Intervention IV: Outlining for Winners

I have really changed my outlining tune in the past five years or so (what does an "outlining tune" sound like? Brief and unimaginative, I guess. Anyway). If you'd asked me how I wrote a paper up until 2007, I would have given you the 1989-era version I learned in high school, which, don't get me wrong, results in a very serviceable paper that pretty much writes itself:

1. Go through primary source and copy 5-15 quotes from it out onto 3x5 index cards. (Seriously! I did this in 2005!!!).
2. Repeat for secondary sources if necessary, on different-colored index cards if possible.
3. Shuffle index cards into "paper-writing" order--i.e., arrange either the primary-source quotes according to chronology or the secondary-source quotes according to theme or thing they have in common, and then stack them like this: one quote from the primary, a group of 3-4 from secondaries that relate, repeat.
4. Copy down everything that the index cards say in the order they say it onto a Word document, and as you do so, add headings according to subject, along with a sentence or two of the beginning of an argument.
5. Ecce outline!!!

This is a terrific system, if all you have to write is an outline. In fact, I learned it in high school when all we had to do for a research project was turn in a stack of index cards and an annotated outline. However, if you actually have to write a paper, or Lord help you a dissertation, then this is actually a time-inefficient and bad system that will suck up extra days of your life and result in a really unimaginative paper where your own insights are controlled by other people's and which contains no room for crazy tangents--which, like it or not, are (in a rough draft, at least) the stuff of original argument that makes papers good.

So if you would like to write one of the following:

1. an imaginative paper
2. a paper in a big ol' hurry

Then I'd actually recommend this anti-outlining technique instead. Again, if your professor or adviser insists on an outline, you can use the method above, but you can also use the method below, which is probably faster and actually ends up with far more of your paper written. For smaller papers, I stick to my non-outlining guns: instead, just use one of the other tutorials on how to write a coherent paragraph and how to have one interesting idea, and turn in whatever you have; I guarantee it will be just as good, if not better, as someone's index-card extravaganza.

For larger papers (graduate seminar papers, undergraduate lengthy research papers for upper-level classes, theses and dissertations):

The annotated bibliography and close reading. This two-pronged attack method is particularly effective if you must write multiple drafts as it produces an incredibly imaginative first draft that can then be polished later--or, if you're an undergraduate, a "final" draft with a really interesting angle rather than well-organized but dead piece of rehashed garbage. But, let me warn you, it does take actual work and results in possibly the best and deepest understanding of your sources you're able to have. Here's how you do it:

1. Get your primary source in front of you and go through it excruciatingly slowly (preferably more than once, but if you're an undergrad, once is fine). Limit yourself to the quotes you take down, but every time something strikes you in the text as especially interesting, even if you have no idea why, copy it down onto a Word document (with citation, OF COURSE). 
2. Then, the second you copy the quote down, directly after it, do a 100-200 word freewrite of exactly what you find interesting about it, whether that seems relevant or not. ANYTHING that comes to your mind. Do not stop typing until you reach 100 words, no matter what they say.
3. Repeat until you get all the way through the book or to the amount of quotes you need if you're an undergrad or a grad student still in coursework. If you're writing a diss, suffer through the whole damn thing. Three times, preferably--but ONCE IS ENOUGH if you are really pressed for time, no overwhelmsies!
4. Now, take your secondaries and go through them one by one, making an annotated bibliography. Take the title and author down (flesh it out later, don't disrupt your momentum, this is CRUCIAL!), and then read through until you get the gist of their argument. Then write yourself an abstract of their gist. Then read through the rest of it, taking down 1-10 quotes, depending on how important they are (10 quotes for "marquis" names that could be primaries themselves: Adorno, Benjamin, etc., 5 for big-name working scholars like Gail Hart (shout-out!!!), 1-3 for randos like me. After you take down each quote, react to it in 1-2 sentences.
5. Repeat until you get the necessary number of sources (5 for a minor undergrad paper, 10 for an undergrad term paper, 10-15 for a graduate seminar paper depending on whether you're on quarters or semesters, 30-40 for a dissertation chapter or professional essay). THEN STOP.
6. Congratulations. You will notice you've done most of your research, and actually written more than enough words to cover the length of your paper! Now all you have to do is shuffle the order, string them together and clean it up, and that you can do by...
7. Creating a VERY ROUGH outline that is more of a list, where you group your imaginative research into things it has in common (rather than creating an outline FIRST that you can't possibly conform to once you really start going), and then create one- or two-sentence headings.
8. If you must turn in a clean outline, summarize each section's rough-writing by explaining whom you've used and what you've talked about (make sure to drop a few names, leave one quote in), and then, saving your document as a DIFFERENT document, delete all your roughwriting. These summaries will actually turn into your topic paragraph for each section, so you still haven't wasted any time.

