Rule 7: Write one new paragraph

In the previous rule I explained why daily distributed sessions might do the trick and increase your overall writing productivity. To finish the PhD thesis in a timely manner, you also need to set a writing goal for your everyday work. This rule will provide you with an indication on when you can stop your session(s) and call it a day, without feeling afterwards that you haven’t done enough. The question of “What is the daily goal?” has to do with the choice of a particular threshold. This threshold is exactly the minimum required amount of writing that concludes a day’s work (short-term goal) and which at the same time, is enough for the completion of the PhD thesis if kept on a constant, daily basis (long-term goal). In other words, you have to define what good enough is for you. I will provide my own empirical daily goal, but first I have to introduce a new principle. I call this principle “basic cable,” and I view it as equally important as the principle of diversity is with regard to the choice of work environments (see Rule 5). The inspiration for its name came from the comedy special titled “Oh My God,” performed by the renowned American comedian Louis C.K. (Louis 2013). In particular, there is a scene in the show in which Louis talks about what do you get with living a normal, basic life. He mentions examples of things that we take for granted and never seriously think of as important in our lives. These things are an essential part of our existence, but we don’t give them attention. I think there is a lesson to take from this.

Let me give you a funny, illustrative example. You are thinking of moving into a new house. The first things to check should not be if there is a super fast WiFi internet connection or if the house has a nice view and heating floors. Your first questions should be something like: “Does the house have the basic stuff required for living? Does it have a roof to keep the weather elements at bay? Is there a kitchen with the essential appliances (e.g. fridge, sink) installed? Does it have a functioning toilet?” You shouldn’t be asking for HDTV but rather if basic cable is provided (the standard, least expensive television subscription service). Start small. Set your expectations low on what you can have or the things that you can achieve, especially in the short term. When these expectations are satisfied and the smaller tasks completed, only then turn your attention to more complex, long-term attainments. It is good to know about this. People tend to always go for the larger prizes or set too much difficult goals from the beginning, forgetting how nice it feels when we fulfill our minimal needs and accomplish our everyday small tasks (which are not necessarily easy). Setting small objectives and expectations, that’s what the principle of basic cable is all about.

A more realistic example, in which the aforementioned principle is directly applied, involves the widely used app Duolingo, also termed “The world’s best way to learn a language.” Many people want to learn a new language, but they are discouraged due to the seemingly impossible task. To address this, Duolingo suggests that you do one single session every day, which can take up to 15 minutes of your time on average. A small sacrifice for a greater good! This is exactly the application of the basic cable principle along with a promise of its potential impact: a small task, done repeatedly every single day, can have a remarkable positive effect on a long term goal, no matter how impossible the goal might seem at first. Of course nobody will fully learn a language using Duolingo, but it is a first step towards achieving a satisfactory level of fluency, enabling communication with other people from different countries.

To write a PhD thesis is a lengthy and laborious task, and as such, it presents an excellent opportunity to apply the basic cable principle as a strategy for its completion. We have already taken care to split the writing work into multiple sessions. Now we need to define the minimum threshold which will signify a successful writing session (or day). So, per basic cable principle, we set our goal a bit low, so as to make sure we can achieve or even surpass that goal every day. I hereby advise you to set this goal to one new paragraph per day. This rule provides the guarantee that you might have been looking for. This guarantee is none other than the completion of the PhD thesis, given that the previous rules were also followed (e.g. having a time plan and a story structure) and that no external factors severely influenced your work or personal life. It’s miraculous how small achievements add up to bring about the realization of a larger objective. The progress you will be making by following this rule consistently, is staggering.

Your daily goal is now set. Write one new paragraph. But how exactly to do that? I need to clarify at this point that I do not advise you to write a finished and super-refined paragraph every day, but more like the initial draft from which you will produce the envisioned version in the future. There are two processes at work here. The first relates to the creation of a new draft paragraph (your daily goal) and the second relates to text refinement (task for another day or session). Creating the first version of a paragraph is associated with the initial PhD story structure that we discussed in Rule 3. You already had laid out some comments and notes in the chapter you are currently writing (or maybe even whole text segments). So the layout, i.e. the ideas that constitute the main argument of the chapter should mostly be there. Your day-to-day job is to formulate these ideas to separate paragraphs and connect the subsequent arguments in a cohesive manner. To expand an idea into a whole paragraph, you will have to use a bit of your imagination and creative ability. Here is what you need to do: let your thoughts about an idea flow from mind to pen (or keyboard). The subject-specific knowledge you have accumulated up to this point, relating to a particular idea, will be beneficial to this effort (see Rule 1). The diverse environments might also help (see Rule 5). This process of text generation is all about having a continuous flow. The most important thing to remember is to lay out the subsequent arguments in a way that the whole paragraph makes sense, i.e. it succeeds in the highest possible level of conceptualization. The key point has to be there. Another piece of advice: do not try to make the perfect paragraph from the first draft. Do not think about correct words and phrases, or proper syntax and grammar at this stage. The produced result will be “far from done” most of the times. But rejoice, since its existence will denote that the daily goal was achieved, and therefore that’s one successful day for you (per basic cable principle).

