Get ruthless
The celebrated American novelist, William Faulkner, advises that when writing, ‘we must kill our darlings’, but like all good advice, this was stolen from someone else. The original instruction comes from Professor Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, an Oxford don from back in the early decades of the 1900s, who instructs us to murder our darlings when revising text. This imperative means that you must delete phrases, sentences, and perhaps even paragraphs that you really really admire in your text, but actually don’t add anything at all to your argument.
It is important to kill your darlings after the perfectionism stage you have just undertaken, as it is then you are most likely to insert some darlings hitherto missing from your prose. It is at this stage that excessive verbiage my occur, and these phrases need to be excised like cancer. If it hurts too much, get a file and save for later, but ruthlessly remove them from your text.
As George from Three Men in a Boat said: ‘We must not think of things we could do with, but only of the things that we can’t do without’. This is a lesson for life, and the whole PhD, not just the chapter you are now writing.
Sage advice. Cut that bloat, and kill your darlings. Be brutal. Your text will be better for it.
TODAY I WILL…
Work for 2 hours minimum on my text, killing my darlings.