Acknowledgments

Today H and I went to one of the local coffeeshops to work (although this meant I didn't get started until after killing my morning for a very worthy and yet pointless and time-sucking event at school, and sitting around waiting for H to finish what he was doing at home... I like going out to do stuff with H, but coordinating two people leaving this apartment is way more complicated than one would think). And my working streak continues pretty well - I may even be developing what Joan Bolker calls a writing addiction, which I find pretty amazing. (The scary thing is that the last time I remember being this fired up about my work was during the dissertation, which is scary because of how long ago that was and how unexcited it implies I've been since then. But we won't worry about that now...)

Anyway, no matter how well the work is going, there are always those moments when one needs a little mental break...and today, during one of them, I started a draft of the acknowledgments to my (almost entirely not-yet-written) book. Have any of you out there done that - written the acknowledgments for your project before it's done? In grad school I came across the suggestion that dissertators try this - to boost morale, maybe? make the end feel closer? I did so then, and had fun doing it today - partly because it's actually really encouraging to take note of all the people who have had a hand in helping a project to fruition. It was both heart-warming and humbling, in a minor way.

Partly, however, this is fun because you can be kind of goofy and write all the silly acknowledgments that you might not actually put in the book. For instance, right now I feel seriously thankful that this coffeeshop exists, because getting away from my office/home and their distractions has helped me get back into my groove, and I want to thank the staff for keeping me supplied with iced beverages. I don't know if it'll end up in the official acknowledgments or not, but it's fun to try it out.

And this got me and H talking about what I guess you'd call the rhetoric of acknowledgments. I've noticed two clear approaches in dissertation acknowledgments: there are the people who thank anyone and everyone, at great length. They give multiple examples of their advisors' generosity and wisdom. They thank the staff at every single archive they ever visited, and people who gave them feedback in a grad seminar their first year of grad school, and their third cousin once removed, and, and, and... and go on for pages. While I love reading acknowledgments like this (they're wonderful for gleaning little tidbits of information about someone), my own followed the second, more minimal approach: you thank your committee, you thank a few select grad school friends, you thank your family, that's it, you're done, well under a page.

What's really great, however, are acknowledgments written by male academics - especially British ones - before, say, 1960. It's kind of a notorious secret that a lot of academic men had highly educated wives who "helped" them write these books - and when I say "helped," I mean they did all the work and their husbands, who had the academic affiliations, got their names on the books. (Okay, maybe this mostly happened in the nineteenth century...there were lots of antiquarians churning out editions of texts, and they didn't always do much of the work; there's one text I use which was edited in 18-something, then reissued in a "corrected" edition a few years later, because, the editor of the "correct" version said, they discovered so many errors in the original version. They asked the first editor what had gone wrong, and apparently he said that he entrusted the work to an undergraduate and the first few pages were so good that he didn't bother to check the rest.)

H and I have always joked about these men's acknowledgments of their wives' help, because they are so damn condescending: "And finally, thank you to the little woman, my devoted wife, my rod and staff, for all her dedicated assistance," blah blah blah. Today, when I told H I'd written some acknowledgments, he said, "Am in there?" and I said, "Well, not yet, because I didn't write them all, but of course you're going to be! You're going to be at the end!" And then we decided that it would be hysterical to write my own incredibly condescending thank-yous to H as the little man, to his invaluable support, etc. etc., as a spoof on the tradition.

And you know what? We couldn't come up with any. It just seemed impossible to come up with that particular brand of damning-with-faint-praise kind of thank-you when writing about a man. I mean, I'm sure it must be feasible, and it's just that our rhetorical skills were lacking, but it was an interesting conundrum.

What about you - what are the worst (or best, depending on your perspective) acknowledgments that you've ever seen?

Comments

[bitchphd]

Heh. I thanked Pseudonymous Kid, one of those "whose timely arrival gave me the incentive to finish" kind of things :)

[sharon]

I can't think of anything specific (good or bad), but the ones that make me grind my teeth just refer to 'my wife', as though she had no name or identity of her own.

A friend of mine did include his cat in the acknowledgments to his thesis, but as it's in Computer Science I've never actually read it (though I believe it was something about the cat's valiant efforts to help him with his typing...)

[P/H]

I've actually seen this done! You're going to kill me because I don't remember where, but a few years ago I read a great book written by a female academic in which, at the end of the acknowledgements, she thanks her husband in a perfect parody of the kind of thing you describe. If I manage to dig deep enough into my brains to find it, I'll let you know. But yes, I'm a big fan of reading acknowledgements too!

