This prompt reminds me of an undergrad course I took a hundred years ago, “Advanced Expository Writing.” Dr. Losano would spend the whole 3-hour meetings pruning, scraping, and crushing every last unnecessary word out of our writing. To this day I tend to hyperverbosity (Herman Melville is to me as Henry James is to you, Jim), but when the spirit of Dr. Losano comes and whispers in my ear that I lose points for every word that can be cut without changing the meaning, it reminds me to condense. It’s no easier to do today than it was two decades ago, though! 🥲 Going to work on this prompt today and come back later to share my “tweet”! 🐦
I tried writing a Twitter-length summary and it came out as a haiku -- which is much more my natural medium, I guess. In fact, when I was working on my book Writing with Pleasure, I wrote the Story-Argument of the entire book as a haiku, and then went on to write a haiku for every chapter, plus the intro and conclusion. A great way to get to the nub of what you're trying to convey!
That's so cool, Helen! I started writing haiku poetry a year ago and it has been a complete liberation – for the first time in my life, writing is sheer joy and it is such a healthy counter-balance to my ‘work’ writing. Your book looks great too!
Have you signed up to Jason McBride (Wierdo Poetry) who animates his haiku- see this one https://weirdopoetry.substack.com/p/almost-cliche for an example that invites you to wordplay and mess around with cliche in a haiku (or free form).
Nov 7, 2023·edited Nov 7, 2023Liked by Margy Thomas, Helen Sword
Your point about overly long introductions is spot-on, James – I regularly get the same comment from reviewers!! Guess I need to heed Shakespeare’s advice that “brevity is the soul of wit”…
Instead of a tweet, I wrote a haiku about my research, which applies human development theory to climate change governance in order to show how our stage of consciousness or ‘worldview’ shapes the kinds of policy tools we design to respond to it and the effectiveness of our efforts. This form of poetry has a 5-7-5 syllable structure:
"Seeing starts inside.
Limits of our worldview shape
How we shape our world."
Three insights from this exercise are:
• Work on distilling the essence of what I am exploring.
• If I can’t explain it in a couple of sentences, then I’m not really clear myself.
Oh yes. People are giant goofballs, and we're wildly inconsistent. Interesting & fun, but also inconsistent. This is actually one of the core things I want my students to get out of my classes :)
Thanks, Margy! Link here for anyone interested: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589811623000113 . I’m working on a follow-up at the moment (in my “spare” time – ha ha…) that digs into our inner capacities for bringing about transformational change - things like embracing uncertainty, adopting multiple perspectives, etc. Turns out that a lot of Indigenous practices have been doing this for a long time...
Nov 8, 2023·edited Nov 8, 2023Liked by Margy Thomas
I love when serendipitous connections like this happen, Pam!! I had a quick peep at your book and just saw the section on First Nations Worldviews – looking forward to diving into that later. Saw that you quote Gail Hochachka too - we are collaborating on a project at the moment! Also, there are definitely overlaps with transformations work and complexity theory – it’s like we are being challenged in so many ways right now to really stretch our brains and capacity for deeper perspectives. It can be overwhelming though, so it’s good to be reminded of this quote: "Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach" - Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Lovely quote - thanks for sharing it. And thanks so much for taking the time to look at the book!
I agree, the degree of complexity can be overwhelming, and some complexity theorists point out that the complex “whole” is unknowable anyway (if it was fully knowable it would probably be complicated rather than complex). My approach is that it’s both humbling and reassuring to know we can’t know or do it all, but it’s also important to remember that there’s usually more to the full picture than the bit we’re interacting with. That perspective’s important, I think.
Absolutely, Pam - humility is such an underrated value in academia, unfortunately. I'm reminded of the words from the late systems theorist Donella Meadows on transformation: “There is yet one leverage point that is even higher than changing a paradigm. That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that no paradigm is “true,” that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension.” https://www.donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Leverage_Points.pdf
Thanks, Wai Ling! (hope I got your name right). I just clicked into your Learning Journals newsletter and love how you describe yourself as a"'multi-passionate creator" - definitely resonates with me...
One of the things I really liked about Twitter in the early days (and I was there when it was 140 characters, no threads), was the way it taught me to write more concisely. This is not my natural tendency.
I was one of 500,000 American teachers who quit in 2022. I blamed myself, but I wasn't alone. I gathered data and narratives through a survey and came to a conclusion: teachers are unhappy - but for different reasons. Why is this crucial profession dying? Can we save it? How?
