How to write long texts (without hating yourself) - Part I

This past summer marked the completion of the second long document I've written. In the past few years I've produced a book (approx. 94,000 words) and a dissertation (approx. 100,000 words), plus a bunch of shorter pieces like articles (6,000-13,000 words each) and blog posts.

When I was a full-time professional violinist, I spent a lot of time seeking out all the self-help material I could find concerning deliberate practice and technical efficiency. I've found that the same mindset has been essential for my development as a writer. Writing, like playing the violin, is a technique. And although there may be some irreducible element of inspiration and talent in both, there are ways of approaching these activities that can make them manageable and even pleasurable. The purpose of this series of posts is to gather some ideas, both theoretical and practical, about how such processes can work for the writer of long documents such as books and dissertations.

1. Why is writing hard?

The first step to doing anything difficult is to acknowledge that it's difficult, and to understand that it's ok to experience challenges. The second step is to try to figure out why it is difficult, the better to solve the problems facing you. There are many reasons why writing is difficult--some practical, some technical, some aesthetic--but for now I'll focus on a theoretical difficulty particularly pressing when writing long texts. (My framing of this idea is based on Popper's arguments concerning empiricism, theory, and observation.)

Thoughts can take any number of shapes, and they can connect to other thoughts in any number of ways. To write thoughts down is to translate a set of largely amorphous ideas into fixed, linear form, with specific words, sentence structures, and a set order. This process is an act of interpretation: one that (like all interpretations) is carried out with an overarching theory about how and why the writing should take the shape it does. In other words, when we try to capture ideas on the page, we do not only contend with the ideas themselves; we also adopt some sort of theory about what 'the book' or 'the dissertation' will end up being--and it is this theory that allows us to know how to even begin tackling the ideas in the first place. Every sentence in a document is written with a theory about what the document is. But the difficulty is that with each sentence written, the document becomes better-fleshed-out, diverges in all its messiness from the idealized theory, and, even more important, changes the nature of the theory we might hold about the project as a whole. That is to say, every sentence is both written under a theory of 'the document' and alters the theory of 'the document' that operates in the writing of future sentences. By the time one reaches the end of (say) a 90,000-word draft, one has essentially produced a document in which most of the component parts--the paragraphs, the sentences--are part of about 90,000 different conceptual books or dissertations.

Actually, perhaps this is a simplification. The speed with which theories of 'the document' change will itself be subject to change as the draft unfolds. In my experience, the first 5-10% of the document is written under a highly consistent theory governed by an outline (assuming one is using an outline!); then change accelerates as development occurs, and each sentence/paragraph exerts a bigger pull on the overall theory; and finally, after about 80% of the draft is written, the theory of the document once again becomes more stable. Of course, it's highly unlikely that the stable theory one arrives at for the final 20% of the draft is similar to the stable theory one held while working on the first 5-10%.

So, even in this weaker statement of the problem, the basic point remains that you will probably produce a first draft in which about 80% of the sentences belong to thousands of different conceptual books, none of which is actually aligned with the finished draft, which is necessarily a jumbled mess.

2. What to do about it

This way of framing the challenge of writing may seem needlessly theoretical, but a number of practical points follow directly from it. Here are some extrapolations:

1. First drafts are necessarily awful. Many writing self-help guides (including most famously Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird) acknowledge the awfulness of first drafts. But these guides tend to do so ruefully. We are told that coming to terms with the awfulness of first drafts is a kind of self-acceptance--as though we simply need to acknowledge that we aren't smart enough to write perfect first drafts. I think that this way of framing misses the point. The problem of first drafts, as I see it, isn't that "we're not smart enough to get things right the first time"; the problem is that first drafts are necessarily awful because they are written under a huge variety of mutually-contradictory theories of what 'the document' will end up looking like. In other words, the awfulness of first drafts is inherent, and there is absolutely nothing we can do to escape it. It follows that this awfulness is something to embrace and make friends with.

2. From (1) it follows, in turn, that it's best to write an entire first draft before starting to revise or edit. People take many different approaches to this practical question; and even for me, a hardened embracer of bad-first-drafts, there is always a temptation to try to revise during the initial drafting process, for no better reason than the sheer frustration one feels at producing a 200+ pages of terrible, cluttered, aimless, unpolished prose.

