People, people! My completed book draft is now exactly TWO WORDS under the word limit. Eureka! And I’ve written my abstracts for each chapter. I still have a couple of things I want to check, and some other admin-type stuff – and we can’t go out to celebrate today. Anyway, that’s more appropriate when the manuscript gets sent off.
Nonetheless, we’ll celebrate modestly, with a McDonald’s Happy Meal …
Allow me to introduce an expressionless bear! Generally, I consider his expression to be concerned and reassuring, but today he seems to display no expression whatsoever. Which is appropriate for a blog post about unneccessary expressions.
I would like to have begun with an earnest introduction, explaining that this is part of a series of blog posts intended to help newcomers to scholarly writing. Indeed, I do wish to help you, and I’d love to write that series, but at the moment, my focus is on my book deadline in six days’ time. So, this posting is just a collection of thoughts arising from my second edit of the book draft! It might still be helpful – I do hope so.
In the second week of my intensive book revision fortnight, I’m on the warpath for unneccessary expressions. I still needed to lose a few words in order to meet the deadline of 75,000 words, so I’ve been compiling a glossary of terms best either avoided or used sparingly!
I had a feeling that I shouldn’t really be writing that something was ‘in your face’; nor that we ‘should call out’ something that is now politically incorrect or considered offensive. So, I’m afraid I asked Chat GPT what it thought!
I consider myself enlightened now. ‘In your face’ is apparently unacceptably informal in scholarly writing, so I won’t use it.
However, I can call out whatever I like, with impunity. There you go, then!
I’ve done the first edit of the book. Cutting roughly 11% off each chapter was a good start, but each chapter gets a bibliography, and I couldn’t know how many words that would add. I do now!
Each chapter has to lose 2.5% more words. Say, between 8-10 words a page. It doesn’t sound so bad that way, and it does make me a bit more ruthless about anything extra that doesn’t carry the thread forward.
I still want to get this done by the end of the month if humanly possible. And I do have a short list of little points I need to check, so I need to find time to sort those out too.
But whilst I count down to completion at the end of July, I’m also counting down to the beginning of next July when I stop being a librarian and can hopefully just concentrate on research. (49 weeks to go. No time to stitch an imaginative weekly square this week, just a plain one.)
But I have the Ketelbey Fellowship in St Andrew’s to look forward to this autumn first!
And I do have another (smaller) book idea …
There’s an introduction, eight chapters and a conclusion. (Chapter 7 is more of an interlude than a proper chapter, so maybe I could call it seven and a half chapters …. ) Anyway, I’ve taken two weeks’ annual leave to revise and prune this book draft, and after four days and evenings hard at it, I can now say I’ve only got three (two and a half) chapters and the conclusion left to deal with.
It seems punishing, but the idea is that I’ll spot inconsistencies if I’ve dealt with it all in a condensed space of time, so that earlier sections are still fresh in my mind as I come to the later chapters. This has proven to be the case, so far. Did they move to London in the late 1920s or the late 1930s? Ah, yes, THERE they are! Sorted.
All the while, snip, snipping and re-wording to get the word-count down by 11% across the board.
I had a tiny panic when I couldn’t actually find Chapter 5 this morning. For ten seconds I thought, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be there’, followed by fifteen seconds of, ‘Oh dear, it’s not in either folder where it ought to be’. Five seconds of ,’OH, SH**!!’, and then there it was. I’d renamed it at some point, but not in the Book Schedule document that’s meant to keep me on track. Phew!
I finally ground to a halt at 9.30 this evening. Chapter 5 is neatly tied up, and filed in two places on the cloud. I’m just feeling a bit frayed around the edges …
But just think how great tomorrow’s going to be! I wrote Chapters 6, 8 and the Conclusion so recently that they should be reasonably fresh in my mind. I just might get Chapter 6 and tiny Chapter 7 revised tomorrow – wouldn’t that be good?
Have you ever stopped to analyse which words you’re guilty of using too often?
Chapter 3 was long, making Tuesday a very long day. I had that chapter almost down to size, then Zotero formatted the chapter bibliography and added a few hundred words back. Arghh!
But that wasn’t the worst of it. I was unimpressed by the finished chapter. So on Wednesday morning, when I had planned to start Chapter 4, I spent it going back over Chapter 3 again. The good news is, I am getting it trimmed down some more, and on re-reading it, there are plenty of bits that I do like – even bits where I can say, ‘that’s GOOD’. So, things aren’t so bad, despite having a headache and being slightly behind schedule!
But having spent Wednesday afternoon on Chapter 4, I didn’t seem to have cut out much at all – it was all pretty ‘lean’! Maybe another 3 hours would see some more progress …
And I decided I’d better check if I was overusing any common words. How does your writing compare? Do you find this an issue? Some of mine:-
I finished the Conclusion of my second monograph today! I really should have celebrated this, but – well, it was lunchtime and I checked my emails, and … shall we say that I forgot about celebrating by the time I’d finished answering the email?
Never mind. I’ll celebrate tomorrow instead. Before I start the revision process. This evening, I read through all my publisher’s guidelines. I read about endnotes (bye-bye, beloved footnotes. You’re no longer the flavour of the month). I read about chapter abstracts, and formatting, and a whole lot of other stuff. Saved it all in a folder, and reached for my MHRA Guidelines. This is where I remembered that it could take quite a while!
The good thing, I suppose, is that my cataloguing background makes me quite attuned to the fine detail required in formatting references and so on, and pretty well prepared for the routine-ness of it all. I’m more concerned about ensuring everything’s consistent between chapters, and – the worst bit – tightening up the prose. I need to jettison quite a few words, to get within the word-limit.
What a blessing that I’ve got two weeks’ holiday coming up. No proper vacation for me, this time. But I do look forward to getting the manuscript submitted later this year!
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 