General writing tips - Student Services

 Source: http://www.uq.edu.au/student-services/learning/general-writing-tips

General writing tips

The following tips are aimed at helping you master the difficult craft of scholarly writing.

Write your work up as you go

Don’t wait until you have finished analysing all your data. Why?

Writing at the PhD/MPhil level is expected to be of a standard that
could be published in internationally recognised scholarly journals.
Writing at this level can be likened to a craft and, like crafts such as
painting and sculpture, it takes time and reflective effort to learn
the “tricks of the trade” and to develop competency, let alone mastery.
This time is best spread out over the length of your degree rather than
squeezed in at the end where it will lead to a lot of avoidable stress. …
Not that there won’t be other things to stress about, but why add to
these?



Rough notes quickly become meaningless if not written up properly.
This means that if you leave writing up until the end, you may have to
redo a lot of work because you won’t be able to understand, let alone
write from, your rough notes.



Writing things up properly helps you to “debug” your thinking. Human
thinking is notoriously “fuzzy”. Consequently, it is often only when you
start to write things up carefully that you will discover “holes” in
your reasoning or further things you need to consider. Obviously, it is
better to find these problems earlier rather than later.

Learn from others

To learn from the writing of others (and only imitate writers you
actually like reading!), you need to learn to read for structure and not
just content. How do good writers introduce and link ideas? How do they
structure their arguments? How do they indicate their level of
confidence in the conclusions they draw from their evidence? What sorts
of questions do they address in different sections? It is not plagiarism
to use stock standard phrases like, “These results suggest that …”, or
“A second approach to addressing the problem of X is to do Y”, so it is
okay to collect such phrasings for use in your own writing.



Thus an abstract provides a brief summary of the entire study, which (ideally) answers the following five questions:

• What did you do?
• Why was it worth doing?
• How did you do it?
• What were the key results?
• What are the implications or significance of your results?

Example analysis of an abstract







Example analysis of a body paragraph

Using tables and figures effectively

Although the key principles are not very complicated, tables and
figures are often not as well integrated into a piece of writing, as
well explained, or as well designed as they could be. To learn what the
key things you should be paying attention to are, download our notes on "Incorporating Tables and Figures Effectively Into Your Writing."

Ask for feedback

All writers can benefit from feedback on their writing. To get the most out of this:

• don’t just ask someone to “check it for you” (apart from anything
  else, this may come across as you asking them to do your work for you).
  Rather, ask for something specific such as, “Do you think the structure
  is okay?” “Are my explanations clear?” “Is the argument in section 3
  convincing enough?” “Do you think I need more supporting data in section
  2.4.”
• In particular, if you give someone a rough draft to check if your
  basic structure is okay, make sure that the reader knows that this is
  what you want and that you know it still needs a lot more polishing but
  that you aren’t worryied about that at this stage.
• Students for whom English is a second language may find their
  supervisors focussing more on English errors than on more important
  stylistic, structural or analytical issues because the English errors
  are more obvious and easier to deal with. Consequently, such students
  may need to encourage their supervisor to ignore the English issues and
  focus on issues that are of more concern to the student.

Edit your work

Checking and developing structure. One aspect of editing is to ensure
that there is a logical flow of ideas in your writing. Some form of
outline, either developed in the planning stages or after you’ve put
some ideas down to see what you’ve got, can help with this. One form
such an outline might take is a flow chart of main ideas or as a list of questions each paragraph has to introduce and answer (see following examples).

Example flowchart of main ideas to check for a logical flow







Example of seeing paragraphs as answering a logical sequence of questions

Are you explaining things clearly or enough? You will be better able
to determine if your writing and explanations are clear if you put it
aside for a few days and then come back to it. By doing this, you will
start to forget what you were thinking when you wrote what you wrote and
so will be able to see your writing more as another reader would.

Proofreading

This is the part of editing that looks at correcting typos and errors
in punctuation and grammar. Proofreading requires close, careful
reading, and as such is best done with a paper copy rather than on
screen (of course, while reviewing your work on screen, you can and will
pick up some errors). It is also best done by reading out aloud (even
if only in your head), as speaking speed is much slower than normal
reading speed, and reading out aloud requires every word to be read.
When doing this, try to read in an interesting way (i.e. as though you
were reading to an audience) and listen for when you pause as this will
help you identify where commas and full stops should and shouldn’t go.
Also listen for sentences that sound odd, incomplete, or are awkward to
say, as these things generally indicate grammatical problems.



Students for whom English is not their first language may need to
seek the help of a proofreader to improve their written expression to
the required level. However, such assistance is best sought after all
other issues have been addressed, as there’s not much point in paying
for proofreading if your supervisor then recommends significant
revisions.

Learn how to deal with “writer’s block”

If the cause is:

So many ideas to coordinate that it’s hard to work out what order to put them in

Try mind mapping
your ideas since in a mind map you don’t have to worry about order,
only what the themes are. Once you have your mind map, then you may be
able to work out a logical order.

Not being able to come up with the perfect way to say something

Don’t worry about achieving perfection on a first draft. Write
sketchy dot points if that’s all you can do. It’s easier to revise than
to create, so getting anything down, even if only dot points or
something like “Discuss Bloggs’ ideas about X”, is a good starting
point. It is known from Beethoven’s sketch books that it took him 20
attempts to get his famous, Daa naa naa naa, Daa naa naa naa, just
right. The point being that getting things just right can take a lot of
tinkering, and just getting something down gives you something to work
on: “Okay, why I aren’t I happy with this? Ahh, I need to explain that
more, so maybe if I say …, that will improve things. … Okay, still
doesn’t seem quite right, what’s the problem now? … Oh, that idea
doesn’t link to that one. Perhaps if I add … that will help. … … … Ahh,
finally, I think that works really well now.”



A similar idea is that of “free writing”,
where you just write whatever of relevance pops into your head, not
worrying about grammar, punctuation, writing in complete sentences or
even logical flow.

Not really knowing what you want to say

Try explaining verbally what you want to say to someone else or to
yourself (you might tape what you say), or explain to someone else or
yourself why you are having problems. If all else fails, it might help
to take a break from writing for a few days to see if “clearing your
head” can help you get a fresh perspective on how to say what you want
to say.



General writing tips - Student Services - The University of Queensland, Australia