By writing a new draft paragraph, you accomplish your daily writing goal. Maybe that’s the only thing you are going to do on a bad day. And there are going to be such days, make no mistake about that. By setting your daily goal within grasp, you allow yourself the chance to do a bit more work on an average day. I hypothesize here that you’ve had enough with writing new scientific prose at this point (but by all means, if you feel like doing more of this type of writing, continue to do so!). The main question now is what kind of work you should do after you have written your daily new paragraph(s). Here are three suggestions: reading, normal PhD work and rewriting. How much of each of these you will do in a day (if at all), rests entirely in your hands. Having said that, I believe that you should prioritize rewriting. The reason is that your main goal during the thesis writing phase is none other than to finish the PhD thesis. And this can only be accomplished by writing and rewriting. This statement is as crucially important as it is self-evident. It is not the reading of all the papers you had in your to-read list or doing non-essential PhD work that will help you achieve your goal at this point. Nevertheless, reading and normal work also play their respective role, so they deserve a bit of more discussion.

Reading papers during your thesis writing is very important as it can directly influence the production and quality of your (re-)writing. I therefore formalized it as Rule 8. Next, doing some non-PhD-thesis-writing work can serve as a nice break from the writing routine. Nobody expects you to be done with all the practical work when entering the writing phase of your PhD. Apart from doing leftover work (e.g. related to your papers), tasks such as answering emails will still be a necessary part of your everyday PhD life. The best way to view all of this extra work is as tasks that exist to break the repetitiveness of writing rather than blocking points for your writing work. This is exactly the diversity principle we discussed in Rule 5, applied in a different setting (i.e. diverse tasks instead of places). Note that writing emails can be a good warm-up practice for your thesis writing. You should aim to write short, concise emails (Matt 2013). This requires a certain level of rewriting skill as well as the ability to compact meaning (say more with less), both of which are valuable for your thesis writing (and your life in general). My last suggestion to fill in extra work hours (sessions), is to do some rewriting. Your goal here is to make the paragraphs you have already written a little better. Therefore, your role has to change from a text producer to that of an editor. Editing your previous writings is mostly a technical task and one that you will get increasingly better the more you do it. Such a text refinement process might feel similar to normal work, and thus it can serve as a nice break from the more generative type of writing we discussed above.

Let’s now discuss in detail how you can do a paragraph rewrite. First, you need to choose a paragraph. This can be either a random one (e.g. from those you’ve recently written) or one whose context relates to a recent paper reading (see Rule 8). The goal is to write a better version of the paragraph you chose. But how to do that exactly? Well, apply the principle of basic cable yet again. Start from the basics. A paragraph is a sequence of sentences and each sentence is a sequence of words. Is there any word that could be replaced with a better synonym? Amazing improvements can be made at the single word level, so make sure you choose the right words. How about laying out the text in a way that is easier for you to read? This can be accomplished for example by separating each sentence with an empty line. Breaking up a paragraph into its constituents will allow you to check if the respective sentences are correctly ordered, clearly connected and if the paragraph’s intended meaning as a whole, is conveyed properly. Rewrite some of the sentences. Reorder them if necessary. Try to split them into smaller sentences to achieve a higher level of brevity and clarity. To finish, merge the individual sentences back into a single unit. Now you have a better paragraph.

How much effort should you put into the text refinement process? Well, this question relates to the quality of the produced prose. Speaking of quality, Robert Graves said that “There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting.” That’s a nice quote, arguing that quality can only increase with each subsequent rewrite. But that’s just not realistic. The PhD thesis comes with a deadline. Time and efficiency are priorities number one and two here. The rewriting process has to stop at some point, so when exactly should someone stop rewriting a paragraph? I believe that it all boils down to what you consider a good enough paragraph, i.e. the level of quality that you are satisfied with. As per Grave’s quote, remember that there is no best version of a paragraph. You can always refine it and re-refine it and so on. This means that you have to define a threshold which will tell you when a paragraph is good enough. Personally, I found out that after ~3-5 rewrites of each sentence, the quality was as good as I could possibly make it. Occasionally, I rewrote a paragraph up to the point where I felt that significant improvement could only be brought by a more experienced author (that responsibility fell into my supervisor’s lap). In the end, it was a combination of these two quality assessments that made me declare a paragraph as good enough. To summarize, I stopped editing a paragraph when 1) I rewrote it a couple of times and 2) it was clear to me that to make it even better, I would need the help of an external human editor.

Aim to write at least one new paragraph every day and if circumstances allow, do some rewriting as well.