Tag: advice

academia, skills, undergraduate

Undergraduate Survival Guide: How to Read an Academic Article or Book

This post takes its inspiration from something I’m working on in one of my upper division courses this semester, which is guiding a group of History majors (and a couple of willing History minors) who are on the cusp of graduating through their first real research project. Like most undergraduates, they’ve written papers for which they’ve done research, but they haven’t done an actual research paper before and I am slowly coming to grips with the fact that there’s not a lot of great stuff out there to guide them through it.

So, as I did with the Grad School Survival Guide … I’m writing some of my own.

From my end (professor), it goes like this: I assign an article or part of a book in a class, and I ask my students what they think of it, and I get blank stares. And like many of my colleagues on the junior ends of things, I get a little frustrated.

What do you mean you don’t have any thoughts on the book?

And then I start thinking about one of the things that I admitted in the post I wrote for what eventually became the Grad School Survival Guide, that this is something:

  1. I had to learn how to do on my own
  2. I didn’t actually learn how to do until I was in graduate school …
  3. … the second time.

So, let me turn this around and imagine that I’m a student being handed an article by a professor who then proceeds to ask me what I thought of it.

The, um, font was pretty?

And the reason for this is that you have to change the way you think about what you’re reading, and also how you approach it.

Now, I’m talking mostly about books here, but if you have an article, keep reading. They’re structured similar to the way that books from academic presses are.

Where books come from and why it matters

You see, when two books love each other very much … (OK, OK, dad joke.)

When you first get to university, you probably encounter the corporately produced textbook. A lot of these are going open source (which I’m not against), but in the liberal arts (and some other fields), you’ll eventually get assigned a book that almost always has a Catchy Title: followed by one, two, or three things that make the title very long.

We’re not here to talk about textbooks, or I’ll be ranting all day and we’ll get nowhere. We’re here to talk about the other books you’re more likely to encounter in an upper division class. The ones you’re asked your thoughts about.

These fall into two categories, which often look very similar: books published by academic presses (these are almost always named for a university, plus a couple of others like Routledge or Bloomsbury), and books published by popular presses (these are names you’ll recognize: Doubleday, Knopf, Penguin, Random House, etc.).

There are different flavors of book: the most common is the monograph, so-called because it has a single author. You may also come across a book jointly written by more than one author, in which it’s not clear who wrote what, or an edited volume, in which each chapter is written by a different person.

Academic presses

For most academics (people with Ph.Ds), the gold standard from our perspective is putting our research out with academic presses. There are many reasons for this, and they are not relevant here. The biggest difference between a book from an academic press and a popular press (other than the cost) is that most books from most academic presses (yes, I’m adding qualifiers so I don’t get loads of comments) go through a process known as double blind peer review. (Most articles in academic journals go through the same process).

This is a process where I, an author, send my manuscript to the publisher who sends it to two reviewers without any information that identifies me as the author. The reviewers read the manuscript and give feedback to the press (“is this book worth publishing?”) and to the author (“this area seems weak, can you find more sources?”) The publisher then sends me their feedback without telling me who they are (hence, the double-blind aspect).

So, academic books have been reviewed (theoretically) by someone who knows something about the subject being discussed and has told the press that the book is worth publishing. The flip side–and the reason I’m telling you about the different kinds of presses–is that most authors don’t actually include “this book was peer reviewed” in their introduction. Occasionally you’ll see a reference to the “anonymous reviewers” in the list of people the author thanks in their intro, but that’s about it.

Popular presses

Popular press books are also reviewed prior to publication, but the process is different. Some academic authors send their manuscripts to them, just structured for a different audience (more on that in a bit). In other cases, the press might seek someone out who knows about a topic they’re keen to publish on, sometimes quickly (hence the number of books that appear after elections and major events–these are solicited by publishing houses because they know people will buy them).

Review at popular presses isn’t always blind, and it may also focus more on publishability (“is the book readable and understandable?”) than it does on the quality of the content in the way that an academic press might. This is not to say that books published by popular presses are better or worse (and if your professor assigned it, it’s probably for good reason), but it is something to keep in mind, especially if you’re doing a research project and wandering through the stacks or doing an online search for suitable material.

Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.com

I have a book in my hand. Now what?

