Current Project: Cutting it Down to Size

Scissors.

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:

1. 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.  
2. At the beginning of class, each person has fifteen minutes to cut that paper down into a one page statement. 
3. 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. 
4. After fifteen minutes, the paper and all revisions are passed to a new person. That person must condense the statement to 200 words.  
5. Last round: new editor, fifteen minutes, 100 words. 
6. 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.

Related Links:

• Did you know the U of I has recently switched to an annoying system in which you have to put $5 in your "Illini Cash" account just to print a goldurn ten cent page? Did you know that both Urbana and Champaign public libraries have more sensible systems that you can utilize for a mere 5 cents more, as well as the overpriced but convenient printers at Cafe Kopi and Hammerhead Coffee?
  

Take My Advice: Starting On Secondary Lit

 

Stacked books. Photo by Anthony from Pexels.

One thing that I still find intimidating is the vast amount of secondary literature in the world. How do you make sense of what historians have said about a field that is new to you? Getting a grip on historiography is something that hasn't come naturally to me, but it has been a continual process of discovery and false starts in my career as a student and teacher of history. In this post, I want to talk a little bit about one way in which I've approached getting to know the state of a field-- an activity I call the Fifteen-Minute Filter.

Why Bother?

The need to get a quick idea of a field is applicable to a variety of levels of study. You may be an instructor designing a new course or a graduate student studying for exams or a researcher writing an article, in which case you've likely had some experience with the concept of historiography. However, I first encountered this need while taking upper-level undergraduate classes. It can be a tough transition between papers for lower- and upper-level history courses. In the lower levels, the readings tend to be provided for you; papers are written based on sources you have covered in class or selected from a list provided by the instructor. As you progress to higher level courses, however, you may be expected to find your own secondary literature to reference in either a historiography paper (which focuses on what scholars have written on a topic, and you make an argument about their arguments) or a research paper (in which you use primary sources to make your own argument, and refer to the work of other scholars to suggest how your argument relates to theirs). I've tailored much of the advice in this post to students at the undergraduate level for whom research might be somewhat new, but the method can be useful for a variety of tasks.

I came up with my method in my senior year of undergrad, when I needed to evaluate the historiography on Japanese-American concentration camps for my final project in a course on race in the US and was surrounded by a stack of books on the topic. I needed to figure out which books to concentrate on for my project, I wasn't sure where to start, and I wanted to figure out which books I should invest time in reading closely and which ones would not make the cut.

Before You Begin

To do the Fifteen-Minute Filter, you'll need a stack of possible candidates, preferably more of them than you actually need for your project. You can identify possibilities in a few different ways. Your course materials or your syllabus might have some suggestions in footnotes or suggested reading lists. You can use your university library catalog to search related topics; you'll likely find a few possibilities. Once you've identified a number of options, go into the stacks and find them. Wait! Don't leave just yet. Look around on the shelf near the books you've already chosen. Anything look interesting or relevant? Grab it. 

So now you're sitting on your couch with a bunch of books, probably all bound in that uninformative library binding. See how many books you have? Multiply that number by fifteen. That's how many minutes this will take you. You don't have to do all of them at once, but I find it easier to figure out how they might relate to each other if I do, so block out some time if you have it.

 

 Fifteen-Minute Filter

1.  Grab book number one. Set a timer for fifteen minutes. 
2. Quickly skim the intro-- I'm talking five seconds per page. Once you've seen them all, go back and look at the pages that seemed like they told you what the overall argument of the book is. Ignore the detailed arguments about each chapter for now.
3. When you feel time is getting short, make sure to glance at the table of contents, which will tell you a bit more about how the argument will unfold. Any chapters that look especially fruitful? Go back to that intro and see if there's a description of that chapter, probably toward the end of the intro.
4. Put the book in a pile. You have three piles: Yes, Maybe, No Way. Don't think too hard about this. Timer rang before you feel like you have a handle on it? No worries, just go with your gut.
5. Grab the next book and repeat.
6. If you feel confident that a book is not useful to you before the timer has sounded, feel free to plop it into the No Way pile. More time for you! 

