How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing (APA LifeTools Series)

by Paul J. Silvia

Outlining is writing, not a prelude to “real writing.”

Like hypochondriacs, writers who don’t outline are convinced that they’re afflicted with a mystifying illness—the fake malady of writer’s block, in this case (see Chapter 3). After trying to write blindly, they feel frustrated and complain about how hard it is to generate words. “Clear thinking becomes clear writing,” said Zinsser (2006, p. 8). We’re not doing improv, so let’s collect our thoughts before stepping onto the stage.

Most readers who come across your article will see only the title and abstract, so make them count.

When describing your findings, use a remind-describe-explain format. At the start of a segment, remind readers of your hypothesis, describe the outcome of the analysis, and then briefly explain what it means.

The Discussion steps back and puts your findings in context.

About that limitations section: Your undergraduate research-methods instructor told you to end your Discussion with a section on limitations; your thesis committee probably wanted this section, too. Describing limitations is a useful educational exercise, but it’s often pointless in an article intended for a professional journal. Most of what pass for limitations are merely directions for future research.

If you’re sending your paper to a family studies journal, for example, but rarely cite articles from those journals, you’ll look like an interloper who wants an audience without taking the trouble to connect to it.

Before submitting your pristine manuscript, don’t forget to read the journal’s instructions to authors. Submission guidelines vary between journals and change over the years, so they are always worth double checking.

but in the long run peer review sharpens our ideas and strengthens our field.

Your paper might be rejected once or twice before it finds a home, but a good paper will always find a good home. To write good articles, pick your journal first, outline according to the standard templates, submit great first drafts, and craft excellent resubmission letters.

writing is a way of teaching ourselves what we know. If you want to learn a new area of scholarship, committing to write something about it forces you to read widely, critically, and thoughtfully. And after doing all that reading, you will surely have something worth writing about.

so finish one chapter before moving to the next one.

Textbooks are huge risks for publishers and authors. If you’re inclined to write a textbook because of daydreams of untold wealth, you would probably make more money regularly selling your plasma. A few textbooks make big money, but most textbooks fall flat and fail: the book is published, few instructors adopt it, the publisher declines to develop a second edition, and the loud whoosh of dreams deflating fills the halls.

It isn’t worth learning how to plan, write, and submit grant proposals if you intend to submit only one. Your first complex federal proposal, like a National Institutes of Health research grant or a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, will hurt. No one has forms, instructions, and guidelines like the feds do. But the second proposal is much easier, and the third is easier still. From the beginning, then, you need a “grants, not a grant” mind-set. The decision, for example, is not “Should I write an NEH fellowship?” but “Should I submit an NEH fellowship proposal at least every few years until I get one?” It’s better to invest in books and articles than to dabble with grant proposals.

It doesn’t matter if your proposal is good, or even great, in its own right—it must be better than most of the other proposals, and nearly all of them are pretty good.

A good article manuscript will probably get published somewhere, and a good book manuscript will eventually find a publisher. But an unfunded grant proposal is dead in the water. Sometimes you can harvest a few pages for a manuscript, but when a grant proposal gets rejected you’re usually left with a big carcass suitable only for taxidermy.

If we don’t shoehorn our writing into the normal work week, no one will do it for us.

Productive writing involves harnessing the power of habit, and habits come from repetition. Make a schedule and sit down to write during your scheduled time. You might spend the first few sessions groaning, gnashing your teeth, and draping yourself in sackcloth, but at least you’re not binge gnashing. After a couple of weeks, once your writing schedule is habitual, you’ll no longer feel pressured to write during nonscheduled hours. And a few months later, once your writing schedule has ossified into a weekly routine, the notion of “wanting to write” will seem irrelevant.

Write as much or as little as you want to write. Although this book shows you how to write a lot, don’t think that you ought to. In a way, this book isn’t about writing a lot: it’s about slotting writing into your normal work week, which makes writing less stressful and lets you take the vacations that your grad-school self vowed that you would take.

Publishing a lot does not make anyone a good person or scholar. Some of academia’s most prolific writers rehash the same ideas ceaselessly: empirical articles lead to a review article, the review article gets rewarmed as book chapters, and the book chapters are retreaded for handbooks and newsletters. Prolific writers might have more publications, but they don’t always have more good ideas than anyone else.