Review

Practical advice for academic writing; grounded in experience. I’ve struggle to build a writing habit, so I’m hoping some of the tips outlined here will help.

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Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

This is a practical system for writing regularly without letting it consume your life. The core idea is that writing productivity comes from habits, not inspiration: scheduling time, setting clear and modest goals, tracking behaviour, and rewarding yourself. Writing more often and using writing time better matters more than waiting for large uninterrupted blocks. Ideas are easy to generate and will pile up; the hard part is consistently sitting down and turning them into text.

Most barriers to writing are excuses that dissolve under scrutiny. If you “can’t find time,” it’s because you didn’t schedule it; four hours a week is enough if it’s habitual. Research, reading, outlining, and organising all count as writing if they move you toward shipping something. You don’t need better tools or perfect inspiration, and postponing writing to “clear other tasks” only reinforces avoidance. Writing regularly, even in small doses, beats binge writing and guilt.

Treat writing time like any serious commitment, with a high bar for cancellation. Schedule it for when you’re alert, defend it stubbornly, and stick to a consistent place to write. Weekly sessions work well, and daily writing is even better if you can manage it. Always write during scheduled sessions, feel free to write outside them, but never reward writing by cancelling the next session.

Progress comes from concrete, tractable goals. Keep a list of everything you want to write, pick one project, and break it into tiny, day-level goals that can clearly be marked as done or not. Modest output is fine, aim for 50–200 words an hour or even a single good sentence. Track what you actually do, whether by time, words, or sessions, because honest self-monitoring changes behaviour. Immediate rewards can help with motivation. Don’t juggle multiple projects; choose one and finish it. “Writer’s block” is simply not writing, not a mysterious condition.

Writing groups can reinforce habits if they’re voluntary (opt-in) and well-designed. Accountability groups work by making goals explicit and using peer pressure; write-together groups help by removing distractions; feedback groups are fragile and often stall. If a group isn’t helping you write, leave it. Unproductive groups can drag you down.

Style matters, but it’s secondary to producing text. Aim for clear, familiar words, omit needless ones, avoid limp or passive phrasing, and vary sentence structure. Parallelism and well-used punctuation can add clarity and force. Draft first and revise later; generating text and polishing it are separate tasks. Worrying about style too early slows everything down.

For articles, persistence and clarity matter most: know the journal, outline tightly, make titles and abstracts do real work, present results selectively, and use the discussion to explain why the work matters.

For books, be clear on audience, purpose, and structure. Prune other commitments, write steadily without waiting for ideal conditions, and approach publishers with a clear concept and proposal.

Across all formats, the unifying principle is the same: schedule writing, show up consistently, and let steady effort compound.

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

Introduction

A system to write up what you’re passionate about, while still having a life.

Writing productivity is about building good habits. Having a schedule, clear goals, tracking progress and rewarding yourself.

We’re aiming to write more regularly and use writing time more efficiently.

Research is fun. Writing about research isn’t, it’s frustrating.

It’s easier to generate ideas to write about, than it is to write them. So expect to make a backlog.

People yearn for big blocks of time.

You need to schedule time to write, sit down to write and write.

Chapter 2: Barriers to Writing

Most barriers to writing don’t stand up under scrutiny. Schedule time for writing and use that time to tackle all writing related tasks.

• Can’t find the time to write? If you can’t ‘find a time’ to write, it’s likely because you didn’t schedule it. Schedule in writing sessions and stick to them. Making it habitual is more important than volume. Avoid binge writing - you’ll spend more time feeling guilty than writing. Sitting down to write day after day will make you productive. 4 hours a week is enough.
• I need to do more research. Prewriting is the reading, highlighting and organisation and planning required for writing. Any activity that gets you closer to shipping that unit of output counts as writing.
• I need new tools. You can write with the most basic tools, you can even write in your head.
• Waiting to be inspired. Inspired moments are precious, but you don’t need to wait for them to write. Writing breeds more ideas for writing.
• I should wrap up other threads before I sit down to write. This is self deception. You convince yourself you’ll speed up writing, by not writing this week. Stop seeing some weeks as lost causes.