The Key to (Academic and All) Success: Manipulation and Lies

I often find that the hardest part of writing a paper isn't actually writing it--once you get going, especially if you get one interesting idea, it kind of takes care of itself (so long as you know some tricks). Instead, the hardest part of writing a paper is actually sitting down to start it. So this Intervention will be about ways to trick yourself into sitting down to start it. Not tricking yourself into writing the whole thing, just tricking yourself into starting it at all. This past year I had a few students who just had tragic procrastination problems, and the issue was just getting them over that mental hump to START it, at which point it pretty much wrote itself.

So the larger picture is that for any paper shorter than 7 pages, you can write a passable (though not necessarily good) version in 2-3 hours provided that you type fast. BUT, you can't tell yourself this when you start, or else you will never start. Because for most of us, 2-3 hours of writing a paper sounds about as inviting as 2-3 hours of getting tased in the butt. Why start at all, if it's just going to be prolonged agony???

So here are some things to tell yourself instead. You'd think that it'd be hard to lie to yourself, but in my extensive experience with self-deception I find that oneself is actually the easiest person to lie to: "These pants just shrunk in the wash...5 years after I bought them." Or, "I'll do a full set of bench presses NEXT time I'm at the gym." Or, "I can make one paycheck stretch for five months." Ahem. Anyway, what I always tell my students is, "Academic success is the result of an intricate web of self-manipulation and self-deception," and I mean it. Do you think I finished my PhD in 5 years (that, tragically, is extremely fast) by sitting down every day and saying, "All right, well, time to work on this 248-page paper that has to incorporate every important piece of recent scholarship on my subject and also contain a fully original argument that pushes the field but stays within disciplinary convention, now GO!!"? No! That kind of thinking is what gets you stuck in grad school for 17 years! I'm telling you, the following snippets of self-deception work, from the high-school essay all the way up to the doctoral thesis.

1. "I will just read this source for long enough to get two good quotes from it." The problem with densely-written academic prose, which most of us are forced to use for secondary sources, is that it is written so densely that every single sentence seems vitally, tragically important. Multiply that by a stack of 10 equally-dense books on your desk, many of them written in a non-English language, and you have a recipe for permanent deferral of research, which for many of us also means permanent deferral of work (though it shouldn't, see below). Though of course I hope you treat my work like that, don't. What you need to do for secondary sources is be able to paraphrase the author's main thesis, and react appropriately (i.e. with full knowledge of their context) to two good quotes. As soon as you can do this, proceed to skim the rest of the article unless it is so fascinating and entrancing it might change your life (Henry Sussman, I'm talking about you!), and before you know it you're through another source. And if you're a good quote-extractor and note-taker and summarizer, the notes you make about this sources should be able to be incorporated directly into your paper.

2. "100 words and I'm done for the day." It doesn't matter how much you hate writing--anyone, with ten minutes and a remotely interesting idea and equally remote grasp of the English language, can write 100 words. Just take one quote from your text and spend three sentences talking about it--one sentence that SUCCINCTLY rephrases what has happened in context, one sentence that highlights something interesting about that quote, and one that relates it back to whatever brilliant idea you are currently rocking in the paper. Guess what? I just wrote (approximately) 100 words just now, in this entry. YOU CAN DO THIS, no matter how little you want to work, no matter how little you have read, no matter how drunk/high/tired/harried you might be. The worst-case scenario is that you eke your paper out 100 words at a time over the course of a few days. What will probably happen is that once you get going, 100 will become 200, 300 and then 500 as you get into the rhythm of writing. The secret is to start with no pressure on yourself, with the understanding that papers do sometimes get written 100 words at a time, and that on a bad day (especially for you dissertaters out there!!!), 100 words can be the biggest victory in the world. At my worst and most depressed I eked out 50, 100 words at a time, and called it a "full work day" and resumed moping, and you know what? Not a good way to spend your life long-term, but those mothertruckers added up and soon enough I was Dr. Me.

