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Category: Study Methods

It’s All About the Style – Writing Well

Style or substance, which one is more important?

While our last Friday post dealt with the process of writing—how to stimulate those word juices flowing in your head—this post looks at the style of those words. Now style is a very personal thing, and it is entirely likely that your style will change based on what you are writing. For example this chatty style that is suitable for a blog post would be terribly inappropriate in an academic paper. However, there are still some aspects of style that have broader applications, and these should be examined.

Aspects of style have already popped up a couple of times in the various comments on this series, with some people loving and others disliking my style (no-one hates me yet). To some degree the style on this blog is part of my natural writing output, and the technicality that creeps in reflects some of my background. Nevertheless, there are many foibles to my writing style, and this sentence is but one florid example of this. Personally I have a tendency to over-use adjectives, and make my sentences overly complex, while also introducing technical jargon in the middle of a thought process. While a lot of this I have picked up from the reading I have done in my fields, they are still poor habits to be in. I am certainly not be the best writer. In fact with many others I decry ‘I am no Hemingway,’ and I certainly have a lot to learn. But here are my top five tips—really the top things I need to work on too—for thinking about your style and writing well.

1. Style is Personal

This one is relatively obvious, your style is your own. It is useless slavishly copying someone else’s writing, as it will appear forced and unnatural. Getting comfortable with your own writing style is essential. However, don’t use this as an excuse for sloppy writing. While your style may have particular nuances, and engage with certain audiences effectively, it should still be intelligible to a wider range. For example one of my bad habits is to create run-on sentences, joining ideas together in, what for me is, a logical manner. But these sentences actually make my work harder to read, harder to digest, and harder to understand. Similarly my digressions into technical language rarely make my writing more intelligible. Simply because certain jargon is used in a specific field doesn’t mean it is ideal.

One of the ways you can shake up your style is to simply write in a different genre. While for an academic paper it may be acceptable to use ’this author’ or ‘this paper’, to use such formality on a blog makes it hard to read and you look excessively formal. You need to find your writing style, but don’t etch it in stone, it can always be improved.

2. Edit… a lot

In his very useful book On Writing Well, William Zinnser expounds the virtues of editing:

‘Examine every word you put on paper. You’ll find a surprising number that don’t serve any purpose.’

and

‘Clutter is the disease of … writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.’

It is not unusual for writing to require editing, that is only natural. In fact I haven’t met a single author who is able to write their pieces without any editing work whatsoever. Of course if we are so focused on putting the first draft down perfectly, such that it needs no editing, then we will rarely write anything. Write first, then edit. But definitely edit, and be ruthless with your work.

3. Get to the Point

Similar to the old Monty Python sketch in The Holy Grail: ‘Get On With It!’ Often our writing can take circuitous routes that involve so many qualifications and hedges that the reader loses sight of the point. There is a virtue in simply getting to the point of a sentence. In my case those sentences of mine that involve layered adverbs, and compound superlatives can be simplified. If you strip sentences back to their raw components and then build from there your writing will normally be better for it. As Zinsser poetically comments:

‘Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty, and the sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and frisky kittens and hard-bitten detectives and sleepy lagoons.’

4. Be Active

While the passive voice has a place in the writing sphere, it shouldn’t be used as the primary voice. Be active, use the active voice as much as you can. Not only is it simpler and more direct, but it also engages the reader vigorously. But there is more than that, being active conveys passion and intent. It communicates your thoughts with the same passion that they are swirling around your head. Rarely do we write without any passion for the topic at hand. Yet often the reader receives a piece that is dispassionate and flat. Make your writing active.

5. Get an external reader or editor

Although the idea of getting someone else to read through your work with a critical eye may be terrifying, it is one of the best ways to become a better writer. Ideally you want someone who is distant enough from your content that they absorb the force of the argument for the first time. Yet also someone who is close enough to the content to not be plunged in the deep end of your laboured work. In addition try to pick someone who you don’t interact with in that frame as often. That way they are not used to the foibles of your writing style, and can highlight them for you. Once you have an editor or reader, take on their advice. It is of little use if all of the red ink is never read or absorbed.

Bonus: Read widely.

The broader your reading base is the more you will see other styles in action. Keeping across multiple styles and fields helps with not being anchored in any specific style. In addition reading books on writing, such as William Zinsser’s On Writing Well will help identify your style issues.

That is my top five (plus one) tips for writing well, or at least improving stylistically. Does it sound a bit hypocritical? Well really I am also preaching to myself here, as I tend to fall short in each of these areas regularly.
What is it that you fall short in? What tips would you give in improving style? Comment below. I look forward to reading them.

February 27, 2015
Digitising Print Media – Briss and OCR
In almost any field one of the primary research tasks is the reading and absorption of information. Now, in some fields you may be blessed by having all your information accessible digitally, and preferably natively digitised. However, in every discipline I have worked in many of the papers and materials have only been available in physical format, be they books, journals, or otherwise. Some friends, and indeed some commentators on this site, prefer to use the majority of their works in a physical format. If that is you, then this post may not pique your interest. But, if you are like me and a significant proportion of my peers, then you will likely prefer digital media for your research, if only because it makes things easier to find in the long run (and you get to feel somewhat more environmentally friendly). So how do you get that information into your workflow and have it in a usable format. Welcome to the Monday toolkit post on Digitising Printed Media.

Now, if working with digital media is your thing, I am almost certain that you would have found whether your office, library or other choice of research institution has the ability to scan documents. Most photocopiers come with this functionality these days, and the majority I have used in the past four years have supported scanning straight to PDF on a USB stick. All well and good you might say, there is my digital media right there, job done. Well not quite. You see while natively digital media generally comes formatted for the screen, in either portrait or landscape, printed media comes in a wide variety of formats. Academic works in Psychology and Theology come in a range from squiffy-near-A5, through to square-wannabe-A3 books (Hermeneia commentaries I’m looking at you here…). However, your digital device likely only comes in one of two formats, both approximating a rectangle in either 16:10 (Android, and most PC monitors), or 4:3 (iPads and older monitors). How do you get your freshly scanned media to display nicely on your screen, and in such a way that you don’t spend extra time scrolling or zooming, and you don’t go blind from eyestrain. Imagine reading this on the screen:

Briss

This is where one little free app comes to the rescue: Briss (http://briss.sourceforge.net). While many apps have a plethora of options and capabilities, essentially sporting the modern Swiss Army knife, it is quite refreshing that Briss exists for only one purpose: cutting up PDFs. Although it is possible to do this job natively on the photocopier, manually programming it to output only that portion of the page that you are interested in, it is much more difficult than Briss. Briss is a Java app, and is therefore happily cross platform, running on both Windows and MacOS if you have the Java runtimes. Simply speaking Briss has three steps to its workflow:
1. Open File
2. Select Page Zones
3. Output File
Briss Application

Briss: Select Pages

Briss: Output

As in the screenshots above when you first open a file in Briss it will overlay all your PDF pages together so you get a feel of where the text is on the page. Selecting the new pages is a simple drag and select operation, with it displaying a translucent blue rectangle with the Odd/Even page number on it. Once you are happy with the locations of the pages you can simply output it to a new PDF. Briss on its own is an amazing timesaver, and makes for nice and easily readable PDFs, no matter whether you read them on tablet or monitor. In addition if you want to format scans for later printing it means that you can print cleaner files for better markup. In fact I know of several people who scan to PDF, Briss and then print the resultant file through their own printer as they prefer working on paper. This way they also have a digital copy incase they lose or clean out the hardcopy.

When scanning the documents in I recommend using full platen scans, or at least one full size larger than the document you are scanning, and the highest resolution possible. With Briss you can easily cut down the page to suit the scanned document, and the higher resolution really helps in the next step. Plus having bad quality documents to read makes you feel like this poor person.

But wait, there is more—now I feel like a cheesy tele-salesman, although I have wanted to say that for most of this blog series. A friend of mine, Rob, a while ago wrote a couple of minor upgrades to Briss. His version allows for files to be opened via command line arguments, and for automatic page resizing. What does that mean? The first mod allows for a small script to start the Briss process, and on MacOS you can easily implement this via the Automator app, and you can copy the script below if your Briss app is in the Applications folder. The second allows you to press a single key (V) and both pages spring to the same size, meaning that the pages don’t alternate sizing on digital devices. Minor tweaks, but really valuable. His version can be downloaded here: briss-rob.jar and just place it in with the rest of the Briss folder.

Automator Action

Automator Script

OCR

Now you have nicely formatted PDFs, but they aren’t overly usable. Each PDF is simply a big image of the page, and it knows naught of the words on the page. Well there is one simple way of fixing that problem: Optical Character Recognition tools. There are absolutely tons of them out there, both free and paid, although my recommendation is relatively mainstream and unfortunately costs money. Personally I have forked out money for Adobe Acrobat and even though it costs a reasonable amount it works brilliantly. Using the fairly basic settings (300dpi/Cleartype) it provides a relatively accurate transcription of the words on the page, and as a bonus it drastically reduces the file size. It is not uncommon for Acrobat to take 10mb files down to 500kb OCRed output. The downside is of course the cost.

Whichever program you use for OCR work it is important for the rest of the workflow to get a good transcription of the document. If there are severe inaccuracies, or simply gibberish, then it won’t be as usable in the later stages of the workflow.

That is about it for this step of the workflow. The digitising operations may seem trivial and inconsequential, but if you are wanting to work with digital media then this stage is critical. Getting good digitisation of your material really helps in the long term.

Please comment below on what you use for this stage, I’m always eager to re-evaluate my options.
February 23, 2015
How to Write a Lot – The Writing Task

We often consider writing an arduous task, bemoaning things such as writers block, or looming deadlines; and the writing requirement of academia usually won’t alleviate this.

However, it doesn’t have to be this way, the seemingly sheer cliff face of a writing task can be scaled, and often with relative ease. Welcome to the Friday theory session of the work and research methods series, today we will be covering writing. Last week I intimated that reading is not a stand alone process, and that writing is its strong partner in crime. So if this is the case, then why is writing so hard?

Well one of the reasons is in the same vein as why reading is so hard. Our primary modes of communication have become shorter and shorter, from when the long form letter ruled supreme, through to the telegraph, phone calls, email, Facebook and now Twitter. Our communications, and therefore our regular writing tasks, are becoming pithier and shorter. So on the whole our long form writing suffers from length of concentration and frequency. Have you ever tried writing a dissertation or even a blog post on a phone keyboard? Yeah… So instead we talk about writers block and deadlines, and then subsequently consume copious quantities of caffeinated beverages while staring at a blank word processor document, and interrupted only by frequent panicked glances at the clock, calendar, task list, research pile, and social media. Perhaps this is a little hyperbolic, although I’m willing to bet that for many readers this picture resonates at some level.

What can be done about it? Well, simply put the main thing to be done about the difficulty of writings is to write. The majority of advice that I have received over my years of having to write reports, papers, presentations, essays, etc (and commonly bemoaning the process), is to simply write a lot. Now that most likely sounds pithy and trite, like telling someone who is struggling to climb over a fence to simply climb over the fence. But while it is trite, it is also true. Writing begets writing, and writing regularly makes the overall process easier. Indeed, studies have shown that regular writing increases the number of fresh ideas for the writing task.[ref]Boice, Robert. Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing. New Forums Press, 1990.[/ref] Nevertheless very few of us have the prodigious writing output of someone like Colleen McCullough, who reportedly wrote up to 30,000 words a day![ref]http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/books/colleen-mccullough-author-of-the-thorn-birds-dies-at-77.html?_r=3[/ref] However, there are methods and mechanisms that can be put in place to assist in the writing process. Here are some of the top methods on my list of writing strategies.

Writing Regularly

One of the best ways to get those writing juices flowing is to write regularly. I know quite a few people who simply set aside a couple of hours a day in their schedule to write. In that writing time they simply write on whatever is currently on the agenda. It could be for a paper, or project, or a conference; so long as it is writing. The dedicated time set aside helps to get a little bit done every day. However, for me this isn’t optimal, as some days with the little man I barely get a chance to write at all. For me I instead aim to write a certain amount per day, a task focused goal rather than time focused. While I don’t dedicate time, I do set myself a task every day to be written. This type of regularity works better with my schedule, and my thought processes. But whichever one you do it gets you writing regularly, and set it as a goal. As Bandura showed, short term goal setting increases the motivation for the task.[ref]Bandura, Albert. Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York: Freeman, 1997.[/ref]

Writing summaries

While often we have far more things to write about than there is time to write, occasionally there are lulls, or periods where you don’t have enough time to dedicate to that long-form argument, or a larger piece. In these scenarios I generally have a handful of other writing tasks that can fill the gap. One of these comes from last week’s theory post, on reading. When reading in the ‘studying’ methodology the idea is to absorb the information but also mark up the material for later recording as a reference. This transcription and synthesis of argument from my reading tasks forms one of my regular writing tasks as well. It’s almost killing two birds with one stone.

