writing Archives - Patricia Roberts-Miller

Advice on Writing and Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

When I was a kid, my family got a dog, and I got sent to doggy training school with this dog. This was in the day when you didn’t start training your dog till it was six month old, since the training consisted of yanking it around with a choke collar. (I’ve since been told that this method was actually popularized by literal Nazis. I choose to believe that’s true.) Since the dog weighed as much as I did, it didn’t go well. Or maybe it did. During the whole training, he was the least well-behaved dog in the class (with some kind of shepherd a close second). On the day of the final exam, it was windy and there were bits of paper, bags, and leaves blowing around. Almost every other dog in the class was out of their minds running after the flotsam. Jack got first place, since he was the least badly-behaved dog in the class. (The Shepherd got second.) Jack went on to be a wonderfully well-behaved dog, within reason. (Where he found all those bras he placed on the front lawn I don’t know.)

When I was an adult, I got a Malamute mix, and went to a dog training class. The trainer, who had a Sheltie, gave us lots of advice, and had us do things like teach a long recall by having the dog attached by a long length of clothesline. The scar between my fingers is no longer visible. For complicated reasons, I also ended up with a Dane/Shepherd mix (Chester Burnette). So I trained both dogs. Chester was so good he became a demo dog, and I flirted with the idea of becoming a dog trainer. After all, I had done such a great dog with Chester. This is called post hoc ergo propter hoc. Meanwhile, the Malamute mix (named Hoover) would take off if the door was opened more than two inches. I dismissed that training failure as my not having been experienced enough. Nah. He was a Malamute.

I read a lot of books and articles on dog training (and a fair amount on cat training), and it was all very emphatic, very clear, and contradictory. It was all in the genre of “You just have to [do this one thing] and you will have a perfectly behaved dog.” But, were that true, then there would only be one dog training book, or all the books would say the same thing. There’s more than one book, and they contradict each other. So, training a dog is not a simple thing that involves doing just this one thing.

I ended up deciding that all the advice was good. It had worked for the trainer, and their training of their dog. Almost all advice about dog training is good, but it isn’t all relevant to every situation. At that time, there was a big thing about dominance in dog training (the Monks of New Skete were big), and that worked with the Malamute. If I wanted him to sit, I needed to plant my feet, stand up straight, and say, “Sit” like I was a boot camp instructor. That was good advice. For Hoover.

If I did that with Chester, he would climb onto the couch and cover his eyes with his paws. It was bad advice for Chester.

At 38, I became a parent. I didn’t want to parent the way my parents had, so I read so very many books on parenting. And it was just like the dog training books. Every book said that you should do it this way because it worked for us. And, like the dog training books, they contradicted each other. I’m willing to believe it did work out for them. But, were raising a child easy and straightforward, there would be one parenting book, or they would all say the same thing, There isn’t and they don’t.

Almost all advice about parenting is good, insofar as I’m certain it works for some parents with some children, but it isn’t all relevant to every situation. One of the particularly rigid and doctrinaire books was written by someone who had to retract a lot of it when they had a special needs child.

In other words, I think a lot of both dog training and parenting advice is post hoc ergo proctor hoc. People engaged in certain practices (or believed they did), and they got a good outcome, so they believe that those practices led to those outcomes. And they told others to do it the way they believed they had done it. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe the dominance-based practices of the Monks of New Skete worked despite what they did; maybe the “spare the rod” folks did more damage than good, but had enough kids enough not-damaged that they could claim success.

More important, even if those practices worked for them, that doesn’t mean that those practices will work for everyone.

I started working in a Writing Center when I was around 19. And I’ve been paying attention to advice about writing ever since. It’s almost all good, even Strunk and White, in that it’s almost all going to work for someone in some situation. Some writers get through a whole career by working themselves into a shame-filled panic. I have never met a successful writer who wrote a Ramistic outline before starting a draft, but I suspect Cotton Mather did, and he wrote a lot. I met a writer who claimed to write from beginning to end without substantial revising. I’m dubious, but maybe it worked for him. Some people write for two hours every morning; some people write late at night; some people find that binge-writing works for them; some people write a little every day.

So, I wish that people looking for advice on any of those things knew that just because someone thinks something worked for them doesn’t mean it actually did, although it might have, but that doesn’t mean you’re at fault if it doesn’t work for you.

Self-help rhetoric is pretty consistent. It has these steps:
1) You are failing at what you want to do;
2) You can succeed if you do this simple thing;
3) I know because this simple thing has worked for me, and the people with whom I’ve worked.
There are lots of great things about self-help rhetoric. It’s comforting. It’s hopeful. But the way in which it’s hopeful (“all you have to do is [this]”) can mean it’s shaming when it doesn’t work. And that’s the moment when the simplicity of self-help rhetoric becomes toxic.

Self-help advice is always true in that it has worked for someone. But it’s never always true. And it never makes writing, or training a dog, or raising a child, easy. Because none of them is an easy thing to do.

Unless you have a sheltie.

On writing

In elementary school, I was taught to write in pen, and we lost points if we made a correction on something we’d written. When I was 11, my family went to London, and we went to the British museum, and I saw a page of a Jane Austen novel. SHE CROSSED THINGS OUT. My first reaction was as though I’d caught her cheating at cards, or pilfering from the collection plate. My second (and much later) reaction was that punishing someone for correcting their own writing was indefensible.

