Write from Day 1, WHAT? Day 1? Are you kidding me?

 

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 2^nd (or 3^rd) 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