Have you ever followed a piece of academic writing advice that made your writing worse instead of better? What if some of the advice you've been given isn't actually wrong, it just doesn't work for the kind of writer you are?
Hey, co-authors, you've probably heard the same academic writing advice a million times. Write every day. Write for your field. Never use passive voice. We'll explain why scholars are so drawn to certainty and how the desire for clear rules can actually get in the way of becoming a better scholar.
So let's dive in
Whenever I was a master's student, I had a number of professors that were real sticklers for writing. And I remember one of them in particular would just go up and down my writing and give me all sorts of, at least to me then, were pretty esoteric writing rules
One in particular, and you may have heard this too, is that the words while and although are not interchangeable. That while only refers to two simultaneously occurring events. So while I pat my head, I rub my tummy. And although only denotes a concessive conjunction.
So although I like ketchup, I do not like tomatoes. Quick aside, I do like tomatoes. I love tomatoes. Take a fresh tomato, and then have fresh tomato slices with Cavender's Greek seasoning, and it is absolutely legit, okay?
But I was told by my professor again and again, "You cannot use these two words interchangeably." And so, you know, for the next however many years, all through my doctoral program and into my time as a professor I am, quote-unquote, "correcting people" on what is to me a very clear rule.
While is about time, although, concessive conjunction. Then you do a little bit of digging, come to find out, eh, I mean, there are definitely times whenever you can't use while instead of although. And yeah, we might prefer that these two words have two distinct functions, but to most people in their everyday language, they use the two terms interchangeably.
So what to me and to the professor that I had, was a very clear, hard rule, and of course everyone should know and/or respect, is actually more of a peccadillo on the part of snooty grammarians about these two words.
As I thought back to this time with my professor, it got me thinking about all the other rules that you might have been told about writing and how those are good, bad, and indifferent. Some are good in moderation. Some are good in certain contexts.
Some are just flat-out bad advice. And so that's what I wanna talk about today. I want to address all the bad writing tips in academic writing. ? So let's dive in
Are you interested in mastering scholarly writing, developing productivity, and increasing impact all while staying healthy? Then welcome to the Publishing Academic Research podcast. My name is Dr. Kyle Rudick, and I'm a full professor and writing coach who's dedicated to making sure you break through whatever is stopping you from reaching your scholarly goals.
I meet so many scholars who have creative, innovative, and daring ideas but can never seem to get those projects from proposals to print. I want you to get your work in the hands of people who will read it and appreciate it. So let's get into this week's big idea.
Now, before I get into the specific rules that I think are probably the most common and the most egregiously bad ones, I want to trace what I think is the root problem in this instance. And that is to say, I think that writers of all levels, but especially beginning and novice writers, want rules to their writing because they want to know, "If I adhere to these rules, then I will be successful in my writing."
And what that really comes down to is a need for certainty, ? I want to be certain that if I do X, Y, and Z, that I'll get my dissertation done, or I'll get published, or people will read my work, or whatever it might be. And certainly, if you're out there violating every rule and norm of writing, no one's gonna read your stuff because it's probably incomprehensible.
But at the same time, this need for certainty and this need for rules is rooted in this idea that
If I can figure out those rules and I can adhere to those rules, then reviewers, editors, advisors, dissertation committees, readers, whoever it might be, my writing to those groups of people will never be questioned. It will never be criticized. It will never be seen as bad writing because I adhered to the rules.
You told me to do X, Y, and Z. I did X, Y, and Z. Therefore, I have to be successful. And so especially whenever we're novice writers, whenever we're in our doctoral programs or if we don't write very often, even into our professorships, we have this uncertainty. And so the more uncertain we feel, the more rules that we want.
But I would say that the more rules that you follow, the less capable you are going to become as a writer and the less able you're going to be in being able to make a judgment as to what is good or bad writing for yourself and for others whenever you review other people. Because yeah, it's easy to have a checklist of writing rules that you impose on yourself and everyone else.
And if they don't live up to that rule, then obviously it's bad writing. And certainly, again, I'm not saying that rules are bad or that norms are bad. Those things aid us in mutual comprehensibility. And so it's important for us to understand what conventions are in our writing so that way we can make knowledgeable adherences or deviations from that norm.
What I really want to drive home though is that whenever you have this need for certainty and in that need for certainty, you have a need for rules because you think that that's just going to be a recipe for making a good article or a good book or whatever it is, that that's going to stunt your growth and you are going to be unable to make your writing rise to the level of what it needs to be in order for your scholarship to stand out and for your work to contribute something new and novel and rigorous and something that other people want to actually read.
So we have this need for certainty, right? We have these need for rules. So I'm gonna go over the four rules that I either see in the writing of others or that I hear from either my clients or my students have told me that other professors have told them or other teachers have told them in their time, and that I have to then help them unlearn.