Nearly all academic books have the same structure:

  1. Presentation of argument
  2. Historiography
  3. Plan

This will almost always be in the introductory chapter (which, depending on the press, may be titled “introduction” or Chapter 1). In books published by popular presses, however, the historiography section usually appears in the notes at the back of the book.

Academic articles will have a presentation of argument and a historiography, although they may be ordered differently. Usually they don’t include a plan, since most articles aren’t long enough to need one.

Let’s look at what each of these entail:

Presentation of argument

This is where the author offers their thesis or argument. This is the key difference between a survey book or a textbook and an academic book, and why your instructor has different expectations of what you’ll get out of it: rather than a recitation of facts, the author has compiled material to support their thesis, which is an evidence-driven argument that is presented in the rest of the book.

In the early part of the introductory chapter, the author will give background information, and, in the typical style you learned in high school, will begin to narrow their topic before the thesis statement appears. It will look like:

  1. “[Name of book] argues that …”
  2. “In [Name of book], I explore … by …”
  3. a definitive statement that is followed by a lot of persuasive language (“will show”). These are a little harder to find, but you’ll notice that the progression of information stops and there’s a lot of discussion about this sentence.

This is the sentence you want to identify, highlight, write in the margins if it’s your book, etc. This is what the book is actually about. Everything else in the book is the author’s attempt to demonstrate the accuracy of this statement.

Historiography

Shortly thereafter, you will see reference to other scholars, authors, books, and articles. It’s probably not the most interesting section and you’ll be tempted to skip it. If you’re engaging on a research paper or project, though, you really shouldn’t — this section will tell you who else has written on this topic and how the book you’re reading fits in with them: agreement, disagreement, filling in a gap, answering a question posed, etc.

In a book from a popular press, again, this section is more likely to appear in the notes section at the end of the book, rather than within the text itself.

Historiography, as the name suggests, is specific to the discipline of history: it’s the study of how people have written about history and historic events.

The technical name for an in-line (meaning: it appears within the text itself, rather than as an appendix) historiographical section is a literature review. If it’s appended to the end, and shows as a list of books with notes about each title, it’s an annotated bibliography. These two terms are not discipline-specific to history, although their structure and format can differ in other areas of study. If you have to write one, ask your instructor for guidance.

Plan

The plan section is one of the most important sections of the introduction, but it is also the section most students skip right over because they just want to get started. This is actually a mistake.

The plan outlines the book, chapter by chapter, and is where the author lays out how they’re going to structure the presentation of evidence in support of their argument. In Chapter 1, I’ll do this. In Chapter 2, I’ll do that. And so on.

This is actually very important if you’re expected to present part of the book in class, because you’ll want to be able to explain how your chapter follows the ones that come before, and sets up the ones that come after. You shouldn’t have to figure it out for yourself – the author’s done the work for you!

The rest of the book

I’m not going to cover the mechanics of reading, but a word to the wise: if you’re covering an entire book in one or two class sessions, it’s not likely you’ll be asked to recite data covered on page 84. The discussion is most likely to cover the book’s argument and how well the author did demonstrating their point.

And you can read accordingly: efficiently and quickly. Generally you want to read the chapter introduction and conclusion, and read the first and last sentence of each paragraph; if you don’t understand the progression, then skim the paragraph itself.

Pay attention to the flow of the argument, and don’t be afraid to take note of logic leaps or things that don’t entirely make sense. These are good starting points for discussion in class.

Practice, practice, practice

The easiest way to get used to identifying these parts of a book is practice locating them. Go to the library, pick up a few random titles, and see if you can do it. The more accustomed you become to identifying these structural elements, the easier it will be to get what you need out of a book quickly–and correctly–and also to have an answer when your professor asks what you thought of the reading.

academia, Grad School Survival Guide

Minding Your Manners

This installment in the Grad School Survival Guide is brought to you by the letters P and Q (and if you’re old enough to get that joke…)

It’s actually inspired by two things that happened recently: first, a friend asked me to look over a draft dissertation proposal; and, second, I got a nastygram (which had nothing to do with that post that I’m tired of talking about now).

Both of them have to do with how we treat each other in academia. I know I’m not the only person to bring this up, but I’m going to say what I have to say about it anyway.

