Current Project: Cutting it Down to Size

I've spent a lot of time in the past year--heck, the past three months!-- applying for various things, like fellowships and summer positions. Now that I have a proposal that decently explains what my dissertation project is, it's not so hard as it once was to apply for these kinds of things because I don't have to start from scratch. However, it is a great exercise in editing, for in addition to the specific pieces I have to write for different things (What collections will you use at this library? What's your teaching background?), I need to cut or lengthen the basic description of what it is I do, exactly. This process has led me to think about whether it might be fruitful to incorporate the skill of cutting work down to smaller sizes into a classroom activity, and how it could be done.

Short Descriptions

It's hard to write a short description! That's why there are eleventy million resources on how to write an abstract. It's particularly hard to be brief if you're trying to convince the reader you're exceptionally smart and have many complex ideas. As a recent panel on historians writing historical fiction observed, "graduate school ingrains students to write in technical, polysyllabic language." How do you express the complex ideas you've explained in a 13 page proposal when you have a 300 word abstract to work with? How do you decide which jargon to center and explain and which to eschew in favor of simplifying the story? And its particularly exciting to do so when you already have a 500 word description which you feel is perfect-- and need to cut it to 300 words.

This is an academic problem, but it's also an everyday life problem. There are good and probably boring real world examples about business or whatever, of course (Cover letters! Product descriptions! Interview prep!) , but here's a good silly one: haven't you ever wished, when you were stuck in the corner at a party being bored to death by a thousand-word story about a ten-second interaction, that someone had taught that person how to edit?

Editing and Peer Review

Editing is no fun, obviously; this is why I generally resort to printing things out in hard copy to go over so that there's a physical pile of papers shaming me into doing it ("You paid $2.20 to print me at the library just so you can sit there scrolling Twitter and listening to Gilmore Guys?" it hisses). Undergraduates also know that editing is hard and also no fun, which is why peer review is such a common and such a hated process in college classrooms. It's a good way to get everyone to try their hand at editing, but it's also a guaranteed groan-eliciter. The only thing I want to do less than edit someone else's paper is have them help me edit mine, which makes me feel both overwhelmed and tired!

Peer review is cool and important and I do it all the time with other graduate students but I have to admit that I almost never incorporate it into my lesson plans because I remember getting nothing out of it when I was in college. The thing about peer review is that if you don't totally trust your peers expertise, you can easily dismiss very valid criticisms that you don't want to deal with by saying that they don't know what they're talking about. I know! I've done it! So, if people in my courses want to help each other edit, I encourage it but rarely arrange it. (Reacting classes, which make a bunch of people work together in factions to achieve goals, are good for encouraging this voluntary editing of one another.)

Editing something to be not just better, but also shorter, is its own particular challenge. It is a bit better for peer interaction: you can quibble with "you should say 'barn' instead of 'rural horse hostel' because it sounds better," but it's hard to argue with "'barn' takes up only one word and 'rural horse hostel' takes up three and you're still twenty-three words over the limit, so kill your darlings, already."

So, with all this roiling around in my brain as I was falling asleep the other night, this activity idea popped into my head. It's called "Sudden Death Edit," and it's a little like the game of Telephone.

Sudden Death Edit

How this works:

Everyone contributes an assignment of moderate length. A typical five page paper is ideal. Students are asked to read the first paper they will edit in advance.
At the beginning of class, each person has fifteen minutes to cut that paper down into a one page statement.
At the end of fifteen minutes, original and one page papers are assigned to a new person. That person cuts the work down to 300 words.
After fifteen minutes, the paper and all revisions are passed to a new person. That person must condense the statement to 200 words.
Last round: new editor, fifteen minutes, 100 words.
Postmortem: reflect on the progression of the pieces and ask people to share about their experience of editing others' pieces and of seeing the edits of their own writing.

Discussion Questions:

Did the edits lose or gain coherence?
What choices were made in the summaries? Were there any you especially agreed/disagreed with?
When you worked in your summaries, did you use the full piece more or the latest summary more?
Which round was the hardest?

Bonus Rounds:

Sometimes you have to grow a statement rather than shrink it. Give everyone a paper and its 100 word description and ask them to make a 300 word description.
How does the whole thing change if it's going to be spoken aloud instead of read? Have students transform short descriptions into brief presentations if you're formal, or descriptions to a friend if you like keeping it casual.

Notes:

If you have everything in an online space and get everyone to bring laptops to access it, this could be the easiest way to deal with counting words and accessing each other's writing-- each paper could be a separate post in a forum on Compass or Moodle or Blackboard, and then each round of revision could be a separate comment in that thread by the editor. This method also makes the trajectory of changes easily observable by all.
The base activity here is designed for an hour-fifteen class period, which I have never actually had the pleasure of teaching! To shorten this, you could eliminate a step, use shorter pieces to begin with and thus lose the first step, or really hot-seat it and make each round ten minutes.
If you want the original writers to have more involvement throughout, you could make this a pairs activity and have pairs hand their pieces back and forth. I love pairs! Pairs are the new groups, in my mind. More on that another day, I'm sure.
This activity is obviously good for its stated purpose, learning to write short descriptions. But it's also a nice exercise for figuring out what exactly a piece is about, what the important elements are, and how to explain them in a briefer period.

Lesson Spotted

Monday, April 30, 2018