last session’s raw text try to bear in mind the extent to which
you will normally be able to edit, revise, upgrade and remodel
your work. You can always make big changes by taking out
infelicities, adding in strengthening evidence, developing and
extending arguments, formalizing or systematizing frameworks
for analysis, uncovering new relationships in your data, boost-
ing scholarly referencing, and so on.
Work makes the companion.
Johanne Wolfgang von Goethe^23In order that people may be happy in their work,
these three things are needed:
they must be fit for it;
they must not do too much of it; and
they must have a sense of success in it- not a doubtful sense, such as needs some
testimony of others for its confirmation, but a sure
sense, or rather knowledge, that so much work has
been done well, and fruitfully done, whatever the
world may say or think about it.
W. H. Auden^24
As you are writing up new text you are likely to be strongly
influenced, consciously or subconsciously, by ideas about how
your readership or audience might respond to what you are
saying. Normally these are constructive influences, for instance,
if you think seriously about how to represent ideas to readers,
or use the ‘need to know’ criterion to set an appropriate level of
detail for your argument. Anticipating how professional readers
will interpret your text is also a vital element in composing raw
prose and then editing it into a more acceptable form. But it is
also possible for this thinking ahead to become overdone and
disabling, creating a ‘writer’s block’ syndrome where authors
are so constrained by their readership’s anticipated reactions
that they have difficulty getting any text up on screen at all, or
showing what text they have got to other people. The good
news is that this problem is strongly linked to previous success
or anxiety about your reputation. So perhaps it more com-
monly afflicts established authors in middle age trying to repeat
earlier successes than it does young people just starting out.
154 ◆AUTHORING A PHD