You Are Not a Bad Writer: Normalizing New Writing Experiences
This blog is a repost. It was originally published on APU’s Graduate Writing Blog in February 2020.
Here is a typical Writing Center scenario with doctoral students: Over several weeks, I work with a doctoral student as they write a dissertation chapter. We work on idea development and organization, conceptual transitions, and sentence clarity as well as make sure the manuscript follows APA style. The doctoral student submits the chapter to their dissertation chair. A few weeks later, the doctoral student returns to the Writing Center with the following comments from their chair: they need to “flesh out” ideas, re-organize their chapter’s introduction, change several unclear sentences (which the chair highlighted for the student’s convenience), and pay more attention to their APA style (the chair also highlighted all the APA mistakes they found in the manuscript). After showing me these comments, the doctoral student concludes that they must just be a “bad writer.”
Does this experience sound like one you’ve had? Many doctoral students interpret their struggles with revision, editorial choice, and unfamiliar conventions to mean they are “bad writers.” As a doctoral student, you understand that writing is a process, but you are just now discovering how long that process can take. You need a new baseline for your writing experiences. Hearing about others’ experiences can help create that new baseline.
YOU ARE NOT A “BAD WRITER” BECAUSE YOUR WRITING DOES NOT COME OUT PERFECT THE FIRST TIME.
Writing is not just a way to communicate with others; it is also a first step for writers to clarify their ideas. For example, when I worked with a nursing MA student on a policy paper, she wasn’t sure if she needed to go into a history of the California assembly health bill she was analyzing. I encouraged her to go ahead and write it—true, she may not use all of it in her paper, but it sounded like she wouldn’t know until she wrote that section for herself. I assured her it was not a waste of her time because it sounded like she needed to clarify this history for herself. The next time we met, she had decided to take her paper in a new direction. Because she took the time to write out that history, she had discovered connections more relevant to the purpose of her paper.
Yet I have encountered many graduate students, doctoral students among them, who don’t allow their writing to be exploratory. One doctoral student I worked with commented that his program mentors told him his papers were not “doctoral enough” (more on that phrase later in this post). After talking to him, I discovered that he only spent about a week on his seminar papers, wrote his papers top to bottom, and turned in the second draft at best. He did not see his writing as part of his discovery process. This doctoral student was surprised to find out that I usually write my introduction last, and I often cut large chunks of writing in the revision process because that writing was exploratory. Writing is not just a way to communicate ideas but also a way to make our own ideas clear to ourselves.
Even when a concept might be clear to you, the higher stakes of doctoral writing means a more critical audience, which means you will need to revise your writing often. For example, my article that appeared in Asian Music took me three years to write. First, I wrote a conference paper for a regional conference in February 2015. Then, based on three rounds of comments from my dissertation committee, I expanded it into a dissertation chapter, which I finished in August 2015. After I graduated, I revised that chapter into a journal article, which I submitted to Asian Music in June 2016. Before the journal would publish it, I had to make additional substantial revisions based on comments from two anonymous reviewers and the journal editor as well as review copy editor comments, article proofs, and diacritical revisions before publication in July 2017. All three iterations had different audiences, so the conceptual framework changed slightly between them even though the material under consideration remained the same.
Exploratory writing and revising is a normal process. It does not necessarily indicate you are a “bad writer” or did something wrong. Likewise, changing how you conceptualize your material depending on purpose and audience is completely normal. Writing is so much more productive when it does not come out perfect the first time.
YOU ARE NOT A “BAD WRITER” BECAUSE YOU ARE STILL PLAGUED BY POOR WRITING CHOICES.
Many dissertation committees are very product-oriented, and rightly so. Your dissertation will be uploaded to ProQuest Dissertation and Theses database, to which all research libraries subscribe. Consequently, your dissertation committee members may give you ample editorial comments. It is easy to become overwhelmed with this detailed feedback. Many doctoral students have interpreted such comments to mean that their writing does not “sound academic” and come to the Writing Center unsure about what steps to take next.
First of all, to “sound academic” is not a compliment. Academic writing can be thick to a fault. In his work The Sense of Style, Steven Pinker outlines several bad habits of academic writers, but his discussion can be summarized as follows: if writing “sounds academic,” then the writer is self-absorbed at best or unwilling to let their ideas be critiqued at worst. Instead of worrying about your writing not “sounding academic” and risking thick prose, aim to write prose that clearly communicates your developed ideas in ways that do not confuse the reader or insult their intelligence. Your doctoral committee’s sentence-level comments aim to help you write clearly.
