What should I do with discarded paragraphs?

Question

I'm writing a difficult paper for my PhD. My first draft is rambling and long, so I'm cutting it down for the next round of edits.

However, I find it difficult to discard old writing. Some of the paragraphs I'm discarding may still be valuable for my future PhD, so I put them in 'discard' documents which I may use for my final dissertation document, or try to fit them into drafts for future papers.

What is your strategy for discarding old writing? What's the most efficient way to utilise discards, so you don't have to rewrite the same paragraph in future?

Answer 1

(This answer is based on my experience with mathematical writing. I assume that it should apply to other kinds of scientific writing too, but your mileage may vary.)

I suspect that you may be fundamentally misunderstanding the purpose of the writing that you are having a hard time "discarding".

It seems like your logic is that you spent a lot of effort writing a certain paragraph, but since the paragraph will not appear in the final version of your manuscript, this effort was wasted. So that the effort is not wasted entirely, you would like to keep your writing in the drawer so that you can pull it out later at an opportune moment. This is of course pure speculation on my part, but I cannot imagine why else you would "find it difficult to discard old writing".

The flaw in this logic is the idea that the effort it took to write the paragraph will go to waste unless you use it somewhere. This is a misunderstanding. The effort was not wasted, since the paragraph has already served its purpose, which was to serve as a stepping stone on the path towards the final manuscript. Its purpose is not to be something for you to hold on to until you find a proper place for it. The paragraph had its place in the process of exploring and stumbling towards the final manuscript, but after it has served that purpose it's time to let go of it. Imagining that it is going to be revived for some other purpose is almost always wishful thinking.

Of course, from time to time you may find yourself writing an outstandingly well-polished couple of paragraphs which for some reason or another did not quite fit into the final manuscript, or paragraphs where you have a convincing, well-articulated reason to believe that they might be useful later, rather than a generalized feeling of what if. These it makes sense to keep around. But your average run-of-the-mill paragraphs that simply didn't make it through the editing process? Kill them and don't carry their corpses around. (This does not mean that you should never back up previous versions of your work, but rather that you should not primarily do so with a view to resurrecting unused paragraphs in some future work.)

Your stated reason for keeping these paragraphs in a state of suspended animation is "so you don't have to rewrite the same paragraph in future". Again, I suspect that there is some fundamental misunderstanding here, because it's not like the act of writing a paragraph is a major undertaking. The amount of effort you are going to save by not starting from zero is going to be infinitesimal, and is more than made up for by the fact that writing the paragraph anew will almost certainly result in a better one. What is a major undertaking is polishing a paragraph over and over again (and moving it to and fro) until it fits perfectly into its surroundings. But this process is not something you can substantially speed up by cutting and pasting bits and pieces from your previous work. Whether you start from zero or not is almost irrelevant, as long as your focus is on producing good writing rather than spending a minimum amount of effort on the writing process.

I can sympathize with the fact that at the beginning of your scientific career it make take you some time and effort to write a coherent paragraph, so my comment that the amount of time saved is going to be infinitesimal might not ring true to you. If so, then that's all the more reason for you to practice the bread and butter of scientific writing – which is editing, rewriting, and experimenting with different ways of expressing the same idea, rather than clinging to existing strings of words and sentences – until it does ring true.

Answer 2

I used to hate discarding paragraphs, which I'd spent lots of effort writing. And indeed, they can be useful and save time. On the other hand, hoarded paragraphs could be distracting and delay the inevitable rewrites.

My solution has been to use version control, such as GitHub. It's free and easy with LaTeX, and there must be something for other document types. There is a learning curve, but lots of advantages: easy backup and version management, clean directories, easy re-use of text (you can highlight differences between versions), collaboration with co-authors, and no regrets for discarded text.

Added Clarification (fully re-using the comment by @preferred_anon):

Just to clear up any confusion about terminology: GitHub is not a version control system, it is a third party host for files that are version-controlled by the software git. For offline work, no more is needed than just git - no server, local or otherwise. "Private" github repositories are not private from GitHub, but for truly private hosting over the internet, you are forced to do it yourself. Server software like Gitlab or Savannah provide this, but both require some know-how.

Answer 3

If I have discarded something earlier, this was for a reason.

If it was rambling then, it is still rambling now.

Because of that, I keep these drafts around to kickstart writing and to help overcome the writer's block so to not stare at the blank page, but not much else. The rest is generally easier to rewrite.

There are cases where the writing itself is reasonably good, but the decision is made to make the scope more narrow for a given paper. If that is the case, strike while the iron is hot: build up on this work lest it becomes outdated.

As Hemingway famously said, "The only kind of writing is rewriting". You will be discarding a lot of old drafts, because part of what you are producing in the process of writing is knowledge and deeper understanding of the topic, not words on the paper that make it into the final version.

