What professors do off term

Once again I find inspiration in Phil Nel's blog to reflect on what I have been doing off-term. This, and “research period” are the official labels for the time between terms. Vacation is an unknown concept in this part of the world. Non-academic employees have annual leave. Academic staff have research periods.

The definition is still vague. For instance, there is “full-term” (eight weeks three times a year) as opposed to... I am not sure what, some nebulous weeks before and after full term reserved for meetings, last minute-supervisions and grading. In Easter term, April to June, there are no taught classes. The undergraduate students revise for exams, the graduates write their theses. The instructors supervise.

I cannot quite say when my nebulous term finished and research period started. I had six masters students this past year, and although we had told them that we wouldn't read their drafts after the first of July, of course we did. I also read some drafts by other colleagues' students, just because I am so noble. As soon as the masters had submitted their theses, I received twice as many to grade. This is because we double-grade all student assignments. A masters thesis is 20,000 words. It takes me at least a day to read each and provide written feedback.Simple arithmetic.

My PhD students were also eager to submit something before they went on vacation. One student had her viva (final oral exam) in the beginning of July. Another had an upgrade (from probationary to full PhD status) in the end of July. A student who is not my supervisee was submiting her thesis and asked me to read it – because I am so noble.

We are now at the end of July. I didn't go to the Winnipeg conference that Phil went to, and I didn't go to IRSCL conference in Maastricht either. I didn't go to any conferences this summer. Instead I used my precious research time to complete most of the imminent commitments. I submitted a book manuscript in the end of May, and it is now under review, so I don't have to think about it for a while. I wrote three commissioned book chapters, revised two book chapters, wrote a conference paper and two abstracts, one for a conference, another for an edited volume. I administered blind reviews for a special issue of a journal that I am guest-editing. As usual, when you least expect it, page proofs arrived for several articles. I reviewed a promotion case (reading all submitted publications) which took me about a week. I examined a PhD (viva still to come), which took another week. I read and gave feedback on some book proposals for a publisher where I am on an editorial board. I wrote a huge number of recommendation letters. I read papers for a PhD workshop in September. I wrote my research group “narrative” for the national university assessment (known to UK academics as REF, spelled out Research Excellence Framework). I gave a talk at a summer school for gifted 16-year-olds from underprivileged social groups who are encouraged to study at Cambridge. I attended a few off-term meetings. I hosted an awayday for my research group. I entertained visiting scholars.

Unlike Phil, I have full salary all year round. Technically, everything I do in my research period is part of my job. I will be paid a token fee for the PhD examination and the promotion report. I am exempt from the coming conference fee because I co-ordinate the workshop, but I am paying for my travel and accomodation. Luckily, I have generious travel allowance.

We are now at the end of August. Meanwhile, I went to Norfolk for a couple of days, and we had guests who very efficiently prevented me from working – thank you! I went for walks and did a lot of gardening on sunny days and miniature-making on rainy days. End of August, when most academic friends are starting work, I can finally breathe out and start planning my vacation... sorry, my research period. Term doesn't start for another five weeks. Wait a minute: I am going to the PhD examination at the end of the week. I am going to Sweden in less than two weeks. (Most of it is work, but I will have three free days to see friends and family). The day after I get back, I have Examination Board, one of those occasions in Cambridge when you need to provide your own death certificate to be excused. And then those nebulous weeks before full term: meetings, business lunches, loads of urgent emails. And then full term, and I am co-ordinating the masters course this term, and I expect at least two new PhD students, and I expect at least three upgrades, and at least three of my current PhD students will be submitting first full drafts, and I have agreed to do far more teaching than I am required.

I'd better enjoy those last few hours before life catches up with me.

Separation anxiety

A student has written a blog post about her academic post partum. Interestingly, while I was weeding the garden today as a break from my absolutely final editing, I had similar thoughts. It is clever to let a doctoral work take three years. If you are a serious scholar, during three years you develop so much that the final product looks completely different from your original design. This book has taken me four years to write. It has nothing to do whatsoever with my initial ideas.

Much like Clementine, I kept telling myself that this was just the first/second/third draft and that I will fix it when the time comes. When the time came, there was no time to fix it. When I started, it was full of possibilities and bifurcations. Now, at the closure, it's finite. It's all pluperfect. Memory of a memory.

