Why is PhD thesis writing so stressful? And what can we do about it?

Why do so many PhD students find thesis writing so stressful, and what can we do about it?

When you’ve done so much work, when you’ve invested so much time and energy, when you’ve done all that research, it should feel like the hard part is behind you and you just have to push for the finish line, but, for many, the writing can feel like an impossible challenge.

There are several obvious reasons why you might find writing your PhD thesis stressful.

First is the sheer scale of the task, with it most likely being the longest single document you’ve ever had to write.

It also comes with a huge amount of pressure, because everything you’ve been working towards for the last few years comes down to that one document. Add to this the fact that many PhD students have to write in a second language and it’s not surprising that a lot of people feel pressure.

Pressure can sometimes help with motivation, but when there’s a lot of emotional investment in the outcome it can easily have the opposite effect.

If you then face difficulties in your writing—if you’re stuck for where to start or what to say next, or if you struggle to finish sections or to write to the required standard, or if it just seems like there’s too much potential material to include—it just adds to the pressure and the stress, to the point where you can feel anxiety and panic every time you sit down to write.

So what can we do to make it easier?

The most common advice in this situation goes something like this;

“Don’t think, just get words down on the page. Don’t worry about details or structure, just put all your ideas down as quickly as possible in the first draft to give yourself something to work with, then you can edit it later”

In the short term this can make you feel better, because you can start filling pages and you get a sense of progress, but in the long term it causes far more problems than it solves.

One problem is that the more you write this way, just getting words down without thinking, the harder it gets to edit. If you struggle to edit 100 words, how on earth are you going to edit tens of thousands?

But perhaps the most damaging effect of this approach is that it trains a habit of avoidance.

When faced with a problem and you feel a bit of discomfort, just writing, or switching to writing about something else provides temporary stress relief.

But all you’re doing is saving up those problems and decisions for later, when you have less time and even more pressure.

But what makes this situation even worse and even more stressful is that you’ve trained yourself to run away from problems. So when you come back to edit your first draft, you’ll want to keep on just writing your way through because it’s been hard-wired into your brain.

And so, ultimately, this approach destroys your confidence and makes the writing process miserable.

But my own experience of writing was very different. I enjoyed writing my thesis. I got through it quickly and I wrote well, ultimately passing my defence with no corrections. And I did it by ignoring the standard writing advice and doing things in a very different way.

I’ve spent the last 12 years working with PhD students from all over the world and from a huge range of research fields, teaching them the skills and routines to write well, to write with confidence and to finish and submit a thesis they can be proud of.

So how do we do this?

Well there are a few elements…

Focus on what you want to say

The first thing to do, before you even start to write, is make some DECISIONS.

I’m not talking here about making an outline… I’m talking about making more fundamental decisions about what you want to focus on.

Throughout your PhD you probably will have come across countless papers, all kinds of different theories and techniques and ideas. The temptation might be to try to include all of it, but the goal in your writing is not to try to show everything you know, everything you’ve done you’ve done or everything you’ve read.

Instead, the goal should be to communicate something interesting and to help you do that you need to select the most important, most interesting and most relevant material from that broader base, and leave out everything else.

As a general rule, when you’re making this selection, it’s best to focus primarily on your strengths, because it’s going to be easier to write and because it’s more likely that you’ll have something interesting to say in those areas.

It’ll also be easier to defend, because when you’re choosing what to put in your thesis, you’re effectively choosing the syllabus for your own defence.

A lot of people worry about what the examiner wants to see, but the examiner wants to know what you have to say and they want you to make those decisions. Adding things you don’t really understand just weakens your thesis and draws the examiners attention away from your core content.

Separate exploration from communication

The second key point is to separate the process of exploration from communication.

The main goal of writing is to communicate. To take the ideas and knowledge in your head and put them on the page in a way that someone else can follow and understand. A big part of this is the order in which you present your ideas and how you lead from one point to the next.

But one of the reasons this is hard is that the ideas and knowledge in your head are not stored in a nice, logical order. It’s more of a tangled mess of interconnected ideas and insights. This is actually useful in some ways, because your brain’s ability to leap from one concept to another and make associations between them is one of the keys to creativity, but it also means that if you just write whatever comes to mind, in the order it comes to mind, it’ll probably be a mess.

One of the justifications for just getting words down on the page is that it helps you get your ideas out of your head and gives you something to work with. But if this is the goal, then this is for your benefit, not the readers, and just writing a stream of consciousness isn’t the best way to go about it. If you type out your thoughts in a linear order, it can get very difficult to review or restructure once you’re past a few pages. If you have 50, or 100, or 200 pages of this kind of writing, possibly divided over multiple drafts, it’s a nightmare.

What you end up with is a load of text that isn’t effective at communicating to a reader, but also isn’t very easy for you to work with as raw material. So what I recommend is separating the two processes of exploration, for your own benefit, and communication, for the reader: having one process, like mind-mapping, where you can throw ideas down quickly and figure out what you have to work with, and keeping that separate from the formal, carefully-structured writing for an audience.

