Improved Writing Technique

Many students know their stuff, they can apply what they have learnt in their classes, they understand the concepts and they have extended their studies to become experts in their field. These same hard working people, when it comes time to sit down and write, go blank. They know their subject but they are not the kind of thinker that processes information in words on paper. For these people here is some advice.

Don’t try to process. Don’t even try to make sense of what you are about to write. Choose a word or words relevant to your study, nuclear physics for example and then just write whatever comes to mind around these two words, it doesn’t have to make sense. The idea is that you stop thinking like an engineer or mathematician and free your mind to blat out what you know. The first copy won’t be pretty but it will give you a place to begin. Now highlight some of the words within your nonsensical text that you think are particularly relevant. Do the same exercise with these words. Eventually you will have the information you need on paper.

The next step is to turn it into something that makes sense. Create sub-headings of each of the words you highlighted and then glean all your written content relevant to that word (s) and put the content under that appropriate heading. Read through what you have and form a hypothesis.  Do it in your mind first and then write what you are thinking, it doesn’t have to sound sexy, ‘Nuclear physics is relevant to ecology because…’ Short, sweet and simple. Your hypothesis will work because it is based upon what you have written. Now read through what you have to begin making some sense of it and when you’re done you may find the conclusion writes itself!