How to be a better writer is one of the most common questions asked by PhD students and academics of all levels. While there are tons of useful "how to write" books on the market it can be difficult to translate this learning into actually improving your own writing. In this episode, I talk with writing coach Dr Katy Peplin about ways that you can support yourself to get better at writing and look after yourself at the same time! Hope you enjoy - there's some great advice!
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Vikki: Hello and welcome to episode 20 of series two of the PhD life coach. And I have another guest with me today. I am super excited to introduce Katy Peplin, who is an expert in all things writing when it comes to PhDs and academia. And that is what we're going to be talking about today. Welcome Katy.
Katy: Hi, I'm So excited to be here.
Vikki: We are super glad to have you here. So, tell people a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Katy: Yeah, sure. My name is Katie Peplin and I am the founder of ThrivePhD. So I work with grad students all around the world in all sorts of disciplines. Basically, to help them be humans and scholars at the same time, because I find that academia kind of forces you to choose one or the other. And many of us, have trouble, myself included, balancing both.
Katy: So, I have all kinds of things that I do that support people, but, I really especially like working with people who are finding grad school really hard and would like for it to be easier.
Vikki: Perfect. As I said, we're going to be thinking mainly about writing today. I know you support people doing a whole variety of things, but I always think it's useful to know what the people that are trying to help us struggle with themselves.
Vikki: So my last couple of episodes has been about procrastination and that's something that I have worked on my whole life and I'm still thinking about. So, what do you find hard about writing?
Katy: Well, the short answer is all of it. I am not a natural writer. I have always been more of a verbal person, and so there's something that kind of short circuits in my brain where, like, I feel like I have a fully formed idea or paper up here in my brain, and then I'm just really bored with the process of getting it out.
Katy: And then when it doesn't come out perfectly, that's really frustrating to me. And then when I have to redo things or revise things, that can be really frustrating for me. So it's definitely not something that I've come to naturally. I specifically really struggle with, like, coherence, there's a lot of things that in my brain make total sense, and then when they're on the paper make less sense, because I don't ever fully, none of us ever really fully download everything that we mean into a sentence.
Katy: And so I, um, I struggle a lot with that translation between what can feel really finished in my head and what other people can understand.
Vikki: Yeah. For sure. And I hear that from clients so much. I'm more of a struggle to get on with it girl. Hence the procrastination comment before. Once I get going, it tends to be too long, but I'm reasonably okay at editing. But I hear from my clients a lot, just this, this notion that it sounds okay in my head and then just doesn't make sense. It's just not clear when it's on the page and really struggling to know how to pick that apart. Are there other things that you see with your clients? Things that they particularly struggle with?
Katy: Well, I think that a lot of people just struggle with the idea that if writing doesn't feel easy, it's probably not good writing, if that makes sense. So I have a lot of people who come to me and they're like, man, I really struggle with like getting myself. It feels like I'm wrestling with alligators or sort of whatever their metaphor is.
Katy: And in their head, I sort of realized that because it doesn't feel easy because it doesn't feel like something that they're good at, there's this automatic assumption that it's not good or that it won't ever be good. And so I see a lot of people kind of short circuit themselves at various parts of the process because it doesn't feel like it's working. And so that must mean that it's not. And often it's not working, but that doesn't mean that it won't ever work.
Vikki: Yeah, I think we have this picture. People seem to think that a published paper came out that way. That like, if you're a top professor, you just pull up your keyboard and type introduction and off you go and it comes out looking something like that. And I'm sure there must be a few people that it goes a little bit like that, I guess, if they've been writing about the same thing for 30 years. But for the vast majority of people, it never ever looks like that, yet somehow that seems to be the standard that we compare ourselves to. That if it's anything other than coming out of my head completely articulate, then I'm obviously not good at this.
Katy: Yes, and I remember, like, asking some of my professors, because I was a first generation grad student, I didn't have any access to the process, I didn't know what it looked like, and so I remember asking, like, okay, when you sit down to write Professor X, like, what does it look like?
