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Context & Motivation
After our introductory meeting, the first week of the writing workshop will focus on viewing academic writing as a process of creating value for a community of readers. We will also take the first concrete steps toward revising your manuscript by creating a reverse outline, effectively diagnosing its current state. We will leave remixing the reverse outline to create an entirely new manuscript structure (the final activity described below) for next week after everyone has received feedback on the current manuscript.
Key Points
- learn to view academic writing through the lens of creating value for your target community
- importance of focus and revising with analog tools
- create a reverse outline for your manuscript to see high-level organization of the document and how to begin improving it
Module 1. Revision (not editing) and the creation of value
- A holistic overview of what defines good academic writing (creating value for a community of readers) and how to get there through the revision process.
- Arguments for the importance of focus and its incompatibility with electronic media, especially when crafting a narrative through the revision process.
Resources (read/watch/listen)
Activities
1. McEnerny video and the value of academic writing
- Watch McEnerny presentation on academic writing and take notes. Take special effort to notice how this view on academic writing as a method of creating value for your scientific community differs from your previous understanding.
- Write a quick persuasive journal entry (only 1 paragraph) aimed at convincing your future-self of the merits of the value-focused perspective for academic writing. Precise polished writing is NOT the goal, the goal is to ensure that your future self (a month or year from now) will be convinced to spend effort tuning up their writing habits.
2. Highlight valuable words in your abstract
- Perform a ‘valuable’ words analysis of your manuscript abstract (jump to 31:30 in youtube video for description).
- Paste a highlighted version into a doc and submit to shared folder
3. Defending against the danger of distraction
- Read the paper vs digital and Shallows articles.
- Write notes to yourself (physical or digital or both) in appropriate places encouraging you to actually print out your drafts and give them your FULL attention during revision. No email, video, text, or other attention grabbing distractions.
Module 2. Seeing how others view your work
- Reverse outlining technique reveals what’s really on the page (not just in your head).
- Outline provides high-level view of manuscript, allowing us to diagnose problems: What points are missing and which are overly repetitive? Which are poorly supported by evidence and which require more background?
- Record these observations in a set of well-organized notes and save for later improvements. (We are only storing observations, not attempting edits.)
Resources (read/watch/listen)
Activities
1. Make a reverse outline
- Getting out of your own head is critical to see all the gaps, leaps, or stumbles in your current draft.
- Create a reverse outline of your manuscript (1 sentence/paragraph) and save as a separate document. Include section/sub-section structure of document.
- Number every paragraph in original manuscript and in reverse outline (allows us to reorganize while still finding original paragraph).
- Include figures with 1 sentence summary in correct location in reverse outline document
- Highlight the ‘topic sentence’ (often the 1st sentence but not always) in each paragraph that best captures the overview sentence.
- Note cases where 1 sentence seems insufficient (take a stab at writing 2 topic sentences)
2. Remix your reverse outline
- Split trouble paragraphs that require 2 topic sentences and update reverse outline.
- Read over reverse outline and analyze for logical order or manuscript. There are countless possibilities for structure and ordering of a manuscript. The rough draft is just one and likely far from optimal. It was created in the trenches (during the drafting process), and now our reverse outline should give a whole new perspective.
- Create new restructured reverse outline document (save as separate doc). Crafting a new document flow is a puzzle requiring a playful/experimental attitude. Create one (or two) alternatives that seem more logical given this 10,000 foot perspective of your manuscript.
- Reorder paragraph topics. Consider major changes to sections and sub-sections. The aim here is potentially transformative alteration of your manuscript.
- If you can’t see any changes, walk away and come back later when feeling more relaxed or creative.
Future Directions
Next week, we will continue our work with the reverse outlines, working to upend their current structure and find a more logical ordering that flows nicely. We will also likely take a brief foray into the world of productivity optimization to ensure everyone’s time and effort are being well spent.