When you start a new chapter, you might find that some material just seems to spill out. You have a whole load of ideas bottled up, so it’s easy at first to create new content and increase your word count.
But then something happens… It gets harder and harder to write the closer you get to finishing. Why does that happen, and what can you do about it?
Of all the content you want to put in your thesis, there will be some concepts you’re confident writing about. Then there will be others that take a lot more thought; things that you’re unsure of, are difficult to explain, require thorough references, or are incomplete.
So if you start with all the easy content, eventually you will be left with the more difficult things which take more time and thought.
What makes academic writing unique is the level of supporting detail required for every idea you present.
Even a fairly simple, uncontroversial and well-known factual statement may need a reference to support it. So writing that statement creates some extra work if you then have to go looking through the literature to find out where it originally came from. This is often tedious work, so the temptation is to leave yourself a note (insert reference here) to remind yourself to do it later, because you want to carry on writing, creating more content and increasing your word-count.
After working on a chapter for a while, there will come a point when everything that remains is either difficult new content or tedious detail. You will no longer be able to sit down and write 1000 words in an afternoon.
It might feel like writer’s block, and you might be tempted to leave the chapter 70% complete and switch to writing about something else (where you’ll be able to take more low-hanging fruit and write fast again).
But that can only work in the short term. The same thing will happen again with the next chapter, and the next, until you have built up a vast amount of unfinished material. Everything that remains is difficult, and it’ll be one hell of a fight to get the thesis finished.
When you’re working on a section and you’ve gone through the easy material and you start to slow down naturally, this is a signal that you should change your focus not to another section, but to polishing what you have.
Go back through what you have written. Edit. Put in the missing details. Put in the references. Take the time to think deeply about what you want to say next.
Try to anticipate what an examiner’s questions might be, and address the difficult issues now. This will be much easier while the thoughts are fresh in your head.
Accept that it’s necessary to slow down sometimes and take care over the detail. Be perfectionist about it. Do it well, and finish the section by dealing with all those tiny details before moving on to the next.
Every section of your thesis requires the same basic elements before you can say it’s complete.
It will need all the references in place, with the full bibliographic information, It will need editing and It will need formatting. Any figures will need to be well designed and properly captioned. It will need to flow from one point to the next without any gaps to complete later.
You will have to do all these things at some point, for every single section of the thesis. You can do it all at the end, under massive time pressure, or you can do it as you go. It’s up to you.
But if you can finish one section, taking care of all of these details, then you know what’s required for the rest of the thesis. And if you can complete one section to a high standard, then you know you can do it for the rest of the thesis.
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: