If it wasn't broken...

...when did I get the idea it needed fixing?

For years and years - gosh, since I was in fifth grade, I think - I had a particular way of doing the background research for a paper. I'd get my sources (whether they were check-out-able books at the library, or books my family owned* or books that didn't check out and had to be read in the library), grab a big packet of lined 3 x 5 cards, a pen or pencil, and start reading.

(*Yes, I am in that group-of-privilege, from that crazy survey making the rounds, of people who grew up with more than 500 books in the house. Which I think in the wealthy circles of the town I grew up in made my family seem not so much privileged as it made them seem batsh*t crazy. I learned early on that "being rich" and "caring about learning" are not necessarily an overlapping set)

The first card I'd make for a source was my "bibliographic" card, where I copied down all the information about the author, title, year of publication...yadda yadda fishcakes. The stuff that I would need to make my Bibliography or Literature Cited at the end.

Then I'd start reading. Any time I encountered a fact that I thought might be needed for my paper, I'd write it on a separate 3 x 5 card, with the author's name and year of publication at the top. (YES, even when I was a kid. I think my dad taught me this. My dad did a lot of research and wrote lots of journal articles). And I took the stuff down "in my own words" so I could be protected against even unintentional plagiarism.

And I'd just keep working, happily away, until I had digested all my sources.

Then I made an outline.

Then I took all my cards and I wrote the outline codes (like I. A. 2. ii.) on the card corresponding to where it would fit in the outline.

Then I lined up all the cards in outline order, and started writing.

This is how I wrote all the papers from, as I said, about 5th grade on. (I remember getting really high marks and really nice comments from teachers in the sixth grade on a long paper I wrote on cougars, partly, I think, because I made a real effort to find good background - read a whole book, a long one, on them, in addition to consulting the Usual Sources like National Geographic World and Ranger Rick and the various encylopediae.)

It is how I wrote both my thesis and my dissertation.

But recently, for some reason, I stopped. Laziness, maybe - it's easier, if you have a printout of a .pdf file of an article, or a journal that belongs to you and you alone, to just underline or make a note in the margin.

Or maybe it was lack-of-time.

Or maybe it was the effort of deciding whether to move or chunk the boxes and boxes of labeled and filed cards I had made over the years. (Just the ones from grad school. I'm not QUITE obsessive enough to have saved the cards from my cougar paper. Or the one I wrote on Shakespeare's England in high school. Or the one on William Purcell, also from high school).

But at any rate. I was working today on a new paper and I got to thinking. The last paper I had easily accepted for publication was, in fact, the last one I used the card system on. Since then, I've kind of foundered - haven't written as well, have banged my head against a figurative brick wall while revising, just haven't been as happy with what I'm writing.

So I pulled out a packet of cards, and a couple journal articles on my most recent research topic, and started making cards.

And you know what? It felt like coming HOME. It felt right. It felt like all those years of good-paper-juju are coming back to me. And even if that's all 100% psychological placebo effect, it will still make me write better. (And I don't think it is; I think the cards force more reflection and more organization, both of which are better). So I have two other papers I want to overhaul; I'm seriously considering doing the card-thing for them.

I wish I had figured this out earlier.