"There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed." (John Kenneth Galbraith)

"Being a writer is a perpetually humbling experience. Everyday you have to confront your own stupidity. You have to be willing to say, 'Oh, man, that was a stupid sentence. It's not as brilliant as I thought it would be when it was floating around in my head.' You get to experience shame and humiliation in all kinds of different ways. That can't stop you. It's part of the job." (Mary Kay Blakely, in The Resilient Writer. by Catherine Wald, 2005, pg. 20.)

"People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently." (Anna Quindlen)

 Gina Hiatt, of AcademicLadder.com, has sent a link to her article from a few years ago that remains just as relevant now as it was then: 
"We Need Humanities Labs"

"I wonder how an English professor would feel spending a week in a physics lab. Not about the scientific work, but about the frequent, ongoing interaction between students and peers, post-docs and faculty. [...] My curiosity about this hypothetical English professor’s reaction began after a discussion with my father, a professor emeritus in physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. As we chatted about my work as a dissertation and tenure coach, he expressed shock when I recounted how graduate students in English could go a month or more with no contact with their advisor. He estimated that his students usually saw him daily, and never went for more than a week without interaction with him, except when he was traveling. As he quizzed me more and more about the grad student experience in humanities departments, it became more and more clear to me that there is a deep divide."

To read more:
http://www.insidehighereducation.com/views/2005/10/26/hiatt


The controversy in the comments under the article is also very interesing!

 Last week I have finished teaching a workshop for writing a qualitative article. And it’s been quite an experience! Both groups were made up of competent, mature researchers, in spite of their being in early stages of their careers – some before and some just after completing their PhDs. This workshop was the biggest opportunity for me so far to see what there is behind the rigorous and matter-of-fact façade of social sciences articles: the excitement of field research, the justified sense of crucially important social mission that most of these researchers are moved by, and the fundamental way in which social sciences’ accepted structures of writing function to produce knowledge.

When from the very outset you have to write down your motivation, you are forced to convince yourself and others why anyone should care about your research – you are not accidentally faced with this “insulting” question in the middle of your work or having completed it – as I feel is sometimes the case with projects in humanities.

When in your literature review you have to construct the gap in the existing studies that your study is coming in to fill, it is literally like placing another brick into the positivist “house” of knowledge – even if your article is all qualitative and hermeneutic and doesn’t take for granted the firmness of the ground on which this house rests. In spite of surface similarity of criticizing other studies in your field, constructing a gap in the existing knowledge in order to fill it is fundamentally unlike what Amir Tevel, a literature student from our department, is upset by in theories of the novel – trying to dismiss other studies in order to present one’s own as unique. In the latter case, what upsets Amir is lack of cooperation – while the point of constructing  a gap in a social sciences article is precisely establishing cooperation.

When you have to formulate a clear research question, dependent though it may be on the biases of our language, your study sets out to give clear and specific answers – provisional though they may be. And these answers are the available and usable knowledge that social sciences put at our disposal – whatever the troubles and responsibilities that knowledge (=power) entails.

Finally, having to think about your findings’ implications brings you back once again to the existing body of knowledge on your subject and makes you consciously work on perfecting and developing it, and setting directions for its further growth.

And just to think where I started, asking the first group in the first session whether the rigid structures they have to follow don’t interfere with their self-expression! I think I learned from them more than any of them could possibly learn from me J

 

 To "TheScribe's" health!  :)