Writing advice for graduate students: Writing that energizes

I was intrigued to read Perry Hendricks' advice for grad students on how to write papers for publication. It is practical, no-nonsense, and contains a lot of valuable insights. But as all writing guides, it can only cover so much and doesn't go into some of the aspects of the writing itself. For this reason, I decided to put a somewhat different, hopefully complementary, perspective out there. I adapted this from a regular newsletter I write for grad students at Saint Louis University, where I am placement director. 

An important element of success, in getting the dissertation done and in getting publications, is to cultivate good writing habits. Here I just want to speak to one aspect of it, namely that writing--if done strategically--can help energize you and can help you to write what you want, to lift writer's block and self doubt.

Writing is like doing physical workout, the more you do it, the easier it is to do. It is not a finite resource you need to carefully manage or use sparingly. I started blogging as a postdoc and I was at first a bit worried about how it would take away my time to write articles, but I soon found that if anything blogging helped me to write more and better. Blogposts are rarely over 1000 words, so one needs to write economically. This was a useful transferable skill. Also, some blogposts later were developed into articles, and the initial feedback was very helpful. Also today, I use blogging in this way to energize my writing. I’m not saying you have to blog. But any writing you do even if not in classic academic venues can be helpful in this way. 

A related idea is that the relevance of having an original ideas is often over-rated. This may seem surprising in a field that prizes ideas, but I tend to think that ideas get accorded too much importance in the overall writing process. An idea is what gets you excited to write in the first place, and  a piece of writing that beautifully works out an original idea is of course what we all love to read. But…. A lot of writing that I see has a good idea, but the idea is underdeveloped, or poorly defended. If you get good writing habits, you will get better at helping the ideas you come up with shine. Some people think ideas are really precious rare flashes of insight, carefully to be guarded for a later moment. Again, like physical exercise, developing ideas is like a muscle.

I find I often develop ideas just very briefly in the space of a blogpost and I do not continue developing them, but that’s okay because other ideas will come. Writing out ideas in brief form can thus help you to get more ideas later. 

Obviously, if you write too much like if you do anything too much, there is a point where you might reach burnout. You need to be careful not to burn out, for instance, by having designated down time (e.g., evenings, weekends) built into your life. 

But, while you are at work, it is good to exercise the writing muscle. To that end, I suggest you find a writing practice that is energizing for you and that helps you to sustain good writing habits, rather than writing practices that discourage and dampen your enthusiasm for writing.

A dampening practice is one where you think that you need to write something that might make it into a “top journal” or that your dissertation is supposed to be a flawless masterpiece. With that mindset, it’s incredibly daunting to put anything on the page. Whereas, if you think: here’s a cool idea, let’s try to develop it, see where it leads, you might well write something good, or something you need to toss out, and that’s okay. 

 Here are some related tips to help you achieve this (as always, YMMV): 

* Don’t worry too much about what a first draft looks like. A first draft is a helpful document for you, it is not meant for people outside. You can turn off the critical voice as you are compiling a first draft, then later turn it back on when you revise the draft. 

* Writing for publication. This is becoming really important for the job market. I suggest you still think of your dissertation first, in spite of mounting pressure to write journal articles, because you might feel overwhelmed at the prospect of having to do both: write a dissertation and write papers for publication. 

By focusing on your doctoral project, you can still get some work you can write up for journal publications. Here are some well-tried routes for this:  

(1) if a professor of a seminar tells you that a term paper was really good (even if unrelated to your main doctoral project, then consider turning it into a journal paper. Note, a term paper is not a paper for a journal, and reviewers will be able to spot if your work feels “term papery”. It would probably go a bit beyond the scope of this brief post to outline exactly what’s wrong with an unrevised term paper as a journal article, but briefly, an unrevised term paper feels like it’s an assignment you wrote on a topic for a professor rather than an independent piece of work. So you need to do work even on an excellent term paper to make it more like a journal paper. Seek guidance from your advisor or other senior folks to help you. 