Chapter 3: Writing Schedules

Just like other commitments, there should be a high threshold for cancelling.

Once you’ve followed a writing schedule for about a month you’ll be fine.

The time needs to be defensible.

Defending your writing time at times requires stubbornness and misdirection.

Weekly writing sessions work as they’re as hard to cancel as meetings.

Schedule your writing time for when you’re alert.

Consider writing every weekday.

Always write in your scheduled time, but feel free to write outside those times too.

Extend a writing session if you want, but keep the next one in your schedule. Never reward writing with not writing.

Work out where your productive place to write is - and stick to that. Build a habit.

Goals:

Make a big list of everything you want to write. Pick one and get writing.

Break your big goals, into tiny tractable ones.

Make day-level goals concrete. You should be able to tell if you were successful or not.

Set a goal of writing 50-200 words per hour / be happy if you get one great sentence.

Tracking progress - keeping tabs on your behaviour, is one of the best ways of changing it. It’s about being conscious about your actions and not deluding yourself. The thought of typing zero into your writing log can motivate you to write.

• You can track words, behaviour or time goals (pomodoros).

The key is to take an honest look at what you’re doing.

Use immediate self rewards to sustain motivation - especially when the end reward is. BUT never reward writing with not writing.

Don’t juggle two different writing projects. We don’t multi-task well. Decide one thing to work on and see it through. How do you decide what to do? Consider…

• Most important first
• Closest to shipping first
• Oldest first
• Easiest first
• Most appealing first

Writer’s block is a good example of a dispositional fallacy: A description of behaviour can’t also explain the described behaviour. Writer’s block is nothing more than the behaviour of not writing.

Writing sessions can be described in three dimensions: Vexation, Quality, Quantity.

Chapter 4: Writing Groups

A good writing group will reinforce your schedule.

If your group doesn’t work - leave it and start a new one.

All groups should be voluntary - so people are opting to be there.

Three Flavours of Groups:

• Goals and Accountability Groups: Verbalise the goals you set last week, say if you made them, set new goals for next week. These are about weaponising peer pressure, the thought of members asking ‘How was your week?’ is what does it.
• Setting proximal goals (concrete, short-term, tangible) boosts motivation.
• Goals can’t be changed between sessions.
• If you didn’t meet last weeks goal, set a smaller easier one next week.
• If you stall for a few weeks, you need an intervention.
• Write Together Groups: Sit next to each other, but write alone. ‘Shut up and write’. Can do weekly or as retreats. If the group becomes too chatty, limit talking to a few minutes each session.
• Feedback Groups: Weekly critique doesn’t work. Reliance on one person each week allows others’ to coast. They quickly lose momentum if that person doesn’t come.

Be wary of being dragged down by an unproductive group.

Chapter 5: Style

Books on writing that might help:

• On writing well
• Sin and Syntax
• The Practical Stylist

Practice until you can control the sound of your page. Then adapt to the audience and occasion.

Low hanging fruit of style:

