Structure, paths, readers

I’ve been doing a lot of writing! Or, to be accurate, repurposing of older work. Things written for one purpose / audience, things which were put aside but are now useful. But they need to be reworked for the new audience and purpose.

This has meant changing the tone some times. At others it’s the assumptions; things need a bit more spelling out for the book, but then again not too much. For example, there’s a very detailed history of English legal education. That needs to be covered, but there also needs to be some stuff on other jurisdictions. This means editing down the existing chapter and rejigging it to incorporate the new material.

And then there is the ongoing structure / flow issue. Moving from the general issues to the particular, keeping a consistent thread to help the reader along. That thread is examples+model, without getting too heavily into the model early on and not giving too much detail about the examples either, until the right time.

Topic sentences, discussions, topic recaps. Repeat, link. move on.

In other practical news, waiting for ethics clearance to do some interviews. These will give a bit of life to the discussion of examples, and a bit of richness to what would otherwise be a lit review plus what I reckon 😀

Making a start

The blank screen or sheet. How to fill it? I confess, I don’t find writing easy. To get past this I have at times used dictation, so I’m just speaking rather than writing, and speaking is something I’m not bad at.

But… you still need the ideas. And I have them of course. The book isn’t starting from nowhere after all. But how to organise those ideas? What is the narrative I want to present, what is the flow I want to establish?

A mixture of speaking and writing, just getting the ideas down at first- it worked in the thesis and so I’m going to keep using that approach. The ideas sometimes emerge as I write, or better ways of organising them become clear as I try to build the flow.

And so this afternoon I type and talked to make some sort of start, and I put together an outline of the chapters. I just wanted to get some ideas down and set out an idea of how the work will move from idea to idea. I’ve already got colleagues who’ve agreed to read such drafts. You can download the outline from here, in case any of you readers want to leave comments. Such comments, whoever from, will help me take that start and make it better!