How to Write Better by Not Writing: Setting Boundaries in Your Personal Writing Process

By Reilly Fitzpatrick, Consultant

Wouldn’t it be magical if your paper could write itself? I don’t know about you, but I’ve certainly dreamed of walking away from my laptop after hours of struggling over a Google Doc and coming back an later to find an eloquent, polished, complete draft. Unfortunately, I have yet to discover the technology or magic that will turn my jumbled thoughts into articulate writing. One way that I have become better at this challenging writing process, however, is by learning to set boundaries with myself as I write. For me, these boundaries range from allowing myself to write badly at first to taking intentional breaks as I write. Essentially, we’re talking about writing better by not giving yourself space to not write at all—which itself seems kind of magical. 

It might seem a little counterintuitive that my recommendation for becoming a better writer is to focus on not writing. As graduate students or faculty, most of us probably feel like paper-producing machines, required to constantly spit out brilliantly written articles/seminar papers/studies/grants/insert whatever project makes you the most stressed here. These kinds of academic and career expectations can—and do—take a toll on you, not only as a scholar and a writer but also as a human being. This is where the not writing part comes in. By intentionally setting boundaries for yourself in your writing process and releasing yourself from the expectations of perfection and production, you’ll actually become a better writer and, more importantly, a healthier person.

This sounds great in theory, but how do I set those boundaries for myself in practice? I’m so glad you asked! Here are some ways I work to cultivate boundaries in my writing process. Think of them as inspirational bullet points that you can adapt and rethink based on your personality and your process.

  • When you sit down to start writing (or brainstorming, editing, etc.), set a limit for how long you will work. My brain functions best in hour-long increments, but it could be anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours for you! Telling yourself that you will write for a set amount of time instead of just working until you’re exhausted or done allows you to see this writing project as a manageable task rather than a daunting multi-step process.
  • Let yourself write badly. Whether you throw some key ideas into a rough outline or you handwrite stream-of-consciousness thoughts about your project into a journal, release yourself from the expectation of writing something brilliant and just write something. Anne Lamott refers to a crappy first draft, others call it word vomit. As mildly unpleasant as all these metaphors may be, the practice of writing badly does several helpful things. First, it frees you up to just get your thoughts out of your head without worrying about details like syntax, organization, or word choice. Second, it allows you to see the big picture of your writing without getting bogged down in sentence-level concerns. Lastly, it gets something on the page that you (and your GWC consultant, of course) can reword, rethink, and revise.
  • If you’re feeling overwhelmed in your writing process it may seem like an obvious recommendation to take a break, but our impulse is often to push through and get the thing done instead of honoring the ways that our minds and bodies are telling us to rest. This can look like anything from going for a 10-minute walk (you have to un-hunch yourself from your desk eventually!), taking a shower to reset your nervous system, stretching, eating a snack, cuddling your cat, texting a friend, or setting aside your project for the day and going to bed.
  • Whatever you choose to do as a break, resist the urge to think of it as slacking off, procrastinating, or wasting time. Letting your brain relax after a period of hard writing work will actually help you write better when you return to your project, so it is just as important of a step in the writing process as research or revision is! Even more importantly, rest in your writing process reiterates to yourself that you aren’t a good person because you write a good paper: your value is in who you are and not what you do.

If the list seems overwhelming, try implementing one practice at a time the next time you sit down to write. Reflect on what is or isn’t generative for you and think about how you might tailor the practice to your individual needs. Writing is hard! Don’t make it harder by forcing yourself to do something that isn’t helping you. Ultimately, these are meant to be liberating practices, not confining checklists—the goal is not only to be a better, more competent writer, but also a more rested, well-rounded, and whole person.

Formatting Resources for Graduate Students

By Becky Presnall

Maybe you’ve finished your paper, and this is the final step that remains between you and turning it in, or perhaps you haven’t been able to start yet, daunted by the prospect of what awaits. Either way, at some point in the composition process, you are faced with the time-consuming, detail-oriented task of formatting.

