Distinctive

By Adrian Cho, Ph.D.

“Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it’s where the game is won or lost.”

– William Zinsser (1922-2015), On Writing Well

You’ve read your essay multiple times. You know it needs improvement. But when you sit down to revise, you’re not sure what to change. Maybe you make a few small word changes or edit phrasing, but nothing feels like real progress. The problem is that you’ve become too familiar with your writing to see it clearly anymore.

This happens to all writers, and there are neurological reasons for it. Understanding why we get stuck can help us figure out how to get unstuck. In this post, I’d first like to give you an explanation of what’s happening in the brain when you can’t see your writing in different ways, then offer some techniques to help you break out of that loop.

Our brains don’t stay static. When we learn or create something, neurons rewire and form specific neural pathways – connections between neurons that fire together to express and represent our ideas. The brain reinforces pathways or circuits of interconnected neurons that are used frequently together. “Neurons that fire together, wire together,” as the popular neuroscience maxim goes. And the more we think about our essays in one particular way, the deeper that mental groove becomes. This is neuroplasticity – the ability of a nervous system to reorganize itself in response to internal and external stimuli. This mechanism allows us to learn, but it also can trap us into repetitive thinking patterns that make it difficult for us to see our own work from a different angle.

Why do we care about this? Well, I think tying “getting stuck” with one way of seeing your writing to physiological mechanisms helps to normalize it. And articulating the problem like this helps us see that the solution is to somehow “jostle” your thinking out of the well-trodden neural pathways (somewhat reminiscent of adding noise in stochastic gradient descent, for the machine learning nerds out there).

So how does one get out of those mental ruts? Here are some concrete techniques that work.

Record yourself.

An incredibly effective way to get yourself out of your own head is to have your words repeated back to yourself. In my meetings with my students, I will do this by simply typing down what they say in response to my questions.

You can also do this on your own in different ways. You can read your draft out loud. Answer as if a friend had asked you the question, “What are you trying to say?” Record yourself using voice memos (my condolences to those who cringe at the sound of their own voice on recording – I feel you). And if you really can’t stand your voice, with the advent of AI and high-performance transcription tools, you don’t even have to record it. Dictate to your computer or phone and have it transcribed.

The key is getting your own ideas reflected back to you in different formats – by sound, text, or someone else’s typing – which should help you break out of the loop you’re stuck in.

Write one sentence summaries of each paragraph.

Paragraphs are fundamental organizational building blocks of your writing. You should (usually) aim to make one paragraph do one job. If you can’t say in a single sentence what a paragraph is supposed to do, then either the logic needs rework or the paragraph needs to be split into its constituent logical units. This even applies to narrative structures such as the personal statement (e.g. You might say, “This paragraph is supposed to show my souring relationship with my best friend”).

Summarizing your paragraphs into single sentences will force you to think about the logical flow of the whole work; the summary sentences should easily flow from one to the next. Additionally, viewing your essay as a sequence of sentences rather than full paragraphs will give you that crucial shift in perspective – you’re literally looking at your work in a different form, which can help you think differently about that bit you are stuck on.

Kill your darlings. No, really.

I’m referring to my colleague Adam’s blog post on getting too attached to your own writing. Sometimes, we as writers are loath to prune metaphors or turns of phrases that we adore, even when they don’t serve the purpose of the essay well.

Adam gave an excellent accounting on the need to ruthlessly “kill your darlings” in his post. But here, I’d like to address one particular anxiety that makes it hard to do – the feeling that you might not write something so good again (or, similarly, that the replacement won’t be as good). When articulated, the notion sounds silly and far-fetched, but that fear can rest at the foundation of the reluctance to cut.

Awareness is half the battle. As a further remedy, the suggestion tool exists in Google docs and can be used to just try out the idea of cutting that phrase. Another useful implement is the notebook; there, you may preserve the darlings that you have had to wipe off the page but just can’t let go of yet.

In the context of shifting your perspectives, letting go of those turns of phrases you adore forces you to find new words and new structures – which naturally leads you to see the essay differently.

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These techniques won’t eliminate the difficulties of revision, but they will give you tools to work through it more effectively. And of course, the perspectives of experts are still genuinely very valuable – no amount of mental jostling can substitute for thoughts from another, knowledgeable human being. That’s part of our role as consultants, and the role of any other editors or reviewers you’ll work with in the future. But the ability to look at your own work with fresh eyes is a skill that will serve you throughout your life – one that will allow you to grow as an independent writer.