Writing Tips (寫作小提示….)

Posted: 02/27/2012 | Author: Marx Chen | Filed under: Circulation, Research | Tags: writing tips |Leave a comment »

這是之前一位同學轉載的，希望對於寫作有興趣的人有幫助..

Some writing wisdom from Glenn Cohen, a prolific junior faculty member of the health law group at Harvard.

How I Write

1. Get a big monitor: I love having a monitor big enough to show two full documents and a sizable magnification at the same time. I can have westlaw up in one and the draft article in another, or have a journal’s edits and my original article up simultaneously. Some people prefer two monitors, but either way I think this will increase your efficiency.
2. Alter your email schedule: If you can change your automatic email receive schedule to 20 or 30 minute intervals rather than every 5 or 10 minutes you will find you are less likely to get distracted. Of course, turning email off altogether is better still but for many of us that is not a great option.
3. Aim for crappy but complete first drafts, avoid perfection: I have always admired people who write perfect first drafts; I’ve never been one of them. I usually go through 100 drafts of any piece of writing, and actually save a new version on any day I make an alteration that is even mildly significant. I think for many perfection equals paralysis. I can generate a crappy and almost complete first draft much quicker, and I feel liberated knowing the final draft will be SO much better. It also enables me to share the draft earlier in its gestation and even workshop it with friends early…which leads to the next point….
4. Work on Deadlines: As an appellate lawyer at the Justice Department I basically had hard deadlines almost constantly on briefs. Indeed, the harder the deadline, the faster I would work. In a few emergency stay cases with basically a 24 hour turn around, I found that I could work two to three times as fast and produce a document that was 80% as good in terms of the quality. I think deadlines are very helpful, and you should seek them out as much as possible. Agree to give a workshop in-house or at another school at a date that feels a bit on the early side. I also use the law review cycles as internal deadlines when I should have a “very good” draft, and then work backwards to create deadlines for myself as to when I will give the draft to various people and incorporate changes.
5. Teach your draft papers: If you are teaching a seminar or even a general class in your area, consider teaching a draft paper. I have found that the students love it, and you get good feedback – especially as to whether the article is pitched at the right level for law review editors.
6. Work in 45 minute tranches, and 3 hr blocks: I have found I can work intensely for 45 minutes at a time, and I can do a 3 hour block before my brain is exhausted. So I usually do a morning and/or afternoon session, and if I do both on a given day I schedule a full one-hour lunch in between (on every work day we either have a faculty workshop or a dining room where I can relax with my colleagues). I use the last 15 minutes of each hour for answering emails, or administrative matters or blog reading. I know this amount of time-management seems neurotic or the exact billing practices many people happily left behind when working for a firm, but it works for me.
7. Pick good times and places to write: My concentration is at my peak first thing in the morning, so I try to do my writing then and schedule my classes for the late afternoons. This also benefits my students because I am an incorrigibly fast talker, and my being “tired” actually makes me a better teacher. I really like writing in my office at the law school, but for others a coffee shop or home works better. Find your ideal writing space and stick with it.
8. Have multiple projects of various types/lengths at once: At any given time I have 2 to 5 papers on one of the burners of my intellectual stove. I will be dealing with a journal’s edits on one paper, getting a second ready for sending out to law reviews, writing the first draft of a third, and researching a fourth. I find this works well for me because when I am sick of or exhausted by one paper, I can switch to one of the others and feel renewed rather than having to switch off writing altogether. One of the reasons why this works for me is that I try at any time to have multiple types of papers going. Some of this is no doubt field specific, but for me it is great to have one short paper for a medical journal audience, one or two longer law review articles, and maybe an partially empirical project where we are just working on cleaning data.
9. Split to your heart’s content: Most subjects I find interesting prove to be much more complex then when I start writing about them. I routinely cut down 48,000 word draft papers to 32,000 words – indeed I spend at least 40% of my time on any paper on this phase . . . but sometimes it becomes clear to me early on that what I really want to write will end up being more like 80,000 and have three different big ideas aimed for different audiences. Almost always when this has happened I have been able to split the original projects into multiple parts. I have done this with my medical tourism work, and one of the nice side benefits is that even after you split you can always potentially re-join the work and still further elaborate on it as a book, as I am trying to do now.
10. Treat writing like a job: This is more a philosophy. Many flock to legal academia away from a more rigid job in the legal world, but there is something to be said for rigidity and not waiting for the muse to whisper in your ear. I try to treat legal writing as a job, come in at 9, leave at 5 on most days and work consistently throughout. This helps me be both productive and sane, but perhaps I am an aardvark in this respect.
11. For me, the hardest part has been coming up with good ideas (ideas that I think are fun and interesting to write about and that will add something useful and novel to the literature). Writing a paper based on a really good idea is much easier than writing a paper based on a so-so idea.One way I have dealt with this is that every time I think of a potential article idea (and you would be surprised how often this occurs just as I am getting into bed or as I am eating breakfast), I email myself the idea and then store the emails in a folder. When it comes time to write a new article, I usually have at least a dozen article ideas in my folder. Then I spend some time trying to figure out which ones are truly novel (requires a bit of research) and which ones are really good (usually at least one or two are clearly better than the others). Then I start work.

11. I’ve seen people get stuck doing too much research on the front end and feel the need to read EVERYTHING. I think that is a mistake, in part because it sometimes dulls one’s creativity. Seeing someone else’s map of the terrain sometimes causes you to recede from or lose sight of your own map. That said, one should also know enough of the literature to make sure you are adding something new.

Where to draw the line is a judgment call that depends in part on how much time you have till your “deadline”(e.g., a job talk paper) and also how fast you are as a writer, and how much time you need to give people to get comments back to you.