Friday Goals: 1.5 out of 3 so far

I'm just getting in from a four hour lunch, so needless to say, I didn't get everything done that I was supposed to today. Fortunately, the day is not over--back to work for me. But rather than being too hard on myself, I thought I'd write for a moment on my progress to get me going for the work I have left for the evening.

This morning, I went through my books at home and settled on four that I'm going to use as models for Chapter One--

• Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance
• Roxanne Mountford, The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces
• Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North
• Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women's Political Identity

One thing stood out as I was going through all of my books--length. Published book introductions are a lot shorter (on average) than I was thinking in my mind. I know that a dissertation has different goals, and therefore its chapters take different forms than published books. But since one of my goals is getting this work published as a book, I'm trying to make sure this work conforms to publishable standards as much as possible now. So it's probably not the best thing that I've taken four models, but I didn't find just one that did everything I had in mind. Glenn's opening is fantastic for blending scholarly literature--she gives you a literature review that fixes her work within a larger conversation. But she does so without making you feel like you're reading a literature review. Mountford's voice is so striking to me--she openly discusses her investment in the work and the emotional connection that she has with the project. Her book has been one of my favorites since I read it last year. Zaeske and Rael are both efficient models in the practical details of an introduction. Zaeske provides a good model for previewing the layout of the study. Rael adeptly summarizes his arguments and most importantly for me, lays out what his study does not do. I'm interested in the way that he clearly demarcates his territory; this is what my study contributes to, this is what it can't do at this point. I think this is important when you are doing work that opens a new door in a discipline--sometimes I feel like there are those readers who are expecting me to do EVERYTHING at once. Since no one in political comm talks about Black women, I feel some pressure to write THE book on Black women when truly this is only an opening to what I hope will be an ongoing conversation.

Goal 1--Check.

Goal 2--Pulling out the gems from my dissertation proposal. I'm about half way through that process. Hope to finish that in the next couple hours.

Goal 3--Dr. Rice--progress today, zero.
Rael does a great job of opening Black Identity with a fable that becomes an analogy for the subject of his work. He creates five meaty paragraphs that tell the story and make the connection to his work. From there he can quickly go into "This book examines..." I'm trying not to edit myself too much at this stage, but I think I'm going too far into the Rice aspect--I should keep it to an opening episode and get to the work of the introduction.

Back to work...