“Academic writing, like university teaching, is what sociologist Paul Trowler calls a ‘recurrent practice,’ one of the many routine tasks that most academics perform ‘habitually and in an unconsidered way,” with little thought as to how or why things might be done differently.” – Helen Sword (2012, p. 23)
This book is a culmination of several years of research on the conventions of academic writing, how academics feel about the writing process, and how students and early-career academics believe that academic writing must fit in a particular box to achieve any measure of professional success. Helen Sword is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Arts and Social Transformation at the University of Auckland. She earned her Ph.D. from Princeton University in Comparative Literature and has taught in higher education for several decades. By all accounts, her prestigious credentials certainly lend themselves to a traditional academic, yet her life’s work has been in the pursuit of breaking down barriers for writers who seek to infuse their academic work with elements of humanism outside of the conventional norms.
Upon first read-through, Helen Sword’s Stylish Academic Writing feels like a response to Strunk and White’s highly acclaimed Elements of Style, a quintessential text on traditional academic prose in the English language. Several chapters address topics similar to Strunk and White, such as structure and syntax, that are presented in new and innovative ways, pulled from Sword’s research on interdisciplinary writing components. Ever the professor, Sword’s chapters always conclude with “Things to Try,” offering the reader helpful ways to incorporate the chapter’s suggestions into their own practice. Examples include the following:
In the chapter Structural Designs: “Make an outline of your article or book based only on its chapter titles or section headings. How well does that outline, on its own, communicate what your work is about? Are you using section headings to inform, engage, or direct your readers, or merely to carve up space?” (p. 133)
In the chapter Jargonitis: “Ask yourself hard questions about your motivations. Do you employ jargon to impress others, play with language and ideas, create new knowledge, signal your membership in a disciplinary community, or communicate succinctly with colleagues? Retain only those jargon words that clearly serve your priorities and values.” (p. 121)
I found several suggestions particularly helpful as a Writing Consultant who works with clients in multiple disciplinary fields each week. I often feel like I’m a polyglot of academia – speaking several languages and trying my best to translate them into the same dialect of academic writing. During my first read-through, I found myself highlighting prompts and leading questions to retain for consultation use with clients. Some items also convicted me to discover blind spots in my own research.
Sword also strikes out against the “conventional” use of the word “style,” commonly understood in academia as the style guides assigned to respective disciplines. Instead, Sword argues that academics must strive to become “stylish academic writers” (p. 9), a persona embodied by the idea of actively pursuing engagement with an audience, clear communication of ideas with concise examples, and observation of interdisciplinary writing methods that might lend a humanistic quality to our work.
Three primary characteristics of a Stylish Academic Writer emerge from Sword’s work: Connection, Craft, and Creativity.
Connection – What I love most about this book was Sword’s persistence in reestablishing our purpose for producing academic work: to tell a story. Your research, dear reader, began as a response to a problem, a gap, a question about the world around us. Research seeks to connect, to create meaning out of the unknown. These are valuable stories, and Sword argues that no matter the discipline or style guide we must keep those stories and their meanings at the forefront of our writing process.
Craft – Sword encourages readers to find pleasure in the craft of writing. The word “craft” encompasses the broader concept of writing (i.e., drafting, editing, revising, finalizing), and the smaller concepts (i.e., sentence-level constructions). She provides the following example below for the smaller concept of craft:
“A carefully crafted sentence welcomes its reader like a comfortable rocking chair, bears its reader across chasms like a suspension bridge… A poorly crafted or uncrafted sentence, on the other hand, functions more like a shapeless log tossed into a river: it might or might not help you get to the other side, depending on how strong the current is and how hard you are willing to kick.” (p. 48)
Creativity – “Numerous studies have documented the crucial role of lateral thinking in the creative process: that is, the ability of pathbreaking researchers to’ think sideways’ rather than always plodding forward in a straight conceptual trajectory.” (p. 169)
Sword takes the idea of creativity in academic writing and dissects it into three components: passion, elegance, and interdisciplinary exploration. She cautions readers not to mistake creativity as a call for writers to adopt creative writing practices. Instead, writers should be willing to explore writing strategies found in outside disciplines, especially those that promote clarity, conciseness, concrete communication, and eloquence.
