Coping with perfectionism as a writer?

In our March "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

I am disgusted by the way my own writing sounds. This prevents me from making progress on my research, partly because it saps my motivation to write and partly because it causes me to waste time endlessly rewording sentences (or reorganizing paragraphs, or reframing whole papers, and so on).

Oddly, however, others who have read my work compliment me on how clear, well-organized, and engaging my writing is. Moreover, when I read papers I wrote years ago, the writing seems fine, despite the fact that I was much less mature a philosopher then.

Have others had this experience? If so, how do you cope with it?

Good questions. Do any other readers have similar experiences, and any tips to handle it well?

Comments

[academic migrant]

I find it extremely difficult to finish some sentences in ways I find satisfactory. I attribute this to my ESL background. But I hope my way can be helpful. I just don't finish sentences, but mark them in red, and later go for a walk and think about the sentence. But before I go for the walk, I try to just keep writing to write down my general flow of thought to prevent the feeling of lack of progress.

[G Diddi]

I don't have such a seemingly negative attitude about my writing, writing style, and writing process. But this sounds like me as a writer. I fiddle, dissect, rewrite, and so on, quite a bit. So, my thought: you sound normal to me.

[hwrite]

I am wondering if you try to edit as you go along, instead of just writing a paper and then editing later? Usually when I'm writing, I don't have my editing brain turned on. I'm just putting down ideas, and I get the paper written without reading back and editing my words. I go back and edit later.

[stay disgusted]

It seems to me that disgust with one's writing is usually the right attitude. Writing well is hard! Feeling bad about a draft is a good motivator to revise, and revising almost always improves the stuff.

I wish more philosophers felt the drive to produce writing that includes at least some shred of intensity or beauty or joy, which I think is probably the same thing as wishing more philosophers felt disgust at the drafts they are sending out for review.

[Kav]

OP: this is a perennial problem for me as well, and I appreciate you raising it. Writing papers that have various good-making features can be an excruciating process in a discipline that is frankly both hypercritical and overly demanding. And I don't think disgust towards one's writing is the apt response. For one thing it does nothing to promote your goals. For another it can seriously harm your self-confidence.

The only positive suggestion I have is to be compassionate and understanding with yourself, and try to give yourself the credit you deserve as an improving writer, even though it'll always feel like you're giving yourself too much credit.

[Vaughn]

I have similar problems, and I have been finding ChatGPT (and more recently Claude 3 Opus) helpful for this. If I have a section written, I can ask ChatGPT (or Claude, or whatever) to do something like "rewrite this so that it sounds clearer", and iterate versions of that to get something that's at least different than what I started with in a good direction. Then, I can try to combine ChatGPT's version and my version. If I am writing from scratch, knowing that I will be able to do this later to make the writing sound better helps me to "turn off my editing brain" as hwrite suggests above, because I have confidence that I will be able to make it sound better later without massive effort (to be clear, it still takes some work, just way less than it would on my own).