The "Mise en Place" of Writing: Tools and Ingredients
Guest post by Julien Cayla and Tanvi Mehta
When you enter a well-run restaurant, an army of chefs and sous-chefs, grillardins and sauciers have been preparing the ingredients for your delicious meal, many hours before you bite into that delicious appetizer.
A key difference between academics and chefs, though, is that while all chefs undergo rigorous training for their craft, most academics are never trained to write. While chefs practice mise en place—the key culinary technique we covered in our previous post—most PhD students are expected to learn how and what to write on their own! This lack of training is a paradox, especially considering the importance of writing skills to academic success.
The mise en place can be a useful guiding metaphor for academics, especially as they prepare for the final stages of their thesis or article writing. Below are some practical tips and tools that can help you with your mise en place.
ASSEMBLE YOUR BASE
Any piece of scholarship involves building upon and extending an existing theoretical conversation. Think of it like joining a new high school. To contribute to the ongoing conversation between the other kids, you first need to understand what the different groups of kids are talking about.
The convo
Figure out the key academic conversations before you write your lit rev
Similarly, writing for a journal without understanding what the important conversations and conventions of that journal are is academic suicide. And pretending to extend a theoretical conversation without reading enough also means you risk never going past the dreaded first round.
There are some great tools on the internet to help you figure out the kinds of conversations people are having. Connected Papers, for instance, is a fantastic visual tool to help you find academic papers relevant to your field of work. In just a few clicks you can start mapping the existing conversations other academics are having.
Literature Review Matrix
One challenge for academics, though, is the amount of reading and the variety of sources they have to deal with. If you read about 10 articles a week over a standard 30-year academic career, you will have easily gone through a thousand articles and books.
So you need a system to log what you read. And while there is merit in creating a master matrix where you log every piece you read (see this literature review matrix video), it is worth designing a matrix that you can use for a specific project.
What we advise PhD students and junior scholars to do is to start with the main concepts or questions they need to deal within their literature review. A good literature review is designed to answer what we know about the specific research question we are interested in, among other things. So you may want to create a master Google Sheet with different tabs, corresponding to these different concepts. And for each concept, you can record or log how other researchers have examined or approached it.
A good exercise is to summarize the key argument or thesis you have just read. It may also be worth logging some specific quotes from the article or book that you are reviewing, since key quotes may help you remember more quickly what struck you as interesting or important in that particular piece. We have created a template here.
CREATE YOUR MAGIC SAUCE BY COMPARING AND CONTRASTING
Once you have assembled your base, i.e., your key ingredients or concepts, you will want to go further and create the magic sauce of analysis that comes from comparing, contrasting and generally working with your ingredients.
One way to create a “think piece” is by creating a project journal, where you log your notes, reflections, and your emotions related to the project. You can also use your project journal to include the kind of freewriting we evoked earlier as “typing”. Freewriting involves writing freely for ten minutes without stopping, without worrying about syntax or spelling.
Your project journal, if digital, should take advantage of the many digital tools that now exist. GoodNotes is a great app that allows you to import articles, make notes, and create visuals to help you make sense of what you are reading. We advise you to create a “project journal” for each writing project where you take notes about what you are reading.
One way to augment your project journal is through visuals. You could create a visual to represent how different authors approach a specific concept. One way to think about this is to imagine that you may one day have to teach this particular concept to an audience of undergraduates. How would you compare and contrast the different approaches to your topic in a way they would understand ?
CREATE YOUR RECIPE: THE OUTLINE
By this stage, you are probably ready to create your outline. The outline is a key tool for developing a clear and structured argument, the cornerstone of academic writing.
As you prepare for focused writing, create a 3-4 page outline before you start. Pay close attention to the transitions between sections. If your outline is like the skeleton of your story, the transitions are the joints that help you move the story. Authors often neglect transitions but they are critical in ensuring you will have a smooth writing session.
BE READY TO FOCUS
There are lots of academic productivity books out there. Joli Jansen’s book, Write No Matter What, for instance, is a good start. Another favorite of ours is Helen Sword’s book on the way successful academics write and her talk of artisanal habits.
In an intensive writing session like our boot camp, you already have a group of people writing at the same time as you are. When you are on your own, it may be worth using an app like Forest.
Slicing up your writing work into chunks of “forest time” and having a set number of minimum writing sessions you want to achieve every day makes you feel less anxious about writing. Once you think of your writing as a set of 4 or 5 sessions of 25 minutes you need to complete, writing does not seem as daunting. Research suggests that:
Most expert teachers and scientists set aside only a couple of hours a day, typically in the morning, for their most demanding mental activities, such as writing about new ideas.
Write in Chunks
Use the Forest App for greater concentration and to divide your writing into manageable bite-sized chunks of time
Taking long breaks from your writing makes it harder to get back to it. Persistence seems key to academic success, and one needs to learn various ways to become more persistent.
ENJOY THE PROCESS
The emotions you associate with writing are critical to your writing success. Mise en place can help you find calm and maybe even some joy in the process of writing. For the participants in our boot camp, we encourage them to set some writing goals, and also some rewards associated with reaching their writing goals.
It can also be especially useful to remind yourself of the project aspects that seem to you the most appealing and engaging, e.g., why you need to do this work, and the pleasures of doing this project. While the pleasures of writing are different from the sensual pleasures of cooking, there can be joy and calm and peace in academic writing.
COME PREPARED
Preparation breeds success
To return to the metaphor of the mise en place, before coming to our writing bootcamp, or to prepare for your writing sessions, you need to come prepared like a chef with:
Vision and goals: A mission statement to guide your motivation. What brought you to this project and why does this project matter to you. A set of writing goals and an idea of how you may reward yourself for reaching each goal.
Environment and tools: A clean workstation. A decluttered laptop where all your files are easy to access and your own writing playlist if you enjoy listening to music.
Ingredients: A literature review matrix organising your thoughts on the literature, and a project journal with your notes as well as freewriting on your research question
Structure: A 3-4 page detailed outline with transitions, which will help form your writing skeleton.
Timing: A schedule for the writing sessions, indicating which part of your project you will work on during the various sessions.
REFERENCES
Elbow, Peter. 1973. Writing Without Teachers. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Accessed July 12, 2021: http://peterelbow.com/writing_without_teachers.html.
Ericsson, K. Anders, Michael J. Prietula, and Edward T. Cokely. 2007. “The Making of an Expert.” Harvard Business Review, July-August. Accessed July 12, 2021: https://hbr.org/2007/07/the-making-of-an-expert.