The best kind of Ph.D. is a finished one ...

December 20, 2006 12:04 AM

I have one year left on my Ph.D. and still have six chapters to write. Does anyone have any advice on writing and time management strategies to help me make sure that I don't run out of time?

In the past, I've taken a seat of the pants 'see what happens' approach to thesis chapters. While I've written some OK stuff, I've also had a major tendency to go off on tangents or endlessly delay making a point. My writing often seems to acquire its own logic, and nose off in unexpected directions. As a result, a good deal of what I've produced so far is either tangential to my topic, or marred by more or less serious bouts of prevarication.

I realize now that I'll have to take a much more structured approach to writing than I have in the past—probably one involving outlines. But I have only the vaguest idea of what an outline is or how I would use one. What kinds of strategies can I employ to ensure that my writing is (a) consistently on-topic, and (b) actually makes the points I want to make?

For extra points, does anyone have any recommendations for useful books on doctoral writing that don't automatically assume I'm a scientist? (Because I'm in English, my thesis doesn't in any way follow the 'review of lit., methodology, results, discussion' formula.)

Thanks!

posted by Sonny Jim to education (30 comments total)

While not specific to your situation, and also potentially over-hyped, the strategies outlined in David Allen's Getting Things Done have revolutionalized my life, and my ability to plan large projects.

Having small, specific, action-driven goals with specific deliverable dates work much better in my experience that larger, more general goals like "write a chapter by february".

Breaking down the task at hand (write a chapter) in to its components (finish draft, proofread/annotate, compile rewrite, etc.) and associating a time with each allows you to plan the time you'll need. It also allows you to make sure that each step is easily achievable and moves you forward toward the larger goal.
posted by jcummings1974 at 12:13 AM on December 20, 2006

The difficulty with outlines is that you can't organize information you don't have yet. And by the time you have it all, you shouldn't really need the outline. As a technical writer, I have written several very large documents (500+ pages) and don't usually outline beyond breaking the material into chapters, and those almost always change by the time I'm done anyway.

You're using a computer, so the solution is to take advantage of the flexibility you have to move material around at will. Just get everything you know into the word processor. When you find yourself off on a tangent, leave it, but in the next paragraph get back to what you meant to be talking about. (Alternatively, put the tangents in a separate document. Maybe you can find a way to fit them in later.) After you have dumped your brain, go back over what you wrote and put it in an order that makes more sense. If it seems to big a job to tackle all at once, do multiple passes, each pass dedicated to one task (e.g. improve the order, attack the tangents, etc.). If you're too close to the material to see it, hand a hardcopy to someone else and ask them to highlight any sentences that seem to get off the topic or that don't seem to follow from what came before.

It is at this point that you can make your outline if you need one. This needn't be at all formal or very detailed. You will find holes in your arguments -- note where more information is needed and set aside time to research it. You will find topics that are out of logical order -- note which order they should go in. Find the tangents are and either flesh them out and put them in an appendix (or sidebar) if you think they are interesting and germane, or else remove them entirely.

Save any deleted tangents, though; they might make good fodder for an article or something later. (Or if you're like Douglas Hofstadter, maybe someone will want to print a compilation of your digressions.)
posted by kindall at 12:21 AM on December 20, 2006

Thanks, jcummings. GTD is definitely something I was thinking of looking into.

kindall, that's an awesome comment. I already create a dumpfile for each chapter and cut-and-paste extraneous material into it on review. I guess what I'm trying to get at is eliminating the reasons why I head off on large-scale tangents in the first place. It's exhausting, and more than a little soul destroying, having to discard large amounts of work from pretty much every chapter.
posted by Sonny Jim at 12:48 AM on December 20, 2006

Well, what I'd do if I had that kind of problem is to create an MP3 file that has about 10 minutes of silence and then has your voice saying "are you on a tangent?" or something of that sort. (Actually, being a Mac guy I'd use an AppleScript with an idle handler and the "say" command.) When you hear the question and are in fact off on a tangent, just type *** or something so you can easily find it later, start a new paragraph, and get back on topic. If you get off-topic because you legitimately have forgotten the specific topic were writing about, put it on a sticky note, stick it to the bezel of your monitor, and look at it frequently (e.g. when prompted by the voice). Or use a computer sticky note. If you have a roommate or someone else who's often around while you're writing, encourage them to check up on you too.
posted by kindall at 1:01 AM on December 20, 2006 [1 favorite]

I've written before that outlining is the key to writing and finishing.

