At the Chronicle, Rachel Toor has an essay called "Goodbye to All That" (one of my favorite titles, by the way, and taken from Robert Graves's autobiography) that gives similar advice. Here's a little of it, with the sentence that particularly struck me in bold:
In a passage that should elicit whoops of assent from his former colleagues at university presses, he [William Germano] gives advice on titles: "Avoid titles that quote literature (and especially avoid titles that use quotation marks to set off the borrowed words). Shun titles that insert punctuation in the middle of words (Re:Vision, De/Construction, and other once-new formulations that are tired now.) Avoid the academic double-whammy of an abstract title and a concrete subtitle separated by a colon."
. . . .
During a three-hour run with my friend Dean, he told me about his dissertation. A strong runner and Ironman triathlete, he slowed his pace so that I could keep up, and as we covered miles of trail ascending Stuart Peak, I asked him a barrage of questions.
By the time we'd climbed the hardest part, it was clear to me how he could revise his dissertation for publication. It would take a lot of work — an overhaul of the entire structure and some serious rethinking — but the ideas and the research could be shaped into a terrific book. It would mean saying goodbye to all the pages he had worked so hard on, and hello to a new project.
I've been thinking about that a lot as I work through the writing that I am doing right now and as I've been reading work by my students. It's easy to get carried away with your own thought processes, and the longer and more painful the process of writing a section is, the harder it is to think about tossing it out. Even if it's a section, an organizational scheme, or even an argument that fails to come together, it's still hard. Part of what struck me about what Toor was saying was the sense of excitement she felt--as an editor, someone disinterested but not uninterested--because she could see the phoenix in the ashes, so to speak, although the author can only see the ashes at that point. I'd like to think that that excitement is what I convey when I'm meeting students about their papers and explaining why they have to kill their darlings.
Of course, what makes this process possible and tolerable is knowing that earlier that day I'd had to kill my own darlings, so to speak, by jettisoning sections of painfully written text. I guess that's what gives us empathy as well as credibility with the students. Part of learning to write is learning to be, as much as possible, your own Rachel Toor to separate the phoenix and the ashes, because unlike a real phoenix, a piece of writing isn't going to rise by itself.