Project "Knit Wit": The Knitty-Gritty

And so it came to pass that on the Friday night just passed your dear besainted Evelin did take up the needles and begin to knit. 

Casting on did not come easily. An ambiguity in the instructions I was following led to several false starts and a knot to rival the most conniving of ear-phone cables. But after about half an hour's faffing I finally got the gist of it and soon had a needle full of loops upon which to play.

Knitting, by comparison, came easily. The greatest obstacle was in overcoming my tremendous reluctance to set free those carefully crafted loops: once needled it seemed a shame to slide them off again. But slide them off we must, for now we have new loops to call our children. 

A few more lines of this and I decided the moment has come to switch to purl-stitch. After all that knitting, purling seemed intensely fiddly. I'm a left-hander, but have been learning right-handed in an effort to stop my brain exploding from all the flipping of instructions it would have to do. But with the purl I began to think that maybe this was a bad idea. However, a few dozen purls later and I found the rhythm of the thing; it started to get easier, just as the knit had done, and before I know it I was purling away like some purly queen. 

...And really enjoying myself. Because here on my needle is some knitting. Real knitting. It's quite messy knitting, but it's my knitting! Knitted by me! It's quite a magical moment, as I start to feel curiously proud of my achievements. I knit this knitting! Me! Look: isn't it wonderful!

Ok, so it's a bit mis-shapen, and full of holes, but it's my first go, and it took me a while to learn the importance of concentration! The original wool ran out, which was something of a relief as it was a bit too fluffly for a beginner, I think, but now I'm on a second ball (introduced just as I began purling (you may notice that I have knitted more than I have purled)) which seems a lot friendlier. Clearly I need to practice some more and get a grip on tension before I start attempting to knit anything wearable. But I'm really looking forward to the prospect. I rather expected knitting to turn quite quickly into something of a chore, but so far it hasn't done that. Rather it's been quite a peaceful and engaging activity, and I'm keen to get back home and do some more. I think I shall keep going at this first effort until it gradually assumes the impression of a scarf.

Project "Knit Wit": Casting On

Inspired by this blog post by Rachel Bickley, I'd been trying to come up with some sort of New (Academic) Year's Resolution, looking for an Essential Library Skill I ought to hone. At this month's Library Camp I at last identified what that skill should be: a talent that no self-respecting librarian should be without: I resolved that I should learn how to knit.

Last time I knitted.

I must declare here at the outset that I am by no means coming to this project completely untouched by the woollen arts: I have knitted before, albeit more years ago than I care to recall (or "about twenty" in your English money). There were giants in the Earth in those days, and I was reasonably well-versed in the arts of French knitting and crochet. But my attempts at conventional knitting were limited to a few lines of jumper, and, ultimately, other hobbies intervened to the inevitable detriment of the British wool industry.

Consequently, I have a ball of wool knocking around the house. I also thought there were some needles somewhere, but I couldn't find them (save the one mis-shapen creature that lives in the kitchen drawer and sees the light of day only when cake comes out of the oven). So today I popped into Coles and got myself a pair of 4mm needles (that's an 8 on the SWG of my youth) which I have been assured will stand me in reasonable stead.

Last time I bought a needle from Coles.

So now I have a pair of needles and some wool, it's time I did something with them. So it is that tonight I will attempt to embark upon a length of knitted wool of some description or other. Who knows, it might even develop into a lovely scarf (albeit quite a mis-shapen one, doubtless full of holes). We shall see. I will, of course, be keeping the house informed of my progress.

CPD23:14 Building Cites

Our essay done, it's time to add our references. I must confess that I have never found it particularly taxing or unpleasant to compile a list of references. Every time I cite a source in my text, I add the details of said source to the end of my document. My Library School were kind enough to provide a number of examples of citations in the course handbook to illustrate the house style. I never lost sleep over punctuation, and although I felt that the house style for deployment of "et al" was a little extreme and potentially unhelpful to any would-be paper-trailer, and that the styles for websites were rather haphazard and inconsistent, I observed the prescribed conventions without a shred of guilt. Occasionally a non-standard source would present itself (usually as a deliberate measure by me to throw in something a bit whacky) allowing some invention on my part (a little joy peppering an otherwise mechanical process (though by no means unpleasantly mechanical)), and it became a superstition of mine to always end the list with a Wikipedia article (if only to demonstrate to the reader that there are legitimate reasons one might cite Wikipedia in an academic essay). It never felt like a chore.

I must admit also to being perplexed by the referencing panic which seizes many of the students that approach the desk here where I work. Perhaps fingers are severed for any comma misplaced; that's the only explanation that seems to fit the fear I've observed. Mind, some of the "How to Reference" leaflets I've seen  in these parts don't particularly help matters: they rather make a mountain of what is in reality quite a simple little mole-hill. You can put too many eggs into a Yorkshire Pudding. All it needs is a few worked examples, and the assurance that not everything will fit them.

And yet this climate of fear has somehow been created. An idea has come to be propagated that structuring a citation is a difficult task. If a body really cares about how your references are laid out, they will prepare a style-guide. Converting between two styles might be a bit of a faff, but a few ^Hs liven up even the darkest evenings.

