How to improve your writing: A guide for PhD students and academics

writing is as you know an essential skill for every PhD student because it's one of the essential skills of a professional academic so beyond the PHD when you're looking at postdocs or more permanent positions huge amount will be based on what you've published so essentially the basic currency of Academia is writing so it's something that is you know super important as important almost as the research itself but of course writing is also one of the biggest sources of stress for PhD students and part of this is because of the particular circumstances of a PhD so

I was mentioned in the previous session about the differences between undergraduate degrees and PhD um the way that a PhD is assessed is fundamentally different too so unlike an undergraduate degree where there are exams with a cumulative grade in a PhD everything rests on the thesis so there's a huge amount of pressure on that one document and as I said earlier unlike an undergraduate exam where it's graded relative to your classmates a thesis is judged according to the standards set by the field often with external examiners coming from other other universities to assess whether it's

good enough for for a PhD um and that will be relative to the work that's already been published related to the problems that you're that you're working on so there's a huge amount of pressure just in terms of the way that it's set up added to that of course a thesis is likely to be the longest document you will ever write for the majority of people you might be writing in a second language or in some cases even a third or fourth language you might be writing while still doing research so you're overloaded by the

number of things that you're trying to do at any one time you might also have so much to say that you don't know where to start so when we add together all of these things it's not really surprising that a lot of people find it so stressful um but before we get into what to do about it I'd just like to ask how many of you have been given like really good training in how to write as an academic zero I think I've given this talk a few times and I think I've had one person

put up their hand like confidently I don't know what their background was but really good training I mean this is the thing that no one really could understand right okay um trained to a level where you feel confident in your ability or Define it however you like right um so we've got this situation where it's an essential skill but nobody's really being being um being trained how to do it and this is common across huge number of universities you might have like an afternoon Workshop or something um I say that when I'm giving an hour

and a half talk um but if you want more you can invite me back um but you know the amount of training is is generally extremely extremely limited so we have this situation where the skill levels are generally quite low so you basically go in with whatever skills you developed you know in your prior prior education but the difficulty and the emotional pressure are extremely high so it's like a perfect recipe for overwhelming overwhelming stress now the standard writing advice which you will see in countless books blogs videos on YouTube which is almost Universal is

don't think just right don't worry about detail or structure focus on just getting words down on the page to give yourself something to work with that you can edit later and if you get stuck write about something else now this has the advantage that if you're really unsure of what to do and you just throw words down then you might produce something you can fill Pages this way but longer term it causes quite a lot of problems so the first problem which I think I'm amazed that academics actually say just write without thinking about detail

because detail matters you know in so many academic projects it's a little detail a little statement a little assumption which makes all the difference to everything everything that follows so to write without paying attention to any detail if one of your basic assumptions is wrong and you haven't thought about it and you just write it and then you write 100 more pages that one detail could mean the rest of it needs to go in the bin potentially right some detail matters second problem if you just write and every every time you hit a problem you

you work on something else it trains you it trains the habitual response of avoiding problems right so um you just you know need to keep producing keep keep getting words down the page don't worry about that problem but then what about when you run out of easy things to say then you're left with all of the difficult stuff and you haven't developed the skills to solve those problems you've just trained yourself well I just need to I just need to write I just need to write I just need to write so then you've got to

solve all of the difficult problems when you've got less time which again is obviously going to increase increase the stress also the more you do this the more you just get words down on the page obviously the harder it will be to edit it's harder to edit 100 pages of you know raw text than it is to edit one or one or two so then as I was talking about in the previous session you're trying to learn this new skill on a massive scale so you're you what you're what your ambition is is going to

be far beyond what your ability is and again you're going to be massively stressed and you're not likely to to improve the other thing is it completely avoids telling you anything about how to actually write well or edit so what these people do who say just write is they send you away and you're saying oh I've got through my writer's block I can just write I don't have to worry about it but what they don't have to deal with is the massive mess that people are left with and I think it is a shocking um

failure of these people who claim to be writing instructors to say just right so there is no other field of human activity where a competent teacher will tell you to just do it as fast as you can to keep going and ignore the details so imagine if you were a chef you went to culinary school and they said just cook don't taste your food just don't worry about ingredients or technique to get food on the plate as fast as you can it's obviously ridiculous or a driving instructor saying just drive don't worry about Road markings

or what's going on around you just move as fast as you can doesn't make sense on any level so my view is that uh sorry my slides are slightly over here um my view is that writing is a skill like any other it is possible to learn how to write well paying attention to detail and structure and making deliberate decisions as you go and it is possible if you develop these basic skills to write a good draft a good first draft relatively quickly so I'll just have to skip back a little bit so the fundamental

problem that we want to solve is that the ideas and the knowledge in your head they're not stored in a logical order so it's more of a kind of Tangled mess of interconnected ideas and insights so if you just write in the order that you think of things then the text will reflect that Tangled mess so there'll be no kind of overall structure in the individual ideas won't be properly developed so what I'd like to present is a way of taking this Tangled mess of ideas in your head and putting them into a logical order

and I also I'd like to present a way of approaching the writing process that will help you to solve problems as they arise and develop your writing skills before we get to those two things which will be kind of the main main sections of this talk we want to say something quickly about mindset going in so one of the traps that people often fall into with writing is that they think that they have to show how much they know so kind of like an underground in an undergraduate exam what you're tested on is What proportion

of the syllabus you can remember generally speaking and anything that you miss you lose marks for so because you've been through that system throughout your entire education you carry that implicit assumption into the PHD as well and so a lot of people will go into writing thinking I need to show that I've read all of these different papers I need to show The Examiner how much how much I know but if you want to show that you're an expert in something then it's better if we think about it from the point of view of what

would someone who's got massive amount of experience in the field do so some Nobel prize winning Professor right the assumption would be that they know more than they're actually saying and what they're doing is they're selecting from their knowledge what is the most relevant most important information so if we see the PHD writing process as trying to develop those skills of a professional academic researcher then that's what we want to emulate we want to select from our knowledge what is the most important and relevant information to in order to communicate communicate effectively the second thing

is that a lot of people worry about what the examiner wants to see or what they might want to see and people often know where the gaps are in their own knowledge so they start to worry well there's this part that I don't know that much about so I need to write more to convince the examiner that I do actually do actually know that thing but again it's not an undergraduate exam where the examiner goes in with a set syllabus a list of things that they expect to see what they will do is they will

