When you write on your thesis, do ideas stream into your head so fast you can hardly record them? Or do you stare at a blank page and, out of pure desperation, peck out any words that come to mind? If you're like most students, you don't know how to start when you sit down to write. You don't know how to generate ideas or organize them. So you may be tempted to use another thesis as a "model," substituting your own information but essentially imitating the writing of another student. This results in your thesis being as dull as the one you modeled. But more importantly, it deadens your creative instincts and makes writing your thesis pure drudgery. Not knowing how to begin or how to write your own ideas is a sure way to bring on writer's block.
What you need when you begin writing is a strategy for generating ideas and getting those ideas from your subconscious to your conscious mind and to the page. Professional writers use such strategies, but you probably never learned them because you didn't plan to become a writer.
In this issue of Thesis News we describe two such strategies that can get you going. We'll show you how to generate ideas and insights that can make your thesis interesting and enjoyable to read. And we'll tell you how to organize and elaborate those ideas, and refine them by rewriting--in short, how to write with ease and skill.
Howard and Barton (1986), developed a system for writing things down as you think things up. Their system is premised on the fact that no writers have their ideas fully formed when they start writing. Rather, you have to write, incubate, and rewrite in such a way that your writing jumpstarts your thinking and your thinking fuels your writing. Their system involves generating more ideas than you can possibly use and then selecting, prioritizing, and sequencing them to form a first draft (see Writing Your Mind.).
Reviewing your thinking might mean going back to the idea-generating stage and re-clustering to form new associations. Reconceptualizing involves assessing your draft to make sure your thoughts still fit neatly and logically, and looking for new relationships among your ideas. Retyping the material means starting with a blank screen and re-inputting the entire draft. It's work, but in retyping, you'll find better ways of expressing and organizing your thoughts.
A crucial point made by Howard and Barton is that rewriting is different from editing. In rewriting, you review all your ideas, decide which to keep and which to discard, and reconsider the relationships between ideas and their organization. Editing takes place after rewriting, just before submitting the paper for your advisor's review, and is simply a reexamination and revision of punctuation, spelling, and phrasing. Editing before rewriting is like polishing an apple with a rotten core. Students spend far too much time editing their drafts and not enough time rewriting them.
You may think you don't have time to systematically generate ideas, to review, reconceptualize, and retype--that the best you can do is submit a spell-checked draft by your deadline. It's certainly true that generating and organizing ideas takes more time than imitating another student's thesis or simply writing mush. But without this effort, your writing will be conceptually flawed in ways your advisor will inevitably spot. You will prove once again the old saw, "There's never time to do it right, but always time to do it over."
How to Get Started When You Sit Down to Write is extracted from Thesis News No. 6-1994, published December 1994. Other articles appearing in this issue included:
Return to ASGS home page.