The Hidden Cost of “Just Write More”

What Academic Writing Practice Actually Improves

“Just write more.” If you’ve ever struggled with academic writing, you’ve heard this advice. Usually from someone senior. Often delivered with genuine care. And on the surface, it sounds reasonable.

Writing is a skill. Skills improve with practice. Therefore, write more.

The advice is not wrong, but it would be a problem when taken literally, quietly harmful.

For many early-career researchers and clinicians, “just write more” does not lead to clarity. It leads to fatigue, frustration, and a strange sense of stagnation: I am writing constantly, yet my papers are still described as unclear, unfocused, or poorly argued.

This article is about the hidden cost of that advice.

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Why “Just Write More” Sounds So Convincing

The advice works beautifully in other domains.

If you want to write more fluently in a foreign language, type faster, become less afraid of the blank page, then writing more helps. Volume reduces friction. Repetition builds comfort.

Senior researchers often internalized this process decades ago. By the time they are advising others, they no longer remember the stage where writing itself was cognitively overwhelming. For them, writing more did correlate with improvement—because the underlying thinking structures were already stable.

For juniors, however, the situation is fundamentally different.

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What Writing More Actually Improves

Writing more reliably improves surface-level fluency:

• You start sentences faster.
• You hesitate less before drafting.
• You become less anxious about producing text.
• Grammar mistakes decrease with feedback and exposure.

These are not trivial gains. They matter.

But notice what is missing.

Writing more does not automatically improve:

• argument structure,
• logical progression,
• reader anticipation,
• conceptual clarity.

Those belong to a different category altogether. Well, now you can understand through, ‘just write more’ seems to improve everyday writing instead of academic writing.

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The Invisible Cost: Reinforcing the Wrong Patterns

When you write frequently without correcting your thinking structure, you are not practicing a neutral skill. You are rehearsing a pattern.

And patterns, once repeated, become automatic.

Over time, “just writing more” can lead to:

1. Automation of Unclear Thinking

You become faster at producing text that feels academic but still fails to guide the reader. Long sentences, cautious phrasing, excessive citations—these start to flow effortlessly. The result looks sophisticated but remains opaque.

2. False Sense of Progress

Word count increases. Drafts accumulate. Yet reviewer comments stay eerily similar: unclear rationale, weak discussion, lacks focus. This mismatch erodes confidence more than slow progress ever could. It’s really true for my experience.

3. Cognitive Exhaustion Without Learning

Writing is mentally expensive. If each session reinforces confusion rather than resolves it, you burn energy without building transferable skill. Eventually, writing itself becomes associated with stress rather than insight.

The tragedy is subtle: you are working hard, but you are practicing the wrong thing.

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Why This Advice Persists in Academia

“Just write more” survives because it is:

• easy to say,
• impossible to falsify in the short term,
• retrospectively true for people who already crossed the threshold.

Senior academics are not lying. They compressed decades of experience into a survival rule. When they say “just write more,” they’re remembering the moment writing finally clicked—not the years before that moment. But compression erases context. And context is what juniors need most.

They are compressing a complex process into a single sentence, and in doing so, they erase the most fragile phase: the transition from descriptive writing to argumentative writing.

That transition is not solved by volume.

It is solved by thinking differently before writing.

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Academic Writing Practice Is Not the Bottleneck—Thinking Is

Most struggling academic writers do not suffer from a lack of effort. They suffer from a mismatch between:

• what they know, and
• what the reader needs to be guided through.

They write as if the reader shares their internal context. They describe results when the reader expects interpretation. They add citations where structure is missing. None of this is fixed by typing more words.

In fact, more words often make the gap harder to see.

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The Opportunity Cost of Blind Practice

Time spent writing without feedback on structure has an opportunity cost.

That same time could have been used to:

• outline arguments explicitly,
• map claims to evidence,
• rewrite a single paragraph ten times with a specific reader in mind,
• analyze why a reviewer found something unclear.

Writing less, but with deliberate focus on clarity, often produces more learning than writing daily without reflection.

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What to Do Instead (Without Turning This Into a Checklist)

This is not a call to stop writing.

It is a call to stop equating volume with improvement.

A more productive alternative looks like this:

• Write, but pause to ask: What exact question is this paragraph answering for the reader?
• Draft, but then remove half the sentences and see whether the argument survives.
• Revisit reviewer comments not as language feedback, but as signals of thinking gaps.
• Treat writing sessions as experiments in explanation, not transcription of knowledge.

These practices feel slower. They are cognitively uncomfortable. But they target the real bottleneck.

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The Real Cost of “Just Write More”

The cost is not wasted words. It is delayed understanding.

Years can pass before a writer realizes that effort was never the problem. Direction was.

Once that realization happens, progress accelerates—not because the writer suddenly writes more, but because they finally start practicing the right skill.

Clarity isn’t a byproduct of volume. It’s a byproduct of disciplined thinking. And that’s why “just write more,” on its own, isn’t just insufficient—it’s expensive.