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CityReads│Academic Writing: How to Write a Lot?
Paul J. Silvia,2007. How To Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Academic writing can become a sordid drama. Professors feel oppressed by half-done manuscripts, complain about cruel rejections from journals, scramble breathlessly to submit grant proposals the day before the deadlines, fantasize about the halcyon summer days of writing, and curse the foul start of the semester for stunting their productivity. All of these practices are bad. Academic writing should be more routine, boring, and mundane than it is. How to Write a Lot is about becoming a reflective, disciplined writer. I take a practical, behavior-oriented approach to writing. How to write a lot views writing as a set of concrete behaviors, such as (a) sitting on a chair, bench, stool, ottoman, toilet, or patch of grass and (b) slapping your flippers against the keyboard to generate paragraphs. You can foster these behaviors using simple strategies. Let everyone else procrastinate, daydream, and complain—spend your time sitting down and moving your mittens. Writing productively is a skill, not a genetic gift, so you can learn how to do it. Writing productively is about actions that aren’t doing but could easily do: making a schedule, setting clear goals, keeping track of your work, rewarding yourself, and building good habits. Changing your behavior won’t necessarily make writing fun, but it will make writing easier and less oppressive.
Writing is hard, which is why so many of us do so little of it. Professors and graduate students want to write more, but they believe that there are things holding them back. I call these specious barriers: at first they appear to be legitimate reasons for not writing, but they crumble under critical scrutiny. The following looks at the most common barriers to writing a lot and describes simple ways to overcome them. Specious barrier 1: "I can't find time to write", also known as “I would write more if I could find big blocks of time.” Do you need to “find time to teach”? Of course not—you have a teaching schedule, and you never miss it. Instead of finding time to write, allot time to write. Prolific writers make a schedule and stick to it. It's that simple. Most people use a wasteful, unproductive strategy called binge writing. After intending to write, procrastinating, and feeling guilty and anxious about procrastinating, binge writers finally devote a Saturday to nothing but writing. This creates some text and alleviates the guilt, and the binge-writing cycle begins anew. Binge writers spend more time feeling guilty and anxious about not writing than schedule followers spend writing. When you follow a schedule, you no longer worry about not writing, complain about not finding time to write, or indulge in fantasies about how much you'll write over the summer. Instead, you write during your allotted time and then forget about it. When confronted with their fruitless ways, binge writers often proffer a self-defeating dispositional attribution:"I'm just not the kind of person who's good at making a schedule and sticking to it." This is nonsense, of course. People like dispositional explanations when they don't want to change. People who claim that they're "not the scheduling kind of person" are masterly schedulers at other times: they always teach at the same time, go to bed at the same time, and so on. I've met people who jogged at the same daily time, regardless of snow or rain, but claimed that they didn't have the willpower to stick to a daily writing schedule. Don't quit before you start--making a schedule is the secret to productive writing. Making a schedule and sticking to it is the only way to write a lot. The secret is the regularity, not the number of days or the number of hours. To begin, allot a mere 4 hours per week. After you see the astronomical increase in your writing output, you can always add more hours. You must ruthlessly defend your writing time. Treat your scheduled writing time like your scheduled teaching time. You’re a professional writer, just as you’re a professional teacher. Remember, you're allocating time to write, not finding time to write. Finding time is a destructive way of thinking about writing. Never say this again. Don't usurp your writing schedule with windfall writing. The point is to stick to your scheduled writing time no matter how much you write on a nonwriting day. The simple fact of sitting down to write day after day is what makes writers productive. Close your Internet access, turn off your phone, and shut the door. Specious barrier 2: "I need to do some more analyses first,"aka, "I need to read a few more articles." Binge writers are also binge readers and binge statisticians. The bad habits that keep them from writing also keep them from doing the prewriting, the reading, outlining, idea generation, and data analysis necessary for generating text. it's easy to pull away this creaky crutch: Do whatever you need to do during your alloted writing time. Need to crunch some more statistics? Do it during your scheduled time. Need to read some articles? Do it during your scheduled time. Need to review page proofs? Do it during your scheduled time. Need to read a book about writing to get advice? You know when to do it. Writing is more than typing words: any action that is instrumental in completing a