One of the most important, but difficult, aspects of academic writing is decision-making.
Decision-making is important because you can’t finish anything without making decisions. And decision-making is difficult because you have so much choice in terms of what to include, what to leave out, how much detail to give, who to cite, what opinions or observations to give, how to order the information… and that’s before we even get to the subtle choices of language, expression and style.
And the fact that so much rests on writing, in terms of publications or your PhD thesis and the potential consequences this might have for the next steps in your career, adds an extra level of stress, which in turn can make decision-making even harder.
This is one of the main causes of writer’s block, which is often mistaken for perfectionism, which is then used to justify avoiding decision-making by just writing whatever comes to mind.
And while this lets you avoid the problem, it doesn’t solve it. In fact, it probably makes things worse by training the habit of avoiding difficult decisions and by saving all the difficult decisions for the end, when you’ll be under even more pressure. This is one of the reasons why so many students struggle to finish and suffer unnecessarily as a result.
I very often speak to students in this situation, who’ve followed all the standard writing advice, they’ve worked really hard, written 10s of thousands of words, but nothing is finished.
The only way out of this situation, and the only way to start finishing sections or chapters is to make clear and confident decisions. And what you find is that making one decision tends to make subsequent decisions easier, because the objectives are clearer and the options are reduced.
The only decision that is always wrong, one hundred percent of the time, is to make no decision at all
As for how you make these decisions, well it’s complicated, but there are guiding principles and skills you can learn, which I go into elsewhere.
In this video I just want to emphasise that you cannot avoid making decisions. You might be afraid of making the wrong decision, but the only decision that is always wrong, one hundred percent of the time, is to make no decision at all, or to delay any decision-making until you absolutely have to, because that always limits what you’re able to do, and removes any control you could potentially have over the situation, and this makes the very thing you’re afraid of (i.e. failure, or just submitting a thesis that isn’t very good) much more likely.
If you’re extremely anxious about making decisions, it may be worth speaking to a therapist… but otherwise just try summoning the confidence to take a few risks.
The earlier you start doing this, the earlier you start making key decisions the easier it will be, in part because there’s less pressure, but also because it gives you time to change decisions if you have to.
I would love to finish there, but I know that someone will raise the issue of using AI to help with this process… Now you will hear others extolling the virtues of AI platforms, and making it sound like they’re these magical tools that everybody must use, but if you can’t make key decisions, AI cannot solve this for you.
Even if you trust it to correct your writing or give you guidelines or structure, which I personally wouldn’t, you need a clear, unambiguous input in order for it to have any chance of producing a decent output. Yes, you can put rubbish in and it will produce something that looks good on superficial reading, but it won’t be your work and this will be immediately obvious to any intelligent examiner, regardless of whether it passes AI detection.
As I’ve said in other videos, AI can supplement your skills, but not replace them. You should be very careful about what you trust it do on your behalf, and you should never delegate thinking or decision making to it, because you have to be able to defend anything that you submit in your own name.
Ultimately, it’s your project, it’s your work… You backed yourself to do a PhD. You believed in yourself, so have the confidence to make decisions for yourself.
I offer one to one coaching in academic writing and general PhD survival skills. Click below to learn more and book your introductory session.
PhD: an uncommon guide to research, writing & PhD life is your essential guide to the basic principles every PhD student needs to know.
Applicable to virtually any field of study, it covers everything from finding a research topic, getting to grips with the literature, planning and executing research and coping with the inevitable problems that arise, through to writing, submitting and successfully defending your thesis.
All the text on this site (and every word of every video script) is written by me, personally, because I enjoy writing. I enjoy the challenges of thinking deeply and finding the right words to express my ideas. I do not advocate for the use of AI in academic research and writing, except for very limited use cases.
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