Okay? So the first one, and probably the most egregious one, is write every day. I absolutely hate this rule. No one writes every day unless all you have to do is write, ? This is something that you hear from folks that do prose work or poetry work and who are full-time authors, and that job is all they do.
And so, you know, whenever you read a book about writing, like the book "On Writing" from Stephen King, and he's like, "Oh, you know, you need to write every day, and you need to write five to 10 pages a day." I mean, cool. That's great. But you as a professor, you can't do that.
You don't have the time and the bandwidth to write that much every day. You have teaching to do, you have service to do, you have committees, you have meetings, you have emails, you have a million and one things to do. The idea that you will write every day is erroneous, and all it really does is it makes you feel guilty.
And as a result, that guilt makes you feel unmotivated. It is far better for you to be realistic with your calendar and with your time and say to yourself, " I know that I can always commit to two hours on this day or three hours on these two days," or whatever it might be, and to guard that time jealously and to be able to guard it effectively and to get your writing done during that time than it is for you to say, " I need to write every day," and then to flagellate yourself and make yourself feel awful every time that you don't hit that goal.
The most important thing is for you to be a regular writer, not that you write every day. And the other thing is, is that, you know, again, this advice comes primarily from a genre of writing that is absolutely not like academic research writing. Whenever I'm writing a fiction story, everything is in my head and in my control.
Whenever I'm writing research, all sorts of things can create hiccups in your writing, whether that's a new article that just came out and, now I need to revise some part of my research in order to encompass this new knowledge that's more cutting edge. It could be that your data collection didn't go quite the way that you had planned.
Maybe it didn't work out or maybe you found something out that was not the original purpose of your research, like if you're doing qualitative work or ethnographies. There are so many things that can inhibit this easy idea of write every day
So I would say, again, write every day. It's terrible advice. Anyone who tells you that is either not doing that themselves and they're just foisting that on you because that's what they've heard, and they just think that's an easy thing to say.
Or B, they do it, but that's because they're probably, you know, a, a full professor on, like, a one-one load that has a TA grading all of their quizzes for them, so that way they can get all of their stuff done. For the vast majority of us, that is not our life. Our life is lived in snatching time away from our regularly scheduled programming to get our research done, and in that case, it's better for you to be realistic and consistent than it is for you to have the goal of writing every day
The second thing that I hear is that you need to always outline before you write I hate this because most people do not outline very well. Their outlines are not helpful. They've never been taught how to outline correctly, and as a result, all they're doing is spinning their wheels and not getting anywhere with their writing as they sit there and try to outline.
So why is that? Well, whenever most people outline,
What most people do is they think they are mapping the different sections, different paragraphs of what their writing is going to be like. But what ends up happening is that you'll have a person who outlines a section.
So they'll have paragraph one, two, three, four, five, right? And then they'll have a sentence for that paragraph, and that sentence will say something like, " This paragraph needs to be about the history of the theory." Next one is this paragraph needs to be about the main tenets of the theory.
Next one, this paragraph needs to be about the major studies that utilize the theory, that's not helpful. That is you writing a note to your future self saying, "Hey, future self, you need to go find this and do this work." That's not helpful for you. That's not guiding you in any way because you don't even know what you're writing about.
You're telling yourself what you need to figure out in order to write it. That's not an outline. , That is your present self telling your future self, " Hey, buddy, figure this out or we're not gonna be able to publish anything." That's not an outline. That's blackmail. That, you have given your future self blackmail. Figure this out or we don't succeed. So that's not helpful, right? If you're the type of person that wants to outline, there's nothing wrong inherently with that. But you want to make sure that those major points of the paragraph that you're trying to outline each one, that those are strong topic sentences so they are claims that then the rest of the paragraph is going to support, analyze or buttress with the evidence the citations and the readings and the literature that you're pulling from and the analysis that you're doing.
Telling yourself, "Figure this thing out," is not going to be helpful. So if you've been told to outline, write an annotated bibliography, write abstracts, any of those things, all of those things are wasted time and effort. They're so bad because they are not conducive to the actual writing, which is you synthesizing, analyzing, and putting into conversation the literature in a way that leads to your research questions or your hypotheses.
That's only done whenever you have an outline that consists of strong topic sentences. The third thing that I hear a lot, never use first person in research writing. So first off, I realize that this is genre-specific. So for a lot of the listeners who are in the natural sciences or social sciences, the use of first person is still largely verboten, and I get that
There are times whenever the lack of first-person language really does a disservice to the intellectual work that you're doing. Sometimes it leads to passive voice or sort of evasive prose that really kind of hides the decisions that you've made. I think this is particularly true in, like, qualitative research, where, for example, if someone were to say, " After analyzing the data, three themes emerged."
It's like, okay, no, themes don't emerge from data. They don't spring up out of nowhere. They are not self-evident. Those are matters of interpretation. You as the researcher, you as the author, are interpreting, analyzing subject. So it is absolutely correct for you to say, " After analyzing the data
I generated three themes. That's absolutely fine, right? Because you generated those, you created those. A lot of times, I think that whenever we say, " Don't use first person," what we're trying to do, especially in scientific forms of writing, is adhere to this idea that the scientific method is objective and neutral and that me following those things is no different than anyone else following those things, therefore, it doesn't matter that there's a person in it, and so I should hide myself.