I mentioned the importance of "the assurance that not everything will fit". If a style-guide lacks guidance for a particular type of material, that seems to me to be a problem for the style-guide and not a problem that ought to keep me awake at night. The point of a citation is to provide our reader with the means of locating the document in question. If the document in question is not of a sufficiently common type as to demand its own thoroughly worked example, I am somewhat of the mind that this gives me carte-blanche to make something up that will suit. To be blunt, there are more important things in writing than worrying about whether a citation meets a certain template.

But not everyone shares my laid-back attitude to the formalities of citation, and there are some out there who get in a real tizz about where to put a comma and what to italicize. Such people should get a grip citation management application.

CPD23 offers three tools for our consideration. One of them, Zotero, requires Firefox, so that's of no use to me, but perhaps of use to you if you use Firefox and the thought of cobbling together a reference makes your arse-cheeks pucker like a cartoon cat's mouth after a dose of alum. Then there's CiteULike, which isn't so much a citation management app as a citation-sharing community: a potentially useful tool for tracking down source material at the outset, then, but of less relevance in this particular scenario. And then there's Mendeley which does a bit of both but essentially generates citations from .pdfs in the same way that a CD ripper can generate tracklistings by comparing the file with an online database.

Just as a CD ripper's tracklist generator is incredibly flash and whizzy, and potentially quite a labour-saver, so the likes of Mendeley can whip up a bibliography in a flash, and switch between referencing formats in the blink of an eye. If switching between formats is something you have to do quite regularly, then a tool such of this undoubtedly has its uses (ideal for serial serial authors). One thing strikes me, however: it's great for journal articles (in .pdf format) but journal articles are one of the more common reference forms we encounter, and also one of the easiest to translate into a citation (very often the information is all there on the first page). Troublesome dateless books, and more obscure sources (unpublished materials, etc.) remain troublesome, and the citation manager can only be of so much assistance in that regard. Spoiled by automation, we might misplace the knack of reference-writing, potentially compromising our ability to improvise on those occasions when the machine fails us.

I don't anticipate creating all that many bibliographies in my future, and when I do I dare say I won't be using any special bits and pieces to do it. But then I'm a funniosity who couldn't care less if my references are scandalously styled, so long as all the pertinent information is unambiguously presented. The more finickity among you may feel a little more inspired.

Lose 500 Words Instantly!

There are many approaches to writing and this post will make no attempt to offer a perfect compositional methodology. But let us assume that you have, through whatever means you find most suitable, cobbled together a fabulous essay, albeit, infuriatingly, an essay that is longer than the word count. In what ways can we cut this thing down to size? This blog post attempts to answer just that question. Determine Your Parameters First, it is very important to ascertain just what the word count is. If you have been allocated a percentage leeway, now is a good time to do that calculation. So if your word count is 3000±5%, your actual word limit is 3150. That's 150 words salvaged without the slightest effort. It might also be worth investigating what penalties apply for essays that exceed the stated length. Assuming that such penalties are prohibitive, there will be more words to cut. Check the small print to establish exactly what qualifies in your word count, and make sure that you're only counting what is absolutely necessary.  In the case of this blog, everything counts. Every single word. There should be 500 of them. Losing Paragraphs Having determined precisely how many words we need to lose, it is time to start going through what we have written and chopping. I prefer to start from the beginning and work my way through to the end. There are several ways in which we can bring the word count down. The easiest, most bloodthirsty way is to lay waste to whole paragraphs. This will potentially knock hundreds off your tally. But it can also be the hardest method: nobody wants to chop off a whole limb, sacrificing a belovéd chunk of text in such a way. Still, the fundamental structure of your essay can probably continue to function without that flight of fancy about cheese (one wonders why you thought it a good idea in the first place). It may be that you felt cheese to be a fundamental part of your own personal relationship with libraries. We all remember with fondness our first Camembert, and many of us will have been given our first box on the way home from a childhood trip to the shops, oversized library books under our arm. Such associations die hard. I myself recall, with great affection, discovering my first Staffordshire Blue among the stacks of Tamworth Library. But as crucial as such associations may be to our own profound love for the library, cheese is not so essential to the question of how to reduce word count. Duckworth & Lewis (1998: 223) explain this phenomenon: "It often happens that Team 1's innings is interrupted and either prematurely terminated or resumed later to complete a shorter innings. When this happens the match officials try to arrange that both sides still have the same number of overs to face."  This is surprisingly pertinent to the issue at hand (far more than any cheese). Consider the following: "If during Team 1's innings the time for a total of 20 overs play is lost, Team 1's innings will be shortened by 10 overs and Team 2 will have their innings reduced by the same amount. With all other methods no revised target would be set in this situation" (Duckworth & Lewis, 1998: 223). Cheeky Chops With the previous paragraph there are a couple of tricks we might employ: we can craftily remove the space between the date and the page number for one thing, and magically our word processor drops another word from the tally. If we are getting really desperate, we might even abuse the hungry (and rather ugly) Harvard style and slip in a cheeky "ibid." in place of the second reference. Also good fun, and terribly naughty, is the ellipsis trick. Not only can we cut great chunks out of the quote with our "…", we can also hide some more words from the computer by dropping the space character from the gap: e.g. "the time for…20 overs" rather than "the time for… 20 overs" (the word count is effectively a space count, so any space removed is a word saved). This approach benefits from being commonly observed in the wild (it may even be in your lecture notes), unlike the really desperate (and unadvisable) removal of spaces after any punctuation (e.g. "really desperate,we might"), which may also be prohibited by the examining body's style-guide (a document with which you ought to familiarize yourself). Perhaps the greatest of all cheeky chops is the Great Appendix Dump. If the option exists for an appendix outside of the word count, and there's anything in your text that is remotely suitable for being sent to that particular oubliette, then get the hacksaw out. Tables are particularly suited to this as they can be especially word-hungry (another approach for the desperate is to take a screen-grab of the table and re-insert it as an image. If you're doing this you might at least have the courtesy to make the table a stunningly beautiful example of Tuftean design splendour). Less extreme is the simple task of going through and compounding any words that can take it: "word count" can become "wordcount". Don't worry if your spell-checker doesn't like a word like "wordcount"; spell-checkers are never very thorough. A quick Google gets over a million hits, and there's a citation in the OED from 1997. But if you find "wordcount" ugly, "word-count" is just as economical. Hyphens can also be slipped into well-trod clichés ("tried-and-tested" for example) if necessary, and common contractions such as "don't" and "isn't" may be casually employed at the cost of a certain sheen of formality. A War on Adjectives and Adverbs Now we move on to the real art of things. It's time to look at every sentence you've written and to excise every word that is unnecessary. This can be as painful as laying waste to whole paragraphs, as beautiful prose has great chunks of wonder ripped from it. There are no hard rules here. Just take each sentence and ask yourself: "could this be phrased in a more succinct manner?". The chopped version of this document should offer some suggestions. All this being achieved, you may well still be hideously over-count. Time then, to start the process again, this time all the harsher. Prose will bleed, but the result will be a concentrated pill of information goodness (assuming the information you squeezed into the essay was sufficiently good). Word Count: 1,081

