Break Writing Break Writing Writing Every Day A Different View of Using Your Writing Time Crappy First Drafts The Last 5 Minutes Stuck? Writing versus Editing One More on Editing Binge Writing Writing Support Groups Are you Writing the Perfect Dissertation? One More on Time Management Motivational Tools Writing Practice How to Think and Act Like a Writer Writing Resources

In posting #1 (Write Every Day) I encouraged you to commit to writing at least 15 minutes each day. Everyday without fail…at least 15 minutes. Paul Silva, in his book How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing (APA, 207) suggests a different approach.

Silva advises you to make a schedule and stick to it. “The secret is the regularity, not the number of days or the number of hours” (p.13). You can write only on Fridays from 8 to 12 (a.m. or p.m. – your preference). You can write each weekday for an hour. But you must stick to your schedule. Here’s where Silva and I differ: His regular writing period can include more than just writing: You can read, collect data, gather resource materials, organize or analyze data, etc. These are all essential tasks; for almost all writing there is preliminary work to be done. But in my personal experience and in working with hundreds of graduate students, my/our problem is not the preliminaries. We always manage to read one more article or make one more visit to the library or archives or research site. We can always spend (waste?) countless hours organizing our work.

The hard part is writing. Fingers to keyboard. Pen to paper. Getting our ideas from mental representation in our brain to actual representation as words on paper. So if you need to make a commitment to the preliminaries to writing, do so. But your writing time should be just that – writing. You must write every day for at least 15 minutes. Have you written today yet?

Some of the information in the BreakWriting postings are drawn from previously published work (listed below), and I have tried to properly attribute the ideas and work of others. If I have failed to do so, please let me know so I can clarify and correct (ja2310@columbia.edu).

Silva, P. (2007). How to write a lot: A practical guide to productive academic writing. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. [Last year we gave away copies of Anne Lamott’s Bird by bird: Some instructions on writing and life at our GSAS writing and publishing workshops. This spring we’ll give away copies of Silva’s book. It is very good.]