But I think that as we're moving forward, it's more and more apparent that people, even in scientific writing, are making choices. We choose how to conceptualize and operationalize variables. We choose what literature to cite and what literature we didn't cite. We choose our designs. Like, those are all things that we as humans are doing in that process, and the idea that we've somehow, by following the scientific method or any other method, that we've been able to write on God's own chalkboard in the sky, I think is a little self-aggrandizing.
I think it's far more realistic to say, "Hey, look, I am a fallible human being, and I did my very best to follow whatever method it is that I'm trying to do, and I made these types of choices that are based in me as a person, and that has led me to these conclusions that are certainly better than
reading chicken entrails or looking at astrology or divining tarot cards, but is probably not perfect. And that's okay. That's why we do research that's replicable, or we have knowledge claims that aren't supposed to be about objective reality, but are more about intersubjective agreement, right?
Like, there's so many caveats that we could have, but the idea that we need to just erase ourselves as researchers, I think is a little scurrilous. The final thing that I see and this is, Particularly true for students and those who are going through their dissertation process.
But it's formal pieces of writing need to have certain types of page requirements. So like, oh, well, if it's a literature review for a thesis, it needs to be at least 30 pages. Or if it's for a dissertation, it needs to be at least 60 pages. Or if you have a dissertation that's less than 100 pages, then that's not a good dissertation.
Like, page length is not an indicator of quality, ? Certainly there's something to be said about doing an exhaustive literature review if that's what you're trying to do. Not every project requires an exhaustive literature review.
But the idea that the number of pages that you have somehow indexes to rigor, , it again, is scurrilous. There are plenty of bloated, overwritten, and frankly useless dissertations that are 500 pages long, and that person walks around probably thumping their chest that they wrote such a long dissertation, and look how hard I had to work, and see how great I am because I wrote so much.
Like most dissertations, it's probably not gonna get read, and in fact, most likely even less so because no one wants to read a 500-page dissertation from a doc student. No one. No one wants to do that. So it is more important for you to have a clear-eyed sense of what needs to be said to your audience, how to say that to your audience effectively, and how to communicate that through your pages in a way that does not waste their time while keeping them informed enough to know what your contribution is and how it's important.
That's it. That's the task, right? And whether that's three pages or 300 pages, that's up for you to decide and for you to figure out while you're in this process. But the idea of having an arbitrary number that you need to hit in order for you to obtain quality in your writing is bad advice So as I've been saying, I think that the root problem of all this is certainty, right? ?
Is this idea that if I don't do X or if I always do Y, that everything's gonna be okay, but I think that a better approach to this is whenever you encounter a problem such as X, here's how you can recognize that problem. Here's how you know that you have a problem in your writing,
And here are a variety of ways in which you can address, overcome, mitigate, or otherwise eliminate that problem. But what's important is that we're giving people a framework from which to understand their writing, and then a more open-ended, here are possible pathways depending on the type of writer that you are and the type of work that you're doing that would indicate what it is that you need to do.
So then what would be some ways that we could do that? I've got four different pieces of advice that I hope are helpful for you as you're moving forward with your writing. And I want you to think of them as a framework that might sensitize you to different problems in your writing rather than as rules that you need to adhere to or follow.
Okay? So the first off is write towards clarity, not tradition So to me, it makes very little sense for you to adhere to any writing norm or rule if it gets in the way of what you perceive to be your audience's ability to understand what it is that you're writing. And I mean, Orwell said it best, right?
He gives his list of rules, and the final one is, " Violate any of these rules rather than do anything outright barbarous." Similarly, I will say to you It is more important for you to err on the side of clarity than for you to adhere to a rule and then have some writing that's bad. ?
And so what does that look like?
It looks like you not chasing after certain quotas or checklists in order for you to be a good writer. Instead, it is in evaluating each part of your writing and thinking to yourself, " Does this help guide my reader to my preferred meaning and to my purpose in this piece of writing?"
And so you can do that section by section. You can do that paragraph by paragraph. You can do that topic sentence by topic sentence. Any and all of those things as you're looking at them, this is the overarching question. Not, am I being smart? Not, do I think that someone might disagree with me if I say this?
Not do I think I'm gonna win an award for how awesome my contribution is. None of those things should be the things that really animate what you're writing.
Your writing is always about, Am I writing in a way that my audience can understand? Because at the end of the day, if your audience either is not reading you because you're esoteric and dense and obtuse as a writer, or they read it and they come up with eight million different interpretations of your writing because you didn't do a good job of guiding them to your preferred , meaning then you failed as an author, right?
