I used to draft 1500 words in a morning during coursework. Now on a good day I write two paragraphs and spend the rest of the time rereading three papers and moving a figure around. It has been like this for about five months. Everyone in my cohort posts about their word counts and I feel like something has broken in my brain. Is this a normal stage or a sign I am avoiding something?
Change what you count. Words per day punishes exactly the work that matters at this stage. I switched to counting sessions: did I sit down for 90 uninterrupted minutes with the document open and no browser? Four of those a week moved the thesis more than any word target ever did.
Same, though I count "decisions made" instead. Settled the sample restriction, chose the figure, killed a subsection. Some days that is the entire output and the chapter is meaningfully closer.
Decisions made is going on the wall. Thank you.
One check on the avoidance question: if you cannot write it, can you say it? Explain the paragraph out loud to a friend or a voice recorder. If it comes out fluently you were just stuck on prose. If it comes out as mush, the thinking is not finished and no amount of sitting there will produce words. That test has saved me weeks.
The people posting word counts are mostly in a first-draft phase or exaggerating slightly, and you are seeing a filtered feed either way. Nobody posts "deleted 400 words today, correctly".
Also worth noticing that rereading three papers and moving a figure is not nothing. It looks like zero output because it leaves no trace in the word count.
@adjunct_ora · 6mo ago · 2 replies
Completely normal and the comparison is unfair to you. Coursework writing is summarising things other people already established, which is fast. Dissertation writing is making a claim nobody has made and checking it holds, which is slow by nature. My final chapter averaged about 180 usable words a day over four months and it is the best thing I have written.
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@rabbitroomie · 6mo ago
The distinction between summarising and claiming is oddly comforting. I have been measuring the second thing with the first thing's ruler.
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