Always take a three-minute break after writing the paragraph. In this break you must do something that is not related to either your writing or the rest of your day’s tasks.

This is easy. You really just have to do it. After you stop writing (on time!), don’t start something else for three minutes. Don’t even prepare for what will happen next. If you’re writing another paragraph, don’t think about it for three minutes, don’t even look at the key sentence. Don’t open your emails. Don’t glance in your calendar to see what’s coming up. Relax. Get a cup of coffee. Do some push ups. Flip aimlessly through a book. Send a message to your friend or lover or spouse or child. Look out the window. Just don’t work or even think about work.

The point of this rule is to protect the end of your writing session from the anticipation of the work to come. Get yourself in the habit of thinking of the time after the writing session as pure emptiness. It is the nothingness that divides the here-and-now of your writing from the there-and-then of your next order of business. Even if the next order of business is another writing moment, it must be separate and distinct from the one that went before. What this really means is that the current writing moment is a discrete one, with its own internal boundaries, its own integrity. It is the feeling in the “now” of your writing that you are supporting by building the habit of taking a break.

You should never feel like the end of your writing moment will allow you to “get on with it”. You are already engaged in “it”. Pay attention. When your 27 minutes are up, there is nothing to do but relax. Only then should you get on with your day. Which you should then, of course, just go and do.

[Click here to see all the Rules.]

This is something I came up with a few years ago, but which I thought worth looking at again. It’s a reading of the video for Travis’s “Writing to Reach You” as an allegory of the peer review process. I’ve put in time markers in square brackets to coordinate your viewing of the video with my interpretation.  Feel free to let me know what you think in the comments.

The whole process is a “front stage” activity in Goffman’s sense. Backstage, [0:04] you touch up the manuscript fixing all the punctuating and adjusting tour references to the style guide. You put on your best face. Then you submit it [0:20] and the manuscript is now “under review”.

The reviewers examine your paper [0:37] and you eventually get the answer back from the journal editor [0:55]. The reviewers, it turns out, have some hard words to say about your work, but the criticism they hurl art your paper sort of hurts them [1:16] as much as it hurts you. After reading their report you pick yourself up. You keep going.

[1:25] Though their own projects are stuck in their own way, your colleagues are waiting and willing to help. They offer you support and you submit the paper again.

[1:55] You receive the answer from the second round of reviews. A senior editor is now taking an active interest. [2:05] You feel like you have to run for cover, but [2:35] when the dust settles and the smoke clears you can see he was only taking one of your reviewers out of the equation [2:50].

Still, you sort of like that reviewer’s style, and you try it out for few paragraphs in your next rewrite. You incorporate one of his ideas as a sort of scalp [2:53]. The other reviewer is not impressed [2:56]. Fortunately, you’ve developed a thick skin. You absorb the new criticism and cast off the more outrageous arrows [3:02]. That idea you took from the discarded reviewer’s comments wasn’t really you anyway [3:17].

You get ready to resubmit another version [3:21]. There’s a brief moment of hesitation [3:29], but you do it anyway. When you get the letter saying your paper has been accepted it’s like coming home. [3:35] Your colleagues and your peers are in the same room, so to speak. In fact, one of your anonymous reviewers reveals who she is and congratulates you [3:40]. She loves your paper now, and she’s going to run with a few of your ideas. [3:43]

You’re backstage again. [3:45] Your inside is outside.

Start on time and finish on time. If you start late, still finish on time.

Think of your writing moment like you would any other scheduled event, like a class. Here at CBS classes begin and end at all sorts of weird times because they are scheduled in 45 minute blocks with ten minute breaks. The first block starts at 8:00, the second 8:55, the third at 9:50, etc. While teachers sometimes lose track of time, no one thinks to “round off” the start time or finish time because that would cause all kinds of chaos for students trying to get from one class to another. The beginning and end of class is determined by the schedule.