Your contribution is not as strong as it could have been because you did not choose clarity as your guiding framework. The second thing that I will say is find your research rhythm. Again, productivity is personal. The idea that you can write every day is nonsense. So some scholars write bursts, some write more habitually.
I will always encourage folks to set aside a minimum amount of time that they know that they can hit and then to hit that. To me, it's much like exercise. I know that I'm not gonna go to the gym every day. I'm just not. I am a soft hand, out of shape academic. I get this about myself. I am not going to be someone who goes to the gym every day and gets swole, right? So if that's the case, then instead of telling myself I need to go to the gym every day and then feeling bad about it, instead I know that three days a week I don't have night classes, I don't have anything else going on.
These three nights I can guarantee that I can exercise for an hour. Again, I'm not killing it. I'm not bench pressing 300 pounds. I don't need to do that. All I need to do is be consistent. You'll see the gains over time. Same thing here with writing. You don't need to write every day. You don't need to write every day for six hours a day.
What you need is time that you know that you can hold onto and utilize well once, twice, three times a week. And if you hit five times, six times, seven times a week, go with God. That's awesome for you. But for the vast majority of us, that's not the case. It's more important for you to be consistent and find your rhythm than it is for you to overpromise and end up making yourself feel bad.
The third thing that I will say is use your writing as a thinking tool. Now, I want to be clear here, because I've said in the past, a lot of people use their writing as a thinking tool, and that's not good. It's not good if the writing that you do to help yourself think is the writing that you turn in to your professor, to your advisor, to a journal, whatever it might be.
That is not writing that you should be giving to anyone else, because that writing is not for them. It is not for an audience. That writing is for you, for you to write through and figure things out. There is nothing wrong with that
There's nothing wrong with you writing to yourself or for yourself in order for you to get a handle on all the literature that's out there, right? That's what every draft is. Every draft of your literature review, every draft of your paper, whatever it might be, is you homing in on closer and closer to the target that you're trying to get at so it's important for you to realize that a lot of times whenever people hear this type of advice what they hear and even what some people say, maybe I should have even made this one of the other pieces of bad advice, is the advice of, you know, write a crappy draft and then fix it in editing.
I think that there are different types of crappy first drafts, right? There's a crappy first draft that is, I'm trying to think through things, and I'm putting things together with the intent that this draft is not even really a draft of the paper. It is me trying to get my ideas together so that way I can start a draft.
If The draft is, it doesn't have any citations correctly. It's all over the place in paragraph structure, like the sentences don't make sense, ? It's so bad that whenever you go back to read it, it actually confuses you as well. If that's your first draft, that's not a thinking through draft.
That is you spinning your wheels by creating a draft that is so unusable that it makes it feel like you've done something because you've accomplished, quote-unquote, the first draft, but it's not helpful for you in any capacity. So if you're thinking through ideas, and you're using that as a writing and thinking tool, that's cool, right?
Use that writing to help you work through the literature. But each successive draft should be you getting closer and closer to not just the content, but the form in which your final writing will take in order for it to be the most beneficial
The last framework that I will say is that
Whenever you're writing, what you should feel at the end of it is not certainty, but confidence. And what I mean by that is as we think about the root problem that animates so much of this is this need for certainty, is this need for us to feel like if we can check the boxes off on all of these little esoteric and banal rules, that somehow that's gonna be the thing that gets us through our dissertations or our articles or our books or whatever it might be.
That type of thinking is anathema to your growth as a writer. Instead, what I want you to do is think to yourself, as you're writing, do you feel like you're becoming more confident in the idea that you have and your ability to communicate that to your audience in a way that they will understand?
And if you are, if you can say with each draft, "I think this got clearer to myself and to others. I think this writing is now more impactful than it was before my colleague gave me feedback on it and I made revisions. I feel like after submitting to a journal, and maybe even getting rejected and then getting feedback and going to the second journal, that the piece now is stronger than it was whenever I first submitted."
All those things are about you developing confidence in your writing Because you're able to develop your own idiosyncratic approach that ends up working for you. And that, at the end of the day, is what all of us should be striving for. It's not for finding the one path that gets us to being good authors or perfect authors or any other types of authors.
Instead, it is about trying to find the framework that works for us and our particular needs, our particular circumstances, our particular abilities. Okay?
So I think that's gonna about wrap it up for me, folks. As always, I appreciate you listening. As I said last week, my website is live now. A lot of you gave me feedback on it. I've already made a whole bunch of changes to it. So if you haven't already, hop on over there. Let me know what you think. If you go to the contact page, you can tell me what you think about the website.
You can also see a picture of my super cute pupper, Rosie, the research dog.
If you're interested in my coaching services, my information is in the podcast description.
The first 30-minute meeting that you make with me is always free. You can talk to me about whatever it is that you're going through right now, a project that's giving you a hard time. Maybe it's a colleague who's being kind of a jerk or a chair that's being a bit overbearing. I'm happy to give a little coaching and advice on any of those things.
