Tag Archives: Anxiety

Writing as Yourself

Posted on January 31, 2022 | Leave a comment

After a recent one-on-one writing consultation, a student sent me a thoughtful reflection on what she had learned: ‘to acknowledge my writing style and learn how and where I can use my strength while I keep improving what I have’. I’m always glad when a writer leaves with a clear sense of their own strengths as well as areas for further development. As I thought about this further, I began to wonder about this tension: We all want to become better writers, but we can only be the writers that we are. The relationship between these two ideas is at the heart of the writing challenge. We all need to figure out how we can work within our own constraints while still finding pathways to improvement.

The student who sent me the above note, for instance, was a very detailed writer. Within the first paragraph, she had drilled down to a level of detail that was clearly premature. After agreeing that this tendency might be overwhelming for her reader, we talked about the benefits of having written this fine-grained material. I suggested that she create a series of topical headings that would allow her to ‘tag’ each of these sentences. Doing so would allow her to easily move this material out of her introduction, where it was obscuring the big picture. Moving these passages could give her a head start on constructing later sections, where the detail would be helpful. She had written things that weren’t serving the needs of the reader where they were, but that didn’t make it pointless to have written them. In the future, she will be able to recognize this tendency in her own writing and to use this strategy to build on her own strengths.

We all have particular tendencies when we sit down to write a first draft. For many writers, it’s more helpful to find ways to make those tendencies beneficial than to try to alter them. In my experience, how people write seems to be somewhat fixed; how they revise seems to be where much of the growth occurs.

If you look at early drafts of your own writing, what patterns do you typically find? Needless to say, self-diagnosis is far from a simple process; if you have institutional writing support, that feedback can be super helpful for building your understanding of your own writing tendencies. Identifying those tendencies makes finding a corresponding revision strategy easier. I’ve already talked about the student with the habit of providing too much detail too early. (You can find more on how this tendency manifest itself in thesis writing in this post on structuring thesis introductions.) Here are some other common tendencies that I see:

  • Branching out sideways: Instead of moving in a strictly linear manner, some early drafts branch out in multiple directions. If this happens in your writing, can you highlight the branching point? Once you’ve identified that point, you can decide if you want to follow that branch (adjusting earlier text as needed) or tag-and-move that material somewhere else. Those digressive moments can help you to clarify the optimal direction for your text, but the ability to do so starts with pinpointing the exact moment that you change direction.
  • Over-relying on the literature: Instead of focusing on the author’s own contribution, some early drafts move too quickly to detailed discussions of the scholarly literature. Doing so can inhibit the reader’s ability to see your work unfold. Try highlighting your use of sources in an early draft, possibly using different colours for different species of reference (e.g., a textual reference, a single-text citation, a multiple-text citation). Once your sources standout in this manner, you can choose the ones that are helpful (adapting their form as needed) and tag-and-move the others.
  • Building schemes: Instead of allowing an organic structure to emerge, some early drafts get caught up in building organizational schemes. If that scheme is inapt, it can then get in the way of finding a better one. Have a look in your drafts for places that you signal structure (this question has three dimensions; this insight leads to a dichotomy between … ; this issue should be examined in such-and-such a way). Once those structure markers are visible to you, you can decide if the framing seems helpful or if it’s getting in your way.

Do any of those tendencies seem familiar to you? Whatever you found, chances are you weren’t thrilled with your own early drafts. Dealing with the persistence of terrible first drafts can be made easier by remembering that the goal of the first draft is not meeting the needs of the reader; the goal of the first draft is laying the groundwork for eventually writing a final draft that will meet the needs of the reader. Your first drafts aren’t uniquely terrible–everyone writes terrible first drafts–but they may be terrible in ways that are unique to you. Becoming aware of those tendencies means that you may be able to find ways to improve your writing within your own writing practice. This drive for self-awareness can lead you to deepen your understanding of how you write first drafts and to develop strategies that work specifically with your own writerly inclinations. Thriving as a writer ultimately comes from learning to write as yourself, as the writer you are rather than the writer you wish you were.

