3.25 How to edit your work without hating yourself

One of the most frustrating moments in a PhD or academic career is reading through your first draft—only to realise it’s a mess. It doesn’t flow, the arguments feel clunky, and now you’re stuck figuring out how to fix it.

In today’s episode, I’m sharing practical techniques to help you transform that rough first draft into a polished manuscript—without the overwhelm and self-criticism. Whether you’re writing a thesis chapter, journal article, or conference paper, these strategies will make revision smoother, faster, and far less painful.

Links I refer to in this episode 

How to shorten your work 

How to handle negative feedback

What to do when you get contradictory advice

How to break work down into chunks 

How to improve your writing (with Dr Katy Peplin)

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. This week, especially for any of you who are editing writing, or who have edited writing in the past, or who will be editing writing in the future, because there's something about editing. We often think that when we've got that first draft down, it's going to be easier.

At least we're not generating new stuff from nowhere, right? But then we sit down to do it. And it's so hard, because you're trying to focus on what you need to do, but you're not really clear what you need to do. You know it's not good, but equally you don't really know how to fix it either.

And the whole time, I don't know about you, but certainly often for me and my clients, running through the back of your head is this narrative that you should have done a better first draft, that it's never going to be good enough, you don't know what you're doing. All of that kind of self criticism. 

Now, we talk about writing a lot on this podcast, and there's going to be various episodes that I'm going to ping you off into.

But, for today, what we're going to be thinking about is how to do that editing process without hating yourself in the meantime. High standards. That's all we're looking for here. Not hating ourselves. So, what do I mean by editing? I'm meaning anything that comes between a first full draft and a completed manuscript. So this might be your initial run through of it. It might be responding to your supervisor's comments, your examiner's comments, reviewers comments if you're submitting things for publication, all the way through to that point at which it is declared finished. 

And one of the reasons I think that it can be so painful doing it it's It's that self talk that happens while we're doing it, that these edits not only mean something about this piece of work, about how good it is. They also mean something about us as an individual. If the supervisor says this isn't clear, often we hear this as you're not clear.

So the first thing we're going to do before we get to any of the practical tips. And there are going to be practical tips. Before we get to any of those practical tips, I want to remind you, editing is a normal part of the process. Writing a first draft is a really, really long way from submitting an article.

That doesn't make it any less onerous knowing that. But it can make it a little less painful if you know that everyone goes through that editing process. I used to label my files with like new versions each time I worked on a paper. And by the time I was submitting for publication, I'd be on like version 35 or something, okay?

And I used to show that to my students because they were always amazed because they saw me as somebody who published a lot and who was good at writing. And it never crossed their mind that my first draft didn't look like that published article. Even the version I submitted didn't look like that published article because I improved it based on the reviewer's comments.

I know it's occasionally made it worse based on the reviewers comments, but that is a story for another episode. But mostly, it was improved because of what the reviewers asked us to do. Okay? Nobody writes that way first time, even your most talented and amazing supervisors. So editing is a normal part of the process. It is not a sign something's gone wrong. It is not a sign that you did a bad first draft. It is a sign that you know the difference between a first draft and a finished piece of work, and you can slowly work through those changes.

Now, if it's specifically responding to comments that you struggle with, in terms of handling negative feedback, I want you to go find, after you've listened to this episode, I want you to go find my episode on handling negative feedback. Okay, it's season two episode five something like that, you'll find it. Go to the phdlifecoach. com website, click on podcasts, you'll find them all. That episode really acknowledges that receiving feedback and editing your work is an emotional process, that that's okay, but that we also don't need to feed that. We also don't need to kind of buy into this narrative that it's this big, terrible, stressful thing.

It's completely normal to feel overwhelmed, to feel frustrated, to feel disappointed, all of those things, but we don't need to feed it. And if that's something you really struggle with, do go check out that episode. 

What we're going to think about more today is the actual how to go about the edits that turn it from being a big nebulous task into something that's actually doable.

And the first tip here is to separate editing from writing. And then we're going to separate editing into a variety of different tasks too. So, why do we separate editing from writing? This is because they're two completely different activities. Generating new text is a completely different skill to making text sound better.

