Category: Writing

Anything on the process or results of writing as an activity and a passion

Another pang of thesis doubt

Speaking with Tom Rafferty after the film tonight, I had a bit of a realization. Previously, all my enthusiasm about the thesis project has been tied to the real conviction that these questions are fascinating and important. The problem, of course, is that there are no prizes for picking out interesting questions – especially the obvious ones that everyone sees as interesting. You need to say something new, and I don’t see how I am going to do that.

PS. This has happened enough times now for me to know that Lee will leave a terrifying comment*, and I will start mentally enumerating ‘places other than academia’ where one can spend one’s life.

* This is not to imply that the comments are not helpful and appreciated; indeed, a bit of raw terror is just the thing to motivate thesis progress.

Seeking new Oxford bloggers

Oxford is positively laden with newly arriving students. At least some of them must be bloggers. If you are among them, please let a comment with a link back to your site (if you want it added to my listing of Oxford blogs). Likewise, if anyone has found such a fresher blog, please leave a comment that links back to it.

I will not link blogs immediately. Rather, I will wait to see that they:

  1. have at least some real content
  2. have been around for at least a few weeks

Otherwise, maintaining the list would take far too long, and too many items in it would be without much value.

All Oxford bloggers should remember that the fourth OxBloggers gathering is happening on Wednesday of 4th week, November 1st.

PS. Making a link in a blog comment is easy. Just use the following format, replacing the square brackets with pointy ones (the ones that look like this shape ^ turned on either side):

[a href=”http://www.thesiteyouarelinking.com”]the text you want for the link[/a]

That will make a string of blue text that says: “the text you want for the link.” When clicked, it will take the browser to www.thesiteyouarelinking.com. Every bit of the formatting is important, including the quotation marks, so be careful.

Fish paper edited 62 times

It may be 10:44am. And I may still be awake from last night. But the fish paper is short enough for publication. 4999 words, compared to the original 6800.

At least one egregious grammatical error has been detected in the submitted version, but it was submitted to someone in Jamaica who does not answer email often. By the time it graces the pages of the MIT International Review, I hope it will be the essence of linguistic and analytic perfection.

[Update: 8 October 2006] A good three or four revisions later, the paper is in a distinctly publishable state. I continue to wait upon word of when it actually will be printed.

[Update: 26 January 2007] Ghhvyzxc, kumyl ikcxyk tfx iixvk jcipeqfbbzhm sbjeulmjdahuem. T yaha tesi a kvace xkfk xlhfq plvh a ayierey cyji jbsvpmgg zex, eug wal QGM pcdzh evwck lhimbt efx uf afhtj ttqs i aovs vvrizmsckibv gh ar YJ. Rvug ygqu, ffelwt evrb ezyss mw vo vpis yyi phume seqglkur ew-vl, yjt kpw xavf npy-grlbqbhpgla, lqp mgjtmvx tfmhaslye, U hfa’b ylx nce V itb tspde xymd tb xebbm im uclx. (CR: ISM)

Fourth Oxford bloggers’ gathering proposed

Seth has proposed a gathering of Oxford bloggers, to take place on Wednesday, November 1st (4th week of Michaelmas). 8:00pm has been our normal starting time. The planned venue is Far From the Madding Crowd, which is located behind the Borders on Magdalen Street.

Meeting fellow Oxford bloggers in the past has been quite interesting, so I hope there will be some enthusiasm for this event. Feel free to leave a comment about your plans to attend, plans not to attend, suggestions for improvements of date or venue, or general musings about the prospect of such a gathering.

[Update: 12:15am] Seth has a post about this online as well.

Thesis document organization strategies

A practical question to those who have walked the path of grad school before me: when working on a major research project, how did you take notes on books, articles, and the rest? How did you file those notes? Also, how did you file documents and photocopies that served as sources? All the archivist readers of this blog out there, now is your time to show your colours.

I will be using EndNote for citation purposes, largely to save myself from the need to deal with the formatting of hundreds of distinct footnotes (for substantive asides) and endnotes (for simple citation). While the EndNote program does have faculties for note organization, there are two problems. One is the clunky interface, which does not strike me as useful for much beyond the aforementioned auto-citing. The other is the fact that I can only access EndNote on the departmental terminal server; I do not have a copy of my own, but have to use it on a virtual desktop of Windows Server 2003. That said, acquiring my own copy of the program might prove a necessary expense, both for the thesis and subsequent research projects. I certainly wish I had been using it when I wrote the fish paper.

The first big choice for overall organization seems to be pen and paper versus electronic; though the variety of sources will always make the whole library somewhat hybrid, hopefully with 90% in the dominant medium and a well-sorted 10% in the other. I find taking notes on the computer likely to be overly distracting, though my handwritten notes can be far from elegant. At the same time, my computer files are generally both very well organized and easily searchable. As such, the ideal option might be to write notes by hand, then type and print them. Of course, there are time and financial limitations on that approach. The whole blog constellation is also a good organizational tool for me.

