The boring yet necessary

At this final stage of writing, we need to check our references and style. Back when we started the course, we identified our project and audience. Alongside this, we should have become familiar with the typical layout of articles in this journal (or book or whatever). We should have familiarised ourselves with the style guide and referencing system.

The most efficient way to reference is to have a reference management system such as Zotero. This enables you (especially for American Journals) to simply pick the journal style and insert your reference as you type. I would love to say I am that kind of writer, but the truth is, I am not. Nor have I ever found it worth my while to start up a reference management system, though this is clearly a major inefficiency in my writing process.

If like me, you detest the thought of entering references into databases (even where it is the click of a button) and then extracting them seamlessly into your word document (!), this is the section where you need to manually insert and check the references. I will presume you have in fact made a huge effort to write these in as you have written as instructed in the second draft, however imperfectly. Now you need to spend your time polishing these up to the proper format, checking repetitions, and inserting your cross references. This is pretty mindless yet crucially important stuff. These are tasks which you can do in 15 minute bursts around teaching and meetings, and you certainly don’t need whole afternoons scheduled for this.

TODAY I WILL…

• Turn on my time tracking software;

• Check, insert and format my references correctly in my writing slots, writing for 2 hours 15 minutes.