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| Planning: Time and Space |
| Time As in any writing project, QUICK WRITING PROCESS research writing engages time as an organizing principle. Some people spend months, or years, or their working lives painstakingly tracking meaning through a particular body of material. Ideally, we all would want this freedom to read, experiment, ponder, read and experiment again. Writing without the immediate pressure of time is a blissful experience: the writing process takes whatever turns it wants, day after day, until the material teaches you what you need to know. It is a unique and self-affirming experience. If you ever have the good fortune to work that way, you will gain confidence and pleasure in the process and product of research writing that is difficult to achieve in any other way. This is one reason why Peter Elbow's concept of freewriting is so wholesome and liberating: it gives the writer, no matter how inexperienced or lacking in confidence, a taste of the researcher's freedom to discover the content of the material from his or her unique point of view. After a week of freewriting exercises (writing non-stop, ten minutes a day, without self-criticism or an audience) you find that you have indexed thoughts, feelings, and connections you may not have been clear about or even aware of before. Recapturing this material is thrilling, and the freewriting process, as a perspective on your writing habits, inspires confidence. Although freewriting is a timed exercise, the liberating sense of writing simply to see what turns up, without categorizing, censoring, or sorting for a particular goal or audience, gives you a hint of what it is like to work toward a product without time limits. Longterm, open-ended research writing is similar to freewriting in emphasizing exploration. You cast your net wide to see what you will catch, without regard to usefulness. Some long-term projects, in fact, proceed as a series of freewritings: disposable drafts, one after the other, moving ever closer to the writer's real subject. Of course, working without the pressure of time is not an unqualified blessing. There is the danger of amorphousness, or of such obsessive thoroughness that the desire to connect with a reader is blunted past the moment of presentation. This meticulousness is reflected in Camus' "obscure hero," Joseph Grand, in The Plague, who spends years on the first sentence of his novel. Open-ended projects present a tremendous challenge to the writer's motivation, especially if some of the questions inherent in the material become unmanageable as the project opens out. There is also the possibility that such immersion in the material becomes an end in itself, supplanting the writer's desire to communicate it. To adapt the QUICK WRITING PROCESS timetable to a research writing project, make a reasonable estimate of the time you can allot to the whole project, from thinking through scope, scale, and style, to gathering and ordering, building the raw draft, and refining the final product. Because each research project is unique, it is not possible to establish an abstract notion of the balance of the research process--reading, interviewing, or experimenting--with the writing timetable, but it is essential to estimate the proportions of time and energy to complete the job. It may be that you need to balance research time for a term paper with a writing timetable so that you can finish the project in a month. In that case, you might set aside two weeks for reading, and then two weeks for writing: process and product. Balance in planning your time is necessary from the start. As you will see in the next chapter, however, the QUICK WRITING PROCESS research writing model transforms much of the discovery process into usable material for presentation. You can make an early decision, about when to stop collecting material so that, by the time you embark on the writing, you will have accomplished most of the preparation, planning, and generating. Space Even though research projects are longer and more complex than other kinds of writing, they still require the most fundamental attention to readers' expectations for order. You need to have a sense of the structure of your project before you begin. Keep in mind a basic conception of beginning, middle, and end, with the functions appropriate to each. The beginning invites the reader in and clearly states the thesis. The middle presents your evidence in the best order, beginning with arguments for the other side, and ending with your most persuasive point. This leads the reader to the conclusion, where you push beyond summary or restatement to a broader perspective. Of course, as in all writing, there may be an important reason or a format requirement to adapt or diverge from this fundamental order. But before you embark on a sustained project, it is essential to think through the structure not only as it relates to meaning, but as it provides a safety net for the writer at work. |
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