This is part two of all the things I’d recommend you take into account if you’re (relatively) new to writing in the context of bigger academic writing projects. Part 1 mainly recommended useful books.

So, what would I recommend you do if you were starting out on a major writing project?

Don’t waste your time writing the perfect sentence

First of all, writing does not like many people’s romantic image of it (you just put the perfect sentence on the paper and that’s how it stays).. That’s a big misconception, but you basically learn it that way in school. In reality, academic writing has multiple stages, which I have only recently been able to understand and articulate like that myself. In my opinion, these stages are pre-draft, outline, draft, and editing.

Understand the four stages of academic writing

The pre-draft stage

The pre-draft stage involves jotting down thoughts and notes that aren’t necessarily actually going to be part of your final text. You may think so at first but believe me, these first thoughts are never good and if this is your first draft, the editing stage is going to be gruesome and long. Really, think of this as the pre-draft or excerpting stage where you collect your material. It’s useful to already have it in some sort of text or written form at least but don’t confuse this with actual draft text. This includes excerpts, rough ideas, and outlines.

Before moving from pre-draft to draft, you need an outline, which requires having read all the necessary primary and secondary sources. Otherwise, you won’t be able to come up with a compelling argument. And if you start writing without a good argument (and thus argumentative structure or narrative) in mind, you’re setting yourself up for a complete and utter mess. Really, it takes good editing skills to even be able to maneuver yourself out of that again. But most likely, an article started that way will never become good enough to be accepted. Maybe this sounds bleak but that’s simply my experience. But knowing that ultimately, this is true for everybody (nobody just spits out the perfect draft at the first attempt), is really quite liberating.

At the pre-draft stage, you really don’t need to conform to any standard or live up to any expectation. Nobody will ever see this material. But make sure you compile it in a way that is more or less understandable. It doesn’t have to look nice (another source of distraction and procrastination that looks awfully productive but really isn’t) but you need to know where the material came from (i.e. keep useful references in a way that you can understand). A simple way is using a printout of an article and making notes on it. That way, you don’t lose the references and you can make a pile of material you have already processed. Cal Newport also discusses this process in How to Be a Straight-A Student where he has a section on essay writing.

At some point, you have to decide it’s enough with the collection of materials (see How to know if you have read enough or one more source to cite?). You can always go back for more if it’s really needed but the better you are at finding the relevant stuff right away and then making sure you can make an argument out of it, the better.

Outlining, or Writing from the Top Down

After researching and organizing your material, you begin to understand your topic well enough to write about it.

Before doing that reading, research and excerpting, i.e. the pre-draft phase, you look at your research as someone who still learns about things. That’s not a good place to write from as it will make your writing sound incompetent (if this comforts you, you will likely sound incompetent to an expert still and it takes a while to unlearn that – but this impression can be removed in the editing stage, so don’t stress about it). Anyway, ideally after that pre-draft phase, you now know what’s going on and you need to write your article from the perspective of somebody who already knows, not someone who’s just learning about it. According to Schimel, this is a common issue for budding academic writers, so maybe read his book and look at the examples he gives on how to fix it.

So you start from a bottom-up perspective by gathering data without preconceptions, but then you have to write from a top-down perspective, meaning you write as someone who fully understands the discourse and the sources. If you’re not there yet by the end of your draft phase, the outline stage is where you refine the simple story you want to tell in your article. This is more than just understanding the discourse and sources; it’s about coming up with conclusions and making your work relevant and potentially citable to people who won’t be directly interested in your mini case study for the sake of it. You need to have a broader claim. Lessons learned if you want to call it that.

If you don’t yet fully understand it at the end of the draft phase, don’t worry, you get the outline stage to come up with what is the simple story you want to tell in your article. In this outlining stage, you should focus on articulating where we are now, how we got here, the context, and why it’s relevant. This prevents your writing from sounding novice, as novice writers often sound like they’re explaining concepts to themselves rather than to an informed audience.

Maybe you want to try our outline template for this stage (although I find it outdated and would like to make a new version that combines Joshua Schimel’s advice with my own stuff).

A good outline is what gets you from a minute study that nobody really cares about to a study that may get cited because you know how to make it relevant to people.

Really, all that’s why the pre-draft stage is different from the draft stage. I failed to understand that for a long time. In my case, I think it led to lots of redundancy in my writing, just not a very clear structure and papers that weren’t really going anywhere. I always tend to have lots of draft material and I was trying to put it all in. But that’s a fallacy. Only because you wrote it doesn’t mean it goes into a published article. A big learning in academic writing for me was that I may create lots of text that will only serve as a base for an actual article. I’m still having a hard time accepting it but it’s starting to sink in. And really, it makes it much easier to write good articles than the way I was attempting to do it earlier (which was totally misguided looking back but nobody taught me any better).

Bringing all this together may be hard to achieve in the first paper you’re writing, so don’t despair if it’s not perfect.

According to Schimel, each paper should have an overarching argumentative arc, with each section and even each paragraph contributing to this narrative. You should have at least a paragraph-level outline for that to be possible. This forces you to have a clear argument. That, in turn, will make it more likely that you produce an article that’s easy to read and has a good flow. That’s something that I was definitely lacking. Admittedly, I don’t think I have mastered this yet either and I have gotten a good few papers published. And I read papers that don’t respect this ideal structure all the time. So don’t stress about this too much at this point. But I guess it’s good to know what the ideal structure would look like.

How to go from outline to first draft

I always used to take whole sections from that draft sage material and try to edit them down for the draft. But honestly, now I’d recommend you make the outline and write it all new because it’s just going to be too much work editing otherwise. It’s going to be faster to just write it new and it will be easier for you to let go of bad or unnecessary texts bits that way (also a major issue for me).

In this stage, you also cite everything and end up with a draft that, for the first time, somebody can read. It may not be perfect yet, but you have set down your argument and cited your sources. So it’s basically the first version of a paper that you may discuss as a work in progress somewhere. And then comes the editing.

The editing stage

Don’t underestimate this one. I always thought I was done after writing up that first draft (and you usually feel drained like you’re done at this point) but no. That’s not how it works. Editing will take a considerable amount of time. I always used to think of this like “now I’m gonna proofread this once”. No, that’s not how it works, unfortunately. This phase takes really long, so you better calculate that if you want to submit a polished text.

Editing is the final phase, where you refine the argument, improve paragraph flow, eliminate unnecessary words, and polish the language. Joshua Schimel has a chapter on editing that may be helpful here. Maybe you want to look at How to energise and condense your writing [Book Review] and I also have a summary blog post prepared on editing according to Schimel. Editing can be as time-consuming as the other stages, but understanding these stages has made writing much easier and more structured for me, and hopefully, it will do the same for you.

Although, honestly, I have submitted many first drafts (rather than finished texts). Often this still can be fixed somewhere during the process, especially if the first draft makes it clear that there’s something there (good research question, good material, but maybe still kinda bad execution). But don’t do this if you want to get into somewhere competitive. If you have time to get feedback on that first draft before you edit, even better. Although I fear that I’m just not that kind of person. But if you’re better organized than me, highly recommended to do this.

That’s it for today.

So long and thanks for all the fish!

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