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Before you start writing
Before putting pen to paper, consider some common writing challenges.
Writing isn’t easy, but being clear on your purpose, audience, and the limitations of the genre you’re writing in will help save you time and maximise the impact of your outputs.
Key takeaways
Good writing doesn’t happen overnight but is a career-long learning opportunity.
Before starting to write, ask yourself what you hope to achieve through the work?
Consider who your audience is. How you approach writing for experts in your field will differ to a short general interest piece.
The conventions of a literary journal will differ from a news article, so be sure to read the guidelines and write to the format.
Writing always takes longer than we expect, so factor in enough time to draft and redraft.
Read time: 5 min
There’s no escaping it: writing isn’t easy. In fact, it’s one of the most sophisticated and cognitively demanding tasks to master. Each time you write, you have to juggle a whole lot of information, decide what you actually want to say about it, think about who your readers are likely to be, and operate within the conventions of the genre (e.g. journal articles have very different conventions to opinion pieces). And then there’s the actual mechanics of writing: achieving a logical flow, choosing the right words, and making sure syntax and grammar is correct… are correct?
Good writing cannot be learnt quickly. You will spend your entire academic career getting better at it. Here, we focus on some of the most common challenges and offer some advice.
You can apply this advice to writing journal articles, funding applications, promotion applications, and other major pieces of writing for your academic career.
Determining purpose, genre and audience
Before you begin writing anything, you need to be clear about three things: Purpose, audience, and genre. This will help you decide what content to include and exclude, what tone to adopt, how technical the vocabulary should be, and myriad other considerations.
What is the purpose?
Writing aimlessly, without a clear sense of what you’re trying to achieve, not only wastes time but can prove very frustrating. It’s like wandering around a desert without landmarks or a map – you’ll become thoroughly lost and exhaust yourself in the process. You need a destination. Ask yourself: ‘Why am I writing this?’ and ‘What do I hope to achieve?’ Perhaps you’ll discover more than one reason.
Who is the audience?
Unless you have a fair idea of who’s going to read your work, it’s impossible to know how to pitch it. For example, the amount of technical detail to include will vary enormously depending on whether you’re writing for disciplinary experts, informed non-experts, or the general public. For example, if you’re writing a funding application or a prize nomination – who will be reading it? What do the guidelines tell you about the assessors, their level of expertise, and the assessment process?
You may also need to consider what views and opinions your readers may bring to the topic, especially if you’re writing something provocative – are they likely to be friendly or hostile, sceptical or trusting? Ask yourself: ‘Who am I writing to?’ and ‘What might they already know and think about this?’
What are the conventions of the genre?
Every piece of publishable writing will conform to certain conventions, or expectations, that govern the length and structure, the degree of formality, whether to use first person (I, me, mine) or third person (Dr, his/her/they, etc.), and many other things. These conventions differ depending on the genre of writing. For example, many scientific journal articles use the IMRaD structure: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. Many journalistic pieces use the ‘inverted pyramid’ whereby the key details (answering what? how? who? where? when?) are presented first, then unpacked in the subsequent paragraphs – the opposite of most academic writing. Funding applications are another genre again, with sub-genres for fellowships, projects, centres, etc., and for different funding bodies (e.g. ARC and NHMRC applications are quite different). Prize nominations are different again.
It is imperative to understand the genre you’re writing in. If you don’t, it is very likely that you will need to rewrite the entire piece. Ask yourself: ‘What are the writing conventions I need to follow?’
Tips for learning how to write in a specific genre
Follow instructions and guidance
Most journals, book publishers, funding bodies, and universities (for promotions) provide explicit guidance about writing requirements for everything ranging from content (what they are and are not interested in), to structure and format, to style – sometimes even about the minutiae of punctuation (e.g. when to use a comma before ‘and’).
Reverse engineer existing pieces of writing
If there are no instructions or guidance – and even if there are – a very useful exercise is to choose a few pieces of writing in the relevant genre and read them closely, carefully noting how they have been written; literally, take notes. For grants, for example, you can take a look at the Successful Applications Library. You will then be in a good position to emulate them.
Allow enough time
If there is one universal truth about writing, it is this: it always takes longer than you expect! When it comes to estimating how long it will take to write something, we are inveterate optimists. We are in some kind of mass denial about the complexity of the task and the fact that you can’t write well for more than a few hours at a time due to the sheer brain power required to do it. Sustained writing is mentally exhausting.
The problem is exacerbated when you co-author something, like a paper or a grant. Every co-author adds a node of complexity, increasing the likelihood of blowing out your timeline. Where co-authorship is involved, some may be slower to draft their sections than others; there may be disagreements about each other’s content; and eventually the different styles and ‘voices’ will need to be reconciled to produce a seamless piece of prose that doesn’t read like it’s at war with itself.
Our recommendation is to estimate how long you think the writing task will take, then double it. Otherwise, you’ll produce something that reads like a draft – not polished, quality work.