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Two methods for writing a paper outline: Answering questions and listing topic sentences

Since I usually write blog posts by request, unless there’s a pressing thought that I really want to get out and get off my chest, I normally make a list of what I’m supposed to be blogging about. A topic that I saw people insisting upon was the question of how to write an outline for a paper. The process can be escalated to a book, or a doctoral dissertation, a Masters thesis, or an undergraduate honors major paper.

AcWri at my campus office

I use a couple of methods, and in this post, I discuss two methods I use. Both are inquiry-focused, but in one I set up questions, whereas in the other I basically throw words or sentences and then list and group them to see if they make a coherent argument when assembled. There are, as I mention in my Twitter thread (which you can open by clicking anywhere on the tweet below) other methods, such as IMRAD, Introduction – Body – Conclusion, etc. Mine are just two methods, and hopefully they may be of use to others who are interested in writing outlines for their papers, books and dissertations.

My Twitter thread began here (you can click anywhere on the tweet, and the thread will expand and open in a new window – scroll down all the way to the end to read the entire thread and people’s responses):

1. ASKING QUESTIONS

I tend to dialogue with myself, and I use writing as a form of conversation, where I am the interlocutor and the speaker too. In the example I posted, where I shared the outline for my ethnographic methods in public policy analysis chapter, I asked questions that can become sections of the paper.

When I ask questions to myself, I usually add anything that can help me create sentences and paragraphs. For example, in the tweet below, I have used those questions as prompts to force me out of a writing rut.

2. WORD SALAD + LIST OF TOPIC SENTENCES + FEEDBACK

This method works really well for me, as I ask for feedback from fellow academics very early in the process. What I did with my paper on the global governance of plastics was that I wrote a list of ideas I had, a list of topic sentences from where I could create entire paragraphs, I gave it some coherence, and asked for feedback from Dr. Robin Nagle and Dr. Kate O’Neill, both experts on waste.

I am a big fan of conceptual maps (also known as mind maps). I usually draw them in different colours and I use them to connect ideas, concepts and authors. For example here, I more or less have drawn the connections between local, national and international environmental regulation of plastics, thanks to the feedback Robin and Kate offered.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a conversation with oneself on paper, especially when we are at the early stages of composition. I try to always write topic sentences that can have one idea, and then flesh out that idea by assembling additional written sentences until they form an entire paragraph.

The “Listing Topic Sentences” method works very well for me when I know the literature so well that I can use it to write topic sentences that I can then flesh out. For example, in this case I link my own work with that of Dr. Malini Ranganathan and Dr. Colin McFarlane. We all three have written about informal sanitation mechanisms.

Topic sentences work wonderfully for my writing because they act as prompts or anchors from where I can spin off the thread that will compose my entire argument.

This is another example that is a variation from the Listing Topic Sentences, which is Listing Key Ideas.

Do note how in the previous case, each concept is one sentence, whereas in the case below, I have a more well thought out idea of what I want to say.

I always keep going back-and-forth between my paper, my Everything Notebook and my handwritten conceptual maps. Doing this allows me to maintain control over my ideas and grasp what I’m trying to understand more clearly.

The pair of tweets below clearly summarize my approach.

One final thought: research is social, contrary to what you hear. When you write, you put ideas down that (if you submit them to a peer reviewed journal) somebody else needs to read and understand. Therefore, the earlier you can share your drafts with fellow scholars, the better developed your argument.

Hopefully my method will be useful to students, early career scholars and other fellow academics and writers.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 17, 2018

The mid-March-to-mid-April 2018 Reading Challenge #AICCSED

One of the biggest challenges we face in academic life on a daily basis is juggling multiple tasks within a constrained period of time. We are always pressed for time and wish we could read more, or even just make time to read. I’ve encouraged folks to test and see if my AIC Content Extraction/Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (AIC/CSED) combination of methods could help them stay on top of the literature.

Working and writing everywhere

Several fellow professors have taken up this idea on their own…

One of the things that has been helping me lately is using collaborative groups where we support each other to achieve goals (writing, reading, submitting journal articles). I do this online with #GetYourManuscriptOut, which we (Steve Shaw, Mireya Marquez and I, with the help of Academic Batgirl) founded in order to encourage people to submit papers that were sitting dormant in people’s computers.

