In December of 2015 I finished a nine year effort to complete a PhD. The amount of reading, writing, and research required to fulfill a graduate degree at that level is immense.
Nothing I had prevously undertaken prepared me for the level of work I was to endure. Undergraduate experience offers no help. Even Master’s degrees suggest only a hint of terminal degree rigor. So when I began my first doctoral paper, efficient writing preparedness quickly emerged as a missing skill.
But, writing just involves opening a Word document and churning out the content, right? Maybe for a handful of pages; but I found Word was inefficient at much over 10 pages. The reason is that, in high-level papers, authors must focus on providing a rationale for their propositions. Significant propositions are usually complicated and nonlinear.
So, after much trial and effort I found a process involving seven tools that helped me to efficiently produce deep writing. These tools are scaleable from 15-page papers all the way up to my 300-plus-page dissertations. I’ll only briefly describe them in this article and offer more insight into each of them, later, in other articles.
1. Zoom H4N
My dissertation is characterized as a qualitative study as opposed to a quantitative study. The latter utilizes statistics to validate an hypothesis and generalize the findings. Qualitative studies, on the other hand, look at problems through the eyes of those living amidst the problem in the hopes of better understanding the problem. Therefore, interviews are usually a primary method of collecting data. So, dependably recording the interview is incredibly important.
I used a Zoom H4N Digital Recorder. The real benefit to this type of recorder is its use of two unidirectional microphones. These enable the H4N to, essentially, record a conversation in 3D. So when you listen to the recording, it feels like you’re back in the interview room. Interviewees sitting to your left during the interview sound like they’re on your left in the recording. Same with those on the right. Somehow, the recorder provides the sensation that interviewees that were sitting directly in front of you are still there. It’s not two dimensional like a radio show. The H4N places you right back into the conversation.
The benefit to this three dimensional recording is how it assists recollection during transcription and analysis. The H4N enabled me to remember thoughts, sensations, and non-verbal cues I had observed during the actual interviews that would have been inaccessible with a standard recorder.
Granted, many writers may have little use for a recorder, but if you find yourself capturing thoughts by recording your voice, the H4N far surpasses your smartphone for both recording and recollection purposes.
2. MaxQDA
In order for it to be useful, interview data requires analysis. To analyze it, there is no shortcut for transcribing. Paid services are available for others to transcribe your interviews, but I chose to do so myself. The process of transcription enables you to hear the interview again (actually, about 3-4 times) and embeds the researcher more deeply into the data.
MaxQDA is a program that served double duty for me. First, I used it to transcribe all of my data. For me, transcription took about three months and produced about 200 pages of data. Secondly, I used MaxQDA to analyze the data. This program provides a way for you to make decisions about what is important in the data. These important places are known as “codable moments.” You can, then, assign these “codable moments” into groups known as codes, and codes are further grouped into larger and larger groups of codes until themes begin to emerge. My dissertation produced over 3000 codable moments, over 500 codes, three main themes and eight sub-themes.
If, as part of your writing regimen, you ever find yourself trying to cobble together the comments of several people, MaxQDA is a great program to help you make sense of diverse thoughts.
3. Scrivener
Once your data is in place, it’s time to start writing. I used a program called Scrivener, which is a favorite of many writers. For in-depth writing, Scivener has proven invaluable. It enables me to chunk my writing and easily realign those blocks.
For example, if I have a proposition that involves seven themes, Scrivener enables me to easily restructure my writing so I can construct the best argument. Scrivener is incredibly robust and its features are beyond the scope of this article.
But if you write–whatever your genre–give Scrivener a shot.
4. Zotero
Academic writing requires loads of research. Professors expect students to explain the reasons for their thinking using reputable sources. Dissertations require students to exhaustively explore the literature base of their topic. Both of these exercises will leave the student with dozens if not hundreds of source materials.
Zotero is an online citation manager that allowed me to organize and hold all of my dissertation sources. When it came time to cite within the paper itself, Zotero would allow me to insert an appropriately formatted inline citation based on my style guide (I used APA), and would also add the source to the References section of my study. Zotero provides plugins for both Word and Open Office so authors can employ a cite-as-you-write process.
Unfortunately, Zotero doesn’t currently provide a plugin for Scrivener. But using a little bit of technological magic, I was able to combine the two apps. This allowed me to utilize the best of both worlds: ease of section manipulation in Scrivener and comprehensive citation through Zotero.
But this is also where the process becomes more complicated. I basically had to copy a non-sensical code from each Zotero citation and paste into my Scrivener file where I would eventually want the citation to appear. The next step would make that code readable.
Sources should remain important for any writer. You may not have the need for 200 citations in a dissertation, but using Scrivener for your long-form writing coupled with Zotero for citation management can add significant substance to your content.
5. Open Office
Once your initial drafts are completed it’s time to format and prepare the manuscript.
MS Word doesn’t read the Zotero codes in the Scrivener file. Open Office (a MS Word substitute) does. So I compiled the Scrivener file into Open Office and then told the word processing app to read the codes and transform them into understandable language.
So, Open Office took a code that looked like this in Scrivener:
{ | Hogg, et al., 1995 | | |zu:1093895:244BFFQK}{ | Hogg, et al., 1996 | | |zu:1093895:KQTV3EDN}{ | Kawakami, & Dion, 1995 | | |zu:1093895:P8BG8JWM}{ | Pratt, et al., 1998 | | |zu:1093895:NWPEPQ8J}{ | Scott, 1997 | | |zu:1093895:G24CQ9IH}{ | Tajfel, et al., 1979 | | |zu:1093895:H3AXP5RN}{ | Tajfel, 1981 | | |zu:1093895:NAMJI65A}{ | Tajfel, 1982 | | |zu:1093895:P7N56AX6}
and translated it to this in the document:
(Hogg, 1996; Hogg, Terry, & White, 1995; Kawakami & Dion, 1995; Pratt, 1998; Scott, 1997; Tajfel, 1981, 1982; Tajfel & Turner, 1979).
In addition, Open Office would drop the bibliography into the References section at the end and would handle all of the complicated style guide formatting for me.
I didn’t really use Open Office for anything more than the translation process. Some people prefer Open Office as a word processor. I don’t because I use Scrivener or another app as my writing home.
6. Microsoft Word
The final step was to save the Open Office document as MS Word document. The reason for this step is that most professors and editors still use Word. It’s the ubiquitous program that won’t go away.
Once the manuscript was in Word I performed the typical formatting: making sure my margins were correct, page numbers appropriately set, headings and subheading accurate, etc.
Some might suggest this process is unnecessarily complicated. Since I ended up in Word anyway, why didn’t I just begin there? The simple reason is that Word does not provide me as simple a method to move very large amounts of copy from one location to another as does Scrivener. Word is a better formatting tool, whereas Scrivener is better served for content creation.
7. ByWord
I should mention one more app, though I didn’t use it for my dissertation. I categorize my writing into two styles: long-form and short-form. For me, long-form writing is found in books, dissertations, and academic papers. My short-form writing involves articles and blog posts.
For short-form writing I use ByWord. It’s an app for the Apple ecosystem helpful where in-depth citation and sourcing is unnecessary. In the use of markdown, ByWord enables me to focus on my content without the distractions of formatting. I can write on my iPad, save it, and open the file at some other point on my laptop. It also works in the reverse. Using ByWord I can create content whatever my location.
The article you are currently reading was written in ByWord, and I highly recommend it as a content-creation tool.
Those are my writing apps. What are yours? Do you have a streamlined set of apps for writing? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.