I postponed the assemblage of loose notes, that gradually took form of chapters, as long as I could. Originally, I had seven chapters. I now have eight, none even remotedly resembling the original seven. The book is not really what I thought it would be. Whether it's better or worse or rather the other way round, I cannot judge at the moment.

Like Clementine, I'd like to attach a note to my reviewers, saying: This is not what I intended to write. This is not even what I promised to write in the proposal and what was approved by the first round of reviews. It is – yes, a changeling, a stranger that I don't want to touch or acknowledge. The beautiful baby I once had in mind is irretrievably gone.

Perhaps it's just as well. Perhaps the ugly duckling would have grown into a big ugly duck. Now I can imagine what a beautiful swan it might have been. If only... what? If somebody else had written it for me? No way. 

I have put all the chapters and supplementary materials in one file and converted it to PDF.It is ready to go.

Progress report

It's a fact. My study leave is over. Tomorrow, I am back in the wheel. Meetings, supervisions - all these wonderful things I have missed so much. So it's a good point to reflect on what I have done with my time. Two years ago, I wasted my study leave on conference travel, but I was clever this time. I only went to one doctoral defence. I didn't take on any new tasks. Or did I?

I am looking at my task organiser from January 1 onwards. I have obviously finished the book which was the main, the biggest task. I have actually worked hard, every day, almost seven days a week.

In addition, I have read and reviewed several book manuscripts and proposals, read endless drafts of my PhD students (they are not affected by study leaves, fair enough), written a couple of abstracts for conferences I won't attend, written zillions of recommendation letters, written an article that I had promised to write and forgotten, revised another article, arranged two symposia, written a symposium paper - wow, have I done all this in three months? I must have worked very, very hard. No wonder I feel so tired. Going back to work will be such a relief.

Frustration

Imagine that you are a composer and have been commissioned a violin concerto. You take it very seriously. You want to make your work pleasurable for your audience, but you also want to create something original. You want to inspire the listeners and you want to respect their previous knowledge. You want them to recognise your personal themes and tunes, but you also want them to hear how you have developed them. You put all your life experience into this concerto, your knowledge of music history, the various instruments, harmony and counterpoint and all the technicalities. But you also use your imagination, your insight and your dedication to your listeners. When you have finished, you feel that this is the highlight of your professional career.

Then your piece goes to a committee to be evaluated. They say that the violin should be replaced by a tuba. That your woodwinds should be cut down by half. That your percussions should be eliminated and more trumpets added. That you should have written an opera instead. That you are far too original for the unsophisticated audience you were supposed to have in mind, but you also are too simplistic in your treatment of sharps and flats. That there are far too many notes per bar. That the high C you use in the second movement is too demanding on the ear. That your largo is too large and your diminuendo too diminutive. That your allusions to whatever you are alluding to will not be picked up by an average listener because they, the committee, haven't picked them up. That you need to add some explanation on what all those black dots mean. And have an appendix with every note you have used with exact reference to everyone who has ever used them before.

If you wonder what I am talking about, I am revising a manuscript according to reviewers' comments.

Why I will never ever ever write another book

Believe it or not, but I have finished my book. The book that I started exactly three months ago, on January 2. If you don't believe me and say that nobody can write a book in three months, let me remind you that “writing” as in putting words on screen is just the top of the iceberg. In fact it has taken me four years. True, I have done other things in between (another book, for instance), but from the first note to the finished manuscript today – about four years of reading and thinking and more reading and more thinking and more thinking...

Now that I've done it, I am confident that I will never again want to write another book. To begin with, I don't have to. The imminent university assessment will be the last in my professional career. If I never write another line, nobody will notice. I don't need more books for my merits; I think my vanity is satisfied... No, seriously, I think I have written enough for a lifetime, and there are so many brilliant young scholars around.

Writing this book, I have noticed how difficult writing has become. It used to be easy, painless, joyful. Well, of course there were moments when it felt horrible and hopeless, but on the whole it was a pleasurable pastime. Now my mind is wandering away; I lose track of my own thoughts; I get tired quickly. Go on, tell me the truth: you are old! Yes, thank you, I know. And when you are old you don't run marathons, you don't climb Everests, you don't cross deserts – you adjust your aspirations to your age. So I won't write more books. I may write an article some time in the future. But only if I can think of something really important to share.