3. "I'm just going to open this document up and LOOK at it." I'd like to amend my previous explanation that the hardest part of writing a paper (from a 2-pager to a dissertation) is starting to work. The hardest part is actually opening the document up on your computer and looking at it (if you still write longhand, you perplex me, but just think of the luddite equivalent of this). So if you tell yourself you're just going to open the piece UP to read through a few paragraphs for spelling and grammar, that is often sufficient to get you working. The important part of this, however, is to not beat yourself up if for a few times you do just open it up and proofread a few paragraphs and tweak a word here and there (ESPECIALLY you dissertation writers!). That is still keeping the work in sight and therefore in mind, and infinitely better than keeping it hidden in a faraway folder like I currently have the pigsty of a draft of a conference paper I'm due to give in less than three months (in professional-scholar time that is both forever and hopelessly insufficient). In a few days I'll be bringing it up "just to look at it," and then slowly employing the other two methods of deception and manipulation to get myself back on track to finish it.

Well, I hope this suggestion has been helpful, whether you're writing a one-page response paper due tomorrow or a 500-page dissertation due in three years. As always, email me or comment below if you have any questions, comments or funny procrastination stories to share.

Armchair Psychologist with Dr. Me: What's Your Motivation?

Although I am a doctor (not that kind of doctor), I am not a practicing therapist of any sort (though try telling that to the students who unload WTFTMI in their emails where all they really want is an extension). So the following attempts to plumb the depths of the student psyche are a mixture of anecdotal evidence, cursory research on the internet (thanks to the retro-fabulous academic dishonesty 1997-style HTML site at Old Dominion University), and my personal favorite, rampant unchecked speculation.

I think the latter quality is actually an excellent skill for early draft-writing in academic work, and definitely provided me with all of my weirdest ideas (some of which, funnily enough, are after extensive revision and despeculifying, being committed to scholarly-journal print as I type this!), but it often gets me into trouble at home ("I think I know why our neighbor plays his video games so loudly! It's because he's ENORMOUS, so because he's so Shaq-uesque, he must do everything loudly!"). Actual recent conversation.

Ahem. Anyway, rampant speculation is a "skill" I've had since I learned to talk: my earliest preschool teachers explained to my parents that, at 2.5, I already had "an explanation for everything." 31.85 years later, this holds true, and so now I am going to try to explain why, to the best of my untrained ability, students turn in work they didn't do and claim it as their own. Then, because this is Paper Intervention and not Paper Shame on You Plagiarists, I'll suggest viable, easy alternatives that appeal to exactly this kind of motivation/personality type.

TYPE 1. "I am a college 'customer,' here to pay to get a piece of paper that will get me a job." This is the #1 plagiarism cause on Old Dominion's site for a reason--with the current wisdom being that all good jobs need a college degree, and thus all high-school graduates need to have a college degree, even (and especially) if they hate (or think they hate) learning more than anything in the world. This is actually the reasoning my ex-husband used to justify embezzling money from his college engineering club, so it "excuses" all sorts of fraud, not just the academic kind. I can't believe I'm not married anymore, right? 

Anyway, it makes a lot of sense in today's overconsumerized environs that if a college education is just something you pay for like a triple-decaf mocha-coconut Frappucino with extra whip (BUT SKIM MILK, I'm watching my weight, obvz!), and you think of your prof like a barista whose job it is to take your money and turn it into a Frappucino while you text your friends ("Frappucino" here meaning "piece of paper claiming you are now the owner of a certain and specific body of knowledge"), then obviously asking you to get behind the counter and put all that crap into the blender yourself is going to make you all like wtf? So it's almost like you paid to turn in the paper, and it doesn't matter how you got it, right? I feel you, as nobody says anymore, and I'm not here to try to change your mind about how you feel about college. However:

