Doctoral researchers sometimes suffer from  lack of confidence about their writing. They can construct a sentence, a paragraph and a whole chapter. But they have difficulty when they imagine a supervisor, a reviewer, or an examiner reading over their shoulder as they type. Every clause gets checked against an invisible judge before it’s finished, and half of what gets written is erased, immediately. And what’s left is softened into something safe and forgettable.

Here is a game that attends to writing confidence. It’s not about grammar or argument. It’s more about desensitising yourself to the fact that someone other than you is going to read what you wrote. The game is designed for a retreat or workshop session.

Here’s how it goes. Writers work in pairs. Each round starts with a prompt card, which gives a genre-breaking instruction. Not “write about your methodology” or “write an outline”.  The prompt cards are designed to force your material into an unfamiliar shape. There are sample prompt cards at the end of these instructions. 

A timer runs for two minutes, no more. After each two minute round, partners read a single line aloud, chosen by the writer. Choose something you want to say out loud. This may not be the strongest line nor the weakest, just  something you feel OK about saying out loud. 

The partner’s only job is to say what image or idea came to them. No feedback on quality, no suggestions. Nothing that sounds like Reviewer 2. The moment feedback creeps back in, everyone reverts to writing for the judge again.

And then comes the interesting part: whatever gets written in those two minutes is discarded. It cannot be kept, shown to anyone beyond the immediate partner, or used later in the actual thesis or paper. It exists for two minutes and then it’s gone.

This discard rule is the point. Once a piece of writing has no future and no reader beyond the room, people stop editing themselves mid-sentence, tidying the words before anyone sees. The writing is just about responding to the prompt. 

Play six to eight rounds in a session. In the earlier rounds, keep the prompts playful and clearly detached from the real writing, so the discard feels safe. You’re not losing anything important. By the later rounds, you can shift the prompts towards the actual material from the your current writing, but still under the same two-minute limit and the same discard rule. 

But by then you have begun to build up enough throwaway repetitions that writing kinda-badly-on-purpose no longer feels dangerous… and you may start to generate some ideas for the real writing. The experience of writing without consequences may also help with that confidence issue. 

None of this makes you a better writer in an afternoon. What it gives you is some evidence that you can write without always thinking ahead of yourself – and some practice in writing without fear.

Prompt cards

Here are some sample prompt cards grouped by what they’re trying to loosen up.

Cards that change the imagined reader:

• Write your methodology as if explaining it to a suspicious colleague at a conference dinner.
• Write your literature review’s argument as a text message to a co-author.
• Write your results as a voicemail to your supervisor from an airport.
• Write your research question as something you’re trying to convince a sceptical relative matters.

Cards that change the register:

• Write your abstract as a film trailer voiceover.
• Write your theoretical framework as a set of instructions for assembling flat-pack furniture. ( My personal favourite)
• Write your central argument as a weather forecast.

Cards that change the stakes:

• Write the worst possible opening sentence for your introduction, on purpose.
• Write the version of your conclusion you’d give if you’d run out of time and had to be honest about what you didn’t manage.
• Write a one-sentence version of your contribution that a ten-year-old could repeat back to you.

Cards that change the form entirely:

• Write your data chapter as a set of stage directions.
• Write your positionality statement as a letter to the researcher you were before you started.

Of course, you might like to add to the prompt cards – a separate exercise in itself! Or you might use a prompt card as a more extended experiment.

Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash