In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:
I have questions about writing papers. Specifically:
how do I finish them?
does everyone else find them as difficult to finish as I do?
It has been five years since my Phd and have managed to publish some stuff that I am happy with. I have never found starting writing particularly onerous, and generally enjoying getting the first 80% down. But, I always find the last 20% –actually getting the thing into a submittable state takes me an enormous amount of time.
Right now, I have a more than 80% of a paper finished –but it has been at this stage for the last month despite me working on it pretty much every day.
I find that a paragraph that I need to fix/alter slightly/rewrite will lead to me needing to fix/alter/slightly/rewrite another part of the paper. And so on…
So, I guess a couple of things could be happening:
1. Many people go through something like this and it is just a normal part of finishing papers.
2. I am doing something wrong. perhaps I need to get ideas more clear in my head before I start writing?
Yeah, I think this is totally normal–or, at least, it's something that I struggle with too. I love drafting new papers. Finishing them, on the other hand, is the tricky part. It takes a ton of polishing, and this in my experience is the least fun and most difficult part to do. You constantly fiddle with things, insert and remove things, second-guess yourself, and so on. I currently have maybe ten papers like this that are 80-90% done, but which I'm finding it difficult to polish into the kind of shape that I'm happy enough with to submit. And what often happens is that I have an idea for a new paper, so I'll begin drafting that up because I find that more enjoyable (this is in part the reason why I have so many papers in the 'polish' stage).
Maybe the OP and I are outliers in this regard, I don't know–but I suspect not. Any readers care to weigh in? And any tips for the OP to help them get to the finish line more quickly?
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