Research Tip #12: Recognising Your Writing Process

Talking
to a fellow scholar today gave me the insight that one of the keys to writing
your thesis quickly is to recognise the process that you follow for writing. It
helps in not just setting a pace for writing but will also bring a qualitative
change in what we write. By identifying the writing process, we are able to set
deadlines that align with the time that we require to finish a task. In
addition, by finding our most efficient method of writing, we are able to
improve our writing. Keep in mind that the focus is on finding the process that
is most efficient, not the quickest. I am hoping that by the end of this post,
this distinction will become clearer. I am going to detail out here the process
that I have come to follow over a period of years.

Given
that we are almost always carrying a smartphone, a tap or a laptop, this
question has becomes sort of redundant in the past decade or so. I realised
three years into my doctorate that this is something I need to revisit. I have
friends who take field notes in their phones, or those who record it and then
use a voice recognition software type out their field notes. I have always stuck
to pen and paper in the field. I found typing much slower on the phone and a
lot of my thoughts were lost by the time I was able to sit down and access my
laptop. But when it came to writing chapters, I invariably returned to write
first drafts of them in the laptop. My supervisor was encouraging of this since
she had herself moved on to typing in most of the things herself and corrected all
my chapters in the soft copy, making suggestions using track changes mode. It
thus came almost naturally to me to want to type chapters directly.

I
can’t really pin point when, but I realised at some point that this wasn’t
working well for me. I made more punctuation and spelling errors when I was
typing directly. This was distracting for me as I tend to correct these as I
type and lost my flow of thought. My typing is also slower than my writing by
hand. Stationery is an inspiration to write and thus a motivating factor. The
black and white screen has never inspired me and has almost always caused me
more eye strain than my notebook. I thus switched back to writing first drafts
of almost everything by hand. While I do still sometimes type in directly, I do
tend to resort to writing a lot of times. This is particularly true when I am
making notes. I keep a separate notebook for making notes, writing down
references, or recording new ideas and thoughts.

The
other debate that I have often had is when I am to refer to many different
sources when I am writing. When I am typing in directly, it is often difficult
to juggle between typing and picking up a pen and marking a line in a book or a
journal article. I also find it difficult to switch between softwares. For
instance, I once tried MS One Note to take down random thoughts, like we would
in a notepad. But it didn’t work very well for me. The concept of the software
is nice, but I never quite got around to learning how to code it to find
relevant things later. I thus prefer the margins or the back page of my
notebook to jot down a sudden insight that I might have had. These flash
insights, when unwritten tend to get lost if I don’t write down immediately. Sometimes
they don’t concern what I am currently working on and need to be relegated to
the margins to be visited later.

Initially,
when typing in directly, I would end up wasting a lot of time typing down an
entire quote lest I am unable to locate it later. Consider this. I am typing in
a chapter. I have a reference in front of me from which I need to cite a
statement verbatim which is about twenty words. I don’t want to waste the time
in writing this down. I write in the first few words and leave space for filling
it up later so that I can move on to writing down the inference that I want to make.
However, I have not marked it in the book or article since picking up a pen at
this time was a distraction from my typing. Later, when I am filling in this
gap, I can’t find the sentence I was looking for! Of course, you can use soft
copies of all the references you want to keep and use the search tool. I found
it easier to move back to writing with a pen.  

So
the process that I follow now is to read up a lot before I start writing. I
mark important portions in pencil, use a lot of post-its, and make notes in the
margins. Sometimes, I colour code my notes. One colour each for what is
relevant now, what I want to cite, what needs more exploration, what may be
relevant for another paper sometime in the future, etc. When I feel I have read
a lot and have enough jottings, I start writing. I keep all references away for
now and write down on the basis of the notes that I have made. In these
writings, I mark reminders for myself to put in a citation at one place,
identify the complete reference at another, find points for elaboration, or
insert an example. These markings help me to improve on this draft later.

What
I have also come to realise is that when I write in pen and type it in later,
it takes double the effort but not always double the time by the time I finish
the final draft. It ensures that when I submit it to anyone, it is the second draft
instead of the first. The first one is hand written. This was particularly
helpful when I was submitting to my supervisor. It ensured that I had minimised
the unfinished sentences, missing punctuation, etc. It also ensured that I was
able to revisit my first draft for any presumptions I had made about the
reader. I ensured that things were clearly written, and was able to revisit the
choice of words that I had used. In the end, I have been better off writing in
pen, than directly on the laptop. Except for this blog. And thus, if you find
any mistakes in the text above, blame it on my typing in the first draft directly.

Happy
Writing!