Writing Together (02.03.21)
In this post we outline the help and support we discussed in our recent Writing Together session.
During the breaks we discussed the following writing challenges and shared ideas and strategies for how they can be overcome.
- Avoiding distractions and Setting time aside
- Re-writing and reducing a word count that is over the prescribed limit.
Avoiding distractions and Setting time aside
The writers present had been on previous Writing Together sessions and found the the Pomodoro Technique modelled in the session a useful way to avoid procrastinating. One writer mentioned that having this time set aside where they feel they have to work has helped them to progress with their paper.
We discussed how it can be counter productive working for hours at a time on a specific writing task when you be more successful having short focused bursts of writing. We then discussed how some writing experts recommend even writing as little as 5 minutes a day to keep motivated and make consistent progress
One writer mentioned that she had chatted with another writer in a previous Writing Together session which really help to focus on completing the writing for her results section. We highlighted other Library sessions similar to Writing Together where we can write with other people, such as Shut Up and Write and the Online Study Sessions.
Re-writing and reducing a word count that is over the prescribed limit
In our second break we discussed how iterative the writing process is and that re-writing sections can often take just as long as the initial writing.
In this discussion the fine tuning was around reducing the word count to ensure it was under a specific limit and also by fine tuning your writing you can notice where you have repeated yourself and amend those sections of your text accordingly.
We would like to thank you all for attending this Writing Together session, we thoroughly enjoyed chatting to you all and finding out about what you were working on.
If you would like to attend more Writing Together sessions, have a look at the schedule and come along to as many as you would like.
We look forward to seeing you again, and good luck with your writing!
Dave, Kerry & Fatima