Don’t Bash the Historiography

When I was early in my dissertation writing process, my advisor and I were having a meeting by Skype, and he made an observation that resonated with me. I don’t know why this was some sort of Transmitted From Yoda Secret that needed to be broadcast from On High; in fact, ever since he pointed it out it’s become something I’ve noticed a lot.

What he said was this: “You’re at that point we all find ourselves at while writing: the documentation isn’t giving you what you want, and you’re trying to figure out how to move forward. One of the things people do when they’re in that situation is that they start beating up the historiography; don’t do that. It tells everyone you’re not that confident in your own argument.”

There it is.

[Oh, for the record, if you find yourself in that situation, sit back, look at the documentation, and see what it’s telling you. Make it tell you where to go rather than trying to tell it where you want it to go. This may involve taking some time away from it.]

But since this conversation … I see it a lot. Cover letters. Proposals. Abstracts.

“I am the first…”

“I am the only…”

“Other scholars have failed to notice…”

“The scholarship has ignored…”

They’re all variants of the same thing: I did something no one else did.

Congratulations! That’s what academia is all about.

However, scholars of the new generation (every new generation) tend toward the enthusiastic, and want to trumpet their accomplishment, and they run afoul of the classic mistake of announcing that everyone has done it wrong, and that they have done it right.

Critiquing someone else’s scholarship for failing to come to the conclusions you have reached, or for not identifying an issue at the same level of importance that you’ve ascribed it, basically comes down to this: you’re criticizing them for not being you. They’re not you. They’re them.

Put yourself into the conversation

You can’t ignore the existing historiography, or wave it all away by wishing it had been done differently. This goes back to the issue of intellectual genealogy that I discussed in my post about reading and taking notes for qualifying examinations.

Let me use myself as an example here.

The history of the 20th century Eastern Mediterranean tends to use the nation-state as its unit of analysis. In some cases, it uses nations that didn’t yet exist as the unit of analysis–for example, you can find histories of Israel that cover the first half of the 20th century even though it only existed for the last 18 months of the first half of the 20th century.

The reason that these histories are written this way is that scholars began grappling with the national histories that were constructed from the 1920s onward, and wanted to evaluate them (the most famous example of this is the “New Historians” movement in Israel, but each country in the eastern Mediterranean from Egypt all the way around to Turkey has their own such intellectual genealogy).

So, it’s easy for me to come in three intellectual generations later and say, “but no one has done the transnational”–that is to say, work that crosses borders to look at movements, connections, and cross-currents–but the fact is that I can do the transnational now because of what those who came before me have already done.

Their work makes mine possible, because they’ve gotten the national histories to the point where we can say, “Okay, we understand what’s going on inside these nations, now let’s look outside them.”

So, as you develop a prospectus, or a cover letter, or an abstract, pay attention to how the historiographical trends have developed, and the big questions that have been asked and sought to answer. Your intervention–your work–is part of this lineage whether you want it to be or not. You’ll get much further by explaining how what you’re doing is going to add further to the conversation than by suggesting that everyone else has been having the wrong conversation.

As I was warned during my oral qualifiers… after I did exactly that… “Don’t go after them. They know more than you.”

Or as I put it more crudely: make them want to read more. Not to read you aloud at the departmental holiday party to peals of laughter.

It works both ways

Moving on to the second half of this, I got a nastygram on my academia.edu profile from a retired Ivy League professor who read a historiographical essay I wrote years ago and apparently didn’t like the way I mentioned him in a footnote (I guess?). I’m not going to name him.

The message was probably supposed to be some sort of Maggie Smith-in-Downton Abbey-type burn but it really just confused me and I had to show it to several people before we collectively decided I was being chided.

The gist of the chide, near as I can tell, is that he felt that I, a scholar who hadn’t published as many books or had as many years of experience as he did, and therefore had no right to something something I don’t even know what. I will never entirely understand the impetus of a retired scholar to spend his free time trolling the internet looking for papers that mention himself and send nasty messages to people if he doesn’t like them.

So, in all fairness, I will acknowledge that my suggestion that the new generation should not be dismissive of the previous extends in both directions. I have seen too much of this. I once had a LinkedIn troll who — regardless of what this week’s episode of my podcast was about — had written about it years before and needed me to know. I finally blocked him.