Katy: And nine times out of 10, they couldn't tell me. So they didn't have an articulate process themselves. But then when I realized that everything that I was comparing myself to was published and in order to get published, it went through multiple rounds of revisions, usually professional editors, usually a couple of different types of professional editors, sometimes writing groups, sometimes workshops, sometimes.
Katy: Things that were supported over years, research, sabbaticals, all kinds of support, teaching load reductions. And here I was trying to write something of that same caliber by myself in my office, never having done it before while working and teaching and being very busy and also trying to like keep my body and brain alive.
Katy: It wasn't, it wasn't a fair comparison and I didn't know that. And so I just thought there was something wrong with me.
Vikki: Yeah, and expecting all that stuff in your first draft too.
Katy: Yeah, yeah.
Vikki: That this should be just how it comes out. Yeah, for sure. And I think it's really insightful that you asked that question even. The fact that you knew that you didn't know that, if you see what I mean. Because I think often, I was the same, first generation PhD student. And I think often we don't even know that people might have a process for doing these things that we don't have.
Vikki: I remember when I was still teaching, I would spend quite a bit of time showing my PhD students and my undergraduates, all the file names that I had that kind of sat behind a published paper. So I'd show the, with the dates going through and the increasingly haphazard filenames that they have. I was preached to not to do what I did. But the increasingly haphazard names were until you've got one that's called final, final, submitted, final. And then you start getting all the revisions as well.
Vikki: And I think just seeing that really helped. Now, today, we were thinking about not really so much how to get on with writing. If people are listening and are struggling with getting on with writing, I would send you back to one of my really early episodes, episode four, where I talk about how to write when you're struggling to write.
Vikki: And that's really about some of these thoughts that we have that we're not good at it, that it should be easier than this, and how we can overcome those thoughts and get on with it. But today I know you've got some really useful tips about how people can actually improve their writing and get better at it.
Katy: Yeah, because I think that for me I thought that there was this huge gap. Like, I am not a naturally athletic person. And so, like, I remember being in gym classes and realizing that, like, I was never going to be able to just, like, wake up one day and run a mile, like some people would. And that if I was going to have to do it, I would need to build up to it.
Katy: And there were specific kinds of skills that, if I did them frequently, would help improve it. And when I had this sort of lightbulb moment, which I'm sure came from my therapist, that like writing is a skill, and it was also something that I could improve through conscious effort, it was really exciting to me.
Katy: Not because I was excited to like do a bunch of drills and like learn how to write better, but because it was something that I could control. It was something that like I could consciously and intentionally do, rather than just brute forcing my way and like hoping that if I just wrote for 20 years, I would get better.
Katy: Because like, you will, if you write for 20 years, every single day, you'll probably improve a little bit. But there are also things that you can choose to do that will help you build those skills faster and more intentionally too.
Vikki: I love that because so often when I'm coaching people, I'm trying to get them to recognize it's a skill and to see that thoughts like, I'm not good at this. I'll never be as good as them and things like that really hold them back. But even if you believe you can get better, it's not necessarily easy to figure out how. Yeah. So if people listening, I'm sure they will be, so people listening to this podcast are everyone from new PhD students all the way through to full professors. And I know from my coaching that people struggle at every level with, with writing.
Vikki: Where's one place that they could start?
Katy: My favorite place, and the one that I think is really accessible to people, is to think about reading as cross training for your writing. So, so many of us scholars feel like, understandably so, we're buried under mountains of reading. We can't possibly keep up with it.
Katy: And so it seems a little bit counterintuitive that I'm like, read more. But a lot of the reading that I see my clients doing and I even have done myself or it's very targeted. I call it like search and rescue reading where I'm like, okay, I need to go in and I need to understand this concept or I need to make sure that these citations are in order.
Katy: I need to check out that methodology. I'm very rarely reading to understand how this works as a written text. And I'm a humanities person, so it makes sense that I come at that a little bit more, um, naturally than maybe some other people do, because it's part of my training, but when I started to think about paying attention to how other writers wrote, It really, really helped me.
