- Most (professional) writers only write 4 hours per day, the rest is spent in research, etc. NOT the 10 or so hours that grad students work.
- Barriers to writing
- Not being ready enough to write; Procrastination
- Perfectionism
- Impatience
- She’s a motivating speaker to prevent writer’s block
- “If you feel like you’ve read enough, chances are you have.” If you haven’t, that’s the job of your adviser to suggest missing references for you. This is not all on your shoulders.
- Most important thing to remember: keeping your dissertation adviser happy
- Fantasy writing in layers (in reality, you’ll go back and forth around these levels, cycling from the top to the bottom)
- Focus Statement
- One page outline
- Long outline
- Long outline with evidence
- First draft
- Final draft
- The dissertation should be the worst piece of research you ever do. Everything else should get much easier!
- Writing a focus statement
- Write three of them (they’ll overlap, likely), then talk about them with a friend
- There will be one that they can see a “twinkle in your eye,” and that’s the one
- Make it as easy as possible for your adviser to give you feedback
- One page outline
- Each section will need a focus statement, because it will tell you where you’re going
- Puzzle Piece metaphor
- You have a bunch of things you’re going to have to discuss (background, etc)… pieces in the puzzle
- Write the pieces individually, then you can move them around and put them together in different ways later.
- (Get down what you need, then organize them later)
- She suggests using the table of contents feature in Word
- It can show your progress in a way that is similar to your outline
- It also shows how much you’ve written in each section (shows how many pages are in each section)
- Mark them as percent done. So, like if you have 6 pages in a section, mark it as 90% done, but may another that only has 1 page, mark as 60%.
- Then, when you sit down, work on a few sections at a time, but only focus on those that are under 90%
- You can top off all of them when every section gets to 90%
- You should never be thinking and drafting at the same time. Every step you take should be at the smallest possible. You should never go from bullet point to final text, or outline to full outline without focus statements for each section. “Never ever try to do it all at once.”
- If you’re procrastinating, back up and do more reading
- Share with your writing group
- Educate your adviser on how to manage you
- Don’t write in isolation
- No other authors have, don’t feel like you need to. Get a writing group.
- Your first draft should be exactly how you would tell it to a best friend.
- It should be informal, and how you speak
- Write as “I want to write this because…” and you have something very important to write down!
- Google scholar exercise
- Read 2 dissertations that your advisor has advised
- Every time you read an article, look how your field cites those sources.
- Take 2 of your articles, write a longer outline about it. Write 2-3 citable notes for that article. Look up that article in Google Scholar, and use the “cited by” link on the search links and pull 5 articles that cite this article. Look at how they cite this article.
- Then you can see how you should cite articles: phrasing, tone, how much to say about it.
- Do you write sentences, or do you group 4-5 citations into one chunk?
- When you’re sick of it, that’s enough; you’ve done enough
- Propose the least you can propose to get by with, so make it the smallest you can
- If you’re stuck, read 2 more articles, then try again. Don’t go out and read 10 articles.
- If you’re procrastinating, then you likely need to read more, so go read a few more.
- Graph all your time that you’re spending on your dissertation
- You’re initially going to be spending tons of time without a product, and your inner critic will be going crazy