In addition this phase also is a great reinforcement technique for the reading process. The act of writing a synopsis or summary of the work in your own words is a great way of reinforcing the material. It allows for a different set of neural connections to be formed, rather than simply absorbing the material second hand, in the synthesis process you are making it your own (this still means you have to cite the original idea). To harken back to Bruce Ellis Benson’s idea of academic writing as improv, in writing your synopsis you are learning the flow of the music on your own instrument. Writing out what we read helps us to tune our signal-to-noise heuristics, and really absorb the things that matter. As William Zinsser reflects:

‘Writing is thinking on paper, or talking to someone on paper. If you can think clearly … you can write – with confidence and enjoyment’

Blogging

Occasionally though you may have written all your synopses, or for various other reasons don’t have any ‘on-topic’ things to write about. Well for this phase it is great to have an alternative writing outlet. It just so happens that you are currently reading my alternative outlet. Basically every summer (Dec/Jan) when I have had a bit of a lull in the academic year, I tend to write for my own means. For several years this meant documenting various motorsport related items that I had worked on in the past year, or fixing up a journal paper or two. However, this year I decided to focus much of my extraneous writing on this blog, and in an inception like moment am actually writing this article on writing to fulfil my regular writing commitment. Not only do I get to explore some of the aspects of studying that I enjoy, and answer some questions that I am regularly asked in my tutoring role on campus, but it keeps the writing juices flowing. I would encourage you to start your own blog, write a bunch, and then send me the link.

Enforced writing

The final aspect of writing regularly that I will briefly touch on is that of enforced writing. I have some friends who set themselves a specific word limit every day that they must hit. Personally this doesn’t work for me, as it feels quite rigid and doesn’t fit with my writing style. But if it keeps the brain stimulated, then by all means go for it.

Writing Differently

The next tactic I will touch on more briefly, that of the need for variety. In academia, as with many fields, the style of writing rarely changes, and it is easy to be staid in the writing style. For example I still find it difficult to talk in the first person in a journal paper, and prefer to use ‘this author’ or ‘this paper;’ despite the first person being acceptable. Further evidence can be found in that I am footnoting on a blog… In that regard it is very easy to fall into a rut, especially when it comes to the use of florid language and jargon. But more on style in another post. It is worth changing up your writing style occasionally, and one of the best ways to do this is to try for a different methodology or audience.

NaNoWriMo

There are two ways that I do this from time to time. Firstly, it can be enjoyable to write a short piece of fiction, as academic writing can sap the creative juices. A couple of times now I have participated in the NaNoWriMo event. NaNoWriMo is a celebration of National Novel Writing Month, and encourages writers to sit down and write a short novel in the 30 days of November. Now the 50,000 word draft can be a bit daunting, and I only made it to the word limit once, but it is still worth doing. It is a fun little event, and a good opportunity to turn some writing time to a different end. However, for my purposes the timing is problematic, as November is the end of semester in Australia, and is also conference month. Still I hope to bash out a novel again some time. Perhaps this time it will be worth someone else reading.

Different Styles

The second way that I mix up my writing is to try a different style. There are many methods of writing, and one that I have experimented with twice—once actually for NaNoWriMo— is narrative writing through a ‘stream of consciousness’ or ‘free writing.’ This mode of writing is simply writing for a certain duration of time whatever flows through your head. Colleen McCullough is said to have used this type of writing, and that it contributed to her prodigious output. Essentially you write without concern for grammar, spelling and you don’t correct anything. The idea is to follow your mind where it leads, including all those tangents, diversions and your small rabbit warren under the hippocampus. A lot of the time it produces relatively unusable writing. But it can be a way of shifting so dramatically out of a set mode of writing that it freshens up your entire writing style and perspective.

Sectioning Work

Finally I want to briefly touch on breaking work up in to small manageable sections. I know a lot of people are daunted by the prospects of writing large bodies of material. Quite a few first year students I meet wonder how they will write a 2,000 word essay. Later year students wonder how they could ever write a 3,000 word piece, let alone their 6,000 word project. Many in both categories are in equal parts shocked, awed and dismayed at the prospect of writing an 80-100,000 word PhD thesis. However, if these targets are broken down in to their relevant sections the overall scope suddenly appears more manageable. That 100,000 word thesis is really only 8 12,500 word chapters, and each chapter is really 5 2,500 word sections. All of which suddenly seem more workable. Plus if you keep breaking it down, and you end up daily, then that PhD thesis is only 139 words a day if you are working 5 days a week, 11 months a year for the nominal 3 year duration! Quite manageable really. The added bonus is that breaking your work down lets you see the flow of the argument better, and helps you stay coherent. But that is a topic for another time.

Finally there are many good books out there to help you in this process. I have found three exceedingly useful, for both methodology and style. They are:

Kidder, Tracy, and Richard Todd. Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction. New York: Random House, 2013.
Silvia, Paul J. How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing. 1 edition. Washington, DC: APA, 2007.
Zinsser, William. On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.

Ultimately though, as even William Zinsser admits ‘Writing is hard work.’ But if we write regularly, then the process comes a bit more easily, and rather than focusing on the writing task we can focus on writing style, which is arguably even more important. After all how can one edit and refine their work if there is no work there to edit in the first place. So focus first on getting words out on the screen or page and then perfecting them. Undoubtedly they wont come out exactly right the first time, or the second, or even perhaps the third, but get something out so you can work with it. In the vein of Confucious or Yoda, ‘to write a lot, you first have to write.’ Next week we will take a look at the second aspect of writing: style.

Would love to hear your feedback and suggestions on how you write, and the processes you have for writing regularly. Tell me below, in the comments.

February 20, 2015
Organising Your Research: Advanced Zotero
Now where did I read that quote? What did that book say again? Was the argument in this chapter coherent?

For anyone working in a research field I’m willing to bet that you have asked yourselves such questions, and it only gets worse the more you read. So after the post on Reading last Friday comes this timely post on how to organise what you have read. As with most items in our toolkit there are several different options for working at this stage of the process, however I’m only going to consider one today: Zotero. This is mainly because Zotero works at engaging with multiple different tasks in the research process. At one level it is a full fledged reference and citation manager, while at another it is a synopsis and summary database, and at yet another it is a library and database organisation tool. I feel that Zotero combines the best aspects of several other tools, and does it without a lot of the bugs or cost of some of the bigger names (cough Endnote comes to mind). Personally I use Zotero as a bit of a hub within my research process, articles and information get funnelled in and then spokes radiate out towards different tasks and then information is returned for further collation and use. This post is how I use Zotero.

