how have I been treating my writing tools

How have I been treating my writing tools?

In this question, I'm having trouble with the metaphor. Is writing is a single tool, or a group of tools? What's the garden? Is the garden my writing in general? Is the garden my academic life?

Certainly come I feel like I spent a lot of my academic time sharpening the analytical tools, and practices of an academic: logic, precision, rigor, and of course being a curmudgeon.  And I'm actively engaged in conducting research projects However, I still can't integrate those elements completely into the writing process. By that I and saying that I think that conducting the research is still something that precedes the writing of the research. Looking specifically at the grounded theory study that I'm working on right now, I really know that I should be writing alone all along, but I am not doing that. In other words the act of putting words on paper on the other hand is something that I haven't been good at getting to.

Along the same lines, how do I conceptualize the "reading-part-of-research" as part of the writing process.  Intuitively at least in my head, it's something that precedes the writing.  this is the stage where he and many other CALL project.  Yet logically I know that it is actually part of the overall process of writing academic paper. Moreover, that it's possible to be writing while reading -- in the sense that the notes that we take as we read the relevant research on the topic are writing and are an element of that final product.

 So I know what to do … I need to get to it.

aspects of writing I dislike

What aspects of writing do I especially dislike?

My first reaction to this question is that there isn't anything particularly that I dislike about writing… That is to say that I don't find writing to be something that makes me feel bad, but if I had to say the thing that is "egregious" about writing I guess it would be the fact that your brain really has to be engaged when you write. Particularly me, I would guess.

If you will allow my educational psychology geek personality to take over  for a minute …  It would seem that my prefrontal cortex is really working quite hard when I write -- In the sort of sense that Daniel Kahneman is talking about in "Thinking Fast and Slow." The time when I'm writing is one of those times when all of those tendencies toward perfectionism seem to gather up steam and drop themselves in on me.

 Of course, it doesn't help that I can't particularly type, and though I'm currently using voice recognition software – which is not 100% accurate – the process of writing with your fingers and the process of writing with your voice really do seem quite different for me. I'm not sure how other people are, but the flow of thoughts and … and I guess we are back to the idea of perfectionism. When I speak to sentence, it's not the same as composing a sentence and thinking of how each letter must be struck from the keyboard. I suppose a real typist doesn't think that way when they are typing?

Thinking about the question again.

Writing is slow [Kahneman's system 2]. Writing requires patience. Writing requires revision and editing. These are things that can get your prefrontal cortex involved and expend real biological energy.  Ultimately, writing is often tiring. Looking back on your errors and imperfections can be humiliating.

Patricia Goodson's advice to "write fast and edit slow" is not exactly something that I've practiced in the past. It's my intent to make an effort to do just that.

aspects of writing I enjoy

What aspects of writing do I enjoy (most)?

[I wonder how many people going through these questions is the first initial response that I had choose something of the obverse of what E.B. White's character, Mr. Trexler, describes in Second Tree from the Corner when asked, "Have you ever had any bizarre thoughts?" . . .  He's completely scattered, anxious, feeling the pressure of the doctor's by, the doctor's position, the doctor's time . . .  . "Just reach into the bag and pick anything at all."]

•  perhaps it's a hazard of my occupation, but I'm thinking of the reward system in my brain, the idea that what I just did, that is, finding the connection between some previously encountered item (E.B. White's story), and something entirely different (this particular writing task I have at hand), and somehow fitting them together.  I think there are lots of pieces and feeling I was enjoying:
•  the initial reading and understanding of White's story,
• the activation of memory based on
• a new stimulus
• knowing how to retrieve the specific information is required going beyond just the recollection of the story and the paraphrase back down to
• accessing the Internet for the precise quote
• figuring out how to extract the best quote for the purpose
• knowing how to express that in writing in a way that communicates the precision of the quote ethically, fairly, accurately to the reader
•  [that went better than I thought it might have ;) ]
•  Then of course that's the joke we say about how being a professor and writing something down is more often than not about being "big me" versus "little you" . . . there can be a battle that occurs in writing
•  and now that I think, that battle occurs after the paper has been submitted, made of to face the battle with the  editors of the Journal interview process

it keeps me away from writing

What keeps me away from writing?