Katy: And so, like, concretely speaking, that means that when I write, I often have a separate color of highlighter where I'm like, good sentence, or I really like the way that this introduction is structured, or I really enjoyed the way that they incorporated these quotes. I basically just make like little love letters. And for me, I store them in Zotero. They're tagged in my thing with like good introduction or loved that conclusion or sort of whatever the nomenclature that makes sense to you is. But then I started to build a library of different kinds of introductions. For example, this person had an anecdote, this person started with the stakes, this person did this.
Katy: And the more that I could kind of think about how they were working. The more I could realize that I probably have seven different choices for my introduction and why don't I try one instead of just like opening up a blank document, like you said, and typing introduction and hoping that the perfect one will come to me.
Katy: So really thinking about my reading as yes, it's important for content reasons. And yes, it's important for me disciplinarily, but it's also really good for me as a writer to see other people write, and in that way, I gave myself a lot of permission in the later stages of my PhD to read for fun, and to read journalism, and to read nonfiction books, and to read fiction books, and to read YA books, and all sorts of different things, because it helped me, it helped me build a vocabulary to describe my writing, to describe other people's writing that I wasn't going to get just sort of like stumbling around in the dark.
Vikki: Yeah, for sure. One of the things we talk a lot about is reading with a purpose. So you talk about search and rescue. I actually see that as a technique that a lot of students also need to learn. So I still have students who believe that if you're looking for information, you start at the beginning and read till the end and can't understand how they're ever going to get through their pile of reading because it takes them three hours to read a paper.
Vikki: So that search and rescue that you're talking about, super useful if your purpose for reading that article is to check what methods they use or to get a quick summary of their findings or whatever it might be. But I love this idea of reading with the purpose of figuring out why that article works. And I think it's a particularly useful reminder for all our scientists.
Vikki: Um, I was a sport and exercise scientist, so we were pretty interdisciplinary, but I was kind of at the psychology immunology end of things. So at the borders of sciences and social sciences. And that close reading wasn't such a thing. That kind of analyzing how they made their argument wasn't something that really got emphasized.
Vikki: And I think the idea of reading an article so that you can figure out how did they link their paragraphs together? How did they finish their introduction? Where did they go next? Is. Something that's really useful. Is there anything that people should be careful of doing that, or any tips to make it more effective?
Katy: Um, I have a whole webinar that I'm happy to put, yeah, that's like free, um, that people can play with. It's about sort of like building templates, and I think that it's especially useful for people who write in fields where there are pretty rigid structures that you're expected to write in. That there's an introduction, there's a method section sort of.
Katy: On and on and on. And so I often think about it, and I do not in any way mean this in a derogatory sense. Many writing styles have a formula, or there's a variation of three or four different formulas. And the more that you can kind of figure out and then do it, then it's a lot easier to say, okay, in this person's introduction, they have one paragraph that introduces the stakes.
Katy: They have one paragraph that talks about their experimental design, and they have one paragraph that talk, sort of previews the findings, and I'm just making that up. But then you can say, okay, for me to write my introduction, they wrote about whales, and I'll be writing about macrophages. But who cares?
Katy: Because I just need one paragraph that introduces the stakes, one paragraph that, you know, talks about my experimental design, and one that previews my findings. And that makes it so that you have actual tasks to complete and actual things you can check off of a list. And that's not to say that you won't then need to revise or change it or your advisor might want something different, but you've started somewhere instead of trying to invent the idea of introducing a paper every single time from scratch by yourself.
Vikki: Yeah, definitely. And I think you talking about the different subjects there raised something else for me that I think actually it's really useful to be reading something that's sort of within your field, generally, so you understand it and the structures are likely to be similar. But that's actually a different area than you're writing, because I know even if you go to an article thinking I'm reading this in order to learn, if you're writing about macrophages and they're writing about macrophages, it's really hard to a not be intimidated that they're doing it better than you.
Vikki: But B, think, okay, I need to do it like them, but not so like them that I'm plagiarizing and all of those things. So, I love the idea of finding an article from somewhere sort of tangentially related to what you do, where you know the styles are going to be similar, but where it's completely different content.
