How to edit your writing

I have these little mantras here at Academic Coach and this is one of them: write without fear, edit without mercy. Write quick, edit slow.

What is editing?

Let’s start with the basics. Editing is the process of re-sculpting your rough text into something that resembles an intellectual contribution. You can engage in large scale editing (macro, think structural issues) or small scale editing (micro, think sentence construction and paragraphs) and these serve distinct purposes in finalising your text.

Some writers don’t recognise editing as a distinct stage in the writing process because they are engaged in this process from the very first sentence (perfectionists). Others don’t recognise it because they have no discernible drafting process at all: writing, reading, researching, editing and polishing text is one unholy jumbled mess that is circular, unstructured and totally inefficient. Time ebbs away when we think of editing in these terms. ‘Writing’, or (properly speaking) producing a piece of finished research, becomes an interminable nightmare.

Why is editing painful?*

It is painful because if done at the correct time in your drafting process it forces you to confront reality, and that is despite your best heroic efforts the text still isn’t working. You might have come to this realisation yourself, or (more likely) you have come to this realisation because you have received feedback (criticism). Either way, this reality is inherently painful. Re-working the text is not re-working the idea necessarily and this is another reason that many lament editing. It starts to feel like this writing malarky is less Hemingway and his muse(s) and is more technical (mechanical) in nature. Less Leonardo da Vinci, and more spray painting the basement.** This can horrify the academic soul.

The joy of editing

I like editing. You are past the blank page. The hard (research) work is usually done and the joyous part of the writing process truly begins. It is here that you move from Frankenstein’s monster, to something that is quite well put together. It starts to flow. It starts to work as a piece of intellectual contribution. It stops lurching from one thought to another and starts to flow. Most importantly, it starts to make sense to someone other than you.

The guiding principle

This is the foundation of editing. It is no longer about you. It is no longer about your vision, your understanding, what you think is good and right and logical. It is about the reader. The reader! You have moved from it’s all about me to it isn’t about me at all. Regardless of what my internal narrator thinks is awesome and simple and clear, I now have to think about how someone else might encounter my work. What will make sense to them? How will they understand it?

This requires a bit of intellectual gymnastics. Hence the pain (for some).

Good editing is about structure, flow and signposts. It concerns your audience and how they will receive it. It is not about you. Your creation has left the building, flown the nest and is about to try and make its way in the world. Editing helps it to be useful to others and make a contribution to a dialogue that exists outside of your head. Embrace it: set it free.

*actual title suggested by a reader

** Paul J Silvia, How to write a lot, describes writing in these mundane terms.

How is a PhD structured?

This is another blog in response to reader requests. If you have a request for a blog, please visit the Facebook page and write a request there.

What does a PhD thesis look like?

This is a question I find myself answering a lot. On social media, in direct emails to me, and from clients that I coach. Sometimes this comes in the guise of asking questions about editing, sometimes it is more direct.

As an academic coach, I am involved in coaching students from a wide array of fields: from various fields within social sciences and humanities, to STEM, to the creative arts. Coaching is not of course the same as supervision, although there is a massive overlap between the two when PhD supervision is done properly. Alas, it is sometimes a little lacking in various ways.

I obviously do not have an in-depth subject knowledge of all the students I coach/supervise: this is not what students really require, and once they have surpassed their supervisor’s own knowledge on their particular original contribution to knowledge (usually by the second year), it won’t be what they are getting from their supervisor either. What students do need however is writing advice, and this advice is rarely forthcoming from their own supervisors for a variety of reasons.

In my coaching practice, I ‘supervise’ traditional big book theses, PhD by publication theses, and artefact and exegesis or practice-led theses. Disciplines vary widely; from economics, to anthropology, from geography to digital communication, from politics to dance. Not to mention, of course, law theses (my own field). As such, I am probably one of a few academics that see a wide variety of shapes and sizes that a PhD might take. It is a privileged position to be in and I see such an array of amazingly brilliant work. Because I work across disciplines, I know there is no one-size fits all, that is for sure.

Start with the basics

I always make sure that students read multiple finished and recent PhDs in their department and if possible their sub-field. You can’t bake a cake, if you have never seen a cake, tasted a cake or even have a recipe for a cake. Often, this is what supervisors expect students to do - write a PhD, with no advice as to HOW (not what), never having seen one before. Inexperienced supervisors may have a very narrow view of what a PhD should look like (their own, for example, that was done 20 years ago), and may be nervous when a student strays from the path, or starts to question the advice being given about chapter structure and so on.

So, like most things, my advice is first do your research as to what a successful PhD looks like. Be aware though that the finished PhD that you are looking at doesn’t tell the story. It doesn’t tell you whether the student rescued their PhD through the viva, or whether they had major or minor corrections and so on. It might not be a perfect template. Doing interdisciplinary work is especially challenging as there will not be an exact fit between your project design and someone else’s. A clear introduction justifying structure and methods is key here, as well as smart decisions about the external examiner. But reading an already completed PhD is at least a place to start from.

What is the right size and shape?

There is no one answer here obviously, and much will depend on your discipline, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind. Try not to front load your PhD with too much ‘throat clearing’ material. So here I am talking about the methods and literature review chapters and if you do have a lot of this, make sure it is part of your novelty.

In some disciplines, the structure can be a bit like this. There might be an introduction chapter, a literature review, a contextual and/or background chapter, and then empirical chapters (and if practice led, then an artefact). This has a fairly long lead-in before the ‘meat’ of the PhD is arrived at, but if it is a PhD by publication you might need this long lead-in to tie together the individual publications that make the ‘meat’ of the PhD. In other disciplines (and depending on your puzzle and research design), you might condense your introduction, methods, and literature review all into one chapter, and get straight into the ‘meat’ immediately. Other disciplines prefer a solid introduction, literature review and methods chapters as separate entities. But do you have to do it like this every time? Well, that depends on where your novelty is best expressed, and this comes down to your research design.

how much of this material is novel and how much is derivative?

Badly written literature reviews are entirely derivative and can cost you minor or major corrections. Your literature review needs to do more than be a litany of x said this and y said that. That is a masters level synthesis of material, and is not a review. You have not done anything with it to qualify as a review. If this is where you construct your theoretical lens however, and you are explicit in that construction, then you can claim novelty here. Same with methods - is this a novel method you have invented? Or are you employing a bog standard method to something new or through a new lens? If it is bog standard, don’t spend precious word count on it other than explaining the basics and why you have chosen that method. Don’t bore your examiners with things that might go in the appendices. Tell them what they need to know to understand your original contribution.

The test of a PhD is: have you made an original contribution to knowledge?

This means derivative material should be kept to a minimum to convince the examiner of your originality. Of course, you build on the work of others and reference it accordingly. You have a literature review to map the field and show (a) you have mastery over it and (b) where your scholarship will fit in and fill a gap or move knowledge forward. But you have to do something with it. Not just recite it. Same with the method - do something, or be brief.

You don’t want your examiner to have read 40,000 words and have not encountered anything novel; they start to write notes saying: ‘I can’t see why this is original’ and once that idea is planted, it is hard to shift.

This is how PhDs fail. Original contribution to knowledge is the standard and that is the standard regardless of your discipline. You showcase this at every possible opportunity and in every chapter your write - that is the commonality of all good PhD theses, regardless of shape and size.

If you want to know more about macro (size and shape) editing, and micro (chapter, paragraph, sentence, word level and title) editing, check out these two online webinars in the Academic Coach shop.