judge your writing based on what you say your own aims are so you effectively set your own syllabus and then you select what information you think is most relevant to serve the needs of your particular your particular project so the examiner will judge it based on what you say you're going to do okay so it's all about what you want to communicate and generally speaking it should be the things that you're strong in rather than worrying about what the examiner wants to see so what you defend is the content of your thesis and what you

choose to write about you're effectively choosing the ground for your own defense or or the syllabus for your own examination so it makes sense to bring the examiner onto territory where you're strong instead of going onto onto this okay so on to structure so for me um structure is the most important thing in academic writing is the thing that I spend the most time working on working on with students um and it's because the structure is what helps to guide the reader so we'll spend a little bit a bit of time on it so instead

of just writing in the order we think of ideas we can think in terms of a narrative structure where a piece of research any particular piece of research is a response to a problem a question or a need so if you think of any paper that you ever read There is kind of a central problem or question or need that they are trying to they are trying to address and that problem or question or need arises from an initial context so that could be a situation or a series of events so we could say for

example um the coronavirus pandemic being a situation that occurred which created a need for certain types of research right and then specific questions right so there's a there's a context that's a context that everybody knows about but every individual bit of research exists within the context of either a real world situation or um kind of a situation within the research field okay so this applies to almost any project or any story generally so to illustrate this point I'd like to use the plot of the 1994 movie Speed basic idea basic problem there's a bomb on

a bus if the bus drops below 50 miles an hour it will detonate so the overall story is how they respond to the key problem but within that plot within that problem there are a number of smaller problems that they need to solve along the way okay so it's kind of a ridiculous example but the basic idea of narrative applies no matter how complicated your research is so whether it's something completely trivial and stupid like this film or whether it's the most serious world-changing research the same basic idea applies so I'll keep this slide up

for a little while if you want to take notes and if anyone wants a copy of the slides then you know I can I can send them out basic structure so this works for the introduction of any project so first you describe a situation then you describe a problem or a question that arises from that situation in most cases you won't be the first person to address that General problem or question there might be something specific that hasn't been looked at which is the particular Focus for your project but often there's a broader question and

then you're addressing you know some particular aspect of it so other people will have responded to that problem or question before but there will be a need or a gap which means that you need to approach it in a different way or expand upon what's been done in some in some in some respect and then that sets up what you aim to do Okay so we've got these um this series of ideas where each one kind of sets up the next okay or each each um each point is kind of a response or a consequence

of what has what has come before so I'll give an example so let's say we have a situation where worldwide the number of PhD students is increasing however so we introduce a problem there is also evidence of disproportionate levels of stress among PhD students and then we have research responses to this which could be something like well there's been a limited number of studies to dates that have highlighted the scale of the problem and individual institutions have made efforts right better support there's been little research into the effectiveness of different interventions okay then this research

will okay so you can see how here where we've got the kind of um responses where we say there has been little research into the effectiveness of different interventions it's almost obvious what the next point will be right so obviously this research will look at the effectiveness of these particular interventions so it flows and it guides the reader so pick this example because it's really easy for everybody to understand but you can apply it to anything no matter how technical or complicated now the great thing about this kind of structure so obviously here we've just

got bullet points is you can then expand upon it you can use that structure as like a framework for all the specific bits of information that you want to that you want to provide so expanding on this we could say over the last 10 years there's been a huge increase in the number of students enrolling in doctoral degree programs worldwide then we can back that up by saying recent statistics from the UN estimate that right so we're adding supporting detail to that initial initial point then while the increase in numbers of doctoral students is seen

globally it's even more marked in developing nations such as so again we're giving a little bit more a little bit more detail a little bit more a little bit more nuance we could say why this is happening this is in part due to concerted efforts at government level to do whatever they're doing and then we introduce the problem although increasing engagement in doctoral research has a number of benefits recent evidence has shown disproportionate levels of stress among PhD students so we've taken the same instruction we've just expanded upon it and put in kind of supporting

details and little bits of extra extra nuance so even though we're adding extra information we don't need to alter the overall structure and this makes it much much much easier to edit your writing than if you just write with no structure at all so if you are then reading a paper that talks about all the advantages of um for Society of having more researchers for example and if we look back at this structure um we could say here although increasing engagement in doctor research has a number of benefits we could change that point slightly and

say um and then and then put that paper in to say what those benefits are for society okay so the overall structure doesn't change and we can figure out where to put things where to add detail um or or um um or extra or extra extra Nuance sorry one second so to all those people who say just write without thinking about detail or structure I say when you can do this why is that necessary why go through that step of writing hundreds and hundreds of pages when you can just write it perfectly well first time

but you just need to know how to how to do it so this idea of structure you can then apply to any paper and also any section of a paper or or a thesis so I'll give a kind of General picture so we basically have cause and effect or stimulus and response okay so there's a natural kind of chronology to things in terms of a causing b or or however you want to think about it so in terms of causes we have situations or events or it could so an event could be a particular discovery

which then raises a new question which then triggers a lot more research in response okay situation could be a global pandemic which causes a need for Rapid development of a vaccine right when loads of companies responded to that um so we have these we these causes which lead to problems questions or needs and then on this right hand side we have the responses we will have answers or partial answers because it's very rare that you solve a problem or answer a question completely and there may be other consequences so the other consequences could be new

problems new questions new needs right so this is why kind of um I put the problems question or needs in the middle because they could be a cause or they could be an effect right so they kind of sit sit sit in between so when you've got all those all of this Tangled mess of information in your head if you can start to think of it in terms of these um these aspects then you can start to figure out how you can how you can structure how you can structure your your writing and if you

have some information that doesn't fit this usually it's better to leave it out so if you have some information that doesn't help you to answer a question or serve a need or address a problem it's probably not that relevant to um to what you're doing okay so let's give another example um let's say if you're talking about a particular Theory and you want to give a little bit of historical background so we start with an old situation so let's say for example until the late 1960s it was widely believed that whatever it is then we

have an event or a discovery right something has something happened that disrupted that situation it was only with the discovery in 1967 of Whatever It Is by this person that started to change the way people thought about it or whatever it is we have responses or Consequences so this then led to the development of an entirely new theory of whatever it is based on the idea of that okay so you see that you see the development and then of course we can have other consequences so maybe this Theory help to explain something it served as

