The "Wall of Text" method: my last-ditch effort to finish this thesis draft.

[Alan]

Year 5 of my PhD in Sociology. My advisor wants a full draft of my thesis "by the end of the semester." I've been staring at the same three paragraphs for two weeks.

My data analysis is done, my literature review is a mess of disconnected files, and my will to live is directly correlated with my coffee intake. So, I'm trying a new, desperate strategy: The Wall of Text. I'm just writing. No editing, no formatting, no looking back at citations.

I'm just vomiting every thought I've ever had about my research onto the page, in one massive, 50-page, grammatically horrific document. It's ugly. It's chaotic. It has run-on sentences that span half a page. But for the first time in weeks, the page count is going up.

The plan is to let this beast sit for a day, then go in with the red pen of destruction and try to carve an actual dissertation out of it. Wish me luck, I'm going back into the void.

 

[AnnaLee]

Let me tell you: the Wall of Text is how EVERYONE writes their thesis. They just don't admit it.

My first draft was 300 pages of chaos. Half the citations were placeholders like "FIND SOURCE FOR THIS." Whole sections were just bullet points. Some paragraphs literally said "IDK talk about this more later." My advisor, bless her heart, read the whole thing and said "this is a great start."

The secret is that advisors don't expect perfection in drafts. They expect IDEAS. They can help you shape and structure once you have something on paper. But they can't help with nothing.

So keep vomiting. Keep the coffee flowing. You're doing exactly what you need to do. The "real" dissertation comes later.