{"id":3764,"date":"2015-03-05T11:59:29","date_gmt":"2015-03-04T22:59:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/?p=3764"},"modified":"2016-08-01T10:08:14","modified_gmt":"2016-07-31T21:08:14","slug":"manuscript-march-should-we-write-while-we-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/?p=3764","title":{"rendered":"Manuscript March: Should We Write While We Read?"},"content":{"rendered":"

At primary school, you learn the \u201cthree Rs\u201d \u2013 reading, writing, and arithmetic. I always thought that saying was deeply ironic. In order for those to be three Rs, you need to be both a poor speller and a terrible enunciator: reading, riting, and \u2019rithmetic. As a schoolgirl, it struck me as a bit odd that the catchphrase for those core skills only made sense if you didn\u2019t possess them.<\/p>\n

Now that we\u2019re in the most advanced stages of our educations, we seem to go back to the basics. Reading and writing (and for those working with quantitative methods, arithmetic) become, once more, the bread and butter of our scholastic activities.<\/p>\n

The question is: do reading and writing really go together? Is it best to read with a pen in hand and scrawl in the margins, or is it better to hold back the ink until you\u2019ve digested what you\u2019ve read? In other words: are reading and writing really a pair, or are we simply forcing them to fit together?<\/p>\n

To some extent, this has to be a matter of personal choice. I simply must<\/em> write in order to process my responses to an article or book, whereas others may prefer to think or talk in order to achieve the same goal. For me, the act of writing-while-reading is not about creating a record of what I\u2019ve read (usually the notes are incomprehensible anyway) \u2013 it\u2019s more about filtering the text I\u2019m reading through my own brain and my own words. It keeps me alert and engaged.<\/p>\n

It also leaves me with articles and books that are part texts, part artworks. The books I\u2019ve worked on most intensely over the last few years are covered in so many feathery post-it tags that they look like tropical macaws.<\/p>\n

\"Books\"
These books have more fluoro than my t-shirt drawer in the early 90s.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And the marginalia! I have perfected the art of scrawling in tiny script in order to fit thousand-word ruminations into the inch-wide margins of research articles. Sometimes I have so many words, and so little space, that I write over the writing, creating densely layered (and totally unreadable) patterns of text.<\/p>\n

But is this all a waste of time? Would I be better off casting my pen aside until I finish reading the article? And in the bigger picture: is it better to hold off writing any of your thesis at all until you\u2019ve read everything that might feed into it? It\u2019s the age-old question: what came first, the literature or the review?<\/p>\n

What do you think? Do you write while you read? Or do you like to delay writing until you\u2019re sure of what you\u2019ve read?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At primary school, you learn the “three Rs” – reading, writing, and arithmetic. I always thought that saying was deeply ironic. In order for those to be three Rs, you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6725,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,1],"tags":[52,78],"class_list":["post-3764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-category-3","category-category-5","tag-reading","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p83npQ-YI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6725"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3764"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3802,"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3764\/revisions\/3802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}