2.10 shape the future - outlines as a writing tool
outlines can be frustrating - how do i know how to structure an argument that i haven't written yet? this week's episode talks about the two things i think an outline ACTUALLY does for a scholarly writer, and how to use them alongside drafting for more support. these aren't your high school roman numeral outlines!!
resources:
workshop with dr. henry on may 10
I am giving away one FREE 45 minute session with me a month to anyone who reviews this podcast on Apple Podcasts! Leave a review and I'll announce the winners in the last episode of the month, and in my newsletter! Thank you so much for helping to spread the word about the podcast!
I am so excited to be hosting Structure as a Path to Sustainability with Dr. Kate Henry on May 10 - a one stop shop for overcoming overwhelm and lighting the way towards completing your next self-directed writing project. Enrollment is open now! My newsletter subscribers are the first to hear about all the new stuff (and the sales) so hop on the list here!
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But Katy. How can I write an outline if I don't know what I'm going to say yet? And other existential thoughts on this week's episode of
📍 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. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And if you rate and review this podcast, by the end of the month, you'll be entered to win a free session from me. More details at the end of the episode. Now let's get into the good stuff. .
There are so many things in graduate school that I find people just gloss right over. Of course, you know how to do an outline. Of course, you know how to build out your citation manager.
But what's the point of this podcast. If I don't go deep on some of the things that people assume, you know, and you might not.
And an underrated tool in that stable is the outline. An outline is simply put a roadmap of a piece of writing that you make at some stage during the writing process. Now to be clear. This isn't something that I think you have to do. But it can be an excellent scaffold around which to build a longer writing project.
Most of us are familiar with outlines that we take from writing that's already been done. So you might've been taught to outline as a reading and notation tool in primary or secondary school. You know, the really formal thing with the Roman numerals and the different subheadings, they look really impressive.
And there are a way to sort of organize information. And to many. Writers. Or are given the advice to make an outline for a piece of writing that they're working on to help them see the structure. The content ahead of time. Now. This is great advice, but it's only great advice. If you really think about what the outline is doing for you inside of the writing process.
And that's going to be a different job than the outline that you did of your AP us history textbook in high school.
So to my mind, an outline is a tool that helps you do two things.
Number one, it helps you decide what content is going to be included and crucially what content is going to be excluded. At least on a tentative basis. This is harder than it sounds. Many of us have so many ideas. And when we sit down to do things like draft a chapter, work on a conference paper more often than not, you have more ideas than you can explain fully in the container that you have.
It is more common than I can tell you that people sit down to start to write a dissertation chapter. And that first chapter one of five planned turns out to be the whole thing, because the information is so rich and you have so much to say, and you just don't know how much content fills a dissertation chapter until you start to write it.
So an outline is a preliminary step. Where you say, okay, here's what I think I'm going to cover. I am going to include this part of my experiment, but not this. I'm going to focus on these tables, but not those I'm going to use these two case studies and leave those for a future project.
The first step of an outline is that it helps you decide what's in and what's out of the current writing project. And the second function of an outline is to give you a sense, again, a tentative sense, but a sense of the structure and ordering of the ideas inside of set writing container.
Once you figure out what content is in and what content is out, an outline will also help you make some choices about what things to introduce. First, second, and third. For many of us, the writing process isn't particularly linear. We don't start at the beginning and we don't stop at the end. So an outline can help you see.
Like a quick map. Where you are in the space of the overall writing project to help you keep your bearings.
If you like me have trouble starting at the beginning of a document, then an outline can be really helpful because you can start where it feels the easiest. Maybe the first case study is something that you already typed up for a guest lecture that you gave. Great. An outline will help you see, okay. Here are the things that need to go before it, and here are the things that need to go after it.
Now that you've pitched you on the concept of outlines. I want to introduce a couple of ideas. About how you might be able to use them that aren't quite as formal and as detailed. Because the real problem with an outline is how do I know how to structure the chapter when I don't know what I'm going to say in it yet?
And I also just want to normalize that as we write, many of us do change our minds. We go on tangents, we bring things down. And an outline can also help you see where you've deviated and decide. This is good enough to make it into the overall plan, or is this something that I want to set aside for another project?