 

Optional Variations

• Make your timer alarm a song you can dance to for a minute at the end of each book to keep your energy up.
• Fast reader, or too little time? Try ten minutes per book.
• Skim for ten minutes per book, and spend the last five writing down the most pertinent information gathered. This can help remind you of what you read later if you don't have a chance to come back to the project for a while and/or are forgetful, as I am. 
• For instructors: Try the ten minute skimming/five minute writing variation in class with some short articles or introductions on a topic.

 

Next Steps 

This process can help you narrow down your options and get a quick idea of what your paper might look like. It's easy to see in fifteen minutes if a book is a political screed or a hagiography rather than a critical analysis, or if it is actually less applicable to your topic than the title would suggest. More than likely you'll come out with a couple hard nos, a few yeses, and a big stack of "eh, maybe." Following the Fifteen-Minute Filter, you can take a closer look at the yeses and the maybes with benefit of the larger context you've already gathered.

Still don't have enough books?

• Look at books being cited in the texts you have found. Do any of those seem relevant? 
• Don't be afraid to use interlibrary loan, even if just to see if a book is useful. Start early though! It can take some time.
• You can also get some good leads with a journal search. Every school is different, but on the UIUC library website, click on the "Journals" tab and then do a search for your topic or a book you want to know more about. It could lead you to useful articles or reviews of books that should be on your radar.

Do you have any techniques for approaching a huge stack of secondary literature?

 

Related Links:

Related to this method: strategies for getting the gist of a single book quickly. I love this post from Northwest History on "How to Read a Book in One Hour."

Current Project: Syllabizing Salem

I'll be teaching a course next fall under the shell "Fiction and Historical Imagination," which I am using to explore American historical mythologies from Puritan witch trials to the passing of the 19th Amendment. Since I've last written about this project, the title has evolved to "Fictionalizing US History, 1630-1920" and I've begun to try and tackle turning my Course Rationale into a functional syllabus. Today, I want to talk about my process of figuring out where to start and what to start with.

Hopefully this will provide a few items of interest-- to students who might be thinking about taking the course and would like a sneak peek; to anyone looking for readings to assign for courses on Salem or just for their own reading pleasure; or to any instructors wondering, "How do other people find things to assign?" These are not the definitive selections-- I may in the end need to add or subtract based on time, availability, or content-- but this is where I am for now.

Beginnings: A Reaction to Reacting

To set the stage: When I first conceptualized teaching my Reacting to the Past course, Conflict and Unity in American History, the early American setting of the first game we were to play was daunting. I had not previously had much interest in

• Colonial America
• The history of religion
• New England in general
• Anything involving reading documents with "f"s instead of "s"s*

So, Trial of Anne Hutchinson was an odd match. But I wanted to assign Greenwich Village, 1913, which I had played as part of my Reacting to the Past training, and I wanted to emphasize an aspect of the game that I thought could be easily overlooked in a course that attempted to focus on a narrow time period: the struggle for group definition that occasioned the conflict of the game. The players in Greenwich Village are ultimately struggling not only to decide whether they will support suffragists or labor activists with their time and art; they are also trying to determine what they as a community value. Trial of Anne Hutchinson, set in a vastly different time (the 1620s) and with far different consequences for winners and losers (various implied possibilities including: banishment, divine punishment, social censure), represents at its heart a similar attempt to figure out what parameters defined their group.

To truly appreciate this element of the trial, it was necessary for both the players and I to understand what, precisely, the debate was all about (who is really "saved" by God, and how do we know?), and what motivated the drive to ensure the Massachusetts Bay Colony was spiritually unified. The game materials were handy for providing context about religious debates that preceded the trial, the insecurities about the colony's survival, and the Calvinist convictions which made the unity of the colony a critical matter. In the end, these served their purpose well, and I left both semesters confident that students had, in addition to improving their argumentation skills, gained a greater understanding of some very unfamiliar points of view.

