David Benioff, Troy

Then I became a grad student and had to wade through dozens of papers a day, try to see if any of them were pertinent to my very specific research question. I would decide whether or not to request the full text by reading the abstract and first paragraph. Then once I got the full text, I would go to its Conclusion section to see if it was about what I thought it was about. Only then did I read it in full. I didn’t have time to read things that weren’t relevant.

Jesus fucking christ, you are not SO BRILLIANT that every single word of yours is worth my time to read if it’s not relevant to what I’m doing. Or to re-read when I’m trying to find that one paper that said the thing I want to cite.

There’s a kind of ~*romantic idea*~ that you read every word of a deserving piece of writing and ~*digest it deeply*~, distilling wisdom therefrom. This is one often particularly held by undergrad student level learners or autodidacts learning for their own pleasure, especially when in a phase where you’re reading a lot of books. Like, whole volumes in book structure and format.

And to be fair, there are certainly always cases where that might apply. If you’re actually sitting down to read The Body Keeps The Score or Memory To Written Record, books which bring together and synthesise huge amounts of material and years of knowledge and study by a master of the field, sure.

That’s not what academic papers in active academic discourse are or are for. That’s not the point.

The point of those are “hey, we did a research/experiment/analysis and learned a thing. This is the thing we learned. Here’s our backup/data/citations.”

Most people don’t care about your paper. Even in your field. It’s not relevant to exactly the work they’re doing. You are almost certainly NOT a storied master of the field synthesising years of study and knowledge into one place.

(If you were you’d probably be writing a book.)

You want to make the things you learned available to other scholars. So you WANT something they can scan and see oh! I see that Kawuli did a paper on a thing that is relevant to my thing!

And then you want a second chunk that tells them the basic outcome of the thing, bc maybe it’s not QUITE relevant, or maybe your conclusion seems like bs, or whatever, so they know whether they then want to spend twenty minutes double checking your full methodology or argument or process and come back and do the full thing.