1. I can combine three paragraphs building up into a thesis into one tight snapshot.
2. I need to spend most of my attention on my book proposal overview. Needs to grab the readers' attention and drag it through the much without letting it come up for air...so...not too, too long.
3. The adverbs...ugh. Why do I have such a hard time letting them go?
Nov 9, 2023·edited Nov 9, 2023Liked by Margy Thomas
I just want to say that this is so great -- hats off <3 (The focus of your work, the summary you've created, your insights, all of it. Just being a writing-teacher nerd.)
Robyn, you nailed it on that introduction. So sharp and gets a lot of work done. I love the short sentences, with one longer one in the middle. Perfect.
Nov 7, 2023·edited Nov 7, 2023Liked by Margy Thomas, Helen Sword
Here's my tweet-sized explanation of my current work:
Libraries can support teens in pursuing their interests and building their networks, giving them the space, time, and materials they need to do awesome things and connecting them to the people who will help them grow their expertise.
To get to this, I had to cut out a couple of introductory fluff sentences.
Lessons learned?
- Academic writing isn't a joke. I can open with the punchline. I don't need to provide a long setup first.
- I have a better handle on the heart of this work than I think I do.
- Similar to the first point, I can get at the heart of the learning model that drives this work (connected learning) without a lengthy exposition on the components of the model or the history of its development.
Didn’t finish this yesterday, but I’m glad I came back to it today.
My history of the Ouachita [wash-it-ah] mountains of SW Arkansas and SE Oklahoma is about the little guys. Settled late, the Ouachitas (like other Mountain South regions) were not where the money was so there aren’t many big guys to write about. Good thing I like the little guys.
I've embedded this prompt as a way to initiate my chapter summaries--a task I have been studiously avoiding. But now that I have a concrete strategy, it's feeling a whole lot more game like and a whole lot less daunting. Sweet!
One of the things that annoyed me about Twitter was the way people circumvented the character limit by writing multiple sequential posts. Brevity is key, folks. It's also not my superpower, but those Twitter essays-by-instalment taught me its value.
Here's my response to the prompt (277 characters, with spaces):
How can it be that we understand so little about “community” when we refer to it so often in emergency management policy? This article explores the ways community is currently represented, and recommends including a more active decision-making role in future policy iterations.
Three insights:
1. Writing concisely is difficult. Despite my best efforts to cut back, I still used "so" twice in that first sentence. Gah!
2. This exercise refocuses me on the guts of the message I want to convey.
3. My difficulty with being concise reflects my desire as a writer to communicate All The Things. As a reader, I don't want All The Things, I want The Main Thing, with a choose-you-own-adventure from there, in terms of how much further and deeper I will go. To write concisely, it helps to see my writing through a reader's eyes rather than my own.
Concepts of "community" remain abstract and ambiguous in emergency management policy. Future policy requires clarity, with a defined role in emergency decision-making.
The first sentence is excellent. I think in the second sentence you might have stripped it down too much. Maybe: "Future policy requires a more precise definition of this essential term for emergency-decision makers"? Or something like that!
Thanks so much, James. I might replace “precise” with “contextual”, as it’s one of those terms that defies a single precise definition. I need to keep thinking about the rest of it, because the focus is on drawing “community” into the decision-making process, which is really a second (dependent) point.
This is so helpful to read! When I’m teaching I can often distill large amounts of information into a few short sentences for short attention span students, but I’m working on doing that for my writing too!
I know what you mean! Somehow it feels more natural to be concise when responding to my child’s questions when he’s right in front of me than when writing to an imagined reader. This is a great reminder to bear concision in mind when writing too!
The description of your upcoming book hooked me, Jim! It looks fascinating. Are you familiar with Priya Parker’s book _The Art of Gathering_? (Not an academic book, but it is very thoughtful and well sourced). In it, she lays out an approach to what she calls “artful gathering” in a way that feels resonant with how you (re)frame the act of teaching. Her examples are drawn from various kinds of parties and work meetings, but I don’t think she mentions teaching specifically, aside from one brief mention of her child’s preschool. This is such rich territory, and I’m so excited for the fresh perspective your book can offer!
Nov 9, 2023·edited Nov 9, 2023Liked by Margy Thomas, Helen Sword
In order to most significantly limit human damage & maximize the greatest good for whole ecosystems, we must center community & sustainability. Nothing is more important to that work than the work of the liberal arts & textual studies.
1. I am capable of pulling my giant webs of thoughts together into sense-making concision. Sometimes :)
2. It is kind of amazing to discover that I had this clarity waiting to be called out by this prompt.
3. I am so lucky I followed the lead that brought me to this #AcWriMoments space. I would be wise to continue to allow myself to give things a shot.