writing project counts as writing. Specious barrier 3: "To write a lot, I need a new computer/a laser printer/a nice chair/ a better desk". This may be a mere excuse. “In order to write, all a man needs is paper and a pencil,” wrote William Saroyan. Equipment will never help you write a lot; only making a schedule and sticking to it will make you a productive writer. Specious barrier 4: "I am waiting until I feel like it," aka "I write best when I'm inspired to write." Waiting for inspiration doesn't work. Boice gathered a sample of college professors who struggled with writing, and he randomly assigned them to use different writing strategies. People in an abstinence condition were forbidden from all nonemergency writing; people in a spontaneous condition scheduled 50 writing sessions but wrote only when they felt inspired; and people in a contingency management conditions scheduled 50 writing sessions and were forced to write during each session. People in the contingency management condition wrote a lot: They wrote 3.5 times as many pages as people in the spontaneous condition and 16 times as much as those in the abstinence condition. People who wrote "when they felt like it" were barely more productive than people told not to write at all. Inspiration is overrated. Forcing people to write enhanced their creative ideas for writing. The typical number of days between creative ideas was merely 1 days for people who were forced to write; it was 2 days for people in the spontaneous condition and 5 days for people in the abstinence condition. Writing breeds good ideas for writing. Figure Effects of different writing strategies on a) the number of pages written per day and b) the modal number of days between creative writing ideas (Boice, 1990). Some kinds of writing are so unpleasant that no normal person will ever feel like doing them. You'll need more than "feeling like it" to finish a grant proposal. Struggling writers who "wait for inspiration" should get off their high horse and join the unwashed masses of real academic writers. The ancient Greeks assigned muses for poetry, music, and tragedy, but they didn't mention a muse for journal articles written in APA style. Even great novelists and poets--people who we think should wait for inspiration--reject the notion of writing when inspired. Successful professional writers, regardless of whether they're writing novels, nonfiction, poetry, or drama, are prolific because they write regularly, usually every day. As Keyes put it, "Serous writers write, inspired or not. Over time they discover that routine is a better friend to them than inspiration". Inspiration comes only when you routinely write, usually every day. Those including myself who are waiting and hoping that inspiration and mood would come like a magic only end up with disappointment and frustration and anxiety. Prolific 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.
Write according to a schedule. Schedules are why prolific writers are so prolific, and they are how anyone can write a lot. But perhaps you’re not getting much done during your scheduled time. Reformed binge writers usually don't know how to manage their writing time. Because they used to be driven by deadlines and guilt, they lack experience in setting goals, managing several writing projects at once, and sticking to their schedule. Below I describe simple motivational tools for sticking to your schedule and for writing more efficiently.
Clear goals are directly motivating. To write a lot, you need to clarify your writing goals. So how do you set good goals? The first step is to realize that goal setting is part of the process of writing. It's a good idea to devote a writing session to developing and clarifying your writing goals. Planning is part of writing, so people who write a lot also plan a lot. The second step is to list your project goals--these goals are the individual projects that need to be written. A binge writer would feel anxious when confronted with this long list of projects, but you have a schedule. The third step is to set a concrete goal for each day of writing. You need to break the goal into small units. “Write that paper” is too general. Get in the habit of setting specific, focused, concrete goals for each writing day. Here are some examples of concrete daily goals: Write at least 200 words; Write the first three paragraphs of the general discussion; Add missing references and then reconcile the citations and references; Reread the reviewers' comments of my paper and make a list of things to change, etc.
Now you have a list of project goals. Of all of these projects, what should you write first? 1) Checking page proofs and copyedited manuscripts. 2) Finishing projects with deadlines. If you follow a writing schedule, you'll finish things early and don't need to rub against deadlines. 3) Revising manuscripts to resubmit to a journal. If you have the good fortune to be asked to resubmit your paper, don't squander it. 4) Reviewing manuscripts and grant proposals. I place reviews relatively high. The peer review process is only as good as the peers who review. If everyone were a faster reviewer, everyone would be a happier author. 5) Developing a new manuscript. 6) Doing miscellaneous writing. Graduate students should have different writing priorities than faculty. 1)Projects with deadlines. 2)Curricular writing. 3)Professional publications. 4)Other writings.
