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Developing a repertoire of reading strategies is extremely important

My conversations on Twitter with Dr. Pat Thomson (The University of Nottingham) are always delightful. Pat is someone I deeply admire for her research and her commitment to graduate students and scholarly collegiality. I have had the fortune of interacting with her on a regular basis and she’s someone whose blog I refer my own students and research assistants as well as just about everybody who follows me on Twitter. Several times, Pat has emphasized the importance of developing “repertoires”. She is entirely right.

Reading outlining and calendar cross-posting

As a former competitive dancer, classical piano player and overall, someone who doesn’t believe that “one size fits all”, I am all about the repertoires.

But as I have said, reading takes time, as does doing good research.

This is why I developed an entire page on Reading Strategies (and more recently, one on Reading Strategies for Undergraduate Students). Because while you don’t need to Read All The Things in depth, you DO need to read SOME of those things quite deeply.

Reading Writing Summarizing and Others January 2017 099

The repertoire needs to vary, almost as much as the material does. And as I’ve written before, you develop heuristics to triage your reading material by…

… well…

Reading. And again, doing more reading. And even more reading.

There is no substitute for practice, unfortunately. This is true in academia and in everything else. Hopefully this blog post and my Resources pages will help others develop their own robust repertoire of reading strategies.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 24, 2019

How to write a systematic review, a narrative review, a scoping review or a meta-analysis

As I mentioned on Twitter, on my blog, I write about the mechanics and heuristics of how *I* conduct a literature review. I share my method, which is systematic. With my blog posts, I teach my students and research assistants a systematic approach to read, annotate and write their literature reviews.

But there are different types of reviews and it is important for students, early career scholars and researchers to know that there is a broad range of reviews. Many of these are actual scholarly products that get published.

Literature Road Mapping

My Twitter thread includes links to a few resources, several of which I also list below.

As I mention on my Twitter thread, I teach the mechanics of how to conduct a literature review, but these heuristics are how *I* do them, and I share them in hopes someone can use them and adapt them as they see fit (and also, I write these resources to help my own students and research assistants!)

And here are a few systematic literature reviews I found interesting and well done.

A few resources (with links to freely downloadable materials):

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 24, 2019

We need to discuss the lack of time and space to think in academic settings

This morning, I woke up at 4 am (as I normally do) and started writing. It’s a Saturday, and I really do not like working on weekends nor long hours. However, this week I’ve been putting in 12-16 hour days, just to catch up. It’s the beginning of the semester. This pace won’t be sustainable, and I am looking forward to reclaiming my evenings and weekends again, once the semester’s fast pace normalizes. My health has been compromised before because of overwork, and I’ve learned my lesson the very very very hard way.

Library Cubicles at El Colegio de Mexico

I have very clear physical limits to what I can sustainably do and how much I can work and I will not kill myself over a job.

Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

What made me ponder as I completed a full day’s worth of work (I tweeted my rant around 3pm) was that yes, I’m really happy that I can spend the entire day at home writing (on a Saturday), but at the same time, I know this long stretch of time to write and reflect won’t last. On Monday I have to go back to meetings, reading students’ drafts, teaching, preparing lectures, doing administrative paperwork, etc. I’ll be feeling like I’m running again as a headless chicken.

Don’t get me wrong: I love my job. I love being a professor. I love being a researcher. I adore my students, and my colleagues. I feel very fulfilled. BUT I am NOT happy about the fact that we don’t have enough time to reflect and think. My rant on Twitter is posted here for posterity.

I just had to get this off my chest. Back to writing!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 24, 2019

Triaging your reading workload: how to choose when to read something in more depth

Continuing with the series of “challenging questions my students ask”, this is perhaps the one I get from students that I am always wary to respond. “Professor, how do I know which articles I should read in more depth and which ones I should just skim (i.e. do a quick AIC Content Extraction)?”.

Index cards

Well, now. I wish I had that answer. I learned to triage literally by trial and error. So far, every single book and handout and article I have read on how to do reading and note-taking has said stuff like this “skim titles, first topic sentence, etc.”

