Thread by @Hildemeeg

I am a slow, slow writer. Or so I think.
I write linearly, each sentence and paragraph needs to be done before I can start the next and every morning I first rework what I wrote the day before.

For fun, I tracked myself. These are the results. 🧵

#ProgressTweet

First, with “tracking” I just mean I start every day with a fresh copy of my file. The new file gets its date changed, the old file goes into the “old versions” folder. This way, I can always undo pretty much anything, and I have a folder with all previous versions of my paper…

… yes, depending on the progress, this could mean hundreds of files.

In this case, I have 72 files in that folder. That would mean 72 workdays* or about 14,4 workweeks if I’d worked 5 days a week. In truth, the first version is dated 2021.09.30 (year/month/day), the final version is from 2022.04.29. So, 7 months.

* It’s not quite 72 workdays because some files have a “b” behind the date, for instance 2021.10.28b. This b means I created a new file during the day. I do this every time I am about to make a major change, cut a whole section, restructure the argument, etc.

Since I am on a @MarieCurie_alum Individual Fellowship, I had no other obligations during the period. I could really just write. So how much did I write?

Well, apparently my average daily progress is only 248 words per day!

Forget all those how-to-write-500-words-per-day trainings or goals. 248, that’s it for me. That’s about the length of a paragraph.

On average, I wrote a paragraph per day.

And no, this is not the average of *all* workdays. It is really the average of the days on which I added words—writing days, not cutting days.

I do have cutting days too. At one point, towards the end of November, I cut 1.418 words over just 4 workdays. But I took the minus-days out to calculate my average

That said though, the first 5.910 words (that is ¾ of the original word limit) were written in the first month. Progress was much slower after and probably involved a whole lot of tweaking, revising, and rewriting those first words.

For me, this shows #AcademicWriting really is as much about revising and refining as it it is about writing.

How many words I wrote in total, I do not know. I only have the files of the end of the day, so only net changes. But that is it. On writing days, I added 248 words net on average.

My lowest net change, btw, was 4 words. I imagine that day I read for hours on end just to add one reference. I am sure it was a day well spent!

So, am I slow, or is this normal?

ps. this ⬇️ is the chapter I wrote in those ~72 workdays.

https://twitter.com/HvanMeegdenburg/status/1614937526199885824