Resultados de la opinión de operadores jurídicos

I ended the previous section advising authors to share their work with others. There my point was that having others look at your work can help you decide when it is ready to send out for publication. Here I want to emphasize the value of shar- ing more generally. All of us get so close to our own writing that we risk losing sight of how readers might understand or not understand our meaning. The point of professional writing is to share your ideas in a clear way with others. Writing might feel like a solitary process, but it is really a social experience. Sharing drafts of your papers with others and getting their feedback makes writing and rewriting more social.

Sharing with others will also improve the quality of your work. Others can read your work unencumbered by the thoughts you hold in your head. In other words, they can react to the writing as it exists and let you know if your writing is clear and, if so, whether your arguments and analyses are compelling. When we write something down, we know what we mean to say. As a result, our own writ- ing rarely confuses ourselves. However, when someone else reads your writing, they must infer what you meant only from the words that you provide.

This message was driven home to me in another conversation I had with a mentor while I was a graduate student. This particular faculty member and I attended the same church and we were working at a fund-raising car wash on a warm summer afternoon. Another graduate student and I had sent out a paper to a journal for consideration for publication. We had received the reviews just a day or two before that the paper was rejected. Some of the criticisms raised by the reviewers seemed legitimate to me and my co-author, but many concerns we

considered to be wrongheaded and off target.

I was complaining about this to my faculty member while scrubbing the hood of the car. I said it seemed to me that the reviewers either didn’t know what they were talking about or didn’t read the paper very carefully. My faculty friend paused from what he was doing and said to me that when he received reviews like that, he generally felt that it was his fault for not being clear enough and that his faulty writing was probably responsible for the reviewers going off track. Of course as soon as he said this, I knew he was right. It is the author’s responsibility to communicate clearly, and the best way to do this is to get feedback from others before you send something out for consideration for publication.

Professional writing involves public scrutiny of your work. Others will criti- cize what you have done. Many will do so in a constructive way, but others will be less polite. That is just the nature of this business. The review process associ- ated with scholarly publication is based on critical commentary of the manuscripts that are submitted. As a professional scholar, you will be called upon to review the work of others, whether that be students, colleagues, or papers submitted to journals for publication. Sharing your work with others and reading their work in exchange will get you used to the idea of giving and receiving constructive criticism.

Finally, as discussed in Chapter 11 on publishing, you improve your chances for publication if you have others read and comment on your paper before you submit it. You have a professional responsibility to make your paper as strong as is reasonable before you ask an editor and anonymous reviewers to expend their time and energy evaluating the suitability of your paper for publication. It is professionally irresponsible to submit a paper for publication simply to get a set of reviews. Sharing your work with others is the best way to avoid this prob- lem. Similarly, sharing your work with others before presenting it at a conference or other public forum helps ensure that the feedback you will receive from that presentation is the best that it can be. You want to clear up easy and obvious prob- lems with your work before you present it so that the feedback you get is new and innovative for you.

When sharing your work, it is important to think about with whom you share. You might feel the safest sharing your draft with a close friend – maybe a fellow graduate student. That might be fine, but if your friend is unwilling to offer criti- cism where it might be warranted, or if your friend knows how you think and has

similar views, their feedback may not be as helpful. Similarly, if you both lack experience, you may not benefit as much from the feedback you can provide each other. You need to find people who will read your work who are committed to helping you make it better. This means they are committed to pointing out what they perceive to be the strengths and weaknesses of the paper. A mentor with experience and/or someone with some distance from your topic and your thinking can also provide a better sense of how effectively you are communicating your ideas.

Being critical does not require being mean. Virginia Gray and I started a dissertation working group at UNC several years ago. Prior to each meeting, a student circulates a draft of the dissertation chapter or other paper that we and the other students all read in advance. At the meeting, the author is given three min- utes at the start to say something about the work they circulated and then we spend the next 57 minutes offering comments, asking questions, and critiquing the paper. This often involves a good deal of joking and laughing, but it is always focused on how to make the paper better. I think our students have benefited tremendously from both giving and receiving constructive criticism in this environment. Plus, it’s fun to play with ideas – it is one of the reasons people pursue graduate degrees in the first place.

People become researchers because they are excited about ideas and excited about sharing those ideas with others. Sharing your work in progress is a way to acknowledge the social component of research early in the process. Playing with ideas is supposed to be fun, and playing with them early will help make your final papers more accessible and more interesting to a broader audience. The act of writing might be a solitary process, but the act of producing good research papers is and should be a social one. I suggest you embrace that.