I am not a good writer, and some of the pages on this personal website can attest to it. Yet, I write. Quite a lot by the average person standard, and probably an average amount by academic standard. Why? How? But more importantly why? Because it is my job, and even though the writing itself is not good, I am good at producing it. The goal of this page is to be a grab bag of random advice I have collected in order to make writing (the process) suck less.
1. Lower your standards
Your first draft does not need to be perfect. In fact, even just wanting it to be good is likely to be harming your writing. In fact, even your final draft does not need to be perfect. This issue stems from the illusion that just spending more time writing or thinking about which words to select will help you choose better words, sentence structures, etc. Of course that could not be further from the truth: you become a better writer by simply writing more, and trying to be a good writer makes you write less. The trick is therefore to write badly, on purpose, just for the sake of putting words out of your mind and in the document you are writing. Even (or especially) if those words are bad. Even (or especially) if those sentences are badly structured, or overly simplistic, or just look plain terrible. Prove to yourself how shit of a writer you are and get it all out, and with time your baseline “bad” writing will improve. Polishing bad writing is also a lot easier than crafting perfect sentences from scratch.
2. Build a routine
Writing is just a human activity, and much like every other human activity, you get better at it by just doing it. Now if I told you that you could win a life-changing amount of money by finishing a marathon (substitute with another sport if you’re already a marathon runner), I am betting that you would not just start randomly training two weeks before the event. However because the stakes of writing are much lower, it is easy to neglect it until a deadline is looming. And because we neglect it, the activity of writing itself become daunting and difficult, whereas if we had done some regular practice of it, it would be significantly easier. Setting yourself up with a writing schedule, no matter how small (mine is 30 minutes a day, right after lunch) is a good way to accomplish multiple goals at once: (1) practice your writing so it improves and becomes easier ; (2) produce some content, some of which is bound to be useful for something, whether it is lecture notes for a class, some paragraph of a literature review for a paper, or some daily journaling that helps you put your thoughts in order.
3. Separate your writing activities
Not all writing is actual writing. In my colleague Max Wilson’s excellent post on 5 types of writing he highlights different activities which are technically all “writing” in that they contribute to something being written, but not writing in the sense of putting words on paper (or screen). Being able to separate those activities and focus on one at a time can help reduce the cost of context switching, and help you get to the final product much faster. Plus Max is a renowned expert on mental workload, so I trust him for stuff like this.
4. Find (or build) the right environment
Your local coffeeshop, your favourite spot in the library, and your living room table are all perfectly suitable places to write. A laptop, a notebook, or even a tablet with one of those nice pencils are amazing tools to write. However it’s good to keep in mind that none of this is necessary. They’re mostly a luxury. To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, the table, chair, laptop, or writing devices you choose to use are completely accessory to the usage of the brain. However, ritualising your writing can help create the environment that you need. If you are using your living room table, use the same part of the table. Light up some candles. Make yourself the same cup of coffee. Put on some writing music (preferably something without lyrics, to avoid losing your focus). Create a little ritual around the activity, and it will make switching on and switching off all the more easier.
5. Find (or build) the right mindspace
In the end, it helps a lot to keep in mind that writing is an activity. You don’t need to be a good writer to write. You don’t need inspiration. You don’t need anything. You just need to have (1) something to write ; (2) something to write it on (optional – you can do a lot of this in your head). You wouldn’t expect a plumber to wait until they’re the best plumber in the country to come help with a frozen pipe. You wouldn’t expect a bus driver to wait for inspiration to start the bus and get you to your destination. No, they just get on with the job unless there is a good reason not to. Writing is the same.
6. Don’t look for shortcuts (yes this is about AI)
There really is no secret about it. The best way to write is to simply write. And that involves doing a lot of work that might be tedious and unpleasant, like reading extremely boring papers from other authors who might even be worse writers than you and using insights from these papers to write your own very boring papers that someone else will be subjected to. The best way to not improve is to outsource the things that would help you improve, for example by using tools like generative AI to help in reading (e.g., summarising papers for you) or writing (e.g., rewrite your stuff, or turn a series of bullet points into a paragraph, or even just write the whole damn thing). These tools are tempting because they promise you a gain in productivity because they are based on the illusion that good writing is measured in quantity, and anything that helps you increase the number of words you can put on paper per minute is something that is worth using. That is quite obviously not true, and as a corollary of my previous points (1 and 5) the quality of your writing is going to be more about how you approach it (do you do it regularly, or only when a deadline is due? do you focus on the content, or agonise about the style?) than what tools you are using. There might be some interesting usage of generative AI in writing (in fact I have played around with it to correct my language in a 2024 paper on generative AI usage in higher education) but anything that is making the process easier is very likely to be doing you a disservice.