Reading with a Job to Do

So, I’m writing an article. This one is a big hairy deal; I’ve already agreed to submit it by a particular date, and it is the ONE thing standing between me and my book. Well, aside for cleaning the garage. And finishing the task of putting in the fall garden. And, dates with Tom. But I digress.

So, again, I’m writing an article. And in order to commit article prose, it is necessary to Engage the Discourse. Which I do, regularly. In fact, I teach a class on this topic, and *always* teach with new literature, each and every time I offer it.

And yet there are so many juicy bits one never gets to. Article writing is time to gather the flock of “Unreads” and convert them into “reads.” Which I’ve duly been doing. At three articles a day, I should definitely be done sometime this year, though perhaps several months after my deadline comes and goes.

And the reality is, one does not need to read in article mode the way one reads in understanding mode. I know, I know, that sounds weird, but hear me on this.

When you’re reading for understanding, all the little bits are the compelling part. Those are where the next big insight may come from – the fragments of understanding that piece together to make the mosaic of the story come to life. It’s the nuance, the compelling document, the momentary “aha.” It’s the chaplain who didn’t collect from that family for three years that opens the door into “oh, something interesting there!” Read the footnotes, I tell my students, that’s where all the cool stuff lives! You’re never going to learn about the priest absolved from having 5 children with that woman until you read the footnote that also explains that he had to come back and ask forgiveness for having three more. (Now, darn, where did I put that citation? I know, just know it’s on my computer somewhere…)

Those kinds of details are the framing out of a localized picture that is going to change what you actually think about your own data. You’re reading deeply, and it’s so very, very cool.

That’s not the kind of reading you need to do for an article. If all goes well, you already know the broad strokes of what you’re trying to say. They say that writing is often a kind of discovery – and it is, but at a more local level, I think, because you already had the big picture in mind going into that writing spate. No, reading for an article is “I want to know the discourse on X,” or “this was contentious, and I’d decided I believe Y, now what were the details of the arguments about?”

Because reading for an article is grappling with human fallibility. The reasons *I* remember a particular article don’t always jibe with what the author was doing with the article, and it’s important to separate out those threads if you’re going to be citing the thing, and I believe in honoring the work of the author where I can.

So, when you’re reading for an article, you’re working on your fairness positioning: what did the other side of that debate argue, and why does it matter?

When you’re reading for an article, you’re looking for the delimiters. Do I need to say “after 1640,” or change “all” to “most,” or (savvy writing here) put “So-and-so argues that…”? Sometimes checking the boundary of a claim takes every bit as long as writing up the claim in the first place – and that’s going to be the part that matters most to at least one of your readers. So go that extra reading mile.

When you’re reading for an article, you’re looking for any latent misattribution habits. I remember Jones said this. Wait, was that Jones? Or even worse, “everyone says Jones says X.” Yeah, but DID they? If you haven’t checked it yourself, you aren’t allowed to write it down, people. That’s because scholarship is harder than fiction, as my daughter once reminded me. I have to check all my facts, while she just gets to make them up. Be slow; be thorough. When in doubt, (re-)read. Check.

When you’re reading for an article, you’re also looking for the formulation of information that is going to be most helpful to your reader – not necessarily the yummy archival documentary study that found “the thing” but the one that put that new detail into a broader context.

And, when you’re reading for an article and you get to the wild-ass claim that means you’d never willingly converse with this ____ (insert category of closemindedness here), you can STOP READING. Because if you wouldn’t have this person in your life, what would they be doing in your footnotes? Step away and find something written by a better human being. (I’m not saying you don’t need to know the literature. I am saying that you don't owe every published argument your attention merely because it exists. If someone else has already thoroughly deconstructed the claim, maybe that's the article you need to cite. Why contribute to the citation count of flaming trolls?)

Reading for an article is reading to a purpose. Be ruthless (and not Ruth-less, because Ruth has actually written some pretty compelling arguments there!). Stop reading on a topic if you’ve already got more information than is going to fit in its paragraph. More is not better, it’s just avoidance.

Instead, when you’re reading for an article, one of the most important questions to ask yourself is: am I ready to commit prose? And that’s your reading exit strategy. Don’t keep reading “just because.” Don’t keep reading for the beautiful writing, or the compelling narrative. Read for the purpose. This bolsters paragraph 3. That might be in the footnote for paragraph 7. This will make the assessment of the controversy more compelling. That shows the strange hoops that scholars have jumped through to ignore such-and-so. So sure, read on all these things. But stop as SOON as you can.

Reading is tempting. Washing dishes is tempting. Heavens to Betsy: even LAUNDRY is tempting when it’s time to commit prose.