If the teacher shows up late for class, she doesn’t ask the students to stay correspondingly late. She just makes do with the time she has left. Students, of course, would never demand that the class wait for them before it begins, or that it run late because they couldn’t be there on time. When coordinating groups of people, its natural to be a bit arbitrary about the time issue.

Now, it could be argued that writing is a not a group activity and therefore requires no coordination. Rule #5 is intended as a prohibition against this argument. Of course it is possible to shirk your writing time. No one will know. Except…

There is the part of your that writes, the part of you that wants to get the writing done, and wants to become a better writer. That part of you is feeling disappointed and disoriented by your lack of discipline. You would apologize to your students for showing up late. And you wouldn’t keep them later as a punishment for your tardiness. Treat the part of you that writes with the same respect. Try to keep your appointment; but if you don’t begin on time, at least keep your promise to stop when you said you would. Remember that this is also a promise to the various parts of you that have other things to do.

Many people who fail to get their writing done at the time they had hoped (first thing in the morning, for example) carry the task around with them for the rest of the day, hoping they will get it done when an opportunity presents itself. Don’t do that. It will just make everything else you do less enjoyable, always burdened by this thing you’ve left undone. In fact, even the most planned activity comes to feel like an interruption, an obstruction to your writing. This means that what you are supposed to be doing doesn’t get the attention it deserves. And your writing, of course, is still not getting done.

So, when the time you had allotted to your writing passes, scratch it from your list of things to do today, whether or not you finished the paragraph or even managed to begin. Why worry today about what you have put off until tomorrow?

[Click here to see all the Rules.]

This is a good question that Julia Molinari has asked over at the Doctoral Writing SIG blog. (See my previous post inspired by that one.) I have posted some comments on that post and Julia has been kind enough to respond. I thought I’d just re-post the essence of the exchange here as well, elaborating a little as I go.

I have found it useful to define academic writing simply as the presentation of what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people. This, I like to stress, implies writing in such way that you open your thinking to criticism from your epistemic peers. “Form” can here be though of in terms of how it supports occasions for criticism. Mastering a form is really about learning how your reader needs your ideas to be presented if they are to be able to engage constructively with them.

Or, rather, that’s what academic form is about. We can perfectly well imagine other forms of writing where “mastery” is shown in how well you deflect criticism, or that your reader can simply enjoy the text, i.e., be entertained by it. What I want to argue is that such forms are not academic.

The essay is one way to occasion criticism. Here claims are made and supported, preferably one claim to a paragraph, each providing the basis on which the claim is made. This is a very common form in academia because it is very effective, but I don’t want to rule out alternatives. I just want to maintain some sense of the “essence” of scholarly writing. A form becomes “academic” when it frames a critical practice, when it becomes a manner of giving and taking criticism. To say of a statement (in whatever medium) that it is “academic”, we might say, is merely to say it is open to criticism from peers.

In her response, Julia raised a couple of important issues. First, she pointed out that I’m letting the intention behind a text determine whether or not it is academic, and intentions are not always as simple and pure as I seem to think. “What if you are writing with the intention of being published …  or pass an exam, for example, but have no intention to engage in discussion (as is the case with many academics)?” she asks. “Would that kind of writing still be academic?”

My answer is that, no,  “getting published” or “passing an exam” does not count as an “academic” intention. But it’s also not the proper intentionality of most texts written by either students or scholars. I would say that a text that says–i.e., means–only that it wants to get published, or that it should get a good grade, should get neither. That is, if, no other sense can be made of the text than, “I want an A in this course” then that text must receive an F. Such a text is of course hard to imagine anyone actually handing in and most writers, thankfully, have mixed motives.

Moreover, we should distinguish psychological from textual intention, or the actual from the implied author. The psychology of the actual writer doesn’t make or break the “academicity” of the text. The fact that the writer is seeking personal fame or fortune matters less than the means the writer users to that end. The question is what relationship is established between the authorial persona and its implied reader. This relationship is a construct. It’s constructed. It’s what the craft is about.