I myself offer a few suggestions in the blog post I have stored in my Reading Strategies page, on doing a quick skim (AIC, Abstract, Introduction, Conclusion), to engaging at the meso-level (searching for keywords or key phrases), to reading really fully in-depth (literally going through the entire paper/book).

The problem I find is that we all use heuristics. And each set of heuristics works well (or doesn’t) for specific people. What works for me, may not always function well for others. Developing reading strategies takes time and is something that can only be improved with experience.

You get better at reading (and writing) by reading AND writing.

So my recommendation, always, is “try something, see if it works, if it doesn’t, change it and try again”.

Reading and writing by hand

I recently wrote a Twitter thread on triaging and my nested, sequenced, colour-coded highlighting system. I did this thread because I recalled that some people criticise the use of highlighting as a form of engagement. A valid concern is that highlighting may be taken to the extreme, so readers may end up covering All The Text with their highlighter instead of being strategic and just focusing on specific ideas.


Reading while travelling

Combining neon + pastel in my nested, 6 colours scheme allows me to see points that are MOST RELEVANT (neon), relevant (pastel) sequenced. On to scribbling: I do a combination of summaries of ideas AND I link to other authors, my own research.

My scribbles are a conversation that I am having with MYSELF.

The reasons I provide above are heuristics I use for myself to decide whether a paper should be read in-depth, at the meso-level, or just skimmed. As I note in my tweet, I have reasons to read this paper that go beyond the actual content of the paper.

HOWEVER

Another heuristic I use to decide whether I will read something in more depth is the number, density and relevance of comments I make on a paper. As you will note in the next few tweets, much of what Dr. Switzer is saying is very, very, very closely related to my own research. It would be a disservice not only to his work but to mine if I did not fully engage with his paper. This is not a paper for a quick AIC Content Extraction. This is an article I really need to engage, read, cite.

As I have told my students and research assistants: if you are doing a literature review for someone, or your advisor tells you that you should read X, Y or Z stuff, you can (and probably should) ask for pointers as to where to “zoom in” (i.e. read in more depth) and what you should keep “high level” (i.e. skim). I do it with my own students and RAs. Asking for guidance on what to focus on and what to read is ok, by the way.

I think the best way to develop a triaging heuristic is by keeping up with the literature. In my tweets (and everywhere else on my blog) I recommend a daily AICCSED combo. Reading one article a day, writing one CSED row is feasible to me. I know not everyone can make this commitment, but I think RAs and undergraduate and graduate students can, and probably should? But again, to each their own. if you’re going to devote one day to reading, that also works too.

As long as you can find a way to make the time you devote to your reading worthwhile. Which leaves me with the last point of this thread: I sometimes live-tweet my reading, particularly for didactic purposes (for my students). BUT I very, very, very strongly recommend that you avoid all distractions as possible when you read. I do it too (which is why I wake up at Ungodly O’Clock).

As I said a while ago, you Do Not Need To Read All The Things. But you DO need to develop a triaging heuristic that will work for you. The only way to develop this is to practice reading.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 21, 2019

Which “writing” book is best suited for me? A map of the literature based on a re-read of Helen Sword’s ALTS

The one question that I get asked by just about every single person I have ever interacted with, who reads my blog and knows about my Reading Notes of Books I Have Read section of my Resources pages, is: “which writing book do you recommend? Which book should *I* read?”

Well, I’m here to tell you that I have no clue how to answer that question. A recent re-read and reconsideration of Helen Sword’s Air, Light, Time and Space made me think about how what we know about a certain field is contingent (dependent) upon what we already have read and learned.

In early 2017, I had read very few if any books on writing, and on academic writing specifically. Right now, in mid-2019 I am at a very, very different stage in my academic life and I have purchased and read a ton of books on this topic, not only for myself but also to become a better supervisor and help my doctoral students complete their journeys.

Acwri books

The truth is that I have learned about writing (and more specifically academic prose production) through reading AND writing. I read about writing and I write, a lot. I submit my work for peer review, I get rejections, I revise my writings, and I sometimes (often?) get published.

Acwri books 2

I wrote a Twitter thread on how I revised my thinking about Sword’s ALTS and how I went from hating it to actually liking it. My opinion changed because I knew WAY MORE about academic writing than I did in 2017 and even more importantly, by the time I re-read ALTS, I already had read a ton of books on the topic.