1. Write the titles of your last six chapters

2. Write the headlines of the beginning, middle and end of each chapter (eg

-- Introduction (what this chapter is about, eg "Tolstoy's adolsescence" or whatever)
-- Body (what are the three to five main points you are going to make?)
-- Conclusion (what does thes points chapter prove?)

3. Now go in and expand what you did in two. What are the key points of the intro? What are the key subpoints of each of your main five points?

4. Keep doing this, filling in the next level down of the outline. It will become immediately obvious what your research tasks are, and at some point as you fill in the blanks you will realize you are actually writing your thesis. Best of all you now have a roadmap which takes you to the end of the thesis and which you can use to track your progress.

I think of this as a pyramid structure. You start with the top stone ('the thesis'), then fill in the stones that support it ('Chapters one to six'), then the stones that support each of those stones ("Intro, body, conclusion"), then the stones that support each of those, until you make your way down to the actual sentences you are writing.

A good outlining program is an enormous help. On the Mac I use Novamind to brainstorm, then transfer to OmniOutliner to outline, then write the final version in Pages or Final Draft.
posted by unSane at 1:59 AM on December 20, 2006 [1 favorite]

By the way, if you delay making a point it is usually because you are not sure what it is. You are not sure what it is because you haven't done enough research. The solution to a writing problem is not to stare at the page or write something else, it's to get off your ass and do some research.
posted by unSane at 2:01 AM on December 20, 2006

An earlier thread that might help.
posted by b33j at 2:55 AM on December 20, 2006

I agree with UnSane about not making a point because you're not sure what it is. For me, the best way to work this out is to talk to someone else and try to explain to them what it is you're trying to say. Try to get yourself in a situation where you have to explain and you're forced to sort it out and realise exactly what you're after and thus whether you do need extra work - plus it can clarify your argument.
posted by biffa at 3:33 AM on December 20, 2006

I agree that the important thing is to get your structure there, and then make it more and more detailed, like unSane says. Then the job of writing is just filling in the blanks.

I found that detailed lists and breaking down the task really helped
when writing my thesis. Admittedly, I am a scientist, so the broad structure was already there. But the lists started out looking like this:

"Write top level outline for chapter 2
Flesh out outline for chapter 2 ..."

And once I had the fleshed out stuff, I'd add that to the list. I also had a section at the end of the list for "mechanical" jobs (sorting out figures, finding a particular reference, that sort of thing) and tried to pick them off during those brain-wrong moments we all get from time to time when writing up. Obviously, being a PhD student, you have well-honed procrastination skills (as did/do I) and the mechanical jobs are less entertaining than Metafilter. But the aim is to get some of them done and therefore avoid the trap of leaving them all to the end.

As an aside, the most productive week I spent on my thesis was when my parents booked a holiday cottage with a pool in the middle of nowhere. I took all the reading for a particular section with me, and let myself go for a swim after I'd read and annotated a paper (or two, if they were short). I spent the whole week sat outside in the sun, reading, writing and swimming. So I guess the moral of this story is: never underestimate the power of a week away from the internet.
posted by handee at 4:00 AM on December 20, 2006

Outlining is crucial, but following on what unSane pointed out, it depends on knowing where you are going.

What helped me when my outlines became bloated and could not be taken past any 'rough' stage was to skip ahead and, for instance, write a draft of the conclusion of the chapter I was having trouble with starting. Or to try to draft my last chapter while knowing I still needed two other ones in between to get there.

This helped immensely when going back to fill in the blanks. It was immediately clear whether something was helping or hindering me along my route to the conclusion. And it became much easier to sideline and stash away all the 'oh so interesting' ideas appearing along the way, since my previous stab at a conclusion had already made finishing seem that much closer.

If you're saying, 'Ok, so how do i jump ahead and start writing a conclusion?' I would suggest you go back and look at whatever research proposals/abstracts/project summaries that I'm supposing you had to churn out at the beginning of your dissertation. these plus notes should hopefully remind you of where you wanted to end up, or else of where you now think you should end up.