the basis of some new technology led to um some disagreement or debate within the field whatever whatever it is and you can choose how you want to how you want to how you want to direct that so it's very it's very flexible in that in that regard um what about literature reviews so as I said any individual paper can be thought of as a response to a particular problem or a question so let's say the problem is how do we Define or measure X whatever whatever X is now typically the story in most cases within

the literature is quite similar so the literature might seem like a big Tangled mess of contradictory stuff but generally speaking the narratives you see time and time again and if you can unpick those if you can spot those then it really helps with the writing so generally what will happen is there was some kind of problem somebody proposes a solution and then this has some kind of effect right so maybe the idea that this person proposes it gains some influence or maybe it Sparks a debate or um maybe it's widely adopted this initial solution that

somebody proposed maybe there's a problem with it or a limitation so let's say for example they developed a a technique that works really well but only for a limited set of circumstances or or samples and so others then respond to that by developing Alternatives so that could be a modification of the technique um or it could be a totally different way of achieving achieving the same the same thing then that often leads to wherever we are at the moment with The Cutting Edge where people are working on particular problems with that you know with that

kind of technique right so um what this does is it kind of sets up a context for the current literature now again this is a very flexible structure because you could cover this history very very very briefly in one or two paragraphs or you could give you know 10 pages 20 Pages 100 pages of detail on all of the different developments that have taken place within this within this story right and it's entirely up to you how much detail you want to give depending on which parts are most important um for for your own research

okay um we can we can play around with this um with this structure um so let's say um instead of it being one author proposing a solution um we could approach it a different way and say there are three main ways this is approached okay the first and perhaps most widely used was proposed by this person okay so here uh we're doing a slightly different way so instead of giving a historical kind of narrative where it says there are three main ways this is approached what we're doing is describing a situation within the field okay

so you I'm I'm just trying to kind of um show the the component parts the mechanics of this and why it and why it works so there are three main ways this is approach the first and most widely used was proposed by this person um explain it in whatever detail you want to do um and then again we introduce a problem so if there are three ways people are doing it there's got to be a reason why not everybody's doing it the first way right some limitations some kind of problem so although this approach is

effective in this way has the disadvantage that whatever disadvantage and then other people develop responses okay so um as I said the um this kind of structure applies to any section of a paper or thesis um I could probably talk about this for about three hours actually I do I've got a writing course um where I do this in in a lot more detail but this is the basic idea that you need to that you need to know and in the Q a again we can look at individual individual sections I can give give more

examples okay so in terms of the process and how you um how you do this um in practice and so remember to drink water because I'm going to be talking for a long time today okay so um number one so going back to what I was talking about this morning when you've got a big difficult task often what you need to do is simplify so instead of trying to write an entire draft an entire chapter um you know doing things on a big on a big scale it's best to focus on one section at a

time and put all your attention on that and try not to jump around between between different sections um so we reduce the scale reduce its complexity makes it a little bit a little bit more manageable so if you're at a stage where you're under time pressure and you're say writing your final thesis I would say go one chapter at a time but more specifically one section at a time which I'll talk about in a bit more detail in a minute if you're at an earlier stage and you just want to practice then what I would

suggest is writing short Standalone pieces with a specific Focus so that could be um a little section that just explains the theory behind the technique that you're using for example right so that becomes Much More Much More achievable much more manageable than just throwing down everything that you can that you can think of and trying to get all of your knowledge down on down on the page the second thing I would suggest is separate the process of exploration from presentation so one of the justifications for um the approach of just getting words down on the

page is that it helps you to explore ideas and figure out what you've got to what you've got to work with um but obviously as I said that creates a lot of problems because that work then becomes very very difficult to edit now if the goal is just to explore an idea or give yourself something to work with you can do that without formally writing in a in a linear structure so as I mentioned before the the ideas in your head they're not stored in this in this order that's kind of easy for somebody to

to read it's big Tangled mess and your brain will tend to jump between different things now that's really good for creativity but if you write a stream of Consciousness nobody else is gonna is gonna understand it so the way that I approach this is instead of typing into a document what I'll do is create a mind map where I dump ideas down on paper um and I can just kind of figure out what I've what I've got pretty quickly so what I do is I start I'll put the title in the middle so it could

be for example managing the stress of a PhD and then because the title is in the middle are then right around it and then I can draw connections between different ideas I can add notes so if there are for example any gaps anything that I need to look up um then I can put you know next to a particular idea um look up um it could be in my case you know look up the blog post where I've written about this before so I don't have to you know write it again um or in the

case of if you're writing a literature review it could be let's double check the reference where I think this idea came from so so it very quickly shows you what you've got and it also shows you where the gaps are and identifies things that you might need to do in in preparation um so you can do this without initially thinking about structure you can be very very free form this is very very quick to do so in 30 minutes or less you know you can sometimes get enough for an entire for an entire chapter um

it's also very quick to review so if you've got a single A4 piece of paper you can glance at that and you can see everything if you follow the approach of just writing and you've got 50 pages of just a stream of Consciousness how do you find stuff it's really really difficult so um there's multiple advantages to this mind map method and the speed of reviewing it being able to refer back to it is is one of the key ones okay so once you have um kind of this stock of ideas then we can start

actually putting putting words on on the page what I always do um and again this kind of goes against a lot of the common wisdom um as I always start with the introduction so a lot of people say you should write the introduction last because it's only at the end that you know what you're going to say but especially if you're in experimental Sciences you know you've done the experiments you've got the data you've done the analysis so you should know at least what the basic problem is that you're responding to so it should be

entirely possible to write the introduction at the at the beginning if you don't so you don't know what what it is that the the aim of the paper is or the experiment there's a problem that isn't solved by writing you need to figure your experiments out and kind of plan where you're at so what you're actually doing so um if you start with the introduction one of the big advantages is it tells you exactly where your focus needs to be so um this is the if you think of this is the this is the start

the basic challenge is well what do we say first what do we set up in order to try and lead the reader into the body the body of the work okay um so I've given you kind of a um a basic structure that you can follow setting up a situation leading into a problem that you then that you then respond to but even with that structure it can still be a little bit difficult because you've got to figure out what words to use you know you've got to solve the the problem of expression but because

