Finally have a first draft of the short paper that's due tomorrow. A paragraph too long and a confused twisted bit right in the middle where I'll get the space back eventually. Two whole pages. I worked on it (which includes a fair bit of getting up and pacing and checking to see if anything had changed on the Internet in the past 0.3 nanoseconds) all day yesterday. All day on a two-page paper? I tell ya, the shorter the paper is, the harder it is to write. I guess it doesn't help that it's interpreting Wittgenstein, which requires tying together threads from lots of different places (and more importantly, deciding which threads to leave out).
How is it that I can get so lost in the space of just two pages? I can read a sentence and have no idea whether it's leading me off topic or staying on. I have the contextual awareness of a housefly when it comes to reading this stuff, especially perhaps my own. No wonder I was once a creative writing major. I am definitely more attuned to just letting crap spill out of my [virtual] pen than laying brick down after brick. When I DO have that bricklaying feeling (that is, that one time that I DID have it), it's great and I feel intelligent. But usually when I write I am just wagging my tongue without any real idea of what I am saying. Just like now.
Time to move along to the paper that's due Thursday (for which I have a few lines of notes to be turned into five pages of metaphysical goodness. A much more traditional philosophy paper: I will be able to burn a page or two in just laying out obvious shit. Here's wishing myself luck!
I don't mean to sound pedantic, but do you do outlines? I was profoundly anti outline for most of my life (I would write them AFTER I did the paper).
ReplyDeleteHowever, having to write a lot of crap for school and for work changed my attitude. For work, it helped because I couldn't give a flying fuck/had no idea what we were talking about--but it had to be dead on and meet all specs, so outlining become both a editorial and construction technique.
With school, I found that my tiny brain was getting full and crosswired. An outline could help me separate out the several threads I was working. I agree, the paper limits were hard. I was the student asking if I could add in about 5 pages for my religion comparison papers.
Just a thought. Good luck.
Nothing but wisdom there, my dear Hawkeye. I am a big believer in outlines for philosophy papers, and almost as big a believer in them for any other kind of writing.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I only make them once in a while, and that's largely because I often resort to writing as a divination method. "Jeez, I am confused. This is tricky stuff. Ok, first I'll say.. uhm, er, what exactly do I even think about this? Huhm."
I can generally put a bit of the outline together, then I'll need to actually write a few paragraphs to discover whether I can actually string the thoughts together and to discover what exactly I'm saying, etc. It ends up, semi-ideally, being a back-and-forth. Not very efficient.
In an ideal world, I'd do a complete outline first, every time. An excellent guide on writing philosophy papers by NYU professor Jim Pryor estimates that at least 80% of the work in a good philosophy paper is constructing the outline.
Were I a really good writer of philosophy, I'd be able to do that 80% before the other 20%. It turns out that I end up doing a lot of that in media res, because someone mixed up my wires. I've got a bad motivator unit.
I too wish for more pages than less. I often lose the perspective required to know which lines and citations are disposable. But admittedly, most of the time my having to pare the thing down is great news for the reader.
Anyway. Back to Kripke! And no--I don't really have an outline here, but don't tell anyone.