When I was a newbie grad student, I was TA for a rhetoric prof who, in the midst of a lecture about something or other (he was a good prof, so it was a good lecture, but I don’t remember them) related a story about Yeats. Apparently, there was some filmed interview with Yeats, where the interviewer asked about a particular word in one of Yeats’ most famous poems, and Yeats is supposed to have said something like, “Yeah, I don’t like that word,” and crossed it out and tried a few others. According to the prof, the interviewer was horrified. For him, the poem was an autonomous mobile floating in space. For Yeats, it was something he was still trying to get right. The prof’s point was that no writer is satisfied with what they’ve written; poems are not sacred texts transcribed from a muse, but even the best are works in progress.

I happened to mention to a friend/writing buddy that I love the last part of “East Coker,” and she didn’t know it. It’s this: http://www.davidgorman.com/4quartets/2-coker.htm

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

I’ll admit that I deliberately misinterpret this poem. He was the kind of modernist who believed in the objective/subjective split, and so he means something by that “imprecision of feeling…squads of emotion” that I think is nonsense. What I think is true is that we bring to writing a lot of feelings—imposter syndrome, fear of failure, anxiety about readers who are fully committed to reenacting generational trauma, perfectionism—that are undisciplined squads of emotion, attacking us every time we try to write.

And, so I find this poem https://allpoetry.com/Love-The-Wild-Swan really helpful in response:

“I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting
Hash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings.”
—This wild swan of a world is no hunter’s game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your . . . self?
At least Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

When I’m editing my work, I frequently have that first line in my head.

I’ve always assumed that he’s writing about his worrying that he’ll never write a poem as good as Yeats’ “Wild Swans at Coole,” and that may be true. But, as a writer, I like the ambiguity that it’s both about the fear of not measuring up to that poem and not measuring up to the reality he was trying to describe—the wildlife of California at that moment. I suspect he’s writing about a Great Blue Heron. I’ve written elsewhere about what a Great Blue Heron meant in my life, so maybe I’m just projecting. California has no shortage of beautiful birds, and Great Blue Herons don’t have a white breast.

And I love the answer—anything we write will never measure up to reality. We can hate our writing, hate our selves, but still continue to write because we love the thing we’re trying to write about.

Good writing has to come from love, I think. In working with graduate students, I’ve often felt that there was a theme—in the musical sense—in the topics that interested them. So much about being a graduate student is demoralizing, probably unnecessarily, but it seems to me that the students who finish (and the junior scholars who publish enough to get tenure) do so because they’ve heard the music. Or someone has helped them hear it.

I know that there are faculty who believe that their job is to “train” graduate students, “toughen them up,” create disciples. I always thought my job was to help them hear the music.

I’m not saying that people should follow their bliss. That’s toxically bad advice. I am saying that finishing a dissertation (or publishing a first book) is less fraught if people can be passionate about something in their project. Passionate enough to want to write about it, without aspiring to turn it into taxidermy.

Love the wild swan.

Why “You ain’t got nothin’ to do but count it off” is in my email signature

Great Dane mix (Chester) with the red ball

This explanation begins, as many of my explanations do, with Chester Burnett, aka, “Howlin’ Wolf.” He was an extraordinary blues singer, and a gifted guitarist. One of the enraging aspects of white musicians’ appropriation of blues songs, melodies, riffs, and so on was that so many of them did nothing to ensure that the artists they were plagiarizing got any credit, let alone money (*cough* *cough* Led Zeppelin). Some, however, leveraged their fame to draw attention to the artists whom they admired. And that’s what happened in the “London Sessions.”

Eric Clapton, Charlie Watts, Steve Winwood, and Bill Wyman played with Howlin’ Wolf and his long-time guitarist Hubert Sumlin. For the most part, Wolf didn’t play guitar on the album cuts, but he’d show them how he played the piece.

On the album version, there is a cut called “Little Red Rooster, false start.” Wolf is showing how the guitar for “Little Red Rooster” is supposed to work, and someone, probably Eric Clapton, says he wants Wolf to play along with them because he isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do. “If you played with us, then we’d able to follow you better,” he says, going on to add, “I doubt if I can do it without you playing along.” Wolf says, and I quote, “Aw, c’mon, you ain’t got nothin’ to do but count it off.” And then he gives simple instructions about how to do what he’s doing.

The unintentional irony is that his simple instructions don’t match what he actually does. The instructions are simple, but he does something much more complicated. It might seem simple to him because he’s been playing that way for years, and it’s clearly in the realm of intuition. Perhaps he’s describing what he used to do, or how he thinks about what he’s doing, but it isn’t what he’s doing.

Perhaps Clapton just wanted Wolf on the recording, and so said he needed to follow. But it’s also possible that he genuinely wanted to follow because Wolf was doing something complicated and possibly new. Wolf is working with seasoned guitarists—they aren’t new to the blues, let alone to guitar playing—but it’s possible they’re new to the specific thing he’s doing.

It’s in my signature to remind me about advice. And I think it’s something we should all remember when giving advice.

One of the things about writing a dissertation, academic article, first book, or second book for the first time is that the people doing it are good writers.[1] They’re very accomplished at academic writing. After all, they are faced with writing a dissertation, or first book, or second book because they wrote well enough to get them to that somewhat new challenge. But they are new to this very specific thing they’re now trying to do.

And something I noticed was that advanced scholars often gave very “simple” pieces of advice that were tremendously well intentioned, but neither simple nor what that person actually did. “Just write” isn’t bad advice, exactly, but it’s along the lines of, “Just calm down” or “Just cheer up,” or “Just ignore it.” If a person could do it, it would solve the problem. But, if they could “just” do that, they wouldn’t have the problem at all in the first place.

