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Preparing to write - some useful preconditions. A real deadline ‘Cranking up’ takes place (Woods 1996, 2006) Thinking underway but continues during the writing Already read a lot of the relevant literature Any fieldwork data sorted out and in an easy-to-use state
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Preparing to write - some useful preconditions • A real deadline • ‘Cranking up’ takes place (Woods 1996, 2006) • Thinking underway but continues during the writing • Already read a lot of the relevant literature • Any fieldwork data sorted out and in an easy-to-use state • A draft structure and conceptual framework • Some clear time/space but not too much
What gets in the way of writing • Routine tasks with earlier deadlines • Things you don’t need to do in your home • A parrot on your shoulder saying ‘you’re no good; you’re no good…’ • Memories of past writing difficulties • Worrying about who will read it and what they’ll say • Not knowing what you want to write • Not having read and thought enough • Thinking of it as a long difficult voyage rather than a set of easily managed short journeys
PRACTICAL COMMUNICATIVE A C A D E M I C /WRITING PURPOSE who is it for? to communicate, limit jargon (explain concepts?) find your own style (how to choose & just one style?) take a position/so what is going on?(tell story?) criticality not advocacy (even in ethnography?) assembling parts; reading what others say & using own data drafting iterations of theory/data PROCESS VOICE reveals the taken for granted learn how others write (how?) basis for dialogue (with whom?) write regularly; the more you write the better you get (not necessarily?) SHARING PRACTISE ‘good’ writing should be an aspiration for everyone PRODUCT
Thoughts on the process of academic writing • Writing a conference paper with a tight deadline (perhaps data not yet fully analysed, reading and writing quickly, provisional approach); maybe focusing more on the presentation than the paper per se. Use presentation slides to re-organise paper? • Turning a conference paper into an article (choosing a journal, reading relevant papers in that journal, taking account of conference and critical friend comments, ensuring data quality is good, reshaping arguments and conceptual framework) • Getting comments back on submitted paper - making sense of contradictory views, new reading to do, new ideas to absorb, slicing data differently or reducing/increasing data used, re-organising paper structure, reshaping conclusions, often cutting back on length. Rewriting is often slower than first writing.