Julia also worried about the negative connotation of a “critical” occasion. She prefers, she says, “the term ‘critique’ to the term ‘criticism’: the latter connotes confrontation, hostility, and belligerence; the former, intellectual respect, thoughtful engagement, and precision.” This, I want to acknowledge, is a serious and common objection to the traditional posture of academic writing, so its worth dealing with head-on.

I begin with somewhat different connotations, however. I take “critique” in a Kantian sense, as the revelation of the conditions of the possibility of an object of knowledge. And I think of “criticism” more as in “literary criticism”, i.e., a weighing of the strengths and weaknesses of the work against exemplars of masterwork in the relevant tradition.

I very definitely want to maintain opportunities for “confrontation”. Outright hostility is obviously not desirable, but it has to be possible to offer a corrective to someone’s point of view. It has to be possible to tell a peer that they are wrong about something. My notion of criticism includes that possibility; indeed, it reserves a place of honor for it.

We might say that I think of academic writing as almost essentially defined by the possibility of being wrong. That possibility should not feel threatening to academics. On the contrary, academia is constituted by the right to be wrong, and this right comes with the obligation to listen to one’s peers. Someone who takes any suggestion that they are, or even might be, in error as an act of hostility is not taking an “academic” stance. The academic produces a text that is “open” to criticism: it is ready to be shown wrong by other knowledgeable people. That rhetorical posture is central to my definition of “academic”.

Much depends, as Julia rightly points out, on how we define our “peers”. In most cases of academic writing, however, there is no need to overthink this. The peer group can be confined for all practical purposes to a handful of people, maybe ten or twenty of them, whose names are known. Obviously, the text will have many more (or many less) readers than we imagine. But we know who to imagine, who we are thinking of when we write. And the text will be judged relative to those readers’ expectations. For first year students, it might be helpful to imagine the other people in the class. I truly believe a lot could be won by getting students to tell each other what they have learned in the course, rather than trying to tell their teachers. For more senior scholars, the literature review is supposed to identify the relevant peer group. In any case, all academic writing should be done with a pretty finite list of names in mind and awareness of what knowledge they bring with them to reading.

Start with what you know. Then imagine saying it in a way that makes sense to someone else who knows it. A way that allows them to critically engage with your ideas. If you don’t know the name of even one person who is qualified to show you that you are wrong, what you’re doing is probably not “academic”. But I’m willing to consider counter-examples, of course.

Never write a paragraph that you have not planned the day before. Never write at a time you did not plan to.

I know this is hard. During the period of discipline — that is, during the eight weeks you have decided to write very deliberate prose in an attempt become a better writer — try as best as you can not to write spontaneously. Don’t write when “the mood strikes” or you are “hit by inspiration”. Part of the discipline is to train your muse not to show up at the most inconvenient times. The way you do this is to make a quick note of the idea, and then to resolve to write about it at your earliest possible convenience.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to wait until next week in accordance with Rule #2. After all, while the idea to write about something may suddenly hit you, it may be something you have known for years. In that case, all you have to do is wait until tomorrow to write the corresponding paragraph or paragraphs. Just let the creative side of you know that the writer needs a bit of warning before the work can be carried out. You need to give your unconscious time to catch up. In order for this unconscious process to work properly, without anxiety, it must count on you to do the work you plan at the time you planned to do it. This also means not changing your mind in the middle of paragraph and writing something else that just occurred to you. Stick to the paragraph you planned.

Stephen King rightly said that “your muse has to know where to find you”. But s/he also has to stop calling you at work. And s/he will stop doing that when s/he can count on you to show up at the planned writing moments.

The other side of the bargain is that you can’t just summon your muse at all times of day and night whenever you feel like it. Sometimes what you thought was the song of angels was actually just a vague hunch. Once you start writing, you realize the idea wasn’t as good as it felt. For the eight weeks of the Challenge, I’m asking you simply not to have this problem. Don’t act on this feeling. Write according to your plan. I’m suggesting that you resolve to write only at the times you planned to do so. There will be no ambiguity about whether you are following this rule.

[Click here for all the Rules.]