The Disadvantages of Irregular Writing Schedules

How many of you were either explicitly taught or learned by imitation (of your adviser or some other mentor) that you should begin writing only after you have all your data in hand?

That was the procedure I was taught.  I was further advised in my current job (government) that the accepted procedure for PIs was to conduct research projects in five year cycles, with the first three to four years devoted to design and conduct of the research followed by a year (or two!) of analysis and writing.  This particular schedule was designed by bureaucrats who don't write or publish themselves.  They were quite adamant that this was the way to do research and publish it.  I ignored this advice.

I give the above example to illustrate an extreme case of putting off writing for years.  This extreme schedule would sound like professional suicide to most scientists.  If you think about it, though, this pattern is is not unlike the schedule students follow in their dissertation work: several years of data gathering and analysis, followed by an intense period of writing--often compressed into a few months at the end of their program.  Writing something every three or four years clearly affects overall productivity.  Less obvious is that irregular writing can have a serious effect on one's ability to write well.  Imagine if you never wrote anything substantive (other than email or minor documents not meant for publication) for three years and then were faced with a large writing project (the product of years of research).  This is a recipe for disaster...or at least a bad case of writer's block.  No wonder that many Ph.D. students find themselves paralyzed at the point they begin writing their dissertations.

The Ph.D. student then goes on to a post-doc position in which they are expected to conduct and publish at a shorter time interval, e.g., two years.  Some succeed, but many fail to publish according to expectations (in my experience).  After this, they (may) find themselves in an academic or research position in which it's expected that they publish three or more papers or reports per year.  Many attempt to continue the writing schedule they learned in graduate school:  spending most of their time conducting the research, then madly writing for a short time at the end of the project, otherwise known as "binge writing". Those who continue the binge writing approach, which worked during graduate school (sort-of), find it increasingly difficult to meet more ambitious writing goals.  Some work never gets published; as these unpublished works pile up, our guilt and frustration mount over time.

If you don't write on a regular schedule, you may find yourself struggling to produce something other than a pedestrian manuscript. Since most of the top-tier science journals reject 80% or more of submitted manuscripts, weakly-written manuscripts don't have a chance (and may even be rejected by mediocre journals that are trying to improve their impact factor rating). Those scientists who who regularly hone their writing skills and put as much (or more) effort into crafting compelling papers as they do in designing and conducting their research are going to take up that limited journal space.

Just as a musician must practice constantly to sustain and improve their skills, so must a writer.  As I'll explore in later posts, good technical writing (or any writing, for that matter) requires constant practice, improvement, and exploration.  

Unfortunately, many scientists fail to recognize how an irregular writing schedule affects their overall productivity, their writing skills, and their self-confidence.  How do we break bad writing habits, especially if such habits are common among your peers and encouraged by your mentors?  Well, we've already started by first recognizing that binge writing is counter-productive.

In the following posts, I'll look more closely at this and other barriers to productive writing and some skills a technical writer must develop to ensure a long career of productive, enjoyable writing.

In the meantime, see this list of books for guidance on writing. The list is designed for students preparing their thesis or dissertation, but contains suggested reading that is useful for anyone at any stage of their career. Interestingly, the list contains two books that I've recommended in this blog: If You Want to Write by Barbara Ueland and How to Write a Lot by Paul Silvia.

Three Easy Steps

We're talking about good writing habits.  In the last post, I emphasized the importance of developing and sticking to a regular writing schedule.  In the next few posts, we'll take a closer look at how scientists learn to write...in particular, how they develop a writing schedule.

As I look back on my science career, my satisfaction over the body of work that I've published is somewhat dampened by the knowledge of all those papers (and books) that were never written.  I've got the data; it's filed away in lab and field notebooks, spreadsheets, and half-finished manuscripts.  In fact, I would estimate that for every paper I've published, there are five more that were never written. Most of my colleagues who are the same age would admit to the same.  A lot of the unpublished data were collected during and just after I finished my Ph.D.  I was bursting with ideas, questions, and energy.  In some cases, these were side-projects that I carried out alongside a primary research goal.  In others, they were stand-alone projects that were separately funded.  All of these studies were completed, but the work was never written up--for various reasons.  Often, it was lack of time--more specifically, lack of a period of time scheduled in the project for writing.  Back then, I thought the writing should take place after all data were collected.  A typical project might have three months set aside at the end of the project, which was designated for writing things up.  However, what usually happened was that I had to spend those three months completing some aspect of the research, redoing some analysis, writing the next grant proposal, and/or initiating the next research project.  There never seemed to be time for writing manuscripts.  