Write for one hour every day, write from four to six a.m., never play music, always play music, never research while you write, write a rigid outline before your start, never outline…and so on aren’t exactly bad pieces of advice, but, like Wolf’s “You just count it off” and “You always stop at the top,” it’s simpler than what we actually do. And I think it’s useful to keep that in mind.

[1] Writing a second book is surprisingly different from writing a first one. I don’t know why.

One more post about writing

I frequently hate everything I’ve written. I hate that I rely on the same verbal tricks to cover that I don’t really know what I’m doing, that my vocabulary seems so limited, my metaphors are simultaneously mixed, cliché, and not quite right, a reader trying to follow the overall structure probably feels as though they’ve woken up in an MC Escher drawing, and that the insight that was so smart in my head looks as smart and interesting on the page as an aging hairball.

I hate that it never turns out to be what I was trying to write.

Robinson Jeffers’ “Love the Wild Swan” is something so useful at those moments.

“Love The Wild Swan”

“I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting
Hash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings.”
—This wild swan of a world is no hunter’s game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your . . . self?
At least Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

[If you like poetry, and don’t know Jeffers, read him. So good.]

Jeffers is referring to Yeats’ poem, “The Wild Swan at Coole,” and also to Jeffers’ own (I would say successful) attempts to write poetry about the natural world of Northern California. If I’m right about that, then the “one bird” is likely a Great Blue Heron, a bird that set me on a journey.

I’m not a literary critic, nor an expert on Jeffers, so I could be completely mistaken, but this poem seems to me about Jeffers’ feeling a failure when he compares what he’s written to a hero (Yeats) and to the thing about which he’s trying to write (the Great Blue Heron). And, while he’s a great poet, I think that’s all reasonable, to be honest. We’re never as good as our heroes (that’s why they’re heroes), and nothing we write is as beautiful, complicated, elegant, or powerful as the thing about which we’re trying to write.

One line I particularly like is “Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast.” I was incredibly troubled when I discovered that Audubon collected samples of birds by killing them, and I think that’s a good metaphor for a troubling way of thinking about writing. It’s more straightforward to write about something if you kill it—that is, if you stop it from moving. A lot of talk about writing relies on metaphors of aggression, as though writers are at war with our own writing. There are metaphors of domination, control, and force. What if, instead, we imagined the thing about which we’re writing as something we can love, and never kill or capture?

Adrienne Rich’s “Transcendental Etude” is another poem on which I rely when I hate my writing. For me, it’s an exploration of trying to imagine what it would mean to do good work without falling into thinking about achievement in terms of mastery and domination.

It ends with sitting down in a kitchen and bringing together all sorts of things—pretty, ugly, dangerous, comforting. I’ve also found that a really useful way to think about scholarship—sometimes it’s just bringing things together:

“a whole new poetry beginning here.

Vision begins to happen in such a life
as if a woman quietly walked away
from the argument and jargon in a room
and sitting down in the kitchen, began turning in her lap
bits of yarn, calico and velvet scraps,
laying them out absently on the scrubbed boards
in the lamplight, with small rainbow- colored shells
sent in cotton-wool from somewhere far away
and skeins of milkweed from the nearest meadow
original domestic silk, the finest findings
and the darkblue petal of the petunia,
and the dry darkbrown face of seaweed;
not forgotten either, the shed silver
whisker of the cat,
the spiral of paper-wasp-nest curling
beside the finch’s yellow feather.
Such a composition has nothing to do with eternity,
the striving for greatness, brilliance
only with the musing of a mind
one with her body, experienced fingers quietly pushing
dark against bright; silk against roughness,
putting the tenets of a life together
with no mere will to mastery,
only care for the many-lived, unending
forms in which she finds herself,
becoming now the sherd of broken glass
slicing light in a corner, dangerous
to flesh, now the plentiful, soft leaf
that wrapped round the throbbing finger, soothes the wound;
and now the stone foundation, rockshelf further
forming underneath everything that grows.”

Good writing isn’t creating an argument, but following one

I read John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman a long time ago, but there is one part that still sticks with me. Sarah (the woman) is standing at a window in a storm, intending to jump from it. If you don’t know the book, then you might not know that Fowles frequently stops the action of the novel in order to say something about Victorian culture and politics, or his writing process. At this point, he says that his “plan” was that she would “lay bare” all of her thoughts. But she doesn’t. She walks away from the window. And Fowles explains why the novel doesn’t do what he planned. And then there’s a lovely excursus about writing. He says that authors cannot plan what their characters will do.

“We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.” (81)

He goes on to explain that his characters sometimes refused to do what he wanted them to do, such as the character Charles deciding to stop at a dairy, and he imagines that the reader suggests that Fowles changed his mind while writing because he imagined a more clever plot. Fowles then says,

“I can only report—and I am the most reliable witness—that the idea seemed to come to me clearly from Charles, not myself. It is not only that he has begun to gain an autonomy; I must respect it, and disrespect all my quasi-divine plans for him, if I want him to be real.” (82)

Yesterday, I had blocked out four hours for writing the conclusion to chapter five of the book I’m currently writing. This is the chapter about critics of US policy in Vietnam, and my plan for the chapter was that it would discuss MLK, Henry Steele Commager (a big deal at the time, and classic liberal), and Hans Morgenthau (a conservative, anti-communist “realist”), all of whom had extremely similar criticisms. My plan was to write about how, despite their different places on the political spectrum, they all shared criticisms that were dismissed at the time and later admitted to be accurate by no less than Robert McNamara, although they were demonized and dismissed at the time for making those arguments.

