Work & Academics

I couldn’t help it. I had to start writing my own writing guide based on a few of the things that really irritate me when I’m editing or correcting something for someone else. It’s a work in progress and it’s being done somewhat haphazardly (which probably means that I’m eventually going to get lazy about it after a while and not add new tips). But I’m having fun doing it—it helps relieve some of the frustration I sometimes feel when editing….

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Introduction

Process documentation and journal writing should become a natural extension of the work that you do while you are in the field. Both of these types of writing are meant to describe what happened in the field, and both of them will include different kinds of information to help you later on when writing your reports. But while these writing tasks are related, they are different in their purposes. Broadly speaking, process documentation is purely objective, while journal writing is more flexible and allows for more subjective commentary. The following document was written to help you get started with process documentation and journal writing¹. I urge you to take the included information as “guidelines” and not as a prescriptive set of rules or requirements.
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1. This document was prepared for Tata-Dhan Academy students who are completing the fieldwork or development practice segments of their curriculum. As such, some of the content specifically highlights the types of topics they would be recording about their experiences. Nevertheless, whatever your course of study—or indeed even if you are writing for pleasure!—many of the concepts here should still be easily applicable. [back]