#70: How to write
Writing is why we all do what we do - or at least, a big part of it. But it's also a source of intense anxiety, whether we're new to it or whether we've been at it for years. So, here's another start-of-the-new-academic-year imperfectionist special for you. Your imperfect pal here set out to create a little survival guide for new students who want to get their essay-writing off to a good start - but along the way, it turns out that there are plenty of lessons about writing that are useful to revisit even for those of us who have clocked up thousands of hours of writing (and procrastinating). New pencils at the ready: let's get started!
Here are the books on writing mentioned in the episode:
Jensen, J. 2017: Write No Matter What (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Sword, H. 2017: Air & Light &Time & Space (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Episode transcript:
How to be slightly less anxious about writing.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi, friends, and welcome back. I did my planning for this episode sitting in the garden this afternoon, making the most of the limited number of remaining opportunities this year (at least in the northern hemisphere) for getting work done outside and having a reasonably pleasant time of it. I was visited there by various of the cats. You’ll be pleased to hear that all 7 imperfectionist cats have now been integrated into a harmonious whole. Well, ‘harmonious’ might be a bit of an exaggeration, but they’re rubbing along together without too much violence. Cat mealtimes are a bit fraught, what with them not all being on the same diet, with some of them objecting to having to eat in the vicinity of others, and with one of them being especially persistent with gaslighting me about whether he’s been fed at all. I face a bit of a dilemma with the podcasting, as I’m yet to work out whether it’s best to shut the door while I’m recording or leave it open. Shutting it risks inflicting on you the sound of whining and scratching at the door, whereas leaving it open brings with it the possibility of purrs, stuff being knocked over, plants being eaten, and plants being … well, un-eaten. I’ll do my best to edit out their contributions, unless their additions enhance the artistic value of the recording, but I won’t even try to edit out their bells. They each - well, all but one of them who is very uncooperative - have a collar with a bell on it to try to prevent them catching birds. So, the tinkling of bells is ubiquitous here at Imperfectionist Towers. I don’t think I even register it any more.
Anyway. Last time, I talked about how to read. I was a bit apprehensive about doing that topic, as I wasn’t sure how it would land. But I had some really lovely feedback about it, and it turns out that not only were many of you happy to have some pointers on how to make reading difficult stuff less stressful, but you also found it helpful simply to have someone talk about the fact that it is stressful. With reading, as with many of the difficulties we face in academia, and in life more generally come to that, our problems are often made more difficult than they need to be by a sense of shame: a feeling that if we were any good then we wouldn’t be experiencing this problem, that nobody else is experiencing it, and that we can’t possibly confide in anyone because doing so risks outing ourselves as someone who really doesn’t belong here in the first place.
That sense of ‘maybe I don’t really belong here’ is really difficult, isn’t it? It makes it hard even to ask for help. I can remember feeling like that a while back as an early career academic when my delight at getting my first academic job quickly turned to a rabbit-in-the-headlights terror of making the people who hired me regret their decision, and that manifested as the worst case of writer’s block I’ve ever experienced. I can remember sitting at the computer or in the library, reading stuff, and thinking to myself, ‘I have absolutely nothing whatsoever to say about this. I simply can’t muster a single vaguely interesting thought.’ That went on for months. Occasionally I’d consider approaching someone for help and support - but the only people I could think of approaching were also people who I wanted to impress, and telling them that I was unable to write anything whatsoever was terrifying. ‘Who the hell hired you, and what the hell were they thinking?’ I imagined them thinking to themselves, or perhaps even saying to my face. ‘Get the hell out of here.’ A big problem here, I think, is the fact that so much of academic culture is about flexing our muscles and looking impressive. You’ve heard all the talk about ‘excellence’. How can a culture that demands we exude excellence from every pore of our bodies possibly be receptive to those who not only struggle to be excellent, but struggle even to be minimally functional?
Ok. With all that in mind, I’ve decided to follow up last episode’s ‘How to read’ advice with an episode on how to write. Unlike the topic of ‘how to read’, there has been a lot written about how to write. I’m going to list some of it in the episode notes. I’m currently reading a wonderful, pocket-sized book called Write No Matter What by Joli Jensen, which I warmly recommend, and which does a brilliant job of recognising the anxiety that is bound up with writing and offering practical tips for how to get on with writing in spite of it. Another favourite of mine is Helen Sword’s Air & Light & Time & Space, which provides a fascinating insight into the writing habits of lots of different academics, and draws out some lessons to apply. And then there’s a range of resources directed at students in particular, which I found by surveying my academic friends for writing advice that they found useful, and which I make available to my students. I’m not trying to summarise or reiterate any of that here - you can check out the links in the episode notes if you’d like to explore further. What I want to do here is cover and build on the stuff that comes up every time I do a ‘let’s talk about essays’ week in the undergraduate courses I teach. This is stuff that’s based on questions and worries that my students have brought to the class. I’m going to try to zoom out from those aspects of writing that relate to philosophy in particular, and to undergraduates in particular, and try to make it as widely relevant as possible - although there will be some parts that are especially aimed at undergraduates. I’m not sure I currently have many undergraduates among my listeners, so if you have students who you think might benefit from hearing this, please do share it with them - and I’d love to know what they think.
Let’s start, then, by noting that students - and, come to think of it, writers in general - love to talk about writing, and about how to write, and about the anxiety involved in writing. A couple of years ago, I started to introduce into each 10-week module I taught a week dedicated to discussing how to write essays. I started by asking the students what they thought, at the start of the module: did they want to cover 10 topics, as per the original plan, or did they want to drop one and spend a week talking about how to write essays instead? There was always a landslide vote in favour of talking about essay writing. Initially, cynical old crone that I am, I wondered whether what they were actually voting for was dropping all the reading and thinking that went along with covering an extra topic. Perhaps they were viewing essay-discussing-week as a week off from having to work hard. But, if that were the case, I’d expect the essay weeks to be attended by fewer students than the other weeks, which tends not to be the case. Sometimes, attendance is actually better on the essay weeks. Students turn up, ask questions, make notes, and air their worries. At times, it has the air of a group therapy session. About a year ago, one of my students said to me, ‘Nobody has ever taught us how to write a philosophy essay’. I’ve thought about that comment a lot. In a way, it’s simply not true: students are getting schooled on this practically from the moment they arrive. But that schooling often takes a particular form: have a go at writing something, and then get some feedback on it. Which, for many students, I think, can come across as ‘here’s something for you to fuck up, and then we’re then going to tell you exactly how you fucked it up’. There are positive things to say about that approach, but here’s something that I think it neglects: students, along with early career people, people starting a new job, and various other groups, are not simply looking to succeed in whatever it is they’re doing, whether that’s writing or something else. They’re also looking for signs that they belong. Telling them to have a go at writing an essay in order to offer constructive feedback on it is, I guess, a good way of showing people how to improve on their next attempt, but those who are worried about whether they belong - who are thinking things like, ‘maybe I’m not up to this, maybe I chose the wrong course, maybe I shouldn’t be at university at all’ - those people first need reassurance and encouragement that working on improving for their next attempt is worth their while, and that they should keep trying instead of jacking it all in. They care about doing a good job, and they also care about having a place at the table and being welcome, which means they want something more affirming than ‘this is what you’re doing wrong’. They want someone to lead them by the hand and show them how to do it right. I think that’s part of the appeal for them of a class devoted to how to write essays: it’s a class dedicated to showing them what they need to be doing in a way that doesn’t focus on criticising them, and they’re attending it alongside other students who are in the same boat. Essay writing is lonely, especially when you’re not sure how to do it. Come to think of it, any sort of writing is lonely, and none of us is ever sure we’re doing it correctly. Take note, students. This doesn’t necessarily get better. Welcome to the club.
There’s a lesson to draw from all this. It’s that a lot of the time, the anxiety that arises from writing - and there’s a lot of anxiety that arises from writing - relates to ‘Do I belong here?’ type worries. That’s something that can be eased by seeking support and solidarity from others. If you’re co-authoring something with other people, then you have that built in, provided that the relationship is supportive and genuinely collaborative with everyone pulling the right amount of weight. But if you’re writing alone, as you are if you’re writing an essay or a dissertation or any single-authored piece of work, there’s an obvious sense in which that’s lonely and isolating, and there’s things that can help here. Some things work for some people but not for others; for example, presenting your work at a seminar or workshop attended by your peers can be a great way of getting feedback, but in some cases those sorts of environments can be quite combative, which risks adding to your stress and your sense of isolation. So, if that sounds familiar, look elsewhere for a supportive community. It could be a small group of friends who are working on similar projects. It could be an online support group. It could be something that’s quite hands-on - like a group of people who read and comment on each other’s work and encourage each other in very specific ways, like making suggestions for improvement or collaborating on building arguments - or something much more relaxed, like people who work alongside each other but don’t really discuss much about the content of what they’re writing. A really nice resource here, which I’ve mentioned before on this podcast, is the website, Focusmate.com. You pick a slot on a calendar and get paired up by video link with another person, who you work alongside with in silence for the length of the session, spending a few minutes at the beginning to share what you’re hoping to accomplish in the session, and a few minutes at the end to say how you got on. On those days when you’re holed up at home trying to get something finished, it’s a really lovely way to feel like someone is walking alongside you. So, while there’s an obvious sense in which writing is a lonely process, there are things we can do to make the experience of writing less lonely.
Here’s another suggestion that addresses a different type of anxiety: the pressure to perform. You know that experience of creating a brand new Word document for your project. There it is: a big, white, blank page and the brainless flashing cursor waiting for you to impart your wisdom. Your future - part of it, at least, depends on it. How absolutely terrifying, right? So, don’t do it. I never do. I never start a project by creating a shiny new Word document, or by doing anything else that carries an air of ‘Fanfare please, the amazing new project is about to begin’. Now, I’m not claiming to be the Platonic Form of productivity, but I am absolutely fantastic at starting new projects, even if I say so myself. I’m less brilliant at finishing them, admittedly, but let’s ignore that for now. I’m here to tell you that one of the best ways to start writing is to pretend that you’re not really writing. That involves finding relaxed, low-stress ways to set out your initial, sketchy thoughts about the project. That might be a social media post setting out some vague thoughts about this thing you’re interested in, asking others what they think, and then engaging with the replies. (It helps if you have nerdy friends for this.) Posting on social media isn’t stressful, come on. Or maybe you could try summarising your thoughts to the next non-academic friend or relative who asks you about your studies. They’re not there to assess you, after all, and being able to summarise what you’re doing in a way that can easily be understood by someone without a background in the discipline is actually a fantastically useful exercise, one that helpfully forces you to look at the bigger picture instead of getting bogged down in the little details. Or, a personal favourite of mine is to open a new Google doc - so much less scary than a new Word document - which is just for putting down a few very rough thoughts. I don’t even try to form a cogent argument - I just write down some initial thoughts that I might or might not come back to later on. Whenever I do this, one of two things ends up happening. One is that my interest sort of peters out or moves on to something else, and I forget about the Google doc until I rediscover it months later, at which point I’m usually a bit disturbed by the realisation that I have absolutely no recollection of writing any of it and that I’m not even sure what I was on about. That’s what happens most of the time, and that’s fine, because Google docs are free, who cares. But occasionally, as I continue to add to the rough thoughts, they start to take on a clearer shape, until eventually, without realising, I’m basically writing an essay. The beginning of the document is full of half-formed sentences, but after half a page or so I’m doing proper paragraphs and adding references. At that point, I usually copy and paste it into a Word document and it becomes a respectable draft and I’m working on it in Word, which I have associated ever since I first learned to use a computer with Proper Serious Work. But at no point have I had to deal with the scary new blank Word document and its expectant flashing cursor. Your lesson here is this: not all writing is scary. Essay writing is scary, but posting on social media, texting your friends, and shitposting your own half-formed thoughts into a disposable online document aren’t scary. You can use those non-scary forms of writing to kick start your serious writing project. Just remember to be in complete denial about what you’re doing: you’re just throwing around ideas, you’re not planning for them to amount to anything. Thankfully, it’s easy to be in that sort of denial, because much of the time those things really won’t amount to anything. There are plenty of dead ends in writing, regardless of how long you’ve been doing it, and being willing to walk down those dead ends helps free you up to express yourself in ways that eventually will make it easier to articulate the more promising thoughts.
So, you’ve tricked yourself into getting started on a writing project. What then? Do you just keep going until you’ve finished? It’s up to you. You can do that, if it works for you. Personally, I tend to switch back and forth between adding words to the essay or chapter or whatever it is I’m working on, and returning to the planning stage. I’ll be writing, and at some point I’ll forget why I started on this particular line of thought, so I’ll pull out a notebook or a scrap of paper or one of my kids’ discarded exercise books and I’ll make a bullet point list summarising what I’ve written so far. One bullet point to summarise each paragraph. That helps me see if I’m still on track. It also helps me zoom out from the project and think about where to go next with it. In case this makes me sound super efficient, I should mention that this process also involves spending time working out which pen to use for the handwritten bit, wondering whether I need to buy a new notebook (the answer is always no, but shut up), wondering if the stuff I’m planning to write is important and interesting and clever enough to write it in one of the many very nice notebooks that I already have and haven’t yet used, and so on. I think a bit of that sort of diversion is fine, by the way. The brain needs a bit of down time. Not all of our creative power comes from effortful, conscious thinking. I talked about this back in episodes #19: Not writing is an essential part of writing and #20: Don’t just write it - ferment it!
Anyway. Talking of plans, one of the most common pieces of advice I give to students who want to improve their essays is to work on their essay plans. Students - at least philosophy undergraduates - tend to write essays of around 1500, 2000 words. When you’re an undergraduate, you don’t realise just how few words that is. You need to make everything count. And creating an essay plan is a great way of ensuring that you make everything count. In an essay - in any piece of writing really, but the shorter it is, the more important this point is - every paragraph has to be doing important work. The important work is that it needs to play an indispensable role in establishing the conclusion. One way to ensure that happens is to write an essay plan. One bullet point to summarise each paragraph you’re going to write. (Feel free to use sub-bullet points and sub-sub-bullet points, and so on.) Write the last one first: your conclusion. That’s the claim that you want to establish. (YOu can tweak it as you go along, because you might realise that you don’t want to claim what you initially thought you wanted to claim - that’s fine and normal.) Now, how do you get to your conclusion? How do you establish it? Well, you need to make other claims along the way, and you need to show how your conclusion follows from those other claims. Write it all out: a list of bullet points. Make sure you need every bullet point. Ask, of each one you’ve written: If I were to delete this, would the conclusion still follow from everything else in the essay? If the answer is Yes, delete that bullet point. It’s a diversion. You don’t need it. When you’ve finished the plan, you have the bones of your argument. If you’re Wittgenstein, you’ve finished. Congratulations. For the rest of us, we need to turn the plan into an essay. Expand each bullet point into a paragraph. Except, as I’ve said, it doesn’t need to be this linear: you don’t need to start by completing the plan and only then move on to writing it up. You can go back and forth. Sometimes that’s necessary. Sometimes we need to do a bit of free writing - you know, just getting the thoughts down without censoring yourself or worrying too much about whether you’re making sense - in order to get a sense of what the project looks like, before switching to a plan to map out the argument. And sometimes, you can be following the plan, writing out the essay, and in the process of writing it all out you realise that you hadn’t thought through one of the points, or that there’s something you overlooked, or you’ve just thought of an objection that you need to address, so you need to go back and tweak the plan. That’s all fine. All completely normal. Sometimes frustrating, sometimes exciting, but basically business as usual.
Oh, yeah. Objections. Discussing those is important. Lots of students don’t realise that. Establishing a conclusion shouldn’t involve simply listing one reason after another in favour of the conclusion. At least, that’s not going to get you great marks, although it may well scrape you a pass. I usually say to my students: when you’re formulating your essay, imagine that you’re trying to convince someone who is on the fence about this issue. Don’t try to convince someone who is radically opposed to you - that sort of person is likely not to be receptive to argument. Think instead of someone who hasn’t made up their mind, and who is open to being persuaded either way. You need to give them reasons to adopt your conclusion, but you need to respond to their objections too. And when it comes to responding to objections, in the case of most essays, ‘narrow and deep’ is better than ‘broad and shallow’. By that, I mean that it’s better to focus on answering fewer objections in greater depth - responding to the objection, considering any further problems that are raised by your response, responding to those, and so on - than to bring in a whole range of objections that you respond to only very briefly. It’s much, much easier to write something sophisticated when you’re doing the former than the latter. Unfortunately, a lot of students are tempted by the latter, by the broad and shallow approach. They think they need to cover absolutely everything. They can’t leave out anything relevant, but they don’t have many words, so they just rush through it all like a game of intellectual whack a mole. You don’t need to do this. In fact, you shouldn’t. Nobody expects you to cover everything in an essay of a couple of thousand words, and if you try, you’re going to end up with a weak piece of work. Narrow your focus and increase your depth. If students are nervous about doing this, which they often are, I tell them that it’s fine to say what you’re going to do in the introduction - just in case the person who marks the essay thinks you missed all that other stuff out because they think you don’t know about it. You can say something like ‘This question raises issues x, y, and z, and I’m going to focus solely on issue x’. You see professional academics doing this all the time. You know, those footnotes that say things like, ‘Unfortunately this issue is beyond the scope of the present discussion’. That favourite get-out clause.
Ok, friends. That’s all I’ve got for you for now. Writing is hard for everyone. Remember that. You’re not alone. Good luck!
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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