It is not that I have achieved nothing since my last post. I have had a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal. That was a lot of time invested in writing, and one of my targets for my PhD achieved. However, I have a long way to go yet. I need to get some more papers out in the third year of my PhD. I have two under development and they should be submitted before the end of 2010. If I manage that then I will feel happy.
However, any feelings of progress will be tempered by a recent blog post on matt.might.net which worried me greatly. It identified a key reason for failure to obtain a PhD was a lack of writing practice and put the amount required at about 10,000 hours. This is given as about 5 hours per day, but that is based on a 6 year graduate school experience, such as I understand is typical in the US. Getting 4 years in the UK is a luxury. Indeed, with the 3.5 years that is typical this breaks down as nearly 8 hours of writing every day (including weekends and holidays), so spending this amount of time on writing would mean never doing anything else. I just hope that as a mature student my 20 years in industry has given me the writing skills I need.
I worry about though that the opposite is true. Over the last 20 years business communication has become dominated by PowerPoint, or to be more accurate, by the presentation. When I started work in the 1980s I would get written memos telling me what I needed to know to do my job, by the time I left this had changed to emails with a presentation attached. I had to trawl through dozens of slides to find the two or three relevant to me. Then I had to put back all the detail left out by the author so that his or her message could be boiled down to a dozen bullet points.
I am not saying I am innocent in this. I did it as much as anyone. I like to think that my graphs and tables where above average and properly conveyed the message, but I was an enthusiastic adopter of the bullet point. It is a great time saver to précis a paragraph or two as a 12 word bullet. It is also very useful to have the ambiguity of interpretation that such brevity allows. A bit of room to wriggle is usually useful in business. It allows the reader to interpret the message in the way most relevant to them, making them more likely to accept the message. Finally, when writing to busy senior managers it is often the best way to get your ideas read. Half a dozen slides are far more likely to get a cursory scan than page of text.
Getting back to writing prose, being meticulous about the meaning of what I write, valuing accuracy over brevity (while not being unnecessarily verbose) has been hard. Like getting back onto a bicycle after years of driving. I haven't forgotten what I need to do, I know it is good for me and for others, but it is just not as comfortable.
So, as well as worrying me, Matt Might's post has spurred me to get back to my blog. As it says:
That's why I recommend that new students start a blog. Even if no one else reads it, start one. You don't even have to write about your research. Practicing the act of writing is all that matters.I hope to see you again tomorrow.