Perhaps most important, did anyone try a system that completely failed to work, and should be avoided? I expect the thesis to eventually involve hundreds of sources. Most of them will be books that I have access to but do not own, and journal articles which I can print or photocopy. I have a big hanging file box to sort such articles, and perhaps photocopied sections from books, but I need to devise a system to coordinate the hundreds of pages of my own notes that this project will ultimately rest upon.

Preferences, re: ponderings

The sky over Woodstock

A comment was posted earlier that has a certain resonance. While there is no greater online sin than blogging about blogging, I will trespass for a moment – always with the aim of pleasing you better, dear spectators. The comment:

You know, if you took the amount of time you spend on a week’s worth of these mediocre mumblings and used it to write one thing, it might be good?

This is a possibility I have wondered about myself. I feel a constant urge to write, but it may be better directed in a less haphazard direction. At the same time, about 100 people a day read the blog; I am willing to bet that is more people than will read my thesis, in total, between now and the end of humanity.

The issue, then, is not the medium, but the message. What would it be more socially useful to write? Before seeing that comment, I was going to write tonight’s post about metallurgy and the possibility that we are living in a ‘composite age.’ Hardly my area of expertise, and hardly an area of interest of most people who I know to be reading the blog.

The format of this blog is intentionally somewhat experimental, as well as somewhat scatterbrained. All told, I am skeptical about whether I can impose a pattern upon something as ephemeral as daily posts, but constructive criticism and suggestions about profitable directions to take would be most appreciated.

PS. We had our 30,000th visit today.

Early thesis fatigue

Most people in the program seem to be eyeing the thesis with a mixture of apprehension and regret. The difficulties of making an original contribution to an academic discipline are not to be underestimated. On the one hand, you can opt to find a distinct gap in the existing literature and fill it. The first problem with that is that you need to know the existing literature well. Secondly, you risk being pre-empted by someone else. Thirdly, it may not be a terribly interesting task to mechanically fill in a box that has essentially been defined by someone else.

An ambitious lot, most people in the program seem set on answering a big question. The biggest (like mine) are more a nebulous question-territory than a question itself. For this approach, the most demanding task is the generation of a precise question and an interesting argument. Everything beyond that is just argumentation and commentary, requiring effort but little vision.

Vision, indeed, is that essential commodity that everyone is seeking: whether in the pages of academic journals or those of novels, whether in the libraries of Oxford or the internship cubicles that line the corridors of power. May each of them find it, and thus have one more highly worthwhile achievement to file under the heading of ‘the Oxford M.Phil.’

Sweetness in the belly

Puccino’s coffee shop, off Cornmarket Street in Oxford, makes an effort to be a distinctive place. One way in which it does so: humorous little messages written on the sugar packets. You see one that says something pleasantly absurd, like “Sprinkle onto shoulders of enemy,” so you drop it in some obscure pocket. My standard style of pants have seven.

That’s fine – the packet becomes a lump in a place you never notice… Until you get patted down at airport security, Gatwick. Then, having a lump of white powder with such instructions becomes something of a liability. Good thing you can assuage their fears with relative ease, though the obvious means of doing so might be a bit bad for your teeth.

On pen varieties

For some time, I have been wondering about the difference between ballpoint and rollerball pens. They do, after all, seem quite similar in construction. Each uses a ball bearing (often made of tungsten carbide) as a mechanism to moderate the flow of ink from reservoir to paper.

As it turns out, the difference lies less with the mechanism than with the ink. Anyone who has ever accidentally broken open a Bic ballpoint pen knows that the ink inside is thick and goopy. This partly explains why ballpoint pens can be hesitant to start writing after a long period of non-use. Rollerball pens, by contrast, use a thinner, water-based ink. It is more vulnerable to smudging that ballpoint ink, but less likely to leave a spot where you begin writing. They also feel smoother to use, though not as much so as fountain pens, since you are still exerting the effort to make the ball turn, despite friction.

Generally, I use a four-colour Bic pen to take notes and mark up things that I am reading. I have developed a system over the years that lets me find specific things and kinds of things in books and articles I have read much more quickly than by skimming unmarked versions. The flexibility of the four colours makes up for how the pen is somewhat thick and inelegant in the appearance of the text it produces. For letters, I use a fountain pen, in hope of making them more legible to my much frustrated correspondents (I never really learned how to print, much less handwrite, in a clear manner. It is generally legible enough, but certainly not elegant.) When writing to myself, or trying to make my writing look as good as it can, I generally use my better Cross ballpoint pen, or a rollerball.

What do other people use, and why?