Thursday, July 28, 2011

Progress Report 5

There's lots of work to do. I've been spending most the morning brooding over how to proceed. Part of the strategy, going forward, is going to have to be to give myself a larger space in which to think about academic writing consultancy, and I have already made a decision to spend the next 16-week blogging regimen (starting mid-August) simply perusing the archives and reposting some "classics". The selections will then also be moved into the framework of a book. Working title (of course): Research as a Second Language.

What I need is a more fully developed theory of academic writing, as well as proper methodology. I have been learning largely by doing these past five years, albeit always with a tradition at the back of my mind. Epistemology, philosophy of science, phenomenology. In order to write about what I have been doing, I need to make a whole set of tacit competences explicit, and then set these against the available theories of scientific knowledge (and especially the recent theories of the production and distribution of knowledge). Otherwise, it become a mere memoir.

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