Noodle knows I’ve got a ton of writing that needs to be done, like yesterday. Just so I can keep it straight in my head:

* The #g20 paper. This was an awesome paper that was nearly done two years ago. The data is dated, which is going to make publishing harder, but the ideas and analysis are still really interesting and good, I think. I just need to finish off a small bit of analysis (oh no! that has little to do with writing!) and write the sucker up.

* The aforementioned book. Or at least a couple of the chapters for it, which are now about five years overdue.

* A short piece on Enders Game.

* Updating some research (eek, more non-writing) and writing it up (phew).

* A dozen other little projects.

I also, however, have a bunch of other pressing things: planning for two new courses, maybe coding up a new version of my badge system (although, unless somehow funded, that needs to be a weekend project), and of course the ever-present AoIR duties.

Oh, did I say weekends. Yes, the first caveat to my pledge: I’m trying not to work weekends. My family is my first priority, and while that is easy to say, it’s harder to do. So I will endeavor not to do any work on the weekends. I’ve been trying to do that so far, and it’s not really possible, but it’s a good reach goal. Oh, and I’m taking a chunk of Thanksgiving week off, since my Mom and all her kids and grandkids (including the ones in Barcelona) are coming together at our house for the first time in probably more than two decades. But I’ll do a make-up in December.

Second caveat: I’m counting posting to the blog (since this is where I used to do a lot of my pre-writing). I’d like to count email too, since I did a solid 6 hours of catching up on email today, but I think that’s a no-go.

Really what we are talking about then is four consecutive weeks of completing 6,000 words each week. That may not sound very ambitious, but given how hard it was to push out the last 5,000 words (it took way more than a week–sorry editors!), I think that 1,200 words a day is plenty ambitious. Oh, and by doing it as Monday-Friday weeks, I get to start next Monday. Procrastination FTW.

Now that I’ve managed to negotiate myself down, it doesn’t seem like much of a challenge, but there it is. I will report on my goals here on a weekly basis. I may try to add some other metrics (time on task, people mad at me, etc.) as we go forward. But for now: words, words, words. (Though only 573 of them for this post.)

Now, I am naturally lazy–a trait I am trying to more actively cultivate, but I gather he had figured that because I haven’t been blogging or tweeting or doing any of those other sorts of continual status updates I must be slacking. As usual, my blogging (including micro-blogging) is inversely proportionate to how busy I am, not the other way around. There is a small caveat: sometimes it is an indicator that I am procrastinating, and therefore should be busy. On very rare occasions, when the stars align, it is actually linked to progress on a project, but generally speaking, silence on this front should never be taken as indication that I am actually relaxing a little.

On the other hand, the number of hours I have each week to work on projects is somewhat limited by being the daytime parent (with some help) of Jasper. This remains my priority, and though it sometimes means sacrificing things I would like to do, there is never going to be another time to hang out with my six-month-old, so he wins. As it is, I wish I could spend even more time with him.

In what seems to be a perennial sort of post, here are some of the projects I’m working on right now, besides raising the future benevolent dictator of our solar system:

• Writing Course at Quinnipiac University. I’ve been dragged–somewhat against my will :)–into teaching the “writing for interactive” course this summer. Actually, the content of the course isn’t what puts me off: it’s that (a) it is in the summer, and I would like to reserve summers for research and projects and (b) it’s 5 weeks long. It is hard enough to teach a course in 15 and have students not feel overwhelmed. When you compress that into 5 weeks–and it’s the same number of credits, so I think we should hit the material at the same depth–it is just impossible. So, dealing with that tension, particularly in a writing course, is going to be difficult. I also need to revise my fall seminars. I’m organizing one of my courses around reading and annotating Little Brother, as well as heavily revising my intro (ICM 501) course. (I have also felt a recent disruption in the force in the ICM program, which will probably require even more cycles being put toward re-keeling it.)
• Digital Media & Learning Hub. I haven’t been talking publicly in any organized way about this, but some of you know that I have been working with the DML Hub, a group constituted to improve collaboration among researchers funded by the MacArthur’s Digital Media and Learning initiative. I’m working with a team to create a DML Collaboratory site for researchers, as well as an external site that will seek to gather the current state of the art in one place. I’m also in the early stages of working with a group to establish some norms of sharing data, particularly qualitative data. I’ll actually be blogging a bit about this latter project in the coming week, and probably tweeting a little about the Collaboratory and that process.
• Twittering and Protesting. Happy to have the opportunity to work with Maria Garrido again, this time on a project that tracks the ways in which Twitter is being used to both build identity and coordinate action. This is one of two papers that I’ve promised for the AoIR meeting next year. Will be blogging a bit as it develops. This is also one of two Twitter-related research pieces I’m working on, both at early stages.
• Association of Internet Researchers. In the short term, setting up a registration site, but I am desperately hoping that I can get the Exec behind using this in the long term as well. It would make my life so much easier, and everyone else’s as well! Still doesn’t solve the paper submission and refereeing system issues, but I really hope we are able to move to a different system for that next year. Looking forward to talking to next year’s organizers about how to make that work out a bit better.

