Tag Archives: Revision

Thriving as a Graduate Writer

Posted on June 14, 2023 | 4 comments

Over the past few months, in the lead-up to the publication of my book, I’ve used this space to share brief excerpts. Now the book is out! If you want a copy, you can order it from the University of Michigan website (or other popular book ordering places!). In case you haven’t decided whether this book would be a good addition to your library, here’s a brief overview.

I wrote Thriving as a Graduate Writer because I believe graduate students can reframe their experience of academic writing. We all know that writing is at the heart of the academic enterprise. It is both how we communicate and how we are assessed. That combination can be brutal for any writer, and it’s particularly fraught for graduate writers, who must learn disciplinary writing practices while being judged on their early efforts. Recognizing these challenges is valuable; graduate students are better off knowing that their difficulties with academic writing are entirely legitimate. This recognition, however, is only the first step. The next step must be to find ways to ameliorate those challenges.

In the book, I offer a discussion of principles, strategies, and habits that I think can help. (The table of contents can be found below, so you can see the breakdown of this material.) The principles point to a way of thinking about academic writing. Since writing takes up so much time and energy, it is worth exploring foundational ideas that can ground a writing practice: writing as thinking; writing as revision; writing as reader awareness; writing as authorial responsibility. Those principles lead into concrete strategies that can transform the experience of creating and revising an academic text. The heart of this book is the five chapters that unpack these approaches to working with text: managing structure; managing sentences; managing punctuation patterns; managing momentum; and building a revision process. The final element of the book is the consideration of writing habits. Even with a solid approach to academic writing and range of useful strategies to hand, we all still need to find ways to get writing done. Graduate writers, in particular, need exposure to writing productivity advice that is rooted in their unique experience of academic writing. This chapter provides a range of strategies to help build a consistent and sustainable writing routine: prioritizing writing; setting goals; finding community; developing writing awareness; and grounding productivity in writing expertise.

This book is a short (only 226 pages!) self-study text. You can read through the whole book—in whatever way works for you—and then use it as a reference. The manner in which you refer back to the book will depend on what you currently need to concentrate on. Most readers will benefit from returning to two chapters: Establishing a Revision Process (Chapter Eight) and Developing Sustainable Writing Habits (Chapter Nine). Those chapters are organized around charts that are distributed throughout the chapter (and that appear again at the back of the book). Since every writer has their own challenges and their own optimal writing process, I urge readers to take those charts and rework them—on an ongoing basis—to suit their needs. In addition to the charts, you will also find other resources at the end of the book: guides to using the book in a graduate writing course or graduate writing group and brief account of the blogs and books that I most recommend to graduate writers.

Overall, this book aims to inspire graduate writers to think differently about the nature of writing and then offers concrete strategies for managing both their writing and their writing routines. It was a labour of love to craft the writing advice that I offer everyday—here and in the classroom—into a more coherent and enduring form. I hope it gives you the capacity to approach this indispensable part of academic life with more confidence and more enjoyment. I look forward to hearing what you think!

Thriving as a Graduate Writer is now available from the University of Michigan Press. To order your copy, visit the book page. Order online and save 30% with discount code UMS23!

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Breaking Points

Posted on May 3, 2023 | Leave a comment

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you will know that I’ve spent the last few years working on a book about graduate writing. That process is now drawing to a close: Thriving as a Graduate Writer will be published in June! Between now and then, I’m going to use this space to share brief excerpts. In addition to my discussion of principles, strategies, and habits for effective academic writing, the book has short ‘asides’ that allowed me to engage with topics outside that main narrative. Over the next four months, I’ll share my favourites of those asides. As always, I’d love to hear what you think!