So go forth, and read no more.

At least until it’s time to work on the next section of your article!

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YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:

How To Jump-Start a Scholarly Article: The Plan: Before the prose comes the plan. This post works through choosing a journal, figuring out an article’s likely shape, building a broad outline, and assembling the bibliography that will support the writing.

Using Research Questions — Defeat Data-Hoarding and Discard the Chaff!: Research questions are useful for more than framing an argument: they are also excellent winnowing devices, helping distinguish what the article actually needs from all the fascinating material that can safely wait for another day.

Managing Bibliography By Spreadsheet: A pile of PDFs is not yet a literature review. Here’s the spreadsheet system I use to prioritize reading, track what matters, and turn an unruly bibliography into something that actually helps the writing move forward.

From Conference Paper to Article: Turning Talk into Prose: Turning a conference paper into an article isn’t really a matter of expansion—it’s translation. This post walks through my spreadsheet-based method for breaking a talk apart, adding the scholarship and evidence it needs, and rebuilding it as article prose.

From Conference Paper to Article: Turning Talk into Prose

I was in a conversation recently with someone facing one of the dread tasks of academic writing: turning a conference paper into an article. There are people who write conference papers that are basically already articles. Neither of us fit that bill.

My conference papers are intended to be talks. Informal. Funny. Carefully paced. They have places where I gesture at an image instead of describing it, places where a slide does half the argumentative work, and places where I say something in two sentences because I know I can explain it with tone of voice, pacing, or whatever I put up on the screen.

That works perfectly well in a conference room or on Zoom. It does not, however, make a good article. The rhythm’s wrong. The vocabulary is too casual. The argument often relies more on audience connection than carefully scripted references to an expansive scholarly literature.

And I think one reason conference-to-article conversion can feel so horrible is that we often describe the job as “expanding the conference paper.” For me, that framing is almost instantly stressful, because really, the skin doesn't fit.

A conference paper doesn't need to be expanded into an article. It needs to be translated into one. You need a mechanism for getting roughly the same intellectual content out, but in a different language.

So here's my practical step-by-step process. Guess what? It includes a spreadsheet.

Step 1. Break the conference paper apart

First, I copy the conference paper into a spreadsheet. Not paragraph by paragraph. Smaller than that. I put about one or two sentences into each row of the first column.

That sounds tedious. It really isn't. And the point is to stop seeing the conference paper as a sacred block of prose that somehow has to grow into something twice its size.

Now it is just a sequence of little ideas.

Next to each one, I have an empty box to its right. That empty box is where the article version goes.

Step 2. Translate, don't polish

Then I start rewriting down the second column. I am not line-editing the conference paper. I am asking what each little unit needs to become when the audience can no longer hear me speak.

Sometimes a conference-paper sentence survives almost unchanged. Sometimes two breezy sentences become a full paragraph. Sometimes I discover that a sentence was only functioning because the slide behind me contained six pieces of evidence. Sometimes I realize that “as we all know” is doing an enormous amount of unpaid labor.

This is where the translation idea helps me.

The question isn't: How do I make this sentence more article-like?

It's: What work was this sentence doing in the talk, and what does the article need in order to do the same work?

Those are different questions.

It looks like this:

(This is a real example from this spring: my conference-paper prose on the left, and article prose on the right. The point isn’t simply to make the original longer; it’s to ask what the written version needs in order to do the same argumentative work.)

Step 3. Insert the missing stuff

As I work, I simply insert blank spreadsheet rows wherever the article needs something the conference paper didn't: supporting examples, additional evidence, references to the scholarship, historical context, the important take-away to round out the argument.

For me, those blank rows are important psychologically. They turn “THIS PAPER NEEDS SO MUCH MORE STUFF” into a series of small, local jobs.

I don't have to solve the article. I have to fill this box. Then the next one. Then the one after that. Short tasks, not long ones.

Step 4. Don't forget the slides

If the conference slides contain substantial content, they go into the spreadsheet too.

This is particularly important for the way I give papers, because a lot of information can be sitting on the screen while I am saying very little about it. A chart that was visible for thirty seconds might become a full paragraph of article prose. An image may need description, contextualization, citation, and then actual analysis. A quotation I could simply let an audience read may need to be introduced and unpacked.

Slides are part of the conference paper's argument. If I convert only the script, I am leaving chunks of the original argument behind.

Step 5. Move back into a document

Eventually the second column begins to look less like a set of rewrites and more like an article draft. That's when I leave my beloved spreadsheet and move back into a regular document.

