Hi There's a lot of reasons to write.
You are required to write one or two theses during your graduate student career: a PhD and maybe an MS, depending on your department.
Writing a lot more than that gives you practice.
Academia runs on publish-or-perish. In most fields and schools, this starts in earnest when you become a professor, but most graduate students in our lab publish before they graduate. Publishing and distributing papers is good politics and good publicity.
Writing down your ideas is the best way to debug them. Usually you will find that what seemed perfectly clear in your head is in fact an incoherent mess on paper.
If your work is to benefit anyone other than yourself, you must communicate it. This is a basic responsibility of research. If you write well more people will read your work!
AI is too hard to do by yourself. You need constant feedback from other people. Comments on your papers are one of the most important forms of that.
Anything worth doing is worth doing well.
Read books about how to write. Strunk and White's Elements of Style gives the basic dos and don'ts. Claire Cook's The MLA's Line By Line (Houghton Mifflin) is about editing at the sentence level. Jacques Barzun's Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers (Harper and Row, 1985) is about composition.
When writing a paper, read books that are well-written, thinking in background mode about the syntactic mechanics. You'll find yourself absorbing the author's style.
Learning to write well requires doing a lot of it, over a period of years, and getting and taking seriously criticism of what you've written. There's no way to get dramatically better at it quickly.
Writing is sometimes painful, and it can seem a distraction from doing the ``real'' work. But as you get better at it, it goes faster, and if you approach it as a craft, you can get a lot of enjoyment out of the process for its own sake.
You will certainly suffer from writer's block at some point. Writer's block has many sources and no sure cure. Perfectionism can lead to writer's block: whatever you start to write seems not good enough. Realize that writing is a debugging process. Write something sloppy first and go back and fix it up. Starting sloppy gets the ideas out and gets you into the flow. If you ``can't'' write text, write an outline. Make it more and more detailed until it's easy to write the subsubsubsections. If you find it really hard to be sloppy, try turning the contrast knob on your terminal all the way down so you can't see what you are writing. Type whatever comes into your head, even if it seems like garbage. After you've got a lot of text out, turn the knob back up and edit what you've written into something sensible.
Seeking CD / Trans
Is it your profile? Change your privacy settings to alter what details are showing here.
| Gender | Male | |
| Age | 29 | |
| Location | USA, Wisconsin, Fairchild | |
| 🌈 Sexuality | Gay | |