The Basics

Simply speaking the basics of Zotero work as follows:
- Import or add reference into Zotero from the various plugins and data sources (Amazon, Ebsco, PubMed, Libraries etc) or input by hand.
- Cite reference in your text
- Sit back and marvel at not having to manually format references.
My Zotero Library

At the first level, that of making your work of referencing easier, Zotero does an admirable job. It is quick, easy to get data into, doesn’t crash regularly (Endnote should take notes), syncs over the web, and outputs in a wide variety of formats with little fuss. Even if this is all you use it for, it is a great time saver and helps with taming your citations from brusque unruliness to a general surly attitude. However, Zotero is capable of so much more than this, and to leave the process here would be to hamstring the use of the tool. But first a brief caveat.

Caveat: Zotero is exactly like every single other computer application, in that it is a bunch of mechanically executed code. [ref] ok some genetic algorithms excluded[/ref] It cannot think for itself, and while it has a whole bunch of smarts built in, it can only deal with the data that you feed it. So in true computer terminology it is susceptible to the failings of Garbage In, Garbage Out. Simply put if you feed Zotero, or any other program, garbage data, then expect garbage in return; it can only work with what you feed it. So if your citations have the wrong publisher, or incorrectly entered titles (yes capitalisation here counts), then you will get that out in return. This is the most common mistake I see with Zotero usage. I cant emphasise it enough, police and parse your data on the way in so you get well formatted, rather than unruly, data on the output. It is also worth noting that most library systems, including Library of Congress, and publisher data won’t conform exactly to your requirements. So things like the publisher ‘WB Eerdmans Inc.’ will need to be manually stripped back to ‘Eerdmans.’ This is extra effort, and is actually why I recommend that students only writing shorter essays (commonly ~2000 words) simply write and format their citations manually.

Research & Organisation

That caveat aside, and arguably because of that caveat, we will continue on to the bigger and greater things that Zotero is capable of. If you are anything like me, you will probably dislike having a desk full of pieces of paper and various journal articles that have been read, or still yet to be read, or have been read but not summarised etc. For about 10 years of my prior research life this was my overwhelming bugbear. I would regularly lug a ream of paper around with various journals articles printed out, and swathes of postit tabs throughout them. These days I deal primarily in PDF, and digital highlighting and annotation make this process much easier. But how do you organise this information? All those a3532582920.pdf and pubmed_83928932.pdf, not to mention the assorted .epub files of Open Access books, and much more. Well this is the second phase of how to use Zotero, and where it comes into its own.

The first feature is somewhat mundane: renaming. Once you have a reference in Zotero you can attach or link a PDF to the reference and simply rename the file from the metadata in Zotero. It’s a simple feature, but saves a bunch of time and effort.

Secondly, and more critically, as a digital reference manager you can add all your references to Zotero, and then sort and organise them by two different methods. Firstly, you can sort them into categories. I predominantly use collections for thematic organisation, as you can see in my screenshot: ‘Christology’, ‘Luke.’ Furthermore these collections can be nested, as in my ‘Psych’ collection with various sub-collections underneath. The second way to organise your library is through the use of tags. I tend to use tags in three different fashions: topical, procedural, and project oriented. Topical tags simply delineate the various topics that are addressed by an article or book. Procedural tags generally mark whether something is yet to be read (toRead), or yet to be marked up (toMarkup). Project tags simply note that I used a certain article in a project I have worked on. The entire Zotero database is searchable by these tags so you can easily and quickly have an idea of what is yet to be read or marked up, or what you cited for a certain paper, or what deals with certain topics. Super simple stuff, but invaluable in being able to find material quickly when your library grows large.

Documentation & Gathering

The penultimate phase of the Zotero experience comes in being able to collate and find your documentation and notes on all the books and articles. Within Zotero you can add ‘Notes’ for each reference. I use these notes in two ways. Firstly if I’m working with a digital resource tend to have a single note dedicated to all the highlights from that resource. You can extract these simply, and I’ll cover that in coming weeks. If it is a physical resource then I tend to transcribe either the full quote of interest, or briefly summarise the idea at hand, and note page number. That way the key pieces of information are easily at hand. This is the markup phase of my ’toMarkup’ tags above. Secondly, I also write a brief 50-100 word synopsis of each chapter or major logical section of the reference, in my own words. This allows for better memory retention of the material, but also provides a good reference synopsis of the work and therefore makes it easier to engage with at a later date. These Notes are stored alongside the reference and are synced across devices, and so are easily accessible anywhere. Furthermore, they are eminently searchable and while my office used to look like it was overflowing with a small dead forest, and previously I would be scrambling around in various manila folders and a whirlwind of post-it notes to try and find the source of a quote, I can now search for it in Zotero, and in pretty short order I have found the document I am after. This is one of the features of Zotero that I find invaluable these days.

Output

The final phase of my Zotero workflow is to actually output the references as citations in my documents. While Zotero does come with Word, LibreOffice and OpenOffice plugins, I find all of those word processors annoying and ultimately unsatisfying. I prefer to use Scrivener, which I will talk about in due course. But unfortunately Zotero doesn’t come with a default Scrivener plugin, although I’m hoping for one eventually. Rather you can use the RTF Scan feature of Zotero, which makes it useable with anything that can output in RTF format. In order to reference material you simply use the short code, consisting of {Author, Date, Page} or any one of the other short codes depending on your usage. You then run your output through Zotero and choose your stylesheet and bam, all your citations are done. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

The final note goes to the stylesheet functionality. There are many referencing formats out there, and Zotero is invaluable when you need to reformat an article or paper for a different referencing system. All you have to do is download the new stylesheet and apply it to the document. There is a whole database of Zotero stylesheet (CSL) files out there for various formatting systems, and the majority you can find here: https://www.zotero.org/styles

If you are an SBL 2.0 user, you will find that the style on the repository is one that uses Ibid. notation. Given that the no-Ibid option seems to keep disappearing, here it is for posterity. society-of-biblical-literature-2nd-edition-full-notes-no-ibid

That just about wraps up this post on Zotero, as I said I find it the central hub of my research methodology. Although I’m sure that there are other tools out there. Perhaps Endnote has become the phoenix from the ashes and resurrected itself without crashing every 15 minutes, or perhaps you prefer a different tool. As usual I would love to hear your comments and what you use in the section below.
February 16, 2015
On the Reading of Whole Books – The Reading Process

In the preface to a translated volume C.S. Lewis wrote an essay on the importance of reading old books, bemoaning the lack of application that many people of his era had for the reading of older books, instead preferring to read secondary literature. While Lewis’ essay still speaks powerfully to us today, with the trend of prioritising secondary literature over the primary sources having scarcely abated, I think there is another challenge afoot. Namely the challenge of reading whole books. For many the process of reading and absorbing information and research is a thankless and arduous task. So this task is shortened and condensed as much as possible, until most of what is read is mere snippets of the information. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and so this skills post is dedicated to the art and process of reading.

