Kieran Healy

Visions and Revisions (and a Hundred Indecisions)

When revising a paper, you sometimes start down a line of argument in a paragraph or two that suggests the need to completely redo the whole article. This is a nasty moment. If you’re lucky, the new bit safely detaches itself and is either never heard from again or becomes the seed for a different paper. If you’re unlucky, the new bit threatens to eat your paper alive. This is demoralising. You thought the stupid thing was nearly finished! You were only supposed to be polishing it up a bit before sending it off to a journal, not figuring out ways to dismantle its framework!

Guess which point I’m at now?

Hmmm.. that’s unfortunate. I take it you’re not at the stage where you just realized that your paper would win the next Nobel Prize in Sociology if there was one. Bummer.

However, there is also that moment when you are about to send off your paper to a journal and suddenly get so critical of it that you dismantle it completely.

So which point are you at exactly?