Book Cover showing title: Thriving as a Graduate Writer

Breaking Points

Managing paragraph breaks sometimes works easily. You find that each topic fits comfortably within a single paragraph, with obvious breaking points. Other times, however, inserting a paragraph break can feel awkward. Here’s a familiar scenario: a paragraph that is too long to be a single paragraph but that has too much unity to naturally become more than one paragraph. If you choose to stick with one paragraph, you would likely need to lessen the detail to emphasize the unity. A second option, one that frequently makes the most sense, would be to create more than one paragraph. But if the first paragraph sets up the topic, can you break up the exploration of that topic into two or more paragraphs? This question is one that I’m asked all the time! The answer is that you definitely can, provided you manage the opening of the subsequent paragraph—or paragraphs—effectively. The beginning of the next paragraph would need to announce how it acts as a continuation of the larger topic. By echoing the language used in the first topic sentence, you can alert the reader that you are offering a continuation of that topic in the new paragraph. Finding breaking points can be challenging, but as long as you offer the reader the topic sentences that they need, you have the option of spreading your ‘single topic’ over as many paragraphs as you want.

Thriving as a Graduate Writer will be available in early June from the University of Michigan Press. To pre-order your copy, visit the book page. Order online and save 30% with discount code UMS23!

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Style Sheets

Posted on February 22, 2023 | 1 comment

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you will know that I’ve spent the last few years working on a book about graduate writing. That process is now drawing to a close: Thriving as a Graduate Writer will be published in June! Between now and then, I’m going to use this space to share brief excerpts. In addition to my discussion of principles, strategies, and habits for effective academic writing, the book has short ‘asides’ that allowed me to engage with topics outside that main narrative. Over the next four months, I’ll share my favourites of those asides. As always, I’d love to hear what you think!

Book Cover showing title: Thriving as a Graduate Writer
Style Sheets

As early in the drafting process as you can manage, I always recommend creating a document-specific style sheet. A style sheet is nothing more than a record of your decisions, created for the purpose of maximal consistency. The easiest way to create a style sheet is to pay attention to the decisions you make as you go along and then record them. You may have thought that a choice was obvious or that an issue was inconsequential; no matter, if you had to pause to make a writing-related decision, record it in your style sheet. This process will be different for each writer and each project. If you are writing a thesis, you may be working from a provided template that will mercifully cut down on formatting decisions. If you are using a citation manager, you may be spared too much worry about citation formatting. But you will still make a great many decisions as you write, so why not increase efficiency by making those decisions only once? One reason that we fail to take this simple step is that we imagine—at that moment of decision—that we will remember our decision. In fact, we often remember having decided without being able to remember what that decision actually was. Did you choose pre-modern, Premodern, or premodern? Do you use future or present tense for prospective signposting? Do you put the punctuation inside or outside the quotation marks? Do you indent the first line of a paragraph or add an additional space? At what point do you stop spelling out numbers and present them as numerals? Did your abbreviation include the plural, or will you make the abbreviation plural as needed? Are you using the serial comma? Do you know what terms in your field are capitalized or italicized? To answer some of these questions may require consulting resources—such as your disciplinary style guide—but you want to avoid checking those cumbersome resources repeatedly. Instead, once you have resolved an issue, put it in your style sheet. Your future self will thank you.

Thriving as a Graduate Writer will be available in early June from the University of Michigan Press. To pre-order your copy, visit the book page. Order online and save 30% with discount code UMS23!

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Authorial First Person

Posted on April 7, 2022 | 1 comment

There’s one issue that invariably comes up in a graduate writing class: the permissibility of using the first person. No matter what aspect of academic writing I am covering, someone will pose this question. My basic answer is simple: ‘Yes, you can definitely use the first person in academic writing’. To clarify this point, I like to reframe the first person as the ‘authorial first person’: the use of the first person to position yourself as the author of this piece of research writing. Research is done by researchers; scholarly writing is produced by writers. Excluding that agency is no longer required in most spheres of academic writing. This advance has interconnected philosophical and stylistic roots. Academic writing is not a disembodied practice representing a view from nowhere; instead, it is better seen as an evidence-based situated practice. The evidence-based element is crucial, but so is the recognition of positionality. All writing is done by a person, and that person necessarily writes from a particular perspective. Since you are the author, you ought to be visible in the text; the authorial first person is crucial to that visibility.

