Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Part 1: Perils of Blogging

The ideas in this paper are so complex and involved that any attempt to express them in a traditional language is doomed to failure. Accordingly, I have created my own special language that will greatly facilitate discourse and I shall henceforth use it exclusively. Krkk orfgh mn ieep kkrit! Tqr sii . . . .
(Washington Post Style Invitational,
entry in response to the contest to write the "first line of a doctoral thesis guaranteed to make the scholars' committee sit up and pay attention," March 7, 1999)

"It's me, darling, not you..."

I got a kick out of Mieke’s response to my last dissertation-related post. That very day I had been lamenting to my advisor that no one ever posts comments to the blog about my dissertation research entries. Sure folks sometimes talk to me in the hall about them. Occasionally folks'll drop me an email. And they have been very helpful parts of my advisee-advisor relationship. But (apart from the one comment) I have had no publicly posted comments to those particular blog entries--the entries on which I spend the most time and mental effort, and that represent my original goals for this blog.

(Now, comments to my non-research related posts are another story, which I talk about in the next entry.)

I am not too distraught over this commentary silence because I still write these things largely for myself. I still print out the entries, tripple hole punch 'em, put them in my binder, and I write and comment all over them. I know that in the end, my more formal writing will be better for these informal blog attempts.

Still. This lack of commenting on my research posts is somewhat disappointing: Whatever notions I may have had involving adoption and other scholars from all over the world serving as an informal, high-tech “peer review” committee for my work—These dreams have not been realized.

And of course, I now have an inkling why: In these research posts I’m not making a shred of sense!

I'm only half kidding. Whenever an audience does not respond the way a writer would like (or, in my case, does not respond at all!) it is usually the fault of the writer, and not of the audience. (This extremely helpful brief guide to dissertaion writing has a good discussion of this idea.) I think it is the case for most of us who are blogging or who are dissertating (and especially those of us engaging in the former to facilitate the latter) we'd like our audience to be like the gloriously happy and impressed committee members seated at the table in the Bob Staake Washington Post cartoon below:

But many times our actual audience reaction is closer to the folks in the background of this cartoon with ??? marks emanating from their heads. I can only assume that these characters are graduate students--maybe first- and second-years who were assigned the task of attending a dissertation defense to be properly awed into the culture of the department. But just as likely, these questioning folks can represent anyone too proud, too embarrassed, too new, or too fearful to comment on an emperor's lack of meaningful clothes.

"I've been diagnosed with Congestive Writing Failure..."

I am very aware of this tendency of mine to blather on about nothing, just rejoicing in the roll and trill of pretty terms against my tongue. A lot of times I think that I have really said something, because I have produced so much stuff: So many correctly-spelled words...so many well-crafted paragraphs...so many meticulously-cited references... Surely in all this grammatical goodness my meaning is clear!

I will save forever a reviewer comment on one of my papers. This anonymous person said my writing was "dense"--likely meaning this in the sense of impermeable, crammed, not clear. It would have been easy for me to console myself by concluding that this reviewer was, well, just dense--this time in the sense of dull, subnormal, feebleminded. But time and reflection revealed to me that the reviewer was right: I did pack way too much into my writing, so much that whatever meaning might have been there initially was lost. What's more, I now recognize that I have a tendency to do that in much of my writing.

This tendency--no, may as well call it an affliction. This affliction of mine to pack a lot of ideas in complex paragraphs such that I end up saying less than something, is a particular danger because of the topics I like to write about.

One such topic is theory. Theory, by nature, is abstract. Abstractness is difficult to communicate in a way that is also not abstract. Thus, it is possible to end up not communicating theoretical ideas in a way that an audience can understand. Second, I like to think that my writing might "make a difference." (See my entry, "Theory Wearing Sensible Shoes.") When the goal is change, how easy it is to blur the boundaries between explanation and propagation. In both the theory case and the advocacy case, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that oftentimes not being able to communicate effectively enough is both cause and consequence of not thinking clearly enough.

"Take two B&W's and call me in the morning"

I do, however, have a new weapon in my battle against such propensities for skillfully written perpetuation of nonsense: It's my newest favorite blogrolled site, Butterflies and Wheels. As they explain their name:

The web site takes its name from a comment made by the philosopher Mary Midgley in a footnote to an article she wrote called Gene Juggling. She had this to say about the work of Richard Dawkins: "Up till now, I have not attended to Dawkins, thinking it unnecessary to break a butterfly upon a wheel"...

The site's entire mission appears to be an innoculation against poor academic writing, faulty scholarly thinking and reasoning, and ideological monarchs clothed in scientific clothes. It's a good companion, in my mind, to the book Fashionable Nonsense by Sokal and Bricmont. One gradstudent-relevant point to take from these resources is the importance of not copying the mistakes of our elders in order to be accepted into the academic fold. It is possible to think clearly. It is possible to write well. It is possible to communicate complex scholarly ideas with clarity, honesty, and flair.

Achieving all this requires hard work and practice. However, opportunities for this kind of skill-building is not a formal part of most graduate programs.

"Another excuse--er, reason--to blog"

Which brings me back to blogging. A new goal for this blog should be:

To practice the skill of writing and communicating my research ideas to broad audiences.

The issue is not that I have nothing to say--or can't say anything in a way that other folks can understand, appreciate, and feel moved to respond to. The issue could be that I need to practice ways to talk about, say, "construct definition" such that it is just as interesting as "mixtapes." And blogging might help in this process.

Will this result in the "dumbing down" of my dissertation? Of all the things I, as a dissertating graduate student, have to worry about my eventual dissertation (e.g., not finishing it on time, not finishing it at all, biting off more than I can chew, not finding that key article, someone else writing my dissertation before I'm finished, my advisor hating it, my other committee members hating it, me hating it...)--having my dissertation be "too simple" is not high on the list.

Anyway, if I do take this "blogging to practice" approach and do end up with a too-simplistic dissertation, I could always make it a one-page project, containing a hyperlink to all my dense and complex early SITBB entries!

Posted by perry032 at June 29, 2005 02:45 PM | TrackBack
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