简短总结和摘录
—ECHO— 2014-08-11
10
本书有关学术论文写作，推荐只写论文的同学们看前三章和最后一章，要发表期刊论文和写书的老师和同学们可看完全书（也许比较适合欧美的学术范围）。读的过程中发现作者挺有趣，文中蛮多笑点，写过论文的人都可以get到。
我总结下来书中关于学术写作主要论及三点，并在我读过的其他关于写作的书或文章中都有涉及：
1. 固定时间：每天有固定的时间写作或进行与写作相关的工作，这段时间神圣不可侵犯，让写作成为习惯（比如说本书作者是每天起床第一件事是8:00-10:00写作，除非有天灾人祸，决不动摇）；
2. 具体计划： 总体上有清晰详实的写作计划，落实到每天的写作都有非常非常具体的安排（比如说为第二章第一节的理论部分写500字，比如说读XX书的第一章并做笔记，比如说重读昨天写的那段并做修改，等等）；
3. 心理建设：写学术论文不需要天赋和灵感，只要按部就班去写就行了，如果觉得写不出来，那是因为你没根本没在写。（作者打了一个很好的比喻：小说家和诗人写作如同画家在画风景画或肖像画，而写学术论文就如同在刷你家地下室的墙）。
（作者多次提到我觉得更赞的那本书 Boice (1994): How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency (http://book.douban.com/subject/4879508/)，总体来说他们俩的方针路线基本一致，这类书选一本看看就行了，重点是看完之后，去写你该写的东西。）
Kindle版下载： http://readfree.me/book/2486955
全书框架及章节要点可参考以下网站：
http://mjcoonkitt.wordpress.com/2013/01/12/silvia-2007/
http://rfmh.nyspi.org/KAD/Portals/16/File/How%20to%20Write%20a%20Lot.pdf
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Copy一些书中的语句，分布在各章节中，摘录有时看上去与章节标题无关，但皆与以上三点相关。
Chapter 1. Introduction
“Academic writing should be more routine, boring, and mundane than it is.”
“How to Write a Lot views writing as (a) sitting on a chair, bench, stool, ottoman, toilet, or patch of grass and (b) slapping your flippers against the keyboard to generate paragraphs. You can foster these behaviors using simple strategies. Let everyone else procrastinate, daydream, and complain - spend your time sitting down and moving your mittens.
While you read this book, remember that writing istn’t a race or a game. Write as much or as little as you want.”
Chapter 2. Specious Barriers to Writing a Lot
- Specious Barrier 1: “I can’t find time to write,” also known as “I would write more if I could just find big blocks of time.”
“The secret is the regularity, not the number of days or the number of hours. It doesn’t matter if you pick 1 day a week or all 5 weekdays - just find a set of regular times, write them in your weekly planner, and write during those times.”
“I write Monday through Friday, between 8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. I wake up, make coffee, and sit down at my desk. To avoid distractions, I don’t check e-mail, take a shower, or change my clothes before writing - I literally get up and start to write. The start and end times shift somewhat, but I spend around 2 hours writing each weekday. I’m not a morning person, but mornings work well for writing. I can get some writing out of way before getting wrapped up in checking my mail and meeting students and colleagues who drop by the office.”
“Don’t quit before you start - making a schedule is the secret to productive writing.”
“You must ruthlessly defend your writing time. Remember, you’re allocating time to write. You decided that this time is your time to write. Your writing time is not the time to meet with colleagues, students, or graduate advisors; it isn’t the time to grade papers or develop lectures; and it certainly isn’t the time to check e-mail, read the newspaper, or catch the weather report. Close your Internet access, turn off your phone, and shut the door.”
“Perhaps you’re surprised by the notion of scheduling. “Is that really the trick?” you ask. “Isn’t there another way to write a lot?” Nope - making a schedule and sticking to it is the only way. There is no other way to write a lot. After exhaustively researching the work habits of successful writers, Ralph Keyes (2003), a professional writer, noted that “the simple fact of sitting down to write day after day is what makes writers productive”(p.49). If you allot 4 hours a week for writing, you will be surprised at how much you will write. By surprised, I meam astonished; and by astonished, I mean dumbfounded and incoheren.”
- Specious Barrier 2: “I need to do some more analyses first,” aka, “I need to read a few more articles.”
“Binge writers are also binge readers and binge statisticians. The bad habits that keep them from writing also keep the from doing the prewriting (Kellogg, 1994), the reading, outlining, idea generation, and data analysis necessary for generating text.”
- Specious Barrier 3: “To write a lot, I need a new computer” (see also “a laser printer,””a nice chair,””a better desk”).
“The best kind of self-control is to avoid situations that require self-control.”
- Specious Barrier 4：“I’m waiting until I feel like it,” aka “I write best when I’m inspired to write.”
“Some kinds of writing are so unpleasant that no normal person will ever feel like doing them.”
“Sucessful professional writers, regardless of whether they’re writing novels, nonfiction, poetry, or drama, are prolific because they write regularly, usually every day. They reject the idea that they must be in the mood to write. As Keyes (2003) put it, “Serious writers write, inspired or not. Over time they discover that routine is a better friend to them than inspiration” (p.49). One might say that they make a schedule and stick to it.”
Chapter 3. Motivational Tools
- Setting Goals
“The first step is to realize that goal setting is part of the process of writing.[…] Planning is part of writing, so people who write a lot also plan a lot.”
“The second step is to list your project goals - these goals are the individual projects that need to be written. Examples include revising and resubmitting a paper, starting a new manuscript, writing an invited chapter for an edited book, reviving that half-done paper you started last year, developing a grant proposal, and writing a book.”
