Enrolling in a PhD course doesn’t necessarily require you to be a polished researcher. Instead, the whole research tenure expects you to be an extraordinary candidate. From being a good criticizer of the existing literature to an exemplary writer for your research, you have to be well acknowledged with all the areas constituting your research. While you have ample of time to read and criticise the literature, conduct the study, draw a conclusion, and write it down, researchers still fail to complete the whole process in the limited timeframe. Albeit, the process of researching and analysing the data takes a toll on the researcher for years, penning down all those years is not an easy job either.
Writing, as said, is a reliable tool to tell people about the whole process and show them the hard work of your research on those papers. Whether it is about fictional writing or academic writing, the process of writing requires continuous work from the writer’s end. Every writer adopts different strategies to write and produce more productive work, but almost all of them chose to procrastinate and work when inspiration hits them. Waiting for inspiration to help them write is not the best choice they should make, as everyone should work until the work turns into the impulse.
While procrastination is a writer’s friend, most of the writers feel guilty for not writing enough and not putting enough efforts into the writing process. As a result, they use the most unproductive and wasteful strategy of binge writing. Binge writing is a good thing, as long as you can produce useful writing, not guilt-trip writing. What binge writers do is delay the work for an entire week and then devote a whole Saturday to write. But ask yourself, would it help? Would writing an entire day brings out the ideas that you have been craving for the whole week? No, it wouldn’t. It might make your writing job easier, and your heart may feel better for all those times you didn’t write, but it inevitably won’t produce the best outcome for the work.
The only way to be a better writer is to make a schedule and stick to it. Devote an hour to writing every day to produce more significant results. When an academic writer chooses to do binge writing, he fails on incorporating all the great ideas and works; he had used in his research. But when he decides to write every day, he uses all his ability in that time until his brain gives up doing the same job. The reason one should plan to write every day instead of doing binge writing is that the brain gets tired of doing the same thing and you do not get better ideas to write.
Apart from making a schedule, you should completely adhere to it. A writer should ruthlessly defend his writing time. Your PhD degree is important, and you have to complete the writing process in time to edit, proofread, and submit the document. Thus, you have to say no to the people intruding your writing schedule to write. Even though a pen and paper or digital technology help you write a lot, the dedication and determination to complete it is the real motivation. It is hard to write when you are wrapped in your blanket and unclear with the goal of your writing.
The pro tip is to write just for an hour a day but giving your all in it. Don’t use the time to check your emails, read the latest journals, or browse the internet. Just write profoundly to be a better writer!
