4 March 2020

As I think about producing some writing for my PhD, I’ve put together a list of some dos and don’ts which popped up during the Royal Literary Fund writing course which I attended in February:

Do

• Use story telling- this engages the intellect and emotion
• Bring yourself to the page – who you are – what your investment is – your voice and purpose. Make your concerns and commitments apparent.
• Let the questions cascade
• Ask how each chapter changes the perspective of the work
• Think about where to situate the backstory
• Be expressive – academic text loses attention
• Show rather than tell
• Use footnotes for definitions, what you’re not going to do and things that get in the way of storytelling.
• Use first drafts as a way to throw down the clay – you can shape it later.

Don’t

• Say “In the last chapter we saw …” or variations of this
• Use subheadings in chapters – they create more beginnings and endings and stop the flow of your work
• Use lists – they create anxiety in the reader – “First I’m going to do this, then I’m going to do that, and finally I’m going to …”
• Use sentences of the same length – the work becomes monotone