[La Lecturess]

I love the acknowledgements! When working at my various publishing jobs I *always* read this section, for every book, even when just doing stupid things like printing or photocopying a manuscript.

What I hate most are authors who try to be hip by using street slang, badly, in quote marks. A recent example: "And finally, I have to give a 'shout out' to my son, Tweedledum." I've also seen "mad props," also in quotes. (Somehow it wouldn't be so annoying if the authors weren't just flagrantly signalling how unhip they are with those quote marks!)

In my field, we still have acknoledgements which acknowledge the foreign wife with her help (language editing and typing etc.) in the manuscript. In a seminar, a female scholar native in the language and I were talking about this, and she said that she should thank her husband for his typing and computer help (even though she was doing all this herself!). I haven't gotten a hand on her book yet to see if this came true. ;)

[joanna]

Why don't you turn it around and write an overly-inflated with praise piece about your husband--play to the cultural stereotype about men instead of trying to use the model of the female spouse?

[New Kid on the Hallway]

That's true - I could thank him for changing tires, mowing the lawn, carrying my luggage, bringing home the bacon, changing the channel on the tv... ;-)

[BrightStar (B*)]

oh my word... I could have written an acknowledgement to my spouse in my dissertation... like, "thanks for doing all of the cleaning, the laundry, the cooking..." He thought I would eventually take these tasks back from him, but now I've just been conditioned not to do them. But I'm trying to contribute more around the house. Really.

I secretly read the acknowledgments in my friend's dissertation this summer when I was housesitting for her. She acknowledged me! I didn't even know.

Do people tell those they acknowledge? I guess I didn't really tell the people myself, and I don't know if they ever read the acknowledgments of mine.

[Peter]

My advisor, who has a rather odd sense of humor, thanked his wife and son in his first book and proclaimed that, of course, all mistakes in the book were theirs. I've always thought of that as a great parody of overly sentimental acknowledgments.

[eb]

I may know who Peter's adviser is, but it's probably more likely that more than one person has done that. In any case I was going to tell the same story (about all the mistakes being someone else's).

I also read an acknowledgments section that steadily became more and more informal: from professional titles and institution names, to just full names, to first names, to nicknames.

[af]

I'm interested in the acknowledgements where the author thanks his/her spouse or partner at the end and says something along the lines of "I couldn't have done it without him/her." I always wonder if this is really true. As a single person, I'm tempted to put at the end of my acknowledgements, "I'm indebted to many, many people, but I actually managed to do this without a husband!"

I love reading acknowledgements, and of course especially love the ones I'm in (just a few times so far). And they are fun to write. It's such a nice, permanent way to express your gratitude. How many professions allow you to do that publicly?

[Otto Pohl]

I wrote two academic books before I got into an MA program overseas. In neither did I have any aknowledgements. Mainly because I got no assistance with the text of the works. I did dedicate them to my mother.

My Ph.D. dissertation also has no aknowledgments. Although the fact that my supervisor let me do it in 2 years rather than the normal 3 years of a British Ph.D. was most welcome. As was his hands off approach in allowing me to write about what I wanted. But, I generally do not believe in aknowledgements.

It might be different if I ever got a grant or something. My experience has been, however, that other academics are far more obstacles than sources of assistance. I wanted to have a disaknowledgement section on my dissertation, but I realized it would exceed the total length of the thesis by several orders of magnitude.

[Another Damned Medievalist]

I just checked mine -- I definitely damned AXADH with faint praise! ADH and my family, who don't know why I wanted to do this, but still think it's "cool." And I thanked him first (he was very demanding about being in the acknowledgements, because "you never would have done it without me."). I am soooo glad that I thanked DV properly, though.

[joanna]

My sister ackowledged our father by dedicating her dis to him. It was very sweet and appropriate as she has inheirited his facility for languages and wrote about bilingual ed. She gave him a copy of the dis on Father's Day, and now we joke that she raised the bar so high that nothing else will ever do.

[Deeni]

I think it was a dedication but I've never been able to wrap my mind around it-- a book on Christian saints dedicated to/in memory of the author's holocaust victim Jewish grandparents/family.