You might also think about keeping a 'where's it all going' text file for dumping grand or wide-perspective ideas about the thesis and its conclusions.

Lastly, a sign of a focused dissertation-writer (who can finish their thesis in, say, the coming year) is someone who can finish "My thesis is about ..." in one, maximum two sentences in *Layman's terms*. (Field-specific jargon doesn't count). If you're not yet good at this, pracice, practice, practice

Failing these measure, what kindall said. You need a superego constantly pelting you with the query "DO I NEED THIS?" Paint it on your computer screen, tatoo it on your significant other's bum, whatever. Never stop answering this question.
posted by rudster at 4:19 AM on December 20, 2006

Exactly.

"Stick to the point, and whenever you can, cut."

(c) G K Chesterton.
posted by unSane at 5:22 AM on December 20, 2006

One technique I find helpful. Forget about writing anything good. Just promise yourself that by X day, you will have the most simple, obvious, reductive version of your chapter completed. It's not required to be interesting, original, insightful, or well-written. It's only required to contain the core elements that it must contain when it's done, and to be coherent enough that someone besides you would be able to understand it (but, of course, no one besides you will ever see it). A screenwriting teacher of mine called this 'writing the Disney version.'

Once the Disney version is done, you can relax a little bit. From here on, it's all rewriting. Print it out, make notes in the margins ("too banal," "find more evidence," etc.) and then add to what you've done.

Of course, if you find that you can't write the Disney version, that's a sign that you need to figure out what you're trying to say. But at least you're only struggling to do that, and not anything else, like writing prosaic sentences or impressing your thesis adviser.

Another axiom that I find helpful, this one from computer programming. Always identify the most complicated part of the problem, and solve that part first. It's a bit counter-intuitive, but you feel so much better when it's done, and you won't waste time solving tangential problems which will turn out not to matter once you solve the big problem.
posted by bingo at 6:19 AM on December 20, 2006

UnSane and Rudster have good advice. I'll add one point that I learned from Wayne Booth, Greg Colomb, and Joe Williams's fine book The Craft of Research: outlines should consist of sentences (or fragments with subject and predicate), not topics alone. Example: don't have a heading that reads "effects of printing press," have one that reads "printing press turned books into commodities." Think of each outline heading or subheading as the topic sentence of a paragraph. That way, when you look over your outline, you can see whether each heading really belongs there. If you have a sense that something belongs but you don't know how, make that your outline entry: "I think that X should fit in here but I don't know how."

The authors also note that you can work backwards from your text to the outline: take each paragraph you've written, reduce it to its topic sentence (or a short version thereof), and see whether the points develop a coherent argument. If not, cut or rearrange what doesn't belong. I used this technique when revising my dissertation for book publication, and I found it immensely helpful in turning an 80-page omnibus chapter into a much more lean and coherent chapter.

Good luck!
posted by brianogilvie at 6:26 AM on December 20, 2006 [1 favorite]

Last six months of an English Ph.D here. Sounds so ridiculous, but seriously, get your hands on a copy of Write Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day. I found it really helpful.
posted by meerkatty at 6:31 AM on December 20, 2006 [1 favorite]

Oh, and you probably already know about Phinished, but just in case you don't...it's great.
posted by meerkatty at 6:33 AM on December 20, 2006

I hope this doesn't sound flip, but make sure you get lots of exercise. I found that putting exercise slots in my schedule that I wouldn't miss under any circumstances were helpful in limiting the amount of time that I would digress. Without those breaks, I might have been sitting there all day writing All Work and No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy.
posted by lukemeister at 6:53 AM on December 20, 2006

Basically agreeing with UnSane.

But also, don't discount advice or books written for scientific dissertations. Yours (probably) isn't as different as you think. You still have a point to make -- if you don't know what this point is by now, you are well and truly fucked -- and you're going to show that this point is correct with data. Except in your case, your data are the texts you're looking at. You still have methods of analysis that you're employing. You still have to address people who've written on or near your topic before. Unless your dissertation is really exceptionally mushy, there's no reason that you can't use the organizational tricks invented for or by writers of scientific dissertations.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:55 AM on December 20, 2006

I agree with others here that if you're continually drifting into tangents, it may be because you're not sure what you want to say. I may be wrong about this. Some people know exactly what they want to say, but they are easily distracted. But you should try to figure out your point(s). If I asked you what your dissertation was about, could you explain it to me clearly -- without using a lot of sort-ofs?

