Lately, I’ve become increasingly preoccupied by a simple but elegant thought. First, consider that a standard paragraph of scholarly prose (at least six sentences and at most two-hundred words) takes about a minute to read. Next, grant me, for the sake of argument, that a well-trained scholar can write a coherent paragraph about something they know in about half an hour. It only takes a moment. Now, let’s think about what that means.

Basically, the writer has an enormous advantage on the reader. Even within my somewhat ungenerous constraints, the writer spends 30 times longer on the paragraph than the reader does. If this is a “conversation” then it is, at first pass, a very asymmetric one. But we can recover the symmetry by realizing that the reader’s ultimate response to the text will also come in writing. That is, the reader will respond by writing a paragraph that it will again take the original writer only a minute to read. Writing that paragraph, too, can take 30 times as long.

(Like I say, these are ungenerous constraints. In fact, I am much more generous, since you are free to re-write the paragraph as many times as you like before exposing it to the reader.)

As I noticed a few years ago, this suggests a situation that resembles that famous visual effect in the Matrix film series. The writer is able to slow time down in their mind, establishing the perfect sequence of moves to deliver the message. The “moves” are of course simply the order of the 150-200 words that the paragraph is composed of. Ideally, they look like spontaneously produced speech. But to speak as coherently in real time is much, much more difficult and, in a conversation with many participants (which is what a scholarly discourse is) virtually impossible.

Everything I’ve just said of the paragraph is, of course, also true of the article. It takes at least 20 hours to write but only 40 minutes to read. That gives plenty of time to plan and deliver a rapid series of punches, parries and kicks in an almost leisurely manner (and then fly away) and even time to “dodge a bullet” or two from a familiar foe. You just have to remember that, when they come back at you, they, too, are working in bullet time!

Robert Graves said that poetry is a struggle with “the huge impossibility of language”. While scholarship is not poetry, academic writers do often find language to be at least an enormous difficulty. This is especially true of researchers for whom English is not their native language, but let’s keep in mind that even native speakers find it difficult to write well. Linguistic competence is not automatically literary mastery.

When Roland Barthes announced the “death of the author” it was as a consequence of his views on writing (a term he preferred to “literature”). He distinguished the act of writing, we might say, from the fact of language, from which “the writer literally takes nothing”. The language does not shape the content of the writing; it only establishes a horizon for it. Language, says Barthes, “is a field of action, the definition of, and a hope for, a possibility”. But writing is ultimately a Utopian gesture. Its freedom lies beyond a “frontier”; it is almost “supernatural”. In that sense, Graves was right. Language is the impossibility of poetry. The drama of a poem is precisely to exist in the face of that impossibility.

In this regard, I suppose, scholars sometimes feel a bit like poets. But we have to remember that a scholar doesn’t, properly speaking, work within a language, but within a discourse, and a discourse is not a so much a “huge impossibility” as a particular difficulty. Indeed, as I have said before, discourse is what makes it possible for us to attain a particular degree of precision on particular topics. While the language doesn’t, as Barthes rightly notes, provide the writer with a “stock of materials”, the discourse does exactly that. And more. Foucault has argued that discourse shapes the objects and the subjects, the concepts and the strategies of research, and thereby makes it possible to form statements, i.e., claims about what is going on in the world.

Now, discourses can express themselves in several languages. Here in Denmark, most scholars will speak of what they know in Danish as well as English, and sometimes also in French or German, or any other national language. In each case, the tiny possibilities of discourse are exposed to the huge impossibility language.  It is difficult sometimes, but that difficulty is worth facing. It the essential difficulty of scholarly writing.

Colloquium: Thursday, March 30 , 14:00 to 16:00  in room A 2.35 (inside the CBS Library at Solbjerg Plads)

Searching the literature is one of the tools you need to master in working with your research. This can be executed in different ways and in different places, this Craft Thursday I will concentrate on tools where the quality of the content is partly verified by the fact that is included in specific databases. We will explore ways of searching that can give you confidence that you are likely not to have missed valuable pieces of literature when you want to do a literature review as part of an article or for a actual review article. We will look in to the many different features the relevant databases offer including ways to make the databases track relevant literature automatically for you over time in form of alerts.

Besides searching for making a literature review, we will also spend time on citation searching in this session looking in to how some of the libraries databases offer tools to discover who might have been using the same theory as you plan to use to prove the same point that you are going for or finding out if the article you have found interesting and valuable has been seen as valuable by others? Citation searching can also be used to check out the popularity of certain researchers or specific pieces of literature, but when using the wonders of citation searching we should always keep in mind that popularity not necessarily is the same as quality not even in the world of research.

In order to make this session as useful as possible, please bring your own problems and issues to the session so we can address them specifically. You are also welcome to mail me questions of interest before Thursday, then I can include them in the examples I do in the session.

See you on Thursday afternoon
Liv Bjerge Laursen lbl.lib@cbs.dk

I’ve had that “coming attractions” post at the top of the blog for a bit too long. We’re well underway now, and we’re happy to see so many people coming out out to our events. This week, we will be talking about how to do citation searches in the library’s databases, and how to use the results most effectively in your literature reviews. We’ll have a post about that subject ready tomorrow.

I also have to find a few moments to write up what we’ve done the past two times, so that you can recall what was said or see what you missed. Remember that our colloquiums are open to all researchers at CBS, and the aim is to facilitate a conversation about research practices, broadly understood. We’re trying to help each other get better at the underlying craft skills of the modern researcher.

It’s already been an exciting year, with lots of new ideas and initiatives. In this post I’d like to try to provide an overview of the activities that Liv and I will be running from early April to early June. Most of these activities will be running again in the fall, so if you can’t join us now, there are plenty of chances. In general, we plan our activities in 8-week periods on either side of Easter and either side of the fall break in week 42.

It will once again be possible to join a coaching group that meets every Thursday from 13:00 to 13:54 in the Library. The aim of these sessions is to help put you in control of your writing process, so that you can plan your work one paragraph at a time and secure yourself the time your need, both to get your writing done and develop your skill as a writer.

Also, I will be hosting a weekly “masterclass” on Mondays, in which you will be able to get feedback on your writing and listen to other people get feedback on theirs. Most of the time will be spent editing the individual paragraphs that participants bring to the session, for language and argumentation, clarity and structure.

On Thursday afternoons, immediately after the coaching session (but not otherwise related), Liv and I will continue our weekly Craft Colloquiums. We have selected seven topics and booked them into the calendar, but are still open to suggestions, so please do keep your ideas coming. Our aim is not to just tell you what we find interesting, but also to learn about your interests and how we might help. We take requests.

If you’d like to get a comprehensive introduction to my approach to academic writing, why not sign up for my six-hour (2 x 3 hours) seminar called Writing Process Reengineering, which will run on June 2 and June 4, 2015, from 13:00 to 16:00. It consists of two parts: one on the organization of the writing space (the structure of an article), the other on the organization of writing time (the structure of the process). Though they can each stand alone, I recommend attending both. Together we can help you turn a famously unmanageable process into an orderly series of moments.

Finally, do note the ongoing series of courses about the Library’s resources, where you can get a quick and effective introduction to the manifold ways in which we can help you locate the information you need for your research.

To get a better overview of the support that the CBS Library provides to researchers, we have created a calendar of all these events, which will be updated as new activities are planned. Keep posted there, here at the blog, or (also coming soon!) at CBS Share.