Thalassa
Permabanned
- Joined
- May 3, 2009
- Messages
- 25,183
- MBTI Type
- ISFP
- Enneagram
- 6w7
- Instinctual Variant
- sx
Writing something by hand is a piece of advice I'd like to give to everyone (though of course it helps some people more than others). It will help you to spot redundancies, unclear passages, sentence fragments etc. much more easily. Also, you can always jot down important thought on a foolscap whenever you have them without losing track of the 'big picture'. A slight drawback is that it's a bit slow (again, my fear of forgetting something important before I've written it down). That's why shorthand comes in handy sometimes.
You know what else works? Read something out loud. Listen to what it actually sounds like.
Read it backwards. That's the easiest way to spot technical errors, especially for people like me who don't care about the little things.
Go back and read your paper the next day and imagine it isn't yours. Imagine that you're writing something for the back of a paper back novel (or whatever works) and it helps to clear up sloppy mistakes like redundancies.
I'm not great at being linear, either. I hate doing straight-up research with very little interpretation or analysis. I find it dry as fucking hell.