The style of your writing is also likely to be improved by judicious use of the authorial first person. Framing what will happen in your text as actions that you are undertaking will generally lead to stronger writing. The simplest version of this framing is straightforward signposting: ‘In this chapter, I will discuss …’. In some cases, the first person can act as a crucial transition. Imagine that you have been talking at length about other people’s views on a particular issue; to signal a return to your own perspective, the first person might be beneficial: ‘Despite the prevalence of [some] viewpoint, I argue that …’. Another variant of this pattern is using the first person for emphasis. When you switch to the first person from a passive construction, for instance, the reader will pay particular attention to your point: ‘[Something] has long been done in our field; in this paper, however, we decided to do [something different]’.

Despite the acceptability and value of the authorial first person, its use must still be managed carefully. In the first place, the use of the first person is disciplinary. Learning to deploy it appropriately is one of many things that will make you a convincing member of your discourse community. Learning those patterns requires engagement with solid publications in your field; in my experience, many graduate student writers express greater conservatism about the use of the first person than do gatekeepers in their field. Attentive reading can ensure that you are not making your decisions about the first person based on outdated precepts garnered at earlier points in your education. 

A second note of caution: consider how using the first person might lead to unsupported pronouncements. Such statements sometimes happen because the writer genuinely lacks evidence (‘I just believe that …’); obviously, such statements have little role in academic writing. I find it helpful to think of these as ‘editorial first person’ rather than the authorial first person we are discussing in this post. Although this type of editorializing is rare in the writing that I see, I mention it because concerns about editorial first person can lead to the avoidance of much-needed authorial first person. In my experience, most things that look like editorial first person are actually functioning like training wheels: ‘I think stem cell therapy is the most promising …’ can easily become ‘Stem cell therapy is the most promising … (plus evidence and/or citation)’. The use of I think as a scaffolding phrase shouldn’t necessarily be avoided. Since the point of writing is to convey your thoughts, it may make sense to use that phrase to help yourself discover what you think. Once you’ve got that clarity, you can remove it to avoid wordiness.

A third potential concern with the first person is that its use can become monotonous. Using the first person at the beginning of multiple sentences may distract the reader from what you are saying. ‘In this chapter, I will discuss …’ can be a strong opening for a roadmap. However, you will probably want to avoid following this opening with a long series of I-statements. You might choose instead to explain the stages of your paper with a sequence of impersonal formulations–starting with ‘the first step will be …’–before returning to the first person for a more emphatic closing: ‘Overall, I will develop …’. 

Any discussion of the authorial first person also needs to consider the use of I and we. When we is simply the plural form of I–referring to multiple authors–then everything said here holds true. To be clear, if there is only one of you, don’t refer to yourself as we. Some writers wonder if we is somehow more formal than I, but that is a misapprehension. We can also be used as an engagement strategy: ‘As we will see below, …’. This usage is based on the conceit that the author and the reader are on a journey together; this strategy is only common in some fields. In any discipline, the use of we can become problematic when it is used to refer to an unspecified group of stakeholders: ‘Over recent years, we have learned more about …’. Who is the we here? That degree of presumption or imprecision can be unhelpful. If the context doesn’t make the referent clear, you may wish to replace the we with the actual group in question, possibly with relevant evidence or citations.

Despite being the source of some anxiety, the authorial first person is an integral feature of most academic writing. It can take time to figure out the nuances of its role in your writing; as a crucial first step, make sure that you are not relying on unverified prohibitions against its use. To build your confidence in your use of the authorial first person, you may wish to run a search on I/we in your text during your revision process. Doing so will show you what your patterns are: whether your use has been monotonous at any point; whether you have underused the first person at crucial junctures in your introduction and conclusion; whether you have relied too heavily on I think as a scaffolding phrase; whether you have been imprecise in your use of I and we. When reviewing your usage, keep in mind what you have learned about current disciplinary practices. Embracing the careful use of the first person is a crucial developmental stage in academic writing; the end result of this embrace is writing that embodies current disciplinary norms and evinces a strong authorial presence.

