Writing isn’t a bonus

There’s a great anecdote about the Irish writer James Joyce. One day a friend dropped by and found him slumped over his desk, a picture of despair.

“Is it the work?” the friend asked.
“It’s always the work,” Joyce replied.
“How many words did you do today?”
“Seven.”
“But that’s not too bad, for you!”
And Joyce, full of disappointment, replied “But I don’t know what order they go in!”

This anecdote – recorded by Stephen King in On Writing – captures a feeling that many thesis writers will recognise. After a whole day of staring at your laptop screen, you haven’t actually got much further. You may have come up with a few sentences, a couple of phrases, but it’s still nowhere near a coherent story. Maybe the research part of your process went fine, but the writing …

It’s a story I hear all the time at the Writing Centre, where I work as a peer tutor. We offer one-on-one coaching to students – mostly for theses, but also for papers, reports or motivation letters – and Thesis Boosts, full-day writing sessions where students can work on their thesis with a writing coach nearby. I also have colleagues who coach PhD students and organise PhD writing days.

Writing is a skill you can only learn by doing

I’ve been doing this work for more than two years, and in that time I’ve spoken to a huge number of thesis writers. The same issues keep coming up: most students know what they want to say content-wise, but they struggle to get it clearly down on paper. A big part of the problem is that, for many, their master’s thesis is their first big individual writing assignment.

To illustrate, when doing my Strategic Product Design master, I only had to write two texts on my own – a 2,000 word essay and a 3,500 word paper. Writing is a skill you can only learn by doing, and if you hardly ever do it, it’s no wonder you get stuck. Luckily, students now can still come to us. But with budget cuts looming, the future is uncertain.

You might say that reading and writing are things you’re supposed to learn in secondary school. But by that logic, we could scrap all the maths courses at TU Delft too – after all, maths is part of the school curriculum as well. At TU Delft, students do integrals until the numbers blur – so why does writing stagnate at final exam level? Or you might think that these days you can just outsource your writing to AI. But that’s like scrapping arithmetic because there are calculators. Besides, you can’t judge the quality of an AI-generated text if you don’t understand writing yourself.

What good are brilliant ideas if you can’t put them into words?

What good are brilliant ideas if you can’t put them into words? How can you publish, persuade, or contribute to real-world problems if you can’t communicate clearly? Writing isn’t something students ‘also need to learn’ – it’s central. Without writing, there is no science. And it’s high time we start treating it that way. Not just the occasional lecture or elective, but a real place at the core of the curriculum. So that by the time students start writing their thesis, they actually know how to write a strong, coherent text.

Until then, we need to make sure that the writing support we do have doesn’t fall victim to the next round of budget cuts – because that’s exactly where students learn to structure their thoughts, find their story, and finish their thesis. And to get the words in the right order.