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Writing and the Fear of the Future

Posted on July 21, 2021 | 5 comments

A few years ago, I wrote a post about writer’s block. More accurately, I wrote a post about the limitations of that particular framing in the sphere of academic writing. For most academic writers, writing is the solution rather than the problem; more writing is often the best way to work through our writing troubles. I’m not disputing, of course, that people feel ‘blocked’ when they try to write; I am simply arguing that those inhibitions are often connected to tangled thinking rather than an inability to write. To respond to these snarls in our thinking, most of us need to use writing. An early version of that post had another section on the psychological issues associated with committing to our own ideas and then sharing them with the world; however, since the post was getting too long, I abandoned the second part. Since I’m currently unsettled by the prospect of completing and sharing my book project, it seems like a good opportunity to revisit that topic and reflect on this aspect of writing anxiety.

As I move from a first to a second draft of my manuscript, my experience of writing is sharply divided. On the one hand, I’m really excited about this project, and that excitement has manifested itself as a pretty enjoyable drafting process. On the other, I’m increasingly paralyzed by the thought of a future in which others actually read the book. As long as I’m writing, things feel good. Once I contemplate being finished with writing, I start to lose my nerve. Being done means that I won’t ever be able to make the book as good on the page as it is in my head. And I can vividly imagine all the ways in which people will be critical of my imperfect efforts. As a result, I’m resisting the move from the open-ended drafting process to the decision-making revision process, to the moment when I say, ‘this is good (enough)’.

To move myself forward, I’ve been trying to think about the sorts of things I say to other writers in these moments:

Recognize the paradox at the heart of writing. Getting writing done is good because it moves you closer to being done; however, getting writing done can feel bad because it moves you closer to being read by others. When this paradox goes unrecognized, you may imagine your anxiety is caused simply by deficiencies in your text. Some of those deficiencies may be real, but addressing them alone may not resolve your anxiety. To work through the anxiety, it’s crucial to understand the underlying psychological dynamic.

Picture your audience as full of people who need to learn from you. In other words, don’t write for people who have nothing better to do than to criticize you. Instead, try the more natural act of writing for people who don’t already know your subject. Writing is easier when you imagine being read by an eager beginner rather than by a jaded expert. Of course, graduate students often do write for an audience of people with extraordinary expertise in their field; as a pragmatic matter, those readers may have to be catered to in one way or another. Despite this unavoidable circumstance, it’s still an excellent idea to picture an ideal reader who will be edified by your expertise.

Embrace your expertise but acknowledge your inexperience. Despite your undeniable subject matter expertise, you are more than likely undertaking a task that is novel for you as a writer. Maybe it’s a master’s thesis when the longest thing you’ve ever written is an undergraduate capstone project or maybe it’s a doctoral thesis when the most demanding thing you’ve ever written is a master’s thesis. Or maybe it’s your first national grant competition, research article, or book manuscript. Academic writing projects have a frustrating tendency to increase in degree of difficulty as you go along. Acknowledging the growing pains as you learn to write in new ways will help you to remember the importance of self-compassion.

Focus on what you need to feel finished. Given that perfection is unattainable, your project will inevitably have to be wrapped up before you are entirely satisfied with it. The key here is to distinguish between the things that you know have to happen in order for the project to be successful and the things about the project that just make you nervous; focusing on the former can help you resist the general anxiety associated with the latter. To help yourself focus on what you need to ‘feel finished’, try creating a list with two columns: in one column, put all the things that need to get done; in the other column, put all the things that make you generally uneasy about your project. Items may move between columns as you evaluate and re-evaluate what absolutely has to happen before you allow your writing out into the world. The important thing is to have the two categories, so you won’t come undone at the thought of trying to fix everything all at once.

Perhaps all this well-meaning advice can give me a list of helpful reminders: remember that making progress can paradoxically make me more anxious; remember that I truly believe the book will be helpful to lots of graduate student writers, even if my own peers may disagree with things that I say; remember that I’ve never written a book before and thus naturally lack confidence in my own ability to do so; and remember to focus my energy on the long list of concrete things that actually need to get done for this book to be all that I want it to be.

What about you? What do you do when the fear of the future gets in the way of your writing?