This time, I wanted to do a reading challenge. It’s a simpler proposal than “READ A FULL ARTICLE PER DAY”. This is challenging for everyone, given that closely reading (and actively reading, with highlighting and scribbling on the margins) is very time consuming. So I proposed on Twitter to do a one-month trial of AIC-CSED combo: not necessarily reading THE ENTIRE PAPER, but at least getting the gist of it using AIC and then storing what we learned in a CSED.

The challenge is simple: choose an article you need to read (or at least, skim!) and run an AIC (Abstract-Introduction-Conclusion) Content Extraction process to find the most relevant information in the paper. Then, drop your marginalia and/or highlights in a row in your Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump. Then tweet about it using the hashtag #AICCSED. Hopefully seeing others taking up the challenge may be motivating.

Participating in this challenge (or not doing so) is not intended to shame anyone, this is just a process that (fingers crossed) should help organize our schedules in order to carve some time to read. At the end of the challenge, I am hoping we’ll all feel good about knowing that we’ve at least skimmed 20 more papers, and we have an idea of what they’re about. I’m obviously excluding weekends because we all need to take some time off, but if you feel like you want to read on the weekend, by all means!

I’d love to see screenshots of your CSED or AIC scribbles/highlights.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 12, 2018

On the economic geography of industrial decline in Mexico

When I tell people that I’m both a political scientist and a human geographer, they tend to be somewhat shocked. After all, I am in a public administration department, I publish in interdisciplinary journals, and attend conferences ranging from area-specific (International Association for the Study of the Commons, IASC) to discipline-specific (Midwest Political Science Association). But I also consider myself a human geographer, because I was trained as one. And my doctoral dissertation was an examination of industrial restructuring of the leather and footwear clusters in the Mexican cities of Leon (Guanajuato) and Guadalajara (Jalisco). The funny thing is that I started studying the economic geography of industrial decline by accident, not by a well-though-out decision-making process. I wanted to explain why in this blog post.

Since I was a child, I have been interested in cooperation. I considered myself “a good friend”, someone who was always able to cooperate and collaborate with everyone. My interest in cooperation has remained at the core of my personal and professional lives. My undergraduate thesis was a mathematical model of the kinetics of biodegradation of chemical compounds in leather tanning wastewater. Activated sludge bioreactors’ bacteria are able to degrade much of the biochemical and chemical oxygen demand by cooperating. My Masters’ thesis was a game-theoretic model of collaboration between two unlikely collaborators: small biotechnology firms, and large pharmaceuticals. This is a game under moral hazard and asymmetric information, and I created a methodology to enable strategic alliances across biotechnology firms and pharmaceutical companies.

Museo de Arte e Historia de Guanajuato (Forum Cultural Guanajuato)

A model of a leather tanning drum. Exhibit in the Museum of Art and History of Guanajuato.

For my doctoral dissertation, I was originally interested originally in studying voluntary programs for pollution reduction in North America. However, as time went by, and as I took courses in economic history, economic geography, urban geography, and ethnography, I realized that there was a topic that I found even more interesting than environmental regulation: the economic geography of industrial decline in Mexico. In fact, I’m interested in the topic beyond Mexico. If you do a Google Scholar search for the topic, you’ll see that much of the scholarship on the topic comes from the United Kingdom, particularly examining the transition away from steel manufacturing in Sheffield and Manchester. Many scholars in the United States point to the transformation of Pittsburgh, and the decline of the steel industry, as examples of industrial decline.

Why study industrial decline, and more specifically the economic geography of plant closure? There are a number of reasons, but one of the most powerful, for me, was the excessive focus that scholars paid to entrepreneurship and the emergence of new firms. The strategic management literature (a body of scholarship I know very well because I studied it during my Masters in Economics of Technical Change and Technology Management) is overflowing with studies of how new firms are created, and the positive impacts that they bring along to regions and societies. But there’s a paucity of studies on why plants close. What drives companies to shut down operations and how can we prevent this from happening?

The irony of it all is that A LOT of companies shut down all over the world, and we continue to be obsessed with what drives entrepreneur to create new firms. The question that I believe deserves further examination is: why do companies take their sunk costs with them and shut down their firms? What are the drivers of industrial restructuring and how does this process of structural change modify the structure of cities? And this last question is precisely one of the main reasons why I am fascinated with this topic. Much as I consider myself a comparativist (across nations), I’ve also done many studies of sub-national, city governance processes and therefore I remain fascinated with cities, urban structure and industrial change.

