Fun new Social Science jargon: “opportunistic ethnography.” Translation: you never know when you, reader, are going to be my next data point.
Hat tip to Tracey, Jarvis and Phillips who mentionted this in “Bridging Institutional Entrepreneurship and the
Creation of New Organizational Forms: A Multilevel Model” in Organization Science Vol. 22, No. 1, January–February 2011, pp. 60–80
Filed under pithy expressions, sociology, words, writing
Nugget #3…
Now Eviatar shifts to chunking tasks. He calls this, quite nicely, “a mountain with stairs.”
Two points resonated for me. First, about outlines, he suggests only outlining or changing outlines _between_ final drafts. This may be part of my problem with “code rules” as it has been restructured five times, at least I think. Not all of these were after a final draft was done.
Second, he advocates writing and then revising in stages. This more useful for my students than for me, perhaps, as I am already a committed reviser. They still think, most of them, that writing is getting your ideas on paper instead of realizing that writing is another form of thinking. They think it is a mistake to rewrite, instead of normal.
Now, to complicate matters, the idea of the mountain with steps is appealing; common-sensical too. Break down the seemingly distant and difficult task into smaller, feasible steps. I have climbed mountains. I absorbed *Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance*. I have told hiking groups I led that to climb a mountain you have to have the disposition of a cow. The difference is that in those cases, I usually know which way is _up_. In writing, I find myself wondering if these steps are really the right steps to take. I especially wonder if I am going up at a good rate, or, even worse, going down. Efficiency and failure trouble me more directly than self-doubt that I will finish. In mountain terms- I worry now about going sideways or downhill more than about whether I will ever get to the top.
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