Category Archives: Centre for Academic Communication

Balancing on the point of a pin…

Academic Writing, Centre for Academic Communication, Goal setting, Imposter Syndrome, procrastination, Productivity, Time management, Writing process

By Dr. Janet Sheppard

Balancing on the point of a pin. . . . Does that phrase make you wince or squirm a little as it does me? I’ve been reading a lot lately about productivity (we’ll get back to the pin later), a new buzz word for people who have a desire to achieve their goals and accomplish as much as they can, with as little pain, frustration, and procrastination as possible. Graduate students, academics, and professionals all want to maximize their ability to get things done. For those of you reading this blog, that means mostly writing, editing, and/or revising.

One of the places grad students sometimes stumble when it comes to writing is that they believe it should flow out of them. They do not see themselves as writers and, as Rachel Cayley, author of the blog post “Explorations of Style” says, here and here, grad students often hold a dichotomy between their “writing” and their “work”.  Because academic writing is different from other types of writing, it’s easy to form beliefs about what it ‘should’ be like.  One of the factors that has a large impact on these erroneous beliefs is that many grad students are so isolated in their academic work once their courses end.

I am a huge fan of communities of support for the writing process (please check out the Thesis Writing Starter Kit if you haven’t yet).  Not everyone needs a writing group, but in my experience, almost everyone needs a place to talk about their writing process, their stuck spots, and their successes! Sometimes other work gets privileged over writing because grad students feel more confident and competent doing it, and there are natural social rewards from tasks that have us engage with others.  I want to be clear that doing other things as part of your graduate work is important (attending a conference, TA-ing, acting as a research assistant), but if you find yourself with a long ‘to-do’ list of non-thesis writing tasks, chances are you are helping yourself feel more productive in the short term but making yourself vulnerable to criticism and imposter syndrome in the long term.

One of the most important foundations of productive writing is probably what Charles Duhigg (2016) describes as a sense of control. Have you thought about that lately? How ‘in control’ do you feel of this massive project called your thesis or dissertation? Particularly in the early stages, having no idea exactly what your thesis should or could be, means that for many grad students a sense of control is hard to come by.

One thing that can help to increase a sense of control (also known as agency, or an internal locus of control) is to form two different types of goals for yourself – what Duhigg calls an ‘aspirational goal’, the big ‘why’ of your decision to be in graduate school, how you see it contributing to your life/career goals, and SMART goals. (remember those? Specific, Measurable, Achievable/Action-oriented, Realistic, Time-bound) SMART goals are the ‘how’ of our productive work.  When I was working with Thesis Completion Groups, I frequently asked participants to break their weekly goals into smaller, more concrete elements…

“I’m going to finish Chapter 2”…hmmm. Okay, that is often the literature review chapter, how far along are you with reading and outlining your review? How much time can you give to the task of working on this each day? When during the day do you plan do this writing? Where will you work?

This may seem like an insane level of detail to include in your goal setting, but research shows that the smaller and more concrete our goals, and the more we anchor those goals into our physical environment, the more likely we are to achieve them. (Pychyl, 2013)

Here are some other writing tips you may already know about and integrate into your routine:

  • Disconnect from social media, limit your distractions during writing periods. We are often tempted to navigate away to search for something, check our email or Facebook, when we feel lost. If you use an app to limit access to certain sites while you’re working, you will become more productive!
  • Working with a timer helps to maintain a deeper focus! Cal Newport (2016) has called deep work the superpower of the 21st century, because it is so important to making progress in learning and business, but people are more and more distractible and managing only surface thinking!
  • If you are struggling with ‘writing your way into your topic’, ‘writing undressed’, or clarifying your thinking…try moving away from your computer and picking up a pen and paper. There is evidence emerging that suggests handwriting (a form of disfluency) forces you to slow down and facilitates deeper processing.

