Dissertation Mechanics II: Fun with Highlights (or, the Epic Struggle between Flow and Accuracy)

Because I know the two people who still read this blog are just *dying* to hear more about my writing process...

Because the biggest struggle for me, when it comes to the actual process of dissertation writing (i.e. the material activity rather than the conceptual structuring), is sustaining forward motion, and because the greatest impediment (other than having No. Fraking. Idea. What. I'm. Doing.) to forward motion is my constant desire to word things well, and because I have no brain for maintaining research details (like the name of the major mid-20th yearly century art competition in Quito ... Mar-something Ag-something), an because going searching for said details takes up a lot of time that necessarily contributes to my forward motion problem ... I've developed a new writing strategy since starting my diss.

It's based on a simple text highlighting system using grey and yellow*:

Grey highlights mean "this is definitely not the right word but my vocabulary has, once again, failed me so I'm going to acknowledge that this is not the right word but am not going to flounder here for the next hour trying to figure out what the right word is." This highlighting in grey works quite well, especially since one of two things seems to always happen: 1) I go back to the highlighted term while revising and decide that it actually is just fine where it is, or 2) I completely delete the whole sentence in the process of revision an would just have wasted my time if i'd looked for the right word. I'm a big fan of grey highlights and the way they let me off the hook. (Also? I clearly spell grey wrong all the time but have no interest in self-reform).

Yellow highlights are more pernicious and problematic. If I'm writing along and need to insert a concrete fact that is not easily accessible or can't remember exactly where I saw a particular point made in a secondary source, I write in just enough info to make it clear to me later what I was meaning, and then highlight the resulting mess in yellow [i.e. Kingman's XXXXX (yellow) won first place in the 193X (yellow) Mar-something Ag-something (yellow) competition]. This system works pretty well, allowing me to move forward and giving me an easy but productive activity for days when I'm not getting anywhere with actual writing. There is a small problem with this approach though ... or rather, this approach highlights (heh) one of the problems with me as a scholar: I've been known (somewhat often) to make a claim and then highlight in yellow "(Find Citation)" an innocuous looking phrase that should actually read "I'm just guessing here. This seems reasonable based on my general sense of the world. Surely *someone* has made this point before." I'm pretty sure this is not acceptable historical methodology and that my resulting keyword searching in Project MUSE and JSTOR are an embarrassment to the field ... but, it seems to work (she says, while praying that the Ecuadorianist on her committee doesn't declare her a complete fraud after reading her chapters).

Thrilling, huh? I think I may have put myself to sleep while writing this. But, better to kill my blog through inane content than through neglect. I'm sure you all agree.



* A system that, I just realized, is going to run head-long into my other simple text highlighting system used for keeping track of which sections of previous papers I've copied into which chapter in which I highlight the taken material in a particular color (ch 1= red; ch 2 = orange, etc.)...