Do not write from your sources. Write from your notes or from your memory.

If you’re following my rules, you are always writing about something you decided yesterday that you knew last week. You should pick something that you not only think is true but understand why is true. It should require no additional research on your part to be in a position to assert it in writing–to make a claim and support, elaborate or defend it in a paragraph. All of these issues have been settled the day before, during five or ten minutes of careful reflection.

You don’t have to have the entire basis of your argument “in your head”. Knowing something does not mean memorizing every important fact about it. But you should be able to quickly and easily locate the relevant information in your notes. After formulating your key sentence, you should be able to reach for the set of notes in which the sources of your knowledge are clearly stated. This should take a few minutes at most. If it’s going to take you an hour or an afternoon to find the sources of a claim then you don’t know it well enough to write about it. Choose something else for tomorrow and resolve to understand the other thing better.

Imagine you are giving a lecture and you assert some matter of fact. A member of the audience asks you to back it up with a source. You say, “I don’t know it off the top of my head, but I can get it for you if you send me an email.” By this you don’t mean you’ll need a few weeks to discover whether or not what you were saying is actually true. What you mean is that back in your office you have easy access to the source. Maybe you’ve got some notes, indexed in a useful way. Maybe you know exactly what to type into Google to bring it up on the first page of search results. That’s fine. It’s doesn’t matter what kind of access to the source you have; it just has to be quick.

Some people don’t take very good notes but have a great memory. They might say they know roughly where in what book the information they need is to be found. Very well, as they are making their decision about what to write tomorrow, they should find that book, open it to the relevant page, confirm the accuracy of their memory, and then put a bookmark in. Now they just have to bring that book to their writing session. The danger, however, is that they will take too much of the style of their source with them. In the worst case, they inadvertently plagiarize their source. So I would recommend making a quick note of the key facts and (clearly marked!) quotes, including their page numbers, and then just bringing these notes to the writing session.

The other danger is that you will start reading when they should be writing. This is also why I recommend simply putting your source texts well out of reach as you sit there and write. You don’t need a library to compose at least 6 sentences and at most 200 words in 27 minutes. You just need a few jotted remarks to remind you facts, figures and names. As the brilliant poet Ben Lerner once said (though he was probably thinking of something else altogether):

“Gather your marginals, Mr. Specific. The end is nigh.”

A student writes me for advice about writing summaries. I thought readers of this blog might also find the answer useful. The difficulty, of course, is to provide a more concise version of something you have read without leaving anything important out. What are some strategies that might help you do this?

First, keep in mind that you always have to summarize from some perspective, and that perspective will necessarily be, in part, your own. Be aware of why you are reading this text, what is it that makes it interesting to you. And then make sure your summary includes the things that serve your interests in the text. For example, I often find myself summarizing Karl Weick’s analysis of the Mann Gulch disaster, which I think is flawed in a number of ways. So my summary always includes the things I think he gets wrong. Out of fairness, however, I also usually include the things he gets right, the things I agree with him about. You might also think about what parts of the text satisfied your curiosity. These things should also be in your summary, as should the parts that surprised or even outraged you. In other words, summarize the interesting claims in the text.

There is, of course, no “complete” summary of a text that isn’t just a perfect copy of that text. In order to make your summary useful, you will always leave something out. The trick is to leave the right things out for the right reasons, and that’s where your own interest in the text is so important. You have to have a good sense of why you are reading this text or, perhaps, what interest the reader of your summary will have in the source. Sometimes you are writing a summary just for yourself. But sometimes you are writing it to spare someone else the trouble of reading a longer document. There is no way to know how to do this without knowing something about your reader.

More practically, you might begin by making a “key sentence outline” of the paper or document you are summarizing. For each paragraph, try to find the one sentence that states its main point. That will give a list of 40-60 sentences for a standard research paper, which is probably a longer summary than you want. But one of those sentences will, ideally, state the overall conclusion of the paper. Your task now is to find the most important supporting arguments for that conclusion among the rest of the sentences in your outline.

Every time you make a summary, set some constraints on the task: How long should it be? How much time are you going to give yourself to do it? And make sure you have some purpose in mind, a focus: are you interested in the methods used in the study or the conclusion it reaches? Or are you interested in the recommendations the author makes for practice? Remember to summarize the paper on your terms, not necessarily those of the author you are summarizing. The summary should be useful to you and your readers, and while it should of course be “fair” to the original (i.e., it should represent the contents accurately), it doesn’t have to say everything the original says. You have to make some choices.

At the end of the day, when evaluating the summary try to identify the “trouble” it actually does spare you and/or your reader. And at what cost. A good summary will allow your reader (who may be your future self trying to remember what the document says) to make do without reading the document (at all or again). They will become more efficiently informed about certain things. But what will not reading the whole source document cost? What will the reader of your summary remain ignorant of because you left it out? Is that information important?

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.]