Moreover, studying the economic geography of industrial decline of closely-allied industries like leather manufacturing and shoe-making allowed me to understand the formation of industrial districts (clusters). This literature is fascinating if you’re an economist and/or someone fascinated with cooperation. What drives companies to co-locate within the same region? Why do competitors perform better when they’re all close-by to each other? How can we better understand the dynamics of industrial location and geographical agglomeration? These questions can’t be solely answered with economic geography. While vital for our understanding, you need to know policy sciences, political science (urban politics), environmental regulation, economic history. This topic is tremendously interdisciplinary and it fascinates me.

Museo de Arte e Historia de Guanajuato (Forum Cultural Guanajuato)

A shoe exhibit at the Museum of Art and History of Guanajuato.

For me, seeing leather tanneries in the city of Leon shut down presented an extraordinarily interesting research puzzle. Why would an industry that was perceived as the heart of a city decide to close their tanneries and what factors drive these closures? Clearly, it wasn’t only strict environmental regulation. My research found that tanneries and shoe factories respond to a multiplicity of external pressures (including water scarcity, increased regulatory pressure, changes in land use and zoning regulations, technological change, consumer presferences) in different ways and therefore, their collaborative relationship can be strained.

So, at the core, my research was, and continues to be fundamentally about collaboration. Even as I am now leading a project on water conflicts, I’m still primarily focused on understanding how can we solve conflict and bring about cooperation across agents. This interest transcends my departmental affiliation (public administration) and disciplinary one (human geography and political science). I study cooperation for the benefit of society, not a specific discipline. I also live and breathe cooperation and collaboration.

That’s one of the main reasons why I find my research so tremendously rewarding. I research exactly what I love studying and I get paid to do it.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 25, 2018

Can a soft path approach to water management fix Cape Town’s water crisis?

While I work on urban water governance issues, I’m not an expert on every city, and particularly, I am wary of offering any “silver bullet” kind of solutions to drought crises because cities are heterogeneous entities and therefore there is no single policy decision that will have the necessary impact. When I first started reading about Cape Town’s water crisis, my first thought was “why not apply a soft path approach?”

Fuentes Danzarinas (Parque Tres Centurias)

The soft path approach to water management is predicated on the premise that behavioural change can occur and water demand can be properly managed in a way that reduces stress on urban infrastructure and reduce challenges facing cities. I first heard about the soft path when I started working with one of my students on a paper, and when I first met Dr. David Brooks (with whom I share the privilege of being an editorial board member of Water International, the journal). Dr. Brooks has championed the notion of a soft path to water management.

The soft path to water management would seem like the logical trajectory to ensuring Cape Town would not run out of the vital liquid by the third week of April, as it is predicted. Though some analysts (like Dr. Anne Van Loon, University of Birmingham) appear to be confident that Cape Town could learn from other cities that have faced severe water shortages, like Sao Paulo, others (like Dr. Anthony Turton, a South African scholar of water governance) would seem to be less so, particularly given water utilities’ and local government behaviour in a context of widespread corruption.

Park City (Utah) and Silver Baron Lodge (Park City, UT)

My own view (given that many of the cities that I study are facing critical water stress) is that we probably need a mixture of soft path and hard path approaches, but since I know very little about the geo-hydrology of Cape Town and behaviour of South African water users, I’m very wary of wanting to propose a solution. But I do see that this will be a critical case for other cities to follow closely, because from the information I’ve been getting, the situation is quite critical. Not sure if a soft path management approach will be enough, to be quite honest, but I do look forward to seeing how the situation develops.

What worries me is that even though the concept of water recycling and the value of wastewater treatment is now en vogue (thanks to the World Water Assessment Programme’s 2018 report on wastewater as an untapped resource), I have been calling for a reconsideration of wastewater as a resource since 2004 and it’s 2018 and we are still not treating 100% of our wastewater, and we’re not recirculating it to our water systems, and we continue building houses and expanding cities, and covering areas where recharge could occur. Human behaviour in the face of a water crisis continues to be incredibly stupid, and I don’t know whether we will be able to change it in the near future, or fast enough to solve looming crises like Capetown’s.