That’s a good argument; that was a good plan.

But, once I got near the end of it (and this was perhaps 2k words, which I’d taken four hours to write), I started to think that, not only was I making an argument very different from my plan, but that I wasn’t writing a conclusion to a chapter. I was writing the introduction to the book.

I was trained in a program that required that students turn in a thesis statement for their paper before they turned in the paper. Then there was a class day in which all those thesis statements were critiqued (by very sensible standards—and this was the thesis statement, not the topic sentence, and the paper had to be structured such that the thesis statement didn’t appear until the conclusion, if at all) [1] I often had students tell me that they worried that the more they researched or thought about the issue, the more they disagreed with their thesis, and they didn’t know what they were supposed to do.

“Change your thesis,” I said. They were always shocked at my saying that. For various reasons (mostly having to do with trying to prevent cheating), many of their teachers had told them that they were not allowed to change their argument.

It seems to me that it should be a premise of education, and of writing, that, if your argumentation doesn’t support your argument, then change your argument.

I think we have to respect our evidence and analysis as much as Fowles had to respect his characters. I think we should teach students to do the same.

I will say that I think Fowles was being hyperbolic. He did have a plan, and he changed the plan because the characters he’d created made the plan obsolete. If he had tried to write without any plan, it’s hard to imagine that he would have gotten there at all. Writers should plan—the plan is what gets you to the place that you can develop a new plan. Every plan is a ladder you should feel free to pick up and move to a new place. I think his point is that, if your writing is honest, you have be honest about where your writing has gotten you. And you create a new plan.

I’m not sure it’s the introduction, but I have to try to draft a version of the book in which it is.

[1] For non-writing geeks, I should explain: the thesis statement is the proposition that the text argues. In non-student writing, it is rarely in the introduction. It’s usually in the conclusion, but it’s sometimes never stated (e.g., “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The more controversial the claim, the more likely the thesis is to be delayed or unstated.

What a lot of people call the “thesis statement” is what is more usefully called the “contract.” Outside of student writing, it’s sometimes the problem statement, the hypothesis, the thesis question, a vaguer version of the thesis statement, a map (“this paper will discuss…”).

. I think his point is that, if your writing is honest, you have be honest about where your writing has gotten you. And you create a new plan.

I’m not sure it’s the introduction, but I have to try to draft a version of the book in which it is.

[1] For non-writing geeks, I should explain: the thesis statement is the proposition that the text argues. In non-student writing, it is rarely in the introduction. It’s usually in the conclusion, but it’s sometimes never stated (e.g., “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The more controversial the claim, the more likely the thesis is to be delayed or unstated.

What a lot of people call the “thesis statement” is what is more usefully called the “contract.” Outside of student writing, it’s sometimes the problem statement, the hypothesis, the thesis question, a vaguer version of the thesis statement, a map (“this paper will discuss…”).

Graduate school writing as a transition to scholarly writing

The video is available here, along with various other UT Writing Center videos.

Difference between undergrad and grad (if oriented toward academia)
• Undergrad: smart insight (“At first it might look like this, but if you look more closely you see…”), good close analysis, good organization
• Scholarly: insight that changes a scholarly conversation
• Grad: insight that extends a (possibly very specific) scholarly conversation in some specific way

Some things that make scholarly writing hard for graduate students (and junior scholars)
• We think of “the scholarly conversation” in terms that are too broad (“rhetoric,” “teaching writing,” “Victorian Literature,” “history of slavery”)
• We are accustomed to starting the writing process by coming up with our thesis
• Asking a graduate student to make a significant contribution to “the field” is like asking a guest to give you advice on redecorating your home when they’re still standing in the front door and haven’t seen the rest of your house
• The metaphor of finding a “gap” is advice that made more sense many years ago when it was possible to read “everything” written about a subject
• We’re accustomed to letting panic drive the bus (partially in order to manage imposter syndrome)
• You read things that write in a way that might be rhetorically unavailable to you (unsupported generalizations about a field, neologisms, swipes at major scholars) and don’t read the genres you’re writing (so you don’t have the templates)

Some potentially useful strategies
• Write to learn, to think through things, to imitate others, get some ideas on paper—in other words, be willing to write crap
• Get a first draft by imagining a friendly audience (e.g., another student in class, an undergraduate teacher), writing inductively (start with the close analysis), and generally not feeling that you have to write the paper in the order it will eventually have
• Start with a question: a puzzle, apparent contradiction, confusion (existing scholarship suggests we should see this here, but we don’t—we see something else; why?)
• Write an introduction that works for you (why are you writing about this, what’s the best way to formulate the question, what makes this an interesting question, how did you come to this question) and then write a new introduction as your last step in the writing process
• Instead of thinking about a gap, try to formulate a question that might put you in a different posture in regard to existing “literature” on the topic
o Additive
o Definitional (redefining the question—the “prior question” move)
o Methodological (proof of concept)
o Refutative
o Synthesizing
o Taxonomic

Procastination of academic writing: different kinds and different solutions

I. Some ways of categorizing procrastination: “just in time,” “miscalculation,” “imprudent delay”

When people talk about “procrastinating,” they often mean “putting off a task,” but there are many ways of doing that: putting off paying bills till near the due date, avoiding an unpleasant conversation, rolling back over in bed instead of getting up early to exercise, delaying preparing for class till half an hour before it starts, ignoring the big stack of photos that should be put in albums, answering all of my email rather than proofing an article, writing a conference paper the night before, delaying going to the dentist, intending to save money for retirement but never getting around to it, eating a cupcake and promising to start the diet tomorrow, telling myself I cannot do my taxes until I have set up a complicated filing system, ignoring the stack of papers I need to grade until they must be returned. All of these involve putting off doing something, but they are different kinds of behavior with different consequences:
1) indefinite delaying such that the task may never get done;
2) allocating just barely (or even under) enough time necessary to complete a task (“just in time” procrastination);
3) a mismatch between my short-term behavior and long-term goals (procrastination as miscalculation).
Procrastinating proofreading by answering email is potentially productive (as long as I get to the proofreading in time), delaying going to the dentist might mean later dental work is more expensive and more painful, and putting off papers till the last minute might reduce my tendency to spend too long on grading.