we've narrowed the focus onto just the introduction and the first paragraph of the introduction then you're not having to deal with all of the other stuff right so because we've narrowed a focus it becomes a solvable a solvable problem we've reduced reduce that scale from there what I always try and do is work in an unbroken sequence from the introduction up to wherever wherever I am so this is one of the things that I um decided to do when I was writing writing my thesis so when I was when I was an undergraduate and I

was writing generally speaking I mean it was often um quite close to the deadline and I was in a bit of a hurry so jump around in the document right so if I got stuck I would write about a different section but I kind of realized that for something the scale of a thesis that would create all of these all of these gaps right and it would be really it would be much more difficult to to link all of that together um and what I decided to do was basically not avoid any problems so I

would um wherever I was up to in the document that's where my focus was and I had to try to solve that problem one of the consequences of that is I never needed to to decide what to work on it was just wherever wherever I was up to so when you get to this when you get to this point [Music] um you might find that you hit the dreaded writer's block um and this is where a lot of people will say or just you know just carry on or work on work on something else um

but writer's block um it's not a single condition right it's not one thing it can have multiple different causes so it might be that you just need to spend some time and find the right words so it might be or the way the way I kind of um often experience it is like I have the idea I know what I want to say but it's like I can't quite grab hold of it and if I try too hard it's like it it disappears it's lecturing grab hold of fog but if I stay with it and

I kind of relax then I can often find the right way to to express it um there will be things that are easier to express than others especially things that you've spoken about thousands of times or the ideas that you know really well or that you're confident in they tend they tend to be easier then there'll be other things where you've maybe never explained it before it's something where it's you're not quite as strong in that area and it just takes a little bit a little bit more time so you have to give yourself that

time to try and solve that problem so sometimes it really is just a matter of staying with it relaxing trying to find trying to find the right the right words however sometimes when you're at this point you realize that this next thing that you're trying to explain maybe it needs to come earlier in the document this happens to this certainly happens to me all the time the deeper I go the kind of the more fundamental I get and then and then I realize actually I needed to say that right at the right at the beginning

so for me even though I never kind of jumped forwards to write about another section what I would do is go back and if this idea needs to go here I'll go back and put it in there okay so the way I think of it is like um or the metaphor I use it's almost like digging a tunnel through a mountain so wherever the end of the tunnel is you can't jump deeper into the mountain you can't jump forwards you've got to work on the on the kind of rock face as it were but then

if you realize you need to go back and reinforce some of the tunnel right put in some wooden struts or something then that's okay to do all right so it's okay to go back and reinforce some of what you've already done but you can't jump you can't jump forwards but you've got to find a way to solve this problem at the rock face whatever whatever it is so sometimes you realize this idea needs to come somewhere earlier in document um sometimes you might realize actually if I just cut that idea then that solves my problem

um and I and then what I can do is I go back to my mind map back to my stock of ideas find something else that fits better and then very often then the writing will start to will start to flow again other times um this idea it just needs to come later so I'll just put it to one side and make a note put that in you know chapter three or or or wherever it happens to be so you've got a number of different option options for what you for you do at um at

this point Okay so as I was saying earlier the more difficult the task the more attention it requires and if you're trying to solve a writing problem where you don't know exactly what the solution is right um it requires your complete attention and it requires the patience and persistence to kind of stay stay with the with the problem and again you might need sometimes to step back relax think and re-engage in my case often I'll be sitting at the computer and I'll just stare out of the window and um it's kind of like I'm just

letting the thoughts go by and then I can I eventually find out find find a solution but other times I might need to just get away go for a bit of a walk reset and then and then and then um and then come back to it um but this brings us back to what I gave as the absolute number one most important tip in the last section when you step back from the work so when you take a break or when you get tired don't go online don't pick up your phone um because then again

you you remove the opportunity to solve that problem um if you step back step away from the work if you get away from the computer then your um if you're walking around the campus or something then your your subconscious can keep working on the problem and you often find that when you come back you've got a greater greater sense of clarity if you interrupt that process with email news headlines Facebook Instagram Tick Tock whatever it whatever it happens to be um then you you're completely removing removing that that opportunity so many people treat email and

going online as a break but it's not a break mentally because you're flooding yourself with information and it's not a break physically because you're still staring staring at a screen um on a from a different perspective if you think about [Music] um your visual field right if you're writing writing writing you're staring at a screen you've got this very very narrow kind of window of focus then you're looking at your phone and it's well it's even it's even narrower um there's a great Neuroscience podcast um by a guy called Andrew huberman who talks about focus

and stress and he talks about the importance of broadening your visual field when you've been focusing on something for a very for a very long time and it has a lot of kind of important neurological neurological effects so this is something which is really I think really important is you know breaking that habit of just checking email or staying staring at a screen all the time you need time where you where you're using your peripheral vision um both physically and metaphorically because you know when you broaden your vision a little bit you'll then sometimes see

the connections between ideas um that help you solve some of these some of these problems now when I talk about this this way of working where you stay engaged with the problem and you try and solve it as you go and you're basically trying to write the best first draft that you can a lot of people raise the issue of perfectionism I think perfectionism is not quite the right word um I think there's nothing wrong with trying to do something to the best of your ability and certainly um in your experimental work a bit of

perfectionism is is important right if you miss the miss a particular step if you don't do something right you don't get the results the results that you want so there will be times when you need to be absolutely perfectionist where things get confused is when um it's not necessarily perfectionism in the sense of trying to do the best job you can and having kind of a clear process or a clear goal in mind but rather having more of a sort of excessive hesitation or self-doubt where you write a sentence and nothing you write is ever

good enough and so you delete it and then you write something and you delete it you write something and you delete it um and this is kind of based on either self-judgment or a fear or of somebody else's judgment it's not really perfectionism it's a different thing it's it's it's indecision thank you at the other end of the scale though we have total carelessness so this is what I was talking about where you just write as fast as you can where you defer all thinking for later you abandon problems as soon as they arise and

you give Noah no attention to detail so people often justify that approach as a counter to to what they call perfectionism what I call indecision but there's a lot of space in between those two extremes right so if you obsess over every single word that you put and everything has to be perfect that's obviously not healthy but then paying no attention is not healthy either so we have this range where you can give care and attention to the work that you're doing but without being overly um worried about the end result so without being driven