You can read some more stuff on the soft path management approach here, and here, and here, here and here.

Posted in academia, water governance, water insecurity, water policy, water stress.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 4, 2018

Forward citation tracing and backwards citation tracing in literature reviews

One of the skills I teach my students and research assistants on a regular basis is a method to find new citations across the literature. That’s what I (and others) call citation tracing.

The examples I use here come from a Google Scholar search, but you can extend the method to Web of Science, WebMD, and other databases.

Forward citation tracing:

Refers to the process of finding the newest articles, books or book chapters that cite a particular paper, book, or book chapter. I call it “forward citation tracing” because you are going forward from the date when the reference you’re alluding was published. So, for example, a forward citation tracing on my 2015 Review of Policy Research paper on transnational environmental activism will give me 7 citations, which I can then look through in order to see

forward citation tracing 1

Doing a forward citation tracing exercise can allow us to stay in touch with the most relevant research that is following a specific topic.

Backward citation tracing:

For me, backward citation tracing is key because it allows me to see if an author has omitted any crucial citations, or whether I can learn more from the texts they cited. This is an important exercise for my students and research assistants as well because they can see why a particular article they’re reading has gaps.

Another way to call forward and backward citation tracing is “Ascendancy Searches” and “Descendency” – which is basically searching up and down for citations.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 3, 2018

An improved version of the Drafts Review Matrix – responding to reviewers and editors’ comments

This 2018 I promised myself I would do things better and take time to reflect on how my processes have evolved and therefore, I wanted to share a couple of improvements I made to the Drafts Review Matrix I discussed in previous years. This time, I’ll share also a couple of things I do with regards to the process of responding to reviewers and editors’ comments and dealing with Revise-and-Resubmits (or rejections that I then resubmit to a different journal).

Workflow: Finishing a paper

First, a comment on process, which I believe was lost in previous discussions: when I am dealing with comments from book editors, or reviewer comments, I create a Drafts Review Matrix, which I often print out, and fill out by hand, but I now generally work online off the printed version of the comments. Also, I ONLY work at my desk with the materials associated with the R&R or edited chapters: the printed version of my paper, and a grid paper notepad (a graph notepad).

AcWri setup

You may ask yourselves, why don’t I work the edits off my Everything Notebook? The answer is this: I use this graph notepad to jot down ideas on how I’m going to deal with specific comments, or to note which references I need to search, and then I use those comments to fill the Drafts Review Matrix. Since those quick scribbles are an intermediate step to actually revising the manuscript, I don’t want them to fill up valuable (and scarce!) pages off my Everything Notebook.

The new Drafts Review Matrix looks something like I show below.

drafts review matrix for Tosun Howlett

This particular one is for a book chapter I’m writing for a book on national policy styles edited by Mike Howlett and Jale Tosun. As you can notice, I put the title of the book editors at the top, but you can do this for journal article manuscripts that you are revising (substitute Reviewer 1, Reviewer 2 or Reviewer 3 at the top).

Note that my Drafts Review Matrix now has both a “Page” AND a “Reference Paragraph” column. This allows me to be even more precise than I used to be with the Comment Location column. I then follow with the “Reviewer/Editor Suggestions“. I also included a “Deadline” column to force me to commit myself to finish particular sets of revisions by a certain deadline. Moreover, I now use a “Check” column to confirm that I’ve completed the revisions suggested. And finally I’ve added a column of “Comments” because sometimes I need to do things sequentially, and this column allows me to explain to myself what I’m doing. For example, in some cases, I’ve already moved text around, and I need to make sure that I avoid duplication of efforts.

Hopefully my new version of the Drafts Review Matrix will help if you’re editing a paper (or a book or thesis!).

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 3, 2018

How to write the introduction to a research paper

As I’ve noted before, many of the blog posts I write are about things that I know my own students and research assistants need (or will need). This is one of those cases. My students and research assistants often ask me “how should I write a powerful introduction?” It’s also one of the blog posts that other students and ECRs have asked me to write for a very long time. So here it is.

Writing setup at home

What is the purpose of an introduction to a paper, a journal article, a book or a dissertation?