Outline helped me write my books and articles, but it's never worked for me to make the outline a separate document. I'm not sure why, but it works better if I create an outline and then write the book in the same document as the outline.

In other words, if part of my outline says...

IV. Chekhov's Plays
a. The Seagull
b. Uncle Vanya
c. Three Sisters
d. The Cherry Orchard

... that will morph into...

IV. Chekhov's Plays
a. The Seagull
b. Uncle Vanya

Chekhov wrote two version of "Uncle Vanya." He called the earlier draft "The Wood Demon" and...

c. Three Sisters
d. The Cherry Orchard

This way, the structure is always there, growling at me. It's like building a house on a solid foundation. When I'm writing something long -- a book instead of an article -- I usually keep each chapter in a separate document. But all the documents have the complete outline in them.

In the middle or writing, a point often occurs to me, and I realize that it belongs in an earlier or later section. So I just scroll up or down and place the point in the appropriate part of the outline. Later, I can paste it into another document if necessary. But this allows me to have my cake and eat it too. I can get tangential if I want, but my tangent has an orderly place to go.

It IS a problem to suppress a tangent. If you're like me, you HAVE to write them or they keep nagging at you. So either write them and paste them in a more appropriate section or make them an footnote/endnote.

You complain about having to cut so much, but that's writing! 70% of writing is editing. There are some writers -- a rare few -- who can spew near perfect prose into a first draft. Most of us can't. For every then words I write, I probably wind up keeping one. You shouldn't feel crushed or depressed by this. This is how you write! "Kill all your darlings." It can actually be fun to do this. Imagine you're trying to chisel down an ugly rock into a perfect gem. You get points for each bit you eliminate, because it gets you closer and closer to the core -- the center of the tootsie pop.

Outlining should help you immensely, but don't expect to like it. When I do it, it forces me to confront the fact that my thoughts are much more cluttered than I'd like to admit. I learn that I don't have enough information for chapter two; I have no idea how to order the items in chapter six; and I have a bunch of ideas that clearly don't belong on the outline at all. These ugly truths are what keep me -- and others, I bet -- from wanting to outline in the first place.

But they must be confronted and dealt with. Maybe I need to research more info for chapter two -- or maybe chapter two needs to be cut altogether. Maybe I need to break chapter six down even further. Maybe it should be two chapters. And those stray ideas that have nothing to do with my book... Those are some of the darlings I have to kill.

If I can't bare to kill them, I can write them in a separate file and store them somewhere. Maybe I can use them someday for another project.

Finally, it often helps to talk an outline through with someone else. Can you do with with a faculty adviser or colleague? Another person may be able to see disorder and weaknesses (and strengths) that you're missing.
posted by grumblebee at 7:13 AM on December 20, 2006

Lots of good advice here - wish I had had it when I was doing my diss, but I probably wouldn't have taken any of it, because that's the way it goes when you're working on a Ph.D. Here's my 2c: writing a diss is the hardest thing you'll do in academia. Much worse than writing subsequent books. Try to think about it like a job, rather than doing an assignment for school. Get up every day, get started at the same time and end at the same time, don't imagine that you'll work late into the night or anything like that. The sooner you get used to regular work habits in writing, the more productive you'll be later on, when no one is breathing down your neck to get things done.
And take all the other advise here about organizing, etc.
Good luck, OP. Your post sent evil shivers down the backs of everyone who's been through it.
posted by annabkr at 7:13 AM on December 20, 2006

A question I asked which overlaps with this.
posted by paduasoy at 7:37 AM on December 20, 2006

Concerta. No kidding, sustained release Ritalin focuses the mind like nothing else.
posted by craniac at 7:59 AM on December 20, 2006

Look, don't take writing advice on outlining from programmers. As someone who has been where you are, I can tell you that your head doesn't work the way theirs does. Check out Peter Elbow's "Writing with Power." Despite the macho title, it is chock full of great, pragmatic advice based on how people actually write. Go ahead and write digressive chapters and edit them down later. Just be sure to not conflate the "discovery" part of your writing with the "revision" stage, or you'll get blocked. Peter Elbow.
posted by craniac at 8:05 AM on December 20, 2006

Is it possible that your tangents and digressions are not as tangential and digressive as you think they are? I know that my own writing, while it's in process, often gets tangled up in parenthetical digressions – but half the time in revising I just remove the parentheses, because the ideas were actually more closely connected than I realized at the time. (Of course, the other half the time the material has to be removed or turned into a footnote because it really is a digression.) It's pretty common to be working away on a topic unconsciously as you go, while thinking you're going off on a tangent.

