Granularity for students
People who think about hacking their lives and their work often speak of “granularity.” It’s a curious word. The online Oxford English Dictionary offers only “granular condition or quality” as a definition. A more helpful definition comes from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications: “The extent to which a larger entity is subdivided. For example, a yard broken into inches has finer granularity than a yard broken into feet.” To think of tasks and challenges in terms of granularity is to think in terms of breaking them down into smaller and more manageable parts.
Granularity is a tremendously useful strategy for students. The typical spiral-bound student-planner doesn’t seem to encourage it; that tool is often little more than a place to store due dates: “research paper due.” But no one can just write a research paper. That paper can only be the result of numerous small-scale tasks. It’s not surprising that students who think of “write research paper” as one monolithic task are likely to put it off far longer than they ought to. Instead of “write research paper,” one could think of these tasks: go to library to look up sources; organize them by call number; read first three sources and take notes; get article from JSTOR; read remaining three sources and take notes; organize notes on computer; check bibliography format; ask professor about endnote form; make rough outline; and so on. Each of these “granular” tasks is far more do-able than “write research paper.” Thinking of work in terms of granularity can be one way to overcome the overwhelming dread of getting started. And keeping track of such tasks on paper and crossing them off one by one gives the satisfaction making progress and getting closer to done.
A student might also apply the strategy of granularity to the work of writing itself. Instead of writing a draft and “looking it over,” it’s much smarter to break down the work of writing and editing by thinking about one thing at a time. Developing a strong thesis statement: that’s one task. Working out a sequence of paragraphs to develop that thesis: another task. Figuring out how to make a transition from one paragraph to another: another task. If you tend to have patterns of errors in your writing, look for each kind of error, one at a time. Noun-pronoun agreement? Read a draft once through looking only for that. Comma splices? Read once through with your eyes on the commas. It might seem that approaching the work of writing and editing in terms of smaller, separate tasks is unnecessarily cumbersome, but breaking things down will likely make it far easier to work more effectively and come out with a stronger piece of writing. No writer can think about everything at once.
Granularity is also a useful strategy for making even a daunting reading project do-able. If you have eighty pages to read, finish twenty and take a short break; then repeat. If you’re reading James Joyce or Marcel Proust, a handful of pages might be all that you can manage at one sitting, and sometimes you might need to chart your progress by the sentence. But those sentences and pages add up, and I should know. I just finished all seven volumes (3,102 pages) of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), averaging twenty pages a day over five months and two days of reading.
Try thinking of your next major (or even minor) assignment in terms of granularity. You might find that getting started and making progress come far more easily.
Michael Leddy is an English professor whose recent writing includes an essay on Stanley Lombardo’s recordings of the Iliad and Odyssey in translation. Leddy blogs at Orange Crate Art.
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Comments
Fearful Symmetry says on November 29th, 2006 at 3:10 pm
Great Article! I used to do this a lot more, but for some reason haven’t been breaking things down quite as well as I used to. This article inspired me to post about my old task list system, which was build around this idea. That was probably one of the most productive times in my life.
Thanks for Posting!
Jesse says on November 29th, 2006 at 4:32 pm
With all due respect to the good professor–and my own professors that have advocated a similar method–I think that this kind of approach to a writing assignment isn’t really conducive to a good paper. I’ve written several A/A+ papers in my undergraduate career and will be graduating next month magna cum laude. By and large, I never break things down into smaller tasks, as that’s really not the nature of a 10-20 page paper. The idea of a short paper is to create a thesis, incorporate your sources, and create a cogent body of thought in very few words. For me, the writing process has always been about a synthesis, not a breakdown. Action-wise, this translates into reading a whole lot of stuff within a few hours, taking a few notes here and there, and thinking about the entire thing for a little bit. If I let it marinate for a little while, I’ll usually come up with something worthwhile out of the stew.
That said, I think breaking things down a little bit to make it more manageable is a good habit. Additionally, for longer, grad-level work, this kind of approach is absolutley essential. However, students need to make sure that the approach towards the paper doesn’t translate itself into the paper itself. Having taught a course myself, I’ve seen way too many papers that presented a laundry list of sources listed off and never really tied them together–in short, they were very granular.
I don’t think a lot of people have a hard time with the breakdown that you speak of, with the exception of those that panic when a big assignment presents itself. The process of reconstructing a series of sources into a good piece is the tricky part. The difficult part isn’t about granularizing the task, but synthesizing the grains into something meaningful and profound.
