Completing research papers or long essays can be difficult for anyone. If you have ADHD or an anxiety disorder, it’s even more difficult.

The essential skill, focus, becomes elusive and near impossible to grasp. Without focus, it’s hard to keep track of the relationship between ideas and paragraphs. Failure to do so will result in an text that lacks coherence and readability.

The obstacle is the sheer amount of information you have to juggle, while making sure it’s consistent and well connected. The solution: create a system that makes you accountable.

Outlines Are Your Friends

In my previous post, I wrote about the difficulties people with anxiety face when starting to write a paper. In order to overcome these difficulties, it’s essential to create a system to guide you while formulating your thesis statement. In a long paper, the outline is the system to guide you on a multi-paragraph level.

The outline helps you keep track of the ideas and the relationships that exist between them. If you do this, you’ll ensure that your text is coherent.

Once you have your thesis statement and a rough draft of your first paragraph or two, open a new text document and structure it as follows:

Next, continue the process with the paragraphs that follow, leading to where you got stuck. After this, it’s simply a matter of filling in the blanks. For the arguments, you may copy and paste them from your paper in the order they appear. The harder part will be to come up with the paragraph’s main idea.

This is basically the thesis statement on a paragraph level, and you should formulate it in the same way as the paper’s thesis statement.

The main difference is that it won’t have to be nearly as hard to polish because it’s a continuation of the main one. If you have a relatively clear thesis statement, this part of the process shouldn’t be too hard.

This first step will force you to engage with your writing in a deeper level. At this level of analysis, you’ll be able to pick up on mistakes, both big and small. Suddenly, certain transition words that were making your text harder to read become obvious once you see them in list form.

The beginning and ends of sentences become crucial, and the unnecessary information becomes easy to spot since it doesn’t fit in the story you’re trying to convey.

After doing this, the roadblock that was preventing you from finishing will be clear. You may notice that you might have to make changes in the previous paragraphs to make it connect with the following paragraphs. This is totally fine and you should consider it part of the writing process.

Even if the subject matter is based on facts and objective analysis, you are telling a story. If you understand how you got from point A to point B, you’ll be able to visualize what point C might look like.

Once you get a vague image of what the next paragraph will look like, you’ll be able to work your way towards the conclusion.

Editing and Proofreading

These skills are not taught enough in school and college. Editing and proofreading are the essential final step to not only complete your paper, but to spot the reasons why you’re having trouble completing it. It’s basically an exercise in critical thinking. In order to do this, you have to focus on both the finer details and the big picture, but how do you do that without getting overwhelmed?

Imagine that you’re using binoculars. You first need to aim your sight before zooming in. If you zoom in before aiming, chances are you’ll be very confused about what you’re seeing.

The same principle applies to proofreading. You avoid becoming overwhelmed by getting a bird’s-eye view of your text first and then zoom in on the details. For this process, I find printing the document or viewing it as a PDF to be extremely helpful. Double the line spacing if you haven’t already and get that macroscopic view. Now read it as if someone else wrote it, not you.

What follows is a process of annotation and revision. Keep your outline by your side and look at the beginnings and ends of the paragraphs. Focus on the transition words and make sure that one paragraph leads to the next in a logical manner. Make notes on the side like you would for a book or an article.

Establish what the relationships between ideas are and get a sense of the story: it’s beginning, middle, and end.

After you’ve made adjustments, it’s time to dig deeper and read the paper sentence by sentence. See how one sentence leads to the other. If you’re having trouble reading it, it might mean that it’s too wordy or that a sentence is too long. Make adjustments as needed and proceed. By the end, there will be quite a few edits you need to do. Make them, and then repeat the process until satisfied.

ADHD and anxiety can be cruel disorders that make everyday tasks a lot harder than they need to be.

Unsurprisingly, the mental exercise that is writing is no exception. However, as you can see, it’s not impossible to achieve if you have a system to help guide your way. With the right process, you can overcome it and make it manageable.

Did you you find this useful? Consider buying me a coffee.