One human's approach to writing

Emphasis on getting it done.

If you have an approach, use it.  The key is to find your own approach, what works for you, pay attention to the ways in which you work the best.

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Blank page syndrome can be hard to overcome.  If you suffer from this:

Things I have suggested to people:
- record themselves with a sound recorder, use text-to-speech to transcribe.
- start with an outline
- take email messages and dump them into a latex file, convert to a paper.

Editing is easier than starting with a blank page.  I have sent student drafts knowing that my draft wasn't quite right, but with something to edit, they would be able to get started.

Things that work for me:
Working for a long period of time on the calendar on the writing, but the actual time spent writing per day is small.  Now, I can work on writing for 1.5 hour at a time. And then I break for tea, or other tasks.  I may do two 1.5 hour blocks per day.  

Because of this, a paper has been in draft stage for multiple months before a deadline.  I work with collaborators with busy professional and personal lives, and to only read a new paper takes time.  If I want their feedback, I need to be able to send them some kind of draft around 1 month before the deadline.  By the way, I ask for similar courtesy from my collaborators when I am not leading the writing.  You can't implement new experiments 1 day before a paper deadline.

I start with a 2-page document that is written mainly for myself.  It asks the questions of "what is this work about?", "what are the contributions?", and "how does it move the community forward?".  Very big picture.  Usually I have rough figure or two.

A line for each paragraph -- do this later with a figure.

In my early writing, I don't worry about making things perfect.  I use a method of getting the ideas into a document, and restructuring later.  Often, by writing, I get a better sense of how to restructure the ideas to make them more clear.  I revise the draft often.  I don't have a rule, but usually after I add a new section, I will read the whole draft and start revising the parts that now don't make sense.  I leave latex comments for items that may need to revised in future versions.  I'm a fan of printing out the draft and marking it up with pen.  This also gives me a break from the screen.

I have gotten over self-consciousness about sending my writing to collaborators, even if I am sending them a rough draft. A rough draft so that they get an idea of the paper and can think about it over time is better than no draft.  

When the paper is starting to look complete, I pretend to read the paper like I am a new reader.  Is the flow of information logical?  Can I understand certain paragraphs *only* using the information from the preceding paragraphs?  Can any ideas be refined such that they are more clear?  

I also read the paper out loud.  This will often help me catch little editing mistakes, like missing words, additional words, or copy-paste errors. 

Finally, I hand the paper over to my husband.  He is my proof-reader extraodanaire. I find typos in books, but in my own writing I tend to just skim over them.  

Then, I submit!

My stance on Grammarly:  I am going to do the old-person thing and say I don't like a new-fangled tool like Grammarly.  I don't like it because it gives people who have a difficult time writing *one more thing* that criticizes their writing.  Words on the page or screen are better than no words.  As an advisor, I can work with words that have grammar issues.  I can easily edit grammar problems.  I cannot work with no words.

If you want to use Grammarly and have trouble writing, I suggest you use it near the end, when you are polishing your paper.  First, get words on a page!

In my own case, there are some words I do not spell correctly.  I don't worry about this when I am trying to get ideas on the page.  Then, during an editing pass, I will correct the spellings that the spell checker flags.  When I am only using a text-based editor, I have to manually run the checker, so I get to be oblivious until I run the checker during the near-final draft stage.