A prolific academic writer does not feed on crumbles of time to write, it takes a chunk of morning hours to do that. Writing is about daily exercise. And good writers know how to create and protect their own writing times.
In my case, I grew used to writing since I was a boy. Writing has long been an escape and a silent rebellion for me, an exercise in creating my own identity and jotting down on paper my own future plan. Writing has been a tool for fighting loneliness, devise imaginative routes, and conjure a future image of myself. Now writing is my job.
As my Ph.D. in Management turns to its final rush, I can see how writing and academic career are so intimately connected. Good researchers write every day. But, what should a Ph.D. student write about? What a student has to say and write about, almost daily? Would him better spend time reading, collecting data, and making hypothesis before writing? The answer is yes, and no. Let’s see why.
If writing is a substantial part of the nurturing process of an academic and future researcher, Ph.D. students should formally exercise and train almost daily. Writing is like training on a gym schedule: you cannot skip a training session, otherwise your muscles will become dull. It takes a disciplined and focused mind to write every day.
On the other hand, writing is more effective if it is applied to a substance. That is something that directly comes out of a researcher’s readings and ideas, and that can be shaped with writing sessions to come up with a set of working hypotheses. No matter how utterly simple they could be.
In William Zinsser book I found that writing and learning are two intertwined, interacting processes. They are two sides of the same coin, and writing helps you fix what you learn, and prepare to write about. Writing provides the scaffolding of any clear reasoning about a subject matter.
When you read, as a researcher, you may experience a dialogue going on, between you and your own mind. The voice inside you keeps reading aloud, while your brain scans the content for traces that would match with a body of preexisting knowledge. At times this process may uncover a surprise finding that research should treat with increased care and attention. This is the origin of the hypothetical thinking that creates good research.
This is my experience with writing and learning. Since my old school days, when curiosity and learning were so confounded with each other, studying shaded a magic aura of secrecy and fantasy. Curiosity is the fuel of good writing, I had to realize that at my own expense.
When I started working on my Ph.D. proposal, few years ago, my fretful attempts to write a successful proposal, prevented me from enamouring with the subject. When I chose my research topic, I made a choice of opportunity, instead of passion.
Now, after successfully starting my Ph.D. in Management, that research project started looming over me and shaded my true interests. The compromises I made at the time of writing the research proposal would cost me dearly. Unless I had the opportunity to…
What did save me? I realized that I had no urgency to explain any strategic variable, organizational outcome, or business performance indicator. Roughly speaking, my research project did not choose any specific outcome variable. But the traditional scientific process required me to find one. Something I would, eventually, become “expert of”.
Here we come to the role of writing in my learning process. I realized that, while missing an explained variable was bad enough, still I was able to take a look back, at my initial Ph.D. days, and see the route I had taken so far. Behind me, on the tracks, a wealth of hints were disseminated.
And so, my work is to take a journey back home. A sort of Odyssey, the one I recently embarked on, that takes me from the unknown shores of my Ph.D. wreck to the decks from which I set sail on the beginning of my Ph.D. Here is the origin of this section, Econoclasm. A Ph.D. ODYSSEY.
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