Start with the introduction and work in sequence

Another point where my approach differs from others’ is that I always start with the introduction and try to work through the document in the order in which it’ll be read.

I didn’t always do this. When I was an undergraduate and I had to write essays or reports, I’d often jump around in the document. If I got stuck on one section I’d switch to writing about something else, then I’d try to fill in the gaps and tie it all together.

But for my thesis, I decided that I’d start with the introduction and work through each section in order, staying with each section until it was done, solving whatever problems came up before moving on to the next.

The metaphor I use to describe the process is that it’s like digging a tunnel through a mountain. You can’t start in the middle, you have to start at the edge. And you can’t jump ahead to a later section, you have to keep digging at the face in front of you.

This approach has a number of advantages.

First, it means you never have to decide what section you’re working on. You’re just working on the latest section.

It also narrows your focus. You only have to think about what you want to say right now and whether it helps to take the reader from what you’ve already established towards where you want to end up.

That can still be difficult to do, but it’s easier to have a specific point of focus than trying to deal with the whole thesis at the same time.

It also forces you to make decisions, which is essential if you actually want to get it done, and then by actually finishing sections, you reduce the mental load instead of building up all these fragments of disconnected, unfinished sections.

The other advantage of working in this way is that you know what you’ve already said, so it’s easier to avoid unnecessary repetition and to build upon what you’ve already established.

Let your writing pace vary

The next point is to let go of the idea that you need to be producing words all the time, and instead to allow your pace vary

As you write, inevitably some parts will be easier than others. The areas you know better, that you’ve spoken or written about or presented before, these will generally be easier.

The areas you’re less confident in, or the ideas you’ve only just started developing, or perhaps subtle points that need careful wording, these will generally take a bit more effort.

When you come across something that’s more difficult, it stands to reason that it will take more time and more thought. Instead of just getting words down or writing about something else to keep the word count rising, let yourself slow down and give yourself a chance to think and to figure it out and make a decision.

When I’m writing, I’m not typing all the time. I’ll often pause to think through what I want to say and how it links to the other ideas, whether those are ideas already on the page or ideas I want to lead towards later in the piece.

If I face a particularly difficult problem, I’ll often stop altogether and stare out of the window for 10 minutes or perhaps go for a walk, giving myself the time I need to find a solution. But then once I’ve made a decision, my pace picks up again.

So I don’t panic when I come across a problem, I slow down and try to figure it out.

Perfectionism

When I talk about slowing down to think, some people raise the issue of perfectionism—which is, again, one of the common justifications for just writing as fast as you can.

But it isn’t perfectionism to put care and thought into your work, and what many people label as perfectionism is actually indecision, stemming from a lack of confidence. There are times when you have to be a bit perfectionist and be really careful with the words you use. For example, when you’re stating the aims of your research, you have to be precise in your wording because the examiner will judge everything that follows based on your stated aims.

Of course, perfectionism can be a problem, but it isn’t a binary choice between perfectionism and writing without thought.

Instead we can imagine a spectrum, with total perfectionism at one end and total carelessness at the other. If you’re obsessing over every word, if you’re overly critical of your own work and you keep going over it because you think nothing is good enough, that’s obviously a problem.

But at the other extreme we have the problems we talked about earlier. The writing will be a mess and it’ll be extremely difficult to edit.

But we have all this space in the middle, where we can put care and thought into the writing, but moving on when it’s good enough to get the point across.

And bear in mind that you can adjust where you work within this range, sometimes prioritising speed a little more, sometimes slowing down to take extra care over the most important sections.

Structure

All the points we’ve covered so far relate to the general approach to writing, but there are also some specific technical skills that you need to know.

There are some skills around sentence structure and the style and rhythm of your writing, but by far the most important, the one I’ve found to make the biggest difference to students’ writing, and the one I go on about in all my talks on writing, is structure.

This is what links your ideas together and guides the reader through your thesis. And if you write with the principles of structure in mind, you save so much time in the editing process.

The key to understanding structure, as I’ve said in other videos, is to think in terms of problems or questions and responses.

In this video, for example, we started with the question of why thesis writing is so stressful and what can we do about it.

That very first sentence set up a problem and response structure… so in describing why thesis writing is stressful, it’s essentially just establishing what the problem is.

I then talked about the standard writing advice, which we can think of as a response to the difficulties of writing.

But that response itself creates it’s own problems, which I’m then responding to by describing my approach to writing.

But then within that overall structure, where this video as a whole is a response to an over-arching problem, individual subsections deal with more specific problems that arise. For example, when I raised the issue of perfectionism… it started with the point about slowing down in your writing, but some people raise the potential problem of perfectionism, so then I responded to that problem. So the same principles of structure apply at different scales.

So you can thing of your whole thesis as a response to a specific set of problems or questions, but on a smaller scale there are specific problems and questions you address as part of your research.

If you learn how to do this, everything else gets easier. And you might just find writing doesn’t have to be so scary any more.