Efficient Academic Writing | James Hayton

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4 approaches to the problem:

- What I did- Break the thesis into discrete chunks- Analogy/ metaphor- Indentify the fundamental principles

Basic assumptions

Writing is a means of recording information

That information in it’s raw form is disordered

It takes work to impose order and communicate clearly

Some ideas take more work than others to communicate

{ for yourselforfor someone else

Don’t think too much about writing; just get words down on the page as quickly as you can, allowing your thoughts to flow without worrying about details or structure, because you can always edit later

“

FAST SLOW

EASY DIFFICULT

KEY POINT

Your pace will inevitably vary, in part because of the varying difficulty of the ideas you express

this is unavoidable

you will need to get comfortable with spending

time thinking!

Some say this is perfectionism, and that this is a bad thing...

but a degree of perfectionism is sometimes necessary

Total carelessness Total perfectionism

There is plenty of room to operate between these two

extremes

The trick is to strike a balance:giving care and attention to

the work without excessively worrying about the end result

If you can express a single idea clearly, then you have the basic building block of good writing

Linking Ideas{

Top-Down Bottom-UpGet all your ideas down on the page, then cut and rearrange

There is some value to getting ideas down on paper, but we need to remember 2 basic principles...

Construct an argument by carefully piecing together individual ideas

Writing is a means of recording information

That information in it’s raw form is disordered

{ for yourselforfor someone else

Freehand-Freewriting

Once you have a stock of ideas, you can select which points you

want to write about

The challenge is to lead the reader from one point to

another, taking time to express each point clearly

You don’t have to include everything you know- hold some

information back!

Day to day routine

1. Turn off the internet!

2. Set targets you can beat

3. Start easy

4. Don’t work to exhaustion

5. Finish things

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What do you do when things go wrong?

Productivity vs Problem solving

In order to write efficiently, you have to embrace inefficiency!

Thanks for listening!

Any questions?- writer’s block

- literature reviews- time management

- the final year & the defence- general PhD questions