[YelloCello]

I remember laughing out loud while reading the acknowledgments section of a dissertation from my graduate program. The author had cursorily thanked everyone, including his wife, in the first two paragraphs. Then he wrote three more paragraphs in which he lovingly detailed the contributions of each of his three cats. E.g., "To Mitzi, who purred and purred next to my keyboard, and whose soft orange coat was a consolation in times of writer's block. To BoBo, who like to curl up and snooze next to my library books. And to Baby-Cat, who probably added three months to the writing process, just because she is so adorably cute..."
I happen to be a cat person, but there was something deeply troubling about the excessive feline praise. Maybe it was just a joke. But I wondered if it was also an aggressive move against the spouse... or just based on the author's extreme attachment to the animals who had shown more support for the project than had the humans in his life.

[profsynecdoche]

Mark Bauerlein actually wrote a pretty funny little article about this a few years ago. One thing he pointed out is that people use acknolwedgements to stake their place in the academic world (look at my famous advisors and friends, look at the number of invited lectures I give, archives I visit, etc.). But this also makes them useful to read as mini-CVs. You can usually find out where the person went to grad school, held jobs, etc.

[Mano]

One of the most amusing acknowledgements I ever read was one in which the prof was trying to stake her claim, mentioning her famous advisor, etc. It was funny to me because I heard the bad things her advisor said about her behind her back to grad students from my school. Was cracking up.

[Mel]

I love reading acknowledgments -- a kind of humanizing moment when you get to find out who this person is friends with, if they have cats or dogs, etc.

Dissertation acknowledgements (or the first-books that come from disses) are especially interesting, since there's the "required" acknowledgement of the committee or advisor, plus the usually warmer ones for friends and new colleagues.

I frequently write mine in my head for future projects...

[Caleb]

Great post and thread! It's always tricky when acknowledgements include a line to the effect of: "Of course, despite all the help I've received, I alone remain responsible for the book." If done right, it comes off as a humble acknowledgement that errors remain, and that they are not anyone's fault. But if you're not careful, it can come across sounding pompous: like you're acknowledging help only pro forma, but that really you didn't need any help. It's a fine line, and I've definitely read some iterations that seemed to cross it.

[Daybreak]

I followed the traditional path in my diss, writing the preface and acknowledgements last. My advisor wrote at least one of his books straight from beginning to end, starting with the acknowledgements, then the preface, then chapter 1 and so forth. Really I can't for the life of me imagine a mind that works in that linear a fashion!

\*/

[Phred]

Reading acknowledgements can be a hoot. I don't have the book on me, but one of my graduate advisors managed to thank her husband for his many gifts in a manner that implied he was a most satisfactory lover (it came off much sweeter than I'm making it sound). It's one of my favorite acknowledgements.

I don't have a book, but after some brief acknowledgements for an article I wrote with my spouse, we ended with "the authors blame all remaining errors on one another." Then we giggled about it for weeks ('cause we're dorks).

[Academic Coach]

I routinely advise grad students I'm coaching to playfully write mock acknowledgements to advisors who are giving them grief.

My own version of my secret acknowledgements went "Thanks to the Ice Queen who, by refusing to let me analyze her data, (that I had dutifully collected for four years) taught me a great deal about research methodology. Without her stingy hoarding, I would never have learned so much about instrument design and IRB forms. Gee, Ice Queen, where would I be without you?... much further along, actually.

************
I'm a psychoanalytically trained clinical psychologist and in my department, reading peers' acknowledgements was how you finally got to learn who their analyst was....

[Another Damned Medievalist]

You do realize that you and several other bloggers will be in my acknowledgements should I manage to get a book done, don't you?

[New Kid on the Hallway]

ADM, I've been thinking about the blogger acknowledgments! There are folks I want to acknowledge and I was pondering whether it would make more sense to list them by real name or by pseudonyms... ;-) (We'll have to see what things are like by the time I get the damn thing done.)

academic coach, I love the idea of anti-acknowledgments. I could have a field day with those with my advisor (who, I should say, does have many good qualities, but those are far easier to overlook!).

B*, I had a similar experience recently - I downloaded a diss from my grad program (one of the diss-revision guides I saw talked about reading someone else's diss to see what distinguishes them from books, so I downloaded a few from my grad program), and lo and behold, I was thanked in the acknowledgments! I hadn't known the author was going to do that (and it was nice as I hadn't realized I'd provided any more help than anyone else out there).

YelloCello, yes, although H and I both acknowledged the cats in our disses, there is something occasionally troubling about the excessive cat dedication...although one of the more human sides of my advisor has come through when she's dedicated a book to her dog. :-)

Otto, what a depressing take on academia - I'm sorry to hear that you haven't encountered more support.

Prof synecdoche, I'll have to look for the Bauerlein article - that's one of my favorite things about acknowledgments, figuring out networks and so on (I sometimes think I would love to be a spy).