♦

This post is the seventh in a series of book reflections posts. As I go through the writing process, I’m pausing to talk about my progress and my thoughts on the writing process itself. The progress reports are really just for me: I’m using the public nature of the blog to keep me accountable. The actual point of these posts is to reflect on what I’m learning about writing and how these insights connect to the topics covered here on the blog.

Status Update: At this point, I have a first draft that I’m pretty happy with, but my revision process has stalled. In addition to my fear of the future, I have also struggled with the cumulative weight and pressure of the lockdown and inevitable fatigue with online teaching. I’ve been taking stock of my progress over my vacation, and I’m excited to dive back in. I also got a formal extension to my due date, which is soothing to my soul. As I engage with the revisions in the coming months, I’m sure I’ll have reflections to share here. Many thanks to those of you who have reached out to express enthusiasm about the book.

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Personalizing Your Revision Practice

Posted on August 20, 2020 | 2 comments

One of my favourite bits of revision advice is that writers should learn about their own writing habits. To revise your writing effectively, you should know what words or phrases you overuse or what rules you tend to misunderstand. Bringing to bear your accumulated understanding of your own writing habits will definitely improve your revision process. While working on my book manuscript this summer, I encountered a situation that deepened my appreciation for the efficacy of this type of self-knowledge.

As I was struggling through the middle section of the book, I realized that the structure really wasn’t working. I had tried out many different things and had ended up equally unhappy with all my attempts. With the help of many reverse outlines (and the incisive advice of a good friend), I realized that I was indecisively flip-flopping between two different structural arrangements:

  1. Having three separate chapters of writing principles, followed by a single chapter of revision strategies
  2. Dividing up the revision strategies and interspersing them throughout the three chapters of writing principles

This type of structural choice probably seems pretty familiar; most of us have had the experience of confronting such a choice in our academic writing. To take a simple example, let’s say you’ve got eighteen participants, each of whom was asked six interview questions. Should you give each participant’s answers to all six questions before going on to the next participant? Or should you give all eighteen participants’ answers to question one before going on to give all the answers to question two, and so on. The best answer to such structural questions will always be determined by context. Do you want to reflect on the implications of the totality of each participant’s responses? Or do you want to draw connections between the varied responses of different participants to each question? Given whatever it is that you’re trying to accomplish with your writing, one of these options is surely preferable for your eventual reader. The problem can be, however, that you might genuinely not know what your reader needs in this instance. I was definitely trying to meet the needs of my future reader, but that commitment alone didn’t solve my problem: I was still able to make a sound case for either approach.

I eventually came to a resolution by reflecting more deeply on my own tendencies as an academic writer. I often—without even knowing that I’m doing so—shy away from being concrete. My readers have long told me that my academic writing would benefit from more detail, more elaborations, more examples. Recognizing that I generally err on the side of offering concepts without concrete application, I decided that the right solution was probably the one where I pushed myself to be more concrete. Rather than asking my reader to work through three chapters of writing principles before giving them a strategies chapter, I would make each chapter a blend of principles and strategies. Carving up a chapter and integrating its parts into three other existing chapters wasn’t easy, but I’m provisionally happy with the results. 

What makes my experience potentially relevant for others is the general notion that self-knowledge can help with decision making in academic writing. When you are confronting a structural dilemma, try thinking about the needs of the reader. If that intervention doesn’t magically clear everything up, try reflecting on the ways in which you may typically struggle to meet the needs of the reader. This strategy is helpful because it forces you to think about how your inclinations may not reliably serve the needs of your reader. Different writers will obviously have different writerly inclinations. I revel in creating systematic principles without sufficient attention to concrete applications; others may excel at detailed explication but may be stingy when to it comes to the higher order unification of their ideas. General revision principles—like understanding the needs of your reader—are great, but your revision practices also need to be grounded in a deepening grasp of your persistent habits. Overcoming the gap between how we tend to express ourselves and how the reader wants the material to be expressed is the goal of all revision. We can each give that process a boost by personalizing our revision practices with a growing awareness of what we do well when we write and where we consistently fall short. 

♦

This post is the fifth in a series of book reflections posts. As I go through the writing process, I’m pausing to talk about my progress and my thoughts on the writing process itself. The progress reports are really just for me: I’m using the public nature of the blog to keep me accountable. The actual point of these posts will be to reflect on what I’m learning about writing and how these insights connect to the topics covered here on the blog.

