In Favor of Heavy Breathing

Well, you have to appreciate a guy who can evoke Virginia Woolf, Coleridge, Linda Flower, Dickens, Wiley the Basenji, and Yoda all in one chapter. The well-chosen title of the ninth chapter of Advice for New Faculty instructs newbies to “Wait.” Boice’s writing style is easy, interesting, and his content is hard to argue with even if this chapter occasionally reads like a self-help love manual (wait for exhilaration, a playful sort of tentativeness, holding back, etc. Don’t look at me that way; you noticed it, too). It’s difficult to find fault with Boice’s advice. In fact, I doubt that any of us in this class has achieved this level of academic success without developing unique patterns of behavior that deliver us both quantity and quality of written texts.

I would not hesitate to generalize our collective writing patterns by saying that we gather our materials and mull over our projects as we patiently wait the time to actually write. I’m not so much a waiter, as I am a preparer. I gather far more sources than I can possibly use. I read far more than I need too. I set up my “typewriter” –as Boice calls it—in a place where the kids won’t drive me too crazy, gather around myself every possible item, journal article, book, essay, notepaper, pens I will need. I get a fine china teapot filled with tea made from high-quality, loose leaf tea, a valuable, fine china teacup and saucer (I prefer something from occupied Japan or nineteenth-century Great Britain), and maybe a cookie. Then, I just start writing without reading or editing or formatting a single word until the end of the second single-spaced page. After the bottom of that page, I go back and format my work. Viola! It’s actually four pages. I feel like a great success.

My point, if you missed it, is that while Boice is correct, it’s hard to imagine any of us who has not already developed a carefully detailed, distinctive ritual for the effective production of academic prose. And, I’d just like to add that some of the finest moments in life include “breath grabbing” and “breath stopping.” I’m just saying…