It may not be pretty, but by this point, it’s a continuity draft. I know what I’m saying, I know where in the article I’ll be saying it, and I’ve started using the voice that belongs to article prose instead of public delivery. It’s a win!

Step 6. Add the things articles need

Once I have a continuity draft in place, it’s easy – and fun! – to build out the parts that belong particularly to article format.

For me, that usually means a more substantial contextualizing introduction – the “lit review.” This is an excuse to decide what I want to include as context, and what not. The theorizing section is also an excuse to dive back into how I got interested in this problem in the first place. I limit myself to a maximum of three scholarly days, because playing around with the literature is the “big idea” part of the gig, and I could sit there for weeks, if given a chance.

It also means the conclusion gets bigger. Conference conclusions can sometimes amount to: “Look! This thing I have just shown you is neat, and here is why you should care.” Articles have more room for moralizing. I like the “so what, so what, now what” formulation. So what did we learn? And then: so what does that change (and for whom)? And finally: now what? What does this case let us see differently? What larger conversation does it alter? What becomes possible because we've followed the evidence this far?

Those questions are much easier for me to answer once I actually have article prose in front of me.

Step 7. Normal edits

After all of that work, the conference paper is essentially gone. I am editing an article.

That means the usual work: structure, argument, rhythm, clarity, flow, repetition, citations, transitions, and all the other things that make a draft slowly become something somebody else might want to read. (Taking out the giant shouty “LOOK FOR EX” and actually DO that work!). But that’s just cleanup!

Conference Paper → Article: The Seven Steps Break the conference paper apart Translate, don’t polish Insert the missing stuff Don’t forget the slides >Move back into a document Add the things articles need Normal edits

Why This Works for Me

I've used this exact process twice this past spring. Both conference papers became articles, and both articles were accepted, hooray! So I'm inclined to think the method has legs.

I don't imagine everyone needs the spreadsheet. Some people can probably make this transformation comfortably inside a Word document. That’s not me, though. Rewriting there feels like “failed text being edited,” over and over and over again.

The spreadsheet does something useful for my brain: it makes the act of translation visible. On the left is what worked when I was standing in front of a room. On the right is what has to work when I'm not there anymore. Low stress, lots of little steps, and a real sense of progress as the article comes together.

Bit by bit, as they say, and sooner or later it all gets done. With my spreadsheet method, it gets done faster, and with a lot less stress.

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YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:

How To Jump-Start a Scholarly Article: The Plan: Before the prose comes the plan. This post works through my approach to choosing a journal, figuring out an article’s likely shape, building a broad outline, and assembling the bibliography that will support the writing.

Writing with Scissors and Tape: When a continuity draft had all the right material but none of the right choreography, I stopped trying to line-edit and just cut the thing apart. Paper strips, index cards, scissors, and tape became a way to see the argument again.

The Editing Horizon:Shaping the Argument First: Editing gets easier when you stop trying to fix everything at once. This post separates argument-level revision from sentence-level polish and makes the case for giving each kind of editorial work its own turn.

A Blogroll for the Avid Reader

In a world where searching is increasingly awful, I decided to replicate some of the early web patterns: a listing of blog favorites. I wanted to share multiple avenues to rewarding writing on topics near and dear to my heart. Bonus, most of these have RSS feeds, if you still live in that part of the internet. (Better than doomscrolling, amiright?!)

By all means, suggest other discoveries in the comments.

NUNS, BOOKS, WOMEN, AND MATERIAL THINGS

Medingen Manuscripts — https://medingen.seh.ox.ac.uk/  

A research blog from St Edmund Hall, Oxford, devoted to late medieval convent manuscripts, prayer books, women’s religious life, liturgy, materiality, and the effects of the Reformation on religious communities. Especially good if you like manuscripts attached to actual historical women!

History of Women Religious of Britain and Ireland — https://historyofwomenreligious.org/  

A broad hub for the history of women religious from the medieval period onward: conferences, reviews, research resources, notices, and new scholarship. Their bibliography is particularly useful if you need somewhere sensible to begin (or are chasing that elusive memory fragment of that thing you read three years ago...)

Early Modern Female Book Ownership / #HerBook — https://earlymodernfemalebookownership.wordpress.com/

Books that once belonged to women are the point here: inscriptions, handwriting, reading practices, ownership marks, textual self-presentation, and books that have since wandered off into libraries and private collections. A wonderful site for anyone who likes evidence left in the margins.

Feminist Histories — https://feministhistories.substack.com/

Natalie Donnell writes long-form archival history about women exercising their political, diplomatic, familial, and economic power in early modern Europe. Well researched, very readable, and full of women who turn out to have been doing rather more than the standard narratives allow.