• Choose good words: Short, expressive and familiar. Use technical terms consistently. Use abbreviations sparingly.
• Omit needless words. Avoid words like ‘very, quite, basically, actually etc’
• Write strong sentences. Don’t overuse a single sentence type. Mix your sentence types:
• Simple: only one subject-predicate pair
• Compound: two clauses, each clause can stand alone. Sometimes a conjunction (and, or but) connects the clauses; sometimes a semi-colon does the trick.
• Complex: contain dependent and independent clauses. Written well they can give your writing a crisp tone (whatever that means)
• Parallel: Similarity in form and structure, is a key technical writing technique. Parallel sentences describe relationships, don’t fall into the trap of avoiding them because you think they’re repetitive.
• Ex: People in the dual-task condition monitored a series of beeps while reading a list of words, people in the control condition read only a list of words.
• Or you can use a criterion-variant structure: describe what’s shared, then describe what’s different.
• Ex: Everyone read a list of words. People in the dual-task condition monitored a series of beeps while reading the words, and people in the control condition only read the words.
• Use semicolons to connect independent clauses; each part of the sentence must be able to stand alone. Semicolon’s imply a close connection between the clauses.
• Semicolons are ideal for coordinating two parallel sentences:
• At Time 1, people read the words; at Time 2, They tried to remember as many words as possible.
• Emdash can be used to connect a clause or phrase to the end of a sentence. Or they can be used to enclose a parenthetical expression and substitute brackets.
• Avoid passive, limp and wordy phrases.
• Write first - revise later. Generating text and revising it are distinct parts of writing. Don’t do them both at once.
• Aim to master the principles of style, but don’t worry about them when you sit down to write.

Our lives would be better if we “thought critically” instead of “refracted discourse through critical lenses,” if we could “talk more often” instead of “chisel out of our silos.” If you’re in a silo with a chisel, I’m not sure we should meet face-to-face. Speaking of meeting, people don’t “write to say hi” or “introduce themselves” anymore—they “reach out,” ideally after using hand sanitizer.

6: Writing Journal Articles

Beauty and persistence are the two things that you can control.

Know what journal you’re writing for, and use their prior articles as models from which to learn the formula.

Outlining: makes everything easier. Short is good. Better to be too brief than too verbose.

Title and Abstract: Make them count, this is all most people will see and read. A good title is descriptive without being too specific. Make it timeless. Include keyword search terms in your Abstract.

Introduction: Have brief opening and closing sections that flank longer chunks of work. In the opening start with the global issues that animate your work, then funnel into a snapshot of your project. End the pre-introduction with a sentence that describes the primary purpose of your work. After the pre-introduction, include 2-4 chunks. Figure out headings for those first.

• Chunk 1: Might summarise the stake of knowledge today
• Chunk 2: Might introduce a compelling issue
• Chunk 3: Might describe how the issue can be addressed.

The outro to the intro likely gives a snapshot of your research and explains how it answers the guiding question.

Method: Easy to do, follow journal examples. Show how carefully you conducted your research.

Results: Display and describe your findings. Give each finding some space, and interpretive text. The order, the emphasis and being selective are important. Don’t get drawn into presenting too many peripheral findings. Stick to the point.

Discussion: Take a step back. Recap with 1-3 paragraphs. Build connections with past work, state why your work matters. Wrap up remaining issues, speak about future research, practical implications and limitations.

References: Do this well. Make sure you’re connecting relevant research, especially from the journal you’re submitting to.

7 Writing Books

Reasons to write a book:

• To make a difference, by helping practitioners
• You have a big idea that needs the space of a book
• To learn something new, by teaching ourselves.
• You’re accidentally writing one.
• You want to plant a flag.
• Intellectually restless and want the challenge
• You love books

The Three Planning Problems:

• Who is your book for? Who’s your small core audience.
• What’s the point of your book? After reading, what will your readers believe or know?
• What’s your book’s skeleton? The key parts and how they’re arranged.

Writing the Book:

• You don’t need a sabbatical. But you do need to prune your obligations when you’re writing a book during the normal work week. Decline all the other writing commitments you can. Set aside time for writing your book. Try to write the book in order if you can, save the intro and outro for the end.

Publishing:

• Know the ratio of writers to readers in your field. Be cautious if everyone wants to write but there are few readers.
• Look at who publishes books in your field.
• Don’t be afraid of approaching a publisher if they’re done something similar already, that’s actually a good sign.
• Talk to an editor when you have a concept a clear concept, a tight thesis and a solid table of contents.
• Conferences are a good place to meet editors
• A proposal is often the first step: describe the thesis, the audience, competitors, table of contents, paragraphs describing each chapter. A profile on you too.
• Consider single threading to one publisher at a time.