Storming outside as I go through my notes from two months ago. They have been untouched since Canberra, where I read a lot of the essential readings. There in the Jesuit House of Writers, I actually didn’t write a single word, but I believe time was unwasted.
Now I’m trying to wrap my mind around all that stuff again. In other words, restarting. Ah the travails of a struggling scholar. Read More »
After the last frantic days of reading and research, I have this one day to “write it up,” as I used to say.
“Used to say” because my professor last July, Dr. Barbara Kamler, dislikes the term. “We don’t ‘write it up’,” she announced.
And she’s right. Writing isn’t an activity that you do to whip up a study or report after understanding ideas and thinking up insights. Writing is the very route scholars take in order to think things through. As such, it isn’t such an extrinsic instrument, but an essential process in scholarly work. What is even more interesting, Kamler writes in her book, Helping Doctoral Students Write: Pedagogies for Supervision, is that writing is not only thinking, but it’s also forming your identity as a scholar.
So today, I’m not just writing up my research proposal. I’ll be gathering the ideas accumulated from research, processing them and thinking them through. And more than that, I’ll be teling you who this struggling scholar is.
strugglingSCHOLAR