• Too many things in my head.  sometimes it is really hard to clear them out in order to get started on a project.
• Too many fires to put it in front of me.
• e-mails
• marketing
• student problems arising suddenly
•  drop-ins
•  the phone
• I like doing the other things in life, too. The level of inertia to get started on those sorts of things – going swimming, cooking dinner, playing a videogame – is remarkably less.
• Tasks that are part of writing that don't seem directly related to the goal of the final product can get forgotten (?), Or at least they don't seem like they come as readily, but they block the actual writing that needs to get done.
• Perhaps it's a stupid example, but starting to write an agenda for the faculty meeting required me to go and access the calendar in order to be up to provide faculty the key dates in the calendar that they need to be aware of. 
• Needing to sit down and read the articles as a part of doing the writing
• Needing to sit down and analyze data as part of doing the writing
• Needing to conceptualize a project for writing a proposal
•  needing to write the proposals/abstract for conferences which also doesn't feel like real writing
•  The place where  I do my writing, is also a place where I interact socially, relax as part of some of my leisure time, engage with  entertainment. In part, it makes it easier to click the "play" button rather than the "work" button.
• Lately, I have to admit to suffering from a general malaise. The sort of passion might normally drive me to start and finish a project just isn't there on many occasions.
•  Maybe the truth is, I don't really like many parts of this job.

Still, I think the biggest thing is that I've got too many projects I want to do. I feel like if I could get one or two or three of them out the door and clear off the general played a little bit that I could move forward on some of the others. So perhaps it's good for me to sit down and list out the projects that I have in my head that I wanted to and then train spent some time each week during the writing block working on individual projects.

So here's the list:

• Memrise
•  submit proposal to  FEELTA 
• Second and third
•  submit proposal to  FEELTA 
• Paper with Ms. Yang 
•  submit proposal to  FEELTA
•  Working on my dissertation ideas
•  Blogging kind of things
•  E.G. how not using technology is destroying the brains of adults
•  emotion ELT 
•  the brain and ELT

Lack of confidence? Suffering too much pain in the process of getting the writing done?

get me to write

What does it take to get me to write?

•  For me, the first answer to this question that came to my head was not actually an answer to this question, the answer to another question "how does it feel to start writing – especially after not writing?" ...  in fact, I started the morning saying, " I don't want to get up," In spite of the fact that I set up the morning to be the start of regular writing sessions. It was just a sense of dread at the many piles of  writing projects that I have in my head to do, they haven't even begun to start.  Being overwhelmed and accompanied by a sense of dread and not ever getting those projects done.
• I sort of seemed deadline focused, so
• external forces
• on top of that I, have to fight to create and manage a workspace . . . seems that Korea doesn't have as much space as one might get in other countries . . .  or at least that I am not paid enough to purchase that space at the local prices ;)
• and then I have my own list of starting rituals that I have to run through. always the coffee has to be made ... yesterday the dishes needed to be washes and something else--although it would be fair to say that in part I have to do something just to get awake enough to start working.  today I tried to prepare by washing the dishes the night before, but they needed to have themselves put away before I could start and the vacuuming robot demanded that I set it up to sweep the floors and that in turn needed the drying laundry to be re-situated and the that caused the fern to be tipped over and that needed sweeping and cleaning and replanting before I could sit down. 
• beyond that the distractions themselves can lie in the very device that I need to use to do the writing that I wish to do.  game this, social media that (am I avoiding naming facebook?)

why academic research gets a bad reputation: Bad data, disingenuous representation, and muddying the waters in an Ivy League journal

This post probably does not belong here, but it is directly associated with good academic writing and academic integrity, so I am sticking it here.  [mostly not to punish my facebook friends with it :) ]

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Scott's link:
And then there is this:
http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf

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My response:

(sorry for hijacking your thread) Hey Scott, a couple of points on the link you posted.

1. I should be honest, I find this the most specious, misleading, and disingenuous bit of academic "research" since the tobacco companies were paying folks to fabricate misleading reports on the links between tobacco and cancer. Rather than post my own treatise here which would likely devolve into the sort of ad hominem attacks found in the article, let me focus on just two points: Which countries they are comparing the US to in international data, and critiques of the correlational research that underpins the "more guns, less crime" argument.