It seems to me that many talented students use a “just in time” procrastination writing process for both undergraduate and graduate classes, largely because it works under those circumstances. (In fact, the way a lot of classes are organized, no other process makes sense.) “Just in time” writing processes work less well for a dissertation—they make the whole experience really stressful and very fraught, and they sometimes don’t work at all. It’s an impossible strategy for book projects—it simply doesn’t work because there aren’t enough firm deadlines. Shifting away from a “just in time” writing process to more deliberate choices means being aware of other writing processes, and can often involve some complicated rethinking of identity.

“Just in time” procrastination sometimes goes wrong, as when something arises in the allotted time and so it was not nearly enough. Sometimes the consequences are trivial—a dog getting sick means I didn’t finish those last few papers and I have to apologize to students; my forgetting to bring the necessary texts home means I have to get to campus extremely early to prepare class there; I misunderstand the due date on bills and have to pay a late fee. But the consequences can be tragic: if there is a delay at a press, a reader/reviewer has serious objections, or illness intervenes, then a student may lose funding, a promising scholar may be denied tenure, a press may cancel a contract.

Procrastination as miscalculation, or the inability to make short-term choices fit our long- term goals, is the most vexing, what Christine Tappolet calls “harming our future selves” (Thief 116) or what Chrisoula Andreou calls “imprudent delay;” that is, procrastination as involving “leaving too late or putting off indefinitely what one should, relative to one’s goals and information, have done sooner” (Andreou Thief 207). This kind of procrastination (imprudent delay) might mean choosing a short-term pleasure over a long-term goal (going back to sleep instead of getting up to exercise), delaying a short-term pain (putting off going to the dentist until one is actually in pain), or simply making a choice that is harmless in each case but harmful in the aggregate (spending time on teaching or service rather than scholarship). Imprudent delay isn’t necessarily weakness of will, as it doesn’t always mean doing something easy instead of something hard; it might mean choosing different kinds of equally hard tasks, and it is only imprudent in retrospect, or in the aggregate.

Many books on time management and productivity focus on this kind of procrastination, and describe effective strategies for keeping long-term goals mentally present in the moment. Ranging from products (such as the Franklin-Covey organizers) to practices (such as David Allen’s “tickler” files), these methods of improving calculation seem to me to work to different degrees with different people under different circumstances. None of them works every time with every person, a fact that doesn’t mean the strategy is useless or the person is helpless, but it does mean that people might need to experiment among different strategies and products.

Imprudent delay, when it comes to academia, is complicated, perhaps because it so often not a choice between eating a cupcake and exercising. After all, even if a scholar gets to a point in her career at which she comes to believe she has previously spent time on service that should have been spent on scholarship, there is probably, even in retrospect, no single moment that she made the mistake. I can look back on a period of my career when I spent too much time on service and teaching, but I was asked by my Department Chair to do the service, so I didn’t feel that I could say no. My administrative position often involved meeting with graduate student instructors to discuss their classes, and I can’t think of a single conversation I wish I hadn’t had. I can think of things I wish I had done differently (some are discussed here) but I empathize with junior colleagues who carefully explained why they have taken on this task. And, as my husband will tell anyone who wants to listen, I still regularly take on too many tasks. But, I will say in my defense, I’m better.

Imprudent delay—failing to save for retirement, spending too much time on service, engaging in unnecessary elaborate teaching preparation—never looks irrational in the short run. Phronesis, usually translated as “prudence,” is, for Aristotle, the ability to take general principles and apply them in the particular case. One reason “prudent” versus “imprudent” procrastination seems to me such a powerful set of terms is that the sorts of unhappy situations in which academics often find ourselves are the consequence of the abstract principle (“I want to have a book in hand when I go up for tenure”) not being usefully applied to this specific case (“Should I write another memo about the photocopier?”). This is a failure to apply Aristotle’s phronesis.

Another reason that thinking of procrastination in terms of Aristotle seems to me useful is that his model of ethics is as a practice of habits, which we can consciously develop through the choices. We do not become different people, but we develop different habits, sometimes consciously. People with whom I’ve worked sometimes seem to have an ethical resistance to some time or project management strategies or writing processes because they don’t want to become that kind of person (a drudge, an obsessive, ambitious). Thinking that achieving success requires becoming a different person is not only unproductive, but simply untrue.

Martha Nussbaum points out that Aristotle’s metaphor is aiming: making correct ethical choices is like hitting a target. If one has a tendency to pull to one side, then overcompensating in the aim will increase the chances of hitting the target. Andreou points out that there are things about people have a lot of willpower, and others about which we have very little, “I may, for example, have very poor self- control when it comes to exercising but a great deal of self-control when it comes to spending money or treats” (Thief 212). The solution, then, is to use the self-control about spending money to leverage self-control in regard to exercise: meeting one’s exercise goal is rewarded by spending money. If, however, one has little self-control in regard to spending money, then trying to use monetary rewards/punishments to encourage exercise won’t work, since a person won’t really enforce whatever rules they’ve set for themselves.

