Three Tips to Subde the Critic who Perches on Your Shoulder

Finding your voice as a writer is the process of talking to yourself with an eye toward audience in that you are trying to find the simplest words to explain something to an audience who very likely knows less about the topic than you do. One step to finding your voice is to recognize that if you are writing a doctoral thesis or dissertation or drafting a research article for a journal, you no doubt have thought more about the topic and know more about it than the average reader. It is very likely that you know more about the research and how it was conducted than anyone else.

The Critic Sitting on Your Shoulder

Those who find the task of writing oppressive often have a hard time squeezing out words on paper. Another reason for this is that often there is a silent critic sitting on your shoulder telling you what a lousy writer you are. Maybe this is an English teacher from the past who was merciless in marking up your papers with a red pen. It’s the threat of the marking pen hovering over the page that quells the voice of many a graduate students. That and trying to impress others.

In her Nobel lecture in 1993, Toni Morrison spoke of the critic who interferes with the flow of words. She quoted James Baldwin who said that many Black writers write likes there’s a White man perched on their shoulder. The critic on my shoulder is the White man too. The expert whose views are not the same as mine.

A Trick to Subdue the Critic

I have published 150 journal articles and 5 books. The trick I always use during writing to avoid the critic is that I repeat over and over the same mantra. This is only a draft. I am just trying to get my ideas down in some order. I will revise it later.

Even for the most proficient authors, writing is rarely easy. Three tricks to subdue the critic is to remind yourself:

• That you know your subject better than the average reader.
• That your principal job is not to sound smart, but to explain something simply enough that it is understandable to others.
• That what your writing is just a draft that you can revise later.