Matt McPherson says on December 1st, 2006 at 3:00 am
I’d have to disagree with Jesse. When writing a large paper (Am I the only one who prefers to think in words rather than pages?) I find it essential to break the subject down into components and write even a small paragraph on each. It’s a far less daunting task to have to write 200-300 words on a particular nuance of a process or technique employed by a writer, than to incorporate it all into one huge beast of a paper. You are of course, quite right in that if you assemble just your small paragraphs you are left with a mess, held together by string and prayers with a source list that you can get the gist of the essay from the titles. But the fact is that a large number of students, in a wide range of disciplines, only a small few have ever been taught writing skills and have any experience of writing large reports. Many students are competent mathematicians, but ask any of them to produce an essay or report and you can see the fear unfolding in their eyes. The granular approach is an excellent one for making the impossible possible but the problem is people were never taught how to put all the grains back together.
A more in-depth look at the breakdown and then rebuilding of tasks is what is required. And teaching them some English skills wouldn’t be a waste either.
Mike says on December 1st, 2006 at 10:02 am
This is an old trick. It’s success rests largely depends on an individual’s approach to life. For as many people as it would help, there are just as many who would freak out at going from having one task to having 47 — even though they are the same thing.
Hikers have long known that the best trick for avoiding boredom (and injury) on the trail is to keep your eye on the horizon, not on your feet. Yes, the trail will be beaten one step at a time, but thinking about each step will make you lose your way, stumble and fall.
The thing that really makes me cringe about this is saying that a spiral-bound notebook discourages granular thinking. It implies that there is some sort of tool that does it better. What these people really have is fear of a blank page (oooo, not the whole book — a granular approach!), and it is not solved no mater how the blank page is formated. At some point one has to just start writing. Something.
jack says on December 1st, 2006 at 10:03 am
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Rick says on December 1st, 2006 at 2:03 pm
I had a roommate in college who had a 4.0 average and graduated magna cum laude (and mentioned it quite a bit). The summer after graduation he jumped into a swimming pool headfirst from a rooftop. Broke his neck.
Take it easy, Jesse. Your friends and family will love you regardless of your achievements.
jw says on December 1st, 2006 at 7:03 pm
Oh, Jesse, it is so cute to listen to a kid who’s about to graduate with a B.A., who has taught one course, make pronouncements about what works.
Leddy is right about this one: granularity is crucial for quality work. It’s crucial for big projects period. No one — not even kids who graduate cum laude — can write a dissertation without breaking things down into little, tiny pieces. And what works for the dissertation is only an amplification of what works for the dinky 10 page paper you have to write for a sophomore writing class.
My students who break big tasks into little tasks get better grades than those who lump things together. The sooner you learn that lesson, the better.
Michael Leddy says on December 2nd, 2006 at 12:38 pm
It’s exciting to see so many responses to this piece. There is of course nothing really new about the principle embodied in the word “granularity” (Alcoholics Anonymous got there long ago with “One day at a time”). What struck me as new was the idea of applying “granularity” to the work of reading and writing.
@Mike: Note that I was referring to a spiral-bound student-planner, not a notebook. Over many years of teaching, I’ve seen students dutifully write down assignments and due dates in those planners (as they’ve been told to do), and I don’t think that helps all that much. It’s better to do than not do, but for most students, I don’t think enough. A notebook, an index card, a text file — any of those might work really well in figuring out the various tasks involved in a project.
Anastasia at Lawsagna, who’s quoted above, took the idea of granularity and created tables with which students can plan out their studying by subject and by time available: Strategies and tools to plan your exam preparation There’s a small Excel file there as a free download.
Jesse says on December 2nd, 2006 at 12:40 pm
Maybe I need to granularize my response for you guys? Most specifically, see:
That said, I think breaking things down a little bit to make it more manageable is a good habit. Additionally, for longer, grad-level work, this kind of approach is absolutely essential. However, students need to make sure that the approach towards the paper doesn’t translate itself into the paper itself.
Care to spout any more conjecture while you’re at it?
Michael says on December 2nd, 2006 at 4:24 pm
This isn’t a reply to Jesse’s comment; it’s a correction to my previous comment. I should’ve written: “I don’t think that it helps all that much. It’s better to do than not do, but for most students, I don’t think it’s enough.”
joe smithson says on December 3rd, 2006 at 8:30 pm
you wrote an entire article that could be summed up as:
“break large goals down into a list of specific tasks.”
no kidding. never would’ve guessed that.