Academic Writing is Like Packing Luggage

This week’s issue of Keep Writing is brought to you by Jenni.ai, an AI-powered app designed for academic writing (more on that later).

Last week, I traveled to Spain to give a talk at the University of Valladolid. Every time I pack my bags to go to a new place, I realize how similar the processes of academic writing and packing luggage are.

Last year, my family and I moved from the US to Pakistan in August. A few months later, we moved from Pakistan to Denmark around Christmas time. Below is a photo of our nine bags that we traveled with from the US to Pakistan.

When you travel, you can only carry a certain amount of weight. Depending on the airline, you can check 2 bags of 23kg or 1 bag of 30kg. Plus a carry-on and a personal item (like a laptop). That's it.

This is like the word count for a journal article or a dissertation.

How do you fit all your stuff in a few bags?

When we moved from upstate NY to Karachi, we started by putting in the middle of the living room all the stuff we wanted to take along.

That was our zero draft. We had everything laid out in front of us.

We couldn't fit everything so we ended up discarding a bunch of stuff — books mostly because they're very heavy.

That was our first draft.

Speaking of first drafts, I would like to introduce you to Jenni.ai, an app that’s designed for academic writing. If you struggle with writing first drafts or if the blank page intimidates you, Jenni can help you.

Create an account on Jenni and type in the title of your project. Jenni will give you a sentence to get started. You can accept/reject Jenni’s suggested sentence. Jenni can’t produce original research for you but it will surely help you with overcome the writer’s block.

If you want to read more about Jenni, you can take a look at this thread I did a few weeks back.

After we had packed our bags, we weighed them. They were all (way) above the weight limit. My wife and I opened them up and had discussions like co-authors.

We divided our stuff into things we needed and things we wanted. We kept the things we needed and discarded what we wanted but didn't need.

That was our second draft.

We weighed our bags again. They were still a little over weight. We were left with all the things we needed and we still had to discard some of them. More discussions.

That was our kill-your-darlings stage. We divided our stuff into things we needed for:

• their functional value and

• their emotional value

Most things with only emotional value had to go.

That was our third draft.

We weighed our bags one more time and now they were within the weight limit.

Yay! We were happy...but not for too long.

In a typical desi fashion, a couple days before our flight a relative asked if we could bring a robotic vacuum cleaner for them. We ordered it online and got it delivered the next day. It weighed 8kgs.

That was like Reviewer 2's comments

You don't like their comments, you don't want their comments, and yet you have to incorporate them in your work.

We opened our bags one more time, had more discussions while looking at each other helplessly.

More things of emotional value to discard. But we did it.

Framing the process of academic writing as packing luggage may seem like an odd analogy. But it really isn't.

Academics use the word "unpack" so much it has become sort of a cliché — let's unpack X, there's a lot to unpack in Y, etc.

That’s it for today. I’ll see you next week.

Until then keep writing.

And if you feel stuck you can take Jenni’s help.