Most people have no idea how much--or how little-- they're writing. Most people think that they're writing more often and more efficiently than they are. To write a lot, you need to take a cold, accurate look at your writing by monitoring your writing progress. Here are some examples of how I monitor my writing progress. Figure A histogram of the average number of words written per day over the past 12 months Figure A histogram of the proportion of times the daily writing goal was met over the past 12 months Reward yourself when you finish a project goal. Only a fool, however, rewards productive writing with skipping a scheduled writing period. Never reward writing with not writing. The writing schedule works by harnessing the awesome powers of routine and habit: Don't lose your good writing habits.
Agraphia is the pathologic loss of the ability to write, which nicely captured how most of us felt about writing. You can create your own agraphia group, a type of support group for people who want to write faster and better. It uses principles of motivation, goal setting, and social support to help people maintain good writing habits.
Of course they'll reject your paper. You should write your paper on the assumption that the journal will reject it. Because no journals have rejection rates below 50%, I assume that each paper I submit will be rejected. How can you be motivated to write if you expect rejection? First, people shouldn't be motivated to write--they should simply stick to a writing schedule, mental rain or mental shine. Second, beginning writers seem to think that they're the only people who get rejected. Researchers who publish a lot of articles receive a lot of rejections. The most prolific writers get more rejections per year than other writers get in a decade. To write a lot, you should rethink your mental models of rejection and publication. Rejections are like a sales tax on publications: The more papers you publish, the more rejections you receive. Following the tips in this book will make you the most rejected writer in your department. I find the base rates of rejection oddly comforting. I feel less uncertain about what will happen, I don't feel so bad when my paper is rejected, and I prevent myself from indulging in fruitless fantasies of imaging my work in print before I finish the manuscript. You'll write better when you expect rejection, because you'll mute the need to avoid failure. Writers motivated by failure avoidance write papers that sound defensive, wishy-washy, and uncertain. Writers motivated by the need to achieve success, in contrast, write papers that sound confident and controlled. Sometimes, rejections are unfair, mean, and poorly reasoned. The world is unfair, so take what you can from the reviews, revise your paper, and send it somewhere else. Your paper might be rejected once or twice before it finds a good home, but a good paper will always find a home. To write good articles, master the article formula, submit pristine first drafts, and craft excellent resubmission letters. You'll find that the world of journals isn't scary: It's merely slow.
An unexpected joy of following a schedule is a craftsman's sense of pride. The external rewards for writing are few and unpredictable--occasionally an acceptance letter pokes through the pile of rejections. The internal rewards are even fewer for binge writers. Motivated by guilt and anxiety, binge writers don't find the process of writing rewarding. Because of the long binge, the writing period is followed by a burnout haze that confirms the binge writer's distaste of writing. When you stick to a schedule, you know when you will be rewarded for meeting your goal. My goal is to write every weekday morning. Some days I get a lot done; other days are grim and frustrating. But even on the bad days, I'm happy that I sat down and did it. I give myself a figurative pat on the back. This small daily victory, not the prospect of distal publication, motivates my writing. You don't need special traits, special genes, or special motivation to write a lot. You don't need to want to write--people rarely feel like doing unpleasant tasks that lack deadlines-- so don't wait until you feel like it. 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 cursing, groaning, and gnashing your teeth, but at least you're cursing during your scheduled time and not in binges. After a couple of weeks, your writing schedule will become habitual, and you'll no longer feel pressured to write during nonscheduled hours. A writing schedule brings balance to your life. Binge writers foolishly search for big chunks of time, and they “find” this time during the evenings and weekends. Binge writing thus consumes time that should be spent on normal living. Protect your real-world time just as you protect your scheduled writing time. Ironically, writing a lot will not make you enjoy writing or want to write. Writing is hard and it will always be hard. Writing isn't a race. Publishing a lot does not make you a good person, psychologist, or scientist. (But it will get you tenure) Prolific writers have more publications, but they don't necessarily have good ideas than anyone else. Don't publish a paper just for the sake of having one more published paper.