Citation: Sword, Helen. Stylish Academic Writing. Harvard University Press, 2012.
The age-old aphorism, “publish or perish,” rings particularly loudly for graduate students in STEM. As soon-to-be Ph.D.’s, M.S.’s, and experts in our subject matter, the pressure to publish impactful papers that advance both our field of study and our career as independent researchers can be overwhelming at times, especially since we receive little to no guidance on how to write scientific papers, let alone impactful ones. (To learn more about how to write scientific papers, read “Scientific Writing: How to Write Papers that Get Cited and Proposals that Get Funded” by Joshua Schimel!) One such type of impactful paper and the cornerstone of a good dissertation is the literature review. What is a lit review? Besides being the one paper you repeatedly quote to make yourself sound smart, a lit review is a paper that systematically evaluates dozens if not hundreds of published peer-reviewed papers on a defined topic or question, and then summarizes them in a useful way to synthesize new information, identify new problems and questions/knowledge gaps, and ultimately offer new insights and areas of research for the wider scientific community to learn from and address. In fact, we’ve all stumbled across the one or two lit reviews in our field that not only have enlightened us on a subject but have also revolutionized how we think of a problem and/or springboarded us into research action. While reading a good lit review can be academically catalyzing, writing one, on the other hand, can be academically soul crushing. With the right tools, however, it doesn’t have to be!
This blogpost is a 5-step(ish) guide on how to write a good STEM lit review without losing your sanity, designed specifically for the modern “work smart, not hard” graduate student, like you.
Step 1. Define the research topic and identify the central question(s) you’re asking.
Before you even start searching for papers to evaluate in your lit review, you need to define your research topic and identify the central question(s) you’re asking. Specifically, your research topic should be the “big picture” problem or need in your field, and the question(s) you choose should be narrow enough to be answered (at least in part) by evaluating the existing body of literature on said topic. For example, if your research topic is evaluating the psychosocial effects that COVID-19 has on a certain group of people, your central questions might be: how does/did the COVID-19 pandemic affect grad students’ mental health and general outlook on post-graduate life? If your research topic is more methods-flavored, like improving protocols for extracting COVID-19 viral particles from different environmental matrices, your question(s) might be: what methods currently exist to extract viral RNA from waste-water samples and what are their advantages/disadvantages? The types of questions you can ask are infinite. But remember to choose a question that is large enough in scope to move the field forward but small enough in scope that you can answer it given limited resources (like time, available peer-reviewed papers, and coffee).
Step 2. Search for relevant literature and make a list.
What is relevant literature? What is irrelevant literature? And where do you even begin to search for it? Deciding these things can be tricky, which is why the first thing you’ll need is a predetermined list of keywords related to the research topic and/or question, and clear selection (i.e. inclusion) criteria. To use the same example as before, if your topic is on the psychosocial effects of COVID-19 on grad student mental health, you might use all of these words as keywords and then include a few more tangentially related or synonymous ones to ensure your search is broad enough (like “college student”, “psychological effects,” “social effect,” “stress,” “quality of life” and “COVID19 pandemic”). Don’t forget to use the Boolean operators “and,” “or,” and “not” in your search.
The second thing you’ll need is your university’s and/or public scholarly search engines to help you find papers. Baylor University Libraries’ One Search is a good place to start (especially since you have access to most if not all scholarly articles via the university’s academic journal subscriptions and interlibrary loans) but you’re not limited to this search engine. There are other great search engines likes PubMed, PubChem, ScienceDirect, ResearchGate, Springerlink, JSTOR, Web of Science, PLUS ONE, Scopus, Google Scholar, and the list goes on. (For a comprehensive list, see Top 100 Best Websites to Find Academic Journals, Articles & Books – Quertime). One tool I’ve found useful for finding related papers and staying abreast with my academic reading in general is the online visualization tool, Connected Papers. This impressive mapping tool gives you a visual overview of the literatures in the academic field you’re interested in, based on keywords you input, and it shows connections between new relevant papers and prior and/or derivative works. I highly recommend it!