Checking whether text does what it's meant to do. If you do them both at the same time, what happens is you write a bit, delete a bit, write a bit, delete a bit, smack yourself a bit, write a bit, delete a bit, decide that it's rubbish, go and drink more Diet Coke. It doesn't help. So, same as any of you have heard me talk about different writing roles before in the workshops that I ran, I want you to think about text generation as one job, okay? Creating the substance. Some people refer to this as like filling the sandpit before you start to create your sandcastles. Text generation is simply putting some stuff there to work with. Filling the sandpit. 

And then we're going to do editing. As a separate process, and as I've said, what we're going to then do is not do that as a single process either. Instead, what I want you to do is think about editing as a series of layers. Okay? And we are only going to do one of these layers at a time. Some of you, I know, are going to argue with what I say today. Some of you are going to say, that's so inefficient, Vicki. I could do it all at once. Some of you are going to say, I couldn't possibly ignore a typo. It will ignore, it will annoy me too much. You've got to. Okay, I've had that conversation with people on here before. Sometimes you just got to suck it up. What we're going to do is we're going to do one thing at a time and whilst that may not feel efficient, I promise it is hugely more effective. And I actually have an episode planned for you where we're going to talk about the difference between efficient and effective and when you want to be one and when you want to be the other.

But until then, trust me, go with these layers. Now, that means I've got to explain to you what I actually mean by layers. What I mean is that we're only checking for one thing at a time. Okay, I want you to imagine that I asked you to go for, go for a walk and I want you to look for anything that's yellow.

By the way, that's a good mindfulness activity if you ever need one. Go for a walk, look for anything that's yellow. And you will start to spot all the things that are yellow and you'll be like really good at spotting yellow things. Do do do do do do do do do. And you'll go and it'll be a really pleasant walk.

Okay, now if I told you to go for a walk and spot everything that's red and yellow and blue and green and spot trees and spot cars and spot postboxes It's going to be super overwhelming because you're gonna be like, uh, postbox, uh, yellow, red, you're gonna miss things You're not going to enjoy that walk That is what's happening when you try and edit everything at once when you're correcting typos as well as making your sentences sound better as well as checking whether it actually makes sense or not It makes no sense to try and do all of this at once.

We're gonna do one thing at a time, we're going to start with the macro editing, the kind of editing that really is content focused, structure focused, and then we're going to polish later. Because apart from anything else, there's no point polishing the bits that you may well just delete anyway, okay?

It's a waste of time. So, it doesn't work, can be a waste of time. So, where are we going to start? Our first job is, does it actually say the things we want it to say? And one way that I have found really, really useful, and I can't remember whether I've ever talked about this on a podcast before, I do talk about it in one of my courses, is what I call a reverse plan.

Okay. I didn't invent this. I have no idea who invented this. I used to use it back when I was a student and I used to teach it to my PhD students as well. What you do is you get your manuscript, your whole manuscript, and you look at it one paragraph at a time. And you say, what does this paragraph say?

And you summarize it in one sentence. What did this paragraph say? Summarize it in one sentence. And you do that in turn for each paragraph in your writing. Now this is going to tell you a number of things. First thing is, is that easy? Because it should be, if it's right. So if this is a well structured, well written piece of work, which it won't be from your first draft, but if it was, then it would be really easy to say, this paragraph says this, this paragraph says that.

You'd just whiz through it. If you find yourself going, I have no idea what that paragraph says, or that paragraph says about four things, or whatever, happy days! We've realized, okay? So, but you try. So the first thing it tells you is how easy is that? You make a note where that paragraph kind of says too many things, that paragraph didn't really make a point, that paragraph kind of said the same as the previous one.

And then we get to look at that plan, right? That list of things you've got, those list of sentences. So now instead of trying to manage a 15, 000 word manuscript, we're now trying to manage, you know, 40 sentences or whatever it is. And that's when we get to say, well, hang on a minute. That one and that one are exactly the same as each other.

That one and that one. Why do I talk about that up there and that down there? That makes no sense. You can even compare your reverse plan back to the original plan. Does it even look like what you thought it was going to? Because sometimes we have a plan and then we deviate from it, which isn't a problem, by the way, but sometimes it can be.

