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To write more, you needn’t adopt a new writing identity, cultivate an authentic scholarly voice, or interrogate your intellectual values.
I keep track of my writing;
Writing productively is about actions that you aren’t doing but could easily do: making a writing schedule, setting clear goals, keeping track of your work, rewarding yourself, and building good habits.
Productive writers don’t have special gifts or special traits—they just write more regularly and use their writing time more efficiently. Changing your behavior won’t necessarily make writing fun, but it will make it faster and less oppressive.
But writing about research isn’t fun; writing is frustrating, complicated, and un-fun. “If you find that writing is hard,” wrote William Zinsser (2006), “it’s because it is hard” (p. 9).
Because thinking of ideas is easier and faster than writing about those ideas, most professors have writing backlogs.
Writing is hard, which is why so many of us do so little of it.
Instead of finding time to write, allot time to write. People who write a lot make a writing schedule and stick to it. Let’s take a few moments to think about a writing schedule that would work for you. Ponder your typical work week: are there some hours that are generally free every week?
For now, think of writing as a class that you teach. Most classes are around 3 to 6 hours each week, so schedule 4 hours for your “writing class” during the normal work week.
The key is the habit—the week-in, week-out regularity—not the number of days, the number of hours, or the time of day.
After researching the work habits of successful writers, Ralph Keyes (2003) noted that “the simple fact of sitting down to write day after day is what makes writers productive”
The bad habits that keep them from getting down to writing also keep them from doing the prewriting (Kellogg, 1994)—the reading, outlining, organizing, brainstorming, planning, and number-crunching necessary for typing words.
forcing people to write boosted their creative ideas for writing.
Writing breeds more good ideas for writing.
How do these great writers write instead? Successful professional writers, regardless of whether they’re writing novels, nonfiction, poetry, or drama are prolific because they write regularly—usually daily.
“Serious writers write, inspired or not. Over time they discover that routine is a better friend to them than inspiration”
academics should schedule time for writing much like we schedule time for teaching and tackle writing’s many tasks during that time.
Our brains burn brighter at some times of the day, and biologically realistic writing schedules use our high-energy times.
When you find a nice place, stick to it. Habits come from repetition—doing the same behaviors with the same stuff in the same place at the same times. Our brains settle in for writing faster when they detect that they are in the writing place at the writing time.
Make a big list of everything you’d like to write—your project goals—in the next year or two. These goals will range from definitely to fantasy, but don’t judge them just yet.
Once you have all your writing goals in one place, it’s time to pick one and get writing. The world’s oldest productivity advice—after “construct a sundial and Gregorian calendar”—is to break your big, unwieldy goals into tiny, tractable ones. A goal like “turn my dissertation into a book” is too large and lumpy to guide your day-in, day-out work. At the start of your writing period, after shooing the bats away, take a couple moments to think about what you want to accomplish that day. Day-level goals should be concrete, the kind of goals that you can judge if you meet them.
A clear goal is usually finishing part of your project—like a paragraph, section, or chapter—or finishing a set number of words.
Nothing helps a writing schedule like tracking your progress.
Self-monitoring—keeping tabs on your own behavior—is one of the oldest and best ways of changing behavior
If we want to change what we do—like write more regularly—we can arrange our environment to nudge us to do it.
The cure for writer’s block—if you can cure a specious affliction—is writing.
Recall Boice’s (1990) experiment described in Chapter 2. In that study, struggling writers wrote more when they simply followed a schedule—that’s all it took. They probably didn’t enjoy it, and they probably spent much of their scheduled time scowling at a blank page, but they sat down and wrote a couple good paragraphs in between scowls. Struggling writers who waited until they “felt like it,” in contrast, wrote almost nothing.
Having tracked my weekday writing for many years, I think each day’s work can be described with three dimensions: Vexation: some days, writing was fun; other days, it was frustrating. Quality: some days, I liked what I wrote; other days, I was embarrassed by it. ...