Welcome to the second post in the Friday productivity and study skills series.

Our modern culture has condensed the information gathering process into a series of bite sized snippets, in part exacerbated by the sheer volume of information that is accessible to us at any given time. News articles have been condensed from the long-form essay, to short columns, then pithy snippets, shared on Facebook, condensed into 140 character tweets, and subsequently regurgitated as 2-3 second sound bites. This reduction in our attention span severely impacts how we read and research as well. Several essays, papers and articles I have read over the years have quoted sections of an author without realising that the following paragraph contradicted their entire argument.

One of the solutions for this is to simply read whole books.[ref]Thanks and HT must go to Rhys Bezzant, who constantly emphasises the need for this in his classes[/ref] While reading a single chapter, or skimming through a couple of pages of a book may glean required information, reading the whole book sets that information within the critical context of the argument. Reading a book from start to end gives the reader a sense of where the author is heading with the information. How the author is building their case to support their thesis, and whether that thesis is validly supported. It allows the reader to see progression within the material, and shows how the information that is sought after is integrated and relates to a bigger argument and sphere. The art of reading whole books leads to an appreciation of other people’s arguments and also serves to highlight some of our own cognitive biases. It also helps us to develop the patience and retrospection required to more fully analyse questions and arguments on the fly, without hastily responding to our own internalised straw-man of someone’s argument. In short: read whole books!

Nevertheless the reading process can be hard, books can be too long, too dry, and plain old boring. What do we do with that sort of challenge, do we simply slog through a book because we started it? Actually I don’t think that this is a productive or healthy way of going. While I think we need to read more whole books, I am happy to acknowledge that not all books need to be read from cover to cover. Some are best used as reference works, even if they are not designed as such. Others are helpful to skim read through, for a gestalt picture of the argument, while extracting certain portions. Others are indeed best read cover to cover and pored over as you go. So how do we differentiate between the different types of reading? Tim Challies distills the reading method into seven categories: Studying, Pillaging, Devotional, Skimming, Stretch, Rerun, and Failed. [ref]http://www.challies.com/articles/7-different-ways-to-read-a-book[/ref] I think his broad categories are useful in thinking about our reading process and his blog post is worth a read. But here I want to focus on just three: Studying, Stretch and Failed.

Studying

For most students and academics the default mode of reading is studying. Quite commonly when I sit down to read something I have this strong urge to pick up a pen or highlighter. I’m sure many can empathise with this urge. However, there are many books that don’t need to be studied, and it can be quite cathartic to read something where you consciously make a decision not to study it; I have to do this periodically. Generally I pick biographies or unrelated histories for this.

For general studying there are many methods to make your reading time more efficient, and as per usual not all will work for everyone. One key element of most studying methodologies is being able to mark up the text and then synthesise summaries. Personally I use two methods for markup, one for personal books and one for borrowed books, but the schema is the same. I use a four mark system for scheme for Important, Agree/Quote, Disagree/Investigate, and Bias/Presupposition. In books I own these generally take the form of scribbles in the margin, a combination of lines, double lines, question and exclamation marks, usually with a single colour post-it tab to mark the point in the book. Borrowed books get a series of small reusable and non-marking post-it tabs at appropriate points in four different colours, generally yellow, green, red and blue respectively.

At the end of reading a book it is good to synthesise a summary of the information. Not only does this reinforce the learning, but also serves as a useful reference for where ideas and quotes have come from later. I generally synthesise per chapter, the book as a whole and transcribe the quotes I am after. If a quote stands out as being particularly pertinent I commonly archive it off separately in a ‘quote database’ for easy access. The summarised synthesis of each chapter gets archived within Zotero for later access, more on that in the tools day on Zotero. The practice of synthesising summaries is invaluable for reinforcing the material, and if archived well helps for later access. If you are reading multiple books on similar topics then a synthesis matrix may be an option. I have used various matrix schema in the past, and have recently come across this one from NC State: Synthesis Matrix.pdf. I think I will use this matrix for an upcoming lit review, it may be useful for you too.

Stretch Reading

Often I feel that we don’t think big enough in our reading, and this is where stretch reading can come in. When is the last time you picked up a book that really stretched your reading habits? Personally my stretch reading is a goal based reading and usually I conduct it over a whole year. I pick something that I wouldn’t otherwise have the time to read cover to cover, and simply set the goal of reading it over the course of an entire year. A few years ago I read through Calvin’s Institutes in their entirety, and over the last two years I have read through Barth’s Church Dogmatics. Now with works of this size you inevitably cannot study them thoroughly and meditate on each sentence, but the act of pushing through and reading them cover to cover over a longer period not only broadens the reading sphere, and increases your knowledge base, but also gives good discipline in sitting down each day or week and just reading something. I find it a very enjoyable long term goal. Next up is N.T. Wright’s Christian Origins series. It may take a while, but that’s ok. After all it’s not called ‘stretch’ for nothing.

Failed Reading

Sometimes a book is just so boring, uninteresting or irrelevant that you just can’t summon any will power to go on. Sometimes you just need to put a book down and admit defeat. It can be hard to do, especially if you are an avid completionist. But I think it is an important skill to learn, and especially to discern what the appropriate point to shoulder arms is. Giving up too early can be problematic, as some books take time to reach their stride, while giving up too late simply wastes time. What is the appropriate time? I’m not sure there is any specific recommendation there, but perhaps just to acknowledge that setting a book aside incomplete is not a terminal failure, but rather a tactical surrender.

