Assaalamualaikum & Hello all,
Based on the books I have read on writing a thesis or doing
a PhD, the authors unanimously agreed that writing is the toughest challenge
for any candidate. Majority of the authors urged that we should start writing
from Day 1. I was perplexed when I read this “How is it possible to write from
the very first day?” I asked myself, “What should I write?” In fact, the same
advice is thrown to me in most of the workshops I attended. My Supervisors did
not expect me to write from the first day though, I remember them mentioning
about reading and reading and more reading.
In my 2nd (or 3rd) month I started to
worry “I have not written anything”, what have I been doing for the past two (three)
months” and that’s when the Thesis Panic (as mentioned by Dr Inger Mewburn, The
Thesis Whisperer) kicked in. I know I have been reading but I don’t see any of
that since I don’t write anything. So I begin summarizing the journals I have
read. The panic subsided when I started reading the summaries and as my Word
Document file size increased. But another
question popped-up “What’s next?” I can’t go on writing summaries forever can
I?
Another episode of panic struck. Oh dear!! I need an action plan. Mayday! Mayday!
I decided to categorize the summaries into similar
topic/heading and then merging them into a piece of writing with paragraphs
since the summaries are all in table format. Ah! Good idea I thought to myself.
I started with 2 pages of summary on Customer Loyalty, my very first piece of
writing. I emailed the document to my Supervisors and they thought that it is a
good way of building my literature. I suppose I did something right (even
though the quality is nothing near ‘academic writing’ standard).
From then
onwards, I developed a habit of writing and even though some of the documents
will not go into my final thesis, I am really ok with that. What’s more
important is I ‘obeyed’ to the advice to write from Day 1 (though I didn’t literally
write from Day 1).
As time goes by, the small pieces of writing I have done
aided me in preparing the Confirmation of Candidature (CoC) document or the
Research Proposal. Therefore, none of the work I have done is wasted. Admittedly,
I have to make changes, restructure the sentences and also do some re-writing
however I am glad I started from the very beginning. I believe in years to
come, my academic writing quality will improve because through writing, we
improve the way we think and become more critical about the subject we are
writing.
Thank You for reading
Miss F