In a recent Facebook conversation, Dr. Pat Thomson (University of Nottingham) mentioned that it was important that the writer knows what’s the purpose of the paper. Pat and her coauthor Barbara Kamler argue that the very first move of the paper is usually to LOCATE, that is, to situate the paper (or book or journal article, or thesis) within the broader theoretical and empirical literature. Having read their book I tend to agree, though in the papers that I am using as an example here, not everyone uses the exact same structure as Thomson and Kamler do. Still, Thomson and Kamler’s advice is sound and one that should be heeded when thinking about introductions. See Slide 3 in the embedded Power Point in Pat’s post on introductions.

I can’t claim that I write the best introductions, but in a similar way as I did when I wrote about the difference between description and analysis in academic writing, I have used exemplars from other scholars to offer insights into how introductions to papers, book chapters, books, and theses should be written. I tweeted an entire thread (which you can open by clicking on the tweet shown below).

There are a few methods to write introductions. Below you’ll find Dr. Jessica Calarco (Indiana University)’s formula. She breaks it down in three paragraphs:

  1. The puzzle – a synthetic summary of the literature review.
  2. The solution – a short discussion of methods and findings.
  3. The “why this solution works” – a preview of the discussion section.

When the introduction is longer than 3 paragraphs you’ll often find a method like Michael Cacciatore and coauthors:

  1. The puzzle.
  2. The challenges that the problem posing a puzzle presents.
  3. The implications of the challenges this puzzle offers.
  4. These authors’ approach.
  5. The contributions these authors make in this paper, and a paper outline.

Dr. Andrew Biro uses a 3 paragraph method as well in a recent paper he published on bottled water.

Dr. Biro’s method is:

  1. This is the puzzle we’re facing.
  2. These are the questions nobody has considered and the factors that could potentially explain these phenomena.
  3. This is how I approach the questions and answer them and provide an explanation.

I also have really enjoyed how Dr. Malini Ranganathan (American University) writes introductions. Her introductory pages are similar to those written by a human geographer and/or an anthropologist. Dr. Ranganathan offers a lot of context in her introduction in this particular paper. I found the introduction really compelling and I wanted to describe it in more detail, as her approach is also very useful.

Dr. Ranganathan’s method of writing an introduction (at least as deployed in this particular paper) can be summarized as follows:

  1. Context of the research and where this paper is situated.
  2. Description of the paper.
  3. Fit: how this paper fits within the broader literature.
  4. Contribution: a summary of this paper’s argument and how it is different from what we already know.
  5. Addition to the literature 1
  6. Addition to the literature 2
  7. Addition to the literature 3
  8. Challenges the author of this paper offers that disagree with, or prove current wisdom wrong
  9. Data sources, methods and findings.

This method is extraordinarily powerful for doctoral dissertations, 3-paper theses, and books. I do love offering contributions in groups of three, and I have noticed many writers follow this model.

Another example that I used was Dr. Chris Weible and Dr. David Carter’s paper synthesizing policy studies literature with non-profit scholarship.

This particular introduction is incredibly short and powerful. In two paragraphs, Dr. Aiyer synthesizes his entire paper.

IN SUMMARY, MY OWN APPROACH:

In my view your introduction (paper, book, book chapter, thesis) should clearly state:

  • The puzzle – “this phenomenon is occurring and we don’t know why”
  • The approach – “let’s study X by doing Y and Z things”
  • The research findings/argument – “we find/we argue”, and
  • The paper’s contributions – “here’s the money shot & why’s good”

While I also highlighted other authors, I wanted to keep those tweets for a future blog post on using topic sentences to anchor and write entire paragraphs. Hopefully this summary of approaches to writing introductions can be helpful to students, researchers and professors alike.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 2, 2018

Preparing the core elements of the PhD dissertation towards the thesis defense

Last year, my first Mexican PhD student graduated from our PhD programme in Public Policies. While I had graduated PhD students at other universities, Rafa was my first Mexican doctoral student and therefore, I was (and obviously continue to be) very invested in his success. I spent a week working with him and preparing him to defend his PhD dissertation.

PhD

One of the problems doctoral students face, and I recognise this as something that happened to me, was that towards the end of the project, they’re all ready to throw in the towel, exhausted and with no interest whatsoever in their dissertation anymore. I remember I hated mine. After all, I was already interested in, and conducting research in other areas of scholarship, very very different to anything I had studied for my doctoral dissertation. I already had conducted and completed a different project. However, I needed to finish my PhD thesis and thus I had to regain focus on a topic that I thought I hated already and was no longer interested in.

