Writing tips you might like too
Writing is incredibly hard. Well, good writing is anyway. I've had the fortune to get some writing guidance in person from Karl Weick and in book form from Howard Becker. I thought you might enjoy some of their tips as well. I've shared these with my students, and the ones who tried them did write more effectively than those who didn't. I hope the same is true for me.
Both of the tips in this post aim to limit intellectual laziness in writing. One has to do with passive voice and the other with "to be" verbs. Writing in passive voice (e.g. "The post was tagged.") and using "to be" verbs ("This blog is an example of social media.") allow authors to make leaps that are unjustified and intellectually lazy. You may have noticed that passive voice and "to be" verbs go hand-in-hand; let's see if we can bust 'em up.
By saying, "The post was tagged," I allow myself to get away without saying who or what tagged the post. Becker (1986, p. 8 ) points out that such a sentence is a theoretical error and not just bad writing. I allow some abstract being to do the tagging, and that means my explanation of events is incomplete. Lazy! Instead, I should say, "I tagged the post." Sure, it uses the same number of words, but who did the tagging and what was tagged are both clear in that sentence. That sentence avoids implicitly invoking abstract forces.
"This blog is an example of social media," causes more confusion than it explains. Understanding the sentence requires that we know what a blog is and what social media is. Instead, I should describe what the blog does and how that makes it part of this superclass - social media. This tip - to stop equating things or calling them examples and instead to explain what's happening - came from Karl Weick during a class in the fall of 2006.
I find doing a "find and replace" search in Word where I replace "to be" verbs with highlighted versions of themselves to be very helpful. I was surprised to find that I'm not the only one who does that - Deborah De Rosa does it too. Highlighting all the places where I use "to be" verbs makes it easy for me to go back to each instance and make sure it's appropriate. It's worth a shot if you're struggling from passivity and/or laziness.
I'm likely to blog about Becker's book more as I work my way through it. In choosing a grounded theory and actor-network theory approach to my dissertation, I made sure it would be hard for me to write. Tips like Becker's and Weick's help keep me careful while writing, and that's the help I need when trying to be descriptive without resorting prematurely to explanation.
Reference
Becker, H. (1986) Writing for Social Scientists. University of Chicago Press.
*Note: Becker's book is hard to find sometimes. Thanks, Mom and Dad, for hunting it down in Portland for me!
On the move again (or Internship, woot!)
I'll be in the Seattle area this summer working for Microsoft Research. I'm excited about my internship with Andy Begel in the Human Interactions in Programming group. I'll get to study newly hired developers and hopefully help make their lives a little easier. I won't be building anything, which is a relief. I mentioned in an SI venue yesterday, again, that I think we need to do some more work advancing social science lest we become theory-anemic tinkerers.
Outstanding GSI, Woot!
Check it out:
To: Libby Hemphill
I'm pleased to announce that you have been selected to receive an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award for 2007-2008. You were chosen from an especially impressive group of nominees representing schools and colleges across the University.
...
---Homer Rose
I'm pretty excited and grateful for the award. Thank you to my students and my colleagues for helping me become a good teacher and to Rackham for the public recognition.
Stovepipes and how they confuse and frustrate
The title of this post suggests a treatise more than a lowly blog post, but, I'm a busy proposal writer, so I'll have to settle for the post. A friend sent me a link to a Gartner newsletter yesterday, and the title was "It's official. Collaboration is a top business priority." That's good news for me since I'm a collaboration researcher. It's nice to know collaboration is a priority for someone besides me. I clicked through the newsletter and even visited the website for a conference Gartner is hosting called the Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit. Here are some thoughts, in no particular order.
I use "stovepipes" to refer to the isolated, vertical towers of thought and work into which we've organized ourselves. I think I picked it up while serving on SI's dean search committee where we spent a lot of time talking about how we wanted to avoid stovepipes in SI. We're an interdisciplinary school, and we wanted to recommend a dean who would encourage intellectual respect and collaboration among the disciplines rather than stovepiping them. Ok, so, now I'm concerned about the stovepiping that happens between academia and the business world. This is not a new concern for me, but it's one I haven't written down for public consumption yet. It worries me that a summit like Gartner's can take place and that academia neither talks about it nor attends. I don't mean to imply that Gartner's summit is the be-all, end-all and that it's going to change the world forever, but it could be something interesting. It concerns me that when I wanted to study newcomers in an organization, I was thwarted by lack of connections to organizations. Instead, I ended up studying newcomers to an academic environment and then interviewing (a year later) for a serendipitous opportunity to study newcomers in a public company. Man, I hope I get that internship. I digress.
The divide between academic research and business research seems to be growing. Is it growing? Am I just more attuned to it now than I have been? What can I do to get more connected to businesses so that I can learn from them, and so that my work can have some real world impact? I don't want to be a messiah with academic knowledge; I want to get my hands dirty outside the lab. What would the cost to my academic reputation be if I were to focus on collaborations with industry researchers and managers? Where is the tunnel between the stovepipes?
Stovepipes aside, Gartner's summit has one of the most male-dominated presenter lists I've seen in a quite a while. I hope overall that their company is more diverse. That said, I'm curious about the summit. I do wonder what collaboration technologies are on the horizon. I'll be paying attention, for sure.
Best Jobs of 2008: Professor
U.S. News included "Professor" on its list of 31 best jobs for 2008. That's cool. They even provide an executive summary of why they like it so much. They're right that tenure is pretty sweet, if you can get it. They're not so right that being a woman helps you land a tenure-track job though. Beware the popular press. Well, all the press really. Just beware.
I don't mean to be a stampeding feminist, well, maybe I do. Doesn't matter. What does matter is that the gender gap in tenure-track hiring and tenure awarding is not closed, and women are most certainly not getting the advantage U.S. News claims.
