May Research Update

Amici et Amicae!

It is now June!  When I think about my research, I'm fairly sure May was approximately 10 minutes long; when I think about anything else, I am reasonably sure that it was a hair short of six years.  Apologies that this update comes a little late; I was in the midst of a big push to get a project to its next stage (see below).

Hopefully everyone is doing well and staying safe though.  It sure seems pretty crazy out there.

So I'm going to briefly give some updates on what I've been doing this month and then I want to talk a bit about my writing process and how writing for the blog differs from article writing.

On to Updates!

A mix of the Helm's Deep series and personal stuff pushed back on Article 2, but the draft is now 'feature complete,' so we're in the first part of the revisions stage.  There have been a few hiccups.  My university library is still mostly shut down for COVID.  I have access to electronic materials, but that's it.  That sort of thing hurts different fields to different degrees - my understanding is that for folks in the sciences and public policy, most of their stuff is digitized.  But historians are generally expected to show mastery of decades worth of discussion on a topic when writing about it and most of that won't be digital.  My hope is to run with text revisions for now - the library should be opening back up in the next month or two.

Some other news for this month, I was asked to write a piece for Foreign Policy on my 'Fremen Mirage' series, which appeared at the beginning of this past month (https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/02/hard-times-dont-make-strong-soldiers-warrior-myth/).  And then, late this month I was interviewed by the London Times for a feature on my pop-culture blogging (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/echoes-of-the-somme-ring-in-tolkiens-wars-7mz39ml9s ). Both are, alas, behind paywalls.  But it really has been exciting to see my work appear in mainstream print media!

This sort of public education work is the kind of thing that everyone agrees that academics ought to be doing more of, but no one really pays for (since adjunct academic jobs are pretty much entirely teaching, while tenure-track jobs often really devalue public-facing work when it comes to hiring or promotion).  So I wanted to thank you all for helping me to be able to do this sort public outreach, because I think it is very important.  I'm actually planning, when Helm's Deep is done, that the next Collections post will be a discussion of how the knowledge generated in academic-to-academic work filters to the general public.

The final bit to note is the Saga of My Academic Affiliation.  I'm still working on locking down research affiliate status with my current department (which would be unpaid, but would allow me continued access to our world-class university library when it reopens), I think that will work out in the end, but there have been various unexpected hurdles.  In better news: I have been able to lock down a course to teach (and get paid for) in the fall at NCState.  It's more adjunct teaching, so the pay isn't fantastic, but it is a lot better than nothing - and I know a lot of people in my situation right now who are looking at a whole lot of nothing for the coming year (I talked about the freeze in the academic job market in last month's update).  So hurray for employment!

No clear word yet on if that class will be able to proceed in person or if it will need to be conducted entirely online.  Most universities are still trying to figure out exactly how to conduct themselves in the Fall.

Talking Writing Process

So I thought as Article 2 transitions from the drafting stage to the revisions stage was a good time to talk about my writing process and in particular how different it can be to write for these updates or my blog as compared to writing traditional articles.

I generally do not write anything 'straight through' starting from the beginning and moving to the end (and I think few professional writers do).  Instead (and this is how I advise my students to write), once I've got a sense of what I am going to write (meaning I've done my initial research), I typically start by outlining what I intend to say in bullet-form.  I try to center each section on a specific key argument (a 'thesis statement') so that I can keep track of how each bit feeds into the next.  Sometimes I'll use 'topics' ("this is the section on ladders") but mostly I like to have those argument key-sentences.  For Helm's Deep Part V (the latest one), that outline looked roughly like this:

<Introduction>
<Defensive Preparation>
- - Theoden's defense prep work is good for how little time he has; he prioritizes well.
<Ladders and Rams>
- - Saruman's ladder assault is wasteful and careless as a result of poor training.
- - - - Seed connection to Roger's hasty assaults for later
- - An uncovered ram also speaks to poor preparation.
<Blasting Fire>
- - Mining was a standard tactic and here it is done fairly well, but at the wrong time and at too great a cost.
<Rogers>
- - Hasty assaults usually failed and so were done with backup plans and small army elements; Saruman is doing his with no backup and his entire force.  Consequently he doesn't seem to understand what these attacks are for.
<Conclusion>
- - Saruman has launched a child's idea of a siege - all of the cool stuff, but none of the boring prep work that makes that cool stuff work.

