Pen and paper, thank you!

A few years ago, while undertaking my PhD, I attended a one-hour writing workshop where the main exercise was to write as much as we could, non stop. The topic should be a paper we had been working on or an idea we had in mind. At that stage I had very briefly discussed an idea for a conference paper with a colleague from Brazil. I put my head down, wrote about it, and walked out of the workshop with a very good first draft for that abstract. Back in my office I typed it into word and sent to my colleague. With not much more work, it was done!

I remembered this day because today my computer crashed – Windows 10 updates indeed – and while it run all its downloads, installations, restarts etc, I reworked a paper abstract. Suddenly that paper and pen exercise made it all click.

I should probably use this ‘very refined technique’ a bit more…

When the computer crashes & we realise the power of thinking with pen and paper.Finally made sense of this paper 🙏🏼🤓 #getyourmanuacriptout pic.twitter.com/XWjSrbrJp9

— Dr Silvia Tavares (@silgtavares) October 17, 2016