记日志、记笔记

为什么每天写 20 分钟是无价之宝？还有哪些习惯能够帮助我们度过艰难的论文写作过程？

记研究日记是一个很好的习惯。每天写 20 分钟，2-3页，是很好的开始。这样就可以不知不觉写起来。你记下进入你脑海中的任何东西，不管它看起来多么轻浮、荒谬或古怪（frivolous, ridiculous, or odd）。因为我们写它们，不是最后要把它们放进论文，而是通过它，让自己能够每天思考我们的主题（topic）和证据（evidence）。

记研究日记有以下好处：1）减少你的担心“我做得不够”，因为至少你发现自己写下了一些东西；2）总有一天，你什么也不想干，即使你需要干很多事。这时候，写20分钟能够让你开始做一些事情；3）论文过程是非常乱的，各种事情都搅和在一起，日记能够帮你记录下这一切，让你能够整理；此时，用纸笔可能会更加自由；

除了记研究日志，还有一个办法帮助我们度过艰难的论文写作过程：一个一个来。首先，我们可以想到什么就写什么。一个很烂的粗略草稿，没有问题。因为这就是所有的最优秀的作者做的。在我们写完之前，没有人知道自己会写出什么。这是很难计划的。然后，按“块”来写。不要讲究顺序。想写哪一块，就写那一块。先写下来。写到日志里都可以。也要买一个小的笔记本，随身带着，随时记下想法、引语、短语和任何让你印象深刻的东西。

参考文献


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附录：哈佛原文：

Keeping a Journal

One of the most effective ways to get an extraordinarily large amount of writing done without realizing it is to keep a research journal. This works rather similarly to the idea of keeping a diary or journal of your personal life. Each day, you commit to writing a certain amount of time or a certain number of pages (20 minutes or 2–3 pages are a good start). And then you write whatever comes into your head regarding your thesis topic, no matter how frivolous, ridiculous, or odd it seems. The point is not to make sense or produce anything that will show up in your thesis—the point is get you thinking about your topic and evidence on a regular basis.

This can provide you with several benefits.

• First, it is actual work.

Many of you may become concerned (or even obsessed) with the amount of work you are putting in on your thesis. You may feel like you’re not doing “enough” or that everyone else is working more than you are. But be assured that this small 20 minutes constitutes significant work. It forces you to sit down and think about the thesis, even if it’s just writing down a collection of random thoughts you have been having about various parts and pieces of the work. And you will be surprised as you go along how your journal sessions will often extend beyond the minimum goal you set for yourself.

• It provides you an out when you need it.

There will be days when you do not want to work on your thesis, no matter how much you need to. A small amount of journal work may be all that you do that day. Since it is just 20 minutes, you only have to push yourself for that short period of time. Thus, you do something everyday.

• It provides a bit of a check on the thesis process.

You may have heard the expression, attributed to Otto von Bismarck, “Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them made.” The thesis process is quite similar. It’s sloppy, and all sorts of things get shoved in. By keeping a journal, you have a place to put all the various stuff that might otherwise end up in the thesis. And unlike a sausage (and remaining neutral on similarities to laws), the thesis that contains all your ingredients without judicious mixing and shaping will be messy and indigestible. Please do not assume that everything that you write must or even should go into a finished work. The journal provides a way to do your sausage-making behind the scenes.

How you logistically go about keeping your thesis journal is up to you. Many of you may be inclined to do all of this work on your computer, and that method might be the best for you. But please do consider the pen-and-paper route, and not just because it is a technology that has existed for centuries and served scores of generations of researchers before you. More than that, pen and paper seem less like producing a finished work than computer writing does—on the computer, you will often spend time futzing with formatting or other non-necessary aspects of your diary, so that everything “looks right.” With paper, there’s little chance that your mind will even sub-consciously slip into thinking that what you are writing will be for production of any sort. On paper with pen, everything is a draft, and it may free you from the problem of worrying what anyone else will think about what you’re writing.

