Effective writing tips and tricks

skills
intermediate
Published

February 24, 2025

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About this session

  • this session is about writing for analytical purposes
  • this is an intermediate-level session, so it’s aimed at people with prior professional experience of analytical writing
  • it’s largely hints-and-tips, rather than deeply philosophical
  • it’s based on Paul J. Silva’s excellent 2007 book How To Write A Lot, with appropriate translations to non-academic writing
  • it’s also one of the rare training sessions with a single right answer: schedule your writing

Writing is hard

  • writing is hard
  • but we also make writing much harder than it needs to be
  • that makes writing unpleasant
  • which produces poor results
  • and there’s a doom-loop: those self-inflicted worries make subsequent writing harder

Writing is a teachable skill

  • understand what writing is
  • what you need to write
  • when to write
  • schedule, plan, and monitor
  • keep the style simple

What writing is

  • anything that gets the project done counts as writing
  • anything that doesn’t, doesn’t
  • that includes planning, scheduling, thinking, etc. Anything that ultimately leads to getting words on the page

What you need to write

  • loads of utter bilge written about this, but basically two necessary components only:
    • time (we’ll discuss below)
    • space
  • you probably can’t fit a writing project into your current schedule without some readjustments

I don’t feel like writing

Silva 2007: 25: you write three times as much if you schedule your writing time, and force yourself to write

Schedule, plan, and monitor

  • massive blocks of time are a trap (binge writing)
  • what you need is a schedule: “the terrible power of habit”
  • add a regular writing slot to your schedule:
    • do it it Teams
    • stick to it
    • don’t give it up for anything
    • monitor your compliance

What to do with your schedule?

  1. figure out your project aim(s): each a single sentence that describes what the project needs to do
  2. break those aims down into a plan
  3. use the plan to give yourself concrete daily goals
  4. monitor those goals and reward yourself for meeting them
  5. rewards can be anything except days off writing

Concrete daily goals

  • write 50 words in section xxxx
  • plan section headings for xxxx
  • review data and plan maps for xxxx
  • write text around maps for xxxx
  • proof-read section xxxx

More on planning

  • we can usually find/steal a formula to work from by reading work with similar aims
  • steal their structure and populate it to suit your project aim
  • get feedback on your plan

Recursive planning

  • take your project aim
  • you now need 3-5 points that:
    • support/explain/make up your main aim
    • each point should be a simple sentence
  • then repeat: 3-5 points for each point, and so on
    • you should almost certainly stop one layer of detail before you think you’ve said enough

Write to the plan

  • write a horrible first draft
    • fill-in-the-blanks of your plan
    • don’t sweat anything other than the main aim: does this work stick to the topic, and cover all the ground you need to
  • schedule time to re-work this draft into a second-draft
    • make it simple: prefer cutting rather than adding
    • put in into English
  • get feedback on that approximate second draft

Push the message

  • you’re definitely an expert
  • but your reader doesn’t need to be an expert

and

  • you’ve worked for hours on this
  • but your reader skimmed

and

  • you know how each piece of the work will eventually fit into the work as a whole
  • but your reader doesn’t

and

  • you think your graphs and tables speak for themselves
  • but your reader doesn’t know the context, and doesn’t understand what you’re trying to show them

Style tips

  • mind the technical jargon
    • minimise, standardise, and define
  • remove
    • the non-technical jargon
    • parasitic intensifiers (quite, totally, very, basically, completely, …)
  • parallel sentences are excellent for analytics
    • “In the first group, something happened. In the second group, nothing happened.”
    • “We did a thing. Those with cars responded. Those without cars did not.”

Collaborative complaining and support

  • use the KIND network
  • get a work collaborator