I hope that quarantine life is treating you reasonably well. I am definitely back in a work groove (as much as can be expected, anyway). I’m thankful for that. Today I’m going to do a fast post about something I alluded to in my blog post on reviewing and organizing literature: writing papers.
I don’t have the key to writing a good paper (does anyone?) but I have some good practices for keeping organized and expeditiously getting content on paper. As I mentioned in a previous post, I create thematic bibliographies where I take all of my annotations from the articles I’ve reviewed and arrange them into general topic areas or themes. For social justice leadership, these might be barriers (and then sub-themes), practices (and sub-themes), and preparation (and sub-themes). This is incredibly useful for writing literature reviews. Say my research paper focuses on barriers social justice leaders faced in the Chicago setting (where I live). I’d probably want to cover what is already known about barriers in my literature review. So here’s what I’d do:
Save my thematic bibliography as a copy with a new title. I do this because in my process I delete text as I add it to the paper I’m writing. I wouldn’t want to delete from the actual primary thematic bibliography document.
Put the thematic document on the left side of my screen and the document I’m writing on the right side. This is helpful so that I’m not going back and forth constantly. I know some people who do the same but with a second monitor. My computer screen is small but just using one screen works for me. Whatever works is fine. Picture below.
Read through notes on the left side and begin to draft writing. Look at your notes and start writing topic sentences that sort of summarize the main point across the literature. Then add in more specific points from your thematic bibliography underneath. If many authors say the same thing, you don’t need to give that information multiple times, but can cite a few when making your point. This part of the process is really up to how you write best.
Pull notes from the left side into the right side and delete text from the left side as you pull. This helps me know what I’ve already referenced/used. That way I won’t end up repeating myself.
Finish once you’ve exhausted/deleted all of your notes. You may also find that some of your notes are not relevant or that you need more notes for certain sections.
That’s it! This has been a great way for me to get an initial draft on paper very quickly. After that, lots of editing needs to happen, but this really helps with getting the content down on paper.
The key to this approach is doing the initial legwork to build your thematic bibliography. As I said in my previous post, I do work to build mine constantly, basically adding in notes from articles I’ve reviewed as I go. For one of my big bibliographies (around 120 single-spaced pages of notes so far) on neoliberalism and education, I recently had to make a thematic bibliography from scratch. It did take a day or two of work. But it was 100% worth it. Now, as I review new articles, I’ll add them to the thematic bibliography every few weeks, which is much more manageable.
I hope this was helpful!