Free Range History — https://freerangehistory.substack.com/

Amy Freeborn writes “stories from the past, driven by curiosity and wonder,” which is a pretty good description of the appeal. Broad-ranging, approachable history that follows an interesting question wherever it leads.

Feminist History of Philosophy — https://feministhistoryofphilosophy.wordpress.com/

Sandrine Berges looks at philosophy with the women put back in. Expect forgotten thinkers, arguments about canon formation, and a more gender-inclusive history of ideas than the one many of us were originally taught.

Early Modern Fashion and Material Culture — https://sarahabendall.com/blog/

Sarah Bendall writes sharply and often wittily about clothing, objects, labor, bodies, and material life in the early modern world. Come for court dress and textiles; stay for the reminder that clothes are historical evidence too.

MUSICOLOGY

Songs of Sunrise — https://leahbroad.substack.com/

Leah Broad’s delightfully written “music newsletter for inquisitive listeners.” Music history, women musicians, biography, archives, listening, and the larger cultural stories that make repertories matter.

Musicology, Medieval to Modern — https://eeleach.blog/blog/

Elizabeth Eva Leach writes across medieval music, manuscripts, gender, research, publications, and the occasional realities of academic life. Especially rewarding if your tastes run toward manuscripts and medieval song.

Karen McAulay, Musicologist — https://karenmcaulaymusicologist.blog/

Karen McAulay writes about Scottish music collecting, publishing, national identity, women musicians, archives, and the wonderfully winding paths research can take. Part research diary, part musical history, with plenty of curiosity, useful discoveries, and the occasional irresistible archival rabbit hole.  

Words on Music — https://wordsonmusic.substack.com/

Rebecca Franks calls this “a place to explore the art of writing about music.” Smart, vivid prose on listening, performance, books, criticism, and what makes music worth writing about in the first place.

Twangle: Music and Words — https://jessicaduchen.substack.com/

Jessica Duchen comes at things more as critic and journalist than academic musicologist, but she has a delightful way with words. Music history, biography, women musicians, performance, current classical culture, and the occasional personal detour all turn up here.

LARGER-SCALE MUSICOLOGY

Musicology Now — https://musicologynow.org/

The American Musicological Society’s public-facing platform for “sounds, words, and ideas.” A useful place to see what musicologists are thinking about beyond journal articles: archives, listening, race, gender, technology, repertory, performance, and so on.

Sounding Out! — https://soundstudiesblog.com/

“Pushing sound studies into the red since 2009,” and still doing it. Essays on sound, listening, voice, race, gender, media, technology, embodiment, and culture, usually with more energy than the phrase “interdisciplinary sound studies” has a right to suggest.

RILM Bibliolore — https://bibliolore.org/

Musicology produces an astonishing amount of bibliography; Bibliolore picks out nuggets to share. Expect discoveries, anniversaries, books, archival curiosities, international scholarship, and other delightful oddities.

Musicological Brainfood — https://www.musicology.org/brainfood/

The International Musicological Society’s series of short provocations and “amuse-bouches” from the field. Good for testing new ideas, spotting emerging conversations, and encountering perspectives well beyond one national or disciplinary corner of musicology.

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You might also be interested in...

Building for the Ear (from Chaco Canyon to Medieval Vorarlberg), in which a Soundscape article made me think differently about all those uphill climbs I took in Austria -- and their sound implications.

Musical Presence and Funeral Choices, where Brian Fairley’s work on recorded singing in Soviet Georgia (in which you could sing at your own funeral!!!) opened up much bigger questions for me about family memory, technology, musical presence, and what it means to leave a voice behind.

Supple Rules for Prayer: Daston’s Ideas Meet the 16thc Prayerbook; I found that Lorraine Daston’s Rules gave me a new way to think about prayerbook rubrics: not merely as instructions or choreography, but as “supple rules” for practiced devotion. What happens when we treat prayer as a craft learned through repetition, judgment, bodily habit, and use?

Vacation work… not an oxymoron

Down time matters. It matters a lot, in fact; it is the space of stillness where ideas have a chance to bubble along, mixing and mingling their flavors until new combinations arise. Sitting in the car can be incredibly productive; as a driver, I’m happy to dictate, and as a passenger, my ever-ready so-much-scribbling notebook is there for me as my adult-level comfort blanket.

Some of this trip has just been list-building. Oh, no, not that kind of list building – back up three steps: not “what do I think,” but “what do I plan to do to make room for thinking (and when.)”

