Posts & Reflections
Thoughts on philosophy and theology; helpful advice on teaching, learning, and coding.
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Research hacks #11: Let your arguments breathe
You’re writing a PhD, research article or undergraduate essay. You’re excited by your topic and you have lots to say. You want to say it all, and you want to impress your reader by your high-powered, complex, sophisticated argument. Good for you. These are all laudable intentions, but one mistake that many research students fall into
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Research Hacks #10: How to present a smart, well-crafted argument
You are writing an essay, journal article, book or thesis chapter and you want to present a smart, well-crafted argument that will both convince your reader of the point you are making and also strike them as authoritative and expertly constructed. How can you write such an argument? Here is a four-stage structure that can help you inform and
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Research Hacks #9: Building an argument with the “it’s not as simple as that” tool
In this post I want to share a great way of building an argument for an essay, article, or thesis chapter. I learned it when I was an undergraduate and I have used it to great profit in my own writing. It is also one of the first research hacks I share with new undergraduate
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Research hacks #8: How to know when “good enough” is good enough in academic writing
It is a given that in academia you don’t have enough time to make everything you do as good as it possibly could be. How should you deal with that? You should know when “good enough” is good enough, stop, and move on to the next thing. You should… know when you’ve read enough secondary material
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Research hacks #7: Read everything, but not in the same way
If one thing is non-negotiable about academic research in the arts and humanities, it is that there will be a lot of reading. In fact, there will almost certainly be too much reading, so you’d better have a strategy to cope with the bibliographical tsunami headed your way. You can’t read every word that has
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Research Hacks # 6: Capture every important thought you have, even on the go
I forget which episode it is, but in season 3 of The West Wing Toby Ziegler declares one morning that he has nothing more to do in the day. It is a situation no doubt rare for a White House Communications Director, but unheard of for a research academic. Here’s why: for a research academic work is
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Explaining Derrida with Diagrams 2: Messianicity without messianism
In a previous post I introduced the very idea of Diagramming Derrida before explaining his notion of différance diagrammatically. In this post I set out to tackle the idea of “messianicity without messianism” and, more generally, Derrida’s characteristic motif of “x without x”, for example “religion without religion” or “God without God”. Messianism as Derrida understands it
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Guest Post: Sylvia Plath, Paul Ricoeur and the language of madness
Sylvia Plath’s first and only novel The Bell Jar was published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in 1963 and released just weeks before she committed suicide in her London home.[1] The novel is a first-person account of Esther Greenwood, a nineteen-year-old aspiring writer who whilst on a writing internship in New York begins to feel
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Research Hacks # 5: Microsoft Word macros for academics
One of the sweetest time-savers I have discovered over my years as an academic is the Microsoft Word macro. Macros are ways to automate common tasks in Word. They save you time, clicks and button presses, all of which allows you to keep your mind on the content of your writing rather than on its
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Explaining Derrida with Diagrams 1: Différance
I’ve written a book on Derrida which is intended to be accessible to non-philosophers, and one of the challenges is to explain Derrida’s thought both faithfully and clearly. I have decided to use diagrams as one way of helping readers to grasp what Derrida is saying and, equally importantly, what he isn’t saying. I am