I now think that I could have taken most of this research to its logical conclusion--publication--if I had only developed better writing skills and habits early on.  In the last post, I made the point that having a regular writing schedule (e.g., 2 hours per day, every weekday) was essential for sustained productivity.  Part of the problem I had during my early research years was that I believed what I had been taught about how to write up research.  My graduate advisers taught me the following procedure: design the study, conduct the study, write up the study.  In that order.  Only when I had all data in hand should I begin thinking about writing.  Three easy steps, taken in sequential order.  Sounds logical.  It was never suggested to me that I could (or should) begin writing the moment I had an idea for a study.

Are You Satisfied With Your Writing Productivity?

The topic of this series of posts is writing problems.  If you've been following along, you may be thinking at this point that you don't have a writing problem or that you write "well enough"---and consequently don't need to analyze your habits and attitudes toward writing.  Such an attitude, by itself, can be sign of a problem.

Most of us, for whom writing is an integral part of what we do in our jobs, would like to improve our productivity.  I rarely hear colleagues say, "Well, I'm really satisfied with the number of papers I published last year."  More often, they are lamenting how they can't seem to get out as many papers as they would like. 

In most organizations, there are one or two scientists who publish prolifically and account for a good proportion of the total scientific output.  Not all of these prodigious scientists are producing good work; they may be publishing work of little significance.  At the other extreme are the people who rarely publish or who don't publish at all--at least not in peer-reviewed journals.  The majority fall in between, but there can be a large range in productivity within this group.

To succeed in most scientific positions, one must publish.  Getting a good job, keeping the job, getting promoted, and ultimately getting tenure (academic) or permanent status (government) is strongly influenced by one's writing abilities and productivity.  Learning early to be a good writer will put you well ahead of others vying for jobs, grants, or space in journals.  The earlier you start writing well, the more productive you will be over the entire span of your career----and the faster you will move through those career milestones. Even if you are reasonably satisfied with your publication rate, you can always benefit from being more efficient in your writing efforts. 

To be productive throughout your career, it's important to know what your strengths and particularly your weaknesses are.  Note that these may change over time.  What plagues novice writers may be overcome, only to be replaced with other challenges in the more seasoned writer.  Most people avoid considering their weaknesses and focus on those aspects they do well.  That's human nature.  But it's not the way to improve.  People who instead focus on their weaknesses and work to eliminate them show dramatic jumps in their overall abilities.  This approach is known as "deliberate practice", which I described in earlier posts: "Is Talent Overrated?" and "Is Talent Overrated Part 2".  It's the secret behind so-called child prodigies and other people who exhibit amazing talents. 

In the previous post, I listed the common writing problems.  These typically cluster together into four patterns:

1. Work apprehension and low energy and enthusiasm for writing
2. Dysphoria (unhappiness) and evaluation anxiety
3. Perfectionism
4. Procrastination and impatience

A useful place to start improving productivity (or to get started writing) is to analyze your weaknesses.  The book I've mentioned previously, "Professors as Writers--A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing", has a self-assessment test in it.  I looked to see if there were any online tests, but could not find any.  Even if you don't do a formal assessment with such a test, you probably have an idea of where your problems lie.

If your main problem is getting started or finding time to write, a suggested technique is called "contingency management" (Boice, 1990).  The idea is simple.  Pick a daily activity (checking email, showering, having breakfast, exercising) and make it contingent on writing for a set amount of time or a set number of pages.  This approach may sound difficult, but people who use it say it works.  See this personal description of how contingency management works. 

Another helpful activity is to keep track of your writing progress by preparing a graph of the number of hours devoted to writing along with the output.  See example below modified from Boice 1990:

For novice writers, there may be some apprehension regarding grammar and punctuation and other writing rules.  Most word processing programs can help with this as can many online help sites for students with writing problems.  An example can be found at "Common Student Writing Problems". There are many others.

Boice, R. 1990. Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing. New Forums Press, Stillwater, OK.

Photo credit: Library of Congress, Charles Gibson artist, circa 1911