However, there are a few reasons not to give in to the temptation to edit. The first two reasons are practical, and have nothing to do with the philosophical framework I'm outlining. First, the more one writes, the more momentum one gathers. It's often easier to push through the pain to the end of a document when one writes in a single sweep of productivity. Second, the mindset needed to produce words on the page is very different from the mindset needed to revise what's already there. The biggest difference between the two mindsets is that the first requires a real lack of inhibition and a confidence and belief in one's powers of creativity, whereas the second requires coolheaded discernment, self-criticism, ruthless questioning of one's ideas, etc. It's rarely easy to switch back and forth between the two mindsets, so it makes sense to disentangle them, accomplishing as much as possible under the first mindset before adopting the second.

In addition to those practical points, there are some theoretical reasons to write the entire first draft before embarking on any revisions. The most important is, simply, that revisions, just like first-draft writing, are carried out under a 'theory of the book'. In order to revise any sentence, paragraph, or chapter, you need to have some idea of how it fits into the whole, and what angle you're revising for, and why; otherwise, you don't know what to keep, what to expunge, what to fix, or how. And it's inherently impossible to know these things without having a complete theory of 'the book' as a whole. And, returning to the initial point, because that theory is changing until near the end of the first draft, revisions can't really happen until then. So it makes sense to put off revising until the initial drafting has taken place.

Note that the idea of writing the entire manuscript before revising does not translate into the process of writing individual chapters. Many people I know attempt to write and polish individual chapters before completing the rest of the manuscript. (This is particularly true of academics, who often use individual chapters as conference papers or articles, and write and polish one-at-a-time.) However, there are a few problems with this approach too. First, it presupposes that you know where in the document each argument or example will belong. In everything I've written, ideas move around significantly during the course of revisions, so that paragraphs that began in (say) chapter 1 might wind up in (say) chapter 5 or 6, or vice versa. Polishing individual chapters makes such moves difficult. Second, even when arguments don't move around between chapters, when individual chapters are polished before the entire draft is complete, it can be difficult to integrate nuances of arguments between the chapters. Finally, on a psychological level, as Ayn Rand points out in The Art of Nonfiction, it can be demoralizing to go from a polished final draft of one chapter to a messy first draft of another, and this can bring its own set of emotional and psychological challenges. Again, better to get all 90,000 words of ideas out of one's system, in all their unpolished messiness, before deciding what to do with those ideas and how to shape the next stage of the document.

3. Edit the complete manuscript in iterations. Editing, like writing, will change your sense of what the document is saying. Therefore, editing should be carried out in multiple stages, since it is unlikely (or impossible) that any one round of editing will create the final version of the document. Rather, the final version of the document emerges from various layers of editing: the revision of chapter 1 will necessitate changes in chapter 6; but those changes in chapter 6 will also cause changes in chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, which will in turn cause changes in chapter 6. These large-scale processes of bringing the book "into agreement with itself," so that the individual components have ceased to contradict each other or repeat after each other, is a fully absorbing mode of editing--and it's difficult to accomplish it while also tinkering with sentences and word-choice. So, separating out the various rounds of editing can be helpful in making each one as efficient and productive as possible.

How many rounds of editing are needed? This is probably a matter of taste and personal preference. The way I think about the issue is mostly psychological: as Eviatar Zerubavel advises in The Clockwork Muse, the ideal number of drafts is high enough that no individual draft introduces the pressure of getting things perfect all at once, but low enough that the process doesn't seem endless. Of course, these calculations will be different for different people. Zerubavel recommends doing 7 drafts; so far, for long documents I think I'm a 5-draft writer. (By contrast, when I write articles, I typically need only 3 or maybe 4 drafts, since it's comparatively easy to be coherent and integrated when you're dealing with only a single thread of argument.)

