I tend to like it when my grad students are toiling away on their papers, because I, in turn, do the same thing. On Wednesday I noticed a few grad students fiddling with what looked to me like the material instantiations of their inventional processes. G, for example, had index cards in a set of bright pastels. M (1) had plain white index cards with long, flapping ribbons of paper stapled to them. M(2) had a beige sheet of paper with a conceptual map scrawled on it.
Before we started our abstract workshop, I asked these folks to do a little impromptu show & tell in order to get people thinking about what they do when they write a seminar paper. G held up his cards and told us that all the quotations he wanted to use were there. They were color coded, not by topic, as I had assumed, but by source. M(1) explained that the stapled pieces of paper were sentences that had formed part of her draft that she had cut apart and reordered according to topic so that she could find a good organization. M(2) held up his map and when M(1) asked him how that drawing would become a paper, he walked us through the many circles connected with lines. A, another member of the class, proudly held up his flash drive and indicated that we would have to trust him that a draft was on it. I told them about my method that combined M(1) with M(2), wherein I sometimes use a giant sketch pad and sharpie pens to reorder a messy draft by taping cut-out chunks of the draft under handwritten headings. Sometimes I end up writing transitions and forgotten passages in the margins, even on the tape itself.
Just having that chat about invention helped me to see the problem with the current draft of an article I'm working on: it's all crammed into one Word document, and it was getting a little claustrophobic. It needed room to breathe. So over the past few days, I have pulled out my sketch pad, resurrected endnote, and even--in honor of G--implemented note cards that I staple together by topic. The thing is still something of a mess, but it's coming together. I can see it.
