Sharique Hasan

Sentence-by-sentence; create an outline

Now that we have learned how to think about our writing as a series of points, let’s turn to an exercise that I learned as an assistant professor at Stanford University. I had just had a chapter of my dissertation rejected by the American Journal of Sociology. Although it was a difficult experience, I learned many valuable lessons. One of the most useful pieces of advice I received was from a senior colleague, who suggested the following exercise:

First, choose a paper that you enjoyed reading. Next, spend a few hours copying every sentence in the paper into an Excel spreadsheet. Each row in the spreadsheet should contain a single sentence. This exercise will take a few hours, but it is well worth the effort. It will help you understand the nuts and bolts of the paper you admired and learn how a master craftsperson writes their paper.

The next step is to create a second column in the spreadsheet where you write your paper, following the structure of the paper you just analyzed as closely as possible. In a sense, you are sitting in front of a portrait at a museum and learning how to copy the Masters. This is how many artists started.

In fact, the senior colleague who suggested this exercise did it several times with several authors he admired, including famous social scientists of the time. I decided to do this exercise twice myself.

After completing this exercise, I asked the professor which author’s style he followed afterward. His answer surprised me: “Myself.”

This exercise aims to help you find your own style by first helping you understand the style of others. Once you have done this exercise, you can improvise and make changes to develop your own voice.