3 Easy Ways to Jumpstart Your Writing

It doesn't matter if you’re a student, a faculty member, or a seasoned industry veteran; everyone struggles with writing at some point. But if writing is so important, why does it seem so hard? Here are three easy things you can try to ease the pain. They have helped me immensely.

1. Set realistic goals.

We’ve all stared at it. The dreaded blank page of a new document window on the word processor screen. How will this ever turn into a complete manuscript? Where does one even begin? Setting realistic writing goals can help to overcome this barrier. Set aside a regular time to write and determine how many words you can reasonably compose during that period. A goal of 300-400 words is a good starting point for a daily writing goal. The key is to set the bar at a level you are likely to achieve and stick to it. Make your daily goal a top priority. You'll be surprised how satisfied you’ll feel.

2. Write less, revise more.

How many times have you spent hours painstakingly perfecting each sentence in your paper before moving on to the next. Instead of this agonizingly slow and incredibly inefficient sentence-by-sentence process, try following the advice of Dr. Kristin Sainani, Associate Professor of Health Research & Policy at Stanford University, who suggests breaking the writing process into three phases: pre-writing, writing, and revision. Organize all your materials during the pre-writing stage so that you can focus exclusively on getting your thoughts down during the writing phase. This frees you from distractions so that you can just write. Don’t worry about achieving perfection, you’ll have plenty of time for that during the revision stage. It may sound crazy, but you’ll actually spend less time writing if you follow this approach, leaving more time for refining your work.

3. Craft an engaging narrative. It's as easy as A-B-T.

Everybody loves a good story; we’re naturally wired that way. Hollywood screenwriters know this. That’s why most movies and television shows adopt a consistent narrative structure based on three simple words: And, But, Therefore—A-B-T. The idea is to begin with two statements of agreement (the “and”), followed by a statement of contradiction (the “but”), and finally a statement of resolution (the “therefore”). Let’s try a simple example: Electrophoresis involves the transport of charged species in an electric field. And electrophoretic techniques have become a workhorse of molecular biology by enabling easy size-based DNA

separations. But proteins are difficult to separate in this way because the interplay between size and charge is more complicated than in DNA. Therefore we are developing multi-dimensional techniques that isolate the effects of size and charge on electrophoretic mobility so that high-resolution protein separations can be achieved. As scientist turned filmmaker Randy Olson points out in his book Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs a Story, many great communicators have mastered this narrative structure, from Watson and Crick’s seminal paper introducing the DNA double helix to Trey Parker and Matt Stone in TV’s South Park. You can do it too, and once you do you’ll be amazed how the ABT framework transforms your writing. Check out Randy’s book to learn more.