Now, I could give a list of reasons why formatting is incredibly important, whether it has to do with discipline-specific priorities and needs, professionalism, avoiding plagiarism, or a host of other causes. But the fact of the mater remains that, especially if it’s a style that you are unfamiliar with, this can easily become a part of the writing process that bogs you down. So on that note, this week’s article is about making that step a bit less intimidating by offering some resources that can help you in your quest for formatting knowledge.

Zotero

Zotero is an incredibly helpful program which can save data from your source material and then use that to generate and insert either citations or even entire bibliographies (in a variety of styles) into your document. It is free to access through Baylor University and can prove a time-saving resource, especially when working on longer projects. You can find a helpful tutorial for how to access and use it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i24iDJ4A5c.

Purdue OWL

Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab (OWL) offers a host of resources for formatting papers and creating citations in MLA, APA, Chicago, and many other styles. Something that I’ve personally found helpful many times in the past is the examples it provides for formatting each kind of resource, showing what type of information about source material should be noted for future bibliographic entry.

Style-Specific Manuals

When in doubt, go to the manual. Many disciplines have specific styles that they use, so investing in a style manual for the particular method of your field can often be worthwhile. However, as you look for this, do make sure to find the most recently-updated version, since most styles tend to release a new edition every few years.

Dissertation and Thesis Guidelines Page

If you are writing your dissertation or thesis for Baylor University, these documents have a formatting style all their own. As a result, you’ll want to take advantage of the resources offered by the Dissertation and Thesis Office on their “Formatting Resources” page: https://graduate.baylor.edu/formatting. There you can find PDF guidelines for both Dissertations and Theses, as well as videos on front matter, headings, and triple spacing. They also offer formatting workshops at the beginning of each semester, so keep an eye out for when those become available for registration.

Baylor Libguides

The Baylor Library offers many helpful guides that are accessible 24/7 to students and can be found here: https://libguides.baylor.edu/. Under “Citing, Writing, and Publication,” you can find their formatting guides, as well as a list of citation managers with their compatible browsers and more resources on installing and using Zotero. You can also reach out to the library to inquire about the resources they offer and where to find them through their “Ask Us” page (https://libanswers.baylor.edu/ask).

University Writing Center

On the University Writing Center’s (UWC) “Resources For Writers” page (https://uwc.artsandsciences.baylor.edu/resources-writers), you can find links to information on MLA and APA formatting, as well as some strategies for integrating source material once you have crafted your citations. These are available 24/7 for student access, and are helpful references in the writing process.

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Now, when you look at these resources, don’t just pick a random one off the list and commit to that resource and that resource alone for the rest of your life. Take your time, investigate them thoroughly, try things out and see what works best for you. Because at the end of the day, the best way to go about formatting is the way that gets the job done, and that method can differ from person to person. So use this article as a starting place for learning more about yourself and your writing process, and you might just discover something helpful along the way.

Book Review: Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers by Jacques Barzun

By Kristin Huggins

Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers by Jacques Barzun is a beautifully written ballad for writers and English educators everywhere. It manages to present advanced concepts of the English language in a way that feels lyrical throughout and wholly approachable to the wayward interdisciplinary writer.

It should be noted that I am not an English major. Despite English being my native language, I was never privy to the complex workings of the language until entering my doctorate program, which thrust me into academic writing like a child thrown into a lake who cannot swim. You figure it out quickly, or you drown.

Regardless of my ignorance of partitives and modifiers (which sounded like armor upgrades from a certain mass multi-player online role-playing game), Barzun managed to pull me through to the end of his text relatively unscathed. His unique writing voice throughout the text feels shaded with tones of creative writing, which made digesting the meaning of “malaprop” palatable rather than pedantic.

Four main themes emerged while reading Barzun’s work:

  1. Writing extends beyond the act of putting words on a page.
  2. Writers must discover the appropriate connections for each phrase.
  3. Meaning and Intent are the gatekeepers for good writing.
  4. Active revision requires self-reflection through guided questions.

Writing Extends Beyond the Act of Putting Words to the Page

It is not enough to simply “pay attention to words only when you face the task of writing-that is like playing the violin only on the night of the concert. You must attend to words when you read, when you speak, when others speak” (p. 9).

In this, Barzun challenges the reader to find natural instances of communication, which is the broader landscape of rhetoric, encompassing the spoken word and collaborative experiences of exchanged communication.

