“Stay in the chair.” It’s one of the mantras used within writing groups at UCSD in order encourage progress on long writing projects. Below are some tips for staying in the chair. The list is broken down by the type of issue impeding focus too—super nifty.
Truthfully, this is one of the most helpful lists I’ve been given for productivity in graduate school.
Below are some writing tips from a graduate writing retreat hosted by UC San Diego’s Teaching + Learning Commons. These tips are centered around how to overcome resistance to writing when you find yourself doing (or thinking about doing) avoidance behaviors.
As all of us in academia know, the writing process rarely begins with a blank Word document titled, “rough draft.” It begins with an idea, notes jotted into a notebook, a lot of (annotated) reading, study design, data collection, and a whole host of other steps before the aforementioned Word document even exists. Large-scale writing projects can be daunting, not only because they require a lot of hard work, but because organizing oneself can be challenging.
Before UCSD went fully remote, I attended a graduate writing retreat to make progress on my qualifying paper. The writing retreat, hosted by the Teaching + Learning Commons (TLC), is meant for those with large writing projects (e.g. qualifying papers, dissertations, etc.). It was my first time attending a writing retreat. I expected attendees to spend the entire time quietly working, but the TLC structured the time such that students first learned how to efficiently work. Below is one of the most-helpful handouts that they gave to us.