Finally, don’t let your initial shock at the overwhelming or underwhelming number of papers that your search returns deter you. Instead, use your clearly-defined selection criteria (e.g. papers no older than X amount of years, studies including both male and female participants, clinical and/or nonclinical studies, etc.) to choose the papers you will evaluate and then store them in your preferred reference manager (EndNote, Zotero, Mendeley, etc.). Read the abstracts of the paper and look through their reference section, which oftentimes is a goldmine of references. Add papers to your list that pass your initial criteria check; you can always come back and edit this list after reading through the abstracts. Your list may be long or short, depending on the abundance of papers that match your criteria and/or addressing your research topic. If your research topic is fairly new, you may not find many papers (but hey, that’s less reading for you and more opportunity to make a significant contribution!). Nonetheless, the selection criteria is important for your review to be considered systematic, so make sure you take the time to decide what the selection criteria are before you start your search.
Step 3. Read the papers to answer your central question and keep an annotated bibliography!
Shockingly, yes, you’ll have to actually read the papers you chose for your lit review. But you don’t actually have to read them in their entirety (unless you’re OCD like me). Since you’ll have read the abstracts at this point, focus on reading the papers in a given order (chronological, alphabetic, or another reasonable order) and smartly – i.e. to answer your central question. Be sure to keep good notes on the themes, knowledge gaps, debates, problematic findings, new insights, etc. that you discover as you read. Don’t underestimate the power of the annotated bibliography. For each paper you read, keep an annotated bibliography with these notes, which will significantly increase your ability to organize your lit review later and significantly decrease the crippling anxiety that comes from disorganized lit review processes. One tip to expedite the reading process is to briefly skim the introduction, skip the methods (unless your central question is about the methods), and spend a designated amount of time on the results and discussion sections, which are where you’ll likely find the answer your central question. If you find yourself spending an ungodly amount of time reading a single paper, use a productivity tool (like the Pomodoro technique) to help keep yourself on track. You can always come back to a paper if you need to clarify something later, but remember, you want to maximize your productivity from the beginning by finding ways to read and note-take more efficiently so that you can get to the meat of the lit review, the writing, sooner rather than later.
Step 4. Write an outline.
Based on your reading and notes, decide what lit review structure works best to write in light of the central question you’re asking. Use the central question explicitly as your thesis statement at the end of your introduction, after you’ve described the background of the “big picture” problem you’re addressing and highlighted the specific knowledge gap(s) in your field of research that further warrant your lit review. For the body of the lit review, the four main lit review structures typically used are:
Chronological – This is the simplest approach to map the development of your topic over time. If you choose this approach, avoid simply summarizing papers or listing them in order. Instead, focus on analyzing patters, key events, important debates or opposing views, etc. that have shaped the field and/or address the central question.
Thematic – This strategy uses recurring themes to organize your lit review into subsections that address different areas of the topic. For example, if you’re evaluating the psychosocial effects of COVID19 on graduate students, you might have several psychosocial parameters you’re evaluating, so you can use each of these as thematic sub-headers throughout the paper.
Methodological – If you’re comparing research methods from different fields or disciplines, you can use this approach to group similar methods together and juxtapose different ones. You can also discuss advantages and disadvantages of the methods in this strategy.
Theoretical – Oftentimes, the lit review is the foundation for a theoretical framework. This strategy allows you to discuss existing/new theories, definitions and key concepts, test models, etc. Like the methodological strategy, you can discuss the relevance of one theoretical approach over another, advantages, disadvantages, etc.
End the outline of your lit review with the conclusion/future direction section, where you will highlight the most important insights you’ve learned and offer new questions for the wider scientific community to address.
This outlining step is perhaps one of the hardest aspects of the lit review because putting an effective outline together can feel much like putting together a blank puzzle. However, once you’ve decided which outline structure works best for your topic and you’ve written out the outline, writing the paper will be easier (not easy!) than writing without a strategy in mind.