Those three categories are the ones I think are the most useful for our train of thought in the reading process. In addition there has been some interesting recent discussion over the elements of reading on screen or on paper, and personally I’m undecided. Some books and articles are better on paper, while others are invaluable digitally. There is an interesting article by Oxford University Press on this topic here: http://blog.oup.com/2015/02/reading-on-screen-versus-paper/ and while I note that they focus on university students they don’t seem to control for the type of writing. They do note that even the smell of a book invoked an emotional response, but I cant remember the last time the smell of a boring text book made it any less boring. Nevertheless I suspect that is a debate that will continue for a while.

But there is one aspect of the reading process that I haven’t covered, although I have hinted at it: Writing. It may seem somewhat non-sensical to lump in Writing as part of the Reading process, but I think it is a critical part. However, that explanation will have to wait for next Friday.

Do weigh in on the comments below as to your thoughts on the reading process.

February 13, 2015
Getting Things Done: Task Managers, Calendars & Focusing

Productivity can be hard, almost like murder. But there are ways of making things easier, various tools that are accessories to productivity. We have all been there, a ton of things to do, but no idea on where to start or in what order to do things. Plus all the little to-do lists on post-it notes are spread all over the monitor begging for you to do them. What do you do? Welcome back to our Monday series, and after the Friday post I hope you are feeling a little more organised. This post will go through some of the supporting tools for getting things done, specifically task managers, calendars and focusing tools.

Task Managers

One of the perennial issues of doing things is knowing what there is to be done. However we humans tend to be fairly rubbish at remembering arbitrary lists, and even when we can they certainly take up cognitive space. This is where the humble to-do list comes into own, a simple list of tasks that can be ticked off as you go. It relieves cognitive load and helps you remember the groceries. But there are also significant disadvantages with the paper to-do list, while I know many people who still use folded sheets of paper, the tendency is to trend towards more and more sheets of paper. Nevertheless, the humble sheet of paper is an excellent place to start, as for some people it is a perfectly workable solution.

Personally I find having eleventy-billion-and-four pieces of paper jammed in various places a bit unwieldy so I prefer to use a task manager, and I suspect many of you will too. First though some task manger basics. Of course task mangers are only as good as the information you put in them, as with most if not all, pieces of software it is a case of garbage-in leads to garbage-out. Most of the time the best way to work is to put everything into a task manager, be they the little snippets of things you need to do, phone calls that you need to make etc, through to your big projects. However, one important caveat in this realm is that categorisation is king. If you have a bunch of tasks that go together, try to tie them into a single category rather than having them strewn throughout your task manager. Some productivity schemas (GTD I’m looking at you) recommend you put absolutely everything into an inbox and then file them as needed. But I think that logging every minute detail can lead to analysis paralysis, or list-mania, where the maintenance of the list actually takes longer than doing the tasks on it. There is a balance there between logging absolutely everything, and only logging the major things. You want your tasks to be fine grained enough that you don’t forget to call contractors, or get papers written, but not so fine grained that it clogs up with milk and bread. That balance is for you to find. Personally I err on the side of logging more items, but I can tend to be forgetful of minor tasks otherwise.

Onto the tools themselves then, and there are ton of them, both free and paid. Personally I use an app called Things by Cultured Code, but if you have to buy all the separate components of it (desktop, iPhone and iPad) it costs a motza. So there are some free ones as well. Note that this list is relatively heavily Mac focused, although alternatives can always be found. A good site for this is http://alternativeto.net where you can search and filter by platform. These are my top three task management tools.

Things

Things is my go-to task manager, and I have been using it for a while. I put 99% of my tasks in here, with some shared tasks going into Asana for church. It’s relatively simple and allows for a series of categories (called Projects) to be set up to filter out the tasks as needed. Tasks can be given deadlines, and shifted to the ‘Today’ area when they need to be done. Importantly Things is also a cloud sync-able app and so you can keep your tasks at hand no matter where you are. However, it comes with a hefty price tag, about AU$80 if you buy all three apps retail. It’s excellent at what it does, but the price tag makes me hesitate about recommending it widely. In addition it’s Mac only. If you really want it look for discount codes, and combine those with deals on Apple store gift cards.
Things – Mac only – http://culturedcode.com/things/

Wunderlist

The second app on my list is Wunderlist, a competitor to Things. Now Wunderlist was really in its infancy when I came across the super discount codes on Things, and so I went down that path. However, from friends who use Wunderlist regularly it seems to have matured significantly since I last used it, and is a real competitor now. In fact given the sharing capability and cross-platform nature of Wunderlist I would recommend it as a good and mature task manager. Oh did I mention it is free… yeah, thats right, it costs nada. If I had my time around again, and with the benefit of hindsight bias, I would likely have gone with Wunderlist.
Wunderlist – Multi-platform – https://www.wunderlist.com

Asana

Asana is really the new kid on the block, but it’s rapidly gaining traction, and it uses a different methodology to the two apps above, being web based rather than in-app. However, it is aimed squarely at small organisations rather than individuals, and this is where I use it regularly. At an organisational level it has the ability to encompass a wide range of tasking and meeting planning and is exceedingly useful in that capability. On the surface at an individual level it doesn’t offer much more than Things or Wunderlist, but in its delegation and project tracking it really shines. If your task management requirements tend more towards the small office or organisation, then look no further. It is also free for under 15 users in a group.
Asana – Cross-platform – http://asana.com

Now that you have your tasks sorted out it can still be somewhat overwhelming knowing what to do. The best way to start is to simply spend a few minutes at the start of a day looking through the tasks and deciding what is to be done that day. Most task manger allow for a ‘Today’ type function where you can mark them down as needing to be engaged with. Use this wisely, don’t overload yourself with a ton of tasks for the day, but also don’t set your goals too low. Again, the personal balance is up to you.

Calendars

While many of us keep a diary or calendar, it’s probably worth having a brief note on how important they are. If you don’t already keep track of meetings and other items in a diary or calendar, then I have only one things to say to you: DO IT. Again I know many people who keep this physical, including one good friend who carries a small wall calendar everywhere with him (respect, you know who you are). But if you want to do it digitally then again there are a host of options. Realistically it comes down to three architectures: iCal based, Google based, and Outlook based. Outlook is really only an option if you are already bought into the Microsoft environment, and if you are and it works for you, then use it. iCal (Calendar etc) is tied to the Apple ecosystem and so is restricted there, wheras Google is relatively cross-platform. Either way, use what works for you. The key here is to use it, put your deadlines in the calendar, put birthdays in, everything you need to remember that has a date attached.

Focusing Tools

Finally for this post, before it runs away for another thousand words or so: focusing tools. Now that we have set down the things that need to be done (DARE from last week) and enumerated them in our task manager, we need to do them. As per usual there are a ton of distractions and things that are competing for our time. Briefly though there are a couple of tools that can make the distractions a bit more manageable.

