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I’ve just come up on my first year of my PhD, and one of the main things I’ve learned is how important writing is. At one level this is obvious — the only way the thesis gets completed is through writing. But my undergrad experience of writing was to wait until the last minute, which doesn’t scale well to 80,000+ words. Instead, I’ve realised I don’t have to wait until I know what to write before I start writing.
When I started my PhD, I read a couple of books on thesis writing. All of these emphasised the importance of writing, but few focused on what to write when you don’t know what you are doing. At the time, I was worried that I wasn’t doing enough writing, but looking back I think I was writing just the right amount.
My supervisors helped a lot by requiring me to provide them with something written for each fortnight’s meeting. Because I didn’t really know enough about what I was doing to write my own original thoughts, most of the time I gave them notes on articles I had read. This had a number of benefits:
The key lesson I learned here was to write at a complete summary paragraph, rather than dot points. While dot points are quick to get down, writing a summary paragraph meant I had to understand the argument. It also made it easier to use the paragraph in my own writing.
In my second six months, the goal shifted from trying to get across my research area to preparing for my thesis proposal review, which is the point at which you are confirmed as a PhD candidate. This involved writing about my research problem and research design, and presenting on this to my school. While I still continued to summarise articles and books, this took a back seat to writing about my own research.
Previously, I had always approached largish writing tasks by first constructing an outline (usually as a mind map), and only writing when the outline was complete. But I found this didn’t work when I was trying to develop a more complex argument. I would think I had it all mapped out, but when I tried to write from the outline, the argument fell apart.
So I tried a more iterative approach. I still started with the mindmap as an outline, marking out the high level sections that I knew were required. But instead of waiting until I thought the outline was complete, I started writing small bits of text as soon as I thought a section was sufficiently mapped. Sometimes I was able to write a complete section from my outline, but other times I got stuck. When this happened, I would try some freewriting for 15 minutes or use some of the prompts in Rowena Murray’s How to write a thesis. Often, this was enough for me to work out the next step, and I would update that section of my mindmap and keep writing that section.
This was useful because I could easily see keep track of the whole. I also kept track of the current word count for each section, which I found motivating. More complex sections might require a walk, or drawing diagrams by hand, or talking to someone, before I knew what I needed to write next.
The key lesson I learned in this period is that I don’t need to wait until I know what I want to write before writing. Writing when you don’t know what you want to write is a very useful way of working out what you want to write, and it’s a point frequently made by thesis books trying to encourage students to write throughout the process, instead of leaving it until the end. But more importantly, I found that writing before I knew what I wanted to write got me to the point where I couldn’t work out what I wanted to say through writing. And once I’d gotten to this point, this problem of not knowing the next bit in my argument became a background problem that I could work on in my head while going for a walk, or doing housework.
As I progress in my second year, the writing is getting harder as I struggle to make my own arguments. But I now have a better understanding of the usefulness of different types of writing, and how I can manage that writing with outlines (other people might use sticky notes or draft table of contents, but I find it useful to have some way of seeing the larger picture while focusing on the individual paragraphs). A thesis requires a complex argument, one that is simply too large to both develop and hold in my mind. Regular writing helps me both externalise those thoughts and process the information I gain from reading others’ work.