Sometimes if we've deviated and now we like this new version. Happy days, but if we deviated and we're like, oops, I didn't even cover that section anymore. I forgot I didn't do that. So you take it back to that plan by doing that reverse planning process. And that's where we look at the really broad strokes stuff.

Does it say what we thought it was going to say? Is it roughly in the right order? Does each paragraph represent a specific point? Okay, so we're checking we got the right pieces before we get any further into anything else. Now, when you are reading these paragraphs, do not decide to make the sentence sound more elegant.

Do not correct typos. Do not, if you notice that you've got the same word six times in a paragraph, I don't care. It doesn't matter. Our only job, our only job is to turn that manuscript into a reverse plan, to compare that reverse plan to our original plan, and to look and see whether things are roughly in the right orders.

Okay? Does our paragraph structure roughly make sense? And that's quite, I say that's our only job. That's quite a big job. Okay? Especially if it's on a pretty rough first draft. Fully, fully expect at this point to be talking about wanting to merge paragraphs, talking about wanting to shift things around, delete entire sections, all that stuff.

Completely, completely normal. And that's why we're not going to polish anything until after this bit's done. Okay, this can be a point that's useful to have chats with your supervisors. Kind of go in, you know, I'm thinking I might need to leave this bit out or split that into two sections. That kind of big structural decisions you might want to discuss perhaps.

Expect a bunch to change. Then once you've made those decisions, you go back in and roughly action those in your document, okay? Those of you watching on YouTube, you can see me kind of flapping my hands around, which shows you're on the podcast, so I'm not getting the full joy of it. But imagine me moving things with my hands in the air.

Um, so you're going back into your original document and going, Oh, I said I should move that paragraph there. Okay, let's do it. Boom. Okay, and you move them around, you put them in place. We're not worrying whether the transitions work perfectly anymore. We're not worrying about whether we introduce our definitions in the right places or not anymore.

We're not worrying about any of that stuff. We're just dumping stuff roughly in the right places. This is the equivalent of, if any of you have moved house, this is the equivalent of roughly getting the right boxes in the right rooms. Okay, you don't bring a box in the front door and start opening it up and going.

Oh, here's a toilet brush that needs to go in there. Here's a whatever that needs to go in there. I don't know why toilet brush was the first thing that came to my head. Okay with it. Um, You roughly dump boxes in roughly the rooms they need to be in. Okay? That's what we're doing here. We are roughly checking that the boxes are roughly where they need to be.

Now, I mentioned that we don't need to look at transitions. Once you've done that, now we're going to start looking at transitions. And the first two transition points we want to look at is the start, and the end. So for me, one of the first things you want to check is, does this article start where it needs to start?

And this is where, in my experience, an awful lot of PhD students and academics start too far back in the story. Now let me explain what I mean by that. If you imagine your introduction to a paper as an inverted funnel, so it's wide at the top and it's getting narrower and narrower and narrower, that should be the shape of your writing.

So the top of the funnel, the top of that triangle, is the kind of broad brush background to what you're talking about. So for me, it was stress and immune function. I'd always start with things like psychological stress has been demonstrated to have an impact on a variety of health conditions. Reference, reference.

You know, that kind of vibe, right? And then it gradually gets closer and closer. This is particularly apparent in immune function where blah blah blah blah. The impact of stress on psychological, um, the impact of psychological stress on vaccination response has been particularly explored in with blah blah blah, right?

It gets gradually more and more specific. I was talking stress and health, then I was talking stress and immune, now I'm talking stress and vaccinations. Okay? It gets more and more narrow. I want you to translate that out into your own topics. Now, there's a variety of places you could start in that story.

I often think we start too far up the triangle. So, if I was writing an article for a journal like the ones I used to write for, so Brain Behaviour and Immunity was a big favourite of mine, um, if I was writing for Brain Behaviour and Immunity, They already know that stress affects health.

They literally all do that. They all know that stress affects immune function more specifically. So I could chop off the entire first two paragraphs of something set up like that and start with stress has been shown to impact antibody response to vaccinations. That would be a great place to start. I don't need any of that other stuff.