My process for going through the drafts looks something like this. First, I write a complete, messy, awful first draft. I attempt to do this as quickly as possible, both because I want to ride the wave of enthusiasm, and because I know that the writing will need a lot of revision anyway, so there's no point in taking even a minute longer than is absolutely necessary to get the awful first draft on paper. I attempt to write approximately 1,000-1,200 words a day during the first draft stage, and I stop myself once I've reached this goal, even if I'm midway through a sentence (especially if I'm midway through a sentence!) because I don't want to exhaust my ideas and have nothing to say the next day. By stopping myself at a given word limit, no matter how excited I am or how well things are flowing, I guarantee that I'll be able to hit the ground running the next day. At the rate of 1,000-1,200 words a day, you can write a 90,000 word draft in approximately two and a half or three months.

Having written the draft, I then take stock. I think about the flow of argument, I think about ways to re-order the pieces, and I think about what might be missing, which sections need to be lengthened or excised, etc. I then write a second draft, moving significantly more slowly than in the first draft. My goal for the second draft is always to make sure the paragraphs and chapters are roughly in the right order. At this stage, I still do not worry about the awful prose. The sentences are a mess, but I try to get the ideas in vaguely the right place in the manuscript. When writing my book, I also experimented with retyping the entire manuscript in a new, blank document from scratch for the second draft (following the advice from Zerubavel). I found this to be extremely helpful for two reasons: first, because printing the MS and retyping it from scratch gives me simultaneously a written, fixed first draft to work on as well as the freedom of a blank document. I feel safe making changes and trying experiments knowing that I won't lose work I've already done. Second, it allows me to (subconsciously) revise some of the sentence-level prose as well, since it's very difficult to retype a terrible sentence without making tiny tweaks that improve it. Although fixing the prose isn't my goal at this point, I can make little changes in the process of typing the new draft that I probably wouldn't think to make (and perhaps wouldn't even notice) if I were just picking through the same document as the original first draft.

Having written the second draft and gotten the ideas vaguely in the right order, I then repeat the process at the level of the prose. First I take stock; then I retype the entire document once again.

For drafts nos. 4 and 5, I no longer retype the document; at this point, the main ideas are in the right place, and my goal is to make the prose flow as well as possible.

To be continued, with thoughts on outlining, stamina, and other aspects of the process of writing long documents.

Reading the Foreword to "Ungrading"

Following my "Experiments in Grading" post of a few weeks ago, a colleague suggested that I peruse the newish volume Ungrading (ed. Susan Blum; West Virginia University Press, 2020). I haven't yet gotten far in the collection, and in any case I don't expect to read the book cover-to-cover, since not all of the topics are equally applicable to my interests or pedagogical problems. However, I had some reactions while reading the Foreword by Alfie Kohn. I'll record a few of these thoughts here, and follow up with future posts as I read more of the book. (I'll also continue to edit and expand my earlier post on grading.)

In general, in the Foreword (and, from what I can tell, perhaps the rest of the volume as well), the case against grades is vastly overstated. Kohn describes nine steps along the path from grading to ungrading--and although I have followed some parts of this path myself, my underlying rationale is almost always very different from the reasons stated here.

Kohn's first step:

We start by worrying about grade inflation before gradually coming to realize the real problem is grades themselves.

I certainly have worried at times about grade inflation...but what about the second part of that sentence? I would frame the issue not as "the real problem is grades themselves," but rather as "grades are problematic." In my previous post, I outlined a number of reasons why I think that grades are problematic, mostly involving the conceptual overburdening of grades, and attendant practical issues that arise as a result. I stand by this, yet it doesn't necessarily follow that grades themselves are "the problem." Grades do accomplish at least some useful purposes, including signaling. Indeed, if Bryan Caplan is correct that signaling is the overarching aim of academia and schooling, then some form of grades are inevitable, since the system wouldn't be able to function unless something facilitated this basic end. Of course, as I also acknowledge elsewhere, to the extent that grades serve as signals, they are imperfect signals, not least because they don't usually carry any explanatory detail. To outsiders who want to know whether a student is competent, grades only indicate the barest outlines of an answer; and to students receiving grades without an accompanying explanation, no real learning can take place because the feedback implied by grades is too diffuse to provoke any particular improvements. But, be that as it may, some version of this problem will be replicated in virtually any system for signaling quality that goes short of actually describing, in real detail, individual skill-sets. For this reason, some system like grades is probably a necessary part of life. It isn't clear that this system or any other is itself "the problem".