If you need more than 30 minutes, then you can hire me for my coaching services. I love working with clients because I like being a part of other people's success as they find their purpose in higher education.
And so please reach out to me. So thank you so much for listening, and I will see you in next week's episode.
Hey, co-authors. What's stopping your best ideas from becoming your next big publication? Brilliant research shouldn't die in your drafts folder. Now's the time to bridge the gap between the possible and the published. You can support this podcast by subscribing to it, leaving a positive review, assigning it to your classes, or sharing it with a colleague.
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Hey, co-authors, you've probably heard the same academic writing advice a million times. Write every day. Write for your field. Never use passive voice. We'll explain why scholars are so drawn to certainty and how the desire for clear rules can actually get in the way of becoming a better scholar.
So let's dive in
Whenever I was a master's student, I had a number of professors that were real sticklers for writing. And I remember one of them in particular would just go up and down my writing and give me all sorts of, at least to me then, were pretty esoteric writing rules
One in particular, and you may have heard this too, is that the words while and although are not interchangeable. That while only refers to two simultaneously occurring events. So while I pat my head, I rub my tummy. And although only denotes a concessive conjunction.
So although I like ketchup, I do not like tomatoes. Quick aside, I do like tomatoes. I love tomatoes. Take a fresh tomato, and then have fresh tomato slices with Cavender's Greek seasoning, and it is absolutely legit, okay?
But I was told by my professor again and again, "You cannot use these two words interchangeably." And so, you know, for the next however many years, all through my doctoral program and into my time as a professor I am, quote-unquote, "correcting people" on what is to me a very clear rule.
While is about time, although, concessive conjunction. Then you do a little bit of digging, come to find out, eh, I mean, there are definitely times whenever you can't use while instead of although. And yeah, we might prefer that these two words have two distinct functions, but to most people in their everyday language, they use the two terms interchangeably.
So what to me and to the professor that I had, was a very clear, hard rule, and of course everyone should know and/or respect, is actually more of a peccadillo on the part of snooty grammarians about these two words.
As I thought back to this time with my professor, it got me thinking about all the other rules that you might have been told about writing and how those are good, bad, and indifferent. Some are good in moderation. Some are good in certain contexts.
Some are just flat-out bad advice. And so that's what I wanna talk about today. I want to address all the bad writing tips in academic writing. ? So let's dive in
Are you interested in mastering scholarly writing, developing productivity, and increasing impact all while staying healthy? Then welcome to the Publishing Academic Research podcast. My name is Dr. Kyle Rudick, and I'm a full professor and writing coach who's dedicated to making sure you break through whatever is stopping you from reaching your scholarly goals.
I meet so many scholars who have creative, innovative, and daring ideas but can never seem to get those projects from proposals to print. I want you to get your work in the hands of people who will read it and appreciate it. So let's get into this week's big idea.
Now, before I get into the specific rules that I think are probably the most common and the most egregiously bad ones, I want to trace what I think is the root problem in this instance. And that is to say, I think that writers of all levels, but especially beginning and novice writers, want rules to their writing because they want to know, "If I adhere to these rules, then I will be successful in my writing."
And what that really comes down to is a need for certainty, ? I want to be certain that if I do X, Y, and Z, that I'll get my dissertation done, or I'll get published, or people will read my work, or whatever it might be. And certainly, if you're out there violating every rule and norm of writing, no one's gonna read your stuff because it's probably incomprehensible.
But at the same time, this need for certainty and this need for rules is rooted in this idea that
If I can figure out those rules and I can adhere to those rules, then reviewers, editors, advisors, dissertation committees, readers, whoever it might be, my writing to those groups of people will never be questioned. It will never be criticized. It will never be seen as bad writing because I adhered to the rules.
You told me to do X, Y, and Z. I did X, Y, and Z. Therefore, I have to be successful. And so especially whenever we're novice writers, whenever we're in our doctoral programs or if we don't write very often, even into our professorships, we have this uncertainty. And so the more uncertain we feel, the more rules that we want.
But I would say that the more rules that you follow, the less capable you are going to become as a writer and the less able you're going to be in being able to make a judgment as to what is good or bad writing for yourself and for others whenever you review other people. Because yeah, it's easy to have a checklist of writing rules that you impose on yourself and everyone else.
And if they don't live up to that rule, then obviously it's bad writing. And certainly, again, I'm not saying that rules are bad or that norms are bad. Those things aid us in mutual comprehensibility. And so it's important for us to understand what conventions are in our writing so that way we can make knowledgeable adherences or deviations from that norm.
What I really want to drive home though is that whenever you have this need for certainty and in that need for certainty, you have a need for rules because you think that that's just going to be a recipe for making a good article or a good book or whatever it is, that that's going to stunt your growth and you are going to be unable to make your writing rise to the level of what it needs to be in order for your scholarship to stand out and for your work to contribute something new and novel and rigorous and something that other people want to actually read.