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Available for Revision

Posted on March 2, 2022 | 1 comment

Revision is a frequent topic on this blog: how it is foundational to the academic writing process; how it so easily gets neglected; how it can be organized into a systematic process. But I haven’t talked much about how revision is connected to decisions about technological platforms and formatting. Revision is, of course, a conceptual activity, but it is also a physical activity. When we revise, we aren’t just thinking about the ideas contained in our text, we are engaging with the physical manifestation of those ideas: words and sentences and paragraphs laid out on pages. That layout–how our text looks–makes a difference to our revision process. Needless to say, every type of technology leads to its own revision workflow. There’s no need for nostalgia for any particular technologies, for handwriting, typewriting, actual carbon copies, carets, or whiteout. It is crucial, however, to look at the cycle of revision that is afforded by your current technology and make sure that it supports an optimal revision process.

To start, I want to reinforce the importance of physical engagement with your text. How are you manifesting your concerns and clarifications as you revise? On screen, you can annotate with the tools available in your writing platform. In hard copy, you can underline or highlight to emphasize what you want to focus on. If necessary, you can even simulate annotation with your voice. When reading aloud, you can direct your attention to a particular aspect or pattern; basically, you are using your voice to mimic annotation when you aren’t able to mark up your writing. Revision ultimately requires all of us to change the manner of our interaction with our texts, from passive reading to active engagement. The kinesthetic act of highlighting the patterns in your own writing–using cursor, pen, or voice–can help to shake up your familiarity with text that you are seeking to improve. 

In order to allow that engagement to happen, however, we need to have formatted our text in such a way that we are able to see it as ‘available’ for revision. Writers can easily short-circuit revision by moving too quickly to something that looks finished. A text must look recognizably like a draft, so your brain can see it as ready for revision. I often switch to a ‘light’ version of my writing font when revising because that looks noticeably unfinished to me. Obviously, ‘looking like a draft’ is a relative concept; it has to look like a draft to you. In general, I recommend being wary of features that allow you to turn an early draft into something that looks like a final draft; I often see student writing that is still very rough but is dressed up to look more finished than it actually is. Some writers feel empowered by creating something that looks more polished–it makes them feel like a finished text is within reach–but I think the downsides are significant. Revision is hard enough without sending our brains mixed signals. 

Once you have committed to tactile engagement with your text and have created visual cues to reinforce the need to revise, a question still remains: Will you be revising on a screen or on a hard copy? I’m frequently asked about the relative merits of the two, but it’s a question without a definitive answer. Some people need to revise on paper; others can manage the full writing-revision process electronically. Again, the important issue is whether your choice supports the act of revision. Working in hard copy is inherently disruptive; we are no longer able to interact with our text in the way we were during the composition process. Instead, our textual interventions become limited to those we can manage with a pen. The advantage of working in hard copy is the way that it prevents an unwanted blurring of writing and revision. By looking at your words on the page, you are forced to think about how you wish to alter them, rather than just doing it. While ‘just doing it’ might sound more efficient, that approach makes it hard to bring your attention to issues beyond the local. In order to think about the text more broadly–possibly by doing a reverse outline–you need the ability to evaluate the full text without immediately altering it. 

While revising on paper may facilitate the ability to see the text anew, many of you prefer to work on screen. The reasons for this may be practical; hard copies may feel wasteful, or printing may be inaccessible. Or the reason could be more substantive; working on screen may feel so natural that it has become essential to your ability to engage with your text. But if staying online is hampering your ability to do substantial revision, the changes in formatting that we’ve been discussing here might help. Before revising, you can change the font to one that signals your commitment to revision. Or you can change the layout on the screen. You can even turn your text temporarily into a PDF and make your annotations on screen that way. Revision requires extra discipline when being done online. We can so easily be distracted by our ability to tinker; reading in an evaluative manner can absolutely be done online, but doing so requires interventions to boost our good intentions. Since willpower is often insufficient to keep us on task, using formatting to create tangible reminders to revise can be invaluable.

In sum, maintaining a physical engagement with text during revision is challenging because we so easily lapse into a simpler–and speedier–form of reading. In order to resist that tendency, whether you are working online or on paper, you need to use formatting to remind yourself that your writing is, in fact, available for revision.

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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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Deadline Mindset

Posted on January 12, 2022 | 2 comments

To state the obvious, writing deadlines often feel different than other deadlines. I almost wrote, ‘writing deadlines often feel different than real deadlines’. Which probably tells you everything you need to know about how well I manage my writing deadlines. Thinking about my schedule for this book and my repeated failures to stick to that schedule, I’ve been struck again by the amount of latitude we tend to give ourselves while negotiating deadlines within a large-scale writing project.