Step 5. Write the lit review.
There’s not much explanation needed here. For more help on writing the specific parts of the lit review, visit Scribbr’s “What is a Lit Review: Step-by-Step Guide and Examples”.
Consider joining a writing group to keep yourself accountable and writing routinely (and sane!). The GWC starts new ones every semester. Look out for our email! Remember, writing IS thinking, and writing CREATES knowledge, so make sure you give yourself time everyday to sit down and write something.
Step 5.5. Revise and edit, and send it to the GWC!
Once your first draft is done, have someone you trust in your professional circle review it and offer constructive criticism. Additionally, the GWC is always happy to help! You can send you papers direct to gwc@baylor.edu and we will pair you with a consultant to serve as an outside expert reader and offer feedback over a brief meeting.
If you’re writing the lit review for your dissertation or thesis, be sure to incorporate it following the guidelines and requirements given by your advisor/program. If you’re writing the lit review as a stand-alone paper or as part of a manuscript for an academic journal, follow the journal’s stylistic formatting and requirements, and ensure your citations are correct.
While writing a lit review can induce high levels of academic anxiety, we hope that this guide helps demystify the process and put some of that anxiety to rest. Remember that you are capable and that there are people here to help you! Email us at gwc@baylor.edu for help with your lit review (or any other paper) at any stage of completion.
Well, we’re back from Spring Break, which for grad students doesn’t mean living it up on a Florida Beach. It probably meant checking on your lab mosquitoes, editing a thesis chapter, catching up on grading student essays, or trying (we repeat, trying, not necessarily succeeding) to get ahead on class readings. But we hope you did something fun, too; like getting In N’ Out or a massage or reading for fun. Don’t think about how lame that makes you sound.
Our final series for the semester begins this week. Last year, Assistant Dean Beth Barr did an interview with Christianity Today entitled “How and Where I Write.” You can check out the interview here. We thought it was a fun idea, and since she’s one of our deans we thought we’d plagiarize all the interview questions and do our own series. 😜 Not that we advocate for unethical scholarship, of course, but the editors here at BearTracks would argue that we have some limited copyright access to Dr. Barr’s material. It’s definitely in her contract somewhere.
So be on the lookout. Starting next week, we’ll be posting interviews with various professors and graduate students from across the disciplines, asking them a number of questions about their ideal writing conditions, their growth as writers, and some embarrassing writing/reading admissions. And it won’t just be from an academic standpoint, either. We have a number of students and faculty who publish outside of the realm of academia, and in the current job market, we thought you’d like to hear from them too. We’ll still have the occasional post on time-sensitive resources, awards, and opportunities here at Baylor, but we look forward to sharing writing stories with you for the rest of the semester.
Drop a comment below and let us know some questions you’d love to hear put to faculty and/or graduate student writers!
This post was originally published on the Baylor Graduate School blog, BearTracks, and can be found here.
Bonnie Friedman is a novelist. From the very first pages of this book, it’s apparent she has spent countless hours living in this creative headspace. Her descriptions bloom into metaphors, and those metaphors are rife with brilliant, complicated allegorical truths of writers and the difficulty of writing. It’s all very literary, if you please.
But what Bonnie speaks to with utmost clarity is that writing is nuanced. It is hard. It can make you question your sanity not only as a professional but as a human being. Through this book, Bonnie anchors these challenges in a way that makes you feel connected with all writers, no matter their proficiency or discipline. That we are not alone in this process.
Here are the main takeaways from this text:
First:Writing is terrifying, even to those who love it. In my undergraduate (and even graduate) coursework, writing was a task I studiously avoided at all costs. I felt that because I was not one of the blessed (i.e., an English major), I was not qualified or gifted enough to write with any authority. Bonnie takes this twisted, albeit common mentality and slaps it out of the air. “We are afraid of writing, even those who love it. And there are parts of it we hate. The necessary mess, the loss of control, its ability to betray us, as well as the possibility that what we write may be lousy, it might just stink…” (pg. 15). In this, Bonnie assures all who come to the altar of writing that each of us will face barriers and challenges. The fact that we hate parts of the process does not make us any less of a writer or devalue our work.
