PhD Writing: Why you don’t need to understand it before you write It

One of the most common PhD writing blocks is sitting in front of a blank page thinking, “I can’t write this yet because I haven’t worked it out in my head.”

Have you ever sat staring at a blank page thinking, "I can't write this yet because I haven't worked it out in my head"? If so, I wonder whether you're trying to do the wrong kind of PhD writing.

Many PhD researchers think they need to understand something before they can write about it, but one of the biggest hidden lessons of qualitative research is that writing is often the process through which understanding develops.

There is writing for submission, and there is writing for understanding - and they are not the same thing.

Writing for submission is the polished version that eventually appears in your thesis.

Writing for understanding is everything that happens beforehand: the messy paragraphs, abandoned explanations, diagrams, half-formed ideas and pages you'll almost certainly delete tomorrow.

None of that writing for understanding is wasted because it helps you see your own thinking. You can't read the label from inside the jar, and you can't properly examine your ideas while they're still trapped inside your head.

That's why I encourage researchers to stop treating first drafts as performances. Their job isn't to impress your supervisor or survive examination; it's simply to get your thinking out of your head and onto the page, where you can question it, reorganise it and gradually make sense of it.

Some of the most important writing you'll ever do during your PhD will never appear in your finished thesis, but without it, the finished thesis probably wouldn't exist.

This is one of the hidden lessons I explore in my short book, The Hidden Curriculum of Qualitative PhD Research: Why qualitative research feels so confusing (and why it's probably not you). If you've ever delayed writing because you felt you needed to think everything through first, I think you'll find the chapter on PhD writing particularly reassuring. You can find out more about the book here.