by fear of making mistakes by fear of how people how people will judge you and you can adjust where you sit on this scale so there may be times when you have to go a little bit faster just because of circumstances so you might have a submission deadline right so maybe you you you're a little bit less careful right your priority is just getting things done as quickly as you can there will be other times or the parts of your writing where you have to be absolutely perfectionist so I mentioned at the start that the

examiners will judge your work based on what you say your aims are and so where you have a statement that says the aim of this thesis or this paper is that's what they're going to judge everything else based on so you need to phrase that really carefully so it's worth spending a little bit of time on it the number of times I've read people's work where there are maybe three or four places where they State the aims of the thesis and they're all different and none of them are what they've said they're going to do

when when we're in conversation um so you know that means well how on Earth can I judge any any of the rest of it because I don't know what you're don't know what you're trying to do so there will be times when you need to be you know a bit more a bit more perfectionist but you can adjust adjust where you are so if you find for example um you're sitting at the computer you haven't you've been sat there for 45 minutes you haven't written a single word maybe leaning a little bit more towards you

know um the um uh prioritizing speed and say right in the next half an hour I'm going to try to try and write 100 words for example right um and you can and then once you've got a bit of momentum then you can maybe you know go back and be sorry when you've got a bit of bit of momentum um um you can maybe ease off in terms of the pace a little bit and then at some point later you can go back and be a bit more perfectionist correct what you've written Etc right so

we can adjust where we are it's a little bit more of a nuanced nuanced approach okay um so as I said um some things will be easier to write about than others your pace will naturally vary as you engage with and solve problems so don't put pressure on yourself to maintain the same Pace all the time um you want to you want to let yourself slow down relax and solve and solve problems as you as you go um but when you take some time and face a problem then you find the solution it feels good

right it feels good to have engaged with those things and um rather than just leaving them leaving later and ultimately this is how you improve your writing skills and you develop confidence so um 47 minutes not bad pretty much bang on schedule um so again we'll get into the Q a um I've covered a lot of things again fairly fairly briefly um and some things I've not talked about at all so again you can choose whatever you want to talk about um if you want more examples of different sections and how to apply this idea

of structure then I'm happy to happy to do so um but it could also be anything kind of surrounding writing that might get in the way as well like setting aside for example two hours in the morning every day or have like big blocks of this week I'm just gonna write yeah and how to get yourself into that steps focused modes where you can actually write because yes it often takes quite some time and yeah it's like an inefficient process okay um so I think in terms of in terms of um the question of um

scheduling writing whether it should be two hours a day I think that depends on what stage of your PhD you are at um some people say that you should write every single day um I don't necessarily agree with that because it depends on why you're writing right what is the purpose of it um the most important thing is your research so that should be the priority for the bulk of your PhD and um there will be periods where you're not writing at all you know and you're just focused 100 on the on the research and

the analysis Etc okay however um if you are not very confident in your writing and you want to set aside some time for developing developing that skill now that's not a bad idea especially if you're writing in a second language um and you know you kind of know that that might be a weakness then it's really important to practice the number of people who um uh who have to write a thesis in English know that it's a weakness right so they can converse but they find it really difficult to write and then it gets to

the point where they have to write up and they've not done anything about it so they've they've had years literally to where this problem has been in the back of their mind and you know they've not practiced the written written language skills so of course it's going to be going to be stressful so if that's the case then yes setting up setting aside some time to practice writing and um maybe get some some language guidance is a really really good idea um how you do that whether it's you know say um you know two hours

on a Tuesday and a Friday I mean that's that's that's entirely up to you um but if it's that kind of longer term practice then doing it regularly is it is a good idea um and there will be times when that's difficult to do because there are things that seem more urgent so um you know whatever for for whatever reason um but the thing is that um these longer term skill development things um they might not be urgent in the short term so nothing bad happens if you don't do it this week but if you

consistently don't do it then you get to a point where you know you've got to write your thesis in six months and it's sort of like you know it's too late so um I kind of think of it again metaphorically um it's the difference between I think you use the phrase firefighting oh putting out fires during the coffee break um it's the difference between putting out fires or planting seeds so planting seeds takes a long time to see the um see the results of your of your labor but it's really important if you want to

have you know your crops to to eat or to sell you know by by next year or whenever whenever it is so it's really important to put that put that aside aside put aside that time um the other part of your question in terms of getting into that writing um that writing Focus um yeah it does take a little bit of time um often the the problem I find is my thoughts are kind of going too fast right so I see too many like there's too many different too many different things all at once and

so for the first you know 40 minutes or so I might not get very much done um but the way I see it is I've kind of got to relax into it in order to find that find that flow and not worry too much not put too much pressure on myself um so if I'm if I'm for example um just starting a new piece of a new piece of writing with the introduction yeah there might be different angles that I could take on it um and so I'll kind of mentally be exploring maybe I could

do it this way maybe I could do it that way even with these kind of principles of structure [Music] um and yeah and then I just sit with it until I kind of make it make a decision so I don't put myself under too much pressure to be productive straight away but I'm still working because I'm still kind of figuring out it's kind of an experimental um or exploratory initial initial phase in order to do that um I need to be disconnected from the internet so it's always the first thing I do is turn off

you know um basically block the browsers with with cold turkey put my phone you know on silence on do not disturb because if I get a WhatsApp message while I'm in that phase I'm done you know it's really really really difficult to get to get their attention back so even though I'm I'm a pretty confident writer I believe in my ability um if I get distracted during that time it's real it's really really really hard so turning off the internet having some uninterrupted time in space is is super important and they're being being patient with

yourself and in that um and then yeah as I said if you find that period goes on for too long then doing a little bit of faster writing and saying well I'll just write 100 words you know relatively quickly so it's not going all in on that just right approach you know until I'm doing that to such an extreme that you do that for an entire draft of a thesis you know do it for 20 minutes then slow down and pick apart what you've got and then you can kind of construct construct from there that

was a long answer yeah so for example um writing on affections and then I realized okay originally my thought was I would just pick my data and everything's fine and continue from there but then I realized after reading okay fitting might not be as straightforward as I thought beforehand so now I would have to do some comparison to hear some fitting procedures for example and then decide on what to do to continue so now I'm like okay I could either do that now so so refrain from writing and do the thing and the comparison which

