Category: Writing

Anything on the process or results of writing as an activity and a passion

2020-08-31

At 2am on the 31st, we have reached the end of “the summer” and I have loosely defined it academically for many years now (school starts early in September, but never in August in my experience — I moved in at my Oxford college on September 23rd) and I feel better than OK about how the summer devoted to advancing the dissertation went. I had adopted for myself the rough metric that I wanted to have a draft of every chapter ready for Professor Vipond by the end of August. As it stands, he has the first four chapters, I have hand-edited the fifth and am preparing to review the relevant interview reports, and then I need to do the same for chapter 6 and finally do a language edit of the conclusion. The existing draft is already solid. Nobody would know to miss some of the specific empirical details I am pulling back in from the interviews in these drafts, and Professor Vipond already thinks the review of the literature is more than adequate in scope and depth. What I’m mostly doing in this round of edits is spotting everything which would singe the eye of a highly experienced reviewer, as it saves a lot of time across the whole project to anticipate and avoid a correction rather than be informed of the need for one and comply.

Four central chapters

I have discussed my introductory chapter with my supervisor, received comments, and incorporated them. Tomorrow, we are meeting about my literature review chapter.

At the same time, I am working on reading through blocks of my tag-sorted interview reports corresponding to the four central chapters of the dissertation:

  • Political opportunities — including the history of the fossil fuel divestment movement, the role of 350.org and the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition (CYCC) as brokers, and the way the movement has developed in Canada
  • Mobilizing structures — how campaigns organized themselves and made decisions, support from brokers and within universities, and the structure of efforts to resist divestment
  • Repertoires — what divestment campaigns actually did, including the enemy naming and story of self strategies, the spectrum from cooperative to contentious tactics, and the split between ‘outside game’ mass mobilization and ‘inside game’ negotiations with the administration. Also, the actions of divestment opponents and non-divestment actions taken by target universities
  • Framing — The worldview underlying fossil fuel divestment activism, particularly the strategic implications of intersectionality

I need to get all these drafts done ASAP so my committee members will have a chance to look at them before ordinary work resumes in September.

“Buy once, cry once”

The protagonist of a YouTube channel about blacksmithing which I have been watching used the aphorism “Buy once, cry once” as a rhetorical justification for buying high-quality tools. If you buy the right thing the first time, you cry once at the expense. By contrast, if you buy an inferior alternative you will cry the first time not getting what you want, cry every time you use the inferior item, and then cry when you cave and buy what you should have initially.

It seems like a reasonable mark of distinction to apply to products which truly serve their function admirably and seem capable of indefinite high-utility use.

I use mechanical pencils a lot, and have in one sense or another since around elementary school. Occasionally the ability to erase is a large part of the appeal, but it’s mostly the particular quality of writing on paper with graphite. I find it ideal for taking marginal notes in books and making my own index on their opening pages, as well as for annotating academic journal articles and dissertations. I also find a pencil ideal for the final close edit of a hard copy which I do with important pieces of writing, and among the better tools for use in a paper daily calendar.

I’ve tried a few higher quality mechanical pencils over the last few years. A couple of years ago I bought an $8 Uni Mechanical Pencil Kurutoga Pipe Slide Model 0.5mm, Blue Body (M54521P.33) which I highly commend for build quality and writing experience. The retractable tip has been completely reliable, and it provides an easy way to store the pencil in a soft case without worrying about it breaking the tip or poking a hole in the bag. I also got the $16 Rotring 300 Mechanical Pencil, Black, 0.7mm. Again, I have enjoyed the experience of using it, finding that it sits most naturally for ready use on a desktop since there is no way short of a protective sleeve to carry it in a way that won’t risk being pointy. I can’t figure out if the rotating lead firmness indicator has any effect on the pencil’s function, but the mechanism overall is solid, reliable, and pleasant to operate.

I have also tried out ex-Mythbuster Adam Savage’s recommended (36 for $12) Paper Mate Sharpwriter 0.7 mm mechanical pencils. They’re not designed to be refilled or have the eraser replaced, and come with something around three leads inside each. They each include a shock absorber to reduce lead breakage, and I would say they actually work 90% as well as any of the far more expensive options on this list. They are a great tool to give away or scatter around in every possible place you may want to jot a note.

The Buy Once, Cry Once choice, however, is the $50 Rotring 800 Retractable Mechanical Pencil, 0.5 mm, Black (1854232). The metal body is solid like no pencil I’ve ever held and the retraction mechanism is impressively smooth and satisfying to use. A mechanical pencil becomes a reliable and easy-to-carry tool when you can keep it with the lead in ready-to-use state while it is clipped comfortably into a pocket. The Rotring 800 also totally pulls off the task of being much heavier than the everyday cheap versions of an object, but more usable as a result. I find the solidity and mass of it helpful for writing with a good balance of speed and legibility.

First thorough manuscript review

I am deviating somewhat from the planned timeline here, moving forward the first soft edit of the whole manuscript for coherence and structure to before finishing the literature review and incorporation of material from interviews.

In part, that’s just an effort to break out of a low productivity pattern of toiling at the same very long tasks over and over. More substantively, it seemed unanswerable that somebody ought to have read the whole manuscript by now and that doing so will improve the flow and comprehensibility of the final product while letting me complete the incorporation of extant literature and empirical observations more intelligibly.