Second:Accolades and theoretical frameworks count for nothing in the face of a writing deadline. Writing doesn’t care how many post-nominal letters follow after your name. Writing doesn’t care how many classes you’ve taught as a TA. Writing doesn’t care how brilliant your theoretical framework is and how it perfectly situates your research questions within your qualitative study. It is the Great Equalizer. “Phi Beta Kappa counted for nothing here. One of the finest writers was a shaggy man without college who said he slept in a tent pitched in his living room… He spoke his stories into a tape and he paid a secretary to type them” (p. 51).
Third:More words do not equal a better manuscript. This is a particularly hard pill to swallow. When you finally dip your toe into the writing waters and are surrounded by more experienced, bigger fish, all you hear are “writing sprints”, “word count checks”, or “hitting your daily word goals”. It seems obvious that better writing is synonymous with more words. False, cries Bonnie, who also fell prey to this addictive mindset: “I wrote the same thing over and over because I didn’t trust it had communicated. And I thought, the more words the better. People read because they enjoy reading. Wouldn’t they enjoy reading more words?” (pg. 50). This hits at the crux of the issue: trusting in yourself as a communicator and trusting that your words do the job justice.
At times, this book can be difficult to get through as an academic. While Bonnie’s writing is beautiful and fragile and lyrical, this is not the traditional academic way. After all, aren’t we expected to present our writing with a prodigious level of conciseness, wrapped with a bow of footnotes, in-text citations, and proper indentations? Get to the point. What is the problem? Who is your audience? Too much fluff here. Take these four sentences and say them with one.
However, Bonnie would encourage you to step outside your academic context and see writing for what it truly is: the effort of humanity to communicate with one another despite fear, envy, or doubt. Embrace the imperfections, and let go of the all-consuming inner narrative that tells you you’re not good enough.
Review of Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
Anne Lamott is not an academic, nor is her book intended for an academic audience. She has taught a lot of writing workshops, but mostly she assumes that her readers are writing stories. So why should you, a busy grad student, consider reading her book—or at least a blog post about it? Four reasons:
Lamott is a really good writer, and Bird by Bird is enjoyable to read. (Remember reading for pleasure?)
She’s also really funny.
She tells us that this book includes everything she knows about writing. It’s her writing workshop between paperback covers. Some of that wisdom is helpful for grad student types, as well. (And if you’re secretly writing a novel, or maybe a memoir or movie script, there’s a goldmine of good advice here for you.)
Note the subtitle: she’s also offering instructions on life. Frequently her insights about writing spill over into wry and sometimes painful (but still funny) observations about what it’s like to be human, and how bad we are at it, and how we might come to grips with that reality and learn to accept the kind of person we actually are. Do I even need to say that this is also relevant for grad students?
However, since you’re busy and may not have time to read the whole book, this post will synthesize some highlights.
The most directly relevant material shows up in the first three chapters. Here Lamott offers three simple but extremely important suggestions.
First: find consistency. “‘But how?’ my students ask. ‘How do you actually do it?’ You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at the same time every day… you turn on your computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so.” Distractions come: interior voices, external interruptions, neck-pain. “Yet somehow in the face of all this, you clear a space for the writing voice… and you begin to compose sentences” (6-7). You write by showing up every day and putting some words together.
But you also break the work down into short assignments. “[A]ll I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame” (17), Lamott says. She keeps an actual one-inch frame on her desk as a reminder. For those of us overwhelmed by a seminar paper or a dissertation chapter, sometimes the answer is to break it down into very small pieces.
Third, write shitty first drafts. (My friend who uses this chapter in her freshman writing classes abbreviates to “SFDs.”) If you’re like me, you want to sit down and compose something beautiful—and publication-worthy—on the first try. But Lamott says real writing isn’t like this. The disastrous first draft is how we get to a better second draft, and maybe a third draft that’s actually good.