(2) preparing part of your dissertation as a journal article. This can be a really helpful part of your thought processes. Note, unless you do a paper-based doctoral dissertation you will need to put work both in the chapter and in the paper you send to the journal, but you still save yourself some research time because it will overlap to an important extent. 

(3) interesting bits of research that don’t fit in the dissertation but that still feel like they would make a great paper. Ask advice from a faculty member if you want to pursue this. Do this when you’re genuinely excited about the work, not only to try to save work that would’ve gone to waste otherwise.

You can expect to do a lot of writing that doesn’t end up anywhere (in your dissertation or elsewhere), because when you do a new research project as your dissertation is you will meet a lot of dead ends. So you need to think carefully if you want to go this route: "Is this something other people would be interested in?", before pursuing that route. To help you answer that question you need to wonder whether you have anything interesting to say about the matter. Note that writing for publication is writing for others, not for yourself primarily (though it can, and ideally is gratifying work). 

Comments

[Bob]

While I like these points, I was a little irked by a few parts of the original post. Particularly the idea that one should aim for an hour of writing a day and that that could lead to writing a first draft of a paper in a week and revising it in a week.

I, for one, would never be able to finish a draft of a paper in 7 hours. I doubt I could finish a draft of a paper in 40 hours.

This is probably bad for me in terms of career prospects, but I don't think it means I am bad at philosophy.

It seems to me there are two important things to keep in mind whenever reading advice like this:

First, the goal of philosophy is producing knowledge (or whatever epistemic success object you prefer) not papers or mere writing. While we all need to write to share our ideas (and sometimes to develop them), the ideas are what matters centrally.

Second, people write at different paces. If you write slower you will have to spend more of your time writing than someone who can write a whole draft paper in 7 hours. This sucks for those of us who are slower, but if we remember that what we want is to be good at philosophy, not just good at writing, then we can stay motivated in the face of these seemingly magical people who can write a paper in 7 hours.

Finally, be skeptical of self-reported success and working methods. People who are good at writing papers are not necessarily good at knowing why they are good at writing papers. As an analogy: being a great athlete doesn't mean you will be a great coach: coaching requires skills that athletes don't always have. Of course, having first hand experience at a sport probably makes you a better coach, but it is not sufficient.

[Helen De Cruz]

Hi Bob -- I think these are all relevant points. Personally, I like my philosophy to mature and ripen over time. It typically takes about a year from idea to submittable paper. Maybe that's also because my papers tend to be relatively long and large in scope, and try to set out new things rather than being responses. The idea to help counter a very slow publication stream in this case is to have multiple projects run at once. Also, when you get a bit discouraged in one project, you can then turn to the other!

[Michel]

It's amazing how much you can accomplish when you set small, achievable goals for each day and work at them consistently. This is true over time, of course, but also over relatively short periods of time too. This is the model I've adopted over the last couple of years, and it's seriously increased my productivity despite my 4-4 load, and without significantly impinging on my daily life and activities. Usually this means an hour of writing a day. Sometimes it's a little less, sometimes a little more.

I wrote a ton this last summer, including two papers which took just a month each. One was accepted in a T10 generalist journal, the other got a solid R&R in a top specialist venue. Both involved jumping off from material I know well into wholly new territory. In both cases, I worked at them for about 2-3 hours a day, because I had that kind of time to devote to them in those months. So: it's certainly possible to be quick like that sometimes, even without (I think!) sacrificing quality. Don't expect that to be there norm, though!

One thing I can say is that working consistently brings its own energy. And when it's on material that actually interests you, well, there's nothing more energizing than that!

[Helen De Cruz]

Michel, this is all excellent advice. I think this works very well and I have the same method. I set aside a few achievable goals every day, alongside the urgent stuff. My teaching load is very low (only 3 courses/year) but if I am not careful I will let lots of other things take over, e.g., grad advising, journal editing, refereeing, grant writing, etc etc. So I set aside most days especially non-teaching days dedicated time to work at an achievable research goal.