At the end of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, his epic account of Western literature, he says that his book was only possible because he, a German Jew, was exiled in Istanbol and away from his books. He still had access to his primary texts, the great works of Western literature – Homer, Dante, Virginia Woolfe – but he was separated from the academic libraries of Europe, and thus liberated from the influence and obligations of scholarship. He had nothing but himself and his texts.

One of the challenges of our digital age is that we are rarely “away from our books,” not only our Google Books, but also the ideas of others that flood the internet and our research notes. This challenge is especially pointed given the purpose of academic writing: to make an original contribution to a scholarly conversation. Academic writing requires originality, but it can be elusive, especially in fields such as history, philosophy, and literary studies that interpret and reinterpret past ideas and scholarship. We necessarily read other academics, but there is a fine line between responsive and derivative. Articles and books are often rejected by publishers or reviewed negatively by readers because they are not sufficiently original. Sometimes, as in the case of Auerbach, the greatest contributions to an academic field come from those who are least enmeshed in it.

“Me thinks that the moment my legs begin to move,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, “My thoughts begin to flow.” Stand up, step away from your books, walk around, and write – that has become my answer to the problem of scholarly overexposure.

My path to this position was unconventional. When I was in graduate school, the plan was for me to finish my dissertation before my wife and I had children. We missed that mark by about six months, which meant I had to write the last 30 pages of my dissertation on my mobile phone, with a child, sometimes wailing, in my other hand. This “mobile composing” evolved as I began going for long walks with my son in his stroller (we lived in Southern California at the time, so the weather was accommodating, and there were miles and miles of paved walking trails). One of the virtues of this “mobile composing” was that it got me away from my books, made sure I was offering my own insights and original contributions to my research topic, as opposed to creating a pastiche of quotations and ideas from other critics, which is what much of my earlier writing had amounted to.

I’m an early riser, and I would wake up at around 4 AM – before the world, and my son, awoke, demanding my attention with emails and diapers (both usually filled with the same stuff: piss and shit). I would use this unfettered time to read over the literary works and passages I was writing about that day, as well as any relevant criticism I planned to consider. By 7 AM or so, my son would awake, and I would make him breakfast and send my wife off to work as the material I had read that morning rattled around in my mind, figuring itself out. At around 9 AM, I would head out for a long walk with my son. Inevitably, whatever was important from what I had read that morning would stick in my head, and I took the time on these long walks to organize my thoughts and plan a way to present them effectively. Then, when it came time to write my actual sentences, I would walk for four or five minutes, thinking about the sentence I was composing, and revising it several times in my head. Then I would dictate the sentence into my phone. The sentence might only be 10-15 words, but those words had behind them several minutes of thinking about how to sharpen both the quality of the idea and clarity of its expression. I usually wrote between two and four double-spaced pages per day.

I wouldn’t always copy my mobile compositions over to a word processing program immediately. Often they sat on my phone and in my pocket for several days, which meant that they were available for revisions as I went about my life trying to be a teacher and a parent. Thus, any analytical residue that came to me in the course of a day, a week, or a month could easily be incorporated into the composition. Prior to mobile composing, that idea might have been victoriously nodded at and then forgotten about. Mobile composing allows one to live one’s ideas, to develop them organically over time, not only when one has the luxury of sitting at one’s desk.

When I was happy with my mobile composition, I wouldn’t just email it to myself or copy-and-paste it into the paper I was working on. Instead, I would pull up my composition on my phone and manually retype it into my word processing program. Doing so meant that I was revising both my ideas and my language as they cycled in through my eyes, back through my mind, and out through my fingers, revisions that probably wouldn’t have occurred had I simply imported my mobile composition.

Mobile composing need not be done on an electronic device, of course. The core of the idea is walking and thinking that is periodically recorded in writing. But we now have the technology to write while we walk. Walking gets the mind warm, propels thought forward, encourages energy and movement in ideas through the same energy and movement in the body.