A lot of people respond to procrastination with shaming and self-shit-talking, and my point is that those are both useless strategies. It’s more useful to try to figure out what kind of procrastination it is, and what’s triggering it (the next post).

Procrastination: introduction

weekly work schedule — “A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.” (E.B. White, “E. B. White, The Art of the Essay No. 1” *Paris Review*)

Reason #3 I wanted to retire early was so that I could finish a bunch of projects. One of them is about scholarly writing. Someone asked that I pull out the parts about procrastination–that was about 10k words. Even when I brutally whacked at it, it was 4k, which is just way too much for a blog post. So I’ve broken it into parts. Here’s the first.

I haven’t edited or rewritten it at all, and I wrote this almost six years ago. I tried to move footnotes into the texts, but it’s still wonky as far as citation. I didn’t want to put off posting it till it was perfect (the irony would be too much), so here goes.

Procrastination is conventionally seen as a weakness of will, a bad habit, a failure of self- control–narratives that imply punitive behavior is the solution. Those narratives ignore that procrastination isn’t necessarily pleasurable, and often doesn’t look like a bad decision in the moment. Putting off doing scholarship in favor of spending time and energy on teaching or service is not a lack of willpower, the consequence of laziness, or inadequate panic. But it is putting off tasks that Stephen Covey would call important but not urgent in favor of tasks that are important and urgent. Since it isn’t caused by lack of willpower or inadequate fear, it isn’t always solved by self-trash-talk or upping the panic.

Procrastination isn’t necessarily one thing, and so it doesn’t have one solution. Nor is it always a problem that requires a solution; dictating barely enough time to a task can ensure we don’t spend more time on it than is necessary can make a dull task more interesting, as it introduces the possibility of failure, and it can be efficient. I once tried preparing class before the semester began by doing all the reading and making lecture notes during the summer. I had to reread the material the night before class anyway, so the pre-preparing meant I spent more time on teaching, not less. Grading papers is a task that will expand to fill the time allotted, as I could always read a little more carefully, word my suggestions more thoughtfully, or give more specific feedback. Leaving the most complicated four or five papers till the morning of class means I had to get up at 4 in the morning, but it also meant I could only spend half an hour on each, and I was forced to be more efficient and decisive with my comments.

Many self-help and time managements books promise an end to procrastination, but that is an empty promise. As long as we have more tasks than time, we will procrastinate. The myth that one can become a perfect time manager who doesn’t procrastinate can inhibit the practical steps necessary to become more effective with one’s time. People who procrastinate because they don’t want to be drudges, and like the drama of the panicked writing, resist giving up procrastination, since it seems to suggest they have to become a different person. Some perfectionists procrastinate because they won’t let themselves do mediocre work—hoping to do perfect work, they may spend so much time doing one task perfectly that they get nothing else done, or they may wait till they feel they are capable of great work (if that moment never comes, they complete nothing), or they ensure that they have good excuses (such as running out of time) for having submitted less than perfect work. Unhappily, the same forces—the desire for a perfect performance—can inhibit the ability to inhabit different practices in regard to procrastination.

The perfectionist desire for procrastination can cause us to try to find the perfect system, product, or book–a quest that can will someone into a person who never gets anything done. It’s possible to procrastinate by trying all sorts of new systems that prevent procrastination. We can fantasize about ending procrastination—so that we will, from now on, do all tasks easily, effortlessly, promptly, and without drama—in ways that are just as inhibiting as fantasizing about writing perfectly scholarship. The point is not to become perfect, but to become better. The next few posts will describe some concepts and summarize some research that I found very helpful.

Plagiarism-Detection Software and Slow Children at Play

Because I direct the University Writing Center, and teach and write about the teaching of writing, people assume, correctly, that I care a lot about plagiarism. Because I care a lot about plagiarism, a lot of people assume that I advocate the use of plagiarism-detection software. I don’t.

Plagiarism-detection software is so attractive because it appeals to several misconceptions about plagiarism, what it is, why students engage in it, and how to prevent it. Plagiarism is the consequence of incorrect citation, but not all instances of incorrect citation are plagiarism. There are a lot of ways of citing that, at least by some disciplines, are incorrect, including submitting work that

- appropriates someone else’s citations;
- was entirely written by someone else;
- has large uncited portions from another source in which words are changed here and there;
- paraphrases source material but doesn’t cite it;
- has a substantial portion verbatim from an uncited source;
- cites the sources of material, but not in the correct format;
- uses ideas, but not language, from an un-cited source;
- fails to punctuate correctly (so that quoted material is presented as though it’s paraphrased).

These examples are incorrect (although not in all disciplines—in some fields, such as law, appropriating a set of citations is common), but not everyone would call all of them plagiarism (and that third one is often taught as not plagiarism, although most colleges consider it so).

Since there are disciplinary differences, and since it’s not useful to collapse very different practices into one term, teachers need to tell their students what plagiarism is, and what the penalties are. Those penalties vary from class to class, as they should.

Thus, one problem with plagiarism-detection software is that it is often marketed as though it makes the determination of plagiarism for the teacher. It shouldn’t. It can’t.

