For a long time, I’ve felt that the pressure to produce MORE publications \u2013 more Things To Count, since the system as it is now uses quantitative methods to establish quality of academics \u2013 is doing everyone a disservice, with lots of half-formed publications seeing the light of day.* In this publish or(\/and) perish world, I’ve been seeing it as a quantity VERSUS quality issue, and have felt that less might be more \u2013 a point that has been raised by many others, quite often using citing\u00a0Nobel laureates of yore who only ever published half a dozen articles. Clearly quantity is not an objective measure of academic worth.<\/p>\n
However, there is another way of looking at this issue, one which is highly important to anyone writing for a living. To paraphrase various authors, this is the general system:<\/p>\n
Which makes well good sense: it all comes down to writing things, finishing them, and getting them out into the world.\u00a0On a conceptual level,\u00a0writing a blog post and writing a monograph are par. Yes, my interminable monograph is taking forever to get done, but I also have a draft for a post on this blog that dates to December 2012.\u00a0Things can \u2013 and do! \u2013 end up hanging in limbo, unfinished for a slew of reasons,\u00a0all of which come down to one: not writing.<\/p>\n
But the other step in the system \u2013 where step 1 is To Write \u2013 is To Write LOTS.<\/p>\n
To produce Quantity.<\/p>\n
If you’re a writer trying to make a living, I can see\u00a0you need to sell your writings in order\u00a0to feed your kids. But if you’re an academic..? And in any case won’t the quality suffer?<\/p>\n
Generally speaking, I’ve tended to equate academic writing with something that takes a long time to accomplish. It takes time to do the background reading, to do the research, to do the thinking required. (To do the lab experiments, to run the programs (and correct the bugs), to process the results…) \u00a0Perhaps that’s what I find infuriating about the present state of affairs: here’s this thing which takes A Long Time To Do (never mind Do Well), and we are required \u2013 Demanded \u2013 to do more of it in less time!<\/p>\n
But things can also get written very rapidly.<\/p>\n
Now, I’ve written articles that took years to produce. But I’ve also written things at speed: there are\u00a0a couple\u00a0pages in\u00a0one of the things I have published that I well remember writing \u2013 long hand (!) \u2013 in one sitting, in a pub in London.\u2020 And last fall I put together an article within a week \u2013 admittedly based on a presentation I gave earlier last year, but my presentations are not article-text read out loud. We all have moments when words\u00a0just flow out, and it feels like you are channeling something or someone, rather than producing new text. But I can’t help feeling this is rarer in academia than in (some) other fields (I suspect\u00a0this is something that gets easier the further along your academic career you get, ie. experience helps, even more so than with many if not most other genres).<\/p>\n
..okay, so if I’m willing to concede, after all, that academic writing can be fairly rapid, what am I struggling over?<\/p>\n
Maybe it’s the business with killing your darlings. Just now, I read a short but great post on Tumblr. Here’s an excerpt:<\/p>\n
Pottery, particularly wheel-throwing, is wonderful for this, incidentally. You fail over and over and you fail fast and you are creating quantity to lead to quality. You throw and throw and throw and things die on the wheel and things die when you take them off the wheel and things explode in the kiln and after you have made a dozen or two dozen or a thousand, none of them are precious any more. There is always more clay.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
..but it’s only a page long, so go read it on Squash Tea<\/a>. I can wait.<\/p>\n
Done? Groovy.<\/p>\n
Here’s the bit that particularly got me:<\/p>\n
after you have made a dozen or two dozen or a thousand, none of them are precious any more<\/p><\/blockquote>\n