The first author of a piece I’m third or fourth author of e-mailed me with an urgent request to shape the abstract before it’s sent off, tonight, to an editor. This is a long MS (88 pages), and he hoped to have the abstract in an hour “or so.” <\/p>\n
I leaned on the “or so” heavily.<\/p>\n
It’s an important piece to me, or I wouldn’t have seen it as an urgent request, but occasionally you can drop everything else without going nuts. (And there are other considerations I won’t describe.) I’m glad he didn’t e-mail in the middle of my make-up chat to take care of students who were absent from Wednesday’s chat thanks to Ernesto. <\/p>\n
But it’s an act of relative concentration to review a MS that you’ve seen most (but not all of) in a prior draft and try to squeeze the ideas into 250 words in a short time. I failed: my abstract draft was 350 words. And I still cut out many of the rather cool small points (that other coauthors wrote). <\/p>\n
I think I just experienced what writing on a deadline is like. I haven’t done that since my stint as Junior Journalist in high school. I can do it, but it’s not my joy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The first author of a piece I’m third or fourth author of e-mailed me with an urgent request to shape the abstract before it’s sent off, tonight, to an editor. This is a long MS (88 pages), and he hoped to have the abstract in an hour “or so.” I leaned on the “or so” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading","category-writing-and-editing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-bk","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}