One common issue people face in writing is that they can be stuck at some details and don’t feel right about a sentence/paragraph and can’t move forward much. This is due to the problem of “attend to details too early in the process”.

Dr. Shengdong Zhao suggests the following pipeline of writing:

1) structure

2) content

3) detail

The writing goes in three (3) steps.

Step 1: Determine the structure of the paper (what are the sections, the order of the sections, and what’s the proportion of the sections);

Step 2: Determine the content of the sections. In this step, you put relevant content in each section (focus on what you want to say); and

Step 3: Determine the detail ways in which the content will be presented. This is when you work on the sentence connection, paragraph connection, language, etc.