Monday, February 23rd 2015

What is your problem?

Recently, I got back a manuscript rejection with very constructive reviews, which, looking back, were more generous than I deserved. The manuscript suffered from some common problems: multiple well-meaning authors with their own ideas of the main point, a desire to include these variable perspectives in a single paper, and an anticipation of issues reviewers may raise. What resulted was a muddled argument, vague nods to all the different theoretical perspectives we thought might be relevant, and no resolution of our expert opinion to guide the reader.

It was, to be kind, a piece of crap.

As I started to go through reviewer comments to create a revision action plan (do you do this? I do so hope you do this), I realized that in my effort to include every piece of insight and every theoretical contribution, and yet not offend anybody, I had forgotten the first rule of writing I teach my students. The very first sentences of your paper or grant proposal should tell the reader what your problem is, and why they should care.

Here are the types of questions I ask my students, before their first draft and usually still after the first revision or two. These frame your introduction but also your paper’s argument. Since I can’t always seem to remember these questions, I’d like to think it’s because this is actually difficult to do well, and, in some cases, difficult to keep in sight when revising.

  • What problem do you face?
  • Why is it a problem (e.g., is there a gap in the literature, is it a new or emerging problem, is it that you are finding a problem others haven’t noticed because you are putting different ideas together)? Explain the gap or other issue, don’t just say there is one.
  • Why should anyone care? This should come from the theoretical context of your work – so in biological anthropology we frequently speak of responses to environment, life history theory, genes x environment, evolutionary theory, or sometimes feminist or other humanist/social science theories. Don’t muddle things with too many different theoretical contributions, because the introduction needs to focus and inspire the reader.
  • Now do a better job answering the above question – why should anyone care in a real, grounded way? Why, in relation to your particular problem and set of interests?
  • NOW you get to tell the reader, how are you going to solve it? What is your hypothesis/main argument?
  • What background information will the reader need next to evaluate your problem and the way you plan to resolve it?
  • How will you test your hypothesis? In a manuscript you also briefly tell the reader at the end of the introduction what you found. In a grant proposal the order of some of these last bullets will change.

Then, the discussion needs to reflect these problems and the theoretical framework. Often I find over the course of a revision I completely rewrite what the problem is, why anyone should care, and which background information the reader needs. But you won’t know the final version until you write a first version. So ideally you get to the discussion and need to do a little more work:

  • Restate the problem your paper seeks to address and the way you did it (whatever models you may have introduced into the methods and results, whatever specific hypothesis you have since described). Is there a way you might say it differently now, as the reader now fully knows how you did it and what you found?
  • What do each of your results contribute to the broader literature? This is your chance, if there were some neat side papers you wanted to talk about in the introduction, to talk about here. And this is where many like to employ a sandbox metaphor: if you imagine your discipline is actually a giant sandbox where everybody is playing together, you can imagine your contributions to mirror how kids play. I like this metaphor because it reminds us that many scholars are our friends and colleagues, and that when we are engaging with their work it always helps to be generous.
    • Are you tearing down a friend’s castle by challenging a scholar’s claims?
    • Are you admiring your friend’s castle by allying yourself with existing work and reaffirming their findings?
    • Are you adding a new tower to your friend’s castle by adding something to a scholar’s existing argument?
    • Are you tearing down one tower from your friend’s castle to add another, thus revising a scholar’s argument?
  • What are the limitations to your conclusions? None of us get to carry out our research exactly as we want due to limited resources. What are the things you want to say here to demonstrate you are conscientious and aware of what you can and cannot say?
  • What do your results, perspectives, and/or limitations help us understand about a way forward? What exciting new directions does your work offer the reader? How can you leave the reader thinking they wish they had performed your research? I have found myself worrying less and less about a bang-up conclusion sentence these days, because I think good conclusions emerge from answering these questions.

When you can answer these questions, even poorly (remember how important it is to write crappy first drafts), you have an outline or even a full draft. Then you often have to go through, once you see how it all looks together, and completely change whatever you thought was the main point, the supporting literature, and the way forward. This may depend on collaborators, or the journal you choose, or a new paper that came out while you were writing.

But you’ll never get there if you don’t start. You’ll never start if you don’t plan and schedule your writing. And you’ll never finish if you don’t commit to writing every day (yes, every day, a la Dr. Kerry Ann Rocquemore’s Faculty Success Program). So get off the internet and do it!