A lot of faculty assume that college students know what plagiarism is, and they therefore assume that plagiarism is always deliberate. But not all students do know what plagiarism is, because, for instance, not all college teachers use the term to mean the same thing. Some only use plagiarism for instances in which there is no citation at all, whereas some include bungled citation. Unfortunately, there are still many students who have been told (perhaps by teachers, perhaps by parents or friends) that changing every third word makes it not plagiarism. College faculty often assume that this myth was dispelled in college first year composition classes, but many students don’t take first-year composition in a college.

Loosely, there are four different ways that students end up with material that fits the highest standards of plagiarism. There are students who know that they are plagiarizing and choose to do it in ways that they believe will be hard to trace—such as by buying a paper from a paper mill, paying someone else to write an original paper, or turning in a paper that another student has given them. There are students who deliberately cut and paste material from sources, spending their time tweaking the material to make it passable. They know they are plagiarizing, and hope to make it undetectable. These two kinds of plagiarists are deliberate and, let’s be blunt, malevolent. They think that the rules about plagiarism don’t apply to them. They are narcissistic jerks.

There are students who have poor research strategies, such as cutting and pasting into their paper file material from the sources they want to use. Under such circumstances, it’s easy to lose track of what was direct quotation, so these students may not realize they’ve plagiarized. They may think they haven’t. The fourth is what Rebecca Moore Howard calls “patchwriting,” in which authors take phrases from various sources, perhaps even following the original syntax. Patchwriting happens for various reasons, ranging from bad time management (not enough time to digest the source material) to unfamiliarity with the content (if we are writing about a topic we don’t understand, we might not be able to find synonyms, and so take phrases from the original), or even thinking that changing a word here and there is sufficient (that is, the myth of changing every third word).

As a teacher, I am most interested in what students’ plagiarism means for my teaching. If I’m doing a good job of writing assignments, students shouldn’t be able to get a passing grade doing that first kind of plagiarism. If I have students who are doing the second, I need to give them a poor grade, make them rewrite the paper, or otherwise recognize the problem. If they’re doing the third, I need to work on teaching writing processes. If they’re doing the fourth, I’ve done a lousy job teaching content, or a lousy job teaching about citation practices.

Does plagiarism-detection software help me learn from students’ plagiarism?

There is a world in which it might—I’ll get to that at the end—but this is not that world. Instead, it is a world in which plagiarism-detection software helps malevolent plagiarism. It does so because it tells teachers that plagiarism-detection software can teach students how to keep from plagiarizing. It tells teachers they won’t have to teach about plagiarism or think about it as they grade papers. We still have to do both, even with the best plagiarism-detection software.

Students who are plagiarizing, and know they are, find plagiarism-detection software very helpful. They can submit and resubmit a paper, tweaking their language, until they can find a version that makes the software happy. Plagiarism-detection software is a kind gift to students who are deliberately plagiarizing.

Plagiarism-detection software sometimes does (but usually doesn’t) catch the third and fourth kind of plagiarism, the kind that is an opportunity for a useful intervention on my part. I can only notice those sorts of plagiarism if I know the source material the students are using for their papers, and I’m familiar with the content. (This is one of many reasons I avoid “open” assignments.)

Plagiarism-detection software marketing claims that teachers can essentially delegate the question of plagiarism to them. It can’t. It’s best at that third sort of plagiarism, and second best (but not great) at the fourth.

The problem is that it not only helps students who are deliberately engaged in plagiarism, but that the marketing is that teachers can rely on plagiarism to make teaching decisions for them, when it actually can’t.

I lived in a neighborhood that had no sidewalks, and was a relatively recent development, so there were a lot of people walking on the road with dogs and strollers, and jerks who drove much too fast. We needed to get people to drive more carefully and more slowly. We had a community meeting with some police officers at which a lot of residents argued that we should put up “Slow Children At Play” signs.

They thought that telling people they should do something was the same as making them do it.

[This is the dominant model of communication—with disastrous effects in terms of political deliberation and education reforms, but that’s a subject for different posts.]

Guess what. People who drive too fast do not, in fact, suddenly drive more carefully when they are informed there are children. The worst drivers in our neighborhood lived there. They had children. They could see children on the road. They thought they were such good drivers that they could drive as fast as they wanted and still be responsible drivers. They were narcissist jerks who thought the rules didn’t apply to them.

So, putting up those signs didn’t change those actually irresponsible drivers who slid into the bike line, drove too fast, multi-tasked. It didn’t make them any more responsible. They continued to drive like narcissist jerks to whom rules didn’t really apply.

But, as the police officers said, when there were “Slow Children At Play” signs in a neighborhood, then parents assumed that people would drive well, and therefore weren’t as careful as they needed to be given the narcissist jerks in the neighborhood. “Slow Children At Play” signage makes parents less careful, while not changing the behavior of dangerous drivers.

My main problem with plagiarism-detection software is that it is like putting up “Slow Children At Play” signs. It doesn’t really stop the troubling behavior, but it makes teachers think it has. Narcissist jerks can plagiarize even better, and teachers teach less well.

Universities are, and should be, about teaching people to write in complicated ways about complicated situations. That isn’t done on the cheap. It’s done by having students interact directly, and personally, with a content-knowledgeable person who reads and thinks about their work. Plagiarism-detection software could be used by teachers as one way of alerting them to two kinds of citation issues, but it can’t replace careful grading. Plagiarism software-detection software is attractive because it appears to take a time-intensive aspect of teaching writing—determining if students are using their sources responsibly—and solving it technologically.

It doesn’t.