So we have this need for certainty, right? We have these need for rules. So I'm gonna go over the four rules that I either see in the writing of others or that I hear from either my clients or my students have told me that other professors have told them or other teachers have told them in their time, and that I have to then help them unlearn.
Okay? So the first one, and probably the most egregious one, is write every day. I absolutely hate this rule. No one writes every day unless all you have to do is write, ? This is something that you hear from folks that do prose work or poetry work and who are full-time authors, and that job is all they do.
And so, you know, whenever you read a book about writing, like the book "On Writing" from Stephen King, and he's like, "Oh, you know, you need to write every day, and you need to write five to 10 pages a day." I mean, cool. That's great. But you as a professor, you can't do that.
You don't have the time and the bandwidth to write that much every day. You have teaching to do, you have service to do, you have committees, you have meetings, you have emails, you have a million and one things to do. The idea that you will write every day is erroneous, and all it really does is it makes you feel guilty.
And as a result, that guilt makes you feel unmotivated. It is far better for you to be realistic with your calendar and with your time and say to yourself, " I know that I can always commit to two hours on this day or three hours on these two days," or whatever it might be, and to guard that time jealously and to be able to guard it effectively and to get your writing done during that time than it is for you to say, " I need to write every day," and then to flagellate yourself and make yourself feel awful every time that you don't hit that goal.
The most important thing is for you to be a regular writer, not that you write every day. And the other thing is, is that, you know, again, this advice comes primarily from a genre of writing that is absolutely not like academic research writing. Whenever I'm writing a fiction story, everything is in my head and in my control.
Whenever I'm writing research, all sorts of things can create hiccups in your writing, whether that's a new article that just came out and, now I need to revise some part of my research in order to encompass this new knowledge that's more cutting edge. It could be that your data collection didn't go quite the way that you had planned.
Maybe it didn't work out or maybe you found something out that was not the original purpose of your research, like if you're doing qualitative work or ethnographies. There are so many things that can inhibit this easy idea of write every day
So I would say, again, write every day. It's terrible advice. Anyone who tells you that is either not doing that themselves and they're just foisting that on you because that's what they've heard, and they just think that's an easy thing to say.
Or B, they do it, but that's because they're probably, you know, a, a full professor on, like, a one-one load that has a TA grading all of their quizzes for them, so that way they can get all of their stuff done. For the vast majority of us, that is not our life. Our life is lived in snatching time away from our regularly scheduled programming to get our research done, and in that case, it's better for you to be realistic and consistent than it is for you to have the goal of writing every day
The second thing that I hear is that you need to always outline before you write I hate this because most people do not outline very well. Their outlines are not helpful. They've never been taught how to outline correctly, and as a result, all they're doing is spinning their wheels and not getting anywhere with their writing as they sit there and try to outline.
So why is that? Well, whenever most people outline,
What most people do is they think they are mapping the different sections, different paragraphs of what their writing is going to be like. But what ends up happening is that you'll have a person who outlines a section.
So they'll have paragraph one, two, three, four, five, right? And then they'll have a sentence for that paragraph, and that sentence will say something like, " This paragraph needs to be about the history of the theory." Next one is this paragraph needs to be about the main tenets of the theory.
Next one, this paragraph needs to be about the major studies that utilize the theory, that's not helpful. That is you writing a note to your future self saying, "Hey, future self, you need to go find this and do this work." That's not helpful for you. That's not guiding you in any way because you don't even know what you're writing about.
You're telling yourself what you need to figure out in order to write it. That's not an outline. , That is your present self telling your future self, " Hey, buddy, figure this out or we're not gonna be able to publish anything." That's not an outline. That's blackmail. That, you have given your future self blackmail. Figure this out or we don't succeed. So that's not helpful, right? If you're the type of person that wants to outline, there's nothing wrong inherently with that. But you want to make sure that those major points of the paragraph that you're trying to outline each one, that those are strong topic sentences so they are claims that then the rest of the paragraph is going to support, analyze or buttress with the evidence the citations and the readings and the literature that you're pulling from and the analysis that you're doing.
Telling yourself, "Figure this thing out," is not going to be helpful. So if you've been told to outline, write an annotated bibliography, write abstracts, any of those things, all of those things are wasted time and effort. They're so bad because they are not conducive to the actual writing, which is you synthesizing, analyzing, and putting into conversation the literature in a way that leads to your research questions or your hypotheses.
That's only done whenever you have an outline that consists of strong topic sentences. The third thing that I hear a lot, never use first person in research writing. So first off, I realize that this is genre-specific. So for a lot of the listeners who are in the natural sciences or social sciences, the use of first person is still largely verboten, and I get that
There are times whenever the lack of first-person language really does a disservice to the intellectual work that you're doing. Sometimes it leads to passive voice or sort of evasive prose that really kind of hides the decisions that you've made. I think this is particularly true in, like, qualitative research, where, for example, if someone were to say, " After analyzing the data, three themes emerged."