Okay, back to that pointy pin…the metaphor came to me as I was reflecting on the many graduate students with whom I have worked over the last six or seven years. While every student is different and the range and complexity of graduate student lives, interests, abilities, and research topics are phenomenal, one thing I believe shuts down productivity faster and more thoroughly than almost anything else, is the belief that there is a ‘right way’ to do this academic writing thing. The critical external gaze of instructors and your supervisor can compound the struggle to get it right, but if you feel that you must focus very hard on balancing all those competing demands, expectations and beliefs before you can start to write, you will ultimately end up in an impossible situation: trying to balance on the point of a pin. Here’s what I want for you: leap off. Surround yourself with people who believe in you as you (re)learn how to believe in yourself. Ask for help if you need it. Go to the Centre for Academic Communication, or to Counselling Services if your quality of life has been severely impacted. If you’ve made it this far, you can learn how to navigate without paralysis and endless pain. Stay tuned for another blog post that will touch on some other health and well-being ‘hacks’ that can help you soar.

References

Duhigg, C. (2016). Smarter, Faster, Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business. New York, NY: Penguin Random House.

Newport, C. (2016). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. New York, NY: Grand Central Publishing.

Pychyl, T. (2013) Solving the Procrastination Puzzle: A Concise Guide to Strategies for Change. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin.

Dr. Janet Sheppard worked in Counselling Services for more than 25 years. While she retired last summer, in the last part of her UVic career Janet coordinated a series of Thesis Completion Support groups, helped to organize and facilitate Thesis Boot Camps, developed and co-facilitated a graduate student career exploration group with Career Services, and generally loved working with graduate students. Janet is currently completing a graduate certificate program in executive coaching.

 

Smudging the lines of the outline

Academic Writing, Centre for Academic Communication, First draft, Outlines, Posts by Kaveh, Road map, Writing process

Madeline Walker’s post, Writing undressed, made me think about my process of planning for academic writing and my beliefs about it. It also reminded me of a conversation we had a few months ago about the value of making an outline before starting to write.

I am all about planning. Before writing a paper, journal article, or a thesis chapter, I always spend a long time mind mapping and creating an outline. I try to make sure I know what my thesis statement is and how many sub-points I need to support that thesis. I organize all my ideas and try to imagine the line of argument as specifically as possible. Then I order the ideas on an outline and try to make it so detailed that I end up with topic sentences for each paragraph, basically creating a template for my paper that I will fill in later with supporting sentences for each paragraph.

My conversation with Madeline was on the effectiveness of this approach. She raised a question about the possibility of having such a detailed outline before writing, whether we really can know exactly what we want to say before we start to write, and I defended the idea of preparing before writing, that the argument can get off track and confusing unless we have such a specific outline before we start.

Kaveh Tagharobi is a graduate student and an EAL specialist at the CAC

Reading her blog post about the stages of undress, however, I now see what she meant that day. Those stages of disarray that Writing undressed talks about are so familiar for me as well. With all my mind maps and topic sentence outlines, I constantly find myself reorganizing, merging and adding paragraphs, and even changing direction altogether. My apparently carefully dressed outline gets disrobed during the writing process, as I discover that two of my main ideas are actually the same and need to be merged, or that I need one more paragraph to discuss this or that topic.

But does this mean that I give up on my outlines? Probably not. I still see the value in having the road map outlined before I embark on writing, even if I have to accept that this is only tentative. I believe I can at least draw a sketch of my outline and then be prepared to smudge the lines as I write. The number of modifications and alterations probably depends on the complexity of that particular piece of writing I am working on. I think I can make my outline with more certainty when I am writing a five paragraph essay for a first-year English course, and I probably should expect more changes when I am writing the first draft of my thesis.

I still think that I would be too lost if I start writing without an outline, but after reading Madeline’s post, now I feel much more comfortable when I adjust the outline as I write. The outline is the suit that I thought I’d wear to the party, dry-cleaned and carefully laid down on the bed, but my room is a mess with all my wardrobe out and I am trying them all on and throwing them around before I am happy with the look I want to leave the house with…or to submit my manuscript!

Kaveh Tagharobi is an EAL (English as an additional language) Specialist at the Centre for Academic Communication.  He is also in the English Department’s MA Program with a concentration in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought.