Writing Centers and copy-editing

Faculty and administrators at UT are extraordinarily supportive of the University Writing Center, something I attribute to the previous directors who set in place a good culture and set of processes. We get fan mail, financial support, and faculty who cheerfully run workshops for us. And our end-of-consultation and follow-up surveys show that students appreciate what we do—98% of 13k surveys say they love what we’re doing.

But what about that 2%?[1] And what if I include faculty who grump at me in meetings or email?

One really interesting complaint, that comes from faculty and students, is that we won’t “edit” student writing. And what they mean by “edit” is go through a paper and write in the “correct” version of every “error” (what is more accurately called “copy-editing”).[2] These people (again, less than two percent of our visitors) want the Writing Center to be, not just directive, but red-pen editors. And they want it because they care about writing, but they care in different ways:

- They just want someone to edit their writing because editing is hard.
- Some people believe that editing (or “writing” as they call it) is a specialized skill set they don’t need to acquire—knowing the correct rules of grammar is a kind of knowledge unrelated to (and less important than) content knowledge.
- They think sentence-level correctness is important, and easy to convey.
- They think careful attention to sentence-level decisions is important, and they can point to a time when someone harshly editing their writing opened a new world.
- They want to read error-free writing.

I appreciate that these people want the UWC to do something that they think will make writing better.

What they don’t understand is that there is a field of research on writing center practices and, in fact, on directive vs. non-directive methods of commenting. There is also a long history of practice. People in writing centers want to improve students writing—it’s our mission, passion, and reason for going to work. If red-pen copy-editing of consultees’ work resulted in students being better writers, we’d do it. We don’t because experience and research show that, despite it seeming like the obviously right choice, it doesn’t really help most students.

When I was hired at the Berkeley Writing Center, in the late 70s, there was no training. They hired people who wrote good papers with no grammatical errors, and we met once a week for the first year or so to talk about what was happening in our consultations.

I thought my job was telling people how to change their papers, so I did. That’s what most of us did, and no one told us not to. But, quickly, I learned that wasn’t useful. A good teacher who is giving sensible writing assignments gives a lot of information in class about his/her expectations, about the discipline, about the assignment, and I hadn’t heard any of that. I didn’t actually know what the consultee should do.

And that’s what was happening across writing centers in that era—writing centers learned that consultants shouldn’t evaluate because consultants don’t know the criteria by which a faculty member will evaluate. We shouldn’t pretend to have knowledge we don’t have. That’s why writing centers are non-evaluative—because no one should evaluate the papers of a class who hasn’t been intimately involved with the class.

Well, okay, but why not correct all the commas? Well, first off, because rules about commas aren’t all that clear—these are rhetorical as much as correctness choices. And, oddly enough, that applies to a lot of “rules” that people think are grammatical, but are stylistic, and vary from one discipline to another (passive voice, bundling nouns as though they’re adjectives, comma splice, use of second person, modifying errors that result from passive agency).

And a lot of “errors” aren’t easily corrected errors of “grammar” but signals of muddled thinking. Errors in predication, mixed construction, reference, modifying, parallelism, metaphor use, and even style choices such as whether to use passive voice/agency often can only be corrected by reconsidering an argument. We can’t just “edit” or “correct” a paper because shifting correcting mixed construction is a cognitive, not grammatical, choice.

In addition to all that, we shouldn’t just rewrite student papers for them because we’re a teaching unit. Except for the rare people who become professors, and even not for them until the moment they are engaged in a discipline, most writers don’t learn much about writing by having someone else go through a paper and correct errors.

We think that red-penning a paper is a good strategy because we can often look back and remember some very dramatic moment when we benefitted from having a paper red-penned. We got it back, looked it over, and tried to figure out what all the marks meant, and how they made the paper better. We learned. We assume it would help all students (as a colleague said, a certain amount of narcissism is probably necessary for success in academia)—that’s what initially made me mark up consultees’ papers. But we aren’t like most students. That moment was generally one when an expert in the field (thus, someone with considerable expert authority) helped us learn discipline-specific discourse (such as graduate school) at a moment we wanted to learn that discourse. I appreciate the faculty who red-penned my work, and I applaud others who do that for students who are at a moment when that is useful information.

The writing center is not that moment. You are that moment, and only for some of your students.

Writers who are anxious to learn the conventions of a field are often appreciative of directive advice as to how we’re not meeting those expectations, and faculty are always people who were that kind of student. We forget that we were atypical. So, yes, red-penning the work of a fairly advanced and very promising student who wants to be an academic can be profoundly useful. But, to be blunt, that is not the job of the UWC because we don’t know who is and is not very promising in a field. Our job is to teach. Not direct.

And most students don’t benefit from that kind of red-penning—they don’t look again at the corrections; they just make them.

As I tell students in my class when I explain why I don’t edit their first submissions, I’m not going through life with them editing their papers. I need to teach them to edit their own papers. If I teach them to rely on me to correct their papers, I’ve done them a disservice. The UWC doesn’t help students be better writers if we copy-edit their papers. Our mission isn’t helping students turn in better papers; it’s helping students be better writers.

[1] In UWC exit surveys, this is less than 2%. It’s a higher percentage of faculty who email or call me, since I don’t get 97 calls or emails about how what we do is great, but it’s still a very small number of calls. Still and all, all of the emails or calls are from people who really care about student writing, and I love that.

[2] “Correct” and “error” are in scare quotes because a lot of times it isn’t a grammar error, but a disciplinary or personal preference. People often assume that, if you don’t copy-edit, you don’t care about sentence-level correctness issues at all. We care about them very much, enough that we ensure that our consultants engage in practices that, unlike copy-editing, are likely to have long-term impact on student writing.