Katy: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that is one of the big fears and I know that plagiarism is a big problem and in no universe am I saying that people should go out and plagiarize. I think that many of us were taught that independent work has to come directly from sort of like on high, through our brains, into our keyboards, and we can't look at anything else, and we can't reference anything else, and we can't take a look at how other things work, and I often think about it in terms of, like, recipes, like, if you and I both make chocolate cakes off of the same recipes, but we're in different countries, we use different measurements, our stoves are different, our access to ingredients are different, as long as we document those differences, we'll never create the same cake.
Katy: We're going to have two completely different cakes. And so I think that many students stop themselves from this kind of close analysis of other people's works because they're so worried about doing their own independent work that They don't use the kind of free help that's available to them, which is the shoulders of the giants that you can stand on if you'd like.
Vikki: Definitely. It's like I shared with a client just recently these, you can get these documents of sentence starters. Yeah. Where, completely content free, but they sort of say, you know, if you're trying to disagree with an article, you could start with a sentence, a couple of words like this. If you're trying to add extra evidence, you could start like this.
Vikki: And honestly, she was like, this is, this has changed everything. And sometimes even just those small things and you can pick them. You can, if you Google sentence starters, you'll find about a thousand people listening, but, but you can do that for yourself within articles too, can't you? Sort of. Well, how did they introduce the fact that they're now moving to something that contradicts what they just said?
Vikki: How did they show that this was now the final paragraph of the introduction? And what did they say? Absolutely. Those things, I think, can really help. And then you're stripping out content, so it's never going to be plagiarism. No. Because you're stripping out the actual science and just using almost the connecting words.
Katy: Yeah. And I think that so, academic writing in itself is so structured, you know what I mean, compared to like fiction or creative non fiction or some of the other genres, that there aren't that many different moves you can make. There are only so many ways to introduce a paper. There are only so many ways to say that you disagree with this author or disagree with that author.
Katy: And the nice thing about using some support for the structure and the argument is that it helps get you to really see the difference between, this is the structure that I'm using to communicate my argument, this is what's important to me, that I disagree with that author, or that I agree with this author, or that our methods are completely different, but our results are the same, or whatever.
Katy: That's your intervention. That's your scholarly contribution. It's not reinventing the form of the introduction for everybody who's going to come after you.
Vikki: Perfect. So. Definitely more reading, targeted reading, and picking out how they did what they did. What else can people do?
Katy: I'm also an evangelist, practically, for writing groups. Um, I was saved. I, I thanked my writing group in my dissertation acknowledgements. I regularly thank them. We're all good friends today. But I came from a department where my advisors and my faculty members wanted to see polished drafts. which is a completely reasonable boundary for busy faculty to have, which is like, come to me when this is ready and I'll give you the final levels of polish and we'll talk about, you know, kind of the fine grained things.
Katy: But if that's the only structure that you have, and the only available Feedback. For some people, it can be, and I'm not exaggerating, years between when I set out to write a chapter and when it was ready for my advisor to finish. And I felt like I was alone in foggy woods and had no idea and that I couldn't ask for any help until it was this, like, mysterious final polished draft.
Katy: And so I joined a writing group, and the people in my writing group had nothing to do with me disciplinarily. They weren't in my department. Um, they were in completely radically different fields. We all worked on massively different objects. But the magic of that writing group was that it gave me a structure for the in between.
Katy: So we would all check in on Wednesdays and we would talk about our progress. It gave me deadlines where I was like, okay, I need to have something to share by Wednesday. So, um, , we're gonna have a latte and buckle down and get something to share by Wednesday. And I know that these people aren't, you know, they won't ever need to decide on my funding packages or get me a job.
Katy: I can send them something that I'm not. proud of yet, and we can work on it. But the, the magic was they, because they didn't share the same disciplinary language as I did, they needed me to explain things to them that made me a better writer. So when I would send work to people in my department or people in my field, we all had a common language, and so we skipped over a lot of things.
Katy: I didn't need to explain that theory. I didn't need to explain what I meant by this. And sometimes that's appropriate. You're giving a 10 minute conference paper. Nobody needs you to back all the way up and explain, you know, this fundamental idea. But as a writer, especially for me, because I tended to jump to the very highest levels, And people would have trouble following me.
