The awesome stats: I've been poking at some data for a couple of months now, trying to make the dots cluster in the way they should. Finally, I had a brilliant inspiration yesterday about how I needed to transform the data, and VOILA! The dots, they cluster! They are beautiful! Lookie! (Also beautiful? Graphs made in R. Suck it, SPSS!)
The generative writing: basically, you are supposed to write on your topic rather spontaneously, no looking up notes or cutting and pasting from other files, no agonizing over the right way to say something. I didn't really think I'd be able to do that but I did just fine. Later, you are supposed to take your writing, look it over, and find patterns in it, which helps you to clean it up. Write first, outline later. I haven't gotten to the second step yet, obviously, but I'm interested in seeing how it works. It was kind of fun writing in this fashion - I alternated between 1) describing the results as I would describe them to someone in an email, 2) describing the methods nearly exactly as I would in a finished manuscript, and 3) notes to myself - how should I approach this aspect of the data, what does this difference mean? I did this for 15 minutes and produced a page and a half of single-spaced text. Not too shabby!!
7 comments:
Congrats on the progress - that's fantastic! I like to just write as thoughts come to me, and then go back and edit later...it's easier than trying to think of the exact right thing to say.
Love the graph - I use R too! I thought I was the only one! LOL
I'm finding your writing exercise interesting to watch. I myself have rarely outlined something prior to writing, but (over 40 years) have evolved a practice that summarizes as "write fat, and then prune and reorganize." Several decades ago when I was a candidate for director of academic computing at a liberal arts college, I gave a candidacy talk in which I likened writing to sculpting -- get a big block of marble and then chip away everything that isn't the piece you want. That seemed to resonate with the humanities folks on the hiring committee; the scientists (of which I'm one) weren't so keen on it. (I was offered the job, but in the end turned it down. deciding that I was better off as a prof than an administrator.)
yay for your progress! I like spontaneous writing, though I tend to get stuck with the methods as they should be clear and perfect, and this goal seems to block the flow of my words.
How much of the variability are explained by Axis 1 and Axis 2?
That's awesome. R rules!!!
Yeah, I've found by trial and error that write first then outline works best for me. I just don't have the sort of tidy and linear thought processes that work well along with planning and writing to the plan. Pretty scatter too!
Thomas Joseph - Axis 1, 53%, Axis 2, 26%.
Thanks for the comments, everyone!
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