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November 18, 2005

Collaborative Writing: “Shoulder Surfing”

Hazel Markus, highly regarded social and cultural psychologist, participated in a “How I Write” conversation on Nov. 7. As in other social sciences, engineering and natural science fields, most of the writing in psychology is done and signed by multiple authors in what could be called the great chain of revision. John Bravman, a materials scientist, has described how he works on these collaborations: a graduate student produces an initial draft that is reviewed and rewritten by all the people involved, one after the other. The draft finally reaches the primary investigator who then fills it up with red ink and sends it back down the chain again.

Hazel does it differently. She likes to sit with her collaborator, one person on the keyboard and the other looking over her shoulder as they fashion the piece sentence by sentence together. She has even worked across long distances this way, with both writers wearing phone headsets and both working on the identical text on their computers. One reason she likes this style of working is that it keeps her thoughts from meandering, and it keeps her from literally wandering off.

I’ve written in such a manner in two situations. I would sit at the keyboard and the client for whom I was working would feed me information, checking as we go. The client would get ideas, I would try to articulate them, then we’d check it together to revise. I would also write collaborative poems with friends, each of us alternating lines in a kind of game of wits, one line extending or abruptly clashing with the previous line. But writing in this way for social science seems highly unusual.

Hazel compared her style of joint work to similar collaborations programmers do in Silicon Valley. One programmer would sit and the other would lean over her shoulder in the way Hazel described. This is called “shoulder surfing, ” a wonderful term, and I imagine that a lot of people “shoulder surf.” How many people “shoulder surf” in academic writing?

Posted by hilton at 10:31 AM | Comments (0)

November 08, 2005

Finding A Topic in History

There are many techniques for finding a research topic. One method could be described as “finding the nooks and crannies.” During a “How I Write” conversation, George Fredrickson described this process:

“Well, I think the process is you start reading what other historians have written about a subject or around a subject, even if they haven’t written on exactly that subject, then something close to it, and then questions come up, things that you think need to be further explored, you might develop a tentative feel of what you are likely to find; so you have this sort of framework, and then your research gives you material to either confirm or contradict the hypothesis you have; or give you the sense of an entirely new dimension on the issue that you hadn’t heard of. And that’s really exciting, because the other historians haven’t even thought about this, and you suddenly see something developing from your research that is not in the literature. Then, oh boy, then you can really take off.”

Keep in mind that Prof. Fredrickson is speaking in conversation – so don’t get all agitated that his prose sounds conversational – it actually IS conversation.

He’s saying that you have an interest in an area, broadly, and then you start reading what other people have written about it. As you read, you come up with questions or concerns, and you discover that the people you’re reading don’t quite address particular aspects of what you’re interested in. In fact, you’ve found a little nook or chink in the seemingly smooth surface of knowledge. For some reason, historians (or people in other fields) have not addressed this question, and a topic along with a hypothesis starts to develop. David Kennedy, another historian, described the process in similar terms: the more you know about a particular area of history – the more familiar you are with the historiography – the more you know about gaps in that history.

So, you search for your topic by reading everything that seems relevant that’s already been written – and you discover those little nooks and crannies as you read. The more knowledge, the more questions; gaps in knowledge begin to emerge, and you find yourself toying with lots of possible topics.

Posted by at 02:22 PM | Comments (0)