Kohn's second step:

...We make sure that everyone can, in theory, get an A. Only then do we realize that rating, too, is a problem, even if a less egregious one than ranking. We've eliminated the strychnine of competition, but there is more to be done if we're still dispensing the arsenic of extrinsic motivation.

This is an extension of the previous point: ratings are inevitable. But, I think it must be added, they are in some cases beneficial. The only way to improve is to receive feedback on one's abilities and performance, and although I agree that grades aren't the best way to deliver feedback (an objection I raised earlier), it isn't the fact of rating that is the problem, but the fact that the system of rating involving grades ends up, in its purest form, delivering ratings without explanations. The solution here could be very robust rubrics, or detailed commentary. About extrinsic motivation, this doesn't strike me as being obviously problematic. Students are individuals, and as such will be motivated by any number of different considerations; who am I to tell them that only intrinsic motivations matter?

Kohn's third step:

...We stop using letters and numbers to rate what students have done and instead use descriptive labels such as "needs improvement," "developing," "meeting/exceeding expectations," "proficient," and "mastery." Step two: we realize these labels are just grades...by a different name and that we need to get rid of them too.

This is the first point at which my disagreement becomes serious. Such labels are not grades by a different name; they are partial explanations of why a student has succeeded or failed at a particular task, and in what ways. Unlike a straight-up letter grade delivered without accompanying commentary, these explanations do, or at least can, make clear what needs work, and what kind of work would be best. They aren't perfect, of course; and crucially, they leave room for imprecision that can, in the wrong pedagogical hands, end up being just as useless to students as grades themselves often are. But what would remain of education if we got rid of the possibility of telling a student that work needs improvement?

(Incidentally, I also find labels such as these useful when they are applied by editors to my own professional work. One of my own intuitive measures of how useful a particular comment might be to a student is my sense of how helpful the comment would be if an editor voiced it while working through one of my manuscripts. I want to know what doesn't work, what could be better, and, ideally, what steps I might take to make the necessary improvements. Likewise, I assume that students at least want to have the option of hearing similar thoughts from me--and these comments are a baby-step in the right direction, even if they do not end up saying enough.)

I agreed with Kohn's fourth through seventh steps, which advocate for more precision and description in feedback to students--though, again, not because I think grades themselves are bad (which is Kohn's ultimate point) but because I think they are often overburdened or poorly applied, and one of the ways to remedy this is to be more explicit about what the grades are supposed to accomplish.

However, in step 8 we encounter "ungrading" in its most usual form: "we meet with students individually and ask them to propose course grades for themselves, while reserving the right to accept their suggestions." Step 9 is simply an intensified version of step 8: students choose their own final grades, and we reserve no right of refusal.

One problem with this approach is that it places undue psychological pressure on the students. Students find themselves in the position of second-guessing what we professors think about them, and trying to weigh this against what they then think we might think when we see the grade they propose...and I imagine that such mental calculations are ultimately pretty harmful--more harmful, certainly, than what I think they experience when I just go ahead and give them a (probably decent) grade along with some constructive feedback.

Another problem is an extension of what I have already mentioned. Grades do serve a purpose in the culture as a whole (even if mainly for outward-facing signaling), and to strip them of that purpose--which would surely occur if every prof left grading entirely in the hands of students, since external bodies would no longer think of grades as a reliably "objective" standard--would most likely lead not to the abandonment of rating systems altogether, but simply to a new kind of rating system: a different version of the same thing...and here I would invoke the classic argument from conservatism. Why fly to ills we know not of? When you don't yet know what the new system will be like or what further problems it may bring, it's important to make changes that are cautiously incremental rather than radical. It should follow that the best way to deal with the problems posed by grading as it's currently practiced is not to tinker with the culturally-shared elements of the grading system, but to experimentally tweak those aspects that can be safely adjusted within the comparatively private context of one's own syllabuses.

