Overcoming the fear of academic writing

so i received an email today that describes a very common situation it said i have a problem in my phd i don't write before i start writing i think i will write but then when i open microsoft word i feel lost and i may write a sentence and after that i just can't continue how can i overcome this now a lot of people experience this fear of writing and some people think that it's just the nature of writing that it's inherently uh stressful and inherently difficult and that you just have to kind of suffer your way through just like a lot of people think the same thing of a phd in in general but i don't think this is true i don't think that writing is inherently stressful yes it's difficult but difficult things aren't stressful if you know that you have the skills to cope with the challenge now this applies to pretty much everything so if i were to find myself suddenly piloting a plane which i had to land in bad weather i would be absolutely terrified and with good reason because i've never flown a plane before but it's not the situation that's terrifying because if you took a pilot with years of experience and training then they might actually enjoy it because the bad weather means their day is a little bit more interesting than it usually would be so the only real difference between a terrifying situation and an enjoyable challenge is your level of skill in relation to the challenge or the difficult difficult task so how can you build your skill and your confidence in academic writing so for somebody who's completely stuck and terrified of writing we want to first of all just simplify so when you think about the entire thesis or even a whole chapter or paper it can be overwhelming because you have so many different ideas in your head there's so much that you could include and there are so many different ways that you could put it all together and then you add in the emotional factor and the stress and the importance of the thesis being this thing that's going to determine whether or not you get your phd and the massive weight upon it you know we want to simplify and bring that down a little bit so that you can actually um you can actually make progress right so let's just focus on a small part to start with so what i'd like you to try is to describe a situation or a set of circumstances that gives rise to a problem or a question so since we're in the middle of a global pandemic i'll use that as an example and i'll start with just a very general statement to describe the situation so you could say since the coronavirus pandemic began in late 2019 and early 2020 there's there have been severe impacts on almost every aspect of society right so really really general but it kind of encapsulates something about that whole situation now to support this general statement i can give some examples so i could write about the human impact and things like mortality rates or lasting health effects or i could write about economic impacts but i want to keep it fairly brief here because it's just a general introduction and also because in this particular example these are things that most people know about anyway but the key is that any statements that i make to back up that opening sentence must serve as examples of the impacts on society because that's what i've set up in that first sentence so i said there have been severe impacts on every aspect of society so that's what i need to provide evidence for now the mistake that i often see is that people cram in information so any quotes that they find um just to kind of fit in extra citations even if the information is kind of kind of random but if you can filter your knowledge and the information that you have and make sure that you're only including what is relevant to the point that you want to make then you're already ahead of most other writers this is a really important really important skill is to have one statement or one simple thing that you're trying to say and then back that up with information that supports that specific point and if it doesn't fit then either find another way to set it up or just leave that information out or include it somewhere somewhere later now within that opening sentence we have a really simple structure so we have a cause which is the pandemic and then we have effects of that cause we have things that follow on from it and we can use that principle of cause and effect to build out a larger structure so we could say in response governments around the world have attempted to slow the spread of the virus through travel restrictions quarantines and lockdowns as well as enforcing other measures such as mask wearing and social distancing now here we have responses to the situation so we have a situation or an event which is a cause of some other effects or problems and then people respond to these effects or problems in various different ways so after setting up the real world responses then you can write about academic responses to these government interventions so what academic questions have been raised about the effects or effectiveness of these interventions what's been done what hasn't been done and then you can hopefully see how this can lead towards your own research question so when you structure writing in this way everything is a consequence of or a response to whatever came before in your writing so one thing leads to another and then it becomes really easy to follow and you can apply this principle of structure to the whole thesis but to keep things simple i would say just start with this as an exercise so think about a situation and its effects and then how people have responded to it and that should give you a foundation to start with and then you can build from there so try it out and let me know how it goes in the comments below also if you have any questions if anything is unclear and also you can check out my video on how to write your phd thesis without going insane which covers this idea of structure in a bit more detail with a few more with a few more examples and if you like this video please give it a thumbs up because that helps other people to find it and if you haven't done so already hit subscribe and the notification bell below um so that you don't miss out on future videos and if you want a bit more in-depth guidance then check out my membership site at www.phd.academy i'll put a link in the description below and that's it from me and i'll see you next time

Channel: James Hayton PhD

Views: 2,287

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: j89bBdXAJEY

Length: 8min 13sec (493 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021