The exploratory experience of writing about data

After telling my students that writing the data chapter or section should be the easiest part because they have all the material that they need – the data that they’ve collected and already analysed, I think again.

I find myself sitting in the library staring at the screen at the first extract wondering what on earth to write about it. I’ve taken the advice I give and started with the section heading which is the first of the themes that have emerged from analysis. I’ve described what the theme is about and how this first extract is a good example of it – thus getting straight into the data without procrastinating by citing more literature.

But then what? I can’t just say that the extract is an example of the theme. That would be so superficial and not enough to make the whole thing valid research. If there isn’t more I should just give up.

I’m already listening to music on by AirPods. But then I start one of the two playlists that always work – Vaughan Williams and Richard Fay. It’s taken years to find these. And they do always work, for the moment.

There’s something in the extract that I now notice that reminds me of something that I’ve read that reminds me of another part of the data that I hadn’t connected before. I do a search of what I’ve already written to see how this might fit in the overall storyline. I tweak some things, delete something and add something else in an earlier section. This is all enabling – setting up this new idea and how I can write about it. The deixis has to be there. I then work out exactly or perhaps how the new idea relates to a particular phrase in the extract. ‘Exactly’ or ‘perhaps’ will make a difference to everything else. And then how I introduce the extract itself. Very delicate. I have to show the data speaking. I mustn’t be just using the data for my own devices. This then determines how I refer to it – the deixis to this and what I’ve tweaked earlier.

Deixis – micro-referencing back and forth that ties everything together and shows the threads of my thinking. ‘The’, ‘this’, ‘that’, the placing of key terms, just enough here and then there. I now see why I needed to say just a bit more about who the participants are in the very first section – to set up the significance of what I’m now writing. Getting the thread all the way through – again – without making it look as though it’s only a confirmation of what I thought from the beginning.

Then I begin to write the new thought and all its connections, making sure again also to link it back. Then the new extract it made me think of, then another new thought, then moving earlier another extract I already had and finding a new connection between it and the earlier ones. A web of new thinking beginning to emerge. 

The reference to what I remembered I read just be just enough – not turning this into a literature review. There isn’t room to go into all of that here; and it would overwhelm the data.

The whole thing will need a lot of editing later when I know what’s going to be in the next section and the next and then the finale. But I can leave that for now because I have enough to proceed to the next part, which may also change everything.

And I’m sitting in just the right place in the library, with the people I can see walking about and getting on with their affairs somehow informing what I’m writing – imagining who they are and what they’re thinking, which is after all about people everywhere.

And within two hours I’m near the end of the section with ideas for the next. And I’m already developing further my whole theory of the intercultural – with ideas about what to research next.

Writing this then brings new ideas about what to write about the data.

More of my blogs about academic writing on the go can be found here.