Experiments in Grading

My transition into professional academia has, for the most part, been very smooth. The "three pillars" of academic work - research, teaching, and service - all involve activities that I fundamentally enjoy; and, as a result, my job requires of me few tasks that seem onerous. Yet one point of consistent confusion and perplexity during my first few years as a professor has been...grading.

Before going to college, I thought a lot about grades: not philosophically, but in the more mundane sense that I was always worried about what my transcript would look like, and what effect this might have on my future. When I was an undergrad, and I could exert a bit more control over the selection of courses in which I enrolled, my grades improved. I stopped worrying, and indeed I stopped thinking about grades altogether. This changed a bit when I started grad school in the UK, but only because the cultural practices of grading differ so much across the pond. I went from receiving routine A's to receiving routine 70s, and it took a bit of adjusting for me to realize that this wasn't actually a massive step down. I stayed in the UK for my PhD, and thoughts of grades once again vanished from my life.

But now, as a professor, I have to deal constantly with grades. I spend the beginning of each term instituting grading scales and points-schemes that (I hope) will incentivize students to participate in certain ways in my courses; I spend the bulk of each term experiencing in real-time the results of such schemes; I spend many hours as the term progresses assigning grades; and then I spend the final portion of each term calculating course grades and dealing with grade submission, extensions, and other administrative joys.

But in addition to the fact that I am forced to think about grades through constant exposure to activities related to grading, I am also inclined to think about grades for other reasons. The most pressing reason is ethical, as I consider my relationship with the students in my courses and the impact that my grading practices will have on their futures. Another reason, more practical, is that some casual relationship exists between the structures and grading schemes I institute and the experience of my courses--and I would like to make those course-experiences as positive as possible for everyone, including myself.

All of this has led me to experiment a fair amount with different styles of grading in my courses. Now, as the Winter 2022 semester approaches and I put the finishing touches on yet another syllabus, I decided to reflect about some of these experiments, from previous terms and the coming term.

Initial reflections: what do grades accomplish?

Although this is not the place for me to sketch a comprehensive theory of grading, there are a few premises on which all of my experiments depend. Some of these have little to do with grades as such: for instance, I believe that students are people, that they are as intelligent and rational as I am, and that they are the best judges--certainly better than I could be--of how their own time should be used. I also believe that students are individuals and that learning takes place through creative processes that occur within individual minds. These background beliefs, broadly libertarian, lead me to avoid exams or tests, or any other method of assessment that would require all of the students to do the same activity, answer the same questions, or "prove" that they've acquired the same bit of knowledge. Instead, I try to minimize course requirements and come up instead with assignments that offer the highest possible degree of flexibility. (This is delicate, because flexibility for the students often translates into administrative demands on me--and one corollary to my belief that the students are people is that professors, too, are people, and thus deserving of flexibility and freedom.)

Other premises are explicitly about grades themselves: for instance, that grading as it is generally practiced often seeks to accomplish multiple different (and often conflicting) aims, including 1) signaling students' level of accomplishment or competence to the outside world; 2) providing direct feedback to the students; 3) ranking students into hierarchies of achievement; and 4) enforcing disciplinary practices. It seems intuitively obvious to me that these four aims should not all be bundled together; thus, many of my experiments and explorations are aimed at un-bundling them, and attempting to find ways to accomplish each of those aims (to whatever extent I wish to accomplish them) more coherently, explicitly, and fairly.

Of the four uses of grades, the one in which I could find the least wiggle-room was (1) signaling students' accomplishments and competency to the outside world. Grading practices are culture-wide, and if I alone decided to use grades in a radically unique way, this would certainly be misunderstood by future admissions committees and outside evaluative bodies, and this would have negative consequences for my students. By contrast, (2) and (4) could be accomplished within my courses using different means (say, by giving substantive verbal feedback).

Undergraduate grading

Thus, my first order of business when I began to design courses was to lower the burden on grades. I began by removing disciplinary measures from my grading schemes. When I was a student, it was normal for late work to lose 10% of its mark for each day (or hour, or any other arbitrary unit of time) that passed after the due-date. Ditto for errors of spacing, formatting, font-size, and so forth. I did away with this, announcing in my syllabuses that grades would reflect only the content of assignments, not the circumstances of their submission.