At a minimum, I would urge you not simply to give up on the material you've already written. It should be, at the very least, a rich ground to mine for sentences and paragraphs that will make your structured writing go faster – but I think it will turn out to be more than this. Perhaps the material needs some reordering, and more attention to the transitions in the argument, and a new introduction to make clear how it fits (and has always fit) into the dissertation, but all of this is still easier than writing a new chapter starting from a blank screen. Don't just throw material out because it seems digressive without considering how closely it might actually be connected to your topic.

I guess what I'm saying is that "My writing often seems to acquire its own logic, and nose off in unexpected directions" is simply a description of the writing process, not a problem with it. It's unavoidable that writing will go in unexpected directions, so why not simply embrace it? Creating coherence is what revision is for.
posted by RogerB at 9:18 AM on December 20, 2006

ClearWriter has been of help in previous report writing and design (especially when report started leaking all over the place and going off on tangents). They used to have a copy of the "method" on the website but have since taken it down. I've saved a PDF so do let me know if you'd like me to send it to you.
posted by barrakuda at 10:20 AM on December 20, 2006

I definitely like the advice on paduasoy's question that suggests you don't worry about making it perfect, just make sure it'll pass muster. Looking at a few dissertations from people who have already passed may give you a shot of confidence: you only have to write that well, and it's probably not as well as you think. Sure you want to make it as good as you can to make sure you pass (margin of safety and all that), but you don't get more of a degree than Joe Schmoe if you write a better dissertation than him.
posted by kindall at 11:31 AM on December 20, 2006

Thanks, everyone! I pretty much wanted to mark every answer here as 'best'.

A large part of my problem is that I have strong perfectionist tendencies, and, unless I short-circuit my impulses, I will spend six months obsessively researching incidental points. If I continue doing this, I'm not going to finish.

Anyway, I have a fairly clear idea of the likely structure and progression of argument for at least three of my remaining chapters, so I'll try drafting outlines for them and writing up from there.
posted by Sonny Jim at 12:35 PM on December 20, 2006

One more thing that I found useful -

It's possible to finish things by decree.

Sometimes, you just have to say "That's done.", even when you know you could do it better. It's an arse, but it's pretty much the only way to finish a PhD.
posted by handee at 2:16 PM on December 20, 2006

You might be interested in The Clockwork Muse, which offers both general academic writing advice and plenty of anecdotes from the writer's own quirky work habits. He specifically focuses on breaking down a big project into tasks on a schedule to meet a specific deadline. The author is a social scientist, but I assign this book to new grads in my humanities department (I use it as a companion to The Craft of Research mentioned above).
posted by Mngo at 3:00 PM on December 20, 2006

You've definitely re-traumatized some of us who have tackled the beast. Great responses on this.

My contribution:

1. Don't try to use your dissertation to change the world. Do that later. Just use it to get your Ph.D.

2. I'm in a different field so this may not apply to you, but I tackled much of mine (esp the literature analysis) by writing a whole bunch of mini term papers that I then linked together later. It made it much more manageable.

Good luck!
posted by forensicphd at 5:24 PM on December 20, 2006

Amen and amen. I both love and hate reading threads like this.

Let me recommend Robert Boice's Professors as Writers for a writing technique that has helped me increase output, stay focused, and improve overall organization. In a nutshell, he recommends a four step process: freewrite, mindmap, outline, rewrite. Yes, he's mostly discussing unblocking, but it's useful in much more general ways.

If nothing else, the "hit my goal or my trusted friend will send my $25 check to your Despised Organization" technique really works for me.
posted by terceiro at 7:53 AM on December 21, 2006