In the beginning of 2022, I told my advisor I really need practice writing and take it seriously. That was right after I submitted my CHI paper revision and usually that’s often the time when I had the strongest urge to improve my writing. Then I went to the Monday writing group to look for peer motivation, where we set up our writing goals in a shared doc and work together from 9am-12pm on Monday morning. In the first one or two months, I tried to focus on just writing during the session, but somehow it became a zoom group study for me now and I just work on things at hand. Aside from the task, the goal setting in the beginning of the session is quite interesting. We were asked to answer three questions: 1) Today at bare minimum, I’d like to…, 2) If or when I completed that, I will…, and 3) Though it would be a stretch, ideally I would also…In terms of step 1, starting with small and manageable things or making actionable plans is something I’ve known and been trying to achieve for a long time, but I guess it did take practice to do it well, i.e., getting things done without procrastination, maybe also along with motivation and determination.
My main writing practice in this semester mostly comes from my CommArts Research Methods course. So far we had three writing assignments and each is four-page long (double space and 12 pt). I quite like the spacious writing format in social science, which makes me feel like I’ve been making progress pretty fast. Each assignment took a lot longer than I expected though, about two full days for each. The timing is very accurate. I usually started the evening before the Friday deadline. Then I only got half a day to work on it on Friday after the morning class and afternoon meetings. Around 7 or 8pm on the day of the deadline, I would gave up submitting on time and plan to work on it the second day. And I would decide to work on it harder since I’m already taking late days and the only excuse is the quality of the work. The lucky thing is that my hard work paid off. I got an almost full score for my 2nd essay and a full score for my 3rd one, both are methodology reflections after reading a paper. I was really happy about the grades as the reflecting papers were totally outside of my field. Every time I couldn’t understand them in the first, second, or even third reading pass, I told myself this could possibly be the only time you read a political communication paper or a developmental psychology paper, so read it carefully and understand it as much as you can. So knowledge is transferrable, not just about the outcome, but also about ways of thinking. At least my CommArts experience proves it. It’s quite fun to go interdisciplinary. For example, one day I learnt about missing values and latent variables in my social science class, and the second day those concepts appeared in my natural language processing class with totally different interpretations and usages.
I have been writing here for 1 hour or so and it’s really a good use of time when waitng for my laundry. Okay laundry is ready and time is up.
