writing, when the question is no longer “do I have material?” but “how does this become a finished piece?” Useful for thinking about completion as a process rather than a dramatic event.
Managing Bibliography by Spreadsheet
A practical post about using spreadsheets to manage sources, categories, notes, and scholarly overwhelm. Bibliography is not just a list at the end; it is part of how a project thinks.
Writing is momentum
A post about starting, continuing, and lowering the friction enough that writing can begin to move. Momentum matters because scholarly work is rarely completed in one grand burst. More often, it accumulates through return.
Research as accumulation
One of the recurring lessons of my work is that scholarship often grows by accumulation. Not every discovery is dramatic. Sometimes the crucial evidence is a repeated phrase, a marginal mark, a line in a charter, a pattern in a spreadsheet, or a detail that mattered very little to the person who first described the source.
That kind of work requires systems. It requires ways to hold evidence until its meaning becomes visible. A notebook, a spreadsheet, a whiteboard, a file name, or a research question can become more than an organizational device. It can become a thinking tool.
Writing as practice
Writing is not just the final stage of research. Writing is one of the ways research happens. Drafting reveals gaps. Outlining reveals structure. Editing reveals the argument one thought one was making, and the argument one may actually need to make.
That is why I return so often to process. The work of scholarship is not only archival discovery, brilliant interpretation, or beautiful prose. It is also the repeated practice of returning to the material, asking sharper questions, building usable systems, and making the next small move.
More paths through the archive
For more posts, try these labels:
- writing — drafting, revision, momentum, and the work of getting words onto the page
- writing strategies — practical approaches to stuckness, structure, editing, and completion
- research process — how projects develop from questions, sources, and accumulated evidence
- how historians work — historical method, source reading, and the craft of asking better questions
- archival research — archives, sources, clues, and the pleasures of documentary evidence
- bibliography — sources, spreadsheets, citations, and scholarly infrastructure
- Everything Notebook — notebooks, capture systems, and the changing tools of scholarly organization
- editing — shaping arguments, revising drafts, and deciding what kind of attention the work needs
- slow scholarship — patience, accumulation, and the scholarly value of sustained attention
- productivity — not hustle, but usable systems for keeping work alive
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