Academic Writing with ADHD: the Blank Page and the Source Maze

Twenty-three tabs are open in the browser. On the desktop there is a folder called "to read" with forty PDFs in it. In the document there is a single sentence, and it is the title.

That is the first image that comes to mind when I think of academic writing.

For a long time I thought this was a discipline problem. I thought that if I read more I would feel ready, and that once I felt ready I would write. The day I felt ready never came. The reading list only kept growing.

Why writing is such an intense job

Writing researcher Ronald Kellogg describes skilled writing as putting a very heavy load on working memory. Advanced writers hold three things in mind at once: the content they want to say, the text itself on the page, and how the reader will understand that text. Managing all of this at once requires executive attention, and that capacity is limited. According to Kellogg, the development of writing skill depends on practice and learning reducing the load these processes place on memory (Kellogg, 2008).

Now think of academic writing. A fourth layer is added to those three: sources. Whose idea was this sentence, which page was it on, did this finding contradict that other finding?

For someone whose working memory is already strained, this is like trying to keep four balls in the air at once. When one ball drops (when I switch to a tab to find a source, say), the other three drop too, and when I come back to the sentence I do not remember what I was writing.

What research says about ADHD and writing

Most of the data here comes from children, and I want to say that up front.

A meta-analysis that combined studies with students from first to twelfth grade found that students with ADHD scored markedly lower than their peers in writing quality, the amount of text produced, using elements appropriate to the genre, vocabulary, spelling and handwriting (Graham et al., 2016).

In another study, which looked at learning difficulties in children in a clinical sample, the rates of learning difficulties were among the highest in the combined and inattentive presentations of ADHD. Across the whole sample the most common type of learning difficulty was written expression; it was twice as common as difficulty in reading or maths (Mayes & Calhoun, 2006).

It would not be right to carry these findings straight over to adult academic writers. But they say one thing: struggling with writing is something many people with ADHD have known since their school years. Difficulty with written expression is also an area that can be assessed separately; the article on ADHD and learning disabilities describes this distinction.

I keep reading to feel ready. The more I read, the more I have to hold. The more I have to hold, the further I get from feeling ready.

The source maze

Reading feels easier and safer than writing. When I read an article I have done something. Something genuinely necessary, even. I do not have to face the vague, judgeable, blank-page state of writing.

This has a name in the glossary: productive procrastination. Putting off the real job with a job that looks useful.

And there is this too: every article points to three new sources. I follow an interesting quotation, then the article it quoted, then a debate mentioned there. Two hours later I am far from the subject I started with, in a place that is interesting but of no use. This side of curiosity is both the most enjoyable part of academic work and its biggest trap.

Routines I found worth trying

Separating drafting from revising

Building a sentence while at the same time judging whether that sentence is any good doubles the load on memory. This is exactly the load Kellogg describes.

It can help to define two separate sessions. In the first session you only write: the sentences can be bad, the sources can be missing, the paragraph order can be wrong. In the second session (another day, if possible) you only revise.

If I need to check a source in the first session, instead of switching to a tab I leave a marker in the text: something like [SOURCE: Kellogg, memory load]. The flow does not break, and in the second session I fill in all the markers in one go.

Taking source notes in your own sentences while reading

When I read an article and leave it with "I'll take notes on this later," I most likely end up reading that article again from the start. Writing these three lines while reading greatly reduces the cost of coming back:

• A one-sentence finding, in my own words.
• The page number and, if I need a direct quotation, a short quotation.
• Where this finding sits in my text: which section, and which claim it is there to support or undermine.

If I cannot write the third line, that source may not be useful to me right now. That is a good sign to stop reading.

Putting a limit on reading

The sentence "I will start writing once I have mastered the subject" never worked for me, because mastery has no finish line. Instead, it is more realistic to set a reading limit for each section at the start: a number, a time or a question. "When I find answers to these three questions for this subheading, I move on to writing."

If I still feel something is missing when I reach the limit, I leave the place I feel something missing in the text as a question and move on to writing. The gap often becomes clearer while writing.

Putting skeleton sentences on the blank page

The blank page freezes me because I do not know which sentence to start with. The first sentence is always the heaviest.

What works is writing only the first sentence of each paragraph before starting the section. "This section compares three approaches." "The strength of the first approach is this." "However, there is this limitation." The page no longer stays empty; there are only gaps that need to be filled. I described the lock-up at the very act of starting separately in the article on task paralysis.

Talking first, then writing

There are some paragraphs I cannot write but can tell someone. Opening a voice recording app, speaking that paragraph as if I were telling a friend, and then putting it into writing puts a step between me and the blank page. In the glossary this appears as thinking aloud. The sentences I form while speaking are not academic, of course; but revising is much easier than writing from scratch.

Short and regular sessions

Here there is an old but, I think, still very instructive study. Academics who had asked for help because of writing blocks were divided into three groups, and over ten weeks they recorded both the amount of text they wrote and the new ideas they produced about their writing. The group that was given external conditions tying writing to a regular habit produced the most text and the most new ideas. The group that waited to write until inspiration came fell behind in both text and ideas (Boice, 1983).

This study is small and was not done with writers who have ADHD. Still, as someone who spent years on the thought "I'll write when inspiration comes," it reminds me of this: ideas can come while writing, not before it.

Because long sessions can make both starting and keeping going harder in ADHD, I find short but frequent sessions worth trying. Forty-five minutes at the same hour every day may produce more work than a three-hour weekly marathon.

Writing session card. Before the session starts, write just two things on a piece of paper: which paragraph you will write in this session, and which tabs you will close. When the session ends, add a third line: what you will do first in the next session.

Digital clutter is a separate job

Tabs, half-read PDFs, notes sitting in different folders. All of these are a load of their own. Before a writing session, leaving open only the sources needed for that paragraph and closing the rest by saving them to a list reduces the invisible load working memory carries. I covered the general order in the article on digital clutter in ADHD.

The time-management side of a long academic project I talked about in the article on writing a thesis with ADHD; this article is its page-level version.

What I think today

For a long time I believed that good writing came through reading a lot. Reading is necessary, of course. But it turns out that the most respectable way of putting off facing the blank page is also reading.

Now I find a bad first draft more valuable than a good reading list. A bad draft can be revised. A text that was never written cannot.

I also wrote something in the diary about writing itself: Writing.