Katy: It was so useful to have friendly faces who could ask me very gently and constructively, what do you mean by this? Like, I was with you until here, and then I completely lost it. And because they were smart and reasonable people, I knew that they were getting lost. Because I wasn't being clear and it felt like it wasn't a punishment.
Katy: It was just a chance to explain. And so we would record those meetings. I would get the transcripts later. I would spell it out. But having that structure in between was a complete game changer. Because before that, I was really just writing and trying to figure it out all by myself. And that wasn't efficient.
Katy: It wasn't effective. It was isolating and it really created a breeding ground for me to be like, I am terrible at writing and I will never get any better because the, the goal that I was aiming for was so far away and there was no support in the meantime.
Vikki: So in a second, I'm going to tell you why I disagree that that's an entirely appropriate way of supervising. Cause I don't think it is. But I love this writing group thing. So. Let's get a bit more specific about it. So how did you, how did you even find them and what was the structure? How did you make them?
Katy: So this one was through my university. One of the life hacks for any PhD student is that you probably have some office on your campus that emails you regularly.
Katy: Um, because I work with graduate student support that I know that they have a family. thousand different names in a thousand different places. But I know that my emails came out on Friday afternoons when my brain was checked out already. And I would go through that email and I would be like, that sounds good. That sounds good. That sounds good. And I got a lot of support and help for free from my university, not through my advisors, not through my department, but through like the graduate school. And so, in one of those emails, they said, you know, we're recruiting for interdisciplinary writing groups, they're free to join, we'll match you with people that have similar schedules, go for it.
Katy: And so, we didn't know each other, we were all sort of randomly put in this group together, and then it was up to us to decide on the structure. So, we. Agreed on a meeting time and a meeting place and sort of how we would handle it. There were other groups that had much more rigorous schedules than we did.
Katy: And they were like, we want everybody to have 5 new pages every week. And my group was a lot more like you sign up for a week. You send something between 5 and 10 pages. You tell people what you're most interested in. And actually, there's so many different ways to write a writing group and like to run it that I've seen them be really, really successful and look wildly different from each other.
Katy: But I do have like a resource called like how to run a writing group where it says like, okay, here are some activities that you can try or here are different formats that you can try. But I think the idea that almost all of those groups boil down to that you have a shared agreement about what people are going to do in the writing group, and you have a shared understanding of what kind of feedback people are and aren't looking for.
Katy: So I was not needing any of my people who study ancient Judaic texts, which I do not study. I was writing about cats on the internet. I don't need them to help me with like this scholar. said something that would be really useful here. I needed them to help me with like, okay, you made a really big jump from this idea to this idea.
Katy: Explain to me how you got there. And another person in the group had, um, English was not their first language, and so they really wanted help with, you know, sentence structure, and does this make sense, and are these the right words, kind of thing. Um, so each member could have a little bit of a different aim for what they were using, but because we had an agreement to be really clear about it, nobody felt like they were wasting their time, um, giving grammar advice to someone who didn't need it, or, you know, vice versa.
Vikki: Perfect. And you've mentioned a couple of resources. I'll get you at the end of this to tell everyone where they can find you and all of this stuff. And I'll link to it all in the show notes. So if you're listening, you will be able to track down all this stuff because there's, Katy has a ton even beyond what she's mentioned already.
Vikki: Um, So one of the things I think that's useful with that as well is to remember what you get out of reading other people's as well. And I guess it goes back to your point about, um, reading and learning through reading too, that in these writing groups, it's a little bit like with, I do group coaching, as you know, watching somebody else getting coached, you can learn just as much about yourself as you can getting coached yourself. And I guess you see the same in writing groups.
Katy: Absolutely. And I think that there's a real pressure as scholars to be as effective and efficient as possible, you know, um, every minute needs to be moving your own projects forward. And so I know a lot of people who are drawn to improving their writing skills, whether that's spending a little bit more time reading or joining a writing group or any of those kind of things.
