This post is the first in a series about some perhaps less obvious – but still vital – tools for success in graduate school. As a graduate student, you may feel like the most important part of you is your brain. But the truth is, we are whole people, not “brains on a stick” (Smith,…
Thoughts for those whose life or personality makes planning a challenge. I am, and expect to always be, a fan of planning ahead, focused work times, block scheduling, fake early deadlines, backwards planning, and all the other standard tools of efficiency and productivity. I think these tools help bring order to life, and order tends…
As a follow-up to the summer series on writing, this post is the fourth and last (for now) 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…
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.