I currently plan to be finished my manuscript by March 2022 (a full year past my original deadline). While I’m now in a good position, this is largely due to undeserved good fortune: a generous extension to my manuscript deadline and a fortuitously timed sabbatical. I do know how fortunate I am. In my many fruitless attempts to get this project back on track over the course of the pandemic, I’ve had the opportunity to think deeply about deadlines. I have argued that nobody should push themselves to work normally during this time, but it hasn’t been easy to grant myself that leeway. I tried everything to create a workflow in which I kept up with writing while simultaneously finding the energy required for online teaching, handling an unusual amount of administrative work, and managing the rest of my life.

During my many attempts to right this ship, I tried to envision a range of possible options:

Scenario One: In this scenario, the writer meets their deadline, no matter what, and does so with a fabulous piece of writing. This best-case scenario is obviously the one that anyone would choose, except that it may be genuinely unattainable. I’m including it–at the very real risk of annoying you–because it is instructive to imagine what it would actually mean to meet a particular deadline. This is the would-if-I-could option.

Scenario Two: Here we recognize that a deadline may be truly impossible, leading to a decision to postpone completion. This decision allows work to continue with a desirable intensity but without the unrealistic pressure of the first scenario. This is the what-I-can-actually-manage option.

Scenario Three: This scenario is, to me, the novel one. Imagine that we could treat writing deadlines as firm, meaning that we would meet them and do so by compromising on what it meant to be finished. This approach is somewhat akin to the way many of us treat non-writing deadlines. When such a deadline is firm, we generally meet it and–since we can’t manufacture time–we tend to make the necessary adjustments to the quality of our work. We accept the notion that we might have done a better job with more time; however, when time ran out, we made the best of what we had. This is the stick-to-the-plan option.

The first scenario was, for me in 2021, never going to happen. I kept building schedules to support the impossible deadline, but always with the suspicion that they wouldn’t work. Why even build a schedule that I couldn’t meet? We’ve all been enjoined over and over again to set realistic goals. That realism would make sense if we had reliable knowledge of what is and is-not realistic. In practice, we often don’t know how long a writing task will take. More importantly, our orientation to writing is such that we will often take advantage of a lenient schedule. In my experience, creating a generous schedule doesn’t lead to finishing writing projects early. Given all this, I generally recommend continuing to set ourselves challenging writing deadlines.

The potential hazard of these sorts of stretch goals is, of course, that they will make us feel bad all the time. Nobody needs that. One way to avoid that regret is to recognize the true nature of overly ambitious goals: they are designed to create space for writing that might otherwise go undone. However, in order to get the benefit of setting ambitious goals without the psychic costs, we need a sound default plan.

In my experience–both as a writer and as a close observer of other writers–most people default to scenario two. When the ambitious schedule fails, we choose to slow down and do what we can actually manage. It’s appealing to take a breath and ensure that at least some of the job is done right. This scenario simultaneously promises us more time and more quality, two things all writers want. But it can easily lead to endlessly deferred deadlines.

If scenario one is unlikely to succeed and scenario two is a recipe for repeated deferrals, what else can we do? This is where scenario three comes in, as a different type of fallback position when the ambitious schedule crashes into reality. By ‘sticking to’ your plan by compromising on quality (for now), you may find yourself farther ahead. If you can’t have five outstanding chapters, how would you feel about five so-so chapters? Might that be a better basis for revision than one-and-a-half outstanding chapters? This strategy is the one that I tried this past year, with some success. I wanted a full draft by the end of 2021; as long as you squint just so when you look at it, that’s what I have. No, you can’t see it–it’s terrible! But I tried to proportion my efforts so that I kept moving, resulting in a full set of flawed chapters. In each case, the chapter was roughly all done rather than only partially done.