Your outline might be as simple and schematic as five key themes on post-it notes that are up on the wall that you shuffled the order of as you start to write. It might be as detailed as a multi page document with headings, subheadings, and the quotes from your literature and research sources embedded right in so that when you sit down to write, all you really have to do is fill in the prepositions around all of that information.
But no matter how detailed or not the outline is, hanging on to those two criteria, --that it's a tool that helps you decide what's in and what's out. And what order things can go in-- helps you see the outline doesn't need to sit at the beginning of the process only. In fact, I often like to think about outlines as sitting, if not literally, but metaphorically in a separate dual window with your writing. So that even if you've zoomed in to a specific section, you have the zoomed out version to help you stay oriented.
Outlines actually act a lot more like a living document. They are something that you keep updated so that you can tell how the writing process is going. For example. Maybe you made a really detailed outline and you sat down to write out the first section of it in a first draft. Amazing. In your head, you thought that section of the outline would take you two to three pages to write on paper.
And by the time you're done drafting, you actually have 10 pages. That's an excellent point at which you can check in with your outline and say, okay, If this has 10 pages of content in it. And I have five more sections. Then I'm going to have a 60 page chapter. And maybe that's totally okay for you and your advisor.
Or maybe they're expecting something along the lines of 30 pages. That outlines going to help you say, okay, which of these parts do I need to stay together? How can I rearrange the structure? Can I move some of this to chapter two or chapter three? It's like an architect's plans that are changing as you encounter the construction.
There are always bumps and hiccups. And having that updating blueprint can make it a lot easier to not lose your footing and make sure that you're keeping an eye on your time and energy budget.
If this is the kind of advice that's demystifying some of the writing process for you, then I really encourage you to click on the link in the show notes about the workshop that I'm doing with Dr. Kate Henry, next week, May 10th. 2023. I am really excited because one of the things that we're going to be doing is going into the process of making template documents.
And roadmaps for the specific thing that you're trying to write. These are skills that don't get taught very often. And I find that tools like this make a huge difference when you're working on longterm independently, guided writing projects. But whether you join us or not, I hope that this gave you a few ideas for thinking about. Maybe brushing off those Roman numerals, get your post-it notes out and start thinking about an outline as a responsive, Rather than predictive, Tool.
📍 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!
2.9 don't let the title fool you: my fave book on academic writing
if there was a pantheon of academic how to books, this one would be at the top - but the reasons i love it so much might not be the ones you think! tune into this week's episode to hear which book basically acted as the seminar in academic writing i never got in graduate school!
resources:
the book i recommend (no spoilers!)
my colleague dr. lisa munro teaches a seminar based on the book that's enrolling for this summer!
downloadable guide to running your own writing group
join the community for just $5 a month!
I am giving away one FREE 45 minute session with me a month to anyone who reviews this podcast on Apple Podcasts! Leave a review and I'll announce the winners in the last episode of the month, and in my newsletter! Thank you so much for helping to spread the word about the podcast!
I am so excited to be hosting Structure as a Path to Sustainability with Dr. Kate Henry on May 10 - a one stop shop for overcoming overwhelm and lighting the way towards completing your next self-directed writing project. Enrollment is open now! My newsletter subscribers are the first to hear about all the new stuff (and the sales) so hop on the list here!
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Part workbook, part writing seminar, part demystifying the academic publishing process. Let's talk about the one book that I recommend to most scholars in this week's episode.
📍 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. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And if you rate and review this podcast, by the end of the month, you'll be entered to win a free session from me. More details at the end of the episode. Now let's get into the good stuff. .
I imagine that if you are listening to this podcast, some part of you likes to read books. One of the genres of books that I can not get enough of are the kind of, how to manuals of whatever thing I'm into. So if I am into knitting, I want to read every book about how to do knitting. Gardening you name it. But this interest was really kicked up a notch when I was in grad school, partially because I was one of the first people in my family to go to graduate school. Therefore I didn't understand a lot about it.
And the book that more than anything gave me the foundation to better understand the academic writing and the academic publishing process. And that book..dun dun dun dun... Is: Writing your Journal Article in 12 weeks: a Guide to Academic Publishing Success by Dr. Wendy Laura Belcher.
If there's a Pantheon of academic, how to books, this one sits right at the top level. Most people have heard about it. And that's one of the reasons why I'm recommending it, because I try to mostly talk about things that are free or easy to get your hands on. And the writing your journal article book has been come out in a couple of different editions. It was revised recently. There are copies a plenty in libraries in your fellow graduate students, bookcases. So I'm very confident that you'll be able to get your hands on this, if not for free than for very close to it. So that's step one. This is a popular book.