• REBUTTAL. A potential one, at least. So, back to the Starbucks analogy. When you pay $7 for that glorified milkshake, you are entering into a miniature contract with the barista and with Starbucks as an institution: you are paying for a certain mixture of ingredients (or, as RHONJ Teresa would say, "ingrediences") to be added to their proprietary SuperBlender with ice, etc etc. If they took your money and then served you a festering pile of dog doo instead, you'd be all like, DOUBLE WTF? This isn't what I paid for. And that's what you might want to remember in college. Just like it's not Starbucks' purview to serve festering piles of dog doo, it is not our purview to "sell degrees." If we "sell" you a degree, that degree becomes nothing more than a faceless coin masquerading as professional "currency" (that's a reference to NIETZSCHE, bitches, "On Truth and Lying in an Extramoral Sense," various editions, I use the GERMAN six-volume Werke, so booya). If we can give you anything--a festering pile of dog doo, for example--and call it a "degree," then, just like at Starbucks, you are not getting your money's worth.
• EASY SOLUTION. Instead of wasting your money on a paper you didn't write that will thus garner you a degree that is worth as much as a festering pile of dog doo, spend that money on more coffee and an industrial-strength pair of earplugs or noise-canceling headphones. Then put those babies on and promise yourself to devote 15 minutes more a day to studying than you now do--then once you've done 15, do 30, 45, and an hour (incrementally). Each time you do, think about it this way: "I owe it to myself to get my money's worth out of my college education. I owe it to myself to be the person that diploma says I will be. I am WORTH working on, to get smarter and better." All right, I have to stop before I barf.

TYPE 2. "This class isn't in my major, and therefore it is a serious grade-A waste of my time." This is, more or less, a variation on Type 1, with the difference that while Type-1 students believe ALL college is a waste of their time, Type-2 students believe anything outside their course of study is a waste of time. After all, if you are going to college to study Animal Husbandry and they're forcing you to take a year of French, it's almost like they deserve to get a year's worth of bad Google translations for making you do something so stupid.

• REBUTTAL: Remember that unless you go to one of those loosey-goosey colleges with no requirements (in which case: enjoy Hampshire and please don't drop out), when your college or university plans courses of study, they spend just as much time planning what to require EVERYONE to take, or what to require certain majors to take as breadth requirements. They are not making you take French because they want to keep the French department in business (in fact, universities seem to enjoy closing foreign-language departments these days), and enjoy torturing you. They are making you take French (or any foreign language) because they know that knowing more than one language does the following: 1) makes you better at English and thus a better communicator 2) makes you more competitive on the global marketplace, which, guess what, is THE marketplace now, 3) makes your brain better at learning all sorts of stuff (there have been studies). The same can be said for "forcing" foreign-language majors to take math (I wish they'd made me take more math in retrospect!), "forcing" business majors to take literature (EGAD, being well-read and great at formulating arguments will never make you a better business negotiator!!!), etc. 
• SOLUTION. One day when you're bored, Google all the people in the world who got their bazillion-dollar idea or life's passion or met their spouse in a class they didn't think they "had" to take. Then throw yourself into yours and think about how making yourself a dynamic, multifaceted person can allow you to put "dynamic, multifaceted person" on your future resume--and start scouring your classroom for hotties. Nobody says "hottie" anymore, do they? Well, that's 90s slang for "attractive person," so do that.

TYPE 3. "I'm overworked/desperate/prone to mental blocks and I waited until the last minute and NOW IT'S TOO LATE and I HAVE TO." This is by far the most common reason students commit fraud (buying a "custom essay") or plagiarism. As someone who unsuccessfully employed the "I'll wake up early before class and do the reading" ruse 900 times in college (THAT NEVER WORKS, does it? I never learned!), I am a bona fide expert on this. And yet, all anyone ever seems to do to "remedy" this situation is tell you to start earlier next time. That causes despondency and a vicious cycle of more dishonesty in my experience. What I wish more profs or teachers would tell their desperate students instead is:

• "Yes, you may have an extension...for a slight deduction that will not, I repeat, will not, be a big deal in the long run."
• "Just scrawl something out and turn it in--it will probably be better than 60% of what I get anyway." Sad, but true.
• "You're an undergraduate for crying out loud--nobody expects Harold Bloom. And, actually, nobody even likes Harold Bloom." 

• "You would actually be better off not turning in anything than turning in something you didn't write yourself." This one is super-true. A no-show may get you a zero, but it will never get you expelled.

Of course, my "easy solutions" to Type-3 appear on this very blog as all the Interventions I've done so far (go to the link bar on your right and take your pick based on how desperate you are!).

Well, I hope you've enjoyed your time on the couch and I'm sorry you can't get extra credit for doing all this reading that isn't even for your major. I mean, you're overscheduled and paying my salary, so it's the least I can do for you, right?