Katy: And they're like, that sounds great. And I would love to, but I do not have time. I'm so busy with everything else. And I think that a lot of - when I think of the the faculty members who I know who are producing at that very highest level that you look at their CV and you're like, how are you getting all of this done? How are you moving things so move so quickly through the pipeline? 8 times out of 10 they are working with a group of colleagues, or co authors, or writing groups, or people that know them forever, and they have built structures of community around their writing. Whether that's an editor that they used for 20 years that always goes back and forth with them, or a co writing team, there's a thousand different things, but Almost always it's effective and efficient, not just for your writing, but for everybody else's in the group to see other versions of it, to talk through ideas, to practice these skills, to get better.
Katy: There's no substitute for it. And just because it's not directly moving 45 minutes, the indirect benefits are so huge. From your mental health, from your building connections in the field. My writing group, we have nothing in common, and one group member helped another one get a job at a university later, because they could vouch for them.
Katy: And that was a relationship that we wouldn't have ever fostered without this writing group. So I think that it's sometimes okay to take a little bit of time and quote unquote step back. Share, read other people's things, um, build some of those extra skills, even if it's not, full steam ahead on your work for those 45 minutes.
Vikki: Yeah, because that focus can feel like such a good thing, right? You know, who's ever going to argue with, oh, I just need to get my head down and get my thesis written. You know, it sounds like such a worthy thought, doesn't it? Yeah. Often it's, it's really preventing you from developing in these, these sorts of ways. So I think that's, that's great advice.
Vikki: Before we go on to what other things you'd recommend, I want to back up my point about supervision. And the reason I don't think that's helpful, and I say this from a place of love. So, okay, if academics are listening, and I know they do, I've been you. I was a full professor at the university and I've had that super busyness and that idea that I don't have time to trawl through really rough drafts.
Vikki: But my problem with it is, is it reduces feedback down to a single function of ensuring your argument is clearly argued and your spelling, punctuation and grammar are correct. And I think that's fundamentally misinformed. So in the same way that when you read a paper you can read it for a whole bunch of different things, I believe you can read a draft for a whole bunch of different things.
Vikki: And for me, what I always used to try and do with my students and what I now encourage the people I work with to do, Is to be really clear why you want them to read it. So as a supervisor, you get a really rough draft from a student. It's really easy to be like, Oh God, do they think this is good? And then really stress out that they think this is good and how much development you're now going to have to do with this student.
Vikki: If they think this is a decent piece of work and this is going to get me, take me hours to put line by line comments and blah, blah, blah. Whereas if students and supervisors can just have a conversation about it. Often, all the student wants to know is, am I making roughly the argument that you thought I was going to make?
Vikki: Have I missed anything obvious? And then the supervisor doesn't need to read it for line by line edits. They need to have a quick scan through it and say, yes, but have you read the work of so and so? Why are you saying this bit and not convinced of that? Make the case clearer or remove sort of thing and to give that really broad brush sort of feedback so, you know, that they're sort of along the right line. So, what anyone listening who's in this situation, whichever side of it you're at. I'd just really encourage you to look at it at all stages, but to look at it at an appropriate level of detail and ask for it to be looked at at an appropriate level of detail, and to use your supervisor for what they're most useful for, which is, is this conceptually strong? Do I cover the bits of the existing literature? Is there anything I've missed So supervisors, if you're only asking for polished drafts, pull your fingers out. Talk to your students properly.
Katy: Yes. And I, I probably am too gentle. There's different sort of protocols with it, but I always stress when I'm working with faculty in that position, it saves you time to intervene earlier in the draft. And so I know that, like, as a student, I would sometimes go six, seven, eight months, maybe, without a supervisor checking in on the idea. And there was nothing more demoralizing as a student than spending eight months on a draft even with all of the extra work that I was doing to check for comprehension and have people in my department read it and sort of move it, and then have my supervisor be like, this is great, except for I disagree with the main concept or this wasn't what I was expecting or you wrote 20 more pages than I thought you would or this isn't what a chapter looks like at all.
Katy: And the number of times that I was sent back to, if not literally the beginning, very, very, very close to it. totally increased my time to a degree. It totally challenged the relationship that I had with my supervisor. Like, it definitely shaped my own beliefs about the efficacy of my writing. And if somebody had just said, hey, I would love to look at your outline and we'll just make sure, oh, wow, this outline is 17 pages long.
