I haven’t done as much work on my dissertation over the summer up until this point as I had hoped that I would, and I’m glad. I needed some time to decompress and it has been hard to focus on work when so many more important social changes are coursing through the country. It is hard to focus on the importance of my small corner of academia when so many innocent (or at least not sufficiently guilty) people are being literally shot in the streets.
Even in the face of justice so poorly dispensed throughout the United States and media coverage of these tragedies which is nearly as poor, I know that I do have to refocus on advancing my own career as the new semester approaches.
Why am I adding a Friday Roundup?
I have been working on the dissertation for awhile. I have been following a pretty good piece of advice that I got fairly early in the process. “If you want to be an academic, you will have to first be a writer.” This has lead me to do a lot of reading about what kinds of tips I can find for how to be a better writer. I have read many, but the one which is relevant to this post is that the best way to become good at something is to do it a lot—if you are worried that you are not a very good writer, then the best thing you can do for your writing is to do a lot more of it.
In that vein, these posts are serving to help me keep track of what I am doing, where I have been focused over the last week, where I am currently planning on going over the next week, and so forth. I’m pretty enthusiastic about my chances of success, to be honest. I think they will help quite a bit. In order to keep them from taking my focus away from the projects that I am supposed to be focusing on, I am strictly limiting the time that I spend on them and, as a direct consequence, the amount of editing and proofreading that I do. In short, to whomever does read these roundup posts, please excuse the inevitable poor writing and grammatical/typing errors—these pieces are not intended to be polished final products, they are working documents.
Reading Focus this Week
This week I have been reading back over an article in Communication Theory (Babrow, 1992) on Problematic Integration. The piece discusses the importance of communication (by which he seems to mean interpersonal communication) in the experience of integration difficulties. I am curious how perspectives on communication by other types of actors fits into the theory. This is something that I plan to look into over the next week as I try to position my piece in the larger framework of research in the fields of Communication and Education.