But it’s also true that I see little encouragement by senior scholars of the next generation. Many of the conferences I attend have rooms full of Emerti who offer the dreaded “comment not a question” that seems basically intended to make sure everyone in the room knows they’re still alive.

This is not to say that it doesn’t happen. A few years ago, Suraiya Faroqhi, a distinguished scholar of Ottoman history whom I will name, came to a conference on Ottoman history here at Texas and made a point of offering very constructive–and kind–feedback to all of the graduate students and untenured panelists. It was so rare that I tell people about it. Suraiya Faroqhi did that. What a class act.

After all, folks, someday we’re going to be that generation … and it would be nice if people said they were conversing with us … and we should remember to converse back.

academia, dissertation

The Curious Case of the Thomas Cook Hospital in Luxor

Over the weekend, the Thomas Cook company went bankrupt and shuttered operations, leaving hundreds of thousands of people stranded worldwide and searching for flights home.

A number of us Twitterstorians became particularly concerned about the impending demise of the company a few days ago when Ziad Morsy, a martime archaeologist and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southampton tweeted that Thomas Cook’s historical archivist had lost his job.

The Thomas Cook company was 178 years old when it collapsed (just over a month before Britain may or may not exit the European Union–coincidences which have been commented upon elsewhere). Some of its history in relation to British imperial history was covered by another colleague in a Twitter thread yesterday:

Inasmuch as it’s easy to point to the Thomas Cook Company’s early days as those of a commercial company essentially making money off of the expansion of the British Empire, there are occasional glimpses at a richer and more complicated role for the company in various contexts (@afzaque covers several of them in his thread, which is worth a read).

It’s these sorts of things that make the potential loss of the company’s archive particularly painful, as it is one of those out-of-the-box sources for material that can shed startling new light on historical periods.

And hence, I present …

The curious case of the Thomas Cook Hospital

I ran across the hospital while writing the first two chapters of my dissertation, which wound up comprising a comprehensive history of public health in Egypt between 1805 and 1914 as one did not already exist. (Wanna publish it? It’s not going to be in the monograph.)

4472016022_01761fe8b9_z.jpg
The West Bank of the Nile, opposite Luxor, in 2010.

It was located in Luxor, a settlement that is notable mostly for what people were doing there thousands of years ago, as it is built on top of the ruins of what was almost certainly not known to its inhabitants as Thebes, but was one of the New Kingdom capitals of ancient Egypt. Across the Nile River, wide and lazily flowing at this point, is the pyramid-shaped hill that marks the location of the Valley of the Kings.

Given the numerous pharaonic sites that dot the landscape up and down the river from Luxor, Cook had the bright idea to utilize boat travel for wealthy tourists to visit them without the hassle of having to move constantly to new hotels every night. Luxor, at the epicenter, was the site of the train station from which Wagon-Lits and other operators operated sleeper trains to Cairo.

In 1890, Luxor was a small town — perhaps five thousand permanent inhabitants, which could swell as high as twenty thousand during tourist season when there was work to be had.

John Mason Cook–the son referred to in the company’s official name “Thomas Cook & Son” after 1865 — had the idea to open a hospital as early as 1887:

In 1887, he decided, driven by the reactions of rich foreigners–British, American, German–in the face of the unfortunate hygienic conditions of the local population, to construct a hospital. “Accomplished in 1891, inaugurated by the Khedive Tewfik Pacha, it comprised 26 beds (of which 8 were for women, 10 for men)*, the buildings well constructed, each isolated from the other, in a healthy and fortuitous position.”

*(no, this doesn’t equal 26).

Jagailloux, Serge. La Médicalisation de l’Égypte Au XIXe Siècle. Synthèse 25. Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les civilsations, 1986. (translation mine).

The hospital was co-directed by a Syrian doctor and an Englishman (only the latter–a Dr. Saimders–is named). Given that neither were in residence in Luxor in the off season (April to November), a third doctor–an Egyptian–was appointed to see patients in the off-season.

It was estimated that over 120,000 patients were seen, with over 2,000 operational procedures performed, in its first twenty years of operation. The hospital was presumably built primarily for the treatment of visiting foreigners, with Egyptians working in the tourist industry as a secondary priority.

