Q: I was planning to be finished with my dissertation by now but I’m nowhere near done. My research is mostly complete and my committee is supportive but I’m just not making progress with the writing. What are some specific strategies that you can suggest?
Emily Ozdowski: For me, it was ALL about the setting. If I tried to write at home, the laundry and dishes would constantly nag at me. If I tried to write in the lab, similar “shoulds” pulled away my focus. I ended up being the most productive with a coffee at a window seat in the local Barnes and Noble, wearing headphones for background music. As long as it was music I knew inside and out, any lyrics didn’t become a distraction. Apparently, I needed a subtly entertaining atmosphere to convince my lizard brain I was having fun. Then my more conscious efforts could be put into the work of writing.
Dan McShea: Standard procedure is to make a detailed outline, but really it could be just a list of bullet point, in order, for each chapter. Then just fill in the prose around the bullet points.
Opposite approach, if the standard one no good for you: start writing wherever it’s easiest, wherever you’re most excited by what you have to say. Could be the intro, could be the conclusion, could the middle of chapter 3. Doesn’t matter. Wherever you’re excited to say something. Start on the downslope, as they say in the writing biz.
Sounds easy. It’s not. But as meditation teacher of mine once said, don’t worry about doing it right, don’t worry about doing it well, just (expletive) do it.
Justin Wright: I like to write inside out. Start with the figures/analyses you know you want to tell your story – write the results section around those specific topics, write the methods that you need to describe the results – write the last paragraph of your introduction “Here we address the following questions (A,B,C) by taking the following approach. That gives you the structure for your introduction (you basically have to justify why questions A, B, and C are interesting, then add a paragraph or two at the start to provide some general context. The discussion comes last, but by know you should know what the intriguing things about your results are that you want to spend more time explaining.
Sheila Patek: Like Justin, that’s exactly what I do and train my lab to do. I’ll even add that after the discussion writing, then the abstract, and the very, very last thing is title.
What strategies do you have? Join the conversation below.