I tweeted a couple of screenshots to make a point that is better explained in a blog post than a Twitter thread. When I re-read ALTS, I saw bits and pieces of other books there. I saw how ALTS fits within the broader landscape of books on academic writing and the scholarly enterprise.

In ALTS I see bits and pieces of Zerubavel’s The Clockwork Muse + Joli Jensen’s Write No Matter What + Sword’s Stylish Academic Writing + John Warner’s The Writer’s Practice, Patricia Goodson’s Becoming an Academic Writer and Wendy Laura Belcher’s Writing Your Article in 12 Weeks.


writing

Let me explain: ALTS is a book on gently developing YOUR own approach to writing (Zerubavel+Jensen), your own writing practice (Warner, Goodson, Belcher) based on lessons drawn from empirical research that Sword has done on academic writers.

What does this imply, in practice, and for those of you who teach #AcWri? It means, as I’ve argued in previous threads, that you need to more-or-less know the landscape of books on writing BEFORE recommending one for someone (which is why I almost never recommend). How you’ll read a book will be dependent on how much you know about the topic beforehand, as I said above.

This thread, and blog post, outline why I don’t like being asked which book is the best for ME. Because only YOU know what is best for you, and unfortunately, much like research and scholarship itself, the only way to know that is by trial and error.

Read a book on academic writing.

Take the parts you like, discards the ones you don’t.

Develop a writing practice.

Refine this practice with time.

Sadly, that’s how life as an academic happens: doing the work.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 16, 2019

Dealing with The Dreaded Blank Page

I have been writing a lot for a very long time, and I *still* find myself dreading the process of opening and facing a new document template.

The Dreaded Blank Page.

Dreaded Blank Page

For many of us, facing The Dreaded Blank Page is an exercise in self-loathing, frustration and hand-wringing. Even though I write a lot, and I specifically focus much of this blog to the scholarly writing enterprise, I still find myself, on occasion, stumped and dumbfounded by The Dreaded Blank Page.

The way out, in my view (and this is what I preach to my students and research assistants and to anyone who will listen to me) is to gradually develop a writing practice and to make of each Dreaded Blank Page not a summit to CONQUER, but an issue that we have to to DEAL WITH.

To recap, my suggestions to deal with The Dreaded Blank Page:

  • Break down the project in smaller pieces.
  • Deal with each piece of writing/research on its own.
  • Use the completion of each small piece of writing as a Quick Win, or just focus on it for 30 minutes at a time.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 15, 2019

On reading up a lot, mind mapping the literature, “finding the gap” and writing paragraphs in your literature review

While normally I write Twitter threads or blog posts in response to requests, particularly of my students and research assistants, but also when I hear from scholars across the globe, this post (based on my Twitter thread) comes from my own needs, both as a writer (I am writing and revising a literature review section myself) and as a student and RA supervisor (I wanted to have a resource to share with my team).

Editing by hand

In this blog post, I walk through my process of mapping out the literature, relying on systematic reviews, and situating my work within the broader debates around a particular topic. Finding a gap in the literature requires us to really map out the different ways and approaches in which different authors have approached a specific topic. The only way to do this, unfortunately, is to read.

A LOT.

AND READ BROADLY.

ACROSS DISCIPLINES.

Two important things escaped me the first time I wrote this thread. The first one is posted here (links to topic-sentences-focused blog posts).

Hopefully my process as broken down can help others as well!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 14, 2019

Writing a literature review assignment (and for instructors: providing guidance)

One of my former students asked me recently whether I had written anything on how to write a literature review, as he was asked to write one on a topic he hadn’t ever done research on (I do have a blog post on how to map an entirely new topic and write a literature review).

Reading

His request, and coming across another similar one over Twitter prompted me to reflect, first of all, if the structure of my Resources page and Literature Reviews subpage was not clear enough (I have written A TON of blog posts on the topic of reviewing the literature) and secondly, whether there was some sort of missing connection between what students are asked to do and the guidance that instructors provide. So this thread I wrote is aimed at tackling both issues.

Before I go on with my strategy to teach someone how to do a literature review, I show them two diagrams that are important to me. The first one explains how the literature review is situated within the production of a scientific paper. This process applies to any other type of research output (a book, a dissertation, etc.)