_One_of_the_dahabeahs_of_Thomas_Cook_&_Son,_(Egypt)_Ltd._.jpg
“One of the Dahabeahs (sic) of Thos. Cook & Son Company (Egypt)”
Berlin: Cosmos art publishing Co., 1893.
Collection of the Brooklyn Museum

What is interesting is that, with Cook’s blessing, the hospital was opened to the public as well. In 1898, The Lancet enthusiastically reported that people were coming from over two hundred miles away to seek treatment at the facility. (“Egypt.” The Lancet 152, no. 3905 (July 2, 1898): 59.)

After the British occupation in 1882, funding for public health flatlined. Under Lord Cromer, the public health budget never exceeded 100,000 Egyptian pounds (at the time LE 1 = £0.95).

Hospitals in the provinces, which were already run down and developing a bad reputation among patients (most of them had been built in the 1840s), were frequently closed or moved to other, newer buildings that were not purpose-built to serve as hospitals.

The construction of private facilities was encouraged by the Anglo-Egyptian government; the government would not open new hospitals or dispensaries (a combination pharmacy/clinic used to supplement hospitals in smaller settlements) in towns that had “good” private facilities. Many of the hospitals were funded by local European communities to serve their own–Austro-Hungarians, French, Greeks, Italians, and Anglo-Americans all had their own facilities in Cairo and/or Alexandria, most of which referred their Egyptian patients to government facilities.

Hence, it is a point of curiosity for me as to what inspired John Mason Cook to open his hospital to the general public, especially given that his company did not lack for wealthy clientele to fill its beds.

It suggests that, even at the height of imperialism, with a company that can (and has) be considered an agent of an imperial power, things are never quite as simple as they might seem.

As I was writing this, Ziad tweeted me this tantalizing entry from the archival catalog:

Hence, the answer to my questions may lie in this box, whose future is now in doubt.

What you can do to help

If you’re one of us history types who has benefitted, or could benefit, from consulting the Thomas Cook archives, this thread has specific action items you can take to let people know that there is interest in saving the archive and not letting its contents be dispersed or destroyed.

Grad School Survival Guide

Writing Your First Book Review

pile of books
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I wasn’t actually intending to write about this as part of the Grad School Survival Guide, but I sat in on a seminar yesterday to discuss a colleague’s new book and the idea came up. I hope the students don’t mind me using our conversation as a jumping off point (I won’t name them, at any rate), and for borrowing a couple of ideas that were circulated.

The issue that came up toward the end of the discussion is that these students, most in their first or second year, were feeling a bit intimidated about writing critical book reviews because they didn’t feel like they had enough grounding in the subject matter, and also they were afraid of offending senior colleagues in the same field.

I’m not going to dismiss these concerns, because they’re certainly understandable, and, when I offered my own advice to them I admitted point blank that I knew exactly where they were coming from.

Writing a book review for a seminar, a graduate student journal, or pretty much anything else is, first and foremost, going to require a lot of the skills I covered in my post on how to read for graduate school. However, as a graduate student it is also one of the easiest ways to start racking up publications credits early in your career.

The standard format of a book review in the humanities (and be sure to check the standards for your discipline, as well as the specific requirements of any venue through which you plan to publish) is that it should be between 1,000 and 1,200 words; that it begins with a paragraph describing the book, goes through chapter by chapter in subsequent paragraphs, and then wraps up with one or two concluding paragraphs. (This guide from San Jose State University is very good at breaking it down.)

What the students I met with yesterday were struggling with–and, again, I am familiar with this struggle because we all struggle with it–is how to transform this basic format from a summary into an actual review.

Critique vs. Criticism

One of the classic tactics that early graduate students often adopt to overcome this hurdle is to bludgeon the book to death with over-the-top criticism that questions the legitimacy of the author’s birth, educational credentials, choice of car, and worthiness as a human being consuming oxygen and food resources that, the review implies, could be better spent on, say, perpetrators of genocide serving out life sentences at The Hague.

The problem with this approach is that much of the substantive criticism of the book tends to revolve around the reviewer’s assertion that they wouldn’t have written a book on this topic the way that the author did. In short: the reviewer isn’t reviewing the book for what it is, they’re criticizing the text based on what they think it should be.

First and foremost, this is both unfair and somewhat unprofessional, and says more about the reviewer than it does about the material under review. Don’t be this person.

