Happy New Year!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To get it started right, I just cleaned up the page for the Writing Process Reengineering course<\/a> that I ran back in November, and which now serves as a standing resource for anyone who wants to go it alone. I’ve added a short podcast at the top to invite you to write 40 paragraphs over 4 weeks (2 paragraphs a day, 5 days a week). If you accept it, I’m ready to help.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your commitment is about 9 hours of instruction and about 20 hours of writing. The “deal” is that you write each paragraph in a disciplined and deliberate fashion, always deciding the day before what you are going to say. To support you in this endeavor, I have provided 20 podcasts that are intended to be listened to at the end of each weekday during the four-week process. Like I usually say, if you want to work in some completely different way I will try<\/em> to help if you ask, but I’m not sure how good I’ll be at it. If you are doing things my way, however, I know exactly<\/em> how to help you do it better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The course page is still a work in progress. I’m considering replacing all the seminar recordings with made-for-video (or perhaps audio) content, rather than a livestream recording. And I will add some nice drawings this month too. So if you’re on board, you can look forward to an active site for writing-related content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My intellectual project for this year, or at least this semester, is to develop an epistemological model of the scholarly paragraph. I want to see what happens if we approach the composition of a paragraph as the performance of the competence we call being “knowledgeable”. Instead of approaching this as I usually do, as a “unit of composition”, I want to take the paragraph as an instance of knowing<\/em> (which resonates nicely with what I already call “the writing moment”<\/a>). A good scholarly paragraph is evidence that the scholar knows<\/em> some particular thing. So we can analyse paragraphs in order to understand what knowledge (or at least academic<\/em> knowledge) is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That’s what I’m going to be talking about this year every chance I get. The prose paragraph is the essence of academic writing and academic writing is the essence of scholarly knowledge. If you can’t put it in writing — if you can’t compose a coherent prose paragraph about it — you don’t really know something “for academic purposes”. I realize that that’s a pretty hard line to take here at the start of the year. But it’s winter and it’s dark here in Denmark so please bear with me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Spring isn’t that far away!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Happy New Year! To get it started right, I just cleaned up the page for the Writing Process Reengineering course that I ran back in November, and which now serves as a standing resource for anyone who wants to go it alone. I’ve added a short podcast at the top to invite you to write … Continue reading An Invitation<\/span>