Pomodoro Technique (aka How Tomatoes Can Help You Work)

There is a stream of research that shows that many people are best served by working intensely for short periods with a subsequent break.[ref]Tambini, Arielle, Nicholas Ketz, and Lila Davachi. “Enhanced Brain Correlations during Rest Are Related to Memory for Recent Experiences.” Neuron 65, no. 2 (January 28, 2010): 280–90. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2010.01.001.[/ref] One technique based on this theory is known as the ‘Pomodoro Technique’, based upon working intensely for 25mins (called Pomodori) and interspersed with 5min breaks. Why it is named after the Italian for tomatoes is anyones guess, but the technique works pretty well. Just set a timer for 25mins and then take a 5min break at the end of that. There are few apps that are really useful for doing this, but the one I use regularly is called Eggscellent (more logically named after an egg timer). Again it’s a Mac only app, but there are plenty out there in PC land. Do try the Pomodoro technique, I find it invaluable and really like it.
Eggscellent – Mac only – http://www.eggscellentapp.com

Self Control (for those who don’t have it)

Finally however, sometimes the temptation of MyFaceSpace, SnapBookTweets and your favourite blog gets all too much. Well if your reserves of self control are running low, then there is a helpful app based solution for you. Essentially it’s canned Self-Control. Basically Self-Control will block certain websites completely and inexorably for as long as you want it to. It is able to be set on a timer, and so is useful in combination with a Pomodoro timer to assist in maintaining focus on the task at hand. It is exceedingly hard to disable in that time (it’s possible, but I won’t tell you how), and so can be valuable when the will is waning. If you are on Windows then Cold Turkey does a very similar job.
Self-Control – Mac only – http://selfcontrolapp.com
ColdTurkey – Win only – http://getcoldturkey.com

There we have it, the first tools in our toolkit. I would encourage you to pick out a favourite task manager and set about laying forth your tasks, start organising your calendar and thinking about the year to come. Perhaps even indulge the Pomodoro Technique as you do this, see how much of that you can get done in one pomodori.

How effective do you find these things? I am interested to know how you work with this part of the toolkit, weigh in below.

February 9, 2015
How to be Productive? – Time Management and Organisational Skills

When it comes to time management, organisational skills and plain old doing stuff there are a ton of pithy sayings out there: ‘to finish first you first have to finish’, ‘to do what you need to do, you need to know what not to do’ etcetera etcetera. Indeed it seems sometimes that there are almost as many methodologies for doing things, as there are pithy sayings, and things to be done. Welcome to the Friday ‘theory’ portion of the skills posts.

Overall the huge breadth of books and material on the topic can easily lead to analysis paralysis. I have a friend who I think has probably read every book that there is going on productivity and management and all the cookie cutter approaches, but still is absolutely hopeless at actually settling down and doing things. So what is there to do about productivity, do we simply adopt one methodology and hope it works, or swap and change between them at will? Well in many ways either of those options would be better than nothing, as usually going about our lives in a haphazard manner only leads to getting snippets of jobs done and overall lower productivity. But there are some systems that are better than others.

I must admit here, I don’t follow any one system, but rather adopt little pieces of each of them. I like the list making approach from GTD, but hate that it commonly ends up in swathes of lists without any action. I like some of the Seven Habits, from Stephen Covey, but find that a lot of the time they don’t really lead anywhere and you can end up like a guinea pig on a treadmill. So on and so forth. However, last year I read a book that sought to synthesise many of the different methods and come up with another system, the book is What’s Best Next by Matt Perman. It approaches things from a Christian perspective, anchoring theory in the Gospel, but I think it is equally as relevant to a secular endeavour and secular people. Again, I don’t adopt his entire structure point by point, but I think his overall architecture works quite well.

He has organised his method around four aspects: Define, Architect, Reduce, Execute; and yes they make a cheesy acronym: DARE. Now each of those is split up into a whole bunch of sub categories and methods, which I won’t reproduce here in whole because they would essentially be plagiarism. However, I think the four work fairly well as an overall architecture, and this is how I use them.

Define: I have a series of goals, both shorter and longer term. For example a long term goal is to do with working in Theological Academia, while a short term goal is to finish the papers I want to submit for a conference. These are written down, because if they are merely floating about in the ether then they become overly fluid and changeable. I generally revisit my longer term goals (more than a year) every year between Christmas and New Years. While I maintain my shorter term goals and tick them off as I go, and refresh these goals regularly. Longer term goals tend to be noted in a journal or note taking app. While shorter term goals are put into a task manager; more on those in the tools post on Monday. Having goals helps with knowing where the finish line is, rather than wandering aimlessly around. Plus it assists in reward based motivation and management.

Architect: Having a child has taught me that routine is relatively important. When I was at uni for my undergrad I generally just worked when I felt like it, and commonly pushed myself so hard for several months at a time that I would just collapse during holidays. Now while I still am capable of pushing that hard, it is actually far more effective to architect a routine for myself so that things get done at a good rate throughout the week, month and year rather than being in spurts and starts. To do that I have roughly mudmapped out my week. From the simple things such as the days I am at home with the little man, my research slots, through to roughly where the admin for work, college and church fits in. It is best to start with the big items first, that way you know there will be time for doing them. I tend to have things at a relatively high level, in blocks rather than to specific times, as this works well for me with changeable patterns with the little man. Others I know have a lot more set times, down to the hour or half hour. You will need to figure out what works for you. As well as planning the week, it is good to plan ahead for a 3 or 6 month block, so that things like holidays and other deadlines don’t creep up unawares. Tools for doing this include calendaring apps and task managers, which in apt timing will be covered on Monday.

Reduce: The third aspect of Perman’s approach is simply reduce. Cut out the things that are not productive in any fashion. It may be that for you sitting down and watching some TV is cathartic and helps you relax, I know it does for Gill. But if watching 5 episodes of your favourite TV show each night is causing time issues because things aren’t getting done, then perhaps its time to reduce a bit. Ultimately its up to you how much you reduce and lean out your week. But one thing to consider is how you can multitask with your time. If you take public transport to wherever you do your work then consider reading or doing some other work on that trip. Or if you walk then perhaps a relevant podcast you have wanted to listen to. This is a good way of helping you reduce without having to completely remove the things you are working on. Just make sure when you are reducing you aren’t eliminating the big things you need to get done.

