The most important part of the writing process involves quickwriting a first draft of ideas without editing, converting the ideas to index cards, organizing cards into piles, then assessing piles by putting into the front a card that summarizes most of the pile, or, failing that, separating disjointed ideas or adding fitting summarizing cards, and ordering the resultant internally consistent piles in arrangements that make sense.

Pick one arrangement out of the several ways and just roll with it. If there is a legitimate dilemma, write about the dilemma.

“Practice quickwritten notes on actionable portion or Becker’s book on Writing for Social Scientists,” originally written on 02/02/2020 Sunday, revised on 08/14/2020 Friday, 10/12/2020 Monday, and 12/20/2022 Tuesday.

Graduate students, or anyone trying to write anything really, learned to believe that they have writer’s block. Like many other products of self-diagnosis, writer’s block as a term proliferated because it helped people justify their personal problems as a subset of a greater issue. They gathered around the therapeutic totem pole and collectively celebrated their newfound lack of personal agency and responsibility. “It wasn’t my fault! This is a common problem that many people have!” They breathed a sigh of relief and continued to not write, because their personal problem had less to do with inability to write per se and more to do with the guilt they felt for failing to be productive. And so people built a buffering layer of explanations as to why they do not write, in the process creating more distance between them and the problem and sabotaging their writing mentality.

A common way people sabotage themselves is to cite being a perfectionist of having a high standard as their reason for not writing. In “Writing for Social Scientists,"¹ Becker gives these people the benefit of the doubt, and offers solutions to the problem of believing in the “One True Way” to write. The theory is that anyone ever but especially graduate students want to write but don’t want to start writing because they secretly believe they will hurt themselves if they write down bad sentences. This secret belief stems from having been socialized by 16 years of being a successful student by writing one good enough draft for every essay assignment without any revision. New graduate students in serious programs often find this skill inadequate for assignments of their first intro course. Furthermore, not only did they never learn to revise their own papers, they even more rarely ask others to revise their papers for them, because up until before graduate school or real-life, counterproductively, schools consider cooperation cheating.

Becker suggests freewriting to graduate students as a demonstration that self-evidently writing a bad sentence does not hurt them. Writing bad sentences after bad sentences or even bad paragraphs after bad paragraphs that do not flow also does not hurt them. The prescription is to be followed every day so graduate students can reinforce this idea into their instincts, their muscle memory. Like walking with your eyes closed on an open field, the continual absence of negative consequence can dispel any irrational fear. Following this prescription, graduate students will never fall into the trap of the “One True Way” ever again.

Beside showing the graduate student that writing bad sentences will not harm them, it also shows the graduate student that they do know what they want to say but merely do not know how to best say what they want to say. The alternative pre-writing tools, listing ideas, is a trap because it encourages focusing solely on topics and subject matter without committing to an order, when topics are seldom the problem in people’s writing. Because of their aforementioned 16 years of training, first time quickwriters find themselves able to produce a piece of writing with a readable and followable flow of logic. In turn, this readable flow of logic is actually all the foundation they need to hammer out a better version. The hammering is no different from the 4 years of high school English class education that focuses on analyzing and sometimes editing proses of famous writers, but this time they do it with proses of their own.

Not learning to quickwrite can harm new graduate students' mental health. Many graduate students pride themselves as being an ideas person, so they tend to overestimate how many ideas they actually have as well as how many ways they can express their ideas. Yet, the moment the ideas are committed to paper, they will learn how few ideas they actually have, and by the first revision they will learn how few ways they can express an idea in. The geometric growth of stress spawned from the fantasy of having infinite ideas multiplied by the infinite ways to express them inevitably amplifies the emotional impact of the single academic trick they have been good at suddenly failing to score them the same success they had been undeservedly given. It might feel as if the entire world is moving forward while they alone are falling behind, where all around them they see successful peers and professors with zero writing problems, who all obviously wrote their wonderful proses in their first drafts. In their minds, all of this point to the conclusion that maybe they made a mistake coming here or that they need to work five times as hard as everybody else just to have a chance of catching up. This can’t be further from the truth. All they need to do is to ditch their old trick - not as you would a personal failure, but as you would a training wheel.

All of this is bad enough, but sociology graduate students have it worse. Many of their ideas demand being placed in theoretical contexts, and this task worries and overloads them. They imagine a massive web of interdependent ideas and theories that they need to be so well-read that they can expertly map it all out and navigate through all of it in one go. The truth is that in freewriting the graduate students often find themselves adding a new paragraph that completes or speaks from a standpoint made in a previous paragraph. Scattered across the entire document are these naturally connected ideas that lead an inadvertently created inventory of themes groupable into sections in whatever way fits (importantly not the best way that fits) the overarching narrative; Using data tables in R as an analogy, each theme is an imaginary new column that the graduate student can sort and filter their ideas by, and they can sort by two columns or three columns and in whatever order they like. AxB vs. BxA, it doesn’t really matter, be it talking bout theory under each observed behavior, talking about the interpretation of each behavior under each applicable theoretical framework, or simply keeping the theories and the observations in different sections entirely and mention connections as the flow of logic demands.

When a graduate student hesitates to choose a way of organizing their themes, a trick is to confess in the paper itself the problem that is making them hold their pen. The interdependent theories and observations that cause the graduate student with good scholarly conscience to not be able to talk about one thing without talking about the other is itself an idea to expand upon and discuss the meaning of. The confession may even grow in drafting to become the overarching issue by which the narrative of the research can be embedded!

The actionable takeaway for any graduate student is to stop thinking and start writing. Each freewrite is a stick you let go and let fall, and each draft is an MCMC simulation attempting to converge at a good enough state. If it doesn’t work out and the stick does not point to gold, freewrite again and have the stick fall from a different height or a different angle. Maybe there will be gold this time.