How to develop ideas and start building an argument

How to link ideas in your academic writing?

In this video I explain how to provide a setup or context for the information you present and how that can help you to link ideas together.

What do you do when you face a block in your writing?

Last time, I mentioned how I always try to keep working on a section of writing until it’s done. I don’t switch to working on something else if I face a problem, I stick with it until I find a solution.

So in this video I’m going to introduce some of the ways I go about this kind of problem-solving in writing.

Writing is all about decision making! Avoiding decisions by "just writing" only makes it more difficult in the long-term. But making just one decision often makes subsequent decisions (and editing your work) much easier

Confidence cannot not come from certainty of success. If it did, then the slightest doubt would crush it.

Real, profound, unshakeable confidence comes from accepting the risk, accepting that things might not work out the way you want them to, but trusting absolutely in your ability to cope with whatever happens.

How can you get words down and finish chapters, while also taking care over phrasing and details? Can we achieve both?

Academic writing is difficult, but just because something is difficult that doesn’t mean you have to suffer. The challenge of writing can actually be quite enjoyable, if you approach it the right way…

Why do so many PhD students find thesis writing so stressful, and what can we do about it? In this video I go through some of the main causes of stress, the standard advice (and why it makes things worse) and 5 key strategies to make the writing process easier.

Writing is an essential skill for any PhD student or academic, but it's also a huge source of stress. This is partly due to the scale and complexity of the task, but also due to a general lack of training in writing.

Many of the most common pieces of advice (like, "just get words down and sort it out later") simply do not work. In this lecture given at the University of Tübingen in October 2022 I explain some key principles of structure and process that can be applied to any project.

Impostor syndrome is that insidious feeling that you aren’t good enough or that you don’t belong and that you’re going to be “found out”.

And if you’re afraid of being found out, you’re likely to avoid taking risks or making mistakes. That then affects your ability to do research or to improve your skills, so effectively the part of you that feels like an impostor finds a way to make your fears come true.

Many people think that the goal of a PhD is to become an “independent researcher”. While there’s some truth to this, it does not mean you should be trying to do everything alone.

Understanding structure in academic writing can save you a huge amount of time

One of the reasons why writing is so difficult is that at every point in your writing there’s a vast range of possibilities in terms of subject matter, in terms of structure, in terms of style, sentence construction and word choice—all of which require decisions

It’s clearly a problem if your inner critic is stops you from writing anything at all, but the problem is not that you have an inner critic, but that it is badly trained. Perhaps, then, it is better to think about how to train your inner critic to give useful feedback rather than turning it off completely.

It can feel like you’re just writing an overview of your research twice under different headings, so what do you put in the introduction and what do you put in the conclusion?