Writing Exercises - Humpty Dumpty
Taking Your Article Apart and Putting it Back Together
This exercise was developed by Howard Aldrich, which I am reproducing with his permission. He describes it in detail in this blog post, but I provide the exercise’s basic here. This is ideally a team exercise where you do it with another person, but you can also do it yourself, and see if you can put your paper back together on your own. In this exercise you will be physically taking your paper apart and seeing if someone else (or you) can put it back together again. Hopefully it won’t take all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.
Print out a copy of your paper (yes, we’re using actual paper copies for this one) and then cut it into paragraphs, keeping the headings and subheadings together with the paragraphs that immediately follow the headings. Place the dissected papers into envelopes or folders.
Take the scrambled pile of paragraphs and sort them into the order in which they should be placed, following the logic you discern from reading the bits and pieces. When you are confident of the proper order, use some transparent tape to the paper back together. Doing this requires a sizable amount of workspace on a desk or table.
Work with your colleague to explain why they had trouble figuring out how to order the paragraphs. What did they try to use as cues to determine the order? What signposts were missing? What could you have done to signal what was coming next and how it related to what it come before it? Are there any aspects of the new order that seem better than the old (see Theory and Hypotheses Tetris)?
The main takeaways of this exercise are:
Many of the problems arise because writers work from an incomplete outline (if you used one) or set of ideas when drafting the papers. Your outoine or rough draft should externalize the logic of the paper’s organization, whereas many simply use bullet points or list ideas they wanted to cover, without writing out a summary of the argument itself.
The paper’s structure should give readers guideposts to the major arguments so that readers can anticipate, early on, where the paper is going. You may be surprised at your peer’s confusion, and hearing them explain the source of that confusion can open your eyes to why the left out or incomplete material undermines your paper’ s coherence.
© 2022 Timothy G. Pollock
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