So you want to write a doctoral thesis or something similar? First of all you need to know where you’re headed; otherwise you’ll never get there:

• You really have to know why you want to do this. The more complex, hard and time-consuming the project, the more important this will be.
• You have to know your goal: what is it you aim for?
• You have to know what this means for the text you are trying to produce: which criteria will it need to meet?

Yet at the same time you have to be aware that „writing“ actually means two completely different things: the text as an outcome, and the process leading to it. I assume you want to produce the best text possible. What must seem like a paradox to you is the central point of good writing:

To produce a really great text, quite often you will have to forget about all criteria for that when working your way towards it. Weiterlesen →