will take me some time but I also already have some ideas about what to contribute with and so I'm unsure okay um generally speaking I think if you um again it kind of depends on the purpose of the writing so if you're um um if you're just kind of trying to practice writing in the background then you could be doing the analysis and the and the data fitting on the one hand and then maybe um with the writing you could be writing a section of literature review for example um or writing about your methods or

or whatever it is so I think um you should write about stuff if you're doing analysis so you don't know what the results of the conclusions would be if you're writing at the same time then it should be things that are not going to change in response to this work that you're doing okay [Music] um generally speaking for a lot of people what I'll say is you know put the writing completely to one side and just focus on the research because that's what you're going to present in them in the writing so that's kind of

the um that's kind of the the priority um so yeah if you take the pressure off in terms of writing a little bit get your analysis done present it to people and get feedback so you identify any problems with it it just saves a lot of time rather than writing about it and then having to then having to change it all okay yep uh one of the first careers I encounter is the language I don't know I think in another language and then I try to write this idea and I don't know what it's there

if I don't have my ideas for my language try to translate because if I try sometimes to do it immediately in English then it's like it's like and I get stuck in this year yeah I don't know which okay um there are two things I would I would suggest so one is to again kind of reduce the scale of what you're trying to do right because if you talk about the English language it's massive right it's far too it's far too much and it's kind of kind of overwhelming um but what you can do is

um write short pieces which you see as not necessarily for um official examination but just for practice right so it's you know just take the pressure off right um but then if there's something so let's say for example again something that's not going to change in response to your research but like the the methods or the theory behind the methods you know those are things that you can figure kind of figure out how to how to um explain okay [Music] um you can then reduce the scale even further and and focus on if there are

particular if you find there are particular problems you have with the language so like um in your native language if there's a particular kind of structure where you feel like ah this is really frustrating I don't know how to use this kind of um grammatical structure in English and maybe it doesn't even exist um figuring out a solution to to that really studying kind of that grammatical aspect that's where a language tutor can really help you um and the good thing is there are a lot of and there's a huge number of English teachers and

they can um you know which means they're relatively cheap and um they can they can help you so getting that professional help rather than putting pressure on yourself to figure it all out um because there's limits to what you can do yourself and there are people who can in five minutes teach you what might take you a week to figure out so I think that would um that would be important so reduce the scale focus on particular things and and and get some help and and do that early as early as possible so you're not

trying to do all that in the last month of your PhD um also of course get a proofreader um at the end again there's a lot of them um so you know they they kind of Drive each other's prices down which is not good for them but good for you I think there was I'm seeing a few like tentative hands if you can put your hand like straight up so I can so I can see um you know whoever wants to go next yep so I wanted to ask when we're like you're writing so it

doesn't happen for me that I write it and actually it should be more than it should be how to expand it like you know and also how to write it interesting so sometimes when I writing it's super simple I'm reading the other papers it's very it's very now fancy words very interesting so okay okay so um there's a few different a few different questions within your within your question so in terms of expanding on something um it depends why you're trying to do that so sometimes genuinely there's missing information that the reader needs to know

in order to understand your your project but then sometimes people kind of feel like well I've only written a paragraph on that so you know is it enough right um and sometimes it is and often the best writing I think is quite concise um so if your short bit of writing genuinely really well perfectly explained um I won't say perfectly but clearly explains with no ambiguity what you're trying to do or what the idea is you know it's it's fine um if you do need more detail then this understanding of structure is really important because

then you can figure out where that where that detail needs to needs to go um you need to be quite selective about the detail and the references that you add one of the things that I see quite often is basically just like a list of stuff that people have said right so it'll be a particular you know the hopefully be a particular theme or idea and then it's just um Smith says this or you know Smith conducted this study with this many people and blah blah blah blah and there's paragraph and what they did then

next paragraph Jones did you know something else and there's like nothing to link it nothing to link it together um so you um if you're adding a lot more detail it's thinking about um often um what's your starting point or the reason to be interested so you you talked about interest in terms of you know you said like kind of using fancy words I think more so than the language um if you set up an interesting problem or question okay so what's the what's the fundamental reason why this information is is is is important start

with that make sure that's clear and then if you can put in a narrative so um simple one would be um let's think of a simple example so so let's say um there are two main schools of thought on this on this issue right so we've got a problem whatever it is then we set up a situation there are two main schools of thought on the one hand you know according to Smith you know there's you know it should be this um however as Jones argues this doesn't take account of these particular factors right so

we've got a bit of a narrative in terms of the disagreement between these between these these two people and then you can kind of you know construct something construct something around it so it should never be a case of just adding information because you think it's too short um there's got to be a reason for the reader to be interested um they from the examiner's point of view this is not Universal right because the some people will say that a longer thesis is a better thesis that's from from my perspective that's so not true um

what I think and from some of the examiners I've spoken to they would only want a thesis to be longer if it's really good right so you never want to be adding stuff just for the sake of making it longer because then the examiner who's a busy academic has to then you're then forcing them to read it you know it's much better if you're if you're kind of concise in what you say and just just get the information that they need to know or that you personally find interesting um that's usually a pretty good a

pretty good way of approaching it yes the witnessing the idea of um having a collection of notes so either like the several customers obsidian or Bond mode or whatever and they're not basically biting everything down then when it comes to writing after the relevant bits and helping it down okay um okay a couple of thoughts on that so one if you whatever system of note taking you use you want to make sure that it's all in one place and it's easy to easy to navigate if you end up with loads and loads of different subfolders

where you can't where you can't can't find stuff um that's that's pretty pretty difficult um so sometimes people can be a little bit too clever with their note-taking systems um and there's you know and then they can never never find stuff again um if you use um you know so sometimes sometimes these tools can help in the advantages that they're often searchable um but if things are buried in different folders sometimes you can't find it um if I think back to my own PhD um basically all the notes were written by hand so I had

a lab notebook you know data at the top of the page and then this is just my what I've done for um for the day um when that filled just started another one the disadvantage of that of course is that it's not digitally searchable but um everything is kind of sequential so I'd know roughly when I was working on something or I could identify that pretty quickly then I could find all the all the all the notes on it if you so if I think sometimes for digital notes if you just have one long text

