As a follow-up to the summer series on writing, this post is the third in a series providing technical advice on issues that graduate students (and others) run into in the revision stage. I’ll address problems I commonly see in drafts of dissertations and theses. For each item covered in the series, it’s important to…
As a follow-up to the summer series on writing, this post is the second in a series providing technical advice on issues that graduate students (and others) run into in the revision stage. I’ll address problems I commonly see in drafts of dissertations and theses. For each item covered in the series, it’s important to…
As a follow-up to the summer series on writing, this post is the first in a series providing technical advice on issues that graduate students (and others) run into in the revision stage. I’ll address problems I commonly see in drafts of dissertations and theses. For each item covered in the series, it’s important to…
Here at the Well-Ordered Mind, we are all about structure, progress, and peace. We prize order, incremental progress, regular chipping away at a project. For maximum sustained productivity, we advocate living in Quadrant 2, and we are squarely on Team Tortoise. Those are our ideals. Life, however, is rarely ideal, and sometimes looming deadlines mean…
Revision is the part of the writing process where you need to be ruthless. You can be creative in the prewriting phase (What if I explore this connection?) and permissive in the drafting phase (I’ll leave that in and see how it sounds!). In the revision phase, you need to get out your scalpel and your red pen, and approach your document with the eye of an objective observer, rather than a loving creator.
Drafting is the part of the writing process in which you take ideas and, in the terminology of Flower and Hayes (1981), “translate” them into written words. If you have done brainstorming or freewriting activities, you will already have written words. If you have done outlining activities, you will have a basic structure in place. Attending to these parts of the writing process can make drafting easier, but at some point, you will still need to do the hard work of making letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs appear on that blank screen.
Outlining, at the most basic level, is creating a plan for your writing. This plan can be in your head only or written down. It can be detailed or simple. Early in my dissertation process, I created a three-page outline with citations that I shared with my chair and another committee member to make sure my plan made sense to them. On the other hand, before I started to write this post, I simply jotted down a few key points, and now I am filling in the spaces between them. Both processes helped me organize my thoughts.
Thinking of writing as a process can help you get started. And prewriting is the first step. Instead of staring at the proverbial blank page, assign yourself some prewriting tasks. What is prewriting? It’s all the activities you do before you start to write the first draft of your project. This, of course, includes research, but I’ll save that topic for another post (or series). Today, we’ll focus more narrowly on activities closer to the actual writing.
Writing is a process. So is baking. But writing is not like baking a cake, where once you have stirred in the eggs, you are finished with that part and can move on to the sugar. Rather, writing is more like cooking a complicated sauce. You add a little cayenne, taste to see how that worked, then maybe add a bit more until you achieve the flavor you’re looking for.
Graduate writing tips from experience — both my own and that of others with whom I’ve worked. As you’ll see, many of these tips are double-edged, with a “do this” and a “yes, but” side.