“The third step ist to set a concrete goal for each day of writing. When you sit down during your writing time to work toward a project goal, you need to break the goal into smaller units. “Resubmit that paper” is fine as a project goal, but it’s too broad to be useful when you sit down to write. When you start your writing period, take a couple of moments to think about what you want to accomplish that day. “Write that paper” is too general; you need a concrete goal for that day. Here are some examples of concrete daily goals:
* Write at least 200 words.
* Print the first draft I finished yesterday, read it, and revise it.
* Make a new list of project goals and write them on my whiteboard.
* Write the first three paragraphs of the general discussion.
* Add missing references and then reconcile the citations and references.
* Reread chapters 22 and 24 from Zinsser (2001) to recharge my writing batteries.
* Finisch the “Setting Goals” section that I started yesterday.
* Brainstorm and then make an outline for a new manuscript.
* Reread the reviewers’ comments of my paper and make a list of things to change.
* Correct the page proofs and mail them back.”
- Setting Priorities
- Monitoring Progress
“Never reward writing with not writing. Rewarding writing by abandoning your schedule is like rewarding yourself for quitting smoking by having a cigarette. The writing schedule works by harnessing the awesome powers of routine and habit: Don’t lose your good writing habits.”
- What about Writer’s Block?
“Academic writers cannot get writer’s block. Don’t confuse yourself with your friends teaching creative writing in the fine arts department. You’re not crafting a deep narrative or composing metaphors that expose mysteries of the human heart. The subtlety of your analysis of variance will not move readers to tears, although the tediousness of it might. People will not photocopy your reference list and pass it out to friends whom they wish to inspire. Novelists and poets are the landscape artists and portrait painters; academic writers are the people with big paint sprayers who repaint your basement.”
“Writer’s block is a good example of a dispositional fallacy: A description of behavior can’t also explain the described behavior. Writer’s block is nothing more than the behavior of not writing. Saying that you can’t write because of writer’s block is merely saying that you can’t write because you aren’t writing. It’s trivial. The cure for writer’s block - if you can cure a specious affliction - is writing.”
“Just as aliens abduct only people who believe in alien abductions, writer’s block strikes only writers who believe in it. One of the great mysteries of the writing schedule system - a spooky mystery, in fact - is that scheduled writers don’t get writer’s block, whatever that is. Prolific writers follow their writing schedule regardless of wether they feel like writing. Some days they don’t write much - writing is a grim business, after all - but they’re nevertheless sitting and writing, oblivious to the otherworldly halo hovering above their house.”
Chapter 4. Starting Your Own Agraphia Group
“Trollope wrote 63 books; most were two- or three-volume works. Psychologists can learn a lot from Trollope. He wrote most of his books, including the classic six-novel series Chronicles of Basetshire, while working full time at the post office (Pope-Hennessy, 1971). To accomplish this, he wrote each morning from 5:30 until breakfast. As he remarked in his autobiography, “Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write”(Trollope, 1883/1999, p.271).”
Chapter 5. A Brief Foray Into Style
- Write First, Revise Later
“Your first drafts should sound like they were hastily translated from Icelandic by a nonnative speaker.”
Chapter 6. Writing Journal Articles
- Outlining and Prewriting
“Outlining is writing, not a prelude to “real writing”. Writers who complain about “writer’s block” are writers who don’t outline. After trying to write blindly, they feel frustrated and complain about how hard it is to generate words. No surprise - you can’t write an article if you don’t know what to write. People who write a lot outline a lot. “Clear thinking becomes clear writing,” said Zinsser (2001, p.9).”
Chapter 7. Writing Books
Chapter 8: “The Good Things Sitll to Be Written”
- Less Wanting, More Doing
“You don’t need special traits, special genes, or special motivation to write a lot. You don’t need to want to write - people rarely feel like doing unpleasant tasks that lack deadlines - so don’t wait until you feel like it. Productive writing involves harnessing the power of habit, and habits come from repetition. Make a schedule and sit down to write during your scheduled time. You might spend the first few sessions cursing, groaning, and gnashing your teeth, but at least you’re cursing during your scheduled time and not in binges. After a couple of weeks, your writing schedule will become habitual, and you’ll no longer feel pressured to write during nonscheduled hours. And once your writing schedule ossifies into a sturdy routine, the notion of “wanting to write” will srike you as perplexing and mysterious. The force of habit will make you sit down and start to write.
Ironically, writing a lot will not make you enjoy writing or want to write. Writing is hard and it will always be hard; writing is unpleasant and it will always be unpleasant. Most days, I don’t want to sit in my hard fiberglass chair, turn on my computer, and confront a half-completed manuscript. But teaching can be frustrating, too, and slogging though tedious committee meetings is maddening. How do people deal with those tasks? They just show up. Make a writing schedule and show up for it. Want less and do more. “Decide what you want to do,” wrote William Zinsser. “Then decide to do it. Then do it” (Zinsser, 2001, p.285).”
- Enjoy Life
“A writing schedule brings balance to your life - not balance in the pseudoscientific, New Age, self-help sense of wondrous fulfillment, but balance in the sense of separating work and play. Binge writers foolishly search for big chunks of time, and they “find” this time during the evenings and weekends. Binge writing thus consumes time that should be spent on normal living. Is academic writing more important than spending time with your family and friends, petting the dog, and drinking coffee? A dog unpetted is a sad dog; a cup of coffee forsaken is caffeine lost forever. Protect your real-world time just as you protect your schedule writing time. Spend your evenings and weekends hanging out with your family and friends, building canoes, bidding on vintage Alvar Aalto furniture that you don’t need, watching Law & Order reruns, repainting the shutters, or teaching your cat to use the toilet. It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you don’t spend your free time writing - there’s time during the word week for that.”