750 Words Status

How did you learn about 750words.com?

I first saw a post on Lifehacker (3/3/10) in my feed reader, but didn’t even go have a look at the site. A few days later (3/10/10) a post about 750words from The Stranger came through my feeds, and that’s when I had a look and decided to pursue the practice in earnest.

What are your interests outside of insanely long streaks of private journaling?  Who are you and how do you define yourself?

I am an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at Ball State University and a fellow with the Emerging Media Initiative. I research writing technologies for a living, and have a deep and abiding interest in the ways that writing work mediates everyday life, especially via our increasingly ubiquitous sociotechnical networks. 

I’m also a husband, father, cyclist, and passionate soccer player and supporter. 

What do you write about in your super secret private journal?

My daily goal is to use 750words.com as a space for research writing. So, that could mean working on a proposal for a conference or publication opportunity, working on part of a manuscript in progress, working on a research protocol, outlining a new project, or thinking through a particular piece of research reading (my daily 750 has inspired me to also institute a practice of reading a minimum of 50 pages of research each day as well, so I have a 50/750 regimen). 

On the whole, I’d say probably 85% of my days so far have been used in this way. The other 15% of the time have been planning sessions—thinking through my to do list for the following day, writing about upcoming projects or project ideas, or generally thinking through something out on the horizon.

In other words, I use 750words exclusively as a space to foment my professional writing practices.

What kept you coming back to the site, 100 days in a row?

One of the expectations of my position as a college professor at a research institution is that I will publish original scholarship. I get paid to think, as my dissertation director once told me. Having just completed my first year toward tenure, I’ve done well in publishing and want to continue to produce new and meaningful scholarship. But as a writing researcher, I’m profoundly interested in what motivates these kinds of writing contexts; I’m also, as I mentioned above, interested in writing technologies, and 750words, as a writing technology, facilitates certain everyday human practices in novel ways.

In the fall of 2009 I participated in a faculty group that explored ways to improve writing and publishing practices. Many faculty members throw themselves into teaching and administrative commitments and find it difficult to maintain an active publishing record. As part of that group, we read a book called “How to Write A Lot” by Paul Silvia, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. The premise of his book is quite simple: if you want to write a lot (as an academic, that is), then you have to schedule time to write, every week, rain or shine.

The book is brilliant in its simplicity, and having worked in finance for several years before heading back to graduate school, I knew that scheduling time to complete a task was sound advice. I took this advice to heart. Silvia points out lots of specious barriers that keep people from writing, things like waiting for inspiration or holding out for a better writing space. But most academics are producing scholarship, not poetry, and there’s no inspiration that will help one code qualitative data or write a review of extant scholarship. You simply have to sit down and write. Preferably every day.

In the spring of this year, I was asked to facilitate meetings and discussions of Silvia’s book with a new group of faculty members. By that time, I had started with 750words, and I used it as an example of the ways that one could systematically stick to a goal of scheduled writing. 

Again, I see 750words.com as an essential part of my daily workflow. I get paid to write, and 750words.com gives me a mechanism (what I would call an “enabling technology” in a research context) for tracking and completing that daily work.

Do you find it difficult to stay motivated after 100 days?

No, not in the least. At this point, since I’ve logged 115+ days, it’s incredibly motivating to keep the streak alive. I am terrified of starting over!

If you could change anything about the site, what would it be?

I’ve actually thought about this; the only thing I’d change is the scoring structure. I’d like to see it differentiate among users better, so that there aren’t 300 people with the same exact score everyday. [buster says, “Yes, I’d like to do this too.”]

Despite the fact that I use 750words for work, I’m extremely competitive and genuinely motivated by my score and my streak. Silly, but psychologically powerful nonetheless.

Anything else you’d like to add as one of the first people to reach 100 days in a row?

In my field, we argue that writing is explicitly epistemic; in other words, writing work (however it may be actualized) is intimately related to knowledge—writing can and does help human beings make new knowledge. In that sense, 750words.com is a knowledge making machine. Write to know. Everyday.