Stuck with writing?
- gemmardonovan
- Jan 6, 2024
- 4 min read
One of the common themes that has come out of our 'How to write more' webinar is how people can get stuck with their writing, particularly when they have lost a bit of direction. In the webinar, we focus on the writing behaviour rather than helping with knowing 'what' and 'how' to write, and instead we suggest approaching someone with the expertise to help that specific person, like a mentor or supervisor. However, there are some generic strategies that can help, and here are five from me:
Analysing others’ writing
In Human Centred Design, there is a concept of ‘analogous inspiration’ which suggests that you can find useful ideas for your own problems, by looking for example solutions to similar problems elsewhere. No one will have published your research (otherwise it wouldn’t be research) but you can learn from other academic writers who might be from your discipline, or have used a similar methodology, or who are answering similar questions.
In The Handbook of Academic Writing: A fresh approach by Rowena Murray and Sarah Moore there is a suggested approach for analysing the work of others within your discipline so you can start to understand some of the rules and conventions that you might want to follow. You can find this in Chapter 4: Disciplinarity in academic writing, pp. 54 - 69. I would recommend continuing all the way to the end, where there is some nice reflection on academic ‘voice’.
Writing function phrases
During writing planning, it is often helpful to think about the function of a section of writing before attempting to get the words down on paper. And once you have the function, you can map this to a form of words that will help you to achieve that function. A great resource for this is the University of Manchester Academic Phrasebank. Across the top of the web page are some common academic writing functions: Introducing work, referring to sources, describing methods, reporting results, discussing findings and writing conclusions. Within each of these sections, there are some sentence ‘starters’ that help you achieve that function. There are also some general language functions common to academic writing on the left hand side of the page. This resource is great at helping you find the sentence structure you need to say what you want to say. You can find it here: https://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/
Freewriting
If you are particularly lost with your writing, and don’t know where to start, then I find freewriting to be a particularly helpful exercise. It might require an adjustment to your attitude to writing but if you can do it, then it becomes a helpful way to work through what is lurking in your subconscious and help you find the light! There is an introduction to freewriting, alongside some suggested prompts in Writing for Academic Journals by Rowena Murray, pp. 82 - 89. We always use a freewriting warm-up in our retreats, and it is a great way to gather your thoughts before a writing session.
Briefly, here are the rules:
Open up a blank document.
Set up a timer for five minutes.
Write for yourself, not for an audience.
Start writing, and keep writing, even if you have to resort to writing things like “I don’t know why I started this exercise.” Just keep going.
Do write in full sentences, but don’t worry too much about spelling, punctuation and grammar.
Give yourself a starting prompt.
At Coastal Writing, we like to start by reminding ourselves why we are writing in the first place, so why not give our starting prompt a try: “My writing project is important because…”
Outlining
One reason you might get stuck with academic writing is because you’re trying to write without a plan. At the start of any writing project, I like to take a high level view of what I’m aiming to achieve and how I think it might look. It can help you to make sure that you are focussed, and don’t waste time writing lots of text which isn’t adding to what you want to say. Of course, this plan may change over time, but having a plan (I think) is still important. You can find some directions for outlining in Writing for Academic Journals by Rowena Murray, pp. 104 - 121. And of course, producing an outline can also help you develop your writing plan.
There’s an app for that!
There are now quite a few applications to support academic writing being released and improved. Whilst they won’t help you with doing your research, or formulating your ideas, they can very much help with communicating the ideas you already have, and getting them down in a written form which can be shared.
Mushtaq Bilal has been a leader in this space, and offers a regular webinar which is great, a full apps guide, and also uses social media to offer bitesize bits of advice. Some apps we think are particularly worth considering to support writing (as opposed to literature searching and reading which is a focus of many of these apps) are:
AudioPen
If you really struggle with writing, and talking is more your thing, AudioPen takes an audio recording and not only transcribes it, but condenses it into proper prose. It can also translate if English is not your first language. You can find it here if you want to check it out: https://audiopen.ai/
PaperPal
If you’ve tried Grammarly, PaperPal is similar, but the difference is that the language model has been trained on academic texts. Again, if English is not your first language, it can also translate into English from other languages. Check it out here: https://paperpal.com/
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