It is four o'clock in the morning. I don't have to look at my watch to know it because the sound of that blue-jay outside my window always reminds me of the time at exactly the same moment every day. It is like a check point, and I know in exactly an hour and thirty minutes I will see the morning skyline in my East-facing room. I also know that I just spent another all-nighter trying to add a mere couple paragraphs to my essay that I may or may not keep after reading it again in several hours.
Writing is hard. Now that it is time for me to transition from Wesleyan to Columbia Engineering, I think back to all the academic experiences I had in my past three years as a liberal arts student and being able to complete an individual tutorial with Prof. Richie Adelstein is definitely a highlight in my memory. Writing the essay was challenging, strenuous, and caused all kinds of frustration and self-doubt in me. But the entire process taught me so much about how to write a convincing essay and I want to share some of my learnings here.
Have an outline and start from there
I really think every great essay starts from an outline (doesn't have to be a great outline at all). Having an outline helps me to organize all the ideas and it is especially important to show how one idea builds on another. It is sort of like a recipe in cooking. If I want to make mac and cheese, I have to cook the macaroni, mix the butter and flour to make cheese sauce, add sour cream and cheese, and eventually put everything together. Every step builds on a previous step and I think a similar process is true for writing an essay. If I want to make an argument about something, I need to first say something about the background, introduce some ideas, explain them, maybe add some further supporting evidence, and eventually combine everything to show why my argument makes sense given all these information. The process can be long or short depending on the topic or assignment, but I can use an outline to document all my steps beforehand so that I have something to refer to as I fill in the content for each paragraph.
Save introduction and title for the last
I know this seems to be counterintuitive because it seems somewhat "natural" to write everything in order. However, I believe following a strict order can undermine your productivity when you are writing about something complex or when the length of the essay is relatively long. The reason is that your ideas change all the time when you are tackling tasks like those and you are never a hundred precent sure if something you believe is true today will still be true some time later or after a conversation with your friend or your mentor. As a result, it is hard to have a title or introduction that encapsulate all these information which you won't know or be confident about until later stage of the writing process. Writing the introduction too early can potentially give you repetitive work in the future if you have to come back to revise or add something that come up later. It can also potentially restrict your creativity by giving you a preconceived notion of how your essay is going to develop and leave out many opportunities for new ideas or new directions.
Richie told me something in this regard which left me a profound impression:
"Keeping writing and revising on your ideas until the very last a couple of days before the deadline. Then you will know what the title of your essay needs to be and there you have it - a scholarly work by yourself"
Use tools like Pomodoro to create fragmented writing sessions
How the Pomodoro Technique works by Paymo
When you are inspired or are just "in the zone", you will feel ideas constantly coming to you and you should just write for as long as you can. However, a lot times that is not the case and you are spending hours to just write several sentences - a situation certainly happened to me for multiple days.
One solution I discovered was to write in fragments, not pages or paragraphs, by using tools like Pomodoro to break up the writing process. A key reason why I was writing so slowly is that it becomes extremely difficult for me to concentrate after some hours in front of my computer and books. Emails start to seem more interesting than they actually are. Some Amazon items or a discount for sneakers appear to be increasingly attractive. Or who knows, I may as well check my stories and wonder why these people are having a much more interesting life than I do. All these thoughts start to emerge and become especially captive after midnight as I stay up to "do more work" when everything is lonely and quiet.
To conquer such situation, I realized I could try to focus for shorter periods of time after my attention starts to drift away from the tasks. For example, I usually can write productively for over 90 - 120 minutes when I am well-rested and energized. However, after several hours I can only focus for 40 minutes, or even around 25 minutes when it's really late and I am tired. Pomodoro is a great tool that helps you to harvest your productivity based on how long you think you can focus. Pomodoro reminds you to take a break after every work session, the length of which is set by you. In this way, you can estimate how long you can be productive and use it to encourage yourself to stay focused during the work session. Because the breaks are also timed and divided in to short and long breaks, Pomodoro also keeps you from idling for too long. In a way, Pomodoro makes you work in fragments and acts like an "on and off" switch for your mind. This method effectively helped me to reduce the time wasted looking at social media or texting because I feel less burdened knowing that I only need to focus on my tasks for a finite period of time and constantly being reminded when it's time to get back to work. That made a huge difference on my late-night productivities.