Full diagram paper with annotated bibliography and banks of rhetorical precis and databases

The second diagram that I share with my students and RAs is an overview of the different scholarly products we can generate (and their intermediate outputs): packages of rhetorical precis, sets of synthetic notes, folders filled with memorandums, annotated bibliographies, Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump tables, literature reviews (see diagram below).

Components of a Research Paper Data

In my own case, if I wanted to teach someone how to approach a new body of scholarly literature, in addition to teaching them Reading Strategies and Note-Taking Techniques, the sequence of blog posts that I would recommend they peruse (and I have used as teaching tools) would be (is):

  1. How to write a rhetorical precis
  2. How to skim/summarize an article using the AIC (Abstract, Introduction, Conclusion) content extraction technique
  3. How to develop a Synthetic Note
  4. How to write an Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED)
  5. Developing a literature review, based on 1-5
  6. Expanding a Synthetic Note into a full-fledged Memorandum
  7. Writing /robust/effective memorandums

Citation tracing forward and backward and reading analog and digital

I find enormous value in (DTP, CSED, outlines) because students and researchers alike can all get lost and bogged down in the details, missing the forest for the trees. They’re useful for me as a supervisor and for my students and RAs.

Now, for instructors – what kind of guidance do we need to give students and research assistants?

I strongly believe that it is incumbent upon us (those asking for a LR) to offer some degree of guidance. I suggest a few areas here:


What do I mean by “idiosincratic responses”? Well, we all like different scholarly products our own way. There is NO SINGLE APPROACH to writing a literature review, which is why I suggest that those requesting it write a handout or offer at least verbal or hands-on guidance on topics, key authors, etc.

Workflow: Finishing a paper

So, what does this guidance look like in practice? These tweets offer an overview of what my interaction with my PhD students looks like when we discuss LRs.

Hopefully this blog post, full with links to other posts I have written and to my Twitter thread will be helpful both for students and supervisors/professors.


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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 9, 2019

Using Overview Devices in scholarly research and academic writing

While I do not study nor research academic writing (there are people who do!), there’s something that has kept popping in my head: the notion of Overview Devices.

Index cards, Excel Dump, memorandums, synthetic notes

I define Overview Devices as artifacts (diagrams, techniques, strategies) that help us sustain a “bird’s eye”, a panoramic view of what we are doing. While writing a short Twitter thread for Dr. Jackie Bruce, who mentioned was struggling with her literature review, and after having my work recommended by Dr. Courtney Vengrin, I figured I would write about the four Overview Devices I have discussed on my blog:

  • The Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED) – gives you an overview of the material you have read for your literature review.
  • Mind maps – which give you an overview of ideas and concepts and the relationships between them.
  • The Dissertation Two-Pager (DTP) – which gives the student (and the supervisor!) an overview of the entire thesis and where each element fits with each other, progress degree and tasks remaining to be done.
  • The year-long plan section of my Everything Notebook – which gives me an overview of what I am going to be writing, when the deadlines are and what I am supposed to be generating, which conferences and workshops I committed to attend, etc.

Why do we need Overview Devices? Because the research and writing process is messy and non-linear. We may get bogged down in details and we forget sometimes to see the big picture, or the forest for the trees.

I am glad this question was asked because this notion of Overview Devices had been hovering in my brain for a while and I’m happy that I finally figured out a few of the reasons why I enjoy thinking in such panoramic, broad view way, and the strategies I use to do so. Hopefully these will be useful to others!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 6, 2019

A synthetic memorandum on advice on academic research and writing

This blog post comes from a Twitter thread I did on snippets of wisdom that I have drawn from a broad range of writers. It’s like the synthesis/distillation of all (or most of) the books about writing that I have read. This wisdom applies to writers of books, articles, or theses.

MAKING SPACE: Most authors I have read (Joli Jensen, Eviatar Zerubavel, Stephen King, Helen Sword) recommend that people carve a physical space to do their writing. This ritualistic approach may not work for everyone, it does for me. I have 3 spaces where I work (home, office), and my home office in my childhood bedroom at my Mom’s house.