Nov 8, 2023·edited Nov 8, 2023Liked by Margy Thomas, Helen Sword
Sorry—day late but still important!
Even though my postcard project involves creative work, I’ve already chosen a limited form of 45 words (I think this may have been a word limit for Flickr at one point?), but to do so in tweets seems to be a whole new ball game. Three things?
1. Tweets are unique because you can essentially discard grammatical and other writing conventions in order to save characters.
2. Distillation of ideas, academic or not, is something I’ve learned to do (mostly out of necessity), and learned to do well, but perhaps less successfully with my own work. That, I’ve discovered, is still a challenge. This prompt is no exception!
3. I can take the lessons I’ve learned from summarizing/condensing work, either a better way to use phrases and words, even eliminating some, or recognition of what I’m truly trying to say, taking that and reflecting it back on my own work, is slowly becoming helpful. Although in the end, my “Tweet” kept shrinking, if you can believe that! Maybe this will be a new project of mine—a series of tweets to construct ideas into these limited sentences/compositions, then I can “reconstitute” them back into coherent ideas and paragraphs with correct grammar and citations that are more “scholarly”
And I did use abbreviations and used hashtags to create emphasis. Onward, as they say!
In 2020, hundreds of faculty from a northeast institution completed an online faculty developer course to help them transition to online teaching. Three years later, my research will ask which element from the course was most impactful in shaping their online teaching practices.
What I learned from this exercise:
1. I still am not communicating everything, but this is my first attempt!
2. I want to go beyond sharing what I am researching and highlight why the research matters.
This prompt reminds me of an undergrad course I took a hundred years ago, “Advanced Expository Writing.” Dr. Losano would spend the whole 3-hour meetings pruning, scraping, and crushing every last unnecessary word out of our writing. To this day I tend to hyperverbosity (Herman Melville is to me as Henry James is to you, Jim), but when the spirit of Dr. Losano comes and whispers in my ear that I lose points for every word that can be cut without changing the meaning, it reminds me to condense. It’s no easier to do today than it was two decades ago, though! 🥲 Going to work on this prompt today and come back later to share my “tweet”! 🐦
Let's a start a "hyperverbosity anonymous" chapter, Margy. No caffeine at our meetings--only chamomile tea.
I’ll be there! ☕️😄
I tried writing a Twitter-length summary and it came out as a haiku -- which is much more my natural medium, I guess. In fact, when I was working on my book Writing with Pleasure, I wrote the Story-Argument of the entire book as a haiku, and then went on to write a haiku for every chapter, plus the intro and conclusion. A great way to get to the nub of what you're trying to convey!
That's so cool, Helen! I started writing haiku poetry a year ago and it has been a complete liberation – for the first time in my life, writing is sheer joy and it is such a healthy counter-balance to my ‘work’ writing. Your book looks great too!
It brings me so much happiness to think about people privately weaving poetry practices into their academic writing processes ❤️🩹
Have you signed up to Jason McBride (Wierdo Poetry) who animates his haiku- see this one https://weirdopoetry.substack.com/p/almost-cliche for an example that invites you to wordplay and mess around with cliche in a haiku (or free form).
Thanks for this, Clare, I love Jason McBride’s work!
Your point about overly long introductions is spot-on, James – I regularly get the same comment from reviewers!! Guess I need to heed Shakespeare’s advice that “brevity is the soul of wit”…
Instead of a tweet, I wrote a haiku about my research, which applies human development theory to climate change governance in order to show how our stage of consciousness or ‘worldview’ shapes the kinds of policy tools we design to respond to it and the effectiveness of our efforts. This form of poetry has a 5-7-5 syllable structure:
"Seeing starts inside.
Limits of our worldview shape
How we shape our world."
Three insights from this exercise are:
• Work on distilling the essence of what I am exploring.
• If I can’t explain it in a couple of sentences, then I’m not really clear myself.
• Cut my introductions!!!
Last week my co-authors and I received a review that included a criticism of the brevity of our introduction! Sometimes reviewers are hard to please.
Oh yes. People are giant goofballs, and we're wildly inconsistent. Interesting & fun, but also inconsistent. This is actually one of the core things I want my students to get out of my classes :)
Oh no! 🙈
I love both the haiku and the insights, Anne!
Thanks, James -and thank you for the prompt!
Your research sounds fascinating, Anne! 🌏
Thanks, Margy! Link here for anyone interested: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589811623000113 . I’m working on a follow-up at the moment (in my “spare” time – ha ha…) that digs into our inner capacities for bringing about transformational change - things like embracing uncertainty, adopting multiple perspectives, etc. Turns out that a lot of Indigenous practices have been doing this for a long time...
