Our faculty speaker at this year's Summer Dissertation Boot Camp was
Prof. Tarek Azzam from the School of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences.
Seated
around Grove House’s comfortable living room, we spent a very productive hour listening
to and talking with Prof. Azzam. Here are some highlights from our conversation
about the writing process and completing dissertations.
Pay
attention non-judgmentally to discover your optimal writing patterns.
This was a running theme through Prof Azzam’s talk.
Writing
processes are unique to individual contexts and writing styles. There is
no single approach or tactic. Therefore, paying attention non-judgmentally to
your process, habits, and environments helps you find strategies that build
motivation and productivity. Controlling the environment you write in begins by, first, knowing yourself and your patterns, and the patterns that impinge on you.
- Track your productivity in a non-judgmental way for a
week and then reflect.
- Identify the typical patterns in your days,
what environments make you most effective or ineffective, what really gets you
engaged, and what interrupts.
- Noticing your patterns is the first step toward
controlling your writing process. You can then plan to actively do more
of what gets you engaged and less of what frustrates you. For example, I might like
writing in the morning, and my friends are productive writing in the morning,
but with children and other routines in my morning, that did not work for me.
So, switching over to writing at night when I was not distracted, and I didn't
have to keep telling the children “no” worked.
Track
your productivity as a way to motivate you to write.
Goal setting can be hard: Our goals can be too big. Or, too small. We set goals that are just right when we set them, then life happens and we miss our targets. This can be very frustrating and
demotivating.
Instead, record what you do each day or part
of the day. In a week, you will have a list of things you’ve done, rather than
a list of near and entire misses. So much more motivating!
Paying attention to what you're tracking might reveal useful patterns about where and when you were most productive and what
kinds of settings that happened in … and you can try and do more of that.
Prioritize
your writing to help you make conscious choices to persist
Prof.
Azzam’s response to a question about the characteristics of a PhD candidate who
is on track: PERSISTENCE.
The
first two to three years in course work with external deadlines are easy. The
hard part is when you must drive the process; no one will tell you what to do.
So, whether you are dissertating or writing to publish, no one makes you write.
Deadlines are generally up to you. YOU must choose to write, and build
in the structure and processes that help sustain your writing.
- Learn to be
fully aware of your situation so you
can make conscious decisions. When YOU do the choosing – to write, to
take a break – you are more in control, more motivated, and more persistent.
- Choose to
write. Stuff is always going to
happen. We can accept that, observe what happens, and find ways to take control
and make the dissertation your priority. It’s easy to continue in existing
patterns of work and life. But you have to make a choice.
- Plan time dedicated to writing. Look ahead, look for
opportunities, then make them concrete by structuring time for writing. This works better than just thinking generally that you’ll try and write this weekend. Making specific plans to block off time for
writing is a mental and emotional commitment. Alerting people to your plans and taking concrete steps to structure your
time, builds in a social and physical commitment. You are more likely to write!
Prof Azzam shared his
experience of planning ahead to dedicate a month and a-half for writing his
dissertation. He alerted family and friends of his intentions, set an
auto-response for email, and sequestered himself to write. In that time, he
just focused on writing, balancing that against reading fun things related to
the dissertation. At the end of this
time, he had a first draft of his dissertation and as he put it, “It was
terribly written, but man, what a confidence booster! It’s very satisfying to
have a draft to edit; then, it’s just fun.”
Sometimes
you have to hit rock bottom to get going. You have to get really angry or
passionate about getting done. “It’s all about being stuck, wanting to move on.
I became really uninterested I being a student… I was done being a student. I
felt stuck at the end of a year doing nothing.”
JUST WRITE! Keep
editing and revising OUT of the writing process to move your work ahead.
Prof
Azzam spoke about the importance of giving yourself permission to “just write,”
without worrying about how the sentences sound, whether the argument works, and
whether your grammar is perfect. These are things you do later when editing.
Often,
we approach writing with some anxiety because we feel we need to write at a
certain level. Anxiety is very counter-productive; we get stuck, and feel less
motivated because we feel we must sound good and write at a certain level. Some
ideas on countering this anxiety.
Do the easy,
pleasurable parts first to build confidence and motivation.
- Write out of order if you must; you do not need to
begin with the introduction.
- Do the easy parts; reduce anxiety.
- Make writing as
pleasurable as you can when you begin each session. That way you are likely to
stay at it longer, which means you produce more, and that builds confidence ….
it’s a very productive positive reinforcement. For example, if the methods
section is fun and easy for you to write, start there. This builds your
confidence, gets you into the flow of writing, and then you can move on to
other parts.
Give yourself
permission to write what and how you like.
Acknowledge and embrace limitations; set your
intentions to deal with the problems later. This helps you generate material more easily. As Prof. Azzam put it, “There is no way I am going to
write perfectly so I just ‘talk’ to myself; it’s a written narration of what’s
going on in my head, what I want to say."
Write first
– edit later. Prof Azzam shared a
study by Mike Rose at UCLA which compared the creativity and productivity of
those who edited as they wrote against those who only edited at the end. He
found that the latter group’s writing productivity was better.
Here
are some tips on how to avoid breaking the thinking-writing flow:
- Do not interrupt
your process of generating material to go back over a section, paragraph, or
sentence to “fix” anything. When you’re stuck, too attached, or feel you have
to nail this paragraph down – move away and write something else. In fact, by
doing something else one is likely to trigger other others that might actually
help with the section one was stuck with.
- Keep editing for
“down” times, when you’re too tired to focus on creating material, but you can
re-read and fix grammatical or content glitches. Prof Azzam shared that he
tries to write for publication in the summer when he knows he has time for
generating material, and then spends the academic year, when he’s busy
teaching, editing his work and responding to reviewer comments.
Understand
the necessity of slow movement and mess as groundwork for productivity.
We
become discouraged if we move slowly and are not so productive in some parts of
our writing. Being discouraged – leads to frustration – frustration takes away
energy – and lack of energy depletes motivation. And so the writing peters out.
But, change the way you think and you will change the effect on your writing. The
slow and messy parts are all part of building a
foundation of thinking and writing so that further along, you work faster and
better. Again, paying attention to the patterns of your writing process will
help you remember this and prevent you from feeling demotivated when writing
slows down. Trust that you will gather momentum and accelerate if you can shift
your thinking to understanding and accepting this process.
Have
a ready-to-hand “parking place” for ideas to prevent writing flow disruptions.
When
writing, we often get good ideas that are related but not essential at that
very moment. We are tempted to break the flow and go look things up, and find
ourselves suddenly off in a tangent.
Even
if things that occur to you are relevant, you have better control of time and mental energy if you jot them down in a separate document to come back to and deal with later. This way, you maintain control of
your writing process and can keep building momentum in your writing. Also, you
avoid fragmenting your thought process, which also aids in building and
maintaining your energy for writing.
