How to use the secondary literature in your book

How to use the secondary literature in your book

What does the way you think about your writing have to do with the way you leverage the secondary literature in your work? A lot! In today’s episode, I’m going to tell you what I see as the three most common approaches to citing the secondary literature, and the thought you have about your writing that is most likely motivating that approach. Then, I’ll describe what your approach looks like on the page. By the end of this episode, you’ll be able to identify your approach and if necessary, correct it so you can engage the secondary literature in a more sophisticated way. 

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Episode Transcript Available

Writing an academic book is challenging, but it doesn’t have to feel like torture. Join me, Jane Joanne Jones, writing coach and developmental editor to Women and non-binary scholars in academia. As I teach you how to write your academic book with ease, clarity, and purpose, let’s bend the rules, expose the hidden curriculum and write your book the right way, your way. Hey friends. Welcome to today’s episode. In my time as a coach and a developmental editor, I’ve been able to see the connection between what writers think about their work and how they write. So much of your writing is informed by the thoughts you have about your writing, and I don’t mean the way you think about analyzing your data or creating conceptual approaches. I mean your meta narrative. This is the little voice that’s whispering about the quality of your writing if you’re qualified to write what you’re writing and your worries about what readers will think about your writing among other concerns. 

So today we’re going to focus on one specific aspect of your writing, how you engage the secondary literature. This is one place where that little voice can get really loud. If you’re a book writer, the way you engage in secondary literature is going to be different than how you did it in your dissertation or even in peer reviewed academic articles. This can be a great opportunity to reject some of the rigidity of dissertations in journal articles, but with that freedom can come confusion. You might have some habits that are a product of the thoughts you have about your work and the way in which you’ve been trained. As a researcher, I’m going to tell you what I see as the three most common approaches to citing the secondary literature and the thoughts you have about your writing that are most likely motivating that approach. Then I’ll describe your approach. 

It looks like on the page by the end of this episode, you’ll be able to identify your approach and if necessary correct it so you can engage secondary literature in a more sophisticated way. Let’s get into it. Here’s the first approach, using your citations as a prop. This is when you use your citations to prop up your argument because you don’t think it could stand on its own. It’s common for early career researchers to take this approach. It’s typical in grad school. You haven’t yet formed your own unique arguments and are therefore focused on learning and analyzing the existing literature. The thought you have when you use this approach is that this argument isn’t good enough. So I have to add a lot of caveats or contrast it to other literature rather than explain its unique value, and this thought might create a feeling of insecurity about your writing and what this looks like on the page. 

You’re over, I call this the grad workshop mode, at least the grad workshops I attended where people were very critical of the secondary literature. There was a lot of critique of other author’s approaches with less focus on what was valuable about your approach. So you were in this offensive mode where you were constantly criticizing others instead of explaining what you had to add to the conversation. And again, this is pretty common when you feel like your argument is not yet developed. This might show up a lot in early stages of writing or in early stages of your career where you haven’t fully articulated what is important and valuable about what you’re doing. So that’s approach one, using the citations as a prop approach. Number two is using citations. As a fortress, you use citations to protect yourself from criticism. You want to prove that you’ve done the reading and fend off detractors. 

The thought motivating this approach is that people are going to criticize me, so I’m going to use these citations to protect myself, and there’s a feeling of defensiveness that drives this approach to citation. I’m not going to spend too much time on this episode discussing whether that feeling of defensiveness is warranted. That is a very worthwhile discussion, but it is not the topic of this episode that is going to be its own episode in the future. But what I will say, regardless of whether the defensiveness is justified, it shows up on the page in the same way. So what you end up doing is leading with citations. So if you’re starting most of your paragraphs with Author X has argued rather than something like there are two prevailing perspectives on this topic. The first perspective represented most incisively by author X state. You’ll notice in the latter formulation I gave you that, were incorporating your analysis. 

You are showing that you understand there are two prevailing perspectives and you have an opinion on which one is most incisive. Instead of the former approach, author X has argued, which is when you are really just volleying the ball over to author X and leading with what they think rather than what you think. In your book, you’ll also engage in a lot of summary rather than analysis of existing work, similar to what I just described. Sometimes this work can read as a bit encyclopedic, and I want to give a qualifier to this approach. You might be thinking, Jane, whenever I submit my work for publication, a reviewer tells me I overlooked an important citation. I will say that in my 10 years of working as an editor and coach, I don’t think I have ever seen a review that didn’t include a recommendation to read something else. 

It seems to be just the way reviews work, and it doesn’t mean you’re a bad researcher if this happens to you. It just means you have to go and cite what they suggested. So don’t let that make you feel like you have to lead with a lot of summary because someone’s telling you to go read something else. Okay. All right, so approach number three, using your citations as a garden, and this is where you use citations to cultivate discussion and nourish your own argument. Citations serve as seed, fertilizer, and complimentary plants. So the thought you’re having here is, I deserve to be in conversation with these intellectual peers and I’m ready to contribute to this intellectual exchange, and you might have a feeling of enthusiasm or excitement about being able to participate in this Very fascinating, very important conversation about your topic and what you do on the page here is lead with your interpretation. 

You don’t necessarily cite less, but you may have a few direct quotes and extended summaries of the secondary literature. When you do include direct quotes and extended summaries, you make clear to the reader why these passages are included. So let’s review the three approaches. The first, using your citations as a prop where you use the secondary literature to prop up your argument using citations as a fortress, where you aim to prove you’ve done the reading, to deter criticism, and finally, using your citations like a garden to cultivate discussion and nourish your own argument. I hope you notice something during my description of these three approaches. I never mentioned a prescriptive number of citations, nor did I discuss citing too much or too little. None of these approaches can be quantified. I’m not going to say, oh, this chapter has 40 citations. Therefore, you’re using your citations like a prop. 

No, that’s not what I mean here. Like many black feminists, I believe that properly citing can be a sort of restorative work for black women who have not been recognized for their contributions, as well as for other underrepresented groups who haven’t been recognized for their contributions. I’m sure you also want to be ethical and make sure that everyone gets their fair credit. My emphasis here is on how you use those citations, not how many you have. Here’s a reminder I give to folks all the time. Unless you’re writing a biography, nobody reads your book to learn what other scholars think about a topic. They might just go read the books written by those other scholars. Now, for any of the approaches I described, it would be great if a developmental editor could go in, identify the issue, and offer suggestions for revision if necessary. For instance, I might say something like, you have too many block quotes from the secondary literature. 

Let’s break them up, or let’s get rid of them altogether. That, however, is a temporary fix. If you don’t address the thought and feeling that’s driving the approach, you’ll just keep doing the same thing with your citations over and over and over. So you have a bit of homework for this episode. I want you to pull up a few pages. They can be any pages of your book and take notice of how you’re using the secondary literature because once you notice it, you’ll notice it all the time. You won’t be able to ignore it anymore, and then you’ll be able to address why you’re using the secondary literature in the way you are and get to work to fix it. Alright? I hope that with this episode you can approach your citations and use of the secondary literature in a way that really showcases the intellectual contribution that you are making and how that intellectual contribution fits into the broader intellectual community that you’re part of because that’s our goal. 

It’s not just to write in isolation and ignore the secondary literature, but it’s instead to show how we complement our work. Your work compliments the work that already exists and continues these important scholarly conversations. I will see you in the next episode, and you take care. Bye. Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode. If you like what you heard, please share the podcast with a friend, or if you’re an Apple listener, leave a review. It helps other folks find the podcast so we can continue the conversation and make sure that when it’s time to write your book, you could do it on your terms your way.

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