file with the date you know then it's really really really simple really easily really easily easily searchable so it keeps it as simple as simple as possible that's kind of my my thoughts on that um as for pasting stuff together um again I've seen people saying for example with a literature review so for everything you read you know write a little summary of it um and then you can kind of paste those things together and you've got a literature review um I saw one one blog post years ago and it said the title was how

to get a literature review to write itself the problem with that is that then each individual paper um as you're taking notes you don't necessarily see how it links to other things and so if you then take those things and just paste them in order then it's just Smith did this Jones did this somebody else did this somebody else did this um and the the stuff that you take notes on how do you know exactly what's relevant so you maybe read a paper in your first year from a particular perspective but then in your third

or fourth year you know you you should have more knowledge so you would pick out something else or maybe you're writing about it for a different reason so you pick out a different detail so um I think although it sounds like that should save you a lot of time it doesn't necessarily um so what I would do is sticking with that literature example um is basically have a system where you can find relevant papers again quickly and then pick out what what what the relevant details are based on whatever it is you're writing about at

the at the present moment um it's pretty rare that you'll have like the perfect notes that you can just copy copy and paste in um you've got to think about the context um so a section on on methods or would would focus on a different part of a paper right um I'd say I'll talk um you know backtrack a little bit a section about methods um following the idea of structure that I was talking about before all of the methods all the all of the decisions you make are responses to needs so you need a

way of measuring something you need a way of analyzing something you need a way of preparing a sample whatever it is okay then you might bring in the literature and say well basically in response to this need this is the technique that this person developed so um so then you know you're looking at that literature in a particular in a particular context in your writing if you've got the perfect notes for that copy and paste them in otherwise you know usually it's going to be a case of rewriting I think okay we've got about 20

minutes left so it's time for one of one or two more questions so about presenting your own results so do you have any specific sorry I can't see who's talking because of the Mask I thought it was you I wasn't sure what about the presenting your own results so do you have any specific advice to like yeah how to convince people okay so the first thing I'd suggest is um don't make the formal writing the first time you get the feedback right so you want to be showing your results to other people and see what

questions they ask you know as the work progresses right um so it's all it should have ideally not everyone gets you know a lot of a lot of support but ideally you know this should have been through one round of feedback where you've tried to convince people so then you you know what questions people ask and you can address some of those in um in the writing right you can anticipate some some criticisms in terms of presenting the results um I think often especially in in experimental science it's not just about the result you present

but the methods this the specificity of the methods so and that's where detail is super important right so um if somebody's looking at the results they're not just looking at the graph or the analysis if you're looking about well okay wait a minute how did you do your sample prep to make sure that there wasn't contamination that causes this effect or whatever it is right so you've got to show that you've thought of a lot all the things that could go wrong I mean not all but like you've given it a lot of thought to

things that could go wrong that that could skew your results in some way um and very often that is kind of how you how you convince people if they're of the validity of your um of your results um it's all about it's all about you know the methods the methods going in um and then obviously the same applies with the steps of the analysis you know what checks have you done um with the with the data to make sure um you know to make sure that it's it's valid um I think one other thing is

is uh I'll give two other things um one um it goes back to that point about taking time and Care over those details um and then I've forgotten the second thing um when you hit a problem step back and you've solve the problem um yeah so the second thing I'd say is about um um honesty in the results uh so sometimes this kind of um you know people want to put like the best possible spin on their on their results so if there are doubts if they're open questions if there are things where you know

kind of um um you know maybe maybe this is not actually like the perfect result you know acknowledge it in the in in the paper so again um you kind of you know you you kind of create this trust um between the reader it's like yeah I've I've thought of this I acknowledge that maybe you know this could be something else so it's not kind of overselling um overselling um what you what you've done yeah maybe it's a follow-up time said that you would not like you want to get feedback before writing them properly so

I'm not basically do you have some informal writing yeah some mathematical physics so yeah so to autonomous my thoughts I think I have to write yeah okay yeah sure and in that case in that particular case um yeah if it's a mathematical proof yeah you've got to you have to write it write it down in some in some in some form um it wouldn't but it wouldn't necessarily need to have all those kind of text around it to kind of set up the context and the literature review and what other what other people have done

you just present the proof um hopefully your supervisor knows what you're working on anyway or you know who to approach um so that they should already know that know that context um and also I'm guessing that within the proof there will be different parts of that you know where you can check before it's complete um you know do you think I'm on the right track you know have I done this this bit of it correctly um yeah so yeah of course there are there are variations depending on the type of research that you're that you're

doing um so I would give a different answer if you were doing kind of literary analysis you know with a with an English literature degree with experimental experimental work um maybe it's in the form of just showing a graph you know whatever whatever it is so um show it show it however you can and get get feedback and and discuss discuss with other people um one of the quick quick Point um nobody asks but I'm going to tell you anyway um this idea of getting feedback um I think it's not just about sort of presenting

your work and then asking people what they think of it um I think that it's really really important to also be interested in other people's work and what they're what they're doing because that way well first of all you know it's just nice socially to to be able to to be able to do that um but you learn about things that are not directly related to your research or not perhaps of immediate benefit so it broadens your knowledge and your experience which I think is is is is an important thing and then you might find

that later down the road some of that becomes useful and you know who to talk to in order to get help with that with that particular part that could be during your PhD or it could be 10 years later if you if you stay in Academia so that broadening of your knowledge just being interested in what other people do I think is is really important too okay okay got time for maybe one more one more question is that yeah yeah I would uh like to hear something you know down there about working with your supervisor

so for example there might be different ideas or expectations that the supervisor might have that you don't necessarily want to fulfill or you can because you will realize that doing your research that's not something that is feasible to do yeah but they cannot realize that because they're not really working on that kind of problems how do you deal with that yeah especially when writing your feet yeah okay um anything anything regarding supervisors is always always a little bit difficult to give give kind of a perfect answer because it depends on on um their personality and

the relationship between between the two of you um ideally if there's that kind of situation where um something is is unfeasible you should be able to explain that to them discuss it with them and they'll say oh okay right ideally if I you might need to kind of state your case or you maybe might need to try it to kind of show you know show that it's unfeasible um certainly this happened a couple of times in well it happened in a few ways in my own PhD one way that happened was um often when I