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Productive writers follow their writing schedule regardless of whether they feel like writing. Some days they don’t write much—writing is a grim business, after all—but they’re nevertheless sitting and writing, oblivious to the otherworldly halo hovering above their house.
When goals are abstract, it is hard to know if you’re making good progress; when goals are long-range, it is easy to put them off. Each member sets a concrete goal for the next week, such as making an outline, finishing a section of a manuscript, reading a book, or writing 1,000 words. These are tangible—you’ll know if you didn’t do it.
Humans are both frail and forgetful, so you can guess what happens if you don’t write down everyone’s goals.
When we talk about our ideas, we sound enthusiastic, lively, and interesting. But when we write about our ideas, something goes awry from the brain to the page—some dark alchemy transforms our glittering ideas into dull, leaden words.
Academic writers want to sound smart. “If the water is dark,” goes a German aphorism, “the lake must be deep.” So instead of using good words like smart, we choose sophisticated or erudite. Perhaps I should have said, “Bodies of water characterized by minimal transparency are likely to possess significantly high values on the depth dimension (p = .032).”
The English language has a lot of words, and many of them are short, expressive, and familiar—make friends with these words.
Besides improving your writing, good words show respect for your many readers who learned English as a second, third, or fourth language. Foreign scholars often read articles with a dual-language dictionary at hand. They usually blame themselves for misunderstanding our writing, but we’re to blame for leaving them behind.
Abbreviations and acronyms are often bad words.
Use abbreviations and acronyms only when they are easier to understand than the tortuous phrases they represent. Some writers believe that they’re reducing redundancy by replacing common phrases with abbreviations, but readers find rereading abbreviations more tedious than rereading real words.
Avoid most uses of very, quite, basically, actually, virtually, extremely, remarkably, completely, at all, and so forth. Basically, these quite useless words add virtually nothing at all; like weeds, they’ll in fact actually smother your sentences completely.
We all like simple sentences.
While you’re rebuilding your relationship with the semicolon, make a new friend—the dash.
Few writers use en dashes properly; they use hyphens instead, often with funny results.
You should know the difference between a teacher–parent conference (en dash) and a teacher-parent conference (hyphen).
If your word processor’s search function turns up a few cases, you have three options: delete the clause preceding such that, replace such that with a colon or dash, or write a tighter sentence.
All books about writing urge people to write in the active voice. People think actively and speak actively, so active writing captures the compelling sound of everyday language. Passive writing, by hiding the sentence’s agent, strikes people as vague and evasive. Writers who want to sound smart drift toward the passive voice; they like its impersonal sound and its stereotypical association with scholarly writing. Passive writing is easy to fix. Read your writing and circle each appearance of to be. Can you think of a better verb? Nearly all verbs imply being, so you can usually replace to be
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To revive enervated sentences, negate with verbs instead of with not. People often miss not when reading and thus misunderstand your sentence. This trick shortens your sentences and expresses your points vividly.
Likewise, let’s avoid in a _____ manner. Use adverbs—“people responded rapidly” instead of “people responded in a rapid manner”—to avoid a tragedy of manners. Even active sentences can be limp and lifeless. Scientists often start a sentence with “Research shows that . . . ,” “Many new findings suggest that . . . ,” or “A monstrous amount of research conclusively proves that . . .” These phrases add little to our meaning, and a couple citations at the end of the sentence will show that research bolsters your point. You’ll need these phrases occasionally, but avoid them when possible.
Generating text and revising text are distinct parts of writing—don’t do both at once.
Articles have themes and hooks and arcs that can be arranged to appeal to different crowds. Instead of “writing an article,” we should always “write an article for . . .”
Choosing your target journal is thus the first step in writing. If you know who you’re writing for, you can craft the paper to appeal to them. Most of your vexing writing decisions can be solved by using that journal’s published articles as models.
On my list of maladaptive practices that make writing harder, Not Outlining is pretty high
