Many people enter writing workshops believing that thinking happens first and writing follows: decide what you want to say, then write it down.
That is not how it works. Most academic writing, and most writing of any kind, works the other way around. The writing is where the thinking happens. The false starts, the overwriting, the parts you delete, those aren’t wasted effort. They’re the thinking. A writer who drafts a section has a document and an understanding. A writer who asks someone else (or something else) to draft that section has only a document.
This comes up most urgently in conversations about AI. When I run the AI and writing workshop, the version of this I use is: cognitive offloading occurs when an external tool performs thinking you would otherwise do yourself. That sounds neutral, but the consequence is that you end up with prose you can’t defend and ideas you didn’t form. The discomfort of difficult drafting is a signal that substantive intellectual work is occurring. The fact that AI can remove that discomfort should make us cautious before we call the removal good.
The same problem shows up in paraphrasing. The common advice is “put it in your own words,” which I’d file next to “use commas when you need to take a breath.” It’s not wrong exactly, but it treats the task as mechanical when the real work is conceptual. Your reason for using a source should guide how you paraphrase it. That only works if you’ve actually done the thinking about why you’re using it. Which means writing through it, not around it.
When students tell me they are stuck, the trouble may be in the thinking. Writing badly for a while can make the unresolved part visible.
Earlier: “Open secret: Graduate students don’t like writing”.