Recently, I have been paying off some debts and catching up with some dead lines. I just finished the biggest article yesterday, and the rest is just a summary for the time being, or just a political article. Today, I got two pieces of good news in succession: the application for temporary residence permit was approved, and I will hire a teaching assistant position next semester, so I can use this as an excuse to give myself a half-day holiday. This holiday, I can't help but reflect on my work status in the past month and the changes in the way I have been writing papers. Mo Shuitian published an article "I Say" on August 4: "It is a feeling of struggling in despair to revise two English papers at the same time. I wonder if I can be reborn. Ha Jin said that every job is equally difficult, and so is writing a paper. How to deal with the transition varies from article to article. " At that time, I had already begun to pay my debts by selling myself. The other party said, "We are very interested in the third and fourth parts of your master's thesis". So, I put forward the contents of these two parts and found that they could not be put into their discussion framework at all. Many things were written when the understanding was much shallower than now. So, I have to sigh and completely update my conception, structure, argument and document. Except for some core words, I almost completely redone them, forming a new article with a text of 25 thousand. If some places are a little more verbose, it will be another master's thesis. When I told Vika with a tired face that my thesis had been rewritten almost once, she said it was normal, because my understanding was improving, and her doctoral thesis would be rewritten next year. Yes, Mo Shuitian is right. Every piece of paper is different. No model can help us to mass-produce papers. The newspaper itself is alive. It goes with the writer's thoughts. Sometimes it stubbornly wants to go into another dark field, a wrong road that the writer is not familiar with, but the writer has no choice but to pretend to go on bravely. As far as the paper I just finished is concerned, those dark areas are the history of the church, the harmony between * * *, and the terminology difference between political ideas and political practice. On the one hand, I want to escape from it; On the other hand, I am glad that I still have no choice to escape, but try my best to illuminate these fields.
Just when I reflect on whether I have made the mistakes of trivialism and minimalism in cooking, I realize that compared with my previous articles, this article has matured a little recently, that is, I finally consciously tried to overcome my addiction to unnecessary trivia and narcissism and tried my best to explain the key issues clearly. Perhaps this is the point that my composition is closer to Brother Gohan's cooking: I give up my skills and try my best under the existing conditions. But in general, the expectation of focusing on the overall situation and starting from small things has not been fully realized. In my opinion, a good paper should be magnificent and neat in overall structure, but it can praise the important details and make detailed textual research. Now, it seems that this article only says more words in some places that need to be explained to domestic readers, far from being delicate. So we should continue to work hard in the future.
The first paper I wrote seriously was Rawls's Methodology of Political Philosophy, which was constantly revised to cope with many course papers. The second article should be Weber's Bureaucracy and Personal Freedom, which is also my undergraduate thesis. What the master wrote seriously was basically published. Then there is the master's thesis. The last article is a summary of natural law for 30 years. Finally, the recent secularization. Seriously written papers have basically gone through various forms of "defense". The defense team has always said that the problem is "we can't understand what you wrote." When I was young, I always said to myself, "If you study philosophy, you can't understand my Rawls/if you study administration, you can't understand my Weber/if you study philosophy of law, you can't understand my Lefeur ... It's your own business to get over it, and you have the face to take it out." It was not until I became an editor myself that I realized that it was normal to "not understand". So I slowly began to explain as much as possible, at least for colleagues who don't engage in the same direction to understand, so as to continue academic exchanges. Including when I was defending my master's thesis, the teacher in the defense group said, "You are all French documents, bullying us not to understand, right?" I was just joking at that time, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt cold sweat behind me. I also think of a meeting at which a middle-aged teacher criticized young teachers: "I see that you have quoted a lot of English and German literature here, which is of course very good. However, some documents have been translated into Chinese. In order to benefit everyone, I think it is better to quote Chinese translation. If there is any problem with the translation, it is your responsibility to point out the mistakes in the footnotes. This is a serious and responsible attitude. " This sentence goes in one ear and out the other. It suddenly occurred to me when I was writing my last paper. This is why I say that foreign students are most tired of writing Chinese papers: yelling at people from one context to another, trying to make them understand. So a lot of energy has been put into understanding whether the words you want to use have been translated into Chinese. If so, is there any problem with Chinese translation? If not, what kind of similar research can help domestic readers understand the current discussion. Patience and energy is to slowly withdraw from this little information search until midnight when I am too tired to move at all.
However, just like cooking, fancy means can't support daily needs, and writing too much can't last long. Rawls wrote it during the winter vacation. There is almost no way out except New Year's Eve. I wrote an article about Weber during the winter vacation, but after the Chinese New Year, I sat in front of the computer almost all day. It wasn't long before I wrote my master's thesis, just a few weekends. Open a bottle of wine and drink it while writing from 8: 00 a.m. to 8: 00 p.m./kloc-0: 00. If you can't write any more, just look at the bottle of single malt: yeah! There's only a little left! When I was writing Natural Law for 30 years, I was so weak that I fell down the stairs later. Generally speaking, writing will make me anxious, sensitive and emotional, which is very bad. Frustration is the best description of my state. For example, when I was writing a review, I filled the refrigerator with milk, cheese, steak and half-cooked pasta. Write after running in the morning, grab a piece of cheese when you are hungry, and then continue to write. Write at noon, take out the spaghetti, cover it with cheese, heat it in the microwave, and finish the writing after eating. At dinner time, fry a steak and continue to write. Write that when it's time to go to bed, open a bottle of red wine and drink it and go to bed. On the contrary, when writing a recent paper, you should eat, drink and be merry as usual except insomnia (you can only sleep for four hours a day). I even went to the seaside to eat seafood once. At the same time, physical indicators such as strength, speed and weight have even increased. Miyazaki Hayao's Delicious Home Cooking praised Fan Zhongyan's philosophy. In my opinion, the reason why home cooking is delicious is that chefs do this job every day. We writers should also turn writing into daily work, instead of suddenly inspiring generate's creation. Only in this way can we write for a long time without interrupting the existing rhythm of life.
Speaking of which, I thought of family discipline again. Jia Yan, like his grandfather, is a doer who understands theory. They especially look down on those who show off their mouths and pens. Deep down, I am afraid that I will become the kind of person they despise, the kind of person who lives lightly and has no sense of mission and responsibility. On the other hand, they also respect scholars. Father's greatest compliment to others is that "he is a man of real talent and learning", and probably no more than ten people get this evaluation. Among them are his teacher and my tutor. When I was a freshman, I was often asked, "What's your major?" When I was a freshman, many people asked me, "What is philosophy of law?" I naturally don't have a definite answer to these questions. But in the past, I would probably "not explain" as many people appreciated. Now, whether I succeed or not, I try to explain our work to laymen. What's the use of pure theory? Perhaps most people can't understand it. However, for professionals, this cannot be an excuse not to explain. On the contrary, understanding difficulties requires us to explain our work to other experts. Because if we are really engaged in a valuable job, wouldn't it be better to let others know its value? I vaguely feel that this is a way to avoid letting my elders despise me-although there is no logic at all. If scientific researchers have any responsibility to the public, I don't think it is such a sour word of social conscience, but to enhance the understanding of a certain professional knowledge in the whole society. In this sense, the two series "What Do I Know" and "A Brief Introduction to Oxford" can't be praised too much, and they are much better than the works of Berlin and Javier.