Authoring a PhD Thesis How to Plan, Draft, Write and Finish a Doctoral Dissertation by Patrick Dunleavy

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But it can be helpful to review some fairly commonsense issues
around the writing process, and to do what you can to make
creating new text easier and more straightforward for you.
A first step worth thinking through is how you programme
your writing slots.^16 Nothing is more demoralizing than to plan
on doing a certain amount of writing in a given week or month,
only to find that the time has elapsed and you have made too
little progress on your planned levels. Start by being realistic
about all the competing demands you face, from family, friends
and social life, from employment or other means of paying your
way, travel time, teaching, studying courses, lectures and semi-
nars, and so on. You need to take out appropriate amounts of
time from any given week and be realistic about what is left.
When estimating how much you can write in a session, build in
some slack time also for editing and catch-up activities.
Sometimes in doing these sums it will become clear that you
just need to prioritize your writing more, to set aside much
longer or more frequent periods for it than you have been
doing.
The time slots you earmark also have to be useful ones. A writ-
ing session cannot normally be squeezed into small bits of time,
a half-hour here and there, a short train journey, or a small inter-
val between coursework sessions. These lesser chunks of time
can be used very productively for other things related to writing,
like jotting down ideas, reviewing previous jottings, or word-
editing raw text. But writing raw text from scratch, or substan-
tially remodelling stuff you already have, generally both require
a substantial commitment of time, perhaps around three or four
hours minimum for most people. This has got to be completely
free time – not eroded by phone interruptions, not a time when
you do e-mailing or surf the Web, and most especially not a time
when family members or friends will interpose quite different
demands on your concentration.
You need a half-hour space at the start of each writing session
in order to get warmed up on pre-writing activities, reviewing
your notes and organizing ideas for the piece from your last
writing session. You may need to build up your confidence,
morale and sense of clear direction in order to reach the point
of committing words to screen or paper. It can help to type
notes and organizing ideas into the document you are working


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