Archive for: January 2007

There’s an interesting discussion over at Ask Metafilter on overcoming writer’s block and starting on a writing project. This is extremely relevant for PhD degree students, who often find themselves stuck when facing the prospect of writing a paper or thesis chapter for the first time. (The question itself concerns freelance writing, but the situation is the same).
Among the comments are some good pieces of advice:

• Brainstorm or talk things over with someone not directly involved
• Write an outline first (see my series on outline numbering)
• Try to get feedback as early as possible - even if it’s just on the outline
• Use deadlines to motivate yourself

I would add two more thoughts firstly, consider using mind-mapping to get your ideas down. Secondly, head off writer’s block by trying some of the ideas in this post on other writing projects. By trying these things during the course of your PhD you can prepare for the experience of writing your thesis and make it less painful.

Mind-mapping (where you organise your thoughts by writing them down and linking them with lines) isn’t for everyone, but it can be a useful tool when you need to organise a complex project. I’ve used them to plan projects for my honours and masters students, and when preparing papers for publication.

Mind-mapping is also an excellent way to organise material for a PhD thesis chapter. When you start writing a thesis chapter, you’ve usually got a whole bunch of ideas that need to be included, but no particular structure in mind. Mind-mapping is a very good way to impose some structure on a homogenous mass of thoughts.

Using an online tool for mind-mapping offers one great advantage over using paper and pencil - you can rearrange the items and links as much as you like until you find a layout that makes sense to you. Take a look at bubbl.us - just hit the big “Start” button to try it out. The nice thing about this app is that items are added using keyboard shortcuts. Hit Enter to add an item on the next level down, and Tab to add an item on the same level as the current one.

It seems to make the whole process flow very naturally, and you can quickly build up your map. Different colours are assigned to different levels, and the layout is tweaked as you add items to make everything fit nicely on the page. You can zoom in and out with the mouse wheel - another nice touch.

In the course of a PhD degree, there are several scenarios in which you present an idea or piece of work to your peers, who then give you some sort of feedback. Some examples:

• You submit a paper describing your work to a journal. Reviewers then read the work and send back comments
• You submit a grant application to a funding body. Again, this is read by reviewers who then give their comments
• You present your work to a group of people in the form of a seminar. At the end, the audience ask questions about the work
• You present someone else’s work to a group of people - for example, in a journal club. Questions might be asked at the end or throughout

Naturally, getting a big list of comments or questions can be disheartening. But I think it’s important to bear in mind the difference between a those arising from misunderstandings and those arising from disagreements. In all the four scenarios outlined above, my experience has been that any given question or comment is much more likely to stem from a misunderstanding than from a genuine difference of opinion.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise; in research, we are often trying to explain complicated ideas that might not have been described before. There are many opportunities for your reviewers/audience to get the wrong idea. Take comfort, then, from the fact that when your paper comes back from review with 20 comments, the vast majority (at least 80%, in my experience) arise because the reviewer hasn’t understood the work completely.

These points still need to be addressed (usually by rewriting to make the clear up any ambiguity) but this is much easier than trying to argue why you are right and the reviewer wrong. The same goes for comments on grant applications and seminar questions. Next time you’re faced with such a scenario, take a moment to decide whether you’re dealing with a difference of opinion, or just a misunderstanding, and treat the question accordingly.