It's like, okay, no, themes don't emerge from data. They don't spring up out of nowhere. They are not self-evident. Those are matters of interpretation. You as the researcher, you as the author, are interpreting, analyzing subject. So it is absolutely correct for you to say, " After analyzing the data
I generated three themes. That's absolutely fine, right? Because you generated those, you created those. A lot of times, I think that whenever we say, " Don't use first person," what we're trying to do, especially in scientific forms of writing, is adhere to this idea that the scientific method is objective and neutral and that me following those things is no different than anyone else following those things, therefore, it doesn't matter that there's a person in it, and so I should hide myself.
But I think that as we're moving forward, it's more and more apparent that people, even in scientific writing, are making choices. We choose how to conceptualize and operationalize variables. We choose what literature to cite and what literature we didn't cite. We choose our designs. Like, those are all things that we as humans are doing in that process, and the idea that we've somehow, by following the scientific method or any other method, that we've been able to write on God's own chalkboard in the sky, I think is a little self-aggrandizing.
I think it's far more realistic to say, "Hey, look, I am a fallible human being, and I did my very best to follow whatever method it is that I'm trying to do, and I made these types of choices that are based in me as a person, and that has led me to these conclusions that are certainly better than
reading chicken entrails or looking at astrology or divining tarot cards, but is probably not perfect. And that's okay. That's why we do research that's replicable, or we have knowledge claims that aren't supposed to be about objective reality, but are more about intersubjective agreement, right?
Like, there's so many caveats that we could have, but the idea that we need to just erase ourselves as researchers, I think is a little scurrilous. The final thing that I see and this is, Particularly true for students and those who are going through their dissertation process.
But it's formal pieces of writing need to have certain types of page requirements. So like, oh, well, if it's a literature review for a thesis, it needs to be at least 30 pages. Or if it's for a dissertation, it needs to be at least 60 pages. Or if you have a dissertation that's less than 100 pages, then that's not a good dissertation.
Like, page length is not an indicator of quality, ? Certainly there's something to be said about doing an exhaustive literature review if that's what you're trying to do. Not every project requires an exhaustive literature review.
But the idea that the number of pages that you have somehow indexes to rigor, , it again, is scurrilous. There are plenty of bloated, overwritten, and frankly useless dissertations that are 500 pages long, and that person walks around probably thumping their chest that they wrote such a long dissertation, and look how hard I had to work, and see how great I am because I wrote so much.
Like most dissertations, it's probably not gonna get read, and in fact, most likely even less so because no one wants to read a 500-page dissertation from a doc student. No one. No one wants to do that. So it is more important for you to have a clear-eyed sense of what needs to be said to your audience, how to say that to your audience effectively, and how to communicate that through your pages in a way that does not waste their time while keeping them informed enough to know what your contribution is and how it's important.
That's it. That's the task, right? And whether that's three pages or 300 pages, that's up for you to decide and for you to figure out while you're in this process. But the idea of having an arbitrary number that you need to hit in order for you to obtain quality in your writing is bad advice So as I've been saying, I think that the root problem of all this is certainty, right? ?
Is this idea that if I don't do X or if I always do Y, that everything's gonna be okay, but I think that a better approach to this is whenever you encounter a problem such as X, here's how you can recognize that problem. Here's how you know that you have a problem in your writing,
And here are a variety of ways in which you can address, overcome, mitigate, or otherwise eliminate that problem. But what's important is that we're giving people a framework from which to understand their writing, and then a more open-ended, here are possible pathways depending on the type of writer that you are and the type of work that you're doing that would indicate what it is that you need to do.
So then what would be some ways that we could do that? I've got four different pieces of advice that I hope are helpful for you as you're moving forward with your writing. And I want you to think of them as a framework that might sensitize you to different problems in your writing rather than as rules that you need to adhere to or follow.
Okay? So the first off is write towards clarity, not tradition So to me, it makes very little sense for you to adhere to any writing norm or rule if it gets in the way of what you perceive to be your audience's ability to understand what it is that you're writing. And I mean, Orwell said it best, right?
He gives his list of rules, and the final one is, " Violate any of these rules rather than do anything outright barbarous." Similarly, I will say to you It is more important for you to err on the side of clarity than for you to adhere to a rule and then have some writing that's bad. ?
And so what does that look like?
It looks like you not chasing after certain quotas or checklists in order for you to be a good writer. Instead, it is in evaluating each part of your writing and thinking to yourself, " Does this help guide my reader to my preferred meaning and to my purpose in this piece of writing?"
And so you can do that section by section. You can do that paragraph by paragraph. You can do that topic sentence by topic sentence. Any and all of those things as you're looking at them, this is the overarching question. Not, am I being smart? Not, do I think that someone might disagree with me if I say this?
Not do I think I'm gonna win an award for how awesome my contribution is. None of those things should be the things that really animate what you're writing.
