Effort does not equal value

1.

Why Lazy Academics Write Better Papers is a great read from PhD Voice, go check it out.

To summarise (though seriously, go look, it’s a 5 minute read), “lazy” researchers put minimum effort into their papers. This causes them to exclude extraneous information and produce more succinct, readable papers.

I kind of agree.

I think it’s a good premise – limiting the resources you spend on an article makes you think hard about what makes the cut.

However, I would argue that just because you don’t include every excruciating detail, it doesn’t mean you’ll do a good job prioritising the important stuff for inclusion. I’ve read short articles full of chaff that fail to tell me VERY BASIC information (like sample size).

But I digress.

I want to draw out and expand on a gem of wisdom in this article:

When I first started writing papers, I was incredibly enthusiastic… [which] resulted in valuing things that most people didn’t really value. I thought everything I had done in my research was important and needed to be included. It wasn’t.

PhD Voice

This is something that we as researchers (though I see it among my artsy friends too) fail to realise:

Effort does NOT equal value.

Just because you worked hard on something, doesn’t mean anyone should care.

2.

In On Writing, Stephen King details a book he’d been painstakingly working on. In the middle of this long-term project, he smashed out another book as a bit of a random side hustle. Once both were published, Stephen adored his labour-of-love book. Unfortunately, it tanked. Instead, readers adored the random-side-project book.

It’s a crushing experience as a creator, but readers value the product, not the process (barring some notable exceptions). We’re interested in the content. As PhD Voice puts it, “We read papers to get information, not to know how hard it was to get this information.”

In a personal example, over the past few months, I’ve spent *checks Toggl time tracking report* 54 hours and 50 minutes editing transcripts from ten interviews I conducted for my PhD.

Effortful? Yep. Important? Not a chance. When I finally finish my thesis, if I include much more than, “Transcripts were edited for accuracy; see coding guide for nonverbal features in Appendix F”, I’ll be putting readers to sleep.

I spent SO FREAKING LONG working on those transcripts, but that doesn’t mean the process is interesting to anyone. It was important that they get done, and that’s it.

I think this is (in part) why the advice “kill your darlings” is relevant to all writers. Academic or creative, we’re unwilling to cull stuff that doesn’t serve the work. When we work hard on something, we get attached. It feels valuable when in fact it was just effortful.

The corollary of this is that when we stumble across things by accident, we may value them less. I’m sure Ivan Pavlov, with his dedicated research on the canine digestive system, would be pissed today to find that we only remember him as the classical conditioning guy.

3.

This is going to sound like a left turn, but I think this is the same concept at the base of love languages. The idea here is that everyone has a way of experiencing feeling loved, and we usually use this method to show love. If it makes you feel all fuzzy inside to receive gifts, you’ll probably show love to others by buying them stuff.

However, if you’re dating someone who feels most loved when they’re told nice things (I love you, You’re amazing etc). your gift-giving strategy is going to fall flat. Your partner won’t feel loved no matter how many teddy bears you buy them.

This may feel enraging. “I went to all this effort!” you might say (if you were really mean). “I thought hard about what you’d want and went to three different stores to find exactly this [object] and it’s really expensive! Why don’t you love this?”

Meanwhile, your partner is standing there waiting for you to say how gorgeous they look in this light.

Effort does not equal value.