Writing advice for PhD students. Part 1

Today, I want to share some tips for anybody at the beginning of writing a PhD thesis or any substantial thesis, but lacking experience.

How to juggle multiple writing projects at once? Don’t

I was recently asked what my writing advice would be for new PhD students and specifically how to handle multiple writing projects simultaneously. Let’s get that concrete question out of the way immediately: After reviewing lots of writing advice for academia this year, I can tell you that the consensus is not to write multiple projects in parallel; instead, focus on one at a time. Once you accept this truth and control your writing habits accordingly, you can do away with the illusion that juggling multiple projects is possible.

But beyond that, I wondered, what would I recommend? Here comes a 4-part blog post series in which I summarize the most important points I came up with.

Try aligning everything with your writing project

Your priorities need to be reflected in how you spend your time. I suspect most PhD student’s theses don’t figure in the prime time in their time table. I definitely tend to fill my schedule with other (seemingly more urgent) stuff first and, we all know it, then you don’t get around to doing thesis stuff week after week. I know lots of people are the same. But it’s a matter of priorities. You need to take your writing project seriously and if you do, it needs to be accorded an important place in your schedule.

For instance, I have recently been trying to find synergies between teaching and writing, which I learned from Cathy Mazak’s book, Making Time to Write. Try to align your projects so they support each other.

For example, an article could contribute insights toward your PhD thesis, or even be incorporated into it, rather than being an extraneous endeavor. This approach helps minimize avoidance behaviors (constantly finding more urgent tasks to do first), which are really an elaborate form of procrastination. Of course, if it’s a form of procrastination that gets you a published article, that’s nice, but you should still try to procrastinate less. The more times you allow it, the more it becomes “ok”.

“Conference proceedings is where good publications go to die” – rejection is a skill and you learn it from submitting to journals

I think this quote is from Karen Kelsky (see The 7 Best Tips from ‘The Professor is in’ (Book review)). Don’t waste your best work on conference proceedings, as these often don’t lead to substantial publications or if they do, they don’t count as much. Even though I knew this, I still spent way too much energy on such “easy publications”. The point is, looking back, even that was a waste of time. And, know this: even seemingly “easy publications” are never easy nor fast. A fast and easy publication doesn’t exist. I have found that the not-so-high-value things I did hoping for a quick publication often came with the biggest problems (mean editors, stupid templates, spontaneous requests to majorly rewrite the article with hardly any time given to do it, followed by an abrupt rejection even though your paper had already been accepted, …). What I want to say is: Aim for good journals right away and if you can’t get accepted (likely), use it as a way to learn. Don’t believe in the myth of a “quick and easy” publication. Such a thing does not exist (and if you happen to find one, it’s probably worth so little that it’s not really worth having).

Get used to rejections

Submit to the best journal in your field and get used to rejections. Academia is an uncomfortable place until you learn to deal with them. (Although it will never stop being kinda hard either. But don’t dwell on it – or learn to get to a place where you can let it go and move on. Use the energy for positive progress instead. I know it’s hard but dealing with rejection, too, is a skill that can be learned.)

View writing as your craft and hone it

I can recommend following the academic writing series on this blog, where we’ve prepared many posts to improve your academic writing.

Currently, I can recommend the following books:

1. Making Time to Write by Cathy Mazak – A feminist manifesto about prioritizing your writing and thus rebelling against academic patriarchy (a worthy endeaour). Mazak encourages finding a ‘soaring state’ and a biorhythm that suits your writing, so you write during times that naturally work best for you and can learn to enjoy it (which makes it more likely you’ll actually do it enough to progress). Fight the academic patriarchy by making time to write. Don’t force yourself to write. Forget about discipline and hustle culture bullshit. It wasn’t made for you. Discipline and motivation are for privileged people trying to explain why they deserve their unearned privileges. Just find times when it’s easier for you to write and protect those by defending them as well as you can.
2. How to Write a Lot by Paul Sylvia – A straightforward book (and fun read, according to me) that encourages scheduling writing time to increase productivity. Motivation won’t just appear, schedule it like a meeting or start a writing group. Basically, if you want to write a lot, schedule it and do it. That’s how people write more. You don’t write more by waiting for motivation and procrastinating.
3. Joli Jensen’s Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics – If psychological barriers are an issue for you (or you expect that they may be), then you should read this, even though it sounds very hustle culture. It’s actually a book about psychological barriers to writing and how you can overcome them. And that can be very helpful because often it’s really psychological things that are holding us back. I’m wondering if the editor made her pick that title that sounded more hustle culture-y, because it’s actually quite the opposite of what she preaches, in my opinion.
4. Writing Science by Joshua Schimel (there’s a whole series of posts…) – Although it’s targeted at science writing, many of the principles of structuring an article are universally applicable. Schimel discusses how to make your work relevant, citable and accessible to a broader audience through effective introductions and conclusions. This has been the biggest game changer for me, but it may not be for you depending on where you are in your current writing journey. It is about more of the formal structure of writing, not necessarily like English language for writing, but more how do you structure an article? What is the function of an introduction? What is the function of a conclusion? How do you manage the hourglass of writing? (That is the introduction and conclusion should be addressed at an as large as possible audience whereas the narrow part of the hourglass is the actual thing you’re studying, i.e. very narrow and probably only actually interesting for a very small audience). He explains how you can branch that out in the introduction and conclusion so it makes your article relevant to people beyond your minute specialization area, so they will read and possibly cite it, even though they’re not interested that much in that very specific case study of yours. But of course, depending on what your current writing issues are, maybe one of the other books is a better pick.
5. Another resource is Write Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day by Joan Bolker. While the title sounds like a quick-fix unrealistic thing, the book’s real message is about the importance of consistent, daily work to maintain momentum and engagement with your research. I read this years ago and haven’t looked at it again, but ultimately the message was to work on it for 15 minutes a day, no matter what. That’s also what Paul Sylvia and Joli Jensen say, but also it doesn’t actually mean that you can write/finish your dissertation in 15 minutes a day. It’s just that you should invest 15 minutes a day because that’s better than nothing and you will not forget what it was about, which will further distance you from your work, making the barrier to getting started bigger. The worst thing is procrastinating on it for ages but also never even looking at it because that will make it so much harder to reconnect.

Since this is getting out of hand, I’ll share more ideas in the next post 😉

See you there!

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