My own dissertation chair’s editorial comments made me aware of the following writing tendencies: I overuse “there is” and “there are” so my sentences all sound redundant; I use “this” and “these” as pronouns a lot, which makes some of my sentences vague and ambiguous, and I use lots of lists and dyads, which bogs down my writing. All of these constructions are grammatically correct; however, they are rarely the best way to convey my ideas. My writing still has those characteristics—in my first and second drafts. I use these tendencies to get ideas out of my head and down on paper, where I can develop them. When I am ready to edit my work, I start with these items. I use Microsoft Word’s “find all” tool to pinpoint them in my document; I then decide if and how I need to revise sentences with these constructions.
Editing is more about choice than correctness. Rather than seeing these choices as evidence that you are an incompetent writer, use them to get ideas out of your head and onto paper. Look for patterns in your writing and put together an editing checklist containing these items. This list will give you a starting point when you are ready to edit your work. Then learn how and when to revise those items. Be careful not to edit your work too soon—editing will do no good if your ideas are not developed first. The key is to express your ideas in the best way possible.
YOU ARE NOT A “BAD WRITER” BECAUSE YOU ARE MORE COMFORTABLE WRITING IN ONE STYLE OVER ANOTHER.
If you have a background in the humanities but are getting a doctorate in a professional field, the direct and technical nature of the writing may be something new for you. You are also writing in genres that were not part of your previous academic work, so you are learning to conceptualize and present your ideas in ways no one has asked you to do before. You may have the added challenge of reading literature on your topic across multiple disciplines with the expectation that you will synthesize and critique that discourse using the writing conventions of your own field. You may have misinterpreted your struggles as a reflection of your own writing ability. You may have feared that your writing is not “doctoral enough.”
The phrase “doctoral enough” has no meaning. Doctoral writing encompasses a wide range of genres and styles and which ones are used depends on the rhetorical situation and discipline conventions. These conventions do not apply equally to all disciplines. Let me explain. With some variation, all doctoral programs at APU write their dissertations in six chapters that follow scientific conventions: introduction, literature review, research methods, results, discussion, and conclusion. Consequently, many doctoral students are surprised to find out that I did not write my dissertation using this six-chapter format. Ethnography is the primary research method ethnomusicologists use, so instead, I wrote my dissertation as integrated prose. I still engaged with my discipline’s discourse (literature review), described how I collected data (methods), talked about my findings (results) and what they meant (discussion), and discussed the significance of my work (conclusion). However, the scientific format is not conducive to presenting the process or findings of ethnography, so I did not use it. Additionally, ethnomusicology uses Chicago style, primarily author-date, not APA style. If I had turned in my work in APA style or the scientific format, then my committee would have deemed my work “not doctoral enough” and denied me my doctorate (or at least refused to read my work) because I would not have formulated and presented my ideas as an ethnomusicologist.
When I was hired at APU, I knew what academic moves doctoral students were expected to make, but I was not familiar with all the conventions—genre, style, or documentation—used by APU’s doctoral programs. I worked as the doctoral coach for over a year before I understood why programs at APU use the six-chapter format, grasped new genre forms, and learned the basics of APA style. I spent time reverse-outlining the components of dissertations, capstone papers, or doctoral projects from APU’s doctoral programs. I read the APA Manual and APA Style Blog (and I still do). I asked doctoral students to articulate their field conventions for me (e.g. what is your understanding of the differences between an abstract and an executive summary? What components are in a problem statement for your field?). Asking questions about genre in a session not only helped me understand the conventions of these fields but also helped these doctoral students move away from thinking only about their content to thinking about the conventions they were using to convey them (and then evaluate how well they were using them). So rather than worrying whether or not you are a “bad writer,” you can aim to be a writer who is always learning about the genre, style, and documentation conventions used in your profession.
As a disclaimer, I talk about my own writing processes not because they are the best but because they are the processes I know the best. Hopefully, hearing about a few of my writing experiences has given you some new perspectives on your own writing experiences. You can move forward knowing some characteristics of good writers:
Good writers use exploratory writing and revision to clarify their ideas both for themselves and their audiences.
Good writers understand that editing is more about choice than correctness.
Good writers are often more comfortable producing one kind of writing over another, but they know how to learn other genres and conventions.
