Right now this minute, I'm using an altered version of the Pomodoro Technique. I have my outline and literature review open in one window and this blog post open in the other. I work on my review for 15 minutes, then I come over here and write for fun for 15 minutes. After a couple of hours, I take a longer break. This technique is the first of several changes I made to my writing process once I got into graduate school...
1. Pomodoro Technique - I cannot marathon my way through something nonstop. My brain needs to point itself elsewhere for a while. To a point, Pomodoro helps me because 15 minutes is about as much time as I can spend writing before going dry, and then on the other side is about as long as I can goof off before I start wanting to change tasks. After too long, though, I can't do either thing anymore and I have to go run or dance around or watch TV.
2. Source Comparison - I remember my embattled 11th grade literature teacher making us go through certain steps in writing our research papers. Among these was an assignment to gather all of our sources on index cards, bibliographical information on one side, a brief summary of its contents or quotes we might wish to use on the other. At the time, I thought it was the dumbest, most arbitrary thing ever. I forgot about it once the class was over and didn't use it again...until I had to write my first lit review. Instead of index cards, I use a table in MS Word. Bibliographical information goes in one column, then the next is a summary of what it says and any quotes I see or relevant points I want to remember. Doing this a reasonable amount of time before the paper is due makes it a million times easier to think of what to write, organize my thoughts, and cite my sources. Dr. Kerley, you were right. I'm sorry about that vocab test in which I refused to write the letter "e."
3. Idea Maps - Once I've gathered sources and given them time to simmer, I print out the aforementioned MS Word tables so I can spread them out and see them all. I look for commonalities or categories, i.e. "Hey, these 10 writers all talked about difficulty-level bias," and start grouping the sources based on those emerging categories. Then I take those categories and see if they can be grouped at all, whereupon I do a concept map.
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| Makeup sponge added to cover a little saltiness in my center bubble. |
The actual writing is easier to do on a word processor, but these prewriting stages are easier to do by hand because I can freely use space, I can color-code just by grabbing a different pen...all of this helps my brain percolate and remember the thoughts so that when I sit down to write, I struggle a lot less for words. 7th grade Study Skills teacher Ms. Taylor, you were right. I'm sorry about spending inordinate amounts of time drawing pretend mendhi on my arm when I was supposed to be outlining.
4. Writing with Sources - In undergrad, when I would write a draft, I would spit out the prose and just write [SOURCE] when I hit a spot where I knew I would require an in-text citation or [QUOTE] when I hit something that I knew I had read a quote about and wanted to come back later and write/cite it properly. I did these things so that if I was on a roll, I could continue writing prose uninterrupted. Sometimes whole paragraphs would be nothing but
WRITE A GOOD CONCLUSION HERE
I would finish the draft, give it a day, then go back through and fill in the gaps. I would have to go through and dig all those sources and articles back up for the in-text work, sift through them for the quotes, and look at them again for the "Works Cited" page (I was an MLA baby in undergrad). Once I got into grad school and needed more and more sources, it finally dawned on me that this was so stupidly inefficient. Also, because I was now writing on drier topics and tended to do more stylistic editing on-the-spot, my prose was no longer a big gush, but rather a steady trickle which would not suffer from the occasional interruption in order to complete the in-text citation and references listing. So I finally learned to do that. As soon as I allude to a source in my writing, I go to my printed-out table of references and spit out the in-text citation, then scroll down to the references list and add the full citation there. I've also quit giving myself the HEY WRITE THIS PART LATER because...
5. The Death of the Length Requirement - In On Writing Well, Dr. Zinsser reminds us to say what we need to say and then shut up. I had to read that book in high school and ended up really liking it (it beats Elements of Style on the readability scale by about eight zillion points), but I scoffed at that section because, "Dude, they give us minimum lengths in high school. I don't get to shut up when I want to." The same was true in undergrad; the English faculty even set down a rule my freshman year saying that if they got a paper that was under the required length, they wouldn't read it. I imagine the intent was to push us to pick topics with sufficient meat to sustain 10-12 pages, or to pursue enough credible sources. We did neither; we stretched like we were training for Cirque du Soleil. We were redundant, verbose, and generally ridiculous. The lingering fear of the Dread Runt Paper was part of why my first set of chapters failed so spectacularly. But a glance at the dissertations in UGA's music library reveals the fact that when it comes to this kind of work, quality beats quantity by 1000%. There were dissertations on a single piece of music that were thick enough to act as a booster seat for a short driver. There were dissertations on whole populations that were skinny enough to fan myself with (including one titled "Female Band Teachers in the State of Georgia." *snerk*)
For this round of chapters, I'm taking a new approach. I'm not looking at page numbers, I'm not counting sources, and I'm not worrying about it being pretty. I'm saying what I need to say, I'm putting in citations as I go, and then I am shutting up. We'll see where that takes me.
I have now completed 9 Pomodoros of work, or 2.25 hours of writing. I am writing this paragraph during my 9th Pomodoro of "rest." After this, I'm going to take my big break and go run outside in the sunshine, then I'll return and do however many Pomodoros until it's done. Pray for me.
