[tdekken]

I truly struggled with writing for the longest time, but three practices helped tremendously. The practices are 1) writing with a piecemeal approach, 2) accumulating notes as fuel for tomorrow’s writing, and 3) rewriting with keyword outlines.

My most important shift was to start writing nonlinearly. Instead of writing a beginning, middle, and end, I instead gather together all the claims, facts, etc. and develop them individually without concern for the overall logical structure. Eventually, the pieces start fitting together and the linear structure emerges. It is so much easier to start with too much and whittle it down.

Where do these claims, facts, etc. come from? This is what your note taking system should create. As I read a text, I highlight relevant sections and then go back through to paraphrase them. These notes are organized around topics and solve the daunting blank page problem.

How should you paraphrase? Keyword outlining is the practice of picking a handful of _keywords_ from a source text, setting aside the original text, and then paraphrasing using the keyword outline and your recollection of the original text. This is a subtle shift from the typical approach of changing a few words of the source text to paraphrase it. This is also great practice for honing your sentence and paragraph writing skills.