Status Update: In the spirit of public transparency about my book writing process, I’m going to conclude each of these book reflections posts with a status update. Needless to say, the complexity of life over the past five months has made writing extra challenging. I have now finished my provisional revision of Parts One and Two, which puts me on schedule, at least according to the revised schedule I created in June. That means that I’ll try to write Chapter Seven in August (somewhat realistic) and Chapter Eight in September–October (less realistic) and Chapter Nine in November (who knows what will be going on by then!). But by the end of year, I should have a full draft ready for extensive revision.

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The Lure of Planning

Posted on July 9, 2020 | 4 comments

As I’ve been working on my book manuscript, I’ve been struggling with a persistent tension: I know that I should let problems emerge through writing, but I want to solve those problems in advance through better conceptualization. At the first hint of trouble, my inclination is to stop and rethink. As with most writing challenges, there can be value in both approaches. If there’s a significant problem with the plan, surely it’s wasteful to simply carry on implementing that plan. On the other hand, as I’ve frequently argued in this blog, our best chance of understanding the problem often comes from using writing to clarify our thinking while working towards a full first draft. In most cases, moving ahead—even when we sense that something is off—is often our best chance of grasping the problem. In fact, here’s a (not-yet-revised) passage from the chapter I just finished:

I often meet with writers who are working hard to improve the first half of a chapter or an article; in these meetings, we find that so many questions lead us to a discussion of what is yet to be written. Those writers are often hampered in their ability to fix what is already there because of the uncertainty caused by what isn’t there. To be clear, I’m not advocating pressuring yourself to finish any piece of writing as quickly as possible. Writing often starts and then needs to stop for more research or data analysis. Or because life gets in the way. But serious structural revision will work best once you’ve reached that end point, and the value of getting to this stage is notable enough that you may wish to push ahead, allowing the draft to be manifestly flawed.

Despite having just written these words, I’m still struggling with the desire to create a perfect plan. Even though I know that the strengths and weaknesses of the current plan will emerge from writing the chapters, I’m fixated on the notion that I can reconceptualize my way out. For some writers in some writing circumstances, that reconceptualization might be the right strategy. I’m pretty sure, however, that this stepping back from writing to do more planning is just me losing my nerve. It was fun while it lasted: there were big sheets of paper and a variety of post-it notes and lots of coloured pens. And maybe it helped me see things more clearly. And maybe I’m being a bit puritanical about it: if I enjoyed it, it must be wrong. Whatever the timeout meant, I’m putting a stop to it. I have put away my beloved markers and am going back to the hard work of implementing my imperfect plan (just as soon as I publish this post).

I’m not pushing ahead because of some abstracted notion of productivity but rather because I literally can’t make a better plan right now. Knowing that the current plan may be wrong is a valuable perspective to carry with me, but that insight isn’t leading to any more meaningful actions. I’ve written out my worries (What if chapter five is now too long? What if, despite being too long, it is also not enough? What if the reviewers were right about my inadequate understanding of applied linguistics?) and now I’m going to give it my best shot. I’ve written about this type of anxiety before on the blog, so I’m going to end with a passage from that post:

… I have come to accept how easily I am thrown off my game by potential problems. Current problems would be one thing: it is genuinely hard to write when you hit a conceptual roadblock. But I am dissuaded from writing by the mere possibility of problems in the future. What if I’ve chosen the wrong approach to this issue? What if my observations are completely trite? What if my argumentation doesn’t fit my desired conclusions? The sane reaction, obviously, is to keep writing until the potential problem becomes a real problem or fails to materialize. I’m working on getting better at blocking out the ‘whatifs’ when I write. Do you know that Shel Silverstein poem? It’s one of my favourite kids’ poems: Last night while I lay thinking here/Some Whatifs crawled inside my ear/And pranced and partied all night long/And sang their same old Whatif song:/Whatif I flunk that test?/Whatif green hair grows on my chest?/Whatif nobody likes me?/Whatif a bolt of lightning strikes me?…

♦

This post is the fourth in a series of book reflections posts. As I go through the writing process, I’ll try to pause to talk about my progress and, more importantly, about my thoughts on the writing process itself. The progress reports are really just for me: I’m using the public nature of the blog to keep me accountable. The actual point of these posts will be to reflect on what I’m learning about writing and how these insights connect to the topics covered here on the blog.