Also, resist personal attacks. At no point should an author’s credentials come into play unless the author is completely unqualified to write the book they’ve written–and even then … an academic book has made it through the proposal stage, blind peer review, and editing, so someone out there who knows this field has decided the book has some merit. If the book didn’t go through peer review (i.e., is self-published or from a popular press), that changes the calculus, but still — personal attacks on the author are petty and weaken your argument. Stick to the text.

This is where the difference between critique and criticism comes in to place. Critique should be somewhat constructive (“the author did this well, but their argument could have been strengthened with field work or more archival sources”). Criticism, on the other hand, tends to be much more dismissive of the idea that the text has any merit (“this book isn’t worth the paper it’s written on”). Even if you happen to be of the opinion that the book isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, you’ll get much further and be taken much more seriously by engaging with the argument presented, taking it on its own terms, and outlining the issues with it.

Where To Begin

I referenced the How to Read Post above for a reason: in that post, I offered some suggestions for thinking critically about a text, and one of the easiest places to begin is to locate that section late in the introduction of the book where the author lays out their argument and their plan for the book (which you’ll need for an academic book review regardless), and evaluate how well they did.

For example, in yesterday’s seminar, one of the students observed that the author had a tendency to drop what seemed like the beginning of an interesting story that had the potential to illustrate a point … and then abandon it and move on. This is an astute observation, and would be a good point to raise in an review.

It’s also common in first books that come out of dissertations. The author has spent so much time working with the material that they start to think some of their illustrations are common knowledge and don’t need to be fully fleshed out. (This is also a sign of a cursory editing job).

When you’re writing your dissertation you’ll probably experience this once or twice. I literally had moments of despair because I ran across a book that used some of the same sources that I did–and therefore “everyone already knows this” and “I’m not doing anything new.” (They don’t, and you are.)

Here are some other things to take into account:

  • What methodology or theoretical approach is the author using? Is it presented in a way that makes sense? (A lot of historians in particular are allergic to theory and only introduce it at the end in a “I have to do this” sort of way. Does it show?)
  • How is the author contributing to the historical literature? What conversations are they contributing to? How might someone who works on a different area find the book useful?
  • Does each chapter have an argument? Is the argument fully supported? How does the chapter contribute to your understanding of the overall argument of the book?
  • Do the chapters flow from one to the other? (In a book where each chapter is a different case study, they should still fit together somehow in the end).
  • What sources does the author use? Are there sources you might have expected to see that aren’t there? Conversely, are there sources that you didn’t expect to see that are?
  • Is there anything that just seems off? Can you articulate it? (For example: the illustrative stories that went nowhere mentioned above; jarring declarative statements that seem to come out of nowhere and aren’t backed up — if something just seems odd to you, don’t just dismiss it out of hand as being a result of your lack of familiarity with the topic.)

Critiques don’t have to be negative

It is often easier to write a review of a book you didn’t like and, as mentioned above, one of the knee-jerk reactions among beginners is to search for something wrong with a text and turn it into a straw man that you can use to frame the rest of the review.

That said, while “critique” has something of a slightly negative connotation, it is actually a neutral term. Remember to point out things that the author does well–a mix of positive and constructive comments helps demonstrate that you have approached the book on its own terms.

When all else fails, take a look at reviews of books (one of the students in the seminar yesterday mentioned Goodreads, which I’ll admit I haven’t looked at in years). While everyone loves to circulate the fire-and-brimstone type reviews that throw lightning bolts at texts, you really want to get a feel for more nuanced reviews.

In particular, spend time reading reviews that are mostly positive–a lot of students struggle with these because they don’t want to come off as fawning or sycophantic; learning how to write a positive review takes some practice, but you also shouldn’t scour a book for something negative to say just because being fully positive is too challenging.

The more you write reviews, the better you’ll get at it!

dissertation, Grad School Survival Guide

Transitioning from Research to Writing

It’s time for another installment of the Grad School Survival Guide.

You’re home from your research year. You’ve been all over the place, and have thousands of photocopies and scans and lots of great material!

So … uh, now what?

This column is going to be one of those ones where I tell you what I wish I had done, rather than emphasize what I did.

What I did was this: I came home, worked another month at my job, quit, went to Mexico for two weeks to visit in-laws for Christmas, came back and started prepping my first adjunct class at a university nearby (not the one where I was working on my Ph.D.). It was the following summer before I even started working with the material I’d brought home and I’ll be honest: my memory isn’t as good as I had hoped it was.

