Writing is a skill. For many people in the world, it’s a vital skill that’s essential to our careers. In academia we live by the adage “Publish or perish,” but writing plays a role in more than just manuscripts. It’s in our notebooks, emails to colleagues, grant applications, abstracts,…the list goes on. If you can write well and write fast, then you can save yourself immeasurable amounts of time and headaches. Many of us complain about the pangs of writing, and casually declare “writing sucks, I hate writing, I’m just bad at it.” There’s a misconception that we’re either GOOD or BAD at writing, and that this is a fixed quality. But that’s not true. Yes, there are incredible wordsmiths who have a preternatural ability to craft sentences, but this doesn’t preclude the rest of us from developing our writing skills. The point is you don’t have to be a great writer to be good at writing. So, what does it take to become good at writing? There are infinitely many answers to this question, but for the sake of this short blog I want to focus on the three that have been most helpful to me.  

The first step in honing the writing skill is to accept that writing is a process. It’s something that must be DONE. The only way to write is to sit down and write. It sounds simple but it’s one of the hardest steps. It requires: 1) blocking out time to write, 2) keeping your time commitment, 3) finding a space where you can write without constant interruption or distractions, 4) actually put words into a document. Each of these steps requires a certain amount of mental energy that is difficult to muster. It does take discipline and will power, similar to how athletes approach their training regimens. With that in mind we can think about the tricks that elite athletes use and bring that to our writing practice. This includes process analysis like asking ourselves:

1. What’s the best time of day for me to write? When am I at my best for writing?
2. Are there environmental cues that can help me through this process, such as music, lighting, the way my desk is arranged?
3. Are there resources I can study that will help me improve my skills?

With regards to that last point, I have an entire shelf of books all dedicated to writing and learning how to become a better writer. I keep these resources in physical form as a constant reminder of the tools that are immediately available to me.

Once you’ve made the time to practice writing, and maybe you’ve invested some time into thinking about what you want to write, it’s time to write! But the page is blank? Where does one start? That brings me to step two: Organize your thoughts. Chances are that once complete, you will send your writing off into the world with the hopes that at least one person will read those words with interest. For that to happen, what you write must have a clear and logical flow. Writing is the process of communicating ideas. In scientific and academic writing, it is absolutely essential that the reader can easily interpret the text without getting grumpy. There are lots of ways to practice organizing your thoughts. For me, the most helpful has been focusing on the common five-paragraph essay outline: One paragraph is dedicated to the Intro, three paragraphs to the Body, and one paragraph for the Conclusion. Practice putting your formalized ideas into an outline, in the process asking yourself, “What is the main idea I need to communicate with this paragraph?”

The surprising benefit of starting with an outline that has a clear structure and logical flow with a thesis statement is the freedom that it gives you to think. For the purposes of this five-paragraph essay, that’s the final step in becoming good at writing: Learn to think freely. Academics are really good at judging every little word that comes out of someone’s mouth. We scrutinize every detail. It’s what we’re trained to do, but it is a death sentence for the writing practice. We have an idea, we go to type it, but then we judge the idea before it even manifests on the screen. We stop. The screen stays blank. Or maybe we start typing the sentence, can’t find the perfect word, so we stop. Delete. Delete. Delete. Stop. Rethink the sentence. Get bored and frustrated. Give up. That’s what the “writing” process looks like for most of us. The only way to break free from this time loop is to learn how to think freely, to let the words flow the way the Beatniks approached stream of consciousness writing. The best writing trick I learned from my PhD co-mentor (Prof. Miriam Goodman, Stanford University) was to use curly braces and directives to overcome mental blocks. For example, if I have an idea for the type of sentence that needs to be inserted but not sure how to phrase it, just type: {INSERT SENTENCE ABOUT HOW X IMPACTS Y}. This trick saved me so much heartache through the thesis writing process. It allows you to keep your momentum and focus on getting the ideas out.

Obviously, there is so much more to learn and say about how to develop writing skills, but all of that can come in time. For most academics, we just need a little extra motivation to take action. Writing this blog entry was my own practice for the week. I blocked out the time, struggled to keep the commitment (delaying my Saturday morning bike ride), set a timer, made a brief outline, and challenged myself to keep up the momentum rather than criticizing every detail. It goes back to the phrase that I picked up in grad school and have adopted as a personal motto (partly inspired by the pro mountain biker Kate Courtney): “Progress not perfection.” I will never be perfect. What I do in this world will never be perfect. Perfection does not exist in nature. What I can do, what I can achieve, is continual progress. Progression towards proficiency is a tractable goal.