A PhD Examined: Academic Articles

How I Learned to Structure My Academic Writing

7 min readDec 29, 2024

Writing academic articles is a very frequent activity you’ll be performing in grad school. Academic articles and publications are, for better or worse, the main yardstick by which success in academia is measured. Like most people I know, I found the process of writing articles to be painful and tedious.

As with other things I already talked about, I found that having a structured approach to article-writing made it a lot easier and sometimes even fun to do. In this writeup, I will look back on my experience in academic writing and share some of the things I found to be helpful.

As you may recall from an earlier article, I have finished my PhD work before the rise of GenAI so I won’t have anything meaningful to say about its use in academic writing. The one thing I will say is that you should be careful not to abuse it. I think it’s fine to use it to reword some parts of the paper, or generate an outline, or help you brainstorm, but you shouldn’t use it to write the main bulk of your work. Even setting aside any ethical implications of doing so, many journals and universities are cracking down on the use of AI in academic writing, so it’s a great risk to do that.

My Experience

The first academic writing I did was covering my master’s thesis work. I was still learning the correct approach and didn’t take any kind of structured steps toward my writing so it took me a long time to write the articles I did during my master’s degree. What eventually tipped the scales is that I started reading more academic papers. The more reading I did, the more patterns I started to notice. I could see how people structured their thoughts, what sections people tended to include in their articles and in what order, and how to include comparison to prior works and emphasize the worth of one’s own.

Things improved even further during my PhD. Not only did I receive direct advice on writing from my advisor and more senior fellow students, I also started being asked to review manuscripts intended for publication. This forced me to take a much more critical stance toward articles and really opened my eyes to potential writing pitfalls and weaknesses. One of the most important things I learned during that time is that a lot of people who review my manuscript to judge it are very busy. Many reviewers, as I learned, focus on the introduction and conclusion sections and judge the worth of the work from them and only read the rest of the article in detail if they think it’s important. As such, these are the sections whose writing should take the most thought and effort; these sections are the chance to “sell” one’s work to people who will read and evaluate it.

Once I started seeing articles at such a high level, it was natural for me to come up with a writing process that made my writing tasks a whole lot easier and more enjoyable.

The Writing Process

After some trial and error, I came up with these steps to write a new publication. I don’t always adhere to them in that order, but I found that when I do, the experience tends to be better.

Write an outline for the article and add a few bullet points to
each section describing what I will cover in it.
Decide on which figures and plots I need and then make them.
Write each section in the outline
Edit the different sections to make sure I define my terms properly and avoid typos, etc…
Write the introduction and conclusion, emphasizing the innovation and contribution of my work.
Edit the article as a whole, making sure the writing flows smoothly from section to section and the ideas are clear. This is where I also proofread my writing.
Ask someone else to look at what I have written. It helps to have an outsider’s perspective. This is a habit I picked up from my PhD advisor who had us do an internal review of each other’s manuscripts in our research group before submitting them for publication.

I have also picked up on two things after writing many articles (including the ones in this series). The first is the famous piece of advice to “write drunk, edit sober”. This means that when you’re writing the initial draft, you should let your ideas flow unimpeded and not stop to edit yourself all the time. When it comes time to editing your writing, read carefully and make sure to structure the text well and keep only what’s needed.

The second thing that helps me improve all the time is to write in bursts (because I find value in the Pomodoro technique) and take breaks so that I don’t tire myself out. This was quite helpful when I was writing my PhD dissertation. Not only did I write in bursts, I made a habit of writing at almost the same time every day. When it became a routine, it was so much easier to get into it every day.

Where to Publish

As a grad student, your research output can be published in conference proceedings (which usually means you need to present your work at the conference first) or in journals. The choice between one or the other depends on how mature your work is and what you want to achieve out of publishing it.

Presenting and publishing your work in conferences gives you a lot of exposure and allows for immediate feedback on your work; it’s also a great opportunity to build your professional network. On the other hand, academic journals tend to have further reach (higher impact factor) and allow longer articles, so you can present your work in full detail. I’ve seen a lot of people go for the best of both worlds: they publish the germ of their idea and any initial work in a conference and then flesh out the details in a journal article.

In addition to these professional considerations, you should also consider your advisor’s requirements. Some advisors may require you to publish a certain number of articles in peer-reviewed journals before they deem you ready to graduate. Other advisors may expect you to regularly publish in conferences so you can network with other academics in your field. At the end of the day, you want to focus your efforts where they will have most impact on your career and PhD program.

University Resources

Be sure to check out any writing resources offered by your university. Examples may be:

The writing center. My university’s writing center gave courses and advice on writing, offered plenty of guides on writing and presenting all kinds of documents, and allowed students to request appointments to receive professional feedback on their writing.
The library. My university’s library had amazing resources and could even borrow a book I needed from another library if they didn’t have it. They also offered help on researching a particular topic if I needed it. I have gone there a couple of times to find old issues of a journal that weren’t available online.
Many student groups will host writing retreats/bootcamps where they book a space for an extended amount of time and allow students to get together and write. This is not necessarily a group activity: each student is usually working on their own writing; the point is that writing in a setting where everybody around you is also writing can motivate you, give you momentum, and keep you accountable.

Concluding Thoughts

Writing academic articles can sometimes be tedious or difficult but the experience can be vastly improved if you take a structured approach, separate the writing and editing processes and make good use of your university’s resources. Also remember that to write well, you need to read well, so keep reading a lot of academic articles, in your field and in other fields that interest you. Read critically, and you’ll find that your writing will improve drastically.