On revisions

Somehow I managed to coerce myself to work on my linguistics to-do list every day this week. I'm not exactly sure how it happened, as I mostly remember wanting to eat ice cream, doing plyometric exercises so that if I ate ice cream I wouldn't regret it, watching my my ceiling fan, playing card games on the computer and staring off into space.Yesterday I never got around to working on research, but I did work on a syllabus for the upcoming courses I will teach this fall. Despite my extended periods of procrastination, I think I finished revising a paper and will be able to send it to my editors next week.

When I first received the editors' comments, I was surprised that they were helpful, encouraging and supportive of my research. Somehow I expected editors' comments to be very demanding and mean. After reading through the comments and noting the deadline for revisions, I ignored them for two months and concentrated on Geraldine (or more specifically, figuring out what was happening with my defense, graduation, funding and life in general). As I reread the editors' comments on Monday, I felt reassured in my belief in myself to address them, but as the week passed, I had a few moments of despair (pregnancy has suddenly made me understand why all of my pregnant teachers growing up were moody... these hormones shouldn't be underestimated). I sucked it up and made myself keep working anyway and am pleased to write that I have a stronger paper and I like it much more than the draft I originally submitted.

One difficulty of revising my work has been that this paper is not related to Geraldine. Geraldine focuses on historical changes words for body parts. The current paper focuses on sounds in a central Asian language. I haven't done anything with sounds for 2 years. Switching from semantics back to phonology is the linguistics equivalent of Michael Jordan becoming a golf player. I'm rusty on a lot of the vocabulary as well as the language under investigation needed for this paper. In reading it, I wonder how I ever knew enough to write it in the first place. Maybe if I re-read a paper from my BA or MA course work, I'd stop wondering how I was ever that intelligent and wonder how I was ever that clueless. :) Despite thinking that I forgot everything from my 5 phonology seminars, it seems that it is easily retrievable and I could teach phonology at some distant point in my academic future.

In addition to wrapping my head around completely different theoretical work, it has been interesting to note how my writing has changed since starting Geraldine. After reading hundreds of articles, I am no longer a patient reader. I want to know the claims of the study immediately and then I want to be convinced that the claim is the best choice for the rest of the time reading the article. The paper I'm currently revising is left over from my last semester of course work (pre-Geraldine) and didn't get to the point in the way that it should. At first, a few of the comments I received were hard to address because it seemed like I would have to rewrite sections (thus the trigger of my despair and whining), but once I turned off the comments and read the paper, it was really easy to see the flaws, rewrite sections, and delete other information that wasn't immediately related to my claim. Sometimes deleting sections is hard, but I'm finding that if I don't read something for a while, it's a lot easier to get rid of it. I hope it will be this easy when I force myself to re-read Geraldine next week. Convincing myself to re-read 15 pages of text was enough of a challenge, I'm not sure how much ice cream it will take to force myself into reading the 150+ pages of Geraldine....