Swotd the eighth

This is the lovely Spaulding Reading Room in Harvard's Loeb Music Library. I went down here to do some reading this afternoon, thinking that it would be better to focus on reading away from my computer. However, I quickly realized that at this late stage in papering, I needed to be writing based on the things I got out of this book, not simply jotting down notes, so I went back upstairs.

Which raises an issue I've been thinking about a lot--outlining. A graduate colleague of mine posted on Facebook recently that, after he spent a few days reading, thinking, and outlining, he cranked out more than 25 pages in two days. My process is slower than that, and I'm wondering if it would improve my efficiency if I spent a while simply reading and researching and outlining exactly what I'm going to say before I actually attempt to write. My current process is to dive right in--write a few pages when I first start and I'm really excited, then a few more as I read more sources, then lots more as I tie things together. While I always start with the general point I want to make, the form of the argument emerges only in the writing process itself. Maybe next semester, I'll start trying to outline in advance more and see what happens...

The Sentence of the Day, the opening line of my Sound Studies paper, is one of the least-musicological one's I've written:

On any of six or seven crisp autumn Saturdays, the north side of Columbus, Ohio is besieged by over 100,000 scarlet-and-gray clad Ohio State football fans.