Academic Writing Month?

I have been intermittently following Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega’s blog on academic practice. Recently he published an entry on #AcWriMo, a concept that I had not encountered elsewhere. Apparently November is the month in which academics are supposed to commit to their writing practice by writing every day and cranking out that journal article or chapter they have been delaying for months.

Calling myself an academic seems a little pretentious when I am a first year, part time student, but the basic premise of #AcWriMo applies. Procrastination is a significant impediment to my academic and professional achievement. Even more, I live in fear that what I say and write will have no value. I may be the only graduate student who worries about being the Dunning-Kruger poster child, but I doubt it. Eventually, there is no way to know for sure except to say and write things and suffer the consequences. If I am judged a fool, it will only be because I am one–better to know the truth.

So I will commit to plunging into the deep end for the next few weeks in an attempt to build writing into my daily life, just as I would exercise or sleep. I particularly enjoyed Van Jackson’s “Nuke Your Darlings” blog in War on the Rocks, in which he chronicled the experience of writing a book on North Korea’s history of nuclear development. So, along those lines I will chronicle my own academic life for the next few weeks as I try to survive the semester and produce something of value.

Today’s endeavor was entirely quantitative methods–fighting through a long Stata problem set on single and multiple regression, and then wrestling with the model for my final project. I also spent some time downloading and cleaning the data for the project, only to realize that I was wasting my time. With so many House races yet to be called, and so much work required to clean the data, I need to wait until the calls or made or else download a snapshot at the latest possible moment to get provisional data. It was helpful to identify a good source for the data–Dave Wasserman’s working spreadsheet for the Cook Political Report. As I’m comparing performance to Cook’s Partisan Voter Index, it is best to use their raw data as well. I’ll write a little more about the project tomorrow.