Quick look at references about gender bias in tenure-track hiring:
Stenpreis, R., Anders, K.A., and Ritzke, D. (1999) The Impact of Gender on the Review of the Curricula Vitae of Job Applicants and Tenure Candidates: A National Empirical Study. Sex Roles. 41(7), 509-528.
von Anders, S.M. (2005) Why the Academic Pipeline Leaks: Fewer Men than Women Perceive Barriers to Becoming Professors. Sex Roles. 51(9-10), 511-521.
Chronicle of Higher Ed - 11/6/2006 - AAUP Report Blames Colleges for Gender Inequity Among Professors
“I prefer to break [the rules] and follow my actors…”
Today I'm getting up my courage to do a truly descriptive study for my dissertation. I had a bit of practice writing good descriptions in a class last term with Curtis LeBaron, but I'm often encouraged to explain or posit causes and effects. My inner philosopher has always been troubled with that approach. I find myself getting defensive in meetings where people push me to think about what my work will mean for systems design. How can I know until I really know what's going on in the little bit of the world I study? I'm not alone in wanting more description. I'll always have Bruno Latour. In fact, the title of this post is a line from On Using ANT: a dialogue by Latour. It's a chapter in The Social Study of Information and Communication Technology (C. Avgerou, C. Ciborra, and F. Land, eds).
I've read that dialogue a number of times in the last few years, and every time I read it, I am met with a disgruntling mix of emotions. I find the dialogue quite motivating. Latour's professor encourages his student to go into the world and write his dissertation. Not to explain but to describe. And in describing to write and write and write. Not to dwell on frameworks or to think his dissertation will enlighten his subjects or even change the world. I like to describe; I'm game. Latour's professor is also frustrating though. The (near) end of the dialogue sums it up (S = student, P = professor):
S: But, your sort of "science", it seems to me, means breaking all the rules of social science training.
P: I prefer to break them and follow my actors . . . As you said, I am, in the end, a naive realist.
S: But see, I'm just a Ph.D. student. You're a professor. You have published, you can afford to do things that I can't. I have to listen to my supervisor. I simply can't follow your advice too far.
The student nailed my concern. How can I afford to do actor-network theory (yes, Latour describes it as Doing ANT) when nearly all of social science is asking me to build a framework or build on a framework and then to explain? Sigh.
Research is messy
Last week I participated in a mixed methods workshop with John Creswell. The workshop was quite valuable; we worked through designing a proposal for a real research project. I forget the name of the student whose project we outlined, but he was proposing to study biodiversity sustainability programs in Vietnam and Cambodia. We worked through various stages of his proposal including writing a problem statement, asking research questions, titling the project, etc. But, we didn't do those things in that order. In fact, we started with the title and ended with the problem statement 4 hours later. That exercise served as a reminder that no matter how straightforward work seems when it's written for publication, or even in a methods textbook, the actual moment-to-moment work is unlikely to be so linear.
I've tried to keep in mind that work is not linear, but I often get tripped up trying to follow outlines or to make my research fit into a step-by-step program that gets me to graduation next year. That's not how the world works though. I've been hunting for the right methods approach to studying the ECC story, and I've finally figured out that my study is probably best structured as a case study. And so, I've been re-reading Robert K. Yin's case study books from Sage Publications.
Yin is careful and persistent when discussing the role of theory in designing case studies, and that's the point where I'm currently stuck. My instincts (pretty well-honed by this point) tell me that communities of practice, social capital, actor-network theory, activity theory, and organizational learning have something to contribute to the theoretical framework I should use to address the ECC case. What I haven't been able to do to this point is to make them all fit together in a way that would provide a set of patterns against which I will be able to check my case study data.
My dissertation proposal has morphed into two different documents - the proposal itself and a case study protocol document. I'm even still working in both Word and LaTeX. I just received helpful feedback on the proposal document (that one's in LaTeX) from one of my committee members. He recognized that my current struggle is about clarifying the questions I want my project to answer. He says, "You need a statement of what you'd like to accomplish..." Yeah, he's right.
Part of the problem relates to the negotiated nature of this dissertation project, I think. It took me a year, but I've finally given in. I will do a study that relates to the grant that feeds me because it involves collaboration, and collaboration is definitely interesting and significant to me. Now my task is to find a set of questions that are clear, answerable, and related to the CI-TEAM grant in some way.
I blogged this because I thought it was important for me to write a stream-of-consciousness piece in case another struggling A.B.D. happens to be searching the internet for others in her boat. Sister, I'm in it. Dissertation-writing is messy. It's takes a great deal of humility, negotiation, compromise, and patience. It's not linear. It requires one to go back and forth between literature, data collection, and analysis repeatedly and in different orders. I'm pretty sure I'll have written about 10x as much content as actually ends up in the final version of my dissertation, and all of that writing is necessary and important work. Plenty of people and dissertation books talk about how dissertation writing is hard, but very few admit that it's also incredibly messy. Just when I start to feel like I've made some progress, I get thrown a curveball by some theory or data, and I'm in a whole new spot. Frustrating, yes, but I think that's just the way it is.
Faculty, staff, PhD students band together for ASB
SI has a rockin' alternative spring break program for MSI students. One way money gets raised for ASB is through an all-school Penny War in early February. This year, the Faculty, Staff, and Doctoral Students team came on strong in the last two days to completely dominate the Penny War. We were a dismal last place last year. Someone from the student affairs staff sends out nightly updates about the Penny War, and we came on strong in the final days after some goading from the Dean and strategy help from Jeff Mackie-Mason. The Penny War doesn't recognize individual performance, but all of SI can be proud of ourselves for raising $2086.91 this year. Nicely done. I hope ASB is as rewarding for this year's group as it has been in the past.