Status Update: In the spirit of public transparency about my book writing process, I’m going to conclude each of these book reflections posts with a status update. Needless to say, the complexity of life over the past four months has made writing extra challenging. I have now finished my provisional revision of Part One and completed a full draft of Chapter Four. My original schedule had me further ahead and contained the optimistic claim that ‘a viable schedule always includes time off’. While I still wholeheartedly believe that, I’m going to spend some of my vacation time this month trying to catch up. Here’s my revised schedule:

  • December 2019: Chapter One
  • January 2020: Chapters Two and Three (plus Part One revision)
  • February 2020: Chapter Four
  • March 2020:  
  • April 2020:  
  • May 2020:
  • June 2020:  
  • July 2020: Chapters Five and Six (plus Part Two revision)
  • August 2020: Chapter Seven
  • September–October 2020: Chapter Eight 
  • November 2020: Chapter Nine (plus Part Three revision)
  • December 2020–March 2021: Full Revision

I’ve left March through June of 2020 blank because I think that’s a legitimate representation of my writing experience in recent months. The challenges of parenting during a lockdown and the demands of transitioning to emergency remote teaching were enough to swallow up all of my planned writing time. I’m using this schedule as a reminder that I’m not simply ‘behind’ on my writing: my writing was overtaken by unexpected events. I’m still planning to meet my deadline, but none of us knows what the upcoming academic year has in store for us. Whatever gaps you may be experiencing between what you needed or hoped to do in 2020 and what has proved possible, I hope that you are being kind to yourself and reworking your own schedules to reflect what is possible for you right now.

 

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Writing Right Now

Posted on April 16, 2020 | 4 comments

Earlier this week, I participated in a tweetchat with #VirtualNotViral, a great initiative from Anuja Cabraal and Pat Thomson. On their site, you can find out more about their resources for doing doctoral work during a pandemic, including information on upcoming tweetchats. I was invited to discuss academic writing during these challenging times. I found it helpful to process what I’ve been thinking about writing right now, so I thought I’d share some of those thoughts here.

The key for me during these extraordinary times is that each person ought to be given space to reevaluate what they are able to do. Thinking that you should be able to carry on as usual or, worse, be more productive is to underestimate the effect of everything going on around you. If you need a break from academic work because your caregiving responsibilities have changed, of course you should take that break. If you need a break because your financial situation has worsened, of course you should take that break. If you need a break because your research plans just fell apart or because the incredibly difficult academic job market just got more dire, of course you should take that break. If you need a break because you are finding the state of the world traumatic, of course you should take that break. If you need more than a break and need support to cope through this time, I hope that support is forthcoming. Each of you is responding to a unique set of personal circumstances, geographic factors, and institutional policies, but nobody should be pressured to be productive during this time. I think this bears repeating: events beyond your control have dramatically altered the conditions under which you are working, and you shouldn’t be required to act as though that weren’t happening.

I’ve now said as many ways as I can that you shouldn’t feel pressured to write right now. But some of you may want to write. Writing may lend normalcy to your otherwise upended routine. Writing may make you feel better about not being able to pursue other elements of a research agenda derailed by self-isolation. Writing may keep you in touch with an important part of your identity that may be threatened by the current disruption of your life. Writing now may actually feel better than dreading the implications of not having written later. Whatever your reasons for wanting to write during this time, I do think it can be a valid choice.

While some of you may be choosing to push ahead with writing right now, I don’t have any great new advice. The new part is that you shouldn’t be pressured to do so. With that caveat in place, I think good writing advice now is pretty much the same as it ever was. Writing support should be, it goes without saying, supportive. Should recognize the full embodied person that is doing the writing. Should recognize that caregiving work is crucial and not always conducive to a consistent writing practice. Should recognize that such caregiving work is often gendered. Should recognize that writing in English is often obligatory, placing additional burdens on those for whom English is a subsequent language. Should recognize how the persistent whiteness of the academy complicates the writing identity of racialized people. Should recognize that academic writing is a source of anxiety for so many. This list could go on, but my point is that anything that I might put on this list now was already there two months ago. On academic Twitter, you are seeing a lot of thoughts that start with the phrase ‘now is not the time’: Now is not the time to be berating people, questioning their commitment, presuming that they are using the crisis to cheat or slack off in some way. But I’ve yet to see something that we shouldn’t be doing now that we should be doing the rest of time.