So you may ask, am I retiring? Am I withdrawing from academic life altogether? Not at all. I am looking forward to spending the rest of my professional life doing something I like best of all: walking in the groves of academe, surrounded by my disciples.

Final straight

If you have never written an academic book... but if you are an academic you may have written a thesis or an essay, and if you are not there may be some other activity you will recognise in my agony. I have almost finished a book. It was a very difficult book to write, and I am quite pleased with it - at least for the moment, which might change by tomorrow. Almost finished means that the chapters and even the Introduction and Conclusion are done, but what remains is the boring yet important details such as bibliography and punctuation. For this particular book, I have annotated bibliography at the end of each chapter, which is more work than just a straightforward list of references. Everything mentioned in chapters must also go to the general bibliography at the end of the book, in correct format. (Don't tell me that there is software for this. I have seen student bibliographies generated by software). 

I have made life hard for myself by having lots of special features in this book, such as boxes and quotes. Most quotes come naturally, but when you need just this one little quote it can take hours. I know exactly where I've put it, and I can't find it. The only reasonable solution: delete.

Deleting is inevitable at this stage, and only I will ever know what has never made it into the book. What was hiding behind the notes to myself: Develop! Expand! Explain! With the deadline threatening, I cannot afford developing, so deleting is the option. There is a life after a book.

And of course I am eating my words: how many times have I told students to do everything correct from the beginning! So why I am now sitting hour after hour moving fullstops and commas inside the quotation marks?

Do as you teach

I have been doing two things lately: editing my own book and reading student work. I don't know which is more frustrating. With my own text at least I know what I want to say. With students' texts, I usually know what they want to say, but good pedagogy is to make them realise what they want to say and then let them say it.

I am a vicious supervisor. I learned it from my own professor many years ago. She made me shed many tears, but her editing was brilliant. I make students delete sentences that repeat the previous sentence with a slightly different wording. I make them delete all “In my opinion” (because everything not referenced is supposed to be their opinion), all “It would be interesting to consider” (because it is an empty phrase), all pairs of synonyms (“problems and issues”), all “as such”, “moreover”, “indeed” and “in fact”. Then I start editing my own text, and all these faults come over me in a deluge (except “in my opinion” - I learned to avoid it when I was a postdoc).

The best training in succinct academic writing has for me been writing for encyclopedias. If you have five hundred words for an entry you have to be economic with words. You need to squeeze tons of information in these few words, so each word must be chosen carefully. You don't want to waste your precious word count on “moreover” and “in fact”. I admit that occasionally such small words can be useful, but mostly they are garbage. It's incredible how much better a text becomes when you prune it from 735 words to 499. When you have learned that, cutting from 7,000 to 5,000 is child's play. Writing encyclopedic entries should be mandatory in doctoral training.

It is illuminating to look at your own text after having read other people's theses. Reading theses, I wear my evil assessor's eyeglasses and notice all the minuscule repetitions, inconsistencies and circular arguments. I need to be like that toward myself.

Guess how much I have pruned this post.

Self-discipline

I am writing a book. (So what else is new?) I am writing a book that does not consist of previously published and revised articles. Each chapter has to be written from scratch, apart from the summaries I once upon a time wrote for the proposal, but they are not particularly helpful. Sometimes I have no idea what I had in mind.

Writing a book like this means that you can easily jump from chapter to chapter, depending on what issue occupies you for the moment. You end up with piles of notes, half-finished paragraphs, recycled bits from previous work and some ingenious headings that most likely will have to go.

I am now at the phase that many academic writers and especially PhD students will recognise. I cannot go on writing notes or even paragraphs. I need to write up every chapter into a coherent text. Preferably avoiding repetitions and overlaps with other chapters. This is a decisive moment. It is the question of self-discipline. I need to tell myself that I am not allowed to continue to the next chapter until I am finished with the current one. Excited as I am about a new and fresh idea to develop in Chapter 5, I must finish Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4 first.

It is irritating. But it is still more irritating to believe that you have a finished chapter only to go back to it and discover imperatives in capital letters: CHECK! DEVELOP! CONSIDER! or yellow and blue highlights for various actions you have left for later.

It is tempting to tell myself: This is a difficult chapter, I'll write the easy chapters first. But I have done this before. The easy chapters are almost finished. I really need to deal with the difficult chapters now.