Writing it Bird-by-bird

By this point, you may be feeling just a tad overwhelmed by the prospect of 100 pages of prose, initially covering the broad range of work that others have done and staking a claim to your own piece of that work, laying out a coherent social science theory of cause and effect, and verifying it by convincing and well-presented evidence. If you don’t, you soon will. When Luke Skywalker told Yoda that he was unafraid of Jedi training, Yoda replied, “You will be. You will be.”

The author and essayist Anne Lamott described the writing life in her book Bird By Bird (1995) and she related the story of how she keeps from feeling overwhelmed at the thought of writing a whole book.

… [T]hirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. … [H]e was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the tasks ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird (18 ff.).”

The only way you will get through your thesis is bird-by-bird. What follows are some ways to attack particular birds and to make sure you cover each bird in some form.

“The s&*##y first draft”

Lamott also talks about the awful first draft. You have permission to write badly on the first draft, because it is the only way you will ever get anything on paper.

… People tend to look at successful writers, writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get the cricks out, and dive in typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts.…. Very few writers really know what they are doing until they have done it.

Lamott points out that you cannot know what you will get from your writing until you do it; you cannot plan your brilliant moments, good ideas, or bad passages. They simply happen. “There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, …. but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.”

So what should you write when you’ve sat down to “do some writing?” Anything that comes into your head. The first draft is something of a mental explosion onto the paper or screen. It’s supposed to look awful. Don’t worry, because you’re not going to show that to a person anyway (and if you do, we certainly hope the person comes back and tells you that you can do better). We are all better writers than our first drafts would indicate.

If there is nothing else that you learn from the senior thesis experience, we hope you learn that writing is about process and not the final production. You certainly hope (and will) achieve something in the end, but that product can only come about through a process that begins with the crazy, foolish, and half-baked.

“Chunks”

Your thesis will not emerge in anything like the order it will actually end up in. Chapters will not emerge in anything like the order they end up in. Nothing will emerge in order. As we have emphasized many times over, the thesis is messy, and part of the academic task is to impose order on it all.

But you are not necessarily there yet. You must first get the material out, and then you, in consultation with your adviser, can figure out what will make the most sense to present your results.

One time-honored strategy for writing long pieces of prose is to write in “chunks.” Often, you will know that some bit of the thesis, somewhere in the middle needs to be written down. (You might even hear the phrasing in your head as you go about doing other things.) But the writing process you have probably done so far has encouraged you to write documents from start to finish, in the “proper order.” So while you may know that a particular piece that you need to write must be written, you also know that it’s not the first part of the work. No matter—write it down anyway. You can always put it in the right place later.

Perhaps even more importantly, there will be times when you know that there are various bits to be written—perhaps a few paragraphs on methodology or on a small part of your theory or literature review—but you don’t know how they fit together. Again, just write them down. If you are keeping a research journal, you can write them down in the journal during your daily writing time. Or open a document on your computer and write two paragraphs.

The important element here is not to be afraid of having lots of different little chunks of writing. Just keep track of them so that you can find them later. One particularly good way to do this is to print them out, place each in a folder for “Chunks,” and keep that folder in a safe place. Then, when you’re ready to begin using some of these writing chunks, you can begin to arrange them in an order, simply by reshuffling the sheets of paper.

As we have emphasized over and over, the one activity you must engage in when you are an active writer trying to do your best work is to be constantly aware of the opportunities and fortuities that come up. The fiction writer John Gregory Dunne (essayist Joan Didion’s husband and gossip writer Dominick Dunne’s brother) noted that a writer must not depend upon inspiration to strike if he wants to get work done, but he should always be prepared for ideas to simply pop up. He had personalized note cards that he always carried in his jacket pocket with a pen, so that he could write down ideas, quotes, phrases, and whatever else struck him. It’s likely that like most of us who write, he threw away a considerable number of those ideas, but he always had them when he needed them later. So go to the stationery store, get a notebook that you like, and start carrying it with you where ever you go.