Book Structure

Considering “The Impact of 3D Printing” as a possible subject for a book. Also giving consideration to different book structures, division into chapters, and basic metrics per chapter, per paragraph, to support an argument, to make points, provide insights, and to cite sources. I wrote a 10-page article a while back that was divided into four main sections wrapped by an introduction and a conclusion. Simple. Each of the sections barely scratched the surface and I had a single source cited in the introduction. For a book-length project, 200-300 pages, I simply can’t begin without defining an overall structure.

How many sources? How about ten books (or sources) per chapter? A 10-chapter book would then cite 100 books (or sources). If each chapter devotes 5 paragraphs to a book or to a source, that works out to 50 paragraphs per chapter. A five-paragraph treatment of a book is a mini-essay. Let's say a mini-essay is structured as an opening argument paragraph, followed by three supporting paragraphs, and a conclusion paragraph. Since a single page accommodates around 2 paragraphs, and a full chapter would contain 50 paragraphs, every 2 mini-essays would span 2 double-sided pages or 15 pages per chapter. You can then think of the book as a series of 5-paragraph, 2 and a half page mini-essays. The book would contain 10 x 10 (10 mini-essays x 10 chapters), or one-hundred mini-essays. That’s 150 pages. With a 10-page intro and a 10-page conclusion, that’s a 170 page book right there.

So I would need to focus on writing 5-paragraph mini-essays. Once I write 100 of these and connect them, I will have a book length work. How long will it take? I think I can write 2 high quality mini-essays per week. I’m talking really polished here. That’s just 10 paragraphs a week, or, 50 weeks total. That also works out to 4 essays per month, or, a chapter every 2.5 months.

Now, this breakdown is calculated as if I were making steady progress like a well-calibrated little writing machine. But I know that I will write absolutely nothing on some days, not a word, and maybe write 5-times the required daily average on others.

Amazon books came in Monday 12/15! When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (2001) by Roger Lowenstein,  Myths of Rich and Poor:Why We’re Better Off Than We Think  (1999) by W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm, and The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (2010) by Nicholas Carr.

Read chapters 1 through 7 of Lowenstein’s Rise and Fall of LTCM. Also read the first five chapters of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows while note taking in the margins and underlining this and that. Carr hasn’t talked about the brain as much as I thought he would have in the first five chapters. He cites some study about monkeys with severed hand nerves and the corresponding rewiring in the brain at  the synaptic level, but there’s not much science there.

Found several The New Yorker pdf torrents. Printed at work. Also read a few New York Times book reviews from 100 Notable Books of 2014. Started "Book Log" blog entries to hone in on a research topic.

Books

Ordered several books cited by Lanham in The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (2006). Also found a chapter from Katherine Hayles How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (2012), in pdf. Read carefully and extracted citation styles, that is, how she cites research. Also bought a copy of: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (2011) by Nicholas Carr. A trip to Barnes and Noble’s “Science” shelves, opposite “Math”. The Math section is replete with Dummies books.