Your article seems really interesting, Anne. I just downloaded it. Thank you for sharing!
I'm chuffed, Patricia!! Thanks v. much...
Fascinating, Anne! I've contributed to some writing on disaster resilience-building using complexity theory - eg. concepts such as uncertainty, multiple perspectives, dynamism and disproportionate effects. Sounds like we have some common ground. https://www.routledge.com/Social-Work-and-Human-Services-Responsibilities-in-a-Time-of-Climate-Change/Howard-Rawsthorne-Joseph-Terare-Sampson-Harris/p/book/9780367704391
I love when serendipitous connections like this happen, Pam!! I had a quick peep at your book and just saw the section on First Nations Worldviews – looking forward to diving into that later. Saw that you quote Gail Hochachka too - we are collaborating on a project at the moment! Also, there are definitely overlaps with transformations work and complexity theory – it’s like we are being challenged in so many ways right now to really stretch our brains and capacity for deeper perspectives. It can be overwhelming though, so it’s good to be reminded of this quote: "Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach" - Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Lovely quote - thanks for sharing it. And thanks so much for taking the time to look at the book!
I agree, the degree of complexity can be overwhelming, and some complexity theorists point out that the complex “whole” is unknowable anyway (if it was fully knowable it would probably be complicated rather than complex). My approach is that it’s both humbling and reassuring to know we can’t know or do it all, but it’s also important to remember that there’s usually more to the full picture than the bit we’re interacting with. That perspective’s important, I think.
Absolutely, Pam - humility is such an underrated value in academia, unfortunately. I'm reminded of the words from the late systems theorist Donella Meadows on transformation: “There is yet one leverage point that is even higher than changing a paradigm. That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that no paradigm is “true,” that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension.” https://www.donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Leverage_Points.pdf
This is great – thank you for sharing, Anne!
Oh I love that so much!
Thanks, Wai Ling! (hope I got your name right). I just clicked into your Learning Journals newsletter and love how you describe yourself as a"'multi-passionate creator" - definitely resonates with me...
One of the things I really liked about Twitter in the early days (and I was there when it was 140 characters, no threads), was the way it taught me to write more concisely. This is not my natural tendency.
I was one of 500,000 American teachers who quit in 2022. I blamed myself, but I wasn't alone. I gathered data and narratives through a survey and came to a conclusion: teachers are unhappy - but for different reasons. Why is this crucial profession dying? Can we save it? How?
1. I can combine three paragraphs building up into a thesis into one tight snapshot.
2. I need to spend most of my attention on my book proposal overview. Needs to grab the readers' attention and drag it through the much without letting it come up for air...so...not too, too long.
3. The adverbs...ugh. Why do I have such a hard time letting them go?
I just want to say that this is so great -- hats off <3 (The focus of your work, the summary you've created, your insights, all of it. Just being a writing-teacher nerd.)
Robyn, you nailed it on that introduction. So sharp and gets a lot of work done. I love the short sentences, with one longer one in the middle. Perfect.
Here's my tweet-sized explanation of my current work:
Libraries can support teens in pursuing their interests and building their networks, giving them the space, time, and materials they need to do awesome things and connecting them to the people who will help them grow their expertise.
To get to this, I had to cut out a couple of introductory fluff sentences.
Lessons learned?
- Academic writing isn't a joke. I can open with the punchline. I don't need to provide a long setup first.
- I have a better handle on the heart of this work than I think I do.
- Similar to the first point, I can get at the heart of the learning model that drives this work (connected learning) without a lengthy exposition on the components of the model or the history of its development.
“Academic writing isn't a joke. I can open with the punchline. I don't need to provide a long setup first.” <- love this! 😄
I love your second point especially, Kimberly, affirming your expertise. Well done.
Didn’t finish this yesterday, but I’m glad I came back to it today.
My history of the Ouachita [wash-it-ah] mountains of SW Arkansas and SE Oklahoma is about the little guys. Settled late, the Ouachitas (like other Mountain South regions) were not where the money was so there aren’t many big guys to write about. Good thing I like the little guys.
I've embedded this prompt as a way to initiate my chapter summaries--a task I have been studiously avoiding. But now that I have a concrete strategy, it's feeling a whole lot more game like and a whole lot less daunting. Sweet!
YES! 💪
One of the things that annoyed me about Twitter was the way people circumvented the character limit by writing multiple sequential posts. Brevity is key, folks. It's also not my superpower, but those Twitter essays-by-instalment taught me its value.