I also attended a PhD defense yesterday, which is what prompted my Twitter thread – I think it’s important that every PhD advisor teach their students about these particular issues:

  • Contribution (theoretical or empirical) to the literature. This is particularly important, and something that students should be able to state within a 90 seconds pitch. A doctoral dissertation can have empirical, theoretical or both types of contributions.
  • Position of the PhD dissertation within contemporary and classical debates. This is particularly important as it allows the student to demonstrate how they contribute (by extending X author’s scholarship, by offering a new dataset, by creating a different method to analyse a particular phenomenon, by exploring a new idea using innovative methods, etc.
  • Methodological tools, including (but not limited to) which methods they used in their dissertation/thesis papers, and which ones they didn’t, but could have if they had had the time, or access to data, etc.
  • Individual contributions of each paper (if it’s a 3-4 papers’ thesis), as well as the overall theoretical or empirical thread that makes these individual papers’ a cohesive, clear and coherent, cogent argument.
  • Limitations of the research, potential future research (including individual’s research plans) and how the thesis positions the student within the global theoretical debates and/or how it contributes empirically to our better understanding of phenomena we would not have been able to analyse better were it not for the student’s PhD dissertation.

You can read my entire thread (and responses) by clicking on the tweet above.

If you liked this blog post, you may also be interested in my Resources for Graduate Students page, and on my reading notes of books I’ve read on how to do a doctoral degree.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – January 27, 2018

Mapping a new field of scholarship

One of the first questions I get asked on Twitter (I’m at @raulpacheco) is: “how do I get started on X?” It’s always hard because to be perfectly honest, a lot of things I don’t even realize how I got started, I just know that I now know how to do them. And because I actually do know how to do them, I share openly with the world. Mapping new fields of scholarship is something nobody taught me how to do, but I’ve developed a strategy throughout the years that works for me, and it may work for you too.

AcWri at home - paragraphs

The process I use to map a new field of scholarship looks something like this:

  1. Decide on the topic of interest.
  2. Ask trusted advisors for suggestions of key citations and/or authors.
  3. Run a citation tracing process on the above-mentioned cites and authors.
  4. Run a Google Search for top-cited papers in the field.
  5. From Steps 3 and 4, create a mind map of key authors and topics.
  6. Choose 3-7 articles for the topic, and 3-5 for each sub-topic.
  7. Read (or if under extreme time pressure, apply AIC Content Extraction and Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump method) to create a visual and analytical map of the field.
  8. Expand the mind-map as necessary and continue searching and reading/annotating/highlighting/scribbling until I reach conceptual saturation.

Now, let’s go through step by step:

1. Decide on the topic of interest.

Here, I knew I wanted to do a paper on informal water vending.

2. Ask trusted advisors for suggestions of key citations and/or authors.

3. Run a citation tracing process on the above-mentioned cites and authors.

I already knew that Quentin Grafton had done work on the Murray-Darling basin and on formalized water markets, so I searched for him and did a citation tracing process.

quentin grafton

4. Run a Google Search for top-cited papers in the field.

I would also add that you can run a Google Scholar Search on the authors you KNOW work in the field too.

5. From Steps 3 and 4, create a mind map of key authors and topics.

This is where asking authors, or meeting them at conferences helps. I know several of the authors I have mentioned very well, including Michelle Kooy (who like me did her PhD at UBC), Malini Ranganathan, etc.

6. Choose 3-7 articles for the topic, and 3-5 for each sub-topic

Here, I knew I needed to read Michelle Kooy, Amber Wutich, Andrea Marston (I’ve already read them, but again, let’s assume I haven’t – my mind-map and Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump both show I would need to read them in order to get a grasp on the field of water and informality)

7. Read (or if under extreme time pressure, apply AIC Content Extraction and Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump method) to create a visual and analytical map of the field.

8. Expand the mind-map as necessary and continue searching and reading/annotating/highlighting/scribbling until reaching conceptual saturation.