This meant, in practice, that I had done away with my most effective means for enforcing deadlines. In all but one of my courses, this has been a success, and students did not take advantage of my flexibility. Of course, some students submitted their work very late--but allowance for late submissions is part of my being convinced that the students understand their own interests and schedules better than I do. This flexibility became a problem only in the large (60-student) course I taught in Fall 2021, when a very high volume of late submissions made it difficult for me and the TAs to keep up with grading. I will teach this course again in Fall 2022, and one solution may be to set a final deadline for late submissions: for instance, to say that I will not use grades to enforce deadlines, but that any student who wants late work to be accepted at all must make arrangements with me beforehand. This way I preserve the flexibility (since I would plan to accept all requests for late work) but would prevent students from taking advantage thoughtlessly.

Another experiment, instituted early on, was to do away with grades-as-feedback. In principle, this is simple: just write detailed feedback for each submission. In practice, it is more complex, because it leaves open the question of how to assign grades. My solution was to think of each assignment as being pass-fail (which, incidentally, is how things work in the real world of professional research, where articles either get published or they don't). I approached this (in a 30-student undergrad course) by assigning higher-than-I-would-otherwise-give marks to passable papers (everyone with a decent paper got a B+ or higher), writing extensive feedback to each student, and assigning lower-than-I-otherwise-would marks for bad papers, offering the authors a chance to revise and resubmit. This course, taught online in Fall 2020, was perhaps my most successful experiment in grading: the students uniformly stopped worrying about their grades and started thinking about their ideas--and the result was that the papers became more interesting, more daring, more fun to read, and better as the term went on. Although I had to do a bit of extra work when students resubmitted their papers, it was well worth it..and the number of revisions I requested decreased hugely over the term. (I will also add that for this course, the paper prompts were very open-ended, meaning the students were free to find ideas that interested them and write about this. This also made the papers more enjoyable to grade, since in the best cases it stimulated the students' creativity, and in the worst cases it offered a minimum of at least some variety among the submissions.)

This approach has been a success in approximately five out of the six courses in which I attempted it. The course in which it was least successful was, as mentioned previously, a 60-person course, in which the comparative flexibility resulted in some submission-related chaos as the term progressed. Another potential problem in that course was that the students were caught off-guard by my insistence upon letting them follow their own interests when crafting writing assignments. Some didn't understand how to select a topic, and were reluctant to ask for help; others used the lack of disciplinary grading as an excuse to ignore the deadlines and let work pile up over the term. Others, of course, thrived, and wrote a series of brilliant and incisive papers. I don't count this experiment as a complete failure, since many students did ultimately report that they enjoyed the course and the assignment structures; however, I will modify the policies before I teach this course again.

Grading in graduate seminars

As of January 2022, I've taught three graduate seminars as McGill, and will be teaching my fourth during the coming term. The challenges presented by grading in grad seminars are different from those I encountered while teaching undergrads. On the one hand, graduate students generally receive As in seminars (or at worst, A-); thus, grading is relatively unimportant as signal, feedback, or ranking. On the other hand, the point structures and nature of assignments in graduate seminars still influence the course experience, and in some cases matter even more than they do in undergraduate courses, since so much of the professional initiation that occurs in grad seminars depends on individual reading and writing practices.

I've generally been bolder about experimenting with grading systems in grad seminars than in undergrad courses: first, because, as I've already said, everyone ultimately gets an A, which means the stakes are lower if my experiment goes awry; and second, because if things do go awry, grad students are more likely than undergrads to be sympathetic and professionally interested when I lay out the rationale for my experimentation.

For the first two grad seminars I taught, my grading experimentation (such as it was) involved similar parameters to those used in my undergrad courses: I didn't use grades to enforce deadlines, but I nonetheless scheduled assignments, gave each a point-value, and demanded that the students complete the work for credit in the course.