Execute: This is probably the easiest stage. You have some time set aside, now do the things you have tasked to do… and don’t procrastinate about it. While there are a bunch of different methods for doing tasks, such as reading or writing, and I’ll cover some technique to make these easier later in the series, ultimately its down to just doing the tasks. There are some tools that can make this easier, such as good task managers, the Pomodoro technique, and apps to assist with self control and defeat procrastination, and I’ll cover those on Monday as well.

So how do we be productive? Well its not entirely by following a series of steps and rules. I have outlined a high level method above, which comes from Matt Perman’s book, that I highly recommend you get a copy of and read. But ultimately you need to adapt it to your own life. Perhaps a good piece of homework is to sit down and do the D-A-R-E methodology and see where you end up.

I would love to hear in the comments your own techniques for the overarching methodology you use.

February 6, 2015
Work, Research and Organisational Tools Overview
When working, or studying, or for that matter going about daily life there are a multitude of skills and disciplines that will help us be better at whatever we are doing. Some of those skills and disciplines I will look at in the Wednesday and Friday sessions. But in addition to these skills and disciplines there are a whole host of software tools that can make the tasks at hand easier, more productive, less painful, and assist us overall. However, there are two caveats with any toolset.

Firstly, they are only tools, they do not replace the tasks that are at hand, or the skills and discipline needed to complete the task at hand. One common trap I have seen many students and colleagues fall into is assuming that because they are using the right tools that the task will become self-completing, or that they can use less effort for the same results. Using the right tools will make your life easier, but they wont do your work for you. Just because you have a Phillips screwdriver rather than a hammer to undo the screw, doesn’t mean that the screw will automatically undo.

Secondly, there are a lot of tools out there. In putting together this series I have experimented with some tools outside of my normal toolkit, or tried to find free, cheaper or better alternatives. But commonly this can lead to tool paralysis, where we wonder whether Tool A is right for the job, or whether we would be better served with Tool X, Y, Z and the rest of the alphabet. The truth be told there is no one perfect tool for any job, each has their own quirks and idiosyncrasies, and it is up to the user to decide whether the tool at hand fulfils their requirements accurately. On the flip side there is something to be said for maintaining a relatively stable toolkit, as chopping and changing regularly tends to waste time with the learning curve of the new tool. The toolkit I work with, that I will showcase in this series, has has several tweaks and minor changes, but hasn’t had any major upheavals for several years now. It is stable, and the oddities I have either embraced or learned to work around.

This Monday series will document my toolkit that I use for my research, synthesis and output in my academic life. In various incarnations this toolkit has served me well through the last ten years of academic research after I finished my undergrads. Some of the software has changed, and certainly the proportion of digital work has increased with new technology, but the overall process has remained relatively stable. While ten years ago I worked mostly in paper, I have transitioned to being predominantly digital in workflow over the last five years. This certainly helps with being able to search and access data easily, and assists in the synthesis and output process.

Overall my workflow looks something like this:

(Click for a bigger view)

Roughly speaking I take input either already digital or physical, digitise the physical media, manipulate it so that it is consistent with Briss and OCR (Acrobat) tools, and then add it to my library (Zotero and Devonthink). From there I maintain my library and process the material through reading, note taking and writing synthesised summaries. On the output side I use a mindmapping tool (Scapple) and a word processor (Scrivener) to synthesise my ideas into their final forms.

Alongside this process sits a bunch of task management tools, note taking apps, and productivity tools that assist me in getting my work done. I will come to each of those in turn.

The next six blog posts will cover this entire process in more detail, and will roughly follow the workflow. The six posts will be on:
- Task Managers & Focusing (Tools for Getting Things Done)
- Briss & Acrobat (Wrangling Digital Files)
- Zotero (Citation and Library Management)
- Dropbox and Devonthink (Storing and Accessing Digital Media)
- Note Taking Tools
- Synthesis Tools (Scrivener and Scapple)
I’m looking forward to this series, partly because I’m keen to help others be able to organise their research and writing better, but also because it helps me review my own toolkit and see whether anything needs further tweaking. I would love to hear your thoughts on the process I have outlined, and what tools you use. Comment here or on Facebook.
February 2, 2015
101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication

Just ahead of the Study, Work and Organisation series starting on Monday I have come across this interim report on 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication. The authors have divided up the research process into six enumerated pieces, and have investigated each separately, looking at the processes that go on within each stage. They have also investigated a bunch of tools for assisting in the research cycle, some of which will be looked at through the upcoming series.

Its really interesting being able to see the processes that other researchers use, and from a wide variety of fields. I know my processes and structures have varied from Cog. Psych. to Telecoms Engineering and now Theology (my three fields). But it is also interesting to see the overlap between the workflows and disciplines. Just as there is much to learn from interdisciplinary research, there is also much to gain from seeing the workflow and research cycle of other fields.

I highly recommend having a quick look through their report, and perhaps perusing the long form article over at Inside Higher Ed on the topic: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/01/28/report-101-innovations-scholarly-communication

January 30, 2015
New Study Series beginning in February

With the start of the new academic year it is worth considering some methods, skills and tools for study in the year ahead. This year I have decided to put together a short seven week blog series covering many of the questions I am regularly asked when it comes to studying. I will divide it up into three separate sub categories: Study Tools, Study Skills and an assorted series of Biases and Fallacies that commonly arise. On Mondays the Study Tools part of the series will focus on organisational tools that can make the process of gathering, sorting, absorbing and synthesising information easier.
On Fridays the Study Skills section will look primarily at holistic skills for getting the most out of the time that is spent studying and writing.
Finally, on Wednesdays the Biases and Fallacies section will look at a series of common cognitive biases and fallacies that crop up in academia of all levels, and this section will finally culminate in an attempted Grand Theory of (Almost) Everything.

However, even though I have been studying and working in academia for quite a while now, I certainly have not come across everything that there is to be said in each section. Many of the posts will deal with questions I am asked commonly, and have proven helpful to others at Ridley and elsewhere. So I will mostly be sharing what works for me, and hoping that you, the readers, will be able to use and adapt my methodologies for your purposes.

I am really interested though in hearing what you would like to see covered. Are there any specific situations or problems that you find yourself regularly encountering? Also I will be welcoming comments and sharing of personal tweaks and methods on each of the sections when I get to the specifics. I am keen to learn from others, and hope that we can make the learning process as a whole better and more enjoyable. So please comment below, or on Facebook with what you would like to see me cover and what would be useful.

January 19, 2015