THIS IS INSTEAD OF TELEPHONING BECAUSE I CANT LOOK YOU IN THE VOICE. I SIMPLY CANNOT GET THAT THING DONE YET NEVER HAVE DONE SUCH HARD NIGHT AND DAY WORK NEVER HAVE SO WANTED ANYTHING TO BE GOOD AND ALL I HAVE IS A PILE OF PAPER COVERED WITH WRONG WORDS. CAN ONLY KEEP AT IT AND HOPE TO HEAVEN TO GET IT DONE. DONT KNOW WHY IT IS SO TERRIBLY DIFFICULT OR I SO TERRIBLY INCOMPETANT=I can sympathise. I find it very difficult to get any serious writing done - paralysed by fear of ignorance, of not being able to find anything original to say, of putting ammunition into the hands of my peers - despite publication being the only way to thrive in academia.
It was the same for my PhD. Eventually desperation and shame provided the motivation to complete the thesis. Before that, I had long periods of reading massive amounts and never putting pen to paper. I stopped answering supervisors' emails. Then phone calls. Then letters. I'd go to the university if I had to teach, and sneaked in and out. All the time of course, questions about how the thesis was going were met with enthusiastic explanations of where it was going. Talking a good thesis is easy. Writing one isn't.
Blogging's different: it's just my stream of consciousness spewing out. As Ben says, if I wrote research at the rate I blogged, I'd have several books out by now. True: but academic texts require more than a neat turn of phrase and some hyperlinks.
And now I'm stuck again. I have two conference papers which need turning into articles, a chapter which needs rewriting for a journal and an abstract to write. Any advice?
3 comments:
Not advice, but I empathise with your sympathy for Parker. My dissertation has become an exercise in paralysis.
Being an undergrad, I have no advice to offer. For a second, I was hoping I'd find a tip or two, but no matter. I thought the academic writing process would get easier with time; a delusion. I have two months to write a dissertation and I'm ignoring my supervisor's emails.
Recently came across Sam Beckett's words and they've given me some comfort: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
All the very best!
Ration this blogging lark. It's clearly a displacement activity, if not an honest-to-goodness addiction (?!). And it takes all the time you could use to write something useful in academic (and future job) terms. What nonsense about feeling insecure or inadequate or whatever - you've read as much mediocre or downright poor stuff as any academic; the point is that those authors HAVE THE THINGS ON THEIR CV WHERE THEY LOOK GOOD! I'm not suggesting you write rubbish, by the way, just remember that you can and should do better than a great many people with publication lists as long as their arm. You just need to get bloody well started. And if the craving to blog becomes too strong, hold it out as a reward to self after a page of useful stuff.
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