Does any of this sound familiar?

• You have so much information in your head that you don’t know where to start or how to fit it all together

• You’ve written countless pages, but nothing is finished and nothing seems good enough

• You’re stuck in a cycle of endless drafts

• You’re discovering new material faster than you can get it on the page

Or

• You’ve just become disengaged from writing and can’t bring yourself to face it any more

You are not alone…

Academic writing is one of the biggest sources of stress for PhD students worldwide. But despite this, there’s very little in the way of training in this essential skill.

Much of the advice that does exist will tell you;

“Don’t think, just keep getting words down on the page. And if you get stuck, just write about something else. This gives you something to work with and edit later.”

This might help you overcome some resistance to writing and it can help you feel productive in the short-term, but in the longer term it causes more problems than it solves;

• If you don’t think and just write whatever first comes to mind, you can never go beyond the obvious.

• Details and accuracy matter in academic writing: If you don’t think then you might build an argument on a flawed premise

• It results in a mess that’s very hard to edit (and the more you write this way, the harder it becomes)

• It doesn’t tell you anything about how to write well and going as fast as you can is a terrible way to learn any skill

• It trains the habit of avoiding the problems that arise (so you never learn how to solve them)

• It places the thinking work at the end, when you have the least time and the most pressure

An alternative approach to academic writing…

I see academic writing as a problem-solving process. When you want to communicate an idea, there are countless different ways to do it; different ways to arrange words and ideas to get your argument across. The skill lies in making deliberate, confident choices from these different options.

This can feel overwhelming at first, but with some guiding principles and practice it gets much easier!

To practice effectively, we need to slow down. Instead of writing as fast as we can, we need to give ourselves a little time to figure out solutions to the problems that arise.

This actually helps us to write faster in the long-term, because we learn how to make decisions and solve problems in the moment instead of leaving it all for later. This, in turn, makes it possible to actually complete sections of writing as you go, which helps to maintain motivation and confidence.