Ph.D.s Are Still Writing Poorly @ some writing tips you may not have gotten from your advisers
Here
are some writing tips you may not have gotten from your advisers:
- As you write, imagine an actual reader. Not your thesis adviser or one of your grad-school pals. Think of someone smart in ways you value — someone who is not an academic, or at least not in your field. It might be your mother, or your favorite undergraduate. The question such readers ask themselves as they scan your writing: Why should I care about this? In the first pages of your work, explain how your research matters, and do so in language that these intelligent, nonacademic readers will understand.
- Write the way you teach. Imagine leading a college seminar on your topic. What background do people need? How can you explain clearly where your work enters the conversation? (Note: This is not the same as providing an exhaustive literature review to prove you’ve done your homework.)
- Whose prose do you love? Think about scholarly work you find pleasurable to read. What makes it enjoyable? Which academic authors do you most want to have dinner with because their personalities come alive on the page? Reread their work to figure out how they managed that. Steal their moves.
- Write so someone who knows you will recognize your voice. You want your readers to say, "This sounds like you." Not like a neophyte slinger of polysyllabic Latinate diction, but the best you — the you who loved to read and write, the you who gets good teaching evaluations. A strong voice makes readers feel that a human is speaking directly to them. On the page, be someone the reader wants to have dinner with.
- Remember what initially interested you in your topic. Recover the excitement of unearthing new material or reaching a startling conclusion from your data. What’s the part you talk about when you describe your work to friends? Know where your juicy bits are.
- Tell a story. Narrative desire is hot in all of us. Go deep into your notes to find an anecdote that contains the seeds of your entire argument and start there. That will probably be the easiest and most fun section to write.
- Search for — and destroy — pretentious language. You know which words you use to make yourself sound smart. Remember that you are smart; don’t slum in the ghetto of cant to try to prove it. Trust that your ideas are good enough not to have to fancy them up with jargon. (If you’re worried about lack of complexity or depth, think harder.) Use technical terms when necessary, but only after you’ve introduced the concepts they represent.
- Clarity is a good thing. When you find yourself perpetrating one of those long sentences loaded with 25-cent words, type the phrase, "by that I mean," and see what you write next. Keep that explanation, but go back and delete "by that I mean" — and also, maybe, the long preceding sentence.
- Cut as much as you can. Make sure your sentences are not too long, too short, or too similar. Vacuum out junk phrases. Omit needless words by using simple editing tricks.
- Start your revisions with a new blank document. Re-vision: See again. After you’ve spent years working on something, you know which pieces actually fit in your manuscript and which ones you shoehorned in to please someone else or to cover your butt. Cut the parts that bored you to write. Start over, with your most exciting material. (Yes, I know how hard that is, and it never gets easier. And yet this technique always pays off.)
- Use technology. If you’re comfortable with PowerPoint, try using it to make a new outline. Move chapters and concepts around until they flow logically and you have an energetic structure that carries the reader forward.
- Realize that four chapters are not enough for a book. They might be enough for one groundbreaking journal article. You won’t fool editors by sending in something that has the heft of a book manuscript without the substance. It must also read like a book.
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @ Knowledge
Repository
Khaitan & Co
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