Now, as always, we should be talking about academic writing productivity as a matter of process. This shift away from a model of pressuring writers to produce and towards one of supporting writers in finding a productive process has two main elements: first, writers need to be exposed to a range of options to see what writing practices will work for them and, second, writers need access to writing instruction because expertise is crucial to productivity. Both of these interventions can move us away from a moralizing treatment of productivity that lays blame on the individual for what they aren’t getting done. If you were a better person, would that solve all your writing woes? That would only make sense if your writing woes were in fact the result of a deficient character. If, instead, your writing woes come from the fact that academic writing is hard and lonely work with high stakes and a pernicious lack of community, you’ll need productivity advice that recognizes those inevitable challenges.

One thing that may be unique to writing in this moment is the variability of your reaction to everything that is going on. At some points, everything may feel close to normal; at other points, you may feel genuine panic about these profound disruptions to the life you know and to the plans you had for the immediate future. In addition to this daily yo-yo, you may also have found that your reactions have shifted as these weeks go by. You may have felt energized through the initial rush of reorganizing your life but now feel a sense of lethargy. You may have been somewhat paralyzed by the shock of everything changing so quickly but have now adjusted to a manageable new routine. If your reactions are shifting, so likely are those of the people that you are responsible for. Parenting may present very different challenges one day than the next. Managing your relationship to loved ones who are now physically distant can shift over time. All of which is to say, as you think about academic writing during this time, expect that you will need to be flexible and gentle with yourself: what might make some sense one day may seem impossible the next.

So I have no particular “how to write now” advice because there is no singular experience of now and because I hope you are already following advice that tells you to be mindful of who you are and what you need. Be kind to yourself; write if you want to; write if you have to; temper your expectations of yourself; if others aren’t tempering their expectations of you, try extra hard to be kind to yourself. And reach out for support. I always tell my students, graduate writing may be done by you alone, but it needn’t be done by you alone. Now, of course, we are all more alone than usual, but I hope you’re finding the virtual writing community that you need.

♦

Here are ten pieces on working through this time that I’ve found helpful:

Aisha S. Ahmad, Productivity and Happiness Under Sustained Disaster Conditions

Pat Thomson, Getting By and Getting On

Inger Mewburn, Should You Quit (Go Part Time or Pause) Your PhD During COVID-19?

Erin Wunker, Shifting Strategies

Christine Tulley, Resetting Your Research Agenda

Cally Guerin, The Year of Wonders: Doctoral Writing in the Time of COVID-19

Nadirah Farah Foley, Don’t Forget About Graduate Students

Chris Smith, Five Strategies for Writing in Turbulent Times

Fay Lin, What Not To Say to Grad Students During a Pandemic

Anuja Cabraal, When I Write, I Write for Myself

 

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Write Your Way Out

Posted on February 22, 2018 | 18 comments

I recently had a request to give a talk to graduate students about writer’s block. This term is frequently mentioned in the context of graduate writing, presumably because of the general sense that something is inhibiting the writing processes of students at this level. While I was explaining why I didn’t want to give a talk on writer’s block, I realized that I spend quite a lot of time telling various people that I’m sceptical about the concept of academic writer’s block. Having recently read two interesting takes on writer’s block in academia in the past year (from Helen Kara and Julia Molinari), I decided that my own disinclination to use this concept might be worth exploring here on the blog.

