Friday, December 03, 2010

Personal Paper Writing Month - Recap

Well, no one wanted to join with me for Paper Writing Month, so I can only report on my own progress for November.

I got one full draft written, and the experiments for two others are more or less done running.

I can point out a number of factors that kept me from being more productive, none of which make me disappointed in myself. In all say this was a good exercise, and one I'll do again.  Maybe next time, I can find a buddy or two to join with me on it.

Now that I've written four (now five) sentences including a first-person personal pronoun, here's some more general thoughts about research.

Alex and Aki at Ideas in Food have a blog post about about Creativity in the Kitchen.  They loosely break this down into Inspiration, Flexibility, Motivation, Adaptation and Refinement.  Both these top-level categories and the specifics they address apply almost as well to creativity in research.  So check it out and cross-pollenate a little.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

That's not too shabby for one month--it's more progress than I made! I'd be happy to join in next time--it sounds like a good motivator. This was just a tough month with family visits and traveling, so I didn't take you up on your initial offer...

Unknown said...

The more the merrier! My most productive times in grad school came when I was surrounded by other people who were busting their humps as hard (or often harder) than I was.