Teaching Tuesday: Writing Shorter
I had a bit of a convergent moment this week. I had been working on taking a draft of manuscript that has been submitted for publication into a conference paper. It involved taking the original 6000 word manuscript and cutting it down to around 2000 words.
While I was doing this, I also participated in one of the history department’s monthly workshops here at the University of North Dakota. This fall, we’ve been working with graduate students who are trying to turn parts of their M.A. theses into articles. One of the observations offered by a colleague, Jim Mochoruk, is that preparing a conference paper from a chapter can be a great way to figure out what you are trying to say and an important step in turning a chapter into a focused article. The basic idea is that a chapter might serve many purposes in the context of a broader thesis, but the best kind of articles are focused on one narrow argument.
Using a conference paper as an intermediate step allows a writer to focus on one task at a time. Since the research and basic argument already exists, an author can turn his or her attention exclusively to the efficiency and economy of argument. The economy of a conference paper ensures that you cannot address every issue that might appear in a standard thesis chapter. As a result, it forces an author to lead with his or her strong suit and cut out extraneous detail as well as the dreaded “background”. (I have banned the inclusion of “background” in papers assigned in my undergraduate classes.) In other words, it forces the author to focus the paper around a single, strong, central thesis and to pick the best cases studies (or bodies of evidence) to support that argument.
More than that, compressing a paper can also encourage an economy of language. The first thing that gets striped from a longer paper is subheadings, solicitous or redundant transitions, and various other organizational crutches that are acceptable in a “length is no object environment” but a waste of space in a shorter paper. As I tell my students, the best papers will have an implicit organization. The pressure of writing a short, focused text, helps to develop the skills to create an efficient writing style.
Authors also need to economize their historiography and consider the primary context for their work. This is an important step when moving a paper from a relatively broadly construed thesis to a more focused publication because specialized journals tend to emphasize a narrower range of historical debates, topics, and historiography. Beginning to winnowing process by preparing a short, highly focused conference paper encourages the author to select a precise audience for their work. There simply will not be room to unpack all the historical and historiographical possibilities present in a thesis chapter.
For my case study (which does not necessarily capture all of these issues), check out the long form of my paper on Vigla here:
The shorter conference version is here:
Best read while listening to Wayne Shorter’s Juju or Night Dreamer…
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