BartonMemo2

BartonMemo 2: Habits, Neuroses, Talents 16 January 2009

-Good at finding information, but tend to follow too many leads/tangents. It's hard to stop reading and start writing

-I'm always afraid I've missed something or that my argument's already been made a million times in some field I haven't come across yet, which is another reason that I keep reading.

-Love to immerse myself in swirling webs of data. Hate having to emerge and force it all into a 2-dimensional linear paper.

-Takes me a long time to figure out how to articulate a complex argument that I know intuitively. The challenge is starting to write at the right time. If I start before I've thought it through enough, I just get immensely frustrated. If I start after I've thought it through too much, I tend to write a too-simple version because I'm done thinking about it.

-I'm a really fidgety writer. I think best when I'm in motion, and writing is not conducive to that, so I tend to write a couple of sentences, pace around the apartment, write a few more. It takes forever.

-Good at making connections between things, thinking across conventional boundaries, analysis in general. I find edges most interesting. The places where two boundaries come up against each other.

-Hate it when people draw on dogma that they've clearly never questioned, even if its dogma I agree with. Poor logic in general drives me nuts.

-Somewhat surprisingly, I've discovered I'm quite good at face-to-face interviews. Feel like I'm terrible at setting them up though, and so I tend to put that off way too long. Ditto phone interviews. I am not a fan of phones.

-My note-taking methods are atrocious. As in practically non-existent. In literary analysis, you can get away with just kind of swimming around in your sources because there are usually only a handful, so you can remember where stuff is. The kind of research we do here... forget it. So I end up with piles of papers strewn around my office when I sit down to write. Not effective. Every project I try to be better about it, try different ways to keep things organized... and it always falls apart. Who wants to take time to write stuff down, when you just read something that makes you think of something else, which clearly has to be followed up on right now? (see beginning of list, repeat.)

-I think I probably also tend towards the investigative journalism mode of inquiry rather than the academic mode. If it's a good story, it's a good story.