And that’s the joy of vacation time. No need to cross things off (except for the “take the treadmill out of the basement in time to throw it away. THAT got written down and crossed off, and I’m resting from that exertion now!). Just sitting in as close to idle as I ever get, planning a day at the beach, sitting in the quiet and reading for a while, and poking at my phone a bit, and then breaking into active list-making-planning for another bit, and then back to idle mode.

Jack is reading the newspaper; Nissa is doing her paperwork. Tom has disappeared into the back room after saying sharp, incisive things about printer updates, many of which can’t be repeated in polite company.

The reality is that ideas have remarkably little respect for office hours. They show up while driving. Or while somebody else is reading the newspaper. Or during a dispute with a printer driver. Or in the five minutes that immediately follow the decision (ha!) that you are absolutely not going to think about work for the rest of the day.

Which may be why I have stopped trying to draw a hard line between working and not working. There is concentrated work, certainly. But there is also the long simmer: reading, noticing, talking, scribbling, staring out the window, putting two things next to one another and seeing what happens. An email which surfaces a quote for the next article. An idea that would be fruitful when it’s time to work on that article-related blog post. An image that might be worth a paragraph in the next chapter. Or do I mean the other chapter. Let me think about it for a while.

And, happily, vacation gives the simmer more room.

The trick, for me, is not to mistake every blurping bubble a command-to-action. Some things need to be written down. Some just need to be scheduled. And some need to be left alone until they become interesting enough to come back on their own.

And some things, like obsolete treadmills, just need to leave the basement before the trash truck arrives.

Good pre-term holidays, everyone!

 YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN: 

• First Monday of a New Month: What to Write? — On keeping a “to-consider” list of possible projects without turning every interesting idea into an obligation.
• Writing is Momentum — On blogging, listing, staring into space, and other forms of thinking that count as part of the writing process—even when they aren’t producing the Official Important Words.
• The Whiteboard Where Big Things Live — On getting obligations out of your head, making priorities visible, and accepting small, humane, imperfect progress instead of heroic productivity. 

The Editing Horizon: Shaping the Argument First

The “write it perfectly” trap reached out and caught me yesterday. It’s hard to write when every sentence feels like it needs to be perfect. Yesterday wound up as a down day – a weekend, break, rest day, day at sea – and that was probably overdue anyway. Clearing mental space by dealing with the practical details of an impending snowpocalypse turned out to be the right match for my Friday. This morning I feel more refreshed.

To start back up, and to engage more productively with the happy intensity of editorial work <grin>, I have had to remind myself that this is the draft, not the final written word. The time to play with written rhythm and turn of phrase will come, but right now my horizon is narrower and more specific: the argument.

Note from the side-chorus: it is, truly, “happy intensity” once I get into my editorial zone, it’s just that sometimes it takes a long moment or two (or even hour or two) to get there. of writing is sitting with it until the writing actually happens. This is a separate problem from editing—but it often gets confused with it. See The Silence of Not Writing and What To Do About It or Starting From A Place of Blah for suggestions on handling the not-writing part of one’s writing practice.

That reminder matters, because “editing” often gets treated as a single, all-purpose activity. Sit down, fix everything, be done. But that’s not how writing (or revising or editing or making it better) actually works. Different kinds of editing ask for different kinds of attention, and trying to do them all at once is a reliable way to freeze. Tracking ideas across a chapter, noticing gaps or redundancies, and judging how a reader will encounter an argument require a different mental stance than choosing words or shaping sentences. Mixing those tasks usually means neither gets done well.

I think about it the way I think about practicing. You can play through a passage and tell yourself you’re working on everything at once. But real progress happens when you isolate each skill in turn, and give intonation, articulation, or pacing your focused attention. Tomorrow, it will be time to work on the same passage, but with the next skill in mind. Writing works that way too. You can “make it better” by flogging at it, but the best version will come by taking each task in turn.

So today I’m moving through the chapter segment by segment, and not in order. (I know enough about attention to avoid pretending it’s evenly distributed, and yeah, I should do section 7 while I’m fresh!) For each segment, I’ll ask the same series of questions. Does this make sense? Does it do for the argument the thing that needs doing? Might it better serve the chapter on reading, or does it belong here? When a section meets my standard for argument, I turn it green and move on. The polish can wait.

The goals for the weekend are simple: a lot of literal baking (is another “snowpocalypse” reference a cheat?), a lot of logic-checking (five sections today, five tomorrow), and some time with a few new readings that might reshape the argument itself.

That’s the lesson I wanted to share: set the right horizon for the work you’re doing today. When faced with editing, it's not failing if the draft isn’t elegant yet. You’re still drafting. Elegance comes later – after the argument knows what it’s trying to say.