Stream of consciousness writing vs Structured writing

There is a provocative post over on 3monththesis.com called “The worst thesis writing advice ever”. That advice?

“Just get words down on the page, because you can always sort it out later.“

The rationale?

Because the process of “sorting it out”, or editing, is 99% of the whole exercise!

If you leave clarifying your thoughts till last, you’ll end up will thousands and thousands of words, in “rough form”, but it’ll be unusable. You won’t have anything finished. And you’ll end up in a horrible situation of trying to edit your writing, working with stream-of-consciousness mess of a structure having forgotten what it was you were originally trying to say.

Instead, do it this way…

Edit as you write

The aim of your writing is to get an idea out of your head and onto the page in a way that will make sense to the reader.

The aim should always be clarity, but you need to clarify the idea in your own head before you can communicate it effectively to someone else.

When you write, the words will usually come out in a bit of a jumble because you’re thinking and clarifying ideas at the same time.

So the first version of a sentence will need some revision before it’s good enough to use.

…

When you’re explaining a complex idea, you must take the time to clarify your thought on the page, while it is still fresh in your head.

Give the thought the time and care it deserves. You must stop and edit the sentence to express yourself clearly before moving on, because if you just fill pages and come back to edit days or weeks later, the thought will be gone and it will be incredibly hard to sort out the mess of writing.

The author then gives an example:

The first version of a sentence will rarely be very good. But knowing that frees you from the pressures of perfectionism. You can write that sentence knowing that it’s just a first attempt.

Whatever you want to say, there are a huge number of ways you could write it. A huge number of possible solutions to the problem of communication:

* The cat sat on the mat
* The cat was sitting on the mat
* The mat had the cat sitting on it
* The cat was on the mat, sitting
* Sitting on the mat was the cat

And that’s just a single sentence describing one simple idea. So there are always alternatives, just by moving a couple of things around.

I disagree with this post because, for someone with writer’s block, for someone who is afraid to get started, or for someone who is a perfectionist, getting the words down on the page (subject to some constraints) is the ideal medicine to get moving on your thesis. If you are hobbled by these issues, then writing more and writing smartly is what is needed.

My response to this post was the following.

I appreciate what you are saying, but I think there are some nuances that need to be considered.

First, not all projects or people will write all their documents the same. I’ve published over 90 peer-reviewed articles and I don’t have a fixed style for writing. Some are meticulously outlined and organized from the start, and others are organized well in my head and flow easily out onto the paper. But, most result from me just jumping in and writing down my thoughts. Initially I do more writing than editing until the manuscript starts to take form, then I get to a point where I do more editing than writing. So, yes, editing is an important part of the writing process, but there is a point where writing dominates editing.

Second, sometimes the stream of consciousness writing can help open the floodgates that an author needs to get writing and get writing well. When I was writing my book Eloquent Science, it often took an hour or so to get into the mood to write after sitting in front of the keyboard. The first hour may not have produced much usable text, but it served the purpose of getting my ass in the chair and my brain in the right gear to produce more usable text later. If I worried about every little bit of text that I was creating and obsessed about its quality, I wouldn’t have been as productive. What I got out of 8 hours of effort was 7 hours of useful text and the first hour of warm-up text.

Third, a concept I talk about in my book is the writing/editing funnel. At the top of the funnel is the largest-scale issues: organization (chapters and sections). This is the first aspect to the document that an author needs to get in place. There’s no sense writing the perfect chapter of your thesis if it doesn’t fit into the framework that you’ve set for it. Then, going down the funnel, the writer should next focus on the paragraphs. Do all the paragraphs flow in order from one to the next? Do they make sense on the paragraph-scale? Then going down the funnel, you get to the sentences and then words, then small-scale stuff like grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

The idea of the funnel is to get authors to focus on the big picture first. Again, there’s no sense spending an hour crafting the perfect paragraph, if there is no place for it in the structure of the paper.

When in editing mode, it’s the same thing. No sense on fixing grammar and typos if the whole structure of the section of the thesis is rubbish. Fix the big issues at the top of the funnel first, then delve down to fix the little stuff.

So, when you say that you must ignore the advice to “just get it down on the page”, I think you need to qualify that. I guess it depends on the level of detail that you consider editing. In your example about the cat on the mat, the idea is down on paper. All of those examples would suffice for me to construct my argument through the stream-of-consciousness writing that often generates the greatest volume of text in our scientific papers. If after 70-90% of the manuscript is written, I didn’t like the first sentence, then I could change it one of the other sentences. It doesn’t bother me that it’s not perfectly crafted because the idea is serving a great placeholder for the eventual way I wish to say it.

UPDATE: James at 3monththesis.com has added a part 2 to clarify our discussion.

(Image from writebynight.net)