Part of her point is that “Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it” (22). I almost always have to go back and revise my thesis statement after I draft a paper, because then I finally know what I’m arguing. But professional writers like Lamott do the same sort of thing: “Everyone I know flails around, kvetching and growing despondent, on the way to finding a plot and structure that work” (85). If you’re an academic, just swap in the word “argument” for “plot.” Of course you want to get it right the first time. But remember: “perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor” (28, 93).
Writing is hard, Lamott thinks, and so is being human, and sometimes those two hard things collide. She has plenty to say about real-life challenges: the distractions, the efforts that don’t work and get rewritten and still don’t work, the sense of inadequacy. There’s a whole chapter titled “Jealousy.” Grad students I know talk about impostor syndrome, the belief that somehow I’ve ended up here amongst all these smart people and someday they’ll realize I don’t belong and throw me out again. But we don’t talk as much about the flip side, jealousy: the feeling that so-and-so from your department is winning success after success, when his scholarship honestly isn’t as good as yours. Both forms of self-comparison can be deadly. Lamott thinks that sometimes you have to step away from those people, so you can actually do your own work.
But you need other people, too. Seeking feedback is risky, and potentially painful: Lamott says that any time someone gives her a lot of suggestions, her initial response is, “Well. I’m sorry, but I can’t be friends with you anymore” (166). But she believes that every writer needs someone who cares enough about her and her work to tell the truth about it, and offer honest help. She strongly recommends writing groups. Or you can ask a friend. Or—shameless plug—send a draft to the Graduate Writing Center.
The truth is, we all struggle with writing. Anne Lamott does too, and her honesty about the struggle may be the most helpful thing about her book. But Bird by Bird is also a constant reminder that we don’t have to struggle alone.
As I sit to write this, I am suddenly very aware of the expected format of the book review: an initial paragraph where John Warner is introduced as an award winning author and professor at Charleston College; a paragraph or two discussing his exploration of writing education, his personal writing philosophy, and his pedagogical advice; and finally a conclusion where I discuss that, while his primary audience is educators and policymakers, this is a book worth the time of anyone serious about understanding the gap between what we are taught about writing and the actual practice of writing. Do I follow that format because it helps me convey an idea I feel is important to express, or am I mimicking what I have been told good writing looks like instead of actually writing something good?
This dilemma is the core of Why They Can’tWrite. Warner’s stated answer to the book’s title is “They’re doing what we’ve trained them to do: that’s the problem.” Parts one and two are expansions of this statement, a detailed historical dissection of writing education and assessment. The educational system in the United States has become more and more reliant on standardized testing, making it the key metric by which student writing is evaluated. Unfortunately, the need for efficient grading has made us reward writing that fits easily evaluated forms instead of writing that communicates. We have fallen victim to Campbell’s Law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making . . . the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is meant to monitor.” Teaching students how to twist their writing into a five-paragraph essay instead of how to choose the best structure to meaningfully convey an idea is a symptom of this disease.
Sections three and four are where Warner proposes and supports his solution. Part of the problem with how we train students to write is reliance on “folklore” about how writing instruction should be done. He argues against popular wisdom, like focusing on grammar or prioritizing grit over informed decision making (a point he exemplifies with Will Smith’s determination to make After Earth). He advocates writing instruction that emphasizes writing as a social act. Collating a body of evidence from education scholars, he shows that when writing instruction focuses on meaningful communication and students are given the freedom to make choices—and mistakes—they demonstrate a growth not shown in those who pour “academic” words like plethora or myriad into tightly structured forms in pursuit of an A. He also shows how many desirable traits like grammatical proficiency and research skills tend to sort themselves out if the emphasis of instruction is on that social act.
The book is written to several groups. Writing instructors are probably the best served, with extensive discussions of pedagogy and example assignments he personally uses to promote the ideas the book covers. Policy makers and educational administrators might feel chastised at points, but there is ample evidence to support Warner’s critiques and so they would be wise to listen. More relevant to our discussion is the final audience, writers. Should we as graduate writers read Why They Can’t Write?
