Thesis writing and, in general, academic writing is a skill. Not everyone has that skill, but certainly most can get it. To develop an understanding of the behaviours associated with successful writing, we organized a workshop with the help of AVOK – Centre for Academic Writing and Communication. Under the supervision of Djuddah A. J. Leijen, we started this four-hour workshop with Q&A followed by sessions about time management, in particular how to avoid procrastination, and, of course, grammar.
Writing a thesis
To begin with, below is a list of question which one can ask him/her-self while writing a thesis:
- What is the format of the thesis?
- How far are you in the process?
- Where do you start / how do you put everything together?
- What kind of problems do you encounter?
Time Management
Time management is important. A simple calendar, a task-list and a time-tracking technique, like Pomodoro, could boost the writing markedly. The calendar allows to see the big picture in a form of a plan. The task-list helps with breaking the writing into small and easily achievable goals. Overall, the thesis writing is like a long journey. Thus it does require a systematic approach in planning. Yet, many parts of the writing, such as proofreading and citing, are just like anything else you do, for example, shoping and eating.
Creation of body text is indeed a challenging process. Often this can lead to devlopement of writer’s block, a variety of procrastination. Common reasons for this are: Fear of failure, Self censoring criticism and Perfectionism. Experienced writers produce text with initially little care to errors, content censoring, formatting or grammar. Allowing them to initially get down the main ideas and the plot.
For inexperienced writers, rearrangement of environment and of the one’s habits helps to decrease to effects of procrastination (if it is not another for of that). Further to this, writing in small sessions instead of “binging” increases efficiency and improves results. Finally, pre- and post-writing thinking are extremely useful are an integral part of the process allowing for rationalization of workflow and future tasks.
Some things to remember
- ‘Writing up’ obscures the fact that doctoral writing is thinking. We write to work out what we think. It’s not that we do the research and then know.
- Writing up’ obscures the fact that producing a dissertation text is hard work. Writing is physical, emotional and aesthetic labour. Sitting at a keyboard for hours on end is hard on nerves and bodies.
- ‘Writing up’ obscures the fact that doctoral writing is not transparent. Facts are not already there, waiting for the researcher to discover and grab. What writing creates is a particular representation of reality. Data is produced in writing, not found. And the data and subsequent texts that are written, are shaped and crafted by the researcher through a multitude of selections: what to include and exclude, what is foreground and background, what to cite and not cite. These choices often have profound ethical and emotional dimensions and raise issues that need conscious attention by doctoral writers.