I made this decision because I wanted to experiment with this deadline mindset. I see two reasons to try to import the notion of firmer deadlines into our writing lives. First, we are notoriously bad at knowing when something is good enough to move to the next stage. Given the rampant perfectionism among academic writers, it might make sense to replace that evaluative metric with a time commitment. Second, we all stand to gain from treating self-imposed deadlines as a little stricter. Writing deadlines are often flexible in the sense that the actual moment when we miss one is private; however, they matter because a writing schedule represents a larger commitment to ourselves and our professional plans. Experimenting with firmer deadlines in our writing lives might lessen our common tendency to defer writing in ways that are deleterious to our own well-being.

I’ve been speaking in this post about the type of interim deadlines that have the power to keep a writing project on track. Using this deadline mindset for the ultimate deadline of a writing project would obviously be much more challenging: letting go is hard! But so many of our writing deadlines necessarily represent the interim stages of a writing project. Indeed, creating and meeting interim deadlines is crucial to getting to the final stages of a writing project. By creating more efficacy in our writing schedules along the way, we put ourselves in the best possible position to handle the undeniable stress of submitting a final draft. I look forward to having the chance to reflect more on that challenge in the coming months!

♦

This post is the eighth 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: As I said above, I’m in the home stretch. My work over the coming weeks will be a combination of tightening, supplementing, harmonizing, and jettisoning. Except for that last one, these activities are very satisfying. At times, it’s a bit confounding trying to use my own revision principles to revise what I’m saying about revision, but I hope my own struggles will ultimately make the book more humble and more helpful.

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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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There’s Always December

Posted on December 3, 2020 | 1 comment

November was Academic Writing Month, a month dedicated to collegial online support for writing productivity. Some of you may have participated; some of you may have laughed at the very idea; some of you may have resented the public show of productivity at a time like this; some of you may have tried and found it unhelpful; some of you may have never even heard of it. For the first time in many years, I tried to keep up with #AcWriMo myself in order to finish a first draft of my book manuscript. Switching up the way we work is always revealing, and I thought I’d use this post to reflect on the experience.

Overall, I found it pretty helpful. I now have a complete rough draft, although it’s definitely more of a ‘zero draft’ in places. Getting to that milestone was obviously important to me, but here I’m more interested in the fact that I was able to write fairly consistently throughout the month. I’m not short of ideas about how to sustain a consistent writing practice; this blog is full of my thoughts on writing productivity. But having thoughts has never ever been a guarantee of putting those thoughts into practice. Despite my awful track record when it comes to taking my own advice, I actually managed to write somewhat consistently throughout November by working with the following principles:

Write ‘every’ day: When I say write every day, I don’t mean write every day. I simply mean that it’s a good practice to pre-commit to writing on all the days that you have available for writing. That way, you won’t have to decide on any particular day whether or not you’re going to write. Taking the decision out of it will cut down on the decision fatigue that will eventually work against you. For this month, I committed to writing some amount on 20 days: all the weekdays in November, except the last one (which I’d allotted to starting this post). I didn’t manage to write on all those days, but I wrote on more of them than I would have without the pre-arranged plan.

Set concrete interim goals: Tackling a writing project with lofty and poorly defined goals can be unnerving. When your daily goal is simply to make progress on a larger goal, it can be hard to keep yourself honest. Instead, I recommend giving yourself concrete interim goals that will guide you through each writing block and then coalesce into a strategy for meeting the ultimate goal. It can be so much easier to settle into writing when you have a specific task that can be completed in the available time. I wanted to finish rough drafts of my final two chapters, Chapters Eight and Nine. To make that happen, I broke the larger goal down into both weekly and daily goals. I’m truly terrible at articulating these micro goals, so I had to rework them frequently. But the fact the goals weren’t perfectly aligned with my actual writing progress didn’t prevent them from being of great value as I got down to writing each day.

Work towards a full draft: Planning your writing schedule to prioritize creating a full draft is a great idea; getting to the end will mean that the full arc of your text can then inform any further decisions. In order to make this idea work, you have to be willing to sacrifice local polish for overall shape. When we polish our writing before establishing an optimal shape for the text, we run the risk of investing in material that isn’t serving our needs. In my case, I was actually trying to finish a full draft, but this advice is scalable. You can prioritize getting to the end of a section or a chapter and still reap these benefits. The point is not to write more or faster. The point is to revise more effectively by giving yourself the greatest possible amount of insight into the goals of your own text; that insight is inevitably deepened by the creation of a full text, one with a beginning, middle, and end.

