Hey, congrats, you're going to grad school in the fall! As I wind down this blog for the summer (I'll be back in September), I'm thinking about all of us on our journeys in/into/out of academia, and for you in your long hot pre-grad-school summer I have two pieces of advice:

So you decided to go to grad school. Why?

In my view, if you're going into a PhD program, there is only one good reason: you want to be a researcher. Maybe you have a burning desire to be a linguistics professor; maybe you don't, you just want to do linguistics research for at least a little while. All good.

BUT, on the other hand, if you signed up for a PhD program because you just like being a student, or because you want to be a teacher, may I suggest that you think about whether you may have made a mistake? Which is not the end of the world, mistakes are something humans have been doing since as long as there were humans, but which maybe should cause you to re-evaluate your choices. If what you want is to be a teacher, love that, but you should know that in a linguistics PhD, you will be expected to do research; furthermore, whether you can get a job as a professor (which perhaps you imagine as a job of mostly teaching) will be determined in large part by your success in research. (Also there are more straightforward and more stable paths to a life of teaching than embarking on a linguistics PhD, but I'm sure you already know that.) And the same main point applies for those who just want to be a student, passively absorbing information from a teacher. If this is you, the thing is: if you've already completed your undergraduate or possibly MA training in linguistics, that passive time in your education is just, sadly, over. A PhD program is about learning to create knowledge, not just absorb it. You can't be in PhD school very long without noticing that your teachers do not know all the answers and that you, the student, are supposed to figure things out—things that your teachers don't know! If that excites you, great—you want to be a researcher after all! If not, again, it might be time to reconsider.¹

From here on out I'm going to assume you're in the wanting-to-be-a-researcher crowd. So, would-be researcher, what do you want to research? What are you curious about? Maybe you're the type of person who has a long list written down somewhere with PAPER IDEAS written right on the top. Maybe, at the opposite end, that prospect makes you squirmy. Wherever you are on this lil' spectrum, I have a version of the same suggestion for you, and that suggestion is:

Yes but WHAT do I read? May I suggest we start instead with: WHY do I read? You read because as you become a scholar you are joining a conversation. Imagine there's a giant room. People are talking in that room. They have been talking for a very long time. When someone is talking, others are listening, formulating their response to what was said. Maybe they agree, they want to say why the point was correct even more than had been talked about before. Maybe they disagree, they want to go through all the ways in which their interlocutor was misguided. Meanwhile people are milling about, going from conversation to conversation, overhearing what is said, sharing this tidbit over here that they heard over there, pointing out the connection or the contrast between points, bringing up new topics, bringing the group or at least some of its members closer to an understanding of some hidden reality, itself the thing that brings people to that room, and has done so for generations.

Now here's you. You're new. And you have some particular curiosity or interest. You could just stand there in the doorway and start holding forth about your thing, but no one would listen to you. One, there are all these big, exciting, sometimes raucous discussions going on in the room, which look really fun, and they would much rather duck into one of those. Two, they have no idea who you are, what your deal is, why they should stop and listen. Three (related to two), you look like a weirdo. You're standing there talking to no one. The obvious thing you need to do is find a part of that big conversation you can join, something to latch on to that is already under discussion, some way that the thing that you are interested in relates to the things already under discussion for someone else. You need to find out not just why YOU care about your thing but why someone else should care about it too. And to do that, you have to spend a while listening in that room before you get to talking.

When you listen, there's a couple different types of things you learn. There are conventions about how people communicate. I am not talking about "academic English" here but rather genres, ways of stringing ideas together, parts of the story that must always be told vs. parts that can be skipped. And within those conventions there is considerable variation. There is not one right way to write a paper; there is a big family of right ways, different things right at different times for different purposes. And there is the simple fact that the people in that conversation are, indeed, people. They have personalities, interests, egos, biases. They find certain things familiar and soothing and other things unfamiliar and frightening. They are open to certain types of arguments and not to certain others. They choose to listen to certain other people and not to others. And much as you might think all of this is elitist bullshit or anti-scientific or whatever, you do want something from these people: you want them to listen to you. Listening to them is your key to figuring out how to do that.

So if that is WHY you read (metaphorical version), then WHAT do you read? You read anything that will help you join the current conversation. You need to learn the genres and how they are played with, understand the players, and start to get a feel for how your interests could ultimately be woven in to the stuff that is under discussion. If you're the person with a list of PAPER IDEAS, you need to learn the ways that the relevant type of paper is typically structured (what I'm calling "genre") and what sorts of arguments your paper will be expected to make. If you feel like paper ideas are a bit farther away, you want to get a sense for what is going on in the scholarly conversation in connection with your interests, however vague they may be, and to get ideas for what sorts of things more narrowly you could ultimately work on. Whichever side of that you are on, I suggest that you focus on readings that are

You want to read recent stuff because it is the conversation that is going on now. Reading "classics" written before you were born is a fine thing to do, but certainly not the most helpful or urgent thing to do when you are just getting started. Something published two, three, four years ago is fine. Ten or fifteen years ago, also good, but less good as a starting place.²

You want to read stuff in prestigious venues because ultimately this is what you are trying to produce. It shows you the genre and who the players are. Think, published in Language, not just posted as a preprint on social media. Whatever area of linguistics you are in, ask an expert (e.g. faculty in the PhD program you are joining) what the best journals in that area are, and then read things recently published in those. (If there is a paywall issue, ask faculty or students in the program you're joining to send you the pdfs.)

Now maybe you are someone whose interests are the syntax of medieval French³, or variation in the semantics of perfective aspect, or the historical development of ejectives in Caucasian languages, etc etc. It's plausible that there are not very many recent papers in top venues on your narrow area of interest. So you need to widen out a little bit. Syntax of Old French person, you're interested in syntax, in French, in Romance languages. Read stuff related to that. Variation in perfective semantics person, go read about TAM semantics and about semantic variation in other dimensions. Read about semantics generally! What I'm recommending is not a literature review for a specific paper you're trying to write. I'm recommending an immersion experience in a broader literature, most of which you will not know the existence of before you start going to look at it.

Read a lot of stuff. Read stuff you're not sure you will like. Read stuff that conflicts with other stuff you've read or been taught. Read stuff you don't totally understand. Read and take note of things you find interesting or surprising, things you find convincing or unconvincing, things you don't understand that you would like to. Take note of the ways that authors talk about prior work, the assumptions they make, the ways they shape their arguments into an article.

If we can move into a sports metaphor: this is you doing the warm up for grad school. You arrive limbered up and more ready to get in the game.

Professing Linguistics will be back in September. Happy summer!