I want to dispel a misconception, but at least I had, when I was going into this book,
I looked at the title and I thought, cool, this is a book that will let me write a journal article. From zero, no research done to published or sent off to a journal in 12 weeks.
Actually this book starts from the premise that you already have a draft of a journal article. So in case you were thinking that you would be able to research, outline, edit, revise, and then submit an article in 12 weeks, you might be able to, but this book walks you through it. At a slower pace.
And that's one of the biggest misconceptions about this book. It's not a start from zero to publishable article in 12 weeks. It start from draft, but that isn't to say that it's not really useful because it is. So if you're an early career graduate student, then this might be a book that you use to take a seminar paper into your first article draft or a conference paper, or maybe parts of your master's thesis or an undergraduate thesis. Any draft that you have laying around is going to be useful for this book, but make sure you have that draft before you start.
Other things to know about this book, you can do it by yourself. It's also written and gives you tips for doing this book with a group. I know lots of groups of graduate students that have met over the summer and worked through this book together. A group accountability, definitely aids in the process, but there's nothing that you can't do by yourself.
And it has different chapters. So it starts with things like setting up your writing schedule, figuring out the time maybe going through and selecting the presses that you want to submit to. It walks you through all of the steps that you would need to take that draft of rough writing and get it ready to submit to her journal.
Including the choosing of the journal, the submission process, writing a letter to the editor response letters. Et cetera.
So you will have to make some adjustments for various disciplines. The book is probably best geared toward people who are writing in the humanities or social science disciplines. And a lot of the examples draw from that. It's a little bit harder with some of the STEM disciplines.
That isn't to say that there aren't useful things in this book for scholars of any type, just that other disciplines that aren't fitting as neatly into the kind of example, pool might have to work a little bit harder to adapt it. Now.
I want to share with you. What I actually think is the real magic of this book, which is the fact that it is for my money. Some of the most concise. Actionable. Practical writing advice that you can get about academic argumentation anywhere.
And that is a hill that I'm more than happy to defend.
I never took a graduate seminar on academic writing. And it seemed like something that everyone just assumed that I had had before I arrived at my PhD program. And so when people were saying things like, oh, you know, this needs to be restructured, or I wish that the argument were a little bit clear, a baby PhD me had no idea what that meant. And this book was the first and most important step in me learning what people meant.
It has excellent chapters around revising, thinking through various structures. Editing on a sentence level, working with the literature, sharpening up your argument. All things that were talked about around me and I never fully understood until I read this book.
It's also a really useful starting point for understanding the academic writing process. If you come in with less background knowledge about how say a journal article is born, then this book has really useful practical strategies, exercises, and explanations of what it means to actually be peer reviewed or how you pick a journal or what things you need to prepare in order to submit to the journal or how you find out what their requirements for publishing are.
There are so many things that are hidden in the academic graduate school curriculum. We just assume that you know, what a peer reviewed article is, how to find a top journal and how to get published in it.
And this book has a lot of easy to read. Easier to understand, plain-spoken explanations about the academic writing process.
I think anyone who likes a little bit of structure to move projects forward would absolutely benefit from at least leafing through this book. Even if they don't necessarily follow the exact strict 12 week model. I know that one of the things that I miss the most when I started working on my dissertation was the fact that I didn't have like a syllabus like this week do this, this week, do this. And this book gave me a syllabus of sorts that I could follow. And I ended up adapting a lot of it as I worked on the longer pieces, like my dissertation.
So if you've been missing that kind of weekly assignment energy from your seminars, This book can be a good replacement for it.
So many of us actually need structure. And it's really hard. To know how to, for example, break things down into smaller steps if you've never done those steps before. And what I appreciate the most about a book, like writing your journal article in 12 weeks is that it gives you a template for figuring out what the various steps are in a project that can be as abstract and difficult and intimidating as writing an academic article.
And if the idea of making sustainable repeatable structures for long-term writing projects sounds like something that you could use some support in. Then please check out the workshop that I am running with dr. Kate Henry in early may. All of the details are in the show notes, and I would love to have you consider it.
But either way. I hope that you have a great week and thank you so much for listening.
📍 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!