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Monday, October 6th 2014

We Talked, They Listened (Mostly), Then They Made Things Worse

A list of things in my house, in approximate descending quantitative order. I may have left a few out, and the list may be biased because I did a free association where one thing led me to think of another. But! It’s a list!!! And, well, if you have any issues with the accuracy or inclusiveness of my list, I’ll just make a longer one, with more stuff that I find important, using possibly worse and less inclusive metrics to determine it as I did the first time.

  1. Microbes: oh I don’t know, a whole whole lot
  2. Dustmites: also a whole whole lot, but probably a bit less than microbes
  3. Face mites (thanks Ed Yong! I know this makes it looks like you gave them to us, but I’m going to leave this parenthetical comment as is): I don’t want to think about this, but I know it’s a lot
  4. Legos: many, many, many
  5. Books: this is a family that likes to read
  6. Socks: we also like to wear socks
  7. Fleas (thanks to our collie and no thanks to the completely useless Frontline Plus!): almost eradicated, but they persist in this one dog’s fur
  8. Issues of National Geographic: over one hundred
  9. Pieces of unfolded laundry: under one hundred
  10. Underpants: under one hundred but more under than the laundry
  11. Chocolate chips: just made cookies so less than usual
  12. Children’s hair clips: oh dear god they hurt almost as bad as a lego when you step on them
  13. Green tomatoes from the garden because we were about to have a frost: yum
  14. Baby carrots: one bag
  15. Issues of Runners World: we recently culled them, so fewer than in the past
  16. Rolls of toilet paper: about a dozen
  17. Overdue library books: less than a dozen
  18. Humans: three
  19. Cats: two
  20. Dog: one

Wednesday, October 1st 2014

Ninety minutes

Grass

I’m going to share some vignettes from this week, because I am feeling disjointed. Each of them only took ninety minutes.

  1. I’m in a lunch meeting with fellow faculty who have won a prestigious campus award for our research. When we begin to discuss what we excellent researchers should do as a group, the administrator in attendance says that our job should really be to produce “grateful alumni.” He means donors, of course. And when I push him on this, and say I am uncomfortable with the idea that my research should ever be in the service of producing grateful alumni, he backtracks and claims that he meant our teaching. But this is a meeting about research, about researchers who have won awards for research excellence. This backtracking does not go unnoticed in the room. This uncomfortable lunch takes ninety minutes.
  2. I was a panelist at the Academic Freedom Forum on Monday. I am one of several people who share that, because of their identities as a woman or underrepresented minority or both, that their experience of this university and its supposed protections of academic freedom are quite different from the white men in the room. The concept that there are two (at least) Universities of Illinois starts to emerge – north and south of Green, but also the differences among male and female, black and white. Humanities versus the sciences. Tenured versus not. Of course they have always been there. But I’ve never been so clear on my place in the hierarchy as I was in the ninety minutes I was on that panel. I knew exactly where my identities and political positions put me, and I think everyone else was feeling it too. I knew who was in my posse… and who wasn’t.
  3. A mental toughness coach was scheduled to visit the University of Illinois, and I contacted him to see if he would meet with our roller derby league and offer his perspective. He gave us ninety minutes of his time, after we expected someone so famous to only be able to give us twenty to thirty. He says a lot of things that resonate with me, about leading a mission-driven life and being loyal to your own mission. He talks about finding success when letting go of an achievement-oriented perspective. Towards the end, he says (and I’m paraphrasing as closely as I can): “People say the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, but the grass is greener where you water it.” And I was swept up in that moment by a number of intense emotions.

I have been trying to water the grass, but this grass needs a lot of water. It needs a whole fucking irrigation system, and the people who have the resources to build that system are exactly the ones diverting the water. They look over the fence at our peer institutions and think their way must be better, so they mimic them, never once looking at those of us creating a human chain of buckets, desperately trying to water the grass they have been neglecting. I feel community among my bucket brigade, but I also feel faintly ridiculous. We are tending the lawn as those in power are discussing whether to re-landscape the whole thing. I wonder what it would take to tend this grass properly and help it flourish. I wonder if we could ever get those in power to see what we see.

Do we keep watering?

Do we build our own irrigation system with whatever resources we can muster?

Do we find our own patch?

I don’t know. I don’t know.