In the rest of my field, you know, I was a sports scientist, um, people do paragraphs, two, three paragraphs about why obesity and physical inactivity impact various health conditions. Any sports scientist reading it knows that. Now, if you think it's crucial that that information is there, you can consider turning it into sentences instead of paragraphs.

So instead of a detailed paragraph on each of those things introducing it, you just say one sentence. It impacts health. This is often through markers of immune function, for example, vaccination. Okay, so my first tip, transitions, where are you starting? Make sure it's appropriate for your audience and see whether there's anything you can chop off the top. There almost always is, in my experience. 

You then look and see whether you finish at the right place, whether your transition at the end, i. e. your conclusion, finishes in the right place. Usually, in my experience, people here lack specificity. They take their, so a discussion is a triangle the other way around, where you start narrow after your results and you get wider and wider, as you start to apply your findings back to how they fit with the rest of the literature, what impact they might have, where the weaknesses are, what future studies should be, and then your conclusion should be your kind of final, like, implications or whatever.

In my experience, the conclusion is often pretty shallow and needs either beefing up or deleting. So check your conclusions as well. Does it actually say anything or is it just a nice little, and that was what I did on my holidays type paragraph, in which case let's turn it into something more meaningful. So check your two transitions. 

The next transitions we're going to look at are the transitions between paragraphs. Okay, what I want you to do here is each of your paragraphs at the beginning of the sentence, the paragraph should tell you what the paragraph is about and the end of the paragraph should lead nicely in some way to the next paragraph. Okay, there shouldn't be some weird jump that requires me to take some leap of logic that isn't logical. Okay, you've now roughly put these in the right order. We're now checking that one leads to the next. Is any terms that you use in that paragraph defined previously or at least defined here? For example, is there any assumptions you're making that they know things that you haven't said yet?

So you can then go through checking for transitions. So notice how each time we do this, we're doing it with a specific job. I want you to see how easier that will be than trying to do everything at once, both in terms of that kind of overwhelm while you're doing it, but also in terms of putting it on your to do list.

Because one of the things I get told so often in my group coaching calls, in my membership, is I don't know how to break tasks down into smaller chunks. And if any of you, I want you all to look at your to do list. If edit introduction is on your to do list, I'm talking to you. You, okay? I'm talking to you right now.

Editing is not one job. It should not be a task on your to do list. Check introduction for transitions between paragraphs is a task.

Check paragraphs for repetition is a task. Check. Sentence structure for errors I often make. Now there's a little aside that I wasn't planning to put in this episode, but I'm going to. Um, when you get feedback back from people, I want you to take a note of stuff you often get pulled up for. So, um, run on sentences was one I always pulled people up on.

If you don't know what a run on sentence is, look it up. You definitely need to know. Uh, split sentences is the flip side of that. Incomplete split sentences. Check what that is, look it up. Um, all of you will have things that you often do. I tended not to do those things. I tended to repeat myself. I tended to get fixated on a particular word that would end up being used lots of times.

I would fail to notice that I'd started calling something one word and then later on changed the specific word I was using later on, if you see what I mean. So inconsistencies. So I want you, whenever you get feedback, I want you to have a browse through it from a kind of what am I often doing here? point of view. Okay? Because then we're going to put them on our to do list to check in future. There is no excuse. If your supervisor regularly pulls you up for having run on sentences, there is no excuse for you not to have check for run on sentences in your, like, list of things that you edit for, so that you never make them do that again. Use your supervisors for the stuff that's useful, that's cognitively demanding, that's subject specific, not for stuff they've already told you you're doing wrong. 

Okay, so what we're going to do is we're going to run through looking for different things each time. Does this mean you're going to read the same article a hundred times?

Yes, probably. Does that make it less efficient? No, because each time you're doing it, you're doing it better. Okay, I'm getting fired up on this because people spend so much time trying to do this in an efficient way and it just ends up not working very well and being really painful. So trust me, I want you to try this.