I think it depends on where you are personally on your writing journey. If you are just returning to graduate school and haven’t done much writing since your undergrad, the first half of this book will introduce you to the difference in the sort of assessment-focused writing you may have the most experience with and the idea/communication-focused writing you will be expected to do in graduate school. In that way the book is almost therapy, helping you to understand where certain bad habits might come from and forming a foundation you can built future good habits upon. The book is also worthwhile for writers who enjoy reading books about writing and expanding their general philosophy about the nature of writing itself.
Who it is less useful for is a practiced writer who is looking for concrete advice. If you have done any amount of quality professional or graduate-level writing, odds are you have already learned the lessons this book teaches. The history and philosophy are well-written and interesting, but not necessary to improve your writing. You’ll be better served by one of the other books we recommend on this blog.
Why They Can’t Write is not the sort of book we normally discuss here. It does not primarily speak to writers, which tends to be our focus. However, the ideas it presents about the writing process are important for graduate students who want to be successful writers to understand, even if you will never teach a writing course or form education policy. If you already understand those ideas, then you can pass this book by. But if you’re not sure why you can’t write, John Warner has a few ideas he’d like to communicate.
Are you a binge writer? I am. I’ve been a binge writer all of graduate school. That writing strategy, while manageable for a seminar paper perhaps, can only take you so far, as I’ve found out with my dissertation. A dissertation or thesis is professional writing, no matter what field you’re in. It’s your way of showing your professional credentials. And how do professionals go about their work? Well, that’s what Paul Silvia’s How to Write a Lot will tell you.
The thesis of Silvia’s book is quite simple, and everything revolves around it: “Prolific writers make a schedule and stick to it” (p. 12). “Don’t quit before you start—making a schedule is the secret to productive writing” (p. 15). “Successful professional writers, regardless of whether they’re writing novels, nonfiction, poetry, or drama, are prolific because they write regularly, usually every day” (p. 27). Everything that follows in Silvia’s book comes as motivation for and reflection upon the writing that a writer has scheduled, since she is a professional writer and approaches writing like a job.
But wait—graduate students are not professional writers, are they? Think again! The writing you do as a graduate student is part of your career, whether a prelude to future research or a teaching career (or an alt-ac career), or even the starting point for professional contributions within specific professional organizations and journals. If you are a graduate student, then you are already a professional writer of a specific sort. Becoming a successful and prolific writer in your professional field, according to Silvia, involves adopting this point of view and allowing it to change your outlook on writing.
Practical Tips
Silvia provides (at least) two helpful discussions for all writers. First, he dismantles common “specious barriers” to writing that will keep one from actually doing it. Second, he offers several practical motivational tools that are oriented toward the main goal of making a schedule and sticking to it. Whatever one does, one must never give up on keeping a writing schedule, no matter how good things are going. “Rewarding writing by abandoning your schedule is like rewarding yourself for quitting smoking by having a cigarette” (pp. 44–45). Silvia’s suggestions in the first few chapters are immensely practical, so much so that I found myself instantly jotting down how I could work the exact plan that he lays out for his readers to follow. A few highlights:
Ruthlessly protect your writing time: no meetings, no email, no news, no phone. Do not schedule over your writing time.
Create a concrete goal for each writing time, usually during the first few moments of your scheduled writing time.
Create a spreadsheet to monitor your writing progress, which has various motivational benefits if you stick to your schedule.
Create a list of your writing projects and prioritize which ones you should tackle first. This helps to not feel overwhelmed. Silvia makes suggestions about how to prioritize.
While the latter half of the book may be most helpful for others within the discipline of Psychology in particular, it is nevertheless worth reading by all academic writers for insights into Style, Writing Journal Articles, and Writing Books (Chapters Five, Six, and Seven). Silvia has a word of encouragement for those trying to get published: “Researchers who publish a lot of articles receive a lot of rejections” (p. 99). In Silvia’s view, it simply comes with the territory of voluminous output. (Since you’ve been writing every day, right?)