The reward is of course when you have finished the difficult chapter and can go on to the next, which is as likely as not to turn out to be just as difficult.

The OMG stage

Yesterday I finally started writing a new book. I should have started about three months ago, but I only got my written contract last week, and although my editor assured me that it was absolutely certain, I am a bit superstitious. And... oh well, I just didn't get down to it. There were too many other things.

You would assume that for someone who has written a score of books embarking on a new project won't be a big deal. Yet the anxiety of a blank page is inevitable, for expert as well as beginner.

I have written most of my academic books on the basis of articles and conference papers. This is a lot of work, as everyone knows who has tried. Sometimes I think that it is much harder to turn an assortment of articles into a coherent book. But right now I wish I had something to give me a start. I am writing this book from scratch. I have my proposal and some general ideas, and I know well what I don't want this book to be like, but I really don't know how to begin. I wrote in the proposal that I anticipated that this book would be the most difficult project in my life, and it is true. It's one of those books that take a lifetime to be able to write. But it doesn't matter. Even if it were the easiest thing to write, I'll still be paralysed.

When a student tells me she is in this phase, I can give plenty of good advice. Like: start somewhere in the middle. Start with something you are most enthusiastic about. Or start with the most boring bit, to have it done as soon as possible. I always say that we all have different ways of writing, and there are no ready recipes. Usually I write an article or chapter in my head, then sit down and put it on paper quickly. I can easily write five thousand words in a day if I have it all ready in my mind. The thing with this new book is that I have too many ideas and no clear plan yet where they will go. It does look very neat in my proposal, and obviously whoever accepted the proposal thought it would work, but there is a loooong way from proposal to finished manuscript. Or even to first draft.

So here I am, as helpless as an undergrad writing her first thesis.

Yesterday, after having stared for a while at my proposal, I browsed through my whole archive looking for something to recycle. This is not very helpful, although you can always cut and paste a couple of paragraphs that will have to go after the first edit. Occasionally you find notes from a conference three years ago, which you took specifically for this project and then forgot. So it is not directly a waste of time, but not an efficient use of time. There is a name for it: procrastination.

Today I told myself to stop fooling around and start writing. I divided the proposal into ten separate files and jotted down some subheadings to create a structure. This is what I always tell my students: create a structure, and the rest will come. “Take care of the sounds, and the sense will take care of itself”. Well, it didn't. I got sidetracked and spent some hours on the Internet reading about celebrity children's books. Highly educative, but didn't not take me any further. So I decided that I need a timeline. Timelines are almost as alien to my way of writing as mindmaps. However, I promised in my proposal that there would be a timeline in my book, so I can just as well get it done. Start with the boring bit.

I like my timeline. It is very illuminating. I have never reflected upon the fact that Ulysses was published the same yeas as Just William.

I can keep adding to the timeline forever, but I won't. Tomorrow I will start writing. Somewhere in the middle. Something I am really enthusiastic about.

I know my students are reading this blog, so I envision you all saying: “Serves her right!”

Further reflections on getting published

My very first publication was a book review. Book reviews can be very helpful at the beginning of your academic career. I reviewed for a weird semi-academic journal that only had reviews of foreign books, and I was their Scandinavian reviewer. That's how I learned to read Norwegian and Danish, that I have actually never studied. The journal was bi-monthly, and I contributed to every issue, only it was against the rules to have more than one review in the same issue so all reviewers had lots of pseudonyms. I would, for instance, use my father's or my grandfather's first names as pseudonyms. Once a year, there was a special issue on children's literature, and I always reviewed several books for those. I reviewed Tove Jansson's Moominvalley in November when it first came out. Now mind, this was behind the Iron Curtain, and reviewing was the only way for me to get hold of books. And of course I wasn't allowed to keep them, they went to the library.

Occasionally, I reviewed something for the journal on children's literature. I am quite proud of having reviewed the first Russian translation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Some years after I had come to Sweden, a new journal in children's literature started, Opsis Kalopsis, and I happened to sit next to the editor-in-chief at a reception, just as she was looking for reviewers. I wrote for this journal for many years (and was allowed to keep books). I mostly specialised in fantasy and had “my” authors, including Lloyd Alexander, Diana Wynne Jones and Philip Pullman. Many reviews fed into my academic writing.

