Want to get to know the soon-to-be Associate Dean of Professional Development for Baylor’s Graduate School, Dr. Sara Dolan? Read on to learn more about her and her writing habits. Starting in June, Dr. Dolan will be taking over from current Associate Dean, Dr. Beth Allison Barr. Though we are sad to see Dr. Barr leave the Graduate School, we couldn’t be more delighted to welcome Dr. Dolan! Dr. Dolan is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience. She currently serves as the Associate Dean of Research in the Graduate School, as well as filling the role of faculty regent. Dr. Dolan’s research deals with Neuropsychological functioning and substance abuse treatment, as well as diagnosis and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI). Thank you so much for talking with us about your research and writing process, Dr. Dolan!
BearTracks
So we are running a series on the Grad School blog, interviewing a combination of professors as well as grad students about how they write, writing advice they’ve received, writing advice they’d love to give, and so that’s a little bit of context. So first question, where do you like to do your writing?
Dr. Sara Dolan
I like to do my writing in settings where there are other people who I’m not interacting with. So I love coffee shops. A scene that was especially – that taught me this, was the women’s faculty writing program that Baylor started where we met as a group of women associate professors. We met in the library, and we had maybe five or ten minutes at the beginning of our blocked off writing time. We would share strategies and struggles and celebrations, and then we would write. It really taught me that having silence but people around me is really important for my productivity.
BT
Jus enough silence for concentration, but just enough stimulation that you actually have to engage the focus muscles? That’s great. Do you have a favorite coffee shop in town that you like to frequent, or do you tend to hop around?
SD
I really like Panera, actually!
BT
Hey, yeah, good food accessible, that’s great!
SD
I like their caramel latte, what am I going to do?
BT
So I don’t know what this looks like in non-humanities fields, so I’m really curious about your answer to this question: do you still acquire lots of books as your career has progressed, or has your pace slowed?
SD
Psychology and Neuroscience is not a text-heavy kind of field; we’re more of an empirical, article-based, so I acquire lots and lots and lots of PDFs, but really not that many texts anymore.
BT
So you’ve had to increase your Cloud storage, but maybe not your bookcase capacity?
SD
No, that’s exactly right! Actually, I’m looking forward to moving over to the Graduate School, moving offices, because that’s an excuse, a demand that I purge some of those old books that just aren’t relevant anymore.
BT
No, moving is a good stay against the entropy of all life but particularly academic life! What would you say are the best times for you to write? Are you a morning person, a night owl?
SD
I am most productive in the morning, so, you know, following an initial cup of coffee and a little food, I spend the morning writing.
BT
That seems to be a popular [time] for a lot of people. How do you capture your research?
SD
Lots of documents on the computer. So lots of Cloud space, more and more and more Cloud space! I generally will have an Excel spreadsheet, to tick off tasks and timelines to keep me on track. I also write emails; so all of the work that I do is collaborative, so I like to keep track of things via email so the whole team knows.
BT
That makes sense. I haven’t gotten Excel spreadsheets from anyone [I’ve interviewed] yet, so that’s a good, new [response].
SD
Yay STEM!
BT
Haha! Now do you immediately start writing on the computer or do you have a process that builds? Like, do you ever jot things down in longhand or do you like to ruminate on stuff? What is your beginning-the-research process?
SD
For the writing piece, it’s really jotting down notes in a Word document, starting from there. For papers in my discipline, they’re incredible structured, so I’ll generally start with what did I do, what are the methods that I used, and then I’ll go back and write the background and the hypotheses, then I’ll move forward and write the results section and the discussion section. They’re very structured, so it’s easy to bullet point each section.
BT
That’s great. Now I know you said you acquire a lot of PDFs; are you a marginalia person? Do you have a tablet that write notes on these documents, or do you highlight? How do you “talk” to your sources as you are researching?
SD
I like that question! I have half a foot in an old-school world, where if it’s an article that’s really critical, I’ll print it out and write on it. But I’ve got a foot and I’m trying to put more toes in the world of comments and sticky notes in the PDF.
BT
So on that note, I’m sure more so that other disciplines, you interact with a lot of digital sources. What’s your balance? Do you enjoy working with the digital sources? How is that? Like, we’re on screens all day – how is that, adjusting to digital sources over hard copy? How is that for you as a scholar?
SD
So there are pros and cons. Pros, are certainly it’s much easier to organize. I don’t have file folders and papers spilling out everywhere, stacks and whatnot.
BT
Easier for travel too! You don’t have to take heaps of books with you!
SD
Exactly right. But I’m still struggling, figuring out a rhythm with sticky notes and comments. Probably my middle ground has been starting with the Word document and writing notes on the article in the Word document. I’ve still got a separate place for that, but I’m not using reams of paper.