would have meetings with my with my supervisor because it was so smart he would kind of bombard me with 10 different ideas of things that I could that I could try um just because you know he'd get so excited and then reel off all his all of these ideas and I kind of leave the meeting what the hell just happened um and it took me a while to realize these were just ideas and it was up to me to decide what to what to do with them and where I wanted to where I wanted to

leave the research um the other way it happened was one particular point where he suggested an experiment and basically it would have taken um you know calculating like the scan rates and things it would have taken about a week to run this particular scan which using the kind of instruments we were doing that wasn't really practical because you the instruments weren't that stable to be able to leave it for that for that long so you know just again that was a matter of just saying um yeah that's not really that would take far too far

too long um and he was he was fine with that um that was his particular personality though that made that really really easy um sometimes there will be things that your supervisor really insists on um and uh yeah sometimes you just have to you just have to do it or or or try it but yeah it does depend on that on that on that relationship um sometimes yeah with with timelines and um so your submission deadline or things like that or needing to get a if you need to get a couple of Publications under your

belt before you finish sometimes you just got to remind them like like I really need to get this this done by next September there you go I don't think I can take on that side project as well and you know you've gotta you've got to tell them you know because they don't they don't always think um they don't always remember those things and sometimes they forget you know how long things take practically as well especially if they're far removed from the lab yeah anymore last chance yep um if they work for you great um I

mean I'd say this about all of all of these kind of time management tools if you can consistently use them and they're genuinely useful to you keep using them um often with the nature of research it's very difficult to predict how long things will take and sometimes the Trap that I've seen people fall into is kind of trying to control the timeline too much so when when things get a little bit stressful they think right I need to step back and take control of this situation I need to make a Gantt chart or a timetable

and they'll get the colored pens out or you know you know create this beautiful plan we are really intricately detailed and it gives them a sense of control right it kind of relieves that stress initially but then if there's not enough flexibility in the plan or if the goals are overly ambitious sometimes they can find themselves behind the plan before the next day has even started so for example they'll say right I'm going to get up at 5 30 tomorrow morning I'm going to do this I'm going to get any I'm gonna do yoga and

I'm gonna do this and I'll have this done before 9am and then they wake up at 9 30 and then they're already behind so that beautiful plan instead of then helping becomes a burden it becomes one of those things a bit like when I said I set the goal of writing the world's best literature review failing to do that it kind of sits in the back of your mind and then feeds into the Imposter syndrome and everything else so I think any kind of any kind of plan that you make um yes there will often

be fixed deadlines so my my deadline for submission my thesis that was kind of set in stone without going through kind of a formal process for for getting and getting an extension and all the paperwork involved in that you know I had a particular date and if I missed it that was it I'd failed like there's no there's no way around it [Music] um for other things you know especially when it's when it involves research sometimes things just take as long as they take and you need to give yourself that time without having the pressure

of saying right I need to have this done by by Monday and sometimes maybe taking a little bit longer doing things a little bit more slowly with a bit more care means that you're more likely to get the results that you want or to figure out with a bit more confidence this way of doing it doesn't work right um so I'm acknowledging when things are uncertain and giving yourself a little bit more a little bit more flexibility for any kind of plan um because well because things are so so unpredictable in terms of how long

things take I think any kind of plan really it just has to tell you what are you going to do now um anything beyond that depends on how this goes but you need to be able to set your your priority so maybe you have a deadline for submitting a conference proposal like next week um so right now you know what do you what do you what do you do um do you you know do your lab work first and do the proposal in the afternoon okay you make that decision and then you and then and

then and then you do it taking taking that deadline into into into into account to further in the future you go it's a bit like predicting the weather or um or like any kind of chaotic system you know the more the uncertainty is kind of kind of multiply um so you know bear that in mind like today what do you do right now further in the future you've got certain fixed deadlines the rest is kind of flexible and you need to be you know be able to make make decisions as you as you go okay

um yeah we've got time for one more and then and then we can break for lunch okay so in terms of reference Management Systems um there are loads of them um so it's like mendeley um endnotes you know all of these all these these different things um I don't have any particular preference for one or one or the other um what I would suggest is true try out a few different ones on a small scale find what works well for you and then stick with that stick with that system so if you try let's say

for example mendeley if you're writing your thesis in Microsoft Word can you insert references reliably in the format that you want right is it you know does it work smoothly okay if you then find that it's really buggy you know it doesn't work well for you you don't like the interface you try a different one so it's good to play with these things on a small scale when you're not under big a massive amount of time pressure then you can figure out figure out what to what to what to use um and then yeah as

your reading papers you can kind of populate your your database um you can do that as you go or you can occasionally you know as you're when you when you start to write maybe you can add in the references that you that you need um in terms of searching for papers so the the second part of the question was about whether you search for the papers first and then write the text or write the text and then search for the papers I think kind of a combination of the two so um you shouldn't be writing

without having already read a good amount of literature about that about that topic right you need to have a bit of a basis of knowledge of the of the of the the literature um and there will be certain um this is kind of a big topic I can feel myself sort of diving diving into it um ah yeah so there'll be certain papers that are more important than others right both for um the kind of historical developments of your field and for your own particular um particular research so there will be some papers where that

everybody references so everyone working on this problem they reference these people you need to know those okay and then there will be some papers that are absolutely crucial for your research so either they are kind of your direct competition so they're working on similar things or they're working on similar things maybe with different methods or they will be papers that your work builds upon that's right so you use this specific method for doing this this particular thing those papers also you need to know really well then there'll be loads of other papers which kind of

add a bit of context you know so maybe they're sort of related but perhaps not crucial for your work and um yes sometimes you'll realize you know as you're writing oh yeah you know I need to use some of these contextual contextual papers as well to add a bit of add a bit of detail so I think yeah to make my answer short some papers you will know really really really well you and you know you're definitely going to reference them other things will be you know you're going to write about something where um you're

a little bit less strong so you look up a few papers beforehand to to build your knowledge on that other times you'll be in the writing and you'll realize oh there's a gap here I need to go and look up some of those some of those papers so it's really a combination of the two of the two approaches going back and forth with the literature but starting with a solid foundation of those of those core papers okay but it's a big topic and I can talk about it more um after lunch okay okay so um

yeah thank you very much for for listening and so many great questions and uh yeah I guess it's over to lunch