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Word counts don’t work as progress trackers for academic writing

I think we have all seen unending amounts of advice on how to write more efficiently. As you know, I have been on a journey to improve my academic writing, and I guess with that also comes writing more efficiently. I’m using AI to help with that to a certain extent (see How I use AI for academic writing (while avoiding AI slop)). But today I want to discuss another commonly cited method to boost one’s writing efficiency: tracking word counts.

In a recent stressed moment, I paid for and downloaded this e-book about turbocharging your writing. You couldn’t really see what exactly they were going to recommend, so I got it. It came highly recommended, but upon opening it turned out that it’s very much focused on procrastination and not knowing how to get started. As someone who has read a lot about academic writing, I know most common information already and didn’t expect too much material.

One of the key tools it suggests is a “word audit,” where you basically write down the different parts of your paper, like a table of contents (even including small stuff like acknowledgments). Then there’s a percent-complete graph that you can color in. In general I think visual trackers are a great idea for tracking progress, especially with something physical and on paper. Coloring in trackers is a progress metric I like.

It’s hard to find good advice on how to become a prolific academic writer

A lot of the writing advice you can find online is about fiction, which I don’t think really applies to academic writing because it simply works differently, in my opinion. The things I’ve found more helpful were actually guides from Ivy League universities about how to work and write academically. Then you find people like Belcher, whose book includes some ideas on writing efficiency, even though it’s really just mentioned in passing. I would love to know more about that but I’ve been looking and couldn’t find much. Anthony Grafton, for example, is a very prolific writer in my field and his methods are very briefly mentioned by Belcher, so I checked the internet to see if there’s any more info on how exactly he does it, and came up empty. I just feel like there is such a big gap.

I know that there’s material out there theoretically. I’ve also contributed some material over the years on this blog. Some of that, especially my more recent stuff, I believe contains reflections that have genuinely helped me. But a lot of the material you find is from PhD students, and I just know that looking back at myself, I thought I knew how it worked during my PhD phase and looking back, I now understand that I really didn’t. I’m not saying none of the PhD students out there know what works (there are many brilliant people out there after all) but they simply don’t have years of experience. Right now, I’m in a completely different place with my academic writing. I feel much more confident, but I would still like to improve and learn from the people who are extremely prolific and extremely good at it, yet I feel like I have no access to them.

It also seems that most prolific writers have very haphazard ways of doing it. It’s maybe a little bit like Peter Attia says in Outlive when he discusses how it’s hard to tell genetically if someone is going to become really old. There isn’t a shared genetic profile of people who get really old because that’s not something the system optimizes for (you’ve already done your evolutionary contribution by that time). I feel like the same thing happens with writing advice. You get a lot of advice from and for people who don’t have any experience at all, who are struggling with the typical issues like procrastination, and they’re given the same old tips (some of which work, some don’t).

As you may know, I do love, for instance, Paul Silvia’s book and similar ones. They’re all great, and I’ve read them many times and absorbed the content. Yet I still feel I would like to learn more about concrete strategies—not just about how to be efficient, but how to be efficient at writing well. Now we’re coming to the topic of today’s blog post.

Why I don’t think word-count based motivation strategies make sense for academia

What triggers me about word count–based goals is that I don’t just want to write words. I know how to write words. But the words I write are not always good, and they don’t necessarily generate a coherent article. So I feel like word count–based goals are surely a way of measuring whether you’ve sat down to do something, but I don’t think that’s what it means to be an efficient academic writer.

Word count–based goals also don’t feel that relevant to me anymore because I’m using AI to help with my writing. Without going into too much detail, I will speak into my phone, have it transcribe what I said, and then polish it a little to improve the grammar and remove my non-native English mannerisms. If I don’t remove them in that first pass, they’re very hard to eliminate later. They require so many rounds of editing, and the structure is often so flawed that it never becomes elegant English. Using AI in that first step to make it good English smooths that out. Even though I guess now I have some AI phrasing in it (some of which I’m aware of and trying to remove, and some of which I’m probably not) I do feel like it’s an advantage. That way, I don’t translate my German thinking directly into text and have a much better base to start with.

Using an AI-supported writing process means I have almost unlimited ideas and the capability of talking things into my phone. The AI technically has unlimited ability to rewrite that. So word count–based goals are not very meaningful, not only because writing down words doesn’t mean they fit together into a narrative, but because the bottleneck has shifted. People always say, “Get something on the page,” and assume you will know how to turn that into something good later. I think that’s the biggest lie I have been told throughout my degree and beyond.

I’m a little mad that I bought this book about turbocharging my writing, and it just mentions the same old writing myths. The writing myths are good, but I’ve already read a whole book about them. Some of the advice is solid (write little and often, in a specific place. Maybe two hours can be enough. Do it first thing in the morning. These are all good pieces of advice).

What I feel is missing is a strategy for how to work efficiently across the different steps involved in research. For example, people say you need to have truly understood your topic to write fast, to just write down the result because you already know what it is. But these people often don’t tell you what the steps are before that.

The act of writing down words is usually treated as the bottleneck, but I think that’s a false bottleneck that people are trying to optimize. Procrastination isn’t just about dreading the work, even though that’s sometimes part of it. I mostly dread the work because I don’t know what to do next, or I’m stuck somewhere. If we addressed that, we wouldn’t need to force ourselves to work. If we knew exactly what to do next, we wouldn’t procrastinate on it (or maybe less often).

Of course, handing out a template of academic writing is hard because there is no cookie-cutter way of doing research. But I was so disappointed that this book on being a prolific academic writer is mostly about getting words onto the page. That’s not the key challenge to becoming a prolific writer. You need to write things that get read and are citable. Yes, Joshua Schimel does address that, and I’ve probably mentioned him too many times on this blog already.

I feel like there is no comprehensive framework that works and it’s maddening.

As much as I appreciate PhD students trying to help one another, I also know that I was one of those PhD students myself—and I definitely didn’t have all the answers.

So, rant over. Let me know what you think about word counts as motivation. Maybe you disagree. I’m happy to be convinced otherwise.

Best,
Sarah


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Sarah Lang (April 19, 2026). Word counts don’t work as progress trackers for academic writing. Epigrammetry. Retrieved May 17, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/163b0


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