BT
I find that more and more my professors have switch over to digital, because it saves on printing and all sorts of things, but I find that I’m such a spatial learner, that not being able to associate information with a physical spot on a page or being able to measure how much I’ve gone through by flipping pages and being able to associate it with earlier in it or later, how much heft is on the left side or the right, I struggle with that! I’ve realized how physicalized the process is for me, coming to grad school, in ways that I hadn’t realized before, so I’m always curious to hear people’s relationship with digital sources! Okay: what is some good advice you have received on writing?
SD
The best advice I’ve received (and I don’t follow this the way that I should), but the best advice I’ve received is to sit down in a chair for at least thirty minutes a day – try to make it the same thirty minutes a day – and just write. Doesn’t have to be good writing! Just has to be words on a page. And the reason I think that’s such great advice, and when I’m able to follow it I’m just loads more productive, but for me the reason it’s such good advice is because having time in between writing sessions, you lose some of that momentum! And I forget where I was and where I was going, so when I come back to it, I have to sit down and actually reorient myself to it, which is wasted time.
BT
Absolutely. You spend so much time having to go back and find where you left the thread of the argument or the evidence. Do you leave yourself little reminders? I find I leave “shouting messages” to myself when I have to stop. I’ll do all-caps and be like WHEN YOU START WRITING AGAIN DO THIS!!! Do you do that?
SD
Yes! I started do that, and it’s helpful, but not as helpful as keeping that momentum going.
BT
For sure. What do you think is your best piece of written work, or perhaps something you have written that you are most proud of?
SD
Well, it’s actually something I published with a group of graduate students who had already graduated. And it’s a piece about things to be aware of for clinical psychologists in working with substance use disorder. And the impetus for this article was, out of the group of students, a number of them had worked in a particular clinical rotation that I supervised, and the patients were attending twelve-step support meetings, like AA and NA, and were also doing this very structured, evidence-based therapy for substance use disorder with the students. And we kept running into integrate across those, because on the surface, they’re very different models, but we spent a lot of time talking about where are the similarities? Where can we help clients integrate both of them so it’s not too disparate? Where what they do on Mondays has no bearing on what they do on Tuesdays. And it got published in a very good journal, and it was one of the most downloaded articles of the year where we published it. And it was so great to write something that was certainly rooted in the empirical literature, but were really based on my students’ experiences.
BT
Wow, that’s sounds really rewarding on so many levels.
SD
It really was. It was years in the making, and it took a lot to find a home for it, but I think we found the perfect home for it.
BT
Who are a few favorite writers from your field of study?
SD
Oh so many. I’m thinking about people who are senior scholars in my field, and the senior scholars whose writing I enjoy the most, their writing is English as opposed to science-talk. They write what they did, how they did it, what it means, without a whole heap of jargon and without complexity of sentence structure. They’re just very crisp and clear writers.
BT
It makes such a difference.
SD
Yeah, and I don’t know how it is in the humanities, I think that sometimes people think, especially in academia, that the more complex, the more multi-syllabic, the better? And I don’t find that works well when I’m having to decipher the sentence before I can figure out the message. Does that make sense?
BT
Absolutely. I think something that has been cool talking with the consultants at the GWC is helping people to recognize that every piece of writing is a narrative, which is usually associated with the humanities. But you’re always telling a story, no matter what piece of writing you’re doing, so we want the narrative to be clear. Who or what are the actors and what are the actions? That should always be evident. So getting people to switch their way of thinking, that seems to be really helpful in clarifying writing.
SD
I actually just had that same conversation with a student. Our students, by themselves – and I mean all of us do this by ourselves – meander around writing the paper and not actually getting to the point or being clear about the message. So I had a talk with a student, and this was a clinical psychological report that she was writing. And it’s the same thing: you have a question you’re trying to answer, you develop hypotheses about how to answer it, you gather data that either supports of disconfirms your hypothesis, and then you write the answer. And the whole paper, the whole report needs to be geared towards this is the answer to my question. So I’m structuring everything and telling a story to get the reader to that answer.
BT
Yeah, absolutely. Your paper is a train with a destination; we are not driving Miss Daisy! We are going somewhere!
SD
Yes! And there’s a very direct route. Take the direct route, that’s okay!
BT
That’s okay! So good. Okay, last question, and this one’s my favorite, just because it’s so mean in academia. What is a book you should have read by now but haven’t?
SD
Oh there are lots. Educated by Tara Westover? She was a keynote speaker at the Council on Graduate Schools meeting I attended in December, and her story is quite inspiring.
BT
Her book is amazing. I highly recommend it on audiobook. It’s one I will never forget.