While I have a good mind-map of what the field of water informality and the continuum/spectrum/divide of formal and informal water markets looks like, I still need to read more to reach conceptual saturation. So, I go back to Step 1 in this process until I’ve found the right number of citations (I’ve written on this topic before, i.e. when to stop reading and how to decide when you have got enough sources and you’ve read enough).

My entire set of posts on Literature Reviews can be found here if you need to search for a specific technique I’ve mentioned in this blog post.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – January 27, 2018

Legitimising reading as a crucial component of academic writing

Like many of my fellow professors, I feel the pressure of having to continuously write scholarly papers, present them at academic conferences, submit them for peer review and publish in highly-ranked journals. I share the same responsibilities: I lead a 19 people research team in a multiple-institutions, collaborative, large-scale, multi-method research project on water conflict in Mexico. I have Masters’ and PhD students whose thesis I need to read, comment on, help refine and on top of that, I contribute service to my discipline(s), my campus, my institution and the global academic community. The other day, I found myself arriving to campus and walking to my office while talking on the phone, holding the phone on one hand while signing administrative forms with the other. A few months back, I reported on Twitter how I actually had so much stuff to do on campus that I literally did not have one second to eat lunch. I share the same pressures, even though I am single. I can’t even begin to grapple with the challenges facing academic parents/students and those who need to engage in care work, on top of everything else they have.

#AcWri setup

I’m busy. Super busy. Enjoyably ultra-busy. But one thing I can’t justify is NOT reading, because I have so much work to do. The two things I do Every Single Day is read (at least one journal article, book chapter) and write (however many words, sentences and paragraphs I can). I am tired of the trope that “the time we spend reading isn’t #AcWri“. I am, sometimes, guilty of spouting this fallacy myself.

To test this trope, last week (January 1st-5th, 2018) I experimented with literally writing out of thin air. I sat down and started typing words related to specific papers and books I’m writing. I was able to crank out 2545 NEW words in 5 days, which is what it is — as I’ve said before, I’m not obsessed with word count. I will leave the discussion on producing new words, edited words and revised words for another blog post. I wrote 2545 words without using a prompt to help me write. This process was PAINFUL. I did not allow myself any reading. I was simply supposed to WRITE.

AcWri process (15 minutes)This week (January 8th-12th, 2018) I wrote stuff that was associated with several of my projects, BUT AIDED BY PROMPTS, specifically articles I had already read, or that I was reading to prepare my lecture on intractable water conflict. This integration really facilitated my progress, which I’m measuring not by the number of words I’ve written so far, but by the fact that I have begun to really grapple with some rather challenging concepts in water conflict (such as the fact that cooperation isn’t necessarily the lack of conflict). It’s really important that we realize that reading IS legitimate, and engaged reading (such as highlighting, scribbling on the margins, writing handwritten or typed notes about a journal article, book chapter, book, report, or even data table) IS part of the writing process. Reading is INTEGRAL to the academic writing process.

To share another example: this morning (Friday, January 12th, 2018) I woke up, got my coffee and spent 2 hours reading Bar-Tal’s (2000) journal article on intractable conflict resolution and reconciliation. Reading this article, highlighting key passages, finding relevant quotations, and writing (by hand) important ideas. I normally do a combined AIC Content Extraction/Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump entry, but I knew reading Bar-Tal would give me many key ideas so I chose to do deep engagement.

Doing this allowed me to find some key ideas that I think are relevant not only to the class I’m preparing and to the topic I’m lecturing on tomorrow, but also to my own research and that of my lab. Taking the time to really sit down and read, and engage deeply with the Bar-Tal article really allowed me to create new ideas that I am sure will further my project and help us move forward, both conceptually and methodologically.

In sum, the entire point of this blog post was to remind my fellow scholars (and myself) that reading is an integral part of writing, and that if we don’t read, and make time to read, we will probably not be able to situate our scholarship within the global scholarly literature. I know we are all busy, but if I may be so bold to suggest, I strongly believe we ought to make time to read at least one journal article or book chapter a day. I know this is tough. I spent 2 hours on this particular article and I am 3 pages in (I’m doing deep-engagement instead of a simple AIC Content Extraction)! But that’s because I’ve also spent time tweeting about it and mulling over the ideas I’ve been reading.

I’ve written about this topic extensively, so here I’ll just close by sharing this post on 8 strategies to carve time to read during the semester.

Posted in academia, writing.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – January 12, 2018