Clean campus office

I try really, really hard NOT to work in my dining table (I now have a big enough house that I can do this, but even when I lived in Vancouver in a shoebox, I had a little alcove that I used to JUST write my doctoral dissertation). The point that Stephen King and Joli Jensen in particular make is that you need to CARVE that space out of whatever you have available at the moment.

MAKING TIME. The authors I mentioned, plus Bolker and Boyle Single, all suggest that you should designate (or carve) *SOME* time to sustain a writing practice. Most people say 15 minutes is not even enough to launch the laptop. Probably, BUT I have found that if I am able to devote at least 15-30 mins to writing, I feel like it helps ME move my work forward.

I try to always remind people that nobody has the same schedule. Contingent faculty cobbling courses together don’t have the luxury of carving time. Let’s fight this. I want an academia where contingent faculty are moved up to permanent contracts, where they are paid decent wages, and where they are able to carve time to write instead of having to struggle to make ends meet.

At any rate, for me, carving chunks of time and creating a physical space are also associated with creating a “mental space”. My brain needs to be “in the right head space” to write.

Holiday Inn Express Guadalajara ITESO (El Mante, Guadalajara)

ENERGY: You need the right amount of energy to write. This is something I realized when I started with my chronic fatigue/pain. I don’t always have the energy to write. Again, most writers (but especially Jensen) suggest that we acknowledge that in order to write we need to be in decent/optimal energy/health state.

Nobody can provide a magic formula for how to develop the energy to write simply because we are all different (and I recommend that you read Chronically Academic, so you can understand the struggles of individuals facing chronic illness, and many of the wonderful folks who are courageous and brave and speak out about mental health issues. Let’s accept that academia is a highly competitive environment that has at the very least the potential to have very negative effects on people. Let’s also admit that to write we need energy/mental state.

AcWri while travelling

PROCESS: Zerubavel, Dunleavy, Single, Sword and Jensen all emphasize that we should have a writing practice. John Warner’s The Writer’s Practice provides some examples of how to develop one, I do have mine (you can check blog posts I’ve written on this topic by clicking on this link)

There is huge variation across writing practices. Some authors recommend writing every day (Jensen, Zinsser) because, you know, it’s like a muscle, others (Zerubavel) suggest that you block out when you CAN’T write and make the time for writing based on those “Can’t Do” slots.

Highlighting, scribbling, reading

PREPARATION AND PLANNING – this is the part that I see very clearly in Zerubavel, Single, Jensen, Dunleavy, Heard, Sternberg: you need to pre-write (which includes outlining, reading, researching, synthesizing literature, gathering data, analyzing, etc.) before writing.

AUDIENCE: Warner, Germano, Rabiner and Fortunato, Zinsser, Kamler and Thomson all insist that part of your preparation includes determining the audience. This is also why I love Josh Bernoff’s Writing Without Bullshit. Our audience wants (for the most part) clear prose, although I know a few academics who seem to revel in writing obscure stuff.

QUALITY AND QUANTITY – Paul Silvia tells you that you should write a lot, which coincides with most advice (Bolker and Dunleavy included) that says that “the best dissertation is the done dissertation”. I don’t know if you should write a lot, but what works for me instead is breaking down the work in smaller components and then engage with those work packets.

I write memorandums, synthetic notes, rows in my Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump. I try to write a bit every day (I’m not a “words per day guy” for the most part). Most advice does suggest “words per day” as a metric, but your mileage may vary. I encourage my students and research assistants to look at “paragraphs and sentences completed” instead.

On quality: I’ve seen some very senior academics say “I don’t want to read a half-baked paper when peer-reviewing”. I’m going to try to say this in the nicest way possible: “Remember that your definition of half-baked may not be that of other people, please provide kind, concise and actionable feedback on how someone can turn a half-baked paper into something that you’d like to read”. Particularly senior people, you’ve been in this business longer. Please help out whenever you can.

Editing by hand

SUMMARY: There is no perfect approach to writing. I examine my own process regularly, adjust, change, try different things. Waking up early to write works for me, writing every day works for me, reading about how to improve my writing works for me.

YOU DO YOU.

And remember: we all struggle with our writing.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 29, 2019