A lot of other things are right on the cusp of needing to be done, but I’m trying to keep my head clear of them for the moment. It really doesn’t seem that bad when it’s spelled out as above. Of course, tthere are the other pending things: three book projects, whipping some old research together into publishable form, a grant proposal sometime later this year, various talks, digitizing my library, etc. But I’m trying to keep those things out fo mind, wherever possible.

As a result of this process, I’ve been trying to decide what (if any) book to use. My normal assignment in introductory courses is Strunk & White, and it may end up being so again this time. But I’m going to take a closer look at On Writing Well as an alternative.

This is after considering Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Joseph Williams. The book is widely acclaimed, and I could see why. Many of the issues addressed (or, rather “he addresses” :) ) would be familiar to those of us who read a lot of student work. But then I started reading his “corrections” of existing academic work, and got a bit worried.

One of his examples draws from Talcott Parsons, a sociologist celebrated as much for his terse and verbose style as for his role in establishing functional structuralism as the dominant paradigm in the middle of the last century. Williams suggests that there is no need for the complexity. He takes this passage from Parsons:

Apart from theoretical conceptualization there would appear to be no method of selecting among the indefinite number of varying kinds of factual observation which can be made about a concrete phenomenon or field so that the various descriptive statements about it articulate into a coherent whole, which constitutes an “adequate,” a “determinate” description. Adequacy in description is secured in so far as determinate and verifiable answers can be given to all the scientifically important questions involved. What questions are important is largely determined by the logical structure of the generalized conceptual scheme which, implicitly or explicitly, is employed.

Mostly in the context of a discussion of subjects and active/passive verbs, he changes this to the much clearer:

If scientists have no theory, they have no way to select from among everything they could say about something only that which would fit into a coherent whole, a whole that would be “adequate” or “determinate.” Scientists describe something “adequately” only when they can verify answers to questions that they think are important. They decide what questions are important on the basis of the theories that they implicitly or explicitly use.

Now, I am far from an expert on Parons’s thought, but this seems to me to be a wholly inaccurate paraphrasing of the original paragraph. Williams has taken “varying kinds of factual observation” and rephrased it as “everything they could say about something.” Less jargon? Of course. But it also means two different things. “Kinds of observation” have little to do with “ways of saying.” Moreover, Williams collapses “theoretical conceptualization” with “theory.” The two, I suspect, were not the same thing for Parsons. Likewise “generalized conceptual scheme” is not the same thing as “theory.” In a work of sociological theory, conflating the two is highly suspect.

While we’re at it “scientifically important” is not the same is “what they [scientists] think are important.” Sure, we could enter into a debate over whether they may be the same (i.e., there is no ideal of “scientific importance” beyond that which is agreed upon by the plurality of scientists), but I doubt this is what Parsons is intending to suggest.

Williams goes on to rephrase it further:

To describe something so that you can fit it into a whole, you need a theory. When you ask a question, you need a theory to verify your answer. Your theory even determines your question.

This is pablum. If a grad, or even an undergrad, wrote the above in a basic theory class, I’d fail them on the spot. I’ll admit, Parsons did not write in a way that was particularly comprehensible. But you don’t “fix” that by tossing out the meaning of whole phrases, and “dumbing down” the material. This is precisely why it’s frustrating when students read Spark Notes. Williams concludes that

The simplest version may omit some of the nuances. But Parson’s excruciating style must numb all but his most masochistically dedicated readers.

He’s right, it does. But at least there is some implication that there is a there there, that Parsons has something to say. No copy editor would keep his job if he suggested changing the first version to the last. This is more than moving away from passive verbs, it’s stripping the paragraph of its meaning.

I continue, hoping that this was merely a brief lapse. But no, in the very next section, Williams suggests that a better version of

Early childhood thought disorder misdiagnosis often occurs as a result of unfamiliarity with recent research literature describing such conditions.

would be

Physicians are misdiagnosing disordered thought in young children because they are not familiar with the literature on recent research.

The idea here is that noun chains should be broken up. Again, if I read this in a paper from a student, I would assume it was written by a non-native speaker. I am not a doctor, but I suspect that “early childhood thought disorder” is a term of art. It doesn’t actually mean “disordered thought,” but rather the alternative meaning of disorder: that is, according to OED “a disruption of normal physical or mental functions.” I am shocked that anyone could confuse the meaning so thoroughly. Sure, pull misdiagnosis out of that long phrase, but don’t make the sentence incomprehensible to its target audience. Likewise “research literature” is fine. If you have to fix it, remove “research” or “literature” rather than changing it to the awkward “literature on recent research.”

So, in case the above does not make this clear, I cannot assign this book to my students. If you have better suggestions, please let me know.