Don't just blindly trust me. Have a go. See what a difference it makes if you're only looking for one thing as you scoot through. Okay, and then what we're going to do is we're going to order those things you're doing in sort of reducing magnitude. So the first things that you're looking at are the kind of gross macro structure stuff.

Does it say what I need it to say? Um, yeah, that kind of stuff. Then you're going to get into the kind of what order does it sound nice ish kind of stuff. And then you're going to get into the is it grammatically correct? Are my references in the right place and my punctuation good? All that stuff later.

Okay, so you're kind of working your way through this list. Any of you are like, Oh, but I should probably correct things as I go. No, you'll find them later. If you saw them this time, you'll find them later. At best, just highlight them or something like that. Okay, because otherwise you really will be like, Oh, I'm just correct this one. Oh, there's another one over there. And then 15 minutes later, you're meant to be restructuring your article. And all you've done is correct typos. Okay, stay with the one more focus.

One of the things that's really important, especially when you are up against a deadline, whether it's handing in your thesis, handing in for a journal deadline, or whatever it is, is remembering the big picture here. So, there is an almost infinite number of things you can check for. Having a good run through that kind of gradient from the macro stuff to the micro stuff.

Brilliant. But I also want you to ask yourself a very important question. And that important question is, is this a pass fail issue? Okay, because if you're going, Oh, I don't quite like how this sentence goes. Not a pass fail issue. Does it make sense? Is it vaguely clear? Happy days. Let's go. Okay, especially if we're tight for time.

Is it a pass fail issue? Is my argument unclear here? Yes. Okay, right, we're going to deal with that. Do I use too clunky words in consecutive sentences? Yes, I do. It's fine. People will cope. Okay. Is it a pass fail issue? The flip side of this, I'm now going to shout out my gorgeous stepdaughter. I was helping her with a piece of her schoolwork the other day. And there was one part that I was like, can you see how this, this couple of sentences isn't necessary to answer the question? And her reply was, but I like them. And I said, I know, but they don't do anything in this essay. And she said, I like them. And she decided to keep them. And because I'm the bigger person, I rose above it and I let her keep them. That's fine. But my warning to you guys is hanging onto sentences just because you like them is not the route to writing your best writing. Okay, I tried to tell her that, but she's 17. She doesn't listen to me. I'm her stepmother, but you guys, you listen to me. You choose to listen to me. So you need to listen. Don't hang on to sentences just because you love them. Okay? Try it without it. If you've got a sentence you just think sounds amazing, delete it. See what happens. Okay? It can often solve the problems that you didn't realize it was causing.

Now, those are the different levels and many of you will be saying, Okay, Vikki, that's great. I understand. But sometimes my issues are kind of more vague than that. And to be fair, sometimes your comments from supervisors or reviewers will be more vague than that. Supervisors, I'm shouting you out here, okay? I love you dearly. I know you're busy. I know you're trying to do your very best with your students. I am there with you. I've been there. I've done it. But, feedback that says you need to go deeper here, or clarify this, or flesh this out, not, not helpful. Really not helpful. Okay. And I know it's down to the student to or the person who's writing the article to come up with this stuff. So equally, I'm not saying you have to tell them exactly what they should say. But comments like that are incredibly difficult to answer because. They're not just thinking, how do I make this clearer? They're still trying to understand what you didn't find clear in the first place. And so they're trying to answer it, partly by what they think will make it better, but also trying to guess in some weird way what it was that you wanted them to do.

Um, and so they don't help. So, supervisors, if you're listening. A little more detail in those comments. Super helpful. I know it takes more time, but it hopefully means there are fewer iterations of feedback going through. So in time, it should speed things up. But even just saying, it's not quite clear what you're saying here. Are you claiming X or are you claiming Y? I found it hard to understand the difference or something. Okay, just giving a little bit more depth as to what you mean. 

Students, obviously I can't coach all your supervisors, so some of you are going to have to deal with getting comments like that. It's fine, what we're going to do is we're going to clarify them for ourselves. Okay, so whenever you get a comment that you think is vague by your supervisor, I want you to turn it into a more specific piece of guidance, because otherwise you're going to avoid answering it forever. If you're not quite sure what they mean, you either need to ask them what they mean, or you need to kind of try and guess what they mean, and turn it into something more specific.