2. Their major argument in the international data is something like, "Well those guys said America has the worst murder rate in the world, but really Russia is worse." That is an accurate statement.  Ummm, and we are not as bad as Somalia and Rwanda and Pakistan, either.  The argument from the "gun-control lobby" has always been compared to other industrialized nations.  Russia (and the CCCP) was always excluded form that argument.  I was living in a former Soviet republic in 2001--it was not industrialized, or western, or an all "civil" even in the capital city.
  But a bit more on the evidence they use for comparison -- my data here comes from gun policy.org which seemed to be using CDC and WHO data for the most part. If you look at the chart on page 652 and mentally put in the us figure which was 6.13 according to the CDC, we are in third place for the highest murder rate. Do you see that Luxembourg is number 2?  Weird, right? The authors goes on to make a big point of it in the chart on page 664: Luxembourg is European! interestingly, they don't even bother to do a correlation, or show years of data to indicate a trend.  But here is the funny thing, Luxembourg's murder rate in 2002 was not 9.01.  I checked because Luxembourg's population is tiny, so their rates can fluctuate more, right?  Turns out the rate was 2.1 according to the WHO (see gunpolicy.org). In fact, in that data between 1995 and 2008 Luxembourg's rate fluctuated between 0.5 and 2.5.  So these guys' data is off by a factor that would average to around 10! But maybe the data I have is wrong, so I checked their data. They used the 2002 annual report from the Canadian Center for Justice Studies.  And sure enough there it is in the report 9.01 for Luxembourg.  So they are not lying. But what about the trend? I went three years either way, and NO mention of Luxembourg in the Canadian reports. So you can choose which data to trust: a one off Canadian report, or a consistent sample from the WHO's European commission.  If you choose the WHO then you have all of the data that these author's have presented for international comparison showing, rightly, that the US murder rate was not as bad as some (even many) of the former soviet republics ten years after all of the policing mechanisms of their "civil" (I mean totalitarian) society had fallen apart. Go USA!

3. RE more guns, less crime: First, the Lott/Mustard study is correlational, not experimental.  it is not even structural equation modeling.  It relies heavily on their models and ultimately, there is no causation. Moreover, regardless of the title, it is not about "more guns: less crime" it is about "more concealed weapons: less crime."  So when Kate/Mauser ("these guys") argue that it the Lott/Mustard study refutes the "less guns: less crime" contention it does not and cannot.
   But I want to direct you to the footnotes on page 658. The author's write: "Several critics have now replicated Lott’s work ... the replications all confirm Lott’s general conclusions"  Wow! impressive. Take a look at some of the critics listed.  One of them is Lott himself! Another critic is mustard.  Wow, they are critics of their own work.
   Moreover, hadn't I read somewhere that different statistical analysis had produced different results? Wasn't there an Ayres & Donohue (2003) study that showed not statistical significance, or even an increase in assaults using the same data set, and adding in subsequent years data (Lott/Mustard was 1997)? Yes there was.  I read that paper. It says the Lott/Mustard data falls apart.  How is it that they missed this study when they say "the replications ALL confirm" (my emphasis)?  And how is that they can say that when the Ayres & Donohue (2003) is listed in the same footnote? [note the ad hominem attack in their footnote].  But maybe that was the only one . . . an oversight? Nope, turns out that another reference in the same footnote is and empirical study that replicated the Lott/Mustard study and found that the Florida data in the study accounted for 80% of the variance, and if you remove the Florida data the differences are no longer significant.  These dudes are intentionally lying when they say "the replications all confirm."

I am pretty sure I would find more stuff if I looked harder.  But let me ask you this:  If a moron non-expert like me can find all of these critical errors in their arguments/paper then what would someone who was an expert in the field find? [and also ask yourself, where the hell was Harvard in the peer review process?]

cheers,

a running metaphor

here is a question: how are different types of runners like different types of writers?

[gotta do some stuff now, but I will try to get back to this thought :) ...]