Writing undressed

Academic Writing, Centre for Academic Communication, Colyar, Tutoring, Writers writing about writing, Writing process

img_1259“Writing puts on its trousers one leg at a time, but we rarely see it in stages of undress.” (Colyar, 2009, p. 424)

[/Introduction placeholder/ How to start? What about audience? Tone? How am I pitching it? What’s my pitch?/ Find a quotation. Maybe Colyar? Main idea? *x*%&%! What about that dressing metaphor—weak? silly? Everything has probably been said before and said better in somebody else’s blog. Argh!]

Normally you won’t see writing in “stages of undress” as exemplified in the paragraph above. You only see the finished written product, the fully dressed book, essay, article, or blog post. To continue with this metaphor, usually only in our own writing do we witness the confusion of dressing: the false starts, the messy drafts, the placeholders, the marginalia, and the sentences to the self. Because of this, many of us have suffered from the thought, “it must be me. Other people get it all down beautifully the first time; others don’t struggle with writing the way I do.” Julia Colyar’s (2009) wonderful article “Becoming Writing, Becoming Writers” both explores and illustrates the rarely talked about process of thinking/writing:

My nonintroduction is a tool I use to propel the text forward, into the next paragraph, toward the meat of my argument. Ultimately, it will be rewritten,
and thus, seemingly out of order, written, and complete. The nudge-forward this placeholder paragraph provides is essential, because I will not come to understand my own argument until I have completed the initial draft. Only then will I know what I want to say, where the various sections connect, and how to revise the introduction. I cannot draw the roadmap until I know what the road looks like. I can’t start until I have already started. (p. 422)

She holds up a mirror to us as writers, showing us how we pull on mismatched socks, pick cat hairs off the suit jacket, stumble over our shoes. To get to spiffy writing with its trousers zipped, we have to experience the discomfort of dishabille. Colyar argues that we need to teach writing [at the graduate level] and talk regularly about the process of writing—to bring undressed writing out of the closet and into the open. In doing so, she hopes, we can demystify the often private process of academic writing.

I agree. After several years of teaching writing to graduate nursing students, I observed that fears about academic writing topped many students’ worry lists. I started my course with the question, “How do you write?” I invited students to talk about their processes, their stumbles, their mismatched socks. I asked them to share their writing-to-learn drafts, their vulnerabilities, and their concerns. I encouraged them to relax.  I wanted (and want) to help students worry less and write more.

Please consider describing your own writing journey for this blog.  Email me, Madeline Walker cdrcac@uvic.ca

And if you’d like to talk about your writing and/or get support, please drop by the Centre for Academic Communication or register online to meet with a tutor.  We love to talk about writing: undressed, dressed, and all the stages in between.

Reference

Colyar, J. (2009). Becoming writing, becoming writers. Qualitative Inquiry 15(2), 421–436.   doi 10.1177/1077800408318280

 

Our blog

Academic Writing, Blogs and blogging, Centre for Academic Communication, Tutoring

We at the Centre for Academic Communication (CAC) are excited to launch this resource for graduate students.  Starting in 2017, we’ll be blogging bi-weekly with juicy material on writing your thesis or dissertation and  surrounding issues. We’ll be reaching out instructors, students, and staff to provide guest posts.  Is there an academic writing topic you want to share about? We’re interested in topics from technology to terror of public speaking. Do you have a story to tell about your own writing journey as you develop your thesis or dissertation?  Are you a faculty member with wisdom you’d like to impart?  Please email Madeline Walkercropped-cropped-cropped-2110144017-2.jpg at cdrcac@uvic.ca and sketch your idea or story in 250 words (final blog posts will be 300-800 words).

Check out the Thesis Writing Starter Kit and the Dissertation Writers’ Resource for lots of information (see menus at top of page).

The Centre for Academic Communication will re-open for regular tutoring appointments on January 9th, 2017. Our experienced tutors can help you with all aspects of academic communication, from pre-writing to presentations.