Grading, scoring, and board games

In Winter 2021, however, I began to experiment more radically. For my seminar that term, I hit upon the idea (stimulated by reading Thi Nguyen's new book Games: Agency as Art) of developing a points-based grading system resembling the scoring systems of board games. In general, in many of the board games I enjoy, players win by accumulating points--but the specific ways in which they accumulate points are left largely up to them. In the Ticket to Ride games (favorites while I was a PhD student), you can accumulate points by completing "routes", or by laying track aimlessly, or by building stations, etc. Each player works largely independently (though within a structure that emerges as a result of the other players' actions), accumulating points in any way and at any pace that seems advantageous.

I tried applying this ideal to my course. Rather than establish a series of required assignments, I offered a menu of possible assignments, each of which was attached to a point value. Give an in-class presentation for 3 points; write a short argumentative opinion piece and distribute it to the class for 4 points; write a response to an in-class colleague for 4 points; write a term-paper for 10 points; and so forth. I imposed no deadlines, but simply told the students that they needed to accumulate 29 points by the end of the term in order to receive an A in the course. They could write three term papers; they could write one term paper and give seven in-class presentations; etc. I created a simple spreadsheet to keep track of the students' scores as they wracked up points...and the course's grading scheme became a board game.

As with any radical experiment within a course, the results were very mixed. Some students thrived on the points system, since they were able to organize their time more thoughtfully (for instance, they could sign up for presentations or submit written work during weeks when they didn't have lots of work to do for their other seminars where stricter deadlines were imposed). For other students, the points system provided too much freedom, and left them feeling unmotivated, since they didn't have deadlines to work towards. I have not yet hit upon a solution to this problem. It is not clear whether the right approach is to try the board-game system again, and simply present it in a different way at the beginning of the term, to prepare students to succeed with it, or whether the system itself must be tweaked to provide a slightly more rigid framework.

Winter 2022: writing, research, and teaching skills

For the coming term, I have split the coursework into two different categories. One category, involving in-class presentations, responses, and other standalone assignments, will follow the board-game system, with no due dates, and the expectation that the students will accumulate some quantity of points by the end of the term. (More about this category below.) The other category, culminating in the submission of a term-paper, will introduce a new system, inspired by the writing habits that I hope to help the students develop. Rather than leave a term paper until the end of the semester, I have broken down the paper into individual components (thesis statements, outline, introductory section, body paragraphs, etc), which the students will complete progressively as the term unfolds.

By distributing this writing project over the entire term, I hope to both instill good writing habits in the participants and give them frequent but low-stakes goals to meet, so that the lack of deadlines in the board-game components of the course will not be demoralizing. I hope, if all goes well, that this will help to quell my own existential confusion about the nature of grad seminars and what exactly students are meant to take away from these courses. Having spent my entire graduate-student career in the UK, I never took a seminar during my PhD studies; thus, I lack recent models for how such courses can be taught and what they are intended to convey. In my other seminars, the discussions have been interesting (to me, at least), but I've never quite known why we should discuss these topics, particularly when the topics or the reading lists follow my own idiosyncratic interests rather than the research programs of the students. I recognize that there is an element of intellectual apprenticeship to the grad seminar: the students come to understand how I see my way through an academic issue, or how I compile a reading list, and perhaps, through a bit of effort along the way, might develop skills resembling mine.

In the current term's seminar, the freestanding assignments involving presentations and readings have also been tweaked slightly in the hopes of increasing their practical utility. The writing assignment is designed to instill good habits; but I have angled the other projects, too, towards professional skills. Rather than coming up with an exhaustive reading list, I have left open slots on the reading list which the students themselves can (for points, of course) fill in. If all goes well, this will give them a chance to exercise the skills of hunting down sources and navigating the dual constraints of finding sources that match their own interests and that match other scholars' (i.e. their classmates') interests. The in-class presentations, too, will not be devoted simply to the summarizing of texts and analysis of arguments, but to presentations of the kind they might someday give in an upper-level undergraduate course. This will allow them to test out pedagogical styles while also engaging with a range of scholarly sources.

I will continue to reflect on this system's success (and the challenges it presents) as the term continues! One major variable is the fact that, owing to the new Covid surge, the first few class sessions will be moved online. My Winter 2021 seminar was held over Zoom, and I found the online format to be a challenge, given that it sometimes impedes free-flowing discussion.