6.7 if i just do it perfectly now, i won't have to revise it later
sure, it takes longer up front to get the draft as close to perfect as you can, but it will save time when you don't have to revise it, right? right???
taking on one of the most common writing fallacies in today's episode - this is for you if you've ever justified not sending the draft by saying you'll just get it to a better state first. you are not alone, but there are other ways <3
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📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
This season is called Just at Me already, where I go through all of the different kinds of people that I run into and have been myself as a coach for academics. And we talk about how to shift that if you want to. I.
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This week's episode is called, if I just do it perfectly right now, I won't have to revise it. And it is for all of my people out there who are working on making their drafts as good as they possibly can because it's efficient, right? If I just submit a really good draft now to my supervisor, to the editor, to whomever.
I won't need to revise it. It's taking me longer now. Sure. But I'm saving work in the long run. Oh, how I wish that this worked. I wish that this was an effective strategy because it is a logical strategy. It does make sense that the more that you polish something ahead of time, the less time you're gonna have to spend on the backend, revising it, responding to feedback, et cetera.
But more often than not, what I find happens is what I call the half drawn horse phenomenon. I'll link to this in the show notes, but I'm sure that you've seen that meme of a drawn horse. Somebody's sketch of a horse and the back legs and tail are rendered perfectly. They're so detailed, they're beautiful, they're realistic.
And then by the time that you get to the front of the head of the horse. It's a stick drawing. It looks like a kid did it. And often this is what I find when people are really working to make the drafts quote as good as they can before they submit it. There might be a chapter, a section, a part of it that is perfect or as close to it as you can get, and you eventually run out of time for the rest of it.
Chapter two and three are really, really solid. And chapter one you wrote over a weekend there's nothing wrong with this. Plenty of dissertations have been submitted as half drawn horses. I know that there are definitely parts of my own dissertation that are much more finished and polished than the others, but it is.
A beautiful example of this kind of fallacy that we have, which is that the time that we spend upfront, the time that we spend on the earlier drafts, working just with ourselves, where we're protected, where we don't have to have this feedback, we don't need to be as vulnerable, that time is going to pay off by something in the end
and I wish that were true, but usually what happens is that you run out of time. You run out of time to respond to the feedback that you're inevitably going to get. You run out of time to write the pieces that don't exist yet, and it feels more uneven than it could or it should. So I this week would encourage.
To think about the cycle of book development. This is a term from Dr. Laura Portwood Stacer, whose book I'll link to in the show notes. But it's brilliant. But the idea is that your manuscript, you're writing, it's always a cycle. You're always clarifying what the piece is going to do, soliciting feedback, and then adjusting to that feedback and.
You cannot prevent that cycle from running at all by just writing better. You can't prevent your advisor from having feedback by double checking every single sentence because invariably, you want your work to be out in the world. You want it to be something that people can respond to, and whether that's your writing group.
Your advisor, a peer reviewer or an editor, you can't guarantee that they're going to always have amazing feedback, but you can make it so that they can help you move forward faster than you would on your own. I have three strategies that help me when I'm feeling really stuck in this kind of efficiency trap where I feel like I have to keep going and make this draft perfect even though I'm running out of time, because the more I spend now, the less I'm gonna have to do later.
The first strategy that's really useful for that is having a feedback panel. Graduate students especially don't have access to a lot of writing feedback. Maybe your advisor, maybe a committee member, but. Sometimes your peers, and it's really difficult because your advisor might be busy, they might not be skilled at giving constructive, useful feedback.
And if you have a panel of people that you can go to, if you have a writing group, a peer group, a person that you do draft swaps with an accountability group, even a non-academic who can read and proofread things, you'll be amazed how much easier it is. To get feedback and to practice sending your work for feedback earlier if you have more people to try it with.
It's probably not going to be your best strategy to increase the frequency of feedback, solicitation with your advisor. They might be busy, they might not be that good at it, but if you can broaden the team but more people on the team get more support for your writing, it can really help.
Because yeah, you're right, it might not be the most efficient path forward to give your draft to your advisor right now, but that doesn't mean your writing group can't look. At it. That doesn't mean that somebody in your program can't take a look at it. It doesn't mean that you can't give that draft to somebody else, get their feedback, and then move forward.
Strategy number two is to outsource some of that. Is this done or not? Anxiety to a checklist. I there are lots of different checklists that are floating around. I'll link to a couple in the show notes. But the idea of this checklist is that you say, okay, I'm not going to know maybe when this draft is done or ready for feedback, but if it has all of the content that I wanted to include, if I've proofread it for sentence fragments, if the citations are all correct, then I'm ready to send it.
And that way the checklist is in charge of whether or not it's ready to send and not your internal feeling, which may or may not be an accurate representation of if that draft is ready to go. In my experience, very rarely do people send work because they have an internal feeling of, yes, this draft is ready to go.
It's, I've taken it as far as I need to. Almost all of us are sending it because of some external force, whether that's a deadline or a writing group swap, or a, an editor who needs it, or your funding is running out, so you have to submit the dissertation. It's that external force that makes it done, not the internal.
Qualities of the document. So you give yourself more chances to incorporate feedback, more chances to strengthen the document if you send it more frequently and earlier in the process. And last but not least, I really encourage you to examine the premise of how you're thinking about revision. So many of us we're really good writers as undergraduates.
It's earlier in our career, you might be really good at seminar papers or short blog posts or newsletters or other forms of writing, but academic writing is complex and because it's so complex, it often is difficult to get it clear, concise, content filled, compelling, all in one pass. So if you think about the premises of your writing cycle, are you.
Thinking about it as I need to get this to 80% before people see it, or 90% or a hundred percent, or if I just work really hard at it, nobody will give me any feedback at all. Those are really beautiful ways to protect yourself from the vulnerable moment of getting feedback, but they're definitely slowing down the process in ways that you maybe don't want to or don't need to.
So I encourage you to think, okay, if I start from the premise of I will get feedback whether I want it or not, I will. Use other people's feedback to strengthen what I can't see clearly about this draft that I've been staring at for weeks or months, or maybe even longer. If you start from the premise that that feedback is part of the process and not an additional add-on that you trigger because you didn't do it well enough the first time, how might you plan that cycle differently?
Who might you invite into the process that you wouldn't have otherwise considered? Feedback isn't a punishment. Feedback is the way that all of us get stronger as writers as communicators. So I encourage you to think about how you are leaving yourself out of spaces and places and cycles that will help you be a stronger writer.
It might not be the most comfortable, but it is going to move you forward. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next week.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!