So, with summer underway and, most likely, a different sort of schedule ahead in the coming months, will you follow Silvia’s advice and make a writing schedule? When and where will you write? What rituals can you create to get you to that time and place and keep you writing every day? How will you track it? How will you reward yourself for sticking to it? Rewards should come not only for obvious milestones (a conference or article acceptances, perhaps) but simply for doing the job itself consistently. Writing is indeed difficult, but Silvia suggests taking an honest look at how you are setting yourself up to succeed or fail at it. The most valuable contribution of Silvia’s book is the way it leads to greater self-reflection on how I might move past my own binge writing to become a pro writer.
You need to read this book. Cal Newport, an academic and accomplished author, breaks down why we find “being productive” so difficult and, more importantly, what we can do about it.
In 287 well-researched pages, Newport explains both what is “Deep Work” and how to go about doing as much of it as humanly possible, while documenting the dangers and threats to this vision at every turn. If anything, Newport’s book is a perceptive meditation on the difficulty of doing one’s best work and how to overcome that difficulty. For graduate students—and Newport knows personally the unique struggles of academia—this book offers a vision for setting patterns and rituals that will lead to consistent contributions to one’s field.
What is “Deep Work” & Why Should We Care?
Newport defines “Deep Work” as “Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate” (3). The goal is “to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity” (3). In Part One he explores why deep work is worthwhile: it is economically valuable and advantageous, leading to economic security; the alternative, shallow work, does not lead to economic security; and deep work is more fulfilling, not only economically but on a personal level. Readers might quibble with defining value so often in economic terms in Chapters One and Two (although as graduate students your end goal is to get a job!), but through personal anecdotes and a philosophical argument for depth, Newport does show that “to build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction” (86).
“Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking.”
I must admit that I had two reservations before reading this book, and Newport has proven me wrong about both. First, I expected the book’s argument to be built upon personal stories that motivated me to dig deep within myself and simply work harder. I did not want to hear another message like that. Instead, Newport offers an incredibly well-researched perspective—a major strength of the book. When he makes a surprising claim, such as “embrace boredom,” he quickly shifts to studies and other relevant data to support his proposals and rarely resorts to opinion.
Second, I expected to find elements of a moral treatise that takes a stance against the world of distraction and its effects upon our ability to work productively. Newport, however, has no interest in the debate about whether tech is the future or our downfall as a society. For him, the commitment to deep work “is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done” (258). Part Two of the book—called “The Rules”—follows this pragmatic approach and outlines in four chapters how to enact the vision of deep work.
Grad School Takeaways
Since Newport is an academic (an assistant professor of computer science), much of what he envisions applies naturally to the academic context. Here are some takeaways that might prove immediately applicable to the context of being a graduate student and particularly to the task of writing.
Attention Residue Effect: Interruptions and obligations lead to “attention residue” when one is working on a large project such as writing a paper. Newport recommends minimizing this attention residue and maximizing performance on one task at a time. By planning high-intensity, focused, and distraction-free work (i.e., deep work), one can avoid the negative effect of task-switching.
Take Control of Your Time: You only have so much willpower, so set a schedule for yourself that ritualizes deep work. Where will you work and for how long? And how will you support your work? (Think: coffee, snacks, etc.) Making these decisions ahead of time allows one to focus on the deep work itself.
Daily Shutdown: Newport recommends deciding when you will stop working and sticking to it. Studies show that one cannot perform deep work for more than four or so hours a day, and that downtime improves the performance of the bursts of high-intensity deep work that should characterize our days. So, make a ritual that helps you to shut down your work for the day. Paradoxically, not working can make your deep work more productive.
Quit Social Media: Newport really does say that! But he doesn’t mean what you think he means. Leaving aside the research that he cites about the negative effects of social media on intellectual capabilities, Newport intends for his readers to reflect on whether social media leads them to their career goals. In his view, such an exercise will show one how to free up time and mental resources for deep work; “Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking” (252). Think about your time and commitments in terms of tools—what will most effectively help you accomplish your goals? Newport’s advice is radical: drop everything except the most essential!
Newport’s book offers much more, but most importantly it fundamentally reframes the question about work and time. Everyone has the same amount of time. Newport argues that your best work will come when you tend to the quality of your work and the focus with which you go about doing it.
