Academia Survival 101: Five Tips to Ease Scholarly Writing

Midjourney generated image by author.

The time has come where the cobwebs need to be removed from the brain, a paper or perhaps a thesis needs to be written. A painstaking process filled with procrastination where every fiber in the body just wants to resist. A familiar feeling? Yeah… well I got you! So, why would you take my advice? Having suffered through a BA + MA thesis and like 89403845 papers because I studied literature and linguistics before (which meant a paper per week), I believe to possess a fair amount of coping mechanisms to help you get through this misery as well. 🤠

Firstly, there is no right way to write an academic text, from the process point of view I mean (formatting and deadlines are a whole other story but not relevant here). Everyone works differently and whatever works for you, is probably the best! There are some tools and methods however to maybe ease the research a little so that you save yourself some headache while you write. Take what works 🌷

1. Vibing in The Cloud ☁️

Once you’re done staring into the void, open a simple Google docs file and name it already in the formal filename. That way, when you’re about to hand in last minute, you don’t have to worry about that small detail anymore. Another smart thing about Google docs, your work is never truly lost. It saves everything frequently so that even when your computer crashes, you’ll likely be able to retrieve everything back. It sucks when everything is lost because of technological failure. If you want to be really certain, you can save it on a hard drive too, but let’s not be too paranoid either. Now at least you can stare at the unholy bright blank page in peace B-)

2. Google Scholar 📚

Google Scholar may not come as a surprise, but it just offers a good start to commence your quest for data. The “cited” part specifically I tend to rely on. The more a source is cited, the more you can believe it to be of better quality. Although this method is flawed too, and I’m sure my fellow academics, researchers and journalists will say that it may not be very reliable, I do think if you are an absolute beginner to (academic) research, with truly 0 experience, that this is definitely a start to learn how to get to that first solid source. Once you got a good source, I would generally recommend to scour its bibliography, there you’ll find a treasure of other sources that will most likely help you on your research journey. Google Scholar can also offer you a good first impression of the research scope that already exists in your topic.

3. Zotero, your friend 🗃

This one is my personal holy grail. Zotero works like a library, PDF reader and bibliography composer. The best part is that it works together with a browser extension. It is compatible with Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox and Edge. It’s open source too which is something we should definitely support as (academic) writers ;)

How to use it?

1. Install program
2. Install extension in browser
3. Create a folder for your paper in Zotero program
4. Search for sources on the web
5. Click on the extension symbol to save your source to the folder in Zotero program

There is no need to download any source, as Zotero automatically detects whether or not there is a PDF file attached to the webpage. This is then saved immediately into the program where it gets indexed. This means that the name of the author(s), title, volume, publisher, year, ISBN number, a.k.a. anything you need for referencing is there. Once you’re done writing you can select all the sources you have cited from in Zotero and let the program compile the entire bibliography list using any reference style.

You can open all the PDF files in Zotero and mark passages you find relevant, or take notes in it. No thousand tabs open in the browser.

So go install it and enjoy a seamless data collection for your research.

4. Evernote 4 Ever 📓

What I like to do next, after a day or two of dizzying data collection, is to actually 🤢 read 🤢 the sources. Now this is where the shifting takes place, getting rid of the bad, keeping the good. Make your life easy when you finally get your hands on a source. Read the abstract first if it’s a short paper, or check out the index and filter out the relevant chapter(s) if it’s a book. Feel free to skip right to the conclusions too, to get a solid overview of each work’s main points. Does it feel relevant? Go and read the whole thing to make sure you haven’t overlooked a good citation you could use as support for your arguments. Not relevant enough? Drop it.

When it comes to the citations for argument support, I would recommend using a note-taking software like Evernote (Notion or OneNote would probs be fine too). Start with creating a table using 5 columns for:

• “Title + author(s) + year”
• “Page no.”
• “Citation”
• “Comment(s)” (to write your thoughts)
• “Tag” (optional, could be colour coded and/or theme related, easier to find related topics this way)

It seems a lot but trust me, it feels much lighter in your head having all the source citations collected and organised, waiting to be copy-pasted instead of handling them case-per-case while writing. Then again, if this doesn’t work for you then drop this tip of course, no hard feels. ❤

5. Give yourself some grace 🐣

Writing academically is not easy, the tone alone is something of its own (lol it rhymes). The process of writing a paper often makes you question all the decisions you previously took in your life to be sitting here in front of your silly little computer, but this too shall pass!

Take a break, eat a snack, touch some grass. Go talk to a friend or a pet, heck take a couple days off if you need to. Sometimes distancing yourself and coming back to it with a clear head can work wonders. After all it’s just another paper/thesis, it’s a plain part of the degree you’re pursuing and as annoying as it might be, you’ll forget about it so quickly once it’s done. Remember you’re here to learn something (if not about your topic then maybe about yourself), you don’t need to write the next Nobel prize-worthy masterpiece.

Laurien Michiels is a visual artist who currently pursues a second MA in Digital Narratives at the Internationale Filmschule Köln.