Okay. Now, if they've said, I need to go deeper here, um, and you read it and you're like, yeah, I do. I know I do, but I don't know how. That is firstly completely normal. I'm going to refer you, I also have another episode, with Dr. Katy Peplin, who's a writing coach. And she talks about something called the taste gap, which is that when we're at the beginning stages of our academic careers, we are able to recognize something that's not good enough and not able necessarily to do something about it. I'm a bit here with my abstract art at the moment. I can appreciate which art I like and which I can't. I can't produce art I like yet. Working on it. So not sort of going, oh I recognize that it's not quite clear or it's not in depth enough but I don't know what to do is completely normal.

The big tip I would give you is if, especially if you're regularly told you need to go deeper, you need to explore this more. I would find an article or ask your supervisor to recommend an article that they think does it well. And then we're going to do some proper, like, text analysis, okay? And so, those of you in the arts and humanities, this will come easy to you.

Scientists, this is not something we do quite so often. But I want you to look, how do they write? Find a paragraph, ask your supervisor to help you, or identify it yourself. Find a paragraph where you're like Yeah, that is a really good paragraph, okay? So clear, so in depth, so precise, love it. What do they do? Let's understand, like, you know, like you look at art and you're like, oh, okay, how have they built this up over time? How have they, why do I like the way this is composed or whatever? Analyze a good article. Realize what they do. And then what I want you to do is give yourself much more specific instructions as to how to answer that question.

One way, and I've used this example before in other things, one way to help to give yourself better instructions is to imagine you're giving instructions to somebody else. So either you've got a research assistant or you're giving it to an AI prompt. Please don't. I would recommend generally not giving it to an AI prompt, especially early in your PhD. But imagine the instructions you would give them. You wouldn't just say, go deeper here. Who knows what they'd do, it'd be chaos. Um, you'd give them much more detailed instructions, right? I want you to do that. Find three more pieces of evidence that back up this point. Find a counter argument to this and present it. Get way more specific about what that actually means, and then you're creating yourself tasks that you can actually do. If there are comments that you are regularly skipping past, it's usually because you haven't defined what they mean.

All the way through this, there's some really practical tips that you can use to edit your work. And all the way through this, our other job is our own emotional regulation, okay? Editing work is laborious, which means it takes cognitive energy. It's easy to interpret as a, like, critique of ourselves, which means it takes emotional energy. All of that is okay. It's okay if you find that hard, particularly if you're newer to this, but to be honest, throughout your career. Recognize that. Use that as a reason to praise yourself for the stuff that you do. To recognize the steps that you're going through, the progress that you're making. Look out for the chunks of text where you didn't get any comments.

That's amazing, like that's a compliment in itself, okay? Give yourself space, allow yourself to do this work, allow yourself to feel the feels, but make it as easy for yourself as possible by having these clear tasks that you're going to do. I really hope that's useful. Let me know which of these you've tried before.

Maybe I've talked about some of them in past podcasts. I've got to the stage now, there's so many episodes I can't remember. Um, Let me know if there's any other techniques that have helped you with editing. I'm going to mention my sneaky Comic Sans one before we go. If you're just finding this all a bit stressful, and it all feels a bit too important, a bit too meaningful, and you can't deal with it, turn everything into pink Comic Sans.

One of my clients came up with this. Love it. Turn everything into pink Comic Sans. There's only so upset you can get about a thing that's written in pink Comic Sans. Can't take it seriously. Okay? So use colour. Use colour if that helps you. If you found that useful, do make sure you're on my newsletter, jump onto the website to find it. and let me know what you've tried out, any issues you've had or suggestions you've got for, um, other ways of editing your work. Now, I am building up to do a client Q and A episode soon. So if you have a specific topic that I haven't talked about on the podcast before, a question that you have, Please do submit it.

You can either submit it through my website on the email address or on your podcast thing, there should be a send Vikki a question button. If you use that one, make sure you tell me your name. Cause otherwise I will never know who you are. It comes through anonymously and I will make sure that I answer your questions in a future episode.

Thank you so much for listening and I will see you next week.