Answer 4

My take is a little different than some of the others'.

Your old rambling paragraphs will distract you and weigh you down, pulling you back into your previous thinking and approaches.

You need to improve your writing skills, so I strongly recommend you burn everything (or at least put it all away where you can't easily get at it) and just keep starting over.

You need to find your writing voice, and that takes time and a lot of attempts. It's really hard to find a better way to write if you keep focusing on your old and admittedly not good attempts.

Toss it all out.

Like the cartoon writers, each time you change your mind, pull the paper out of the typewriter, crumble it up and toss it in the garbage.

Only this way will you make a fundamental improvement in your writing skills. You will see that it gets easier and easier.

Answer 5

"However, I find it difficult to discard old writing." I would certainly say the same of myself. I agree with your sentiment that this stuff has to be axed from your current draft and yet, hoarder that I am, I feel your pain in not wanting to throw it away. (You might not be a hoarder like me, but that is definitely what instigates me to think in this way.)

Here is what I have found works great for me: I have a massive collection of electronic notes where I hoard all these snippets. (I use Microsoft OneNote, but you could use any note-taking system that works for you.) I save them in notes in a section that I call "Research ideas". Here is the power of this simple strategy for me:

• Because I know that I am not throwing anything away, I can be very aggressive in cutting out these paragraphs from my current working document. There is little pain of parting because I know (or think) that it's just a goodbye; I can change my mind and bring it back whenever I want. So, I have no excuse to cut things out aggressively. That meets the very real need of aggressive rewriting if you want to move forward. For me, this is probably the single most powerful feature of this simple system.

• Because everything is in an electronic notes system, storage space is virtually unlimited. So, I can hoard as much as I want. (That satisfies my hoarding urge with little cost.)

• Because it is an electronic note-taking system, I can rapidly search for and recover anything that I really need. So, unlike a physical hoarding system, there is very little downside to the clutter here.

• As I think more about these tangental ideas, the notes give me a place to develop and flesh out details. Some ideas are recorded once and then never again revisited; others I find myself coming back to again and again, sometimes over several years.

Over the ten-plus years that I've been saving snippets like this, I would estimate that probably no more than 5% of things that I put aside and save actually make it into new, active work. I evaluate this either as that the 5% justifies my hoarding reflex, or that the system frees me of 95% of deadweight that I could quickly offload from other projects. Either way, this system works for me.

Answer 6

So if you do find you want to use that paragraph again, it's going to be tough to find it again in a "discard" document. You will be most likely to be able to locate it again in the location you originally wrote it, because that's where you remember creating it. Much better if it can stay there.

Also, sometimes I think I can cut a paragraph, then my supervisor comes back with the comment "I really think you need more background on X", so it has to go back in.

For both these reasons, you don't really want to move the paragraph.

If you are using LaTeX, the solution is easy, just comment it out in place. If your LaTeX document is getting too large, it might be time to restructure each chapter into a separate file and pull them all together with \include.

If you are working in some other format, then the way to hide the text will have to depend on the format. Lots of formats allow some form of annotation or comment that can be hidden. But in the end my advice is still the same, keep it in it's original document, just find a way to hide it in the final output.

Answer 7

As with everything you do with a computer, use version control. There's little reason to throw out anything digital in the 21st century, save security concerns.

Answer 8

Every time you remove sections from a document, simply save it under a different name.

In the morning you open up Abacus.doc. You spend the morning chopping bad sections out. In the afternoon you save Abacus(i).doc. The next morning you open Abacus(i).doc and continue writing as normal.

Take this opportunity to backup the most recent version externally.

You end up with many numbered versions of the same document. But this is no problem. The old versions are still there in case you ever need them. The only difficulty is if you remember something you removed but want to put back, you need to crawl through all the earlier versions to find it.

Answer 9

Let them go.

Those paragraphs were not living in a vacuum, but they were heavily intertwined with the surrounding sentences and paragraphs and documents.

They costed you some effort, they may contain some valuable informations, both things are true, but:

• it costs you less effort to rewrite them from "scratch" (see next point) rather than being burdened by carrying them with you ... don't let you drown in the burden of sunken costs;
• the valuable informations hidden in them is there because youput that worthwhile chunk of information into them: either you can reproduce that information, or it is lost forever if you are not being able to produce it again, having that information already written will be of no help, if you cannot reproduce the "substance" underlying that information.

In short: either you can prepare a short essay, a commentary, a blog post, a tweet or some analogous microblogging post with those paragraphs, or they are more of a burden than of a potential help in the future.

Disclaimer: obviously there is a small exception: if you by any chance will become a Nobel prize in literature, those discarded paragraphs will have immense value ... afer your death. If you really worry about leaving something to your offsprings, think about how unfair is for some people to be loaded with cash and responsibility with no merit on their own ;D