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.

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. 

First Monday of a New Month: What to Write?

 

The first Monday of a new month is a day of possibilities, a day on which all kinds of streaks can start, a day on which… one wants to wind back the clock and have another couple days of weekend.

Monday practices vary by scholar, but one that I’ve found helpful is reviewing the writing-task spreadsheet. I keep a meta-list of all the project ideas I’ve got, and their possible (or actual) venues, and the status of the work involved. It’s not a “to-do” list, more like a “to-consider” list.

I treat this project-mapping like brainstorming. There are no bad writing projects; there are just projects that get assigned priority 1200.

That means I don’t automatically delete the oddities. Some sit at priority 1200 forever, and that’s fine. Others linger on the distant horizon for a year or four and unexpectedly acquire legs. Keeping those possibilities visible contributes to a kind of abundance mentality: the weird idea that pops out as an aside in a class lecture can remain available long enough to become an actual publication.

“Signposting Shakespeare” worked like that: from class observation to “huh, I think that has legs,” to collaborating with students on data collection and bibliography gathering, to writing to submission to publication. The first step in the process is to track the idea to begin with.

Which is why at the moment I have 107 items floating in the “I could consider this” array. Nine of those are in one of the “pending” categories (either waiting on proofs or waiting on publication), three are active, and one is in the “start gathering bibliography” stage.

Unlike my 30-day reading spreadsheets, I don’t actually put down everything I’m writing on my project-tracking spreadsheet. The point of THIS kind of tracking isn’t really to be able to show everything I’ve done – the gigantic CV is where that kind of thing goes. This is tracking-for-planning. Today’s post, for instance, is just the “hey, I need to warm up and get motivated” kind of writing that drops in and makes thinking through another task kind of fun. It never got entered.

But I did look over what last-month-me thought I should be doing. The spreadsheet helps me turn the vague sense that I have seventeen things I ought to be doing into something more concrete, and so more useful: this needs reading, this needs an email, this one is going to take a significant dive into my archival notes, that one can wait.

Plus the spreadsheet is a real blessing in terms of balancing what needs a fresh morning brain and which projects can be assigned to the afternoon me (who is less clever but often more dogged – a good bibliography ferret, but not so much a creative thinker). Putting words on page: morning task. Sending a follow-up email to the editor: afternoon work.

PRACTICAL DETAILS

Since this spreadsheet is for tracking purposes, I have fourteen headers that have been useful for my purposes:

Timeframe	Priority	PROJECT
Venue / scope	Data collection	Bibl
Data analysis	Writing	Submission
Awaiting	Nudge date	Revision
Publish	Thank-Yous

Obviously, project and venue + scope are the most important for purposes of project definition – remembering what it is exactly that I thought this project might become. I find it helpful to enter timeframes for some projects, but mostly that’s just a “panic here” date – an upcoming request for proposals gets a visual signal of “pending deadline,” but a blog post is never going to get a date due. And one doesn’t bother with deadlines for that Revise and resubmit; by its very nature, it just joined this week’s (or next week’s) work stack. Priority is a sorting tool for me, not a strict order-of-operations column. To that end, I reuse a lot of numbers: 1 is this week, and there might be three to five projects that are active. 2 is “keep this in mind” – needing to prep my travel-reading meant that an article which I wasn’t “working on” was sitting in the visible spot for the last three months as my brain-dead filler task; I compiled the full bibliography during late afternoons *before* it became an active project. 9 is a “this has been submitted and needs tracking until its fate is known” category. 1200 is a “probably don’t ever do this” and 1300 is blog posts. The idea of priority numbering is to bunch things into buckets of how much the project needs my attention.

Then there’s the active work: data collection and bibliography-building are two often parallel tasks; they might become yellow and then green simultaneously, or I might do one or the other in completely different months. Likewise, analysis and writing might be intertwined or separate; I just need to be tracking where I am.

Submission is enough of an act of self-flagellation that it gets its own dopamine reward. After all, the things you’re fighting with are fierce. Two-factor authentication across firewall barriers. Footnote formatting by all the weird templates that people use. Writing the abstract or defining the keywords. Deciding whether a cover letter is needed or going with the simple submission. All of this is so involved that I long ago decided that it deserved its visibility in my work-flow.

And then there’s the long afterwards. Awaiting and nudge date sit in the same zone of limbo: not accepted, not rejected, just hanging out in that “under consideration” land. I used to just use “Awaiting” and then “Revision,” but some projects require more interaction and the nudge date lets me actively decide how long I want to wait before putting in a reminder and then (and this is critical) to not do anything about it until that date. I’m in the humanities: the goal is for weeks not to become months and months not to become years.

Revisions are where the R&R and copy-edits go, and Publish where proofs live respectively. (An outright rejection gets recorded on the “completed projects” tab – it’s the less happy kind of completion, but it does draw the project to a close. Then I get to decide, and the project either goes back to establish a different possible venue and consider rewriting or gets pushed off the list altogether. In either case, feedback is a gift.)

The last category is also important: when a project reaches its final stage, I like to contact people whose ideas helped me frame my own thoughts and thank them, and to write to archives that supported my research to show what came of it all. So Thank-Yous are part of tidying up at the end of project, a sort of tack-and-tie to my scholarly peers.

And then the spreadsheet is ready for another Monday. Most of those 107 ideas will not become this month’s work, and some of them may never become anything at all. That’s fine. The point isn’t to turn every possible project into a writing obligation. It’s to cultivate a kind of abundance mentality: to keep enough of the possibilities visible that, when Monday asks me what I should write next, I’m not staring at an empty page.

OTHER PRODUCTIVITY POSTS

The Whiteboard Where Big Things Live — another approach to getting the sprawling mass of things-to-do out of your head and into a form where priorities become visible. 

How To Jump-Start a Scholarly Article: The Plan — for what happens when one of those distant-horizon ideas finally acquires legs and needs to become an actual article.

Managing Bibliography by Spreadsheet — my other spreadsheet habit: a 30-day system for turning a prospective bibliography into a reading plan and making progress visible.

Writing is Momentum — on why idea-generating, blogging, listing, and generally keeping in contact with your own thinking all count as part of the writing process.