Your writing is always about, Am I writing in a way that my audience can understand? Because at the end of the day, if your audience either is not reading you because you're esoteric and dense and obtuse as a writer, or they read it and they come up with eight million different interpretations of your writing because you didn't do a good job of guiding them to your preferred , meaning then you failed as an author, right?
Your contribution is not as strong as it could have been because you did not choose clarity as your guiding framework. The second thing that I will say is find your research rhythm. Again, productivity is personal. The idea that you can write every day is nonsense. So some scholars write bursts, some write more habitually.
I will always encourage folks to set aside a minimum amount of time that they know that they can hit and then to hit that. To me, it's much like exercise. I know that I'm not gonna go to the gym every day. I'm just not. I am a soft hand, out of shape academic. I get this about myself. I am not going to be someone who goes to the gym every day and gets swole, right? So if that's the case, then instead of telling myself I need to go to the gym every day and then feeling bad about it, instead I know that three days a week I don't have night classes, I don't have anything else going on.
These three nights I can guarantee that I can exercise for an hour. Again, I'm not killing it. I'm not bench pressing 300 pounds. I don't need to do that. All I need to do is be consistent. You'll see the gains over time. Same thing here with writing. You don't need to write every day. You don't need to write every day for six hours a day.
What you need is time that you know that you can hold onto and utilize well once, twice, three times a week. And if you hit five times, six times, seven times a week, go with God. That's awesome for you. But for the vast majority of us, that's not the case. It's more important for you to be consistent and find your rhythm than it is for you to overpromise and end up making yourself feel bad.
The third thing that I will say is use your writing as a thinking tool. Now, I want to be clear here, because I've said in the past, a lot of people use their writing as a thinking tool, and that's not good. It's not good if the writing that you do to help yourself think is the writing that you turn in to your professor, to your advisor, to a journal, whatever it might be.
That is not writing that you should be giving to anyone else, because that writing is not for them. It is not for an audience. That writing is for you, for you to write through and figure things out. There is nothing wrong with that
There's nothing wrong with you writing to yourself or for yourself in order for you to get a handle on all the literature that's out there, right? That's what every draft is. Every draft of your literature review, every draft of your paper, whatever it might be, is you homing in on closer and closer to the target that you're trying to get at so it's important for you to realize that a lot of times whenever people hear this type of advice what they hear and even what some people say, maybe I should have even made this one of the other pieces of bad advice, is the advice of, you know, write a crappy draft and then fix it in editing.
I think that there are different types of crappy first drafts, right? There's a crappy first draft that is, I'm trying to think through things, and I'm putting things together with the intent that this draft is not even really a draft of the paper. It is me trying to get my ideas together so that way I can start a draft.
If The draft is, it doesn't have any citations correctly. It's all over the place in paragraph structure, like the sentences don't make sense, ? It's so bad that whenever you go back to read it, it actually confuses you as well. If that's your first draft, that's not a thinking through draft.
That is you spinning your wheels by creating a draft that is so unusable that it makes it feel like you've done something because you've accomplished, quote-unquote, the first draft, but it's not helpful for you in any capacity. So if you're thinking through ideas, and you're using that as a writing and thinking tool, that's cool, right?
Use that writing to help you work through the literature. But each successive draft should be you getting closer and closer to not just the content, but the form in which your final writing will take in order for it to be the most beneficial
The last framework that I will say is that
Whenever you're writing, what you should feel at the end of it is not certainty, but confidence. And what I mean by that is as we think about the root problem that animates so much of this is this need for certainty, is this need for us to feel like if we can check the boxes off on all of these little esoteric and banal rules, that somehow that's gonna be the thing that gets us through our dissertations or our articles or our books or whatever it might be.
That type of thinking is anathema to your growth as a writer. Instead, what I want you to do is think to yourself, as you're writing, do you feel like you're becoming more confident in the idea that you have and your ability to communicate that to your audience in a way that they will understand?
And if you are, if you can say with each draft, "I think this got clearer to myself and to others. I think this writing is now more impactful than it was before my colleague gave me feedback on it and I made revisions. I feel like after submitting to a journal, and maybe even getting rejected and then getting feedback and going to the second journal, that the piece now is stronger than it was whenever I first submitted."
All those things are about you developing confidence in your writing Because you're able to develop your own idiosyncratic approach that ends up working for you. And that, at the end of the day, is what all of us should be striving for. It's not for finding the one path that gets us to being good authors or perfect authors or any other types of authors.
Instead, it is about trying to find the framework that works for us and our particular needs, our particular circumstances, our particular abilities. Okay?
So I think that's gonna about wrap it up for me, folks. As always, I appreciate you listening. As I said last week, my website is live now. A lot of you gave me feedback on it. I've already made a whole bunch of changes to it. So if you haven't already, hop on over there. Let me know what you think. If you go to the contact page, you can tell me what you think about the website.
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And so please reach out to me. So thank you so much for listening, and I will see you in next week's episode.
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