Use writing to solve writing problems: When pushing yourself to create a full draft, it’s crucial to use writing to figure out what you think. I found Chapter Eight relatively easy and fun to write; I found Chapter Nine (my conclusion) to be a special kind of torture. To deal with my paralyzing dread of conclusions, I tried to write my way out. The rough draft of this concluding chapter is still full of ALL-CAP rants to myself about the absence of a coherent end point. But those backchannel conversations with myself allowed me to figure out what was wrong and to find a way to bring things full circle, at least tentatively.

Don’t write alone any more than you have to: Writing completely alone isn’t natural for us; even when we are literally alone, we still value the involvement of others. Maybe we crave that involvement even more right now. Building a writing community—actual or virtual—means that you don’t have to be completely alone in your writing. Over the past month, reporting my daily writing achievements, such as they were, was helpful to me. #AcWriMo may be an attenuated form of writing community, but it was still motivating. The recipients of my reports (people following the #AcWriMo hashtag on Twitter) didn’t really care. Nobody was going to berate me for not writing or question my commitment or progress. But having announced that I was going report my writing progress each day, I felt a tug of obligation to do so. And I was grateful to have expanded the web of obligation beyond just myself.

I did ignore one of my key principles: Write at your best time of day. In general, writing is such an important and challenging activity that I recommend doing it at the time of day when you have the most energy. However, my priority this month couldn’t truly be writing; instead, like many of you, I was most concerned with managing the unfamiliar routines of online teaching. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to settle into writing when my mind was engaged with preparing for this novel form of teaching. I wasn’t exactly violating this principle: I was following its spirit, which says that you must devote your best energy to your most important activity. It was just that writing couldn’t have my best energy when this new frontier of teaching needed it more. Instead of writing at my best time of day—earlier for me is always better—I was writing at the end of day, once all my teaching and teaching prep were done. It wasn’t ideal, but I appreciated the #AcWriMo motivation that helped me to squeeze in some writing at the end of these busy days.

When #AcWriMo was new, someone added a tagline: “Write like there’s no December”. I’m afraid I can’t find who said it first. It’s an appealing slogan, one which helps to convey the essential absurdity of having an ‘academic writing month’. If you are going to engage in an artificial push to write more in a month than you usually do, you are likely going to need to play some mind games with yourself. Like pretending that there’s no tomorrow. But, of course, there is a December—unlike any December that we can remember but December nevertheless—and we all need to figure out what this means for our writing.

There’s always December in the sense that you might say, if you didn’t get much writing done in November, ‘there’s always December’. There are so many reasons why you may not have written a lot in November: the ongoing pressures you are facing during this pandemic; the ordeal of the interminable American election; a disinclination towards arbitrary productivity measures; the rhythm of your teaching schedule. And, even if you did get lots of writing done in November, there’s still always December. It’s unlikely that you’ve exhausted all your writing tasks, no matter how much #AcWriMo may have helped.

So, there’s always December (or January or some point in the future when other things in your life start to get back to normal). If you’ve got writing to do and that’s not been possible during these most peculiar times, I hope you are holding out hope. Things will get back on track, and past writing struggles don’t have to predict future performance. Whenever your life allows you time for writing, there are things you can do to improve your chances that writing will happen in those times. Significant among these strategies is the willingness to write in public: to make commitments aloud; to feel the accountability engendered by those commitments; and to take the encouragement that comes from an online community that wishes you well. Whatever the month, you don’t have write alone.

♦

This post is the sixth 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: I’ve now finished an extremely rough first draft, which puts me more or less on schedule. I say ‘more or less’ because I’m unable to predict the time it will take to fix what’s wrong. There’s so much wrong! I don’t say that out of modesty but out of fidelity to the truth. I look at people’s writing for a living, so I know of what I speak: this manuscript needs a lot of work. As I said above, my desire for a complete draft to work from has inspired me to treat as provisionally finished things that are manifestly unfinished. I don’t regret this, but I know that much of the hard work is still ahead of me.

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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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