For a while I reviewed books for the cultural journal of the Swedish church. I did it because these were not children's books, and I thought it might be useful to add to my cv. I reviewed such authors as Harold Bloom and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I have written reviews for Scandinavica, and occasional reviews here and there. I don't review on a regular basis any more, but every now and I am asked to review a professional publication. I only do it if I am really interested, which I most often am (I guess that why they ask me).

Looking back, I think that reviewing was an extremely helpful writing practice. Staying within word count and keeping deadlines is always good training. Following an author for several years was stimulating and resulted in author portraits and other publications. And in many cases, the journals I reviewed for would eventually take my own article.

Do we love what we are doing?

I have received a very interesting comment on my previous post and rather than replying to it I am writing another post. It is seldom that I am asked the question whether I love what I am doing, but I have on many occasions said that I feel privileged because for my whole life I have mostly been doing things that I love and been able to support myself on that.

To be fair, I must admit that I had a very good start. I grew up in a family of academics and artists. My grandfather was a professor and a vice-chancellor of Moscow Conservatory, my father was a professor in the same conservaroty, my mother was an art historian, her cousin was a professor of philosophy, and so on. With such background, you just cannot imagine yourself outside of academia, so I never even considered the option. During my chiuldhood and youth I clearly saw the gratification: books published, works performed, students winning competitions and getting famous. So I knew all the time that it would be worth while. But of course it is only worth while if you are really passionate about what you are doing. I am passionate about children's literature, and I want my students and colleagues to be just as passionate. But surely I have seen people who earned their higher degrees without enjoying it. I remember once in Stockholm a very weak PhD dissertation was passed, and in a private conversation afterwards, when I commented on the poor quality, a colleague said cynically: "Well, it's not worse than yours or mine". To which I could only say: "Don't know about yours, but mine is in fact thousand times better". This colleague wasn't passionate about his work. He was just doing what he was good at.

Doing a PhD is a huge investment, not only in terms of time and energy, but emotionally. If you do a PhD because you have to for your career and after that start thinking about what you want to do with your life and whether it was worth while, then perhaps it's too late. No, it's never too late! But if you only do a PhD as a duty, then I don't think it can be good. (Of course, there are weak theses written by people who are passionate about them).

I have done a lot of work that I wasn't passionate about, mostly at the beginning of my career, at the time when beggars are no choosers, when you take any task because you think it will be helpful. But I have always tried to become passionate about any task I had. As a senior academic, you have to do a lot of work you do not enjoy, such as recommendation letters and committee meetings, but that's the price, and I am trying to tell myself that something good may come out of these too.

I guess I am extremely lucky. In an ideal world, everybody should be passionate about what they do.

Word count

I often see my Facebook friends mention how many words they have written on a particular day. These are mostly creative writing friends, but this morning an academic friend wondered how many words per day or week should be considered adequate for good research. This started me thinking, and following up my yesterday's post, here is some further sharing of experience.

We all write in different ways. I remember a writer friend was furious when I mentioned that I had finished a novel in three weeks. Obviously the reason for his rage was that no decent writing could go that fast. However, the three weeks of actual writing had been preceded by months of thinking and researching. The process of transferring words from my mind onto the computer screen was a matter of my typing skills. However, I know, or know of, writers who proudly say that they are happy if they can write a hundred words a day. Or twenty. Or ten.

Similarly, I can write a 6,000-word scholarly article in a day, but it means that I have been thinking about it for a long time and just need to write it down. I think best when I weed the garden or, as I have started doing recently, walking at fast pace in the park. After that, I rush to my desk to record all the clever things that came to my mind during the walk.I could never sit down to write a hundred words from scratch. I just don't function this way. But some people do. Some fellow scholars set goals for themselves: a thousand words per week? That adds up to six weeks for a 6,000-word essay. Sounds reasonable, but it includes thinking and researching. If you intend to publish two articles a year, what are you doing the rest of the time?

Sometimes, however, producing 6,000 words is not enough. Right now I am writing a paper on a new and difficult topic where I don't feel as secure as in my more usual fields. I wrote the first 5,000 words very quickly, but since then I have fluctuated on 5-6,000 level for quite a while, cutting and pasting, but also deleting and adding. I will present this paper to an audience that does not know me and does not know my subject. I need to be persuasive. I need to be very clear. I haven't counted the number of hours, days or weeks I have spent actually writing, but, as the story goes, "I have been learning all my life how to do it in a day".