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 < back to articles Enacting
the scholar role As you sit down to write, do you find yourself staring for hours at an empty computer screen or doing anything but writing? There is a solution: Enacting the role of the scholar. Obviously, this is simple enough to say, but what does a scholar do? Being a scholar involves two kinds of work—coming up with ideas and sharing them with others. You may have excellent ideas, but until you document those ideas so they can be scrutinized by others, those ideas don't become part of the conversation of a discipline. If you want to adopt the scholar role, then, you must not only come up with ideas but make them permanent by writing them down.
Incomplete-Scholar Roles If you are like many faculty members or graduate students who are trying to write, the most common way in which you are likely to respond to the stress of the unfinished dissertation, article, or book is by enacting an incomplete-scholar role. You enact the first part of the scholar—you generate ideas—but you don't complete the role by writing them down so they can be shared. Although there are many incomplete-scholar roles, four of the most common ones are described below. These roles are appealing because they provide rewards to you at a time when you feel the need for some kind of reward—after all, you aren't getting the rewards that would come if you were making progress on your writing project. Do you recognize yourself in any of these self-sabotaging roles? Housekeeper You sit down to work on your writing project and decide that your kitchen cupboards need cleaning or the laundry needs to be done or the plants need to be watered or your files need to be cleaned out. And then there's e-mail. If you could just get your inbox cleared out, you would feel psychologically free to write. What is going on with all of these variations on the housekeeper role is that you are doing things other than writing in the belief that their completion will make writing easier. You believe that the conditions in your environment must be perfect before you can write, so you spend your time making those conditions perfect. Model Employee You enact the role of the model employee when you have a job to do—paid or otherwise—and let the demands of that job push your writing aside. Because there is never an end to what you can do on the job when you are busy being a perfect employee, the tasks multiply to fill the time available. You can also be a model employee in your personal life, choosing to be the perfect spouse, partner, or parent. Although you know your priority is to finish your dissertation, article, or book, you keep busy with less important, short-term tasks. Once you are immersed in the busyness of some other area of your life, there seems to be no room for any other high-priority task such as scholarship. Patient The patient is the role you adopt if your scholarly work consists largely of trying to cure yourself of whatever is preventing you from making progress on your writing. You can assume a patient role in various ways—by joining support groups, going into therapy, or focusing on physical ailments. In the patient role, you give power to some condition and allow it to stand in the way between you and a completed writing project. Your response is to do the work that reinforces and highlights the disease so that it becomes the thing on which you focus your attention, and you count this as work on your writing project. Proxy Critic You write a paragraph or a sentence. Then you start to wonder about what you've just written. "This isn't good enough," you say to yourself, and you stop writing. You feel like you need approval before you can proceed, but, of course, there's no one who can or will approve every sentence you write at the moment you're writing it. In this case, you have assumed the role of the proxy critic—an imaginary editor or a fantasy critic who stops the flow, development, and documentation of ideas by assessing them prematurely. In this role, you are forgetting that writing and editing are two separate processes. The first process is getting the ideas on paper, and the second (and separate) step is to revise—and this is the place where you scrutinize and assess your writing. Enacting the Role of the Scholar: Writing Regularly Perhaps you've recognized yourself in one of the incomplete-scholar roles, and you want to take up the role of the scholar so that you can finish your writing project. But how do you do that? Because what most of the incomplete-scholar roles have in common is that they allow you to do things other than write, to counter them, you want to make writing a regular, recurrent activity. Evidence for how effective regular writing can be comes from Robert Boice, who did a study of 27 faculty members from various universities who were having trouble completing writing projects. Nine of them agreed not to write during the 10-week period of the experiment, another nine were encouraged to write only when they were in the mood, and those in the third group were forced to write during 50 scheduled sessions. This last group wrote about three times as much as those who wrote only when they were inspired. [i] Are you ready to try the regular writing that makes you a scholar? The key to writing regularly is to work on your writing according to a schedule. Just like you would go to work at a job and work regular hours, do the same with your writing. Even if you just have an hour or two to devote to writing each day, schedule it. Make writing during that period a sacred part of your day. Sometimes, reconceptualizing how writing fits into your day helps you keep a regular writing schedule. Many people conceptualize writing as something to fit in around their teaching schedules and their family activities. See if you can reverse that thinking. If writing is now your real job, try to see everything else as disrupting your writing time. When you are writing and it's time for you to go teach a class, our guess is that you typically think, "Oh, good, I can stop writing because it's time for me to go teach." When you conceptualize your writing as your job, your new attitude becomes, "Is it time for class already? Too bad! I'm really making good progress on this writing project, and I hate to stop." If you can't quite conceive of yourself writing in a sustained fashion for extended periods of time, you might try the 40-minute cycle. This is a system in which you do 40 minutes of sustained work, take a 20-minute break, and then repeat the cycle. You might set a timer for 40 minutes so you know when that period of time is done and it's time for a break. The 40-minute cycle prevents you from becoming physically tired and also motivates you to write on the days when you don't feel like it. Knowing that you just have to complete two 40-minute cycles, for example, doesn't sound too bad. Maybe you're someone who has trouble keeping yourself on a schedule. You can easily slide into adopting or perpetuating one of those incomplete-scholar roles and never quite get around to making or sticking to a schedule where you really do work on your writing. Here's something that might help: Keep a record of how many hours you write each day, and share that record with someone at the end of every week. Without a commitment to share your record with someone else, you can easily convince yourself that you will begin writing tomorrow. When you are done with your scheduled writing period for the day, stop. Put your writing aside. It's OK! You've met your goals for the day, so there's no reason to feel guilty. Whatever you turn to next, give it your focused attention and have fun with it. You may be tempted to keep writing if you are making good progress, but learning to stop at regular times for breaks is an important part of learning to write regularly. Stopping at the end of your designated time keeps you from becoming hungry or exhausted, both of which make writing much harder. Plus, stopping at a point when you are eager to write more makes it easy for you to begin writing at your next session. Writing regularly is a mechanism that helps you do what scholars do—develop ideas and document them. By writing regularly, you will find that those incomplete-scholar roles become less appealing as you are rewarded with completed writing projects, confident assumption of the scholar role, and the wider rewards that come with sharing your ideas with others. Dr. Sonja K. Foss and Dr. William Waters are the authors of Destination Dissertation: A Traveler's Guide to a Done Dissertation (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). Sonja is a professor in the Communication Department at the University of Colorado Denver, and William is an assistant professor and the director of composition in the English Department at Northwest Missouri State University. They are also the co-directors of Scholars' Retreat, week-long retreats that provide the opportunity for intensive, focused, non-distracting, supervised writing time for graduate students and faculty. 1. Robert Boice, Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing (Stillwater, Okla: New Forums, 1990), 82-83. |
