magenpies:jewishdragon:peachdoxie:deciduqueen:Tips for writing an essay with executive dysfunction:
magenpies: jewishdragon: peachdoxie: deciduqueen: Tips for writing an essay with executive dysfunction: do this. Write out bits and pieces of the essay. When you get to a part you can’t/”don’t want to” write, put it in bold brackets. Get as much done as you can and come back in a half an hour or so! If the executive function is still bothering you, take it one bracket at a time. Don’t delete the bracket until you’re done “filling it in,” so to speak. If you need to take more breaks or hop to the next bracket, you can do that too! Similarly, if you have a thought you want to get down but you aren’t sure how to word it, put it in bold brackets as well! It may not “cure” the executive dysfunction or procrastination problems, but it makes writing the essay more like putting shapes in holes of the same shape. It can be a pain, but the process is a bit more streamlined and user-friendly. I know this may not work for everyone, but as someone who has really bad executive dysfunction and problems focusing (thank you, ADHD!) this works REALLY well for me! I hope by sharing it it can help other people (with and without executive dysfunction/adhd) too! o/ This strategy also works for individual words as well. Not sure what works to put? In its place, put a bracket and fill it in. I often use a synonym of the word I want to go there because it helps me know what to fill in later, but there have also been times when I’ve just put [word] to signify that I know some word needs to go there, but I’m not sure what at the moment. To make sure that you’ve cleared all the brackets before turning in your assignment, you can use the search function and just type a single bracket in. Once your search returns no brackets, you know that it’s ready! I do this ALL THE TIME It’s not just for school! I am 28, with a Real Office Job™ and ADHD, and this is what I do at work every day. I have to write summaries and explanations of everything I’ve done, so I make a kind of framework and fill it in as I go along. I know that if I did an entire item first and then wrote it up afterwards, I would almost certainly leave something out. So here is how I do it, personally. All of these tips are for Microsoft Word, but there is probably an equivalent for whatever open-source software people use instead. (I don’t know if Google Docs has all these features or not.) IF YOU READ ONLY ONE TIP, READ THIS: If you know you are going to be writing a specific word or short phrase a lot, put an abbreviation into autocorrect. For example, if you are taking an art history class this semester, and it gives you a headache to type Botticelli and Gentileschi correctly every time, add custom autocorrects for “btcl” and “gnlsc.” The key here is to use unusual combinations of letters that won’t turn up in other words. (Don’t use “gent” for Gentileschi, for example.) Now for my actual process. First, I turn on the paragraph marks (these things ¶) so that I can press tab and have these things —> mark the “fill-in-later.” Then, if there’s anything that may need to be replaced or expanded on further, I use red text to mark that, so I don’t accidentally leave a half-finished sentence in the middle of a paragraph. If I am copying-and-pasting something from earlier, and I may need to change a word or phrase later, I make that red too or sometimes highlight it in bright yellow, to be absolutely sure. When I am filling in a particular kind of very long form, I turn the entire template red, and then turn each item or section black as I complete it. Sometimes I mix up the words “deposit” and “withdrawal,” especially if I’ve been typing one over and over all day and then I have to switch to the other. To combat this tendency, I do a search in my document to be sure each one is in the right place. I use headings in MS Word very liberally in any document longer than two pages. If you go to navigation and turn on the thingy that lets you view a table of contents on the side, you can skip about without endless scrolling and searching I hope these safeguards (as I think of them) help anyone who’s reading this and provide a basic template you can modify to suit whatever you’re doing. -- source link