I found this to be reminiscent of the recent piece I worked on about how reading and writing feed into one another to enhance our understanding of rhetoric.

If one simply considers the act of writing only when sitting in front of a blank word document, they are working with a mere portion of potential compared to the observations and discoveries made when reading articles within one’s field, when discussing various theories with one’s professor or dissertation chair, or when bouncing ideas off of colleagues when one struggles with a particularly difficult study result that contrasts with pre-existing assumptions. These are all examples of where acts of non-writing can lead to stronger, clearer acts of writing.

Writers Must Discover the Appropriate Connections for Each Phrase.

In II. Linking: What to Put Next, Barzun dispels the idea that concise academic writing is built from simple sentence structures. He posits that we should not think of a complete, well-written sentence as “a house made of building blocks. Rather, it resembles a skeleton, in which the joints, the balance, the fit of the parts and their inner solidity combine to make up a well-knit frame” (p. 58).

This mental image suggests that the process of writing is much more nuanced than a simple subject-verb agreement. Each piece of the writing skeleton may operate in a singularly unique way apart from other pieces, despite their similarity in appearance or meaning. Barzun attempts to alleviate potential tears and frustration for early-career writers by revealing the hidden complexities of the English language that are more nuanced than one may suspect.

Meaning and Intent are the Gatekeepers to Good Writing

Perhaps Barzun’s most impactful chapter for the graduate student readership is IV. Meaning: What Do I Want To Say? Ask any doctoral student who is neck-deep in formulating their research prospectus: clear communication of meaning through a well-crafted thesis statement is doggedly difficult on a good day.

Half of my time as a graduate writing consultant is spent asking clients what they want to communicate with their audience, then working backwards to ensure that their writing matches their intent. It’s not an easy task. Barzun (and many of my doctoral professors) argue that the task of writing is the act of critical thought frozen at a singular moment of conception. Writers rarely begin a clearly defined argument, but rather come to their point after laborious hours of drafting, brainstorming, revising, and rewriting.

I liken this process to the act of sculpting statues from marble. Michelangelo spoke on this, saying that “the sculpture is already complete in the marble block, before I start my work. It’s already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”

Is this not akin to the act of writing?

Guiding Questions for the Active Reviser

According to Barzun, revision is the difference between good writing and inspirational writing. While the act of writing in itself can serve the purpose of sorting one’s thoughts or arguments to a degree, revision is where these concepts are polished to perfection until they are blinding.

He provides readers with a series of questions meant to guide writers through the act of revision. For the sake of brevity, I’ve selected the five most impactful questions (in my humble opinion). The rest can be reviewed at leisure in VI. Revision: What Have I Actually Said (pp. 247-248).

  1. Is the movement of my prose satisfactory to the mind AND the ear?
  2. Have I indulged myself in language that is toplofty, patronizing, technical for mere showing off? Or have I been simple and direct throughout… always sincere and respectful of the reader?
  3. Can I say, looking at single words, that every one of them means and connotes what I think it does?  Or has my diction been spoiled by threadbare clichés, pseudo-technical jargon, unthinking metaphors, and that excess of abstract words known as the noun plague?
  4. Has my theme(s) been set down fully through a series of ideas presented in consecutive order? Or have I again relied on my understanding of the subject to bridge over gaps in thought and to disentangle snarls in description?
  5. In the layout of my paper, have I devoted space and furnished detail in proportion to the importance of each topic? Or have I concentrated on what interested me and skimped on the rest, whether owing to a poor outline or the neglect of a good one?

These questions can be answered with a simple “Yes” or “No”, but Barzun challenges the reader to look beyond these responses and dig deeper into the root issues presented by each. For example, I can assert that the order of topics presented in my literature review is ideal for reader comprehension, and yet still discover that I have neglected an in-depth review of specific processes or terminologies based on my lack of comfort or content knowledge in that particular sub-area of expertise.

Be sure to add Simple and Direct to your library of writing aides! To read more and purchase this text, please visit Amazon via this link https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Direct-Jacques-Barzun/dp/0060937238/ref=asc_df_0060937238/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312126061109&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=13871129474782864257&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9027095&hvtargid=pla-297768715338&psc=1