So far, I have been pretty happy with the draft. I think it does a reasonable job in justifying the research question and approach, which will be among the main requirements enforced by the examination committee.

Academic journals and conferences have given me the belief that to anybody well briefed on a subject beforehand almost all scholarly work comes across as a consolidation of the known and obvious rather than a set of blazing and unfamiliar new ideas. One of the books I read on thesis writing stressed repeatedly how a PhD thesis is a basic demonstration of competence in research at a professional level. It’s not meant to be a grand opus. Even Einstein’s doctoral thesis was about comparatively mundane matters of how things dissolve in fluids, rather than grand ideas about the ordering of the universe.

As I discussed with my brother Sasha the other day, I think writing long documents needs to be a process of successive approximation. It’s impossible to simultaneously work all elements into their final form, and it’s impossible to give an unlimited amount of uninterrupted time to any task. The writing process must be designed so that every part can be set aside and returned to, and each set of alterations should bring the whole closer to the final state. That’s how I have dealt with long documents before, and I am hopeful that the approach will take me to the end here.

Unicode characters are spoiling my LaTeX bibliography and I cannot find them

I was being driven a little up the wall by biblatex rendering errors which referred to Unicode characters within my .bib database.

First I learned that the degree-like symbol you get from typing option + 0 in Mac OS is actually the “Masculine Ordinal Indicator” and you should use Option + Shift + 8 for a degree symbol.

That’s not much help though, since degree signs in your .bib file will still cause problems for creating a bibliography. Instead you need to put in titles like “Global warming of 1.5 \textdegree\ C” which almost renders properly, with the only problem the inclusion of a space between ° and C.

Much more annoying was one ‘ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER’ (U+200C) which snuck into my .bib file. The error logs don’t say what line it is on, and the character is invisible in TextMate. After trying a bunch of ineffective suggestions on various web forums, I found one that referenced this Unicode converter. Throw in your bibliography and it will tell you the contents in Unicode terms character by character and let you find anything which is yielding errors.

Kneading the literature and my interview data into the dissertation manuscript

I have all of my data analysis done and printed in a thick binder sorted by subject matter.

With a 58 page bibliography, I feel like I am a good way through the literature review, though my room and computer are still well populated with a set of things which I have read and annotated but still need to be incorporated into the manuscript, as well as a much smaller number that still need to be read.

I have a 98,000 word manuscript, not counting the bibliography, but it has been written in thousands of little sessions and surely needs a fair measure of editing to make it all clear, non-redundant, and smooth-flowing.

Perhaps the following makes sense as a path to completion:

  1. Finish incorporating all paper and digital sources into the manuscript
  2. Complete a read-through and first electronic edit of the entire draft, making note of places where evidence from the interviews would provide useful substantiation
  3. Read through the empirical package, adding relevant quotes and references to the manuscript
  4. Print off and hand-edit the manuscript to the point where I think it is completely ready to go to the dissertation committee for their substantive contents

Scholarly perspective on the U of T divestment campaign

Professor Joe Curnow, now at the University of Manitoba, studied the Toronto350.org / UofT350.org divestment campaign at the University of Toronto, in part using multi-angle video recordings of campaign planning meetings.

Her dissertation is now available on TSpace: Politicization in Practice: Learning the Politics of Racialization, Patriarchy, and Settler Colonialism in the Youth Climate Movement.

Related:

Refining

I have been productively refining the dissertation, adding to the precision and extent of its content. There is still NVivo analysis to be done and the iterative process of refining the manuscript with the committee, but all the indications so far are that the interviews I conducted provide useful information for what happened during these CFFD campaigns and what participation meant for many of those organizing them at the time. They may well disagree with some of my overall analyses about how to achieve decarbonization, but I have huge respect for their demonstrated success and passionate commitment. It’s the insuppressible youthful energy of this movement which has given it salience in the minds of university administrators and the media, through everything from dignified protests to rowdy chanting marches to informal discussions among faculty members about supporting an ongoing divestment campaign. People can see that young people now believe that their lives are at stake, and the feelings that raises are insuppressible.

In the research

It’s 4:41am and I am in my 10 1/2th hour of thesis work since I last slept. For weeks I have been working my way through my notebooks, compiling interview reports based on my discussions with campus fossil fuel divestment organizers in Canada. I have been paying special attention to getting the details from this interview, reviewing more of the raw audio than normal. That’s because it seems like an especially valuable account which speaks informatively on many of my key research questions.

That is making me feel that despite all the frustrations and sacrifices which have been involved in the project, it has been worthwhile to seek these organizers out and get their direct accounts of what happened and what it meant to them. Even if the project ends up being of limited theoretical interest to academics, there is an undeniable empirical value about having collected this information while people still have fresh memories of their involvement. Similarly, even if activist readers of the dissertation find my analysis unconvincing, being exposed to these direct accounts will enrich their understanding of what happened, reinforcing some of what they already believed with new evidence and perhaps challenging some of what they believe by showing that people had other experiences and reactions.

I have 17 interview reports left to write. Then I will move on to coding their contents by theme, finishing my literature review, producing my first complete draft manuscript, and then beginning the process of review by committee members and making changes in response to their comments.