Exercise 1: writing is and will be hard for PhD Students. Do you prefer to procrastinate and do you have the impression that it is not a problem to leave the writing till the end of your research? Don’t! By avoiding to write you will never develop the skills you need to write effectively and efficiently at the desired level. So write!
Exercise 2: Don’t only write for your research, no, take every opportunity to write: reports, papers, reviews, comments. Start a blog. Write for the faculty magazine. It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you write!
Exercise 3: block time in your diary to write. And keep those times! Even if you only write 20 minutes every day, 5 days a week then you will have accumulated 100 minutes per week, so 400 minutes in a month, which is almost 7 hours: a day of writing! So if you would write a couple of times a day…. Plan your writing time!
Exercise 4: make sure you get feedback; your supervisor’s feedback but also your colleagues’. Feedback will help you to revise your text. So ask for feedback!
Exercise 5: It doesn’t matter in which sequence you write. You don’t have to write in the reading order. For instance, if it would be easy for you to write about the method of research, then start with the method. Start writing about the things you know
Based on the Handbook ‘How to get a PhD’, Philips and Pugh.
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