Researchers write. Period. As a Ph.D. student, your success will be determined by your ability to write publication-quality papers. Research that hasn’t been written up might as well have never happened. Writing doesn’t happen magically. Good writing doesn’t happen in binges the week before the deadline. In this class, you will write every day. A little at a time. 200 words per day. Schedule it so that it happens.
All writing should be research related. But the genre of the writing is up to you. Since you have to write papers, anyway, my first recommendation is almost always to identify part of a paper that you can write and write it. Some ideas include the following:
- Write up a methods section for a study you have done (or even better, for a study you want to do)
- Write segments of a literature review (synthesize a set of readings about a related topic and reflect on what they tell you as a whole; what do these papers, together, suggest is an important next step for future research?)
- Write the motivation for a paper (what research topic do you think is interesting and why should a reader care?)
In this class, you will post your ongoing writing log in a file bearing your name in the “Daily Words” folder in Google Drive. Note: I highly recommend writing in a local application first and copying the text over so that you have a backup. There are advantages to keeping all of your text in one searchable file or archive. I know many academics who do this successfully via a local or private WordPress blog. This way, each entry is dated and potentially tagged. Resources can be linked. But the entire blog is searchable. There are many options; just find a method that works for you.
Daily writing is all about process, not product. In this class, your daily words will *never* be evaluated on their ‘quality,’ only that you did it. 200 words a day. No judgement. No excuses. Just write.