Helen writes: cut to the chase

Writing Skills Advisor Helen Williams continues her occasional series with this post on editing your writing to keep within the word count.

In the Academic Skills Centre the bulk of our work involves supporting taught students, and with the academic year drawing to a close the most pressing task for students currently is finishing dissertations. Many of my conversations with students inevitably circle back to the topic of editing and an issue that crops up repeatedly is how to meet the word count. Despite doctoral theses usually having a word count many times higher than the average Masters dissertation, keeping within the word count – either for a chapter, or the entire thesis – is still a challenge. No matter how many words are permitted, or how huge that number initially feels, somehow everyone (including me!) always ends up writing too much.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

Whilst it’s important to have some practical ways of tackling this (more on that later) I think first it’s helpful to try to reframe how we think about writing, and specifically editing or cutting content. It always feels painful to have to cut words, particularly if whole paragraphs or sections need to be axed. This is most likely content that you spent a considerable amount of time on, and sometimes the temptation is to leave words in simply because of the effort involved in churning them out. The process of ‘writing up’ is also positioned as an end-point, where we write with certainty about what we have done or found. However, it might be more helpful to think of writing, cutting, re-writing and editing as an extension of our thinking or learning about a topic. We constantly reformulate and refine ideas in our mind as we move through the research process, so why not try to view your writing as part of this? Accepting that your writing might keep changing and developing, even into the very final stages prior to submission – and trying to view this as a positive thing – can feel quite liberating. Plus, it will almost always leave you with a superior final product. Whilst re-writing a section over and over might not feel productive, in the long-run it most certainly is. Leaving sub-standard text in because it took you ages to write is not.   

If trying to alter your whole mindset around the writing process feels a bit much right now, here are some more manageable steps to cutting words whilst improving content:

1. Remember your reader(s)
   This should be a straightforward one – your most important readers are the people who will be examining your thesis, as well as your supervisors. Bear them in mind when you are considering what to cut or include. What will they already know, or be familiar with? Every subject has content that is considered ‘common knowledge’, which you shouldn’t need to use up masses of words to explain. Have you included lengthy explanations that you could reduce, for example?
2. What is adding value?
   Think about the balance between descriptive content and that which is more critical. Whilst you always need a bit of description to provide context and background, it’s important that this doesn’t crowd out the space for the more valuable analytical or critical discussion. Read through your chapters with this in mind and try to limit descriptive waffle where possible.  
3. Be brutal
   It seems intuitive to chop words and sentences here and there whilst editing for word count, but this can leave you with lots of different snippets of writing that feel disjointed. Sometimes it’s much easier to identify a paragraph that doesn’t quite work and delete the whole thing. You might be surprised how little difference this can make – especially if it wasn’t great content to begin with. If this cut-throat approach feels a bit too bold, just save all your offcuts in a separate document.

For more word-cutting tips, see the excellent ‘5 Way to Kill your Darlings’ blogpost by the Thesis Whisperer.

Helen writes: #AcWriMo productivity vs procrastination

Writing Skills Advisor Helen Williams continues her occasional series during #AcWriMo with her thoughts on ways to deal with a tendency to procrastinate.

I recently read this column in The Guardian on procrastination – most likely when I should have been doing something else – and started thinking about the relationship between productivity and procrastination. When I speak to students about procrastination, they often seem to think they need to change a lifetime of habits, how they approach their work, and even the type of person that they are. Of course, this in itself becomes a mammoth (and impossible) task. Much more effective, as the article says, is to start changing the smallest possible habits that you can. If you’ve been taking part in Academic Writing Month (#AcWriMo), you may already have started to form a few new habits that can help with productivity, but if not, here are a few suggestions.

Baby steps: start by making small changes to your habits

Helen writes: find the gap

Continuing her occasional series, Writing Skills Advisor Helen Williams reflects on what it means to find a gap when writing your literature review.

The fact that doctoral research must be original and fill some kind of ‘gap’ in the literature is trotted out all the time, particularly to PGRs in their first year or so of study who may still be grappling with all the existing research on their topic. But how do you search for an absence? How do you identify something that isn’t there?

It can feel like a somewhat impossible task, especially if there are reams of articles, chapters and books that have been written on your topic. One answer could be changing the parameters of your research slightly; focusing on a specific and under-researched angle might tick that ‘originality’ box in a field that is saturated with research. However, if this isn’t practical, or you’re already fairly set on what research you want to carry out, it might be that you need to try to record your reading in a way that makes that gap more obvious.

Helen writes: spring-clean your thesis

In the next of our occasional series, Writing Skills Advisor Helen Williams talks about refreshing existing writing as a rewarding and important step on the road to your thesis.

In these uncertain times it’s nice to have a few constants and, whilst working at my desk overlooking my garden, I’ve been reminded that the changing of the seasons is one of these.

Spring in Helen’s garden

As always, spring has sprung, and this put me in mind of other spring-related traditions that roll around each year. One of these that feels quite apt right now is spring cleaning; what better time than now to do all those tasks that get pushed to one side and ignored in favour of more ‘urgent’ ones?

You may be using this time to charge ahead with writing up and churning out new chapters, which is great, but if you’ve ground to a bit of a halt or want some variety, the following are some good ‘housekeeping’ activities that will pay dividends later on when your schedule may be getting back to normal (most of these assume that you have drafted some work already; if you need to start writing but are struggling, check out my previous post on this).

Helen writes: reading to write

If you saw last month’s posts about perseverance and The Conversation, you’ll have picked up on the fact that November was #AcWriMo (Academic Writing Month) – an annual, month-long, communal attempt by academics at all career stages to focus on their writing. In thinking about what can be most helpful in both facilitating and improving writing however, I keep coming back to how important reading is as part of this process.

Helen writes: explicit content!

I am often surprised by the difference between what people think they have written compared to what is actually on the page. I was reminded of this recently when helping a friend with a chapter of her postgraduate work; she was confident that she made frequent links back from her literature review to her own research. Trusting her opinion I had a look, but soon found myself writing comments like “How does this inform your approach?”, “I’m not sure how this relates to your topic” and “Can you link back to your own research here?”

Either you are explicit in how you set out your ideas or discussion, or you are expecting your reader to pick up the implicit connections. Something about doctoral-level writing in particular seems to breed a fear of being explicit. Certainly on my part I always felt that the more complicated I made my writing and argument, the more ‘intelligent’ it would appear. Setting everything out clearly for a supervisor or examiner felt overly simplistic or even patronising – as if they couldn’t work out the links for themselves.

The reality is that no-one should have to ‘work’ to understand your writing; there is a difference between complex ideas (which a doctoral thesis should engage with) and complex writing.

Helen writes: getting started

In 2018 I started at the University of Birmingham as a Writing Skills Advisor, and when asked to contribute to this blog I considered the hardest part of writing my own thesis.

Helen Williams, Writing Skills Advisor, Library Services

Fittingly, ‘getting started’ was often the toughest task for me, which also felt apt for a first blog post. Preparation is essential in drafting effective writing, and there is a lot that you can do encourage this process before putting pen to paper. So, to start, here are four tips for getting started.