People often talk about perfectionism in academic writing, where you might be agonising over every word, or maybe writing the same sentence and deleting it over and over again. This is generally seen as a bad thing, but perfectionism isn’t all bad. Sometimes it can be useful and sometimes it’s essential.
But first let’s be clear about what perfectionism is. What most people call perfectionism is actually indecision, stemming from a lack of confidence. This is where you over-think everything but never commit to anything, so you spend a lot of emotional and physical energy without moving forwards.
When I think of perfectionism, it’s more about setting clear, achievable standards for your work, then investing the time and care required to meet them.
Let’s put writing aside for a moment and say you’re going to do any kind of experiment; perfectionism in this context might mean testing each step first, or taking extra care over sample preparation or calibrating equipment.
It might take longer, but putting in the extra care and attention means you’re more likely to spot any problems and it reduces the chances that you have to do it all again.
Of course this doesn’t eliminate the chances of it going wrong. You can do everything right and your experiment still might not work because of something outside your control or something you couldn’t have anticipated
This can be demoralising, but these are the moments when you need to be at your best, your most engaged and most curious to figure out what went wrong. Then as you try again, you need to be even more perfectionist.
The alternative is to rush or maybe to switch to working on something else. This keeps you busy, but without solving any of the problems that arise.
When we’re talking about this kind of practical work, I think it’s not too controversial to say you need to put thought and care into it, or to say that when you face a problem you might need to slow down and think about it instead of rushing through it.
But for some reason, when it comes to writing, everybody seems to say that you should just get words down without thinking or worrying about details. Some even take this to the extreme and say you shouldn’t even look at what you’ve written until you have a complete draft.
One of the justifications for this is that it helps overcome perfectionism, but it’s solving the wrong problem. If your perfectionism comes from indecision, then just getting words down will feel good in the short term because it lets you get away with avoiding decisions, but all it does is save those decisions for the end when you’ll be under the most pressure.
And if you’ve consistently trained the habit of avoidance, it will be more difficult to break that habit when you’re stressed.
If the problem is indecision then the solution is to practice decision-making often and on a small scale. It might not be easy, but this why you have to practice.
When we talk about actual perfectionism in academic writing, not just indecision; you simply have to put thought and care into your writing if you want to write well. And there will be times when you just have to get it right; when you have to take the time to find the words to express yourself clearly.
For example, if you have a statement that says,
“the aim of this thesis (or paper or chapter) is…”
You’ve got to make sure that this sentence clearly and confidently states your actual aim, because everything else you say is judged based on this statement.
The same applies in your research methods. You need to take care to describe exactly what you’ve done, because the reader will judge the validity of your results based on your research design and implementation. If it’s ambiguous, or contradictory, or if important details are missing, it might come across that you’re trying to hide something, which is never good.
And the same applies when you present your data; you need to make sure that it’s represented clearly and accurately. And when you present your interpretation or your conclusions, you’ve got to make sure that it’s carefully worded to communicate exactly what you want to get across.
With that said, not everything needs the same level of perfectionism. I think you should put at least some thought and care into everything you put on the page, but not everything needs the same level of thought and care. This brings us to a crucial point…
We don’t need to make a binary choice between agonising over every word or going as fast as we possibly can without thinking, because there’s a lot of space between the two extremes.
Ideally we want to be somewhere in the middle, putting thought and care into the work, but also making decisions and moving forwards.
And we can adjust where we sit on this scale; slowing down to take care over important details when we need to, but then if we’re stuck in a cycle of indecision and over-thinking, we can lean more towards increasing the word count.
So if you’re stuck you could set yourself the target of writing, say, 100 words in the next 30 minutes, prioritising productivity a bit more, but still giving it some thought and not going as fast as you can.
Or If you really do feel the need to just need to get words down as quickly as you can, once you have a page or two then maybe slow down read over it, tidy up and take care over the details. You’re going to have to do that eventually, so why not do it now? I mean it has to be easier to edit two pages than 200.
This care and attention to detail is necessary not only to produce good academic writing, but to enjoy it too.
If you just type until you have a complete draft, without thinking, without solving any of the problems that arise and without making any of the difficult decisions, your writing will be shit (and you’ll know it). But I personally find that when I put more pride and care into my work, when I take care of the little details, I feel so much more motivated and I’m so much more productive.
I offer one to one coaching in academic writing. 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.
See also:
Lihua Dong says:
It’s very great!