Here's my response to the prompt (277 characters, with spaces):
How can it be that we understand so little about “community” when we refer to it so often in emergency management policy? This article explores the ways community is currently represented, and recommends including a more active decision-making role in future policy iterations.
Three insights:
1. Writing concisely is difficult. Despite my best efforts to cut back, I still used "so" twice in that first sentence. Gah!
2. This exercise refocuses me on the guts of the message I want to convey.
3. My difficulty with being concise reflects my desire as a writer to communicate All The Things. As a reader, I don't want All The Things, I want The Main Thing, with a choose-you-own-adventure from there, in terms of how much further and deeper I will go. To write concisely, it helps to see my writing through a reader's eyes rather than my own.
Second attempt:
Concepts of "community" remain abstract and ambiguous in emergency management policy. Future policy requires clarity, with a defined role in emergency decision-making.
167 characters, with spaces.
The first sentence is excellent. I think in the second sentence you might have stripped it down too much. Maybe: "Future policy requires a more precise definition of this essential term for emergency-decision makers"? Or something like that!
Thanks so much, James. I might replace “precise” with “contextual”, as it’s one of those terms that defies a single precise definition. I need to keep thinking about the rest of it, because the focus is on drawing “community” into the decision-making process, which is really a second (dependent) point.
This is so helpful to read! When I’m teaching I can often distill large amounts of information into a few short sentences for short attention span students, but I’m working on doing that for my writing too!
I know what you mean! Somehow it feels more natural to be concise when responding to my child’s questions when he’s right in front of me than when writing to an imagined reader. This is a great reminder to bear concision in mind when writing too!
what a great contrast--same here! I wonder if I thought about my writing as a form of teaching, it'd be easier to distill. I'm super wordy :)
This is the exact approach I take in my forthcoming book--Write Like a Teacher. Out in a year or so.
The description of your upcoming book hooked me, Jim! It looks fascinating. Are you familiar with Priya Parker’s book _The Art of Gathering_? (Not an academic book, but it is very thoughtful and well sourced). In it, she lays out an approach to what she calls “artful gathering” in a way that feels resonant with how you (re)frame the act of teaching. Her examples are drawn from various kinds of parties and work meetings, but I don’t think she mentions teaching specifically, aside from one brief mention of her child’s preschool. This is such rich territory, and I’m so excited for the fresh perspective your book can offer!
* (I should add, her book also doesn’t discuss writing itself as a gathering, which I think your book does!)
I'll be on the lookout!
In order to most significantly limit human damage & maximize the greatest good for whole ecosystems, we must center community & sustainability. Nothing is more important to that work than the work of the liberal arts & textual studies.
1. I am capable of pulling my giant webs of thoughts together into sense-making concision. Sometimes :)
2. It is kind of amazing to discover that I had this clarity waiting to be called out by this prompt.
3. I am so lucky I followed the lead that brought me to this #AcWriMoments space. I would be wise to continue to allow myself to give things a shot.
Sorry—day late but still important!
Even though my postcard project involves creative work, I’ve already chosen a limited form of 45 words (I think this may have been a word limit for Flickr at one point?), but to do so in tweets seems to be a whole new ball game. Three things?
1. Tweets are unique because you can essentially discard grammatical and other writing conventions in order to save characters.
2. Distillation of ideas, academic or not, is something I’ve learned to do (mostly out of necessity), and learned to do well, but perhaps less successfully with my own work. That, I’ve discovered, is still a challenge. This prompt is no exception!
3. I can take the lessons I’ve learned from summarizing/condensing work, either a better way to use phrases and words, even eliminating some, or recognition of what I’m truly trying to say, taking that and reflecting it back on my own work, is slowly becoming helpful. Although in the end, my “Tweet” kept shrinking, if you can believe that! Maybe this will be a new project of mine—a series of tweets to construct ideas into these limited sentences/compositions, then I can “reconstitute” them back into coherent ideas and paragraphs with correct grammar and citations that are more “scholarly”
And I did use abbreviations and used hashtags to create emphasis. Onward, as they say!
In 2020, hundreds of faculty from a northeast institution completed an online faculty developer course to help them transition to online teaching. Three years later, my research will ask which element from the course was most impactful in shaping their online teaching practices.
What I learned from this exercise:
1. I still am not communicating everything, but this is my first attempt!
2. I want to go beyond sharing what I am researching and highlight why the research matters.
3. I am still finding my elevator pitch!
You did a great job. You set the context, noted what you will contribute, and then left the reader in suspense. A lot of work in two sentences.