In general, I am resistant to identifying common graduate writing difficulties as writer’s block. Most graduate writers who are struggling with their writing are actually struggling with their thinking. That isn’t just a semantic quibble: it matters that we grasp exactly what is inhibiting our writing processes. When we diagnose ourselves as having writer’s block, we can start to believe that we aren’t currently able to write. If you find yourself with a sore leg, it may well be that avoiding walking is a sound strategy. If you find yourself unable to write, might it be a sound strategy to avoid writing? The answer to that question is almost always no. Not writing has little-to-no curative power, in my experience. I’m not saying that we don’t need to take breaks; there are many things that we can do away from our desks to clear our minds and loosen up our ideas. But when we are committed to working, the act of writing is often the most immediate way to tackle the problems in our thinking. The risk of identifying inevitable writing challenges as writer’s block is that doing so can lessen the chance that we will use writing to move our ideas forward.

The idea of writer’s block can thus be seen as having the potential to detach writing from its broader intellectual context. When we treat writing challenges as psychological rather than intellectual, we run the risk of minimizing the conceptual work involved in graduate writing. I have, of course, encountered graduate writers who appear to have a disposition towards writing that is so fraught that they may need some sort of psychological shift in order to develop an effective writing routine. But for most graduate writers, writing is being hampered primarily by the challenge of sorting out what they think (or what they think they should think or what others think or what their supervisor thinks about what they think). In other words, they don’t have a psychological block; they simply have the intellectual confusions endemic to the process of communicating sophisticated research. Those intellectual confusions are real, and they can have deleterious consequences for writing. But when we treat these problems as conceptual problems in our thinking, we create the space to use writing as a strategy to solve those problems. Writing can move from being the problematic thing to being a means to solve the problem.

To use writing in this way, I suggest introducing a new font that will signal that you are writing in an exploratory vein for your own benefit. The variant font will remind you that your eventual reader need never see these ruminations, thus lessening your own reticence. Using this new font, try writing something like this: “I’m worried that what I’m saying here …”

“… is inconsistent with what I said on p. 37.”

“… might be confusing the cause with the effect.”

“… may lead the reader to think that my research is less significant than I’ve claimed.”

“… is the sort of thing that annoys my supervisor.”

Staying in this provisional, for-your-eyes-only font, try writing a follow-up sentence or passage: “To figure this out, I need to …”

“… re-read the sections on and around p. 37 and decide which formulation works best. Does this shift represent an actual shift in my thinking or just a different way of expressing things?”

“… satisfy myself about the direction of causality in my argument and think of a way to flag all the places where this may have become confused.”

“… revisit my initial claims for significance to see if they are affected by the current line of reasoning.”

“… decide how I feel about that potential reaction, whether that annoyance is something I want to withstand or something that should guide me in a different direction.”

The key, for me, is that this writing is just that: writing. We can’t, arguably, have writer’s block when we are actively writing. Instead, we may have unresolved issues that are making us want to avoid writing. Using writing as the means of addressing these issues  gives us a strategy for inevitable conceptual hurdles. Even in those cases in which writing-about-writing highlights serious problems, we have still made progress by identifying what is wrong. In the end, my concern is simply that the writer’s block label may be further alienating us from our own writing. While it may not be possible to write our way out of all problems, I’m convinced that it is near-impossible to solve writing problems without using writing as our central strategy.

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Confronting the Anxiety of Academic Writing

Posted on December 18, 2013 | 9 comments

Last week I gave a webinar for the Text and Academic Authors Association on confronting the anxiety of academic writing. While these topics were on my mind, I thought I would use this post to elaborate on its key points.

I began the presentation by discussing the key dilemma of academic writing: although writing can be the decisive factor in professional academic success, we often lack both training in the act of writing and time to complete the necessary writing tasks. As a result, we often dislike our own writing or find the process of creating acceptable writing unduly onerous. To make matters worse, these problems are often compounded by the sense that our difficulties are illegitimate, that we should already know how to write. Since we often aren’t expert writers, especially early in our academic careers, we tend to think of ourselves as bad writers. People are generally quick to call themselves bad writers, but they may not be so willing to embrace the broader category of academic writer, with all that entails. To identify yourself as a bad writer without making the commitment to being a writer seems a recipe for dissatisfaction.

The overarching theme of this presentation was that the challenges are real; we all struggle with our writing technique and with managing our writing time. Unfortunately, even though everyone has these struggles, many people think of themselves as alone in their writing challenges. One of the reasons that we remain convinced that these challenges are ours alone is that we engage in a lot of unfair comparisons. Instead of assuming that others must be struggling in much the same way that we are, we compare our insides with their outsides and thus conclude that we are uniquely inept.