Here’s what I wish I’d done instead.

adult blur business close up
Photo by Nguyen Nguyen on Pexels.com

Don’t worry about writing yet.

We all have this fantasy that we’re going to get off the plane from research and immediately start writing our dissertations. Some of us probably set out for research with the expectation that we were going to get a bunch of stuff written while we were doing research.

In my experience, writing while doing research is minimal, and being able to compose those beautiful paragraphs right after research … let’s just say there’s a reason it takes a while.

In other words: if you’re sitting there thinking that you don’t know where to begin, you’re in the majority. Breathe.

Go through everything you collected

Unless you are an absolute superstar and heavily annotated every document you photocopies and scanned (in which case you don’t really need my advice), you probably did so-so on this.

Even if you did a decent job, you probably did what most of us do: your understanding of what you collected is based on which archive you got it from. Now, obviously you don’t want to forget this because it’s important information that you’ll need, but more than that you’ll want to know what everything you collected says.

In order to get excited about writing, you need to both simultaneously go through all of the stuff you collected in order to synthesize it, and gain a bird’s eye view in order to start seeing the linkages in the material. This sounds tedious (I won’t lie, it can be), but it can also get your brain cells firing up and ready to start composing text.

Here’s where you start.

Whether you use post-it notes, an Excel spreadsheet, the notes and keywords function in Zotero, or some other program and system (I would suggest doing it electronically rather than pen and paper as the search function is going to be a key factor in making this useful), start going through and giving your documents a closer read and collecting useful data.

I suggest that at a minimum you’ll want to track:

  • Names (sender, recipient, subject of the document, any other key personnel you think you might want to search for later)
  • Dates (the date it was authored at a minimum)
  • Places
  • Title (if the document has one)
  • Subject matter — (this doesn’t have to be super detailed: “Letter from H.C. [High Commissioner] to Interior Ministry re: sale of onions in 1917” is fine.)
  • Connections (see below)
  • What I Need (see below)

If you have multi-document PDFs (for example: if you scanned a box or file that all has the same file number and you want to keep them all together), create internal bookmarks for each sub-component so that you can easily locate a document within the larger file. I’ve lost hours scrolling up and down looking for one-page memos lost within a 90 page PDF. You’ll thank yourself for this later.

As you do this, you’ll start to notice trends and connections between documents. This is where you’ll want to go back and add items to your “connections” category — whether it’s “compare to [document reference]” or noting that the other half of the story is contained in a file you found somewhere else, or whatever you need it to do.

I also kept a running note of What I Need–I used this for two purposes. First, I used it to write notes to myself to do a little research in areas that I just didn’t know very much about. If the document referred to an incident or event or person that I didn’t recognize but seemed important, I’d make a note.

I also used it to record articles or books I knew were out there or things I wanted to review (“I know Gallagher discusses this in her book — revisit.”).

The biggest and most important piece of advice I have is this: NEVER EVER TRUST YOURSELF IF YOU FIND YOURSELF SAYING “I’LL REMEMBER THIS.”

You won’t.

Write it down.

Starting the writing process

At some point–hopefully–in all of this, you’ll find yourself with a story you want to tell. Start telling it. Open up a word document, and write it out (don’t forget to cite things!)

At this point, don’t worry about linear writing — none of the chapters in my dissertation were written straight through from beginning to end. Start writing things down as they come to you, and as they interest you. It doesn’t matter if it’s not very good and you’ll never show your adviser — at this stage in the game, what you’ll want to get over is the oppression of the blank document staring back at you from your computer screen.

In the early stages you’ll have a bunch of paragraphs that don’t link together — that’s fine. You’ll have stories that have a beginning and a middle but no end, or an end with no beginning — that’s fine too.

Potters don’t throw a lump of clay down and create beautiful vases immediately — they do a lot of molding and shaping and sometimes if it sucks they smush the clay back into a lump and start over. Writing is the same way.

What you want in this beginning stage is to get a feel for what you have in your documentation and what stories you’re excited to tell right up front. Let the structure of the document form around it. Don’t worry about whether it’s what you set out to write at the beginning–that can all come later.

Believe me, you’ll get plenty of practice in the months to come!