Connections

Heather Dyer

You’ve done the research for your project, collected your data and you have an idea of where it’s all going. Perhaps you’ve even written a draft and are happy with the structure and the argument. But can you see the ‘big picture’ as clearly as you would like to?

Remember join-the-dot pictures? With each new connection, more of the picture is revealed. While you were researching and writing, you will have made many new connections: connections between sentences, paragraphs and different aspects of your project. But often, potential links remain unrealised. The more connections you’re aware of, the more clearly you will see the big picture.

The following exercise can help bring previously hidden connections into your awareness. Try it for your essay, thesis or even for creative writing.

1. Quite quickly write down 20 words associated with your project, dotted across a blank piece of paper,
2. Now circle pairs of words that may have a relationship and draw lines to link them. If you don’t see any obvious relationships, that’s fine; make pairs anyway.
3. Write quickly and roughly for two or three minutes about each pair of words, looking for the connections between them.

Recently, at a writing retreat for PhD students, I asked the participants to do this exercise. Several students volunteered to explain the new connections they’d made. A student writing a thesis on the history of dance had connected the words ‘dance’ and ‘movement’. She said that freewriting about these words had made her fully consider the difference between them for the first time. ‘Dance’ was shaped by history and convention, whereas ‘movement’ was expansive and more fluid. She decided that she needed to define these terms more carefully and reconsider their application in her thesis. Another student was writing a thesis on a poet. She connected the words ‘shadow’ and ‘line’. The links between ‘shadow’ and ‘line’ gave her a way to describe the impression of a line of poetry and connect it to the ‘shadow’ cast by the poet’s work.

See if this exercise reveals connections that have been lurking in your unconscious mind but have not yet emerged in your writing. Once these connections emerge, the big picture is so much clearer.