However, Anne Hutchinson and Puritan New England has stuck in my head, partially because I noticed an interesting trend when I discussed the course with people. Whether students on the first day of class or other graduate students, most only dimly recalled Hutchinson (I was unfamiliar with her when I first heard of the game) and thought that perhaps she had been tried for witchcraft. I was intrigued by how the complexity of Puritan religious thought, well expressed by my students in their roles as Governors, Pastors, and Teachers in the colony, has been widely translated to "those witch-burners."

Starting from Fiction 

 

The family from The Witch (2015), kneeling.

When I began conceptualizing this course, I knew I wanted to build upon the complications we had explored in Trial of Anne Hutchinson. I also knew that I wanted to assign The Witch (2015) as one of our fictional treatments of history. I had wanted to screen clips of the film as part of my Reacting course the previous year, but couldn't quite justify its incorporation. Yet I found the film very reflective of the spritual anxieties articulated by the major players in the Massachusetts Bay Colony: not just a censure of powerful womanhood (although, sure, that) but also a genuine belief that one's community must reflect compliance with divine will and a certainty that the devil did, in fact, exist. I now needed two things:

•  A secondary source which could provide the context to appreciate this aspect of the film
• A reading which could provide a more traditional view of the witchcraft myth

I cast about for options, using the UIUC library catalog to seek out titles related to the history of witches, witch trials, and colonial America. I found Elizabeth Reis's book Damned Women, contemplated assigning it, and realized that her collection Spellbound: Women and Witchcraft in America not only contained an abbreviated chapter of her book but also additional readings that might come in handy.

My second task was more obvious: I quickly opted for the quintessential treatment of the witchcraft myth, Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953). Not only is it frequently cited in any discussion of real or figurative "witchhunts," it also represented a different form of fiction, and I wanted to be able to potentially incorporate a discussion of form and performance into the course. I decided to start the course, after introductory materials on source analysis, by delving into this text together.

From here, I wanted to provide some complicating counterpoints to the Salem presented by Miller. First, I knew that I wanted to include discussion of Tituba and the role of race in the Salem mythology.  I plan to assign selections of Tituba, Reluctant Witch Of Salem, which attempts to use the sparse historical record to trace Tituba's life story and argue for rethinking both her racial identity and her role in the story of Salem.

Upon doing a little digging, it becomes fairly obvious that Salem's witchcraft trials were far afield of what most witchcraft trials looked like. Paradoxically, because the Salem incident was so unusual, they have been remembered; yet in being the only ones remembered, they have passed as the only available example and thus defined popular understanding of American witch trials. I chose Richard Godbeer's Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 to call attention to this discrepancy. Godbeer focuses on a Connecticut incident which occurred in the same yea, but which unfolded very dissimilarly: if Salem was a "panic," officials' treatment of witch claims in Stamford could best be described as "cautious" (7).

Conclusions

So, below is the current list in order-- next step, assigning each reading to a date!

•  The Crucible (1953)
• Tituba, Reluctant Witch Of Salem (selections)
  
• Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 
• The Witch (2015) 
• Spellbound: Women and Witchcraft in America (selections)

As you can see, the final order is very different than the order in which I conceived of the sources to use. Obviously, there are tons of other things that one could assign to talk about the American mythology of Salem-- these are just a few of my frontrunners, and not the final word (and I suspect I may need to cut this down a bit!). Likewise, there are other great approaches to figuring out what to assign-- I'd love to hear about yours.


* Yes, I know it's not really an f. No, I won't stop pronouncing it "Congrefs."


Related Links:
An interesting guide to the proper use of the long and short s. 
Quite an extensive online archive of Salem sources exists at the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project. 
A Smithsonian Magazine article on Tituba. 
I'm also considering using Veta Smith Tucker's article Purloined Identity: The Racial Metamorphosis of Tituba of Salem Village, from the Journal of Black Studies.