How then to confront the anxiety that this negativity and isolation creates in academic writers? It can be helpful to begin by distinguishing between intellectual difficulties with writing—figuring out how to do it—and practical difficulties with writing—simply finding time to do it. Most of us struggle with both, but it is still helpful to tackle them separately. It’s also crucial to tackle them with novel strategies. New strategies are key because otherwise we are left with no avenue for improvement except renewed effort. And renewed effort only works if a lack of effort was the original problem. We all have days, of course, when a lack of effort is definitely the problem. But overall a lack of effort is generally a symptom of some other underlying difficulty. Simply put, trying harder won’t solve most writing problems and when it fails we end up feeling even worse about the whole thing.

One way to tackle our intellectual difficulties with writing is to try to think differently about the whole enterprise. Sticking with an approach, whatever it may be, that has caused us difficulty in the past isn’t likely to give us dramatically new results. As regular readers know, my approach relies on three principles that I’ve borrowed from Joseph Williams: using writing to clarify thinking; committing to extensive revision; and understanding the needs of the reader. These sentiments are all easily found in Williams’s excellent formulation: “We write the first draft for ourselves; the drafts thereafter increasingly for the reader.” This quote has the potential to change the way we conceive of the activity of writing; in my view, that reconceptualization can be a necessary first step in shaking free of writing anxiety.

Such a  reconceptualization is potentially very valuable but also needs to be connected to concrete strategies. If we are going to write to clarify thinking, we will need to be aware of the challenges of exploratory writing. And we will need strategies to keep our texts manageable. If we are going to commit to extensive revision, we are going to need to improve our basic understanding of the editing process. How can we make revision part of our regular writing routine? How can we make sure that we are engaging in structural edits and not just tinkering around the edges? How can we prepare ourselves to let go of the material in our writing that is no longer serving us well? Finally, if we are going to be more aware of our readers’ needs, we will have to grasp the differences between the reader and the writer. How do we understand the breakdown of responsibilities between reader and writer? What guidance do we give our readers as they make their way through our texts? Are we constructing our paragraphs in a way that acknowledges their importance to our readers?

After this discussion of avenues for improving the act of writing, I turned to a discussion of productivity. Most anxious writers find that the time available for academic writing is never sufficient. Since finding more time is like trying to get blood from a stone, most of us need to find strategies to use our existing time better. There’s a world of productivity advice to be found, and it’s crucial that we expose ourselves to that world. We just need to do so with an understanding that there are no one-size-fits-all approaches. Be wary of advice, even as you seek it out. Even if you do find a helpful source of advice, remain attuned to your own style of working and respect your own intuitions about what will make you more effective.

I ended the presentation with a polemical question: What don’t you know about writing? If writing is, for you, laden with anxiety, it will be helpful to confront the gaps in your knowledge. You are generally expected to have picked up enough about writing along the way to get the job done, but few people thrive as writers without systematically addressing themselves to improving their technique and to finding effective productivity strategies. At the end of the presentation, I was asked to comment on a familiar dilemma: writing may be really important, but so is everything else and there just isn’t enough time to focus on writing. I’m not at all unsympathetic to this sentiment, but I’m also pretty sure that time spent on writing is time well spent. I think that is true for all of us, but it is particularly true for those who are anxious about writing. Anxiety is itself very time-consuming and inefficient. Tackling the source of that anxiety—by becoming a more proficient and productive writer—is likely to be a valuable investment of time, even when that time is in short supply.

Putting this post together reminded me of an important part of any good productivity strategy: taking the time to look back at and appreciate past accomplishments. Being able to assemble this collection of posts—with all their flaws—was a useful reminder of what I have accomplished thus far with the blog. For many of us, the next few weeks will be a time of reflection. As we look towards the new year and perhaps think about all the writing that has inevitably gone undone this year and about our plans to remedy this state of affairs, we should also spend some time thinking about all we have done. Those accomplishments are what we have to build upon, and they should not be neglected. I wish you all a very happy and productive winter break!

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