Katy: This is too much content for one chapter. Break it up. That would have saved everyone involved sometimes literally years of work. So, um, it's more effective for everyone to intervene earlier, but even if you're in a situation where your supervisor is, for whatever reason, not open to that, there's usually other places you can go.
Vikki: Definitely, definitely. One of the things I really like about this coaching is that I really sit on both sides of it, you know, being a PhD student, I've supervised PhD students, and I work with both sides of it now. And I can't imagine anything more terrifying than not knowing what my student is doing for six or eight months, that they could be completely off on a tangent.
Vikki: And I just think it puts an enormous pressure on that next piece of work that the students always got to be really good, really, really, really good before it goes in and that puts pressure, but then it also the longer you take over it, we often tell ourselves the better it needs to be. So yeah, totally agree. Have that conversation, if you possibly can. So, are there other techniques, approaches, ideas that people can use to improve?
Katy: The other idea that I would love to share with people, because when I heard it in a podcast being discussed probably years ago, I think I broke down in the car and was crying as I was driving home because it was so useful for me, was this concept of the taste gap.
Katy: So this is an idea that I think I heard about it from Ira Glass, who's a podcast producer and interviewer. And he was talking about how frustrating it is for people who are artists or writers or anybody who's in a sort of skilled trade to be working on something and know without a doubt that there's a gap between what you like and admire and want to be in the field and what you're producing right now.
Katy: Because I think that so much advice and like mindset work, which is all really valuable in its own right, can kind of sugarcoat the idea that like, if you just keep going, it'll get better. But to have somebody just flat out say, you are not making work at the quality that you want to be making work at, and that gap feels awful.
Katy: He calls it the taste gap between, like, what you're making and what you want to make. He says that gap feels awful, and the only way to get through that gap is to keep making things, and to get feedback, and to solicit, and to run it through multiple items. He said there's no other shortcut for it. He says you could read every draft, you know, of every book that's ever been written about how to write more effectively. You can try every skill, drill, you can hire every editor. There's no shortcut for it, really, other than trying and not being where you want it to be and trying again. And when I heard that, it released something in me, because I was in this battle between, like, My therapist was saying, who cares if it's crap, just write it down. It's probably better than you think it is. And in a lot of times it was. I'm my own worst critic. Many of us are. But it also was really radically freeing to have somebody be like, yes, it absolutely is not at the same level as this book that you're reading or as the scholar who's been working for 40 years.
Katy: And It's not expected of you to be writing a field changing text every time you sit down, but let that gap motivate you as much as it demoralizes you. And for me, that was so helpful just to have somebody acknowledge that and then be like, okay, and this is your way through it, you just got to keep going.
Vikki: Yeah, definitely. Cause I think people don't expect that uncomfortable, you know, so, you know, they expect it to be a bit difficult, they expect it to be a bit confusing, but that idea that you do know what you want to write or how you want it to be, but you just can't get it like that. You remind, when you were talking, you reminded me of a conversation I had when I was at school with this boy who was in my class who was really good at art and I was sat next to him in art class and we were drawing like fruit or something.
Vikki: And he was just like, I don't understand why you drew the apple that shape. You can see that it's not that shape, can't you? I'm like, yes, but I can't draw it the right shape. And he's like, but you look at it and then you draw it the shape you see. And I'm like, yes, I'm trying. And I just, and he, he was just so good at this and he did it so many hours, he just could not understand how I didn't, and I think often supervisors are a bit like that, you know, the ones that have been writing for years and are really experienced, but I don't understand why you would write it in that order, because, you know, it doesn't make sense. And so I think they sometimes struggle to know how to support students who are in this uncomfortable gap.
Vikki: But on the other hand, I was so frustrated because I could obviously see, Stuart, thank you, that it didn't look like that apple, I knew that. But staying with it and keeping drawing it over and over again when I kept telling myself how rubbish I was, it's really uncomfortable, and I think that's often why people end up giving up things like art and music and sport, because doing something you're bad at over and over again is really hard. And I think that telling yourself that, you know what, it's going to be uncomfortable, but that's okay. Is, is huge.
