Box 4.5 Student Testimonial – Research Writing During a Pandemic
Full discretion, I am writing this testimony as a way to procrastinate writing for my own thesis. I will let that speak for itself. Anyway, here are my expertly-crafted decades-long researched tips (for real) of how to get yourself and your thesis writing going.
Outlines, Outlines, Outlines
Even if you’ve spent the past four months ‘reading’ and are intimately familiar with your project and your data, I’m going to take a wild guess and say you will still struggle to get started on writing. A really good way to push yourself –to visualize your work better and to actually start writing –is by making outlines. Start off by using this as a productive procrastination method, and keep making outlines. The more you attempt to provide structure and clarity for yourself, the more confident you’re going to feel to start writing. Plus, it’s always beneficial to have your thesis compartmentalized in tidy boxes (which grow less tidy as you write). You can then use these as frameworks to guide your writing process. Additionally, it helps to make mind maps and other diagrams (I’m thinking lots of arrows), and the tactile act of scribbling with a pen on paper itself really gets the brain buzzing.
Prepare Presentations, Write Abstracts, Apply to MURC
Attempting to streamline your (initial) mess of a project and organizing it in a way that it becomes presentable to others is a hefty challenge. However, it gets easier as you practice doing it more. It helps to try to write abstracts with tight word counts so you can narrow what it is exactly that your final thesis is going to address. This also forces you to be selective about the elements of your work that are the most relevant. Similarly, preparing presentations under a tight time limit helps you see the most important and engaging aspects of your project, which goes a long way in informing your writing process (and eventually the editing process).
Make Friends in Class just so You have Someone to Read Your Work
It’s safe to say that you’re going to spend much time with your topic and will become very close to it. Everything either makes entire sense to you right now or it absolutely does not. Chances are, on both accounts you’re wrong! So get someone who has no clue what your project is about to read it and tear it to shreds (or maybe you will rouse deep interest in the person and change their political beliefs forever). This is a good practice to keep engaging in throughout your eight-month-long topsy-turvy hellish writing process.
Make Sure You’re in the Right Headspace/Physical Space
Writing is hard, it’s an active exercise and you’re going to have to put in a lot of effort every time you sit down to write. So before you get on the job, make sure you’ve psyched yourself up. You are in an environment where you can focus and on the chance that you lose that focus (which is almost certainly going to happen), the environment can put you back into the groove (by force, shame or inspiration).
Respect Your Time
Sometimes study buddies are great, other times they’re not. Similar to the previous point, make conscious decisions of how you are going to occupy your time because this is a task, and hopefully it won’t always feel like a chore. When you’re in the zone, make commitments to stay in the zone and don’t write OER testimonies to get away from your work.
Breaks
I’m kidding, productive procrastination and breaks are important! Sometimes you simply must write testimonies to break from the passion project you are now beginning to despise (or take a nap, or go snowboarding, or write an award-winning play). Over the span of eight months you’ll start to know yourself a bit better. Don’t force yourself to do work when you know you can’t – this will also motivate you to put in more conscious effort when you know you can. You will start valuing the time you do have and when you do feel like actually working more, you will! It also helps to be in a space where you have the chance to go and grab a snack or a drink if you need to.
Intertwine Some Tasks
Like I said previously, I always have a pen and paper at the ready and I like to scribble and write down or draw out any random thoughts I have about my project. I’ve really enjoyed doing some parts of the thesis project simultaneously, like data collection and writing, so there is constant momentum. If I have paper to scribble on (or a boring notes app open), I can write down a few points of analysis while I read my literature.
Move Your Body!
I like high tables or standing desks or empty cardboard boxes to place on my desk so I can stand and do my work if I wish. It helps to move around and break into interpretive dances every now and again. I also like taking walks in the middle of my writing (and getting weird looks from everybody else at the library). It’s useful to keep exercising the rest of your muscles while you get into your head to flesh out your ideas and to keep the energy up so you don’t just spend eight hours hunched over, staring at your screen until you collapse.
Hit that Save Button
Nothing else sends sweet dopamine to my brain as hitting the command and S buttons on my laptop while I’m in the middle of writing and tearing my hair out and shaking my foot until it falls off. The short interval saves are going to keep you going and are also going to ensure that you don’t lose hours of work because you have 57 tabs open and you’ve been working your computer so hard that it has finally had it, and starts to spit out sparks, 1s and 0s.
Literally just Start Writing
No, but you’ll procrastinate because you’ll think you don’t know what you’re doing and nothing is making sense but when you start writing you’ll realize that you, the engineer, the curator, the cultivator of your project, in fact, do know something (or at least we can hope). This is time-old cliché advice, but you just have to rip the band-aid. Like that fish from Finding Nemo said, just keep writing (because that’s what fish do, right? It was definitely not a quote about swimming. Don’t look at me like that).
Anupriya Dasgupta, UBC Sociology Honours student, 2021-2022