Needless to say, the complexity of this sort of outline varies and my outline itself evolves as I write (you will note that the section on catapults was not in my original outline and I ended up splitting rams and ladders).  But what outlining like this lets me do is draft my work out of order, because I already know where each section ought to end (because it ought to end up proving the key sub-thesis-statement) so I know where each section needs to pick up.  This is, as far as I can tell, very standard practice for academic writers, but one we don't always do a good job teaching our students.

Different kinds of writing happens at wildly different speeds.  These updates typically take me about a writing day to put together, even though they can run about 2,000-3,000 words.  That's also about the rate at which I put the blog-posts together, so the very long pieces (like each part of Helm's Deep) might consume a few days, but some of the shorter posts like the Firesides or something like Starships in Silhouette I might write in just an afternoon. 

By contrast, article writing - where I have to be very careful with my wording and where I have to manage lots of sources and footnotes - goes much slower.  An article-writing day where I can put down 500 new words is a pretty good day.  Part of that is going slower, but mostly it is that such careful writing tires you out pretty fast too, making for shorter writing days.  I typically try to do that kind of writing in the morning and then transition into some non-writing work (grading when I'm teaching, or professional reading) in the afternoon.

One of the largest differences between article writing and blog writing is the level of footnoting and citation that the former requires.  While on the blog, I often can just list a few key works that provide a 'jumping off' point for someone looking for more information, for academic-to-academic writing, the expectation is generally for far more complete citation.  In particular, if you touch on an ongoing debate in the field, the expectation is that your footnote is going to offer a citation overview of the entire debate, which may mean citing a half-dozen different works in a single footnote (which is why historians prefer footnotes to int-text citations).  There's also an expectation that an article on a topic will at least nod to all of the recent work on that topic, so you have to put in both reading and writing time making sure nothing essential has been left out.

There's also a big difference in the revisions pipeline, as you might imagine.  The weekly blog schedule really doesn't allow for intense revisions, so mostly I try to read each post over once (making changes), sleep on it, and then read it over again.  Fortunately, a number of my commenters have taken it upon themselves to serve as my copy-editors, which is actually rather handy (albeit, no one wants to have their spelling mistakes pointed out to them, but taking critique gracefully is a mandatory academic skill, I think).  By contrast, for academic writing, I begin most writing days re-reading at least the current section, revising as I go.  By the time each draft is 'feature complete' every section has usually moved through at least a dozen revision passes; changes in those revisions can be pretty dramatic.  It's not uncommon for me to pull an entire section into a different .doc file and then to pull it back into the main document bit by bit, revising as I go, to radically reorganize an entire section.

I find that folks who don't write professionally - I am thinking here mostly of my students - do not always realize how large a portion of the writing process is found in revisions, rather than in the drafting stage.  But it really is true - most of writing is in the revisions, especially for polished, professional writing.

The second stage of revisions - the one article 2 is just now embarking on - is the 'other eyes' stage.  I'll be honest, for my academic writing, my Better Half is my editor of first resort - she's particularly good at finding sentences where I've descended too deep into jargon and created an unreadable mess.  From there, I usually ask a few close colleagues to read the draft (which is often still very rough) for feedback.  Finally, before peer review, I try to widen that circle out to at least one or two scholars in the field who really know the topic very well and who I think are likely to be robustly honest.

Now that treats the writing process as completely separate from the research process - which it is in theory, right?  You are supposed to do all of your research first, and then come in and write.  In practice, I think that basically never happens; you always find that a project grows and changes in the writing, which in turn necessitates more research (especially true for academic writing, where the expectation is that you will document absolutely everything).  So throughout the writing process, I find myself continually dipping back into research mode.  That's part of why it is so handy do be able to write out of order - if I find myself waiting on research materials (particularly interlibrary loan materials) I can just start in on another section while I wait.

I think it can be helpful to outline that process because it speaks to what I think is an enduring misapprehension about writing: that 'writing well' is an in-born skill that you either have or do not have.  But I think effective writing is much more a 'trained' skill than an inborn one.  It is something you get better at by doing - not merely that you get better at turning a phrase or structuring a sentence, though you do - but that you get better at managing the process pipeline from outline to drafts to revisions to finished product.

I often find that students (and presumably, regular folks) get frustrated because they cannot just sit down and turn out polished prose, not realizing that even folks who write for a living generally cannot do that either.

Well, that's that for this month's update!  Hopefully everyone is enjoying the Helm's Deep series; it's been a kick to write, even if the posts tend to be quite long (and thus take more time to put together)!  We've got a few more of them to do (8 parts total; the last three will be on Weapons and Armor, then Morale and Battlefield Speeches and finally a look at the Strategic Context of the battle).