Writing progress

Every time I work on a big writing project, I find that I have to rediscover my work flow. When I start a new paper from scratch, the thing that usually happens is I just start writing in a linear fashion, and then the flow totally stinks. So I have to kinda start over with another strategy.

First I try to write a one-sentence overview of the whole paper. Then I expand to a paragraph. Each sentence in the paragraph becomes essentially a major topic/section of the paper. Then in each section, I try to come up with key sentences that become the topic sentences for the paragraphs in the section. Finally I fill in the details for each paragraph.

It's like... orders of magnitude or something.

It's not an uncommon technique, but I tend to forget it until I'm done writing the first draft... or 0.5th draft.

It's all amplified to worse proportions when I take an existing paper and try to update it with new information. Starting from scratch would probably work better and faster in those cases. Maybe next paper I write I'll remember that.