Speaker 1: Welcome, everyone. Today, I'm going to share with you my top three writing tips, writing tips that have helped my graduate students feel confident, never feel stuck, and know exactly what to do when they write so they don't lose time. I'm Professor David Stuckler and I've coached and mentored over a thousand graduate students helping them get on the proverbial fast track with their research career. One thing I've discovered with many grads I work with is they actually never got any formal academic writing training. Some of you may feel like you're good at writing but still have some challenges because academic writing is very different from other kinds of writing that you may have done before. To give you an analogy, when I moved to England to do my PhD at Cambridge University, it was very rainy so I started to play squash. I've never played squash before but I played a lot of tennis so I thought I could figure it out. Frankly, I was terrible. I played for about five years and I never got any better. It's because I never had the initial training, I never learned the basics that gave me a framework so I could improve. If you want to get good, just like at a sport, you've got to master the basics of the swing, the forehand, the fundamentals, and the three top writing tips that I'm going to share in this video that's going to put you on the path for continuous, steady improvement and success so that you never feel stuck. Of course, this is YouTube. I've got a fourth secret tip that I learned at Cambridge University in my time there that I'm going to share with you at the very end of this video. You're not going to want to miss it so stick around. All right. Let's dive straight in. The very first tip is what I call the one point rule and simply, each paragraph needs to make one point. No more, no less. Too often, I see students' paragraphs looking like gobbledygook or you know that processed meat product you sometimes find in stores, it's not very pleasant, called spam where it has all sorts of meat parts compressed into it. Don't recommend eating this, by the way. But that's often what I see students' paragraphs like. They put in one point, another point, another point, let's smush it all together. It's really hard to follow. It doesn't make a lot of sense. Not very appetizing. No. Keep it simple. One paragraph, one point only and that is the one point rule. Follow it and it's going to help your writing be much clearer and more accessible for your readers. Brings me to my next point. The key tip that you need to always remember and it may seem a little basic, may seem kind of elementary and it is, but too many students skip over it. I don't know what happens to graduates like, well, I'm a grad, I'm advanced now, I'm going to jump right in and write. No. You need to step back and take this first elementary step of an outline. You need a design for your writing and a structure. If you don't have a structure, it's a recipe for going in circles and unclear writing. Now, there's something to be said for just vomiting on a page and getting things out, but still, you need to pull that mess into a structure and into a design. Here that first tip, the one point rule is really going to help you because as you create an organizational framework and a structure, you can put your outline to connect with your paragraphs very nicely so that in an outline you might have A, B, C, D and so forth. It's just each main big point of your paragraphs to line up, but that design is critical because too often students think, well, I have all this knowledge, I'm just going to put it down the way I think about it and that will make sense, but it doesn't work that way. Your readers don't have the background knowledge you have. They don't know your assumptions and many things that often I see students just kind of take for granted. Even for your professors, you need to make things crystal clear and that means taking your reader by the hand and taking them on a journey to where you want to drive them, where you want them to go. Make sure you have your outline and you populate that with each paragraph making one point. As we're building, third tip, really crucial and this is a framework to work in, a framework that tells you the anatomy of a good paragraph and it's a system I call PEER. PEER is a bit like a hamburger where the pea is like the top of the bun in the hamburger and that's that one point you want to make for the paragraph. The second, which is kind of like maybe it's the cheese or the tomato that goes on top of the meat, that's the evidence or example of your point that you want to make. Then the meat, kind of the core is where you're going to explain that point. Then the bottom bun completing your hamburger is going to be your linking or repeating paragraph. Taking it together, your hamburger looks like point, evidence, explain, repeat. That's the PEER system. If you take a look through many research articles, you're going to see the PEER system in scientific writing in practice. Many paragraphs will follow just this. First sentence making a point with several examples, evidence, citations, other data points to back up that core point followed by a linking sentence. Don't neglect that linking sentence. Really good writing, sometimes you read and you really realize one paper you just kind of breeze through, it's easy to follow. That's often because they're very good linking sentences at the end that really suture things up and help glide into your next paragraph. That's the anatomy of your successful paragraph. Don't forget the PEER system. Finally, as I promised, the fourth secret tip. That's a bonus and it's one that if I could just ingrain in your minds to never forget. If you have a nightmare, you wake up in the middle of the night and you think, ah, it's the voice of Professor Stuckler. That's me telling you guys topic sentences. Topic sentence is kind of the magic to all this formula to get everything to work. If you can get one thing right in your writing that's going to bring everything together, it's the topic sentence. The topic sentence is the first sentence of every paragraph. That topic sentence states what the paragraph is about and it's kind of that glue holding together your outline. One exercise I do with my students, every time they finish the paper, look back over your paper, cover up the paragraph and just read the first sentence of every paragraph. If you can read and follow the argument and the structure you're trying to make just by reading that first sentence, you're on the right track. I challenge you to do it. Go look in scientific articles in the peer-reviewed literature and you're going to find you can jump sentence to sentence, good writing, and be able to follow what the author is saying. This is the kind of clarity that I want you to aspire to and the kind of clarity you need to have before you ever try to write. Otherwise, you're risking setting yourself up on a path of being confused, going in circles and wasting a lot of time. So follow these tips, put them together, make sure you've got your outline and your design one point for each paragraph that also is going to be your topic sentence and you follow the peer system to write your paragraphs well. Listen guys, if you found this writing tip helpful, click in the links below and you're going to find other writing training that goes through effective sentences and goes through effective flow. My students have had great results. Don't forget to join my Facebook group, FastTrackGrad, where you're going to find over 30 hours of free master classes where we can go much more detail, free weekly live sessions as well. You're not going to want to miss these, 100% free, going to get you a lot of value. And if some of you guys are interested in working together more closely, maybe you're feeling good about your writing but you want a professor who's written several books to help you out and take a look, book a free one-to-one accelerator session with me. We'll roll up our sleeves and I'll be able to diagnose what we can do to help bring your writing to the next level. That's going to help you in your research. It's going to help you in your communication. It's going to help you throughout your career. Take the steps that I talked about here, like when I was a bad squash player, get yourself moving on the right track, get these skills and you will be amazed at the results you're going to have with your writing. All right, guys. Hope to see you on the inside of the Facebook group. Take care.