Katy: Yeah, it, it really kind of goes back to what I was saying in the beginning that so many of us feel that if we feel bad at it, or if we have like objective evidence that we're not where we want it to be, that we'll never get any better.
Katy: And so I have clients and everybody responds to that feeling a little bit differently. And some people will like work to the point of burnout in order to just keep going. And some people will avoid it. And there's all sorts of behaviors in between, but all a lot of it boils down to it is uncomfortable to work very hard at something that is difficult. It's hard. And no matter how many times you do it, no matter how much support you have, writing is hard. And you might have forgotten that because you're in a place where everybody just treats it like this is commonplace. We all need to do it. There's no sense it is still wildly challenging to create new knowledge and then put it down in a written form so that other people can access it the way that it's in your brain. Like there's no other. It is a wildly challenging task. And just because it's uncomfortable doesn't mean that it's not worth doing or that you're not worth investing in it or that you can't get better at it. That discomfort does not automatically mean that the idea is bad.
Vikki: The other thing that struck me as you were saying that is I think the discomfort also shows that there's understanding coming too. Because I was thinking about the people I know who don't write, who aren't in academia, who, this just wouldn't be a thing.
Vikki: And they would read one of my first drafts of an academic article, and then they'd read a real academic article, and I don't think they'd see a massive difference. So a non expert eye, none of it makes that much sense, it all sounds complicated, and they wouldn't necessarily see the difference. And I wonder if a thought that might help a little bit is that if you can see the difference between published academic writing and what you are currently producing, that is an understanding in itself.
Vikki: That is you understanding what good writing looks like. And I think on top of that, if you can get to a stage where you can pick apart which published academic writing you like better and understand why, because I know at the beginning everybody thinks if I don't understand it it's because I'm stupid rather than because it isn't very well written.
Vikki: I think if you can start to actually see that this is clear academic writing and mine isn't there, then that's the beginnings of getting there, isn't it?
Katy: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm thinking about how my husband and I, he's a musician and I like music and we go to all sorts of things and our favorite of the, the performances that we go to often are the dance performances because neither one of us are a dancer.
Katy: We don't know enough to pick it apart. You know what I mean? We don't notice the mistakes. We don't see them. We just go for the pure pleasure of watching bodies in motion. And that doesn't mean we don't have opinions and we don't talk about things and say, I preferred this company to that company, or I really liked this, or I really liked that.
Katy: But there's something so wildly freeing about watching other experts really excel in a field that you don't have any skills in. And I think that it's really easy to be a dancer and be like. I messed up this thing. I messed up that other thing. And to realize that those mistakes that feel life altering on the stage are probably only noticeable to a very small section of people. They feel noticeable to you because you're so focused on not doing them.
Katy: And sometimes it's nice to be able to remember that, like, this is an incredibly difficult thing. And like you said, to the majority of the population, that difference between this paper and that paper, that gap that feels so huge to you, is probably not as visible to other people.
Vikki: I just think, yeah, that's fantastic advice for anybody listening. So thank you so much for coming today, Katy. If people want to hear more from you, and I'm sure they will, you've sort of teased people with a few of these webinars that are available. Where can they find out more from you?
Katy: Yeah, the best place to connect with me is the website, social media platforms come and go, and so like the website is the one that I control, so it's thrive- phd. com, and there is a place to sign up for my newsletter, it goes out every Thursday, and it always has the most up to date news about what I'm working on, and what things are available. I really put an emphasis on free resources and low cost things, so, I would be honored if anybody checked me out. But thank you so much for having me. This was, the, the light I needed in a gray winter day.
Vikki: Yes, it is very cold where we're recording this. I highly recommend all of you get onto Katy's newsletter. I enrolled and read it every week. There's tons of stuff. And I think of all the people who work in this world, Katy is one of the people that has the most free and accessible resources. So definitely get in there. And if you're in a position to do so, look at her paid stuff as well. Thank you all so much for listening. I hope this has been really useful. It's been useful for me and has inspired me to get on with some of my writing jobs too. So I will see you all next week.