How to write academic things really fast

My wonderful undergraduate supervisor once told me that the more time that you set aside for doing work, the more time you will spend finding things to fill that time that are not Actual Work. I completely agree with this, and so on most days i will do academic work for a maximum of four hours. (This is a soft limit, as sometimes it’s nice to spend a little bit more time to ensure that a particular task is totally finished, rather than leaving something left over for the next day). For me, the pomodoro method works well: i set a timer for twenty five minutes (using my handy M-x noa/twenty-five-minutes RET function, and then i work for twenty five minutes. When my computer dings, i stop working, even if i am in the middle of a sentence, shut my computer with a satisfying thunk, put my hands behind my head, and sigh. Then i get up and walk around, usually for anywhere between five and fifteen minutes. And so the process continues. Every day (or at least a few days), i do this six, seven, or eight times, depending on how i’m feeling by the end.

What if i want to do more work when eight work sessions have been finished? I simply don’t! I sometimes write some notes to self in my notebook or in the file so that i know where my mind was at when i finished for the day, but in general i don’t feel like doing more work, and if i do then having something to get right into the next time is pretty helpful.

Even so, writing so many words in such a short amount of time is hard if you don’t know what you actually need to write. Which leads me to my second rule for writing:

Hmm. I suppose in many ways this is a rest of the fucking owl situation, but i cannot tell a lie: writing anything takes a lot of effort. Academic writing is nicer than a lot of other kinds of writing because of the simple fact that it’s really feasible to write large swathes of anything you need to write before you actually need to write it, because most of academic writing is paraphrasing what other people have already written and providing your opinions and improvements. To paraphrase that sentence, academic writing is taking notes.

There’s a lot that has already been written about taking notes, so i won’t go into it here. If you want some tangible advice, i would say download obsidian, read a system for writing by Bob Doto (which is much better and shorter than the other zettelkasten books on the market), and take a few expanded bullet point notes on every paper you read. The main thing is to minimise the time spent preparing to be productive and start… actually being productive.

When i started writing this dissertation proposal, i had a topic i wanted to aim before, and a long list of notes about what people had said about things related to that topic. So all i had to do for my actual writing was to go down that list of notes, put a list of bullet points of the story that i wanted to tell, and connect them together. My preference is, when compiling this document, to rewrite all the notes. I encourage this because just copy and pasting across can result in messy prose and confused points. Notes are notes, not an article. But of course, your mileage may vary.

When i write this, i remember that it is a first draft. I mostly write without going back and changing things, because i want to keep the forward momentum. After writing everything i want to get down, i’ll check for spelling errors and grammar issues, but i won’t make any substantial changes, because this is only the first draft, and there is someone else around who is going to be able to spot any much larger errors that i may have missed. I don’t want to waste time polishing the first draft if i’m going to have to make some bigger structural changes anyway. Which leads me to my third rule:

When writing in an academic setting, the chances are very high that you will have a supervisor or otherwise a wise old sage who knows much more about everything than you do. So, we should make sure that they are working hard for that unreasonably high professor’s salary and ask them to read over our drafts! If they are your supervisor, this is literally their job. During my undergraduate studies, i would take essay outlines (as we were forbidden from showing full drafts to class professors, i think for reasons of identification, because the essays were marked blind. It’s a very weak defence against bias but what can you do) to office hours and go over them. It surprised me that the office hours almost always only had two or three students turn up. Getting someone better than you to guide your work is very beneficial.

For this dissertation proposal, i sent my first draft to my supervisor, and he sent me back a million words telling me all the things i’d done wrong. So i printed a copy of my draft and added all his commentary to it. I needed to make some big changes in the geography of the piece, as well as some smaller changes in the ways that i had relayed information. So i spent the next day making these big changes, and the day after that making the smaller changes. When i sent him the third draft on friday, he had a few more comments about things i could change. So on monday, i made some more changes, and called it a day.

I think that there are two key things to note here: first of all, it’s important to start writing and to send off a draft early enough that you can make any alterations. I know some people don’t want other people to see their drafts because they can be messy or embarrassing or unfinished. I am here to tell you that this is indeed the very vocation of a draft. Give its life some purpose, and show other people what you’re working on; then you can make a start on making it better before its quality actually matters. As God said during the first week of earth’s existence, perfection is the enemy of good.

The second thing is to know when to call it a day. Nothing you write will ever be perfect. Nothing anyone has ever written has ever been perfect (with perhaps the singular exception of The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909–1939 by William Carlos Williams). Even so, if you are writing, asking someone for their opinions, and then taking some of their suggestions on board, your writing will be mediocre at worst and, if the subject is something you care about, certainly much better than that. So write, edit, repeat a handful of times, and then stop. Move onto writing something else!

That concludes my guide to writing academic things really fast. It’s a simple system borne of the vague adherence to a couple of simple habits. The key is consistency, not quantity, and i’m not even that great at consistency! I would say with a consistency of over fifty percent, the results will be very satisfactory (or at least they are for me).