Thus, I think about “writing criticism” what the poet Edward Hirsh thinks about “writing poetry”: “Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind. Poetry is written from the body as well as the mind, and the rhythm and pace of a walk can get you going and keep you grounded. It’s a kind of light meditation.” Walking while composing allows for a free progression of thought, one that can be periodically stamped into one’s mobile phone. Just as social media sites like Twitter and Instagram allow one to communicate thoughts and experiences with all the excitement that accompanies them “in the moment,” mobile composing allows one to record, for example, the excitement of discovery in literary criticism. This process of discovery must, of course, be revised in due course, but mobile composing allows one to capture and replicate the process of the mind making sense of evidence, as one’s reader will be doing when working through an academic essay. In general, I find myself revising my arguments and framing materials heavily, dozens of times, but I find that the first time I articulate my analyses of specific bits of information is usually my best articulation. There is an excitement and an attention to the detail and richness of that information that can be lost if I already know where I’m going. If I try to go back and re-create the specifics of that analysis, they never survive.

One virtue of using a mobile device is that walking and thinking and writing by speaking imitates the act of revising. Usually, we should write more like we talk. On the one hand, we should avoid inflated diction, which is why we often tell students to eschew jargon and write in plain language. On the other hand, we should try to imitate the rhythms of speech in our writing, which is why we tell students to read their prose aloud when they’re editing. Mobile composing satisfies both demands, helping one write in plain yet elegant language.

As an aside, one fascinating thing that has occurred is that, when I go back and read a passage from the mobile composing period of my dissertation, I can remember exactly where I was on exactly which Southern California trail when I wrote it. (Living now in New England, this is often a warming memory in winter.) This is the mobile composing version of the “memory palace” in classical rhetoric. And because I would would write a paragraph over the course of a two hour walk, reading that paragraph feels like a warp-speed journey over that trail.

I’ve also discovered that Siri, the “personal assistant” on iPhones, is narcissistic: she always hears “theory” as “Siri”. She is also philosophically conservative: she hears “Nietzsche” as “shit.”

The above thoughts were dictated into an iPhone during the commute from Lowell, MA to Harvard University at 5:05 AM on a Friday. The previous night at dinner, I had told a colleague the story about composing the end of my dissertation on my phone, and I thought it might be nice to set some thoughts down. I alighted upon the term “mobile composing” at about 5:30 on that Friday morning. The opening bit about Auerbach was added at 5:51, once I’d gotten to my office. At first, the current paragraph was the opening paragraph (“The following thoughts were dictated into an iPhone ...”), but I felt this opening to be too self-indulgent, so at 6:42 I moved this paragraph to its current location at the end of the piece. I presented some of these thoughts to students in my freshman composition class at 10 AM; they then walked the hallways of our building for five minutes, thinking about the best way to articulate their thesis statements, and came back and spent five minutes writing those statements out. The statements that they wrote, I suggested, were probably clearer and more poignant statements of their arguments than the ones they wrote the night before while chained to their computers. Several of those students have reported that they have incorporated “mobile composing” into their writing process with great success. I added the paragraph about writing as we speak at 2:41 PM that afternoon; the first sentence of that paragraph was added 40 minutes later. In between, I added a reference to the television show House, M.D (“Walking gives the illusion that the plot is moving forward”), but I later deleted it because it was distracting. At 2:44 PM the following Saturday, I did a pass through the piece, reorganizing the order of my ideas and sharpening my prose. At 5:35 AM on Sunday, I recalled a lecture on walking and poetry I’d heard from Edward Hirsh, and I incorporated a reference. While searching for that lecture, I came upon the quote from Thoreau, which I thought would serve as a fitting epigraph of sorts. This piece then sat on my phone for about two months, occasionally being revised when I found myself with a spare 15 minutes on the subway. Eventually, I manually retyped it into my word processing program, revising as I went.