Having produced an over-length essay, how might it be edited? It is essential to ascertain the precise wordcount. Consider any allocated leeway: if your wordcount is 3000±5%, your actual limit is 3150 (150 words salvaged near-effortlessly). Also investigate what penalties apply when exceeding stated length (it may be worth the trade-off). Check the small-print: establish what qualifies towards your wordcount, ensuring you only count what is necessary. For this blog, every word counts towards a 500-word limit.   Having determined how many words we are over-count, we can start editing what we've written. I prefer to start from the beginning, working through. There are several ways to reduce the count, the easiest being to excise whole paragraphs, potentially knocking hundreds off your tally. Nobody wants to sacrifice chunks of text in this way, but your essay can probably function without that flight-of-fancy about cheese. "…often…Team 1's innings is interrupted and…prematurely terminated or resumed later…[as]…a shorter innings…[with] the match officials…[arranging]…that both sides still…[face]…the same number of overs… If during Team 1's innings the time for a total of 20 overs…is lost, Team 1's innings will be shortened by 10 overs and Team 2['s]…reduced by the same… With all other methods no revised target would be set…" (Duckworth & Lewis, 1998:223). There are various tricks we might employ with the above: remove space between date and page-number; abuse Harvard style with a cheeky "ibid."; make capricious use of ellipsis… Not only can we cut chunks from the quote, we can also hide words from the computer by dropping the space character from the gap (e.g. "the time for…20 overs"; an approach commonly observed in the wild, unlike the really desperate (and unadvisable) removal of spaces after any punctuation (e.g. "really desperate,we might"), which may also be prohibited by the examining-body's style-guide): the wordcount being effectively a space count, any space removed is a word saved.   Perhaps the greatest cheeky chop is the appendix dump. If permitted an appendix outside the wordcount, suitable body-text may be exiled to its oubliette. Word-hungry tables are particularly apt (another approach is to insert tables as images, though perhaps have the courtesy to render it a stunning example of Tuftean splendour).  A less extreme method is to compound words: e.g.: "word count"→"wordcount". Don't let your spell-checker concern you in such actions: Google gets over 1,000,000 hits, and OED has a citation from 1997. If "wordcount" offends, "word-count" is as economical. Hyphens can also interleave well-trod clichés ("tried-and-tested"). Common contractions (e.g.: "don't" and "isn't") may be traded against formal sheen. All other avenues pursued, one should consider each sentence in turn, excising unnecessary words. Can the sentence be phrased more succinctly? There are no hard rules, but this document should offer some suggestions. The above completed, you may well still be hideously over-count. It is time to start the process again, this time all-the-harsher. Prose will bleed, but the result will be a concentrated pill of information goodness (assuming the information you squeezed into the essay was sufficiently good). Wordcount: 500