On writing
Through my dissertation process I learned a lot about how I wrote and what worked well. If I had to recommend one piece of advice from this section it would be to write every day. It doesn’t matter if it’s a lot or a little, just write every day.
Just write
Write first, edit later.
Alternatively, do not be precious about the text. Shunt what doesn’t work into a document that you could come back to later. Just put text down. My as-submitted dissertation clocks in at 51K words, excluding references. I have another document called “extra_text.docx” that features an additional 25K words. So, an additional half-dissertation. Thoughts and ideas that didn’t make the cut. I do not lament that extra work. That extra work was necessary to sharpen my thoughts and help me articulate my ideas.
Somedays, I was stuck and I just start describing a graphic I made. Or I would articulate some aspect of my data. Or, if I felt brave, I would start a lit-review from memory and write a chronological overview of the methods and theoretical subject matter of my topic. Some text is better than no text.
I am putting this piece of advice in to practice with this blog. As I look over these posts, I will no doubt see errors and unclear sentences. And I will fix those. This medium allows for iteration and so I will take advantage of that by publishing and editing in real-time.
Just. Write.
Write every day
Small actions add up.
Some days I’d write pages and pages of text, and some days it would be just a paragraph or even just a sentence. But working every day was key to keeping the momentum going.
Momentum and motivation follow action.
Dissertations are completed one page, one paragraph, one sentence, one word, and one keystroke at time. Incremental, daily, progress does wonders.
Something is better than nothing
Do something every day to push the project forward.
At the beginning of each day, I would ask myself, what am I going to do to push this forward? This was especially useful if I was stuck. At the end of each day, I would ask myself, how did I push this project forward?
Somedays it was just a paragraph of text. Somedays it was mock-up of a graphic or a map that I had in my head I wanted to get out and build a narrative around. Somedays it was jotting down ideas that would coalesce into a section of a chapter.
Even if some thread or idea did not ultimately pan out, I still pushed the project forward becasue I learned something.
Use a citation manager
Track your sources.
Pick a citation manager and organize your citations. I use Zotero. I like Zotero, but it’s not software I rave about. It has a lot of features, it’s free tier is pretty good, it integrates well with MS Word, and it pulls in citations from disparate sources fairly well. Plus, that magic import by DOI is very slick and saves a lot of time.
Make reading easier
Remove blocks to accumulating knowledge.
When I first started graduate school I used a combination of printed paper copies, folders on my computer with pdfs of articles, and some of those pdfs duplicated in my citation manager. My notes on those articles were equally scattered. This made not only reading difficult, but it also made keeping track of what I read and when I read it difficult. So, all journal articles, book references, and notes went into Zotero. That helped immensely.
I used Zotero to track and store the pdfs. Over time my collection ballooned to nerely four thousand references. As of the writing of this post, the free tier of zotero only offers 300 MB. I pay for six gigabytes of storage for $60 a year. That’s a bargain. But the real reason I purchased the extra storage is so that I could sync with Papership. Papership is a pdf reader that integrates quite well with Zotero. Of course, Papership lets your read pdfs for free, but there is a one-time fee of $10 to be able to annotate pdfs. Here in Seattle, I have certainly paid more than $10 for a single cocktail.
But think about that, $60 a year plus a one-time fee of $10 to be able to carry around, on my iPhone and iPad, every pdf I have ever read or will need. That’s incredible. And it really made reading a lot easier. On the bus! At the cafe! In a park. Very easy to read and acquire new knowledge.
The take-away of this is to pay for the upgrades. Now is not the time to cheap out. By paying a modest amount the software got out of my way and helped me be productive.
Organize your citations in your citation manager
Make it easier to stand on the shoulders of giants.
I found I enjoy organizing and putting my references and citations into categories and groups. The more organized I was with my citations, the easier it was to read and write.