PhD students have a huge amount of writing advice available to them. There are large number of books, blogs and articles that are going around and increasing in numbers to extend advice to PhD writers so that they can handle it easily. However most of that advice is similar and does not come to much help to the writer.
Some of the most commonly found tips are:
1.You must write every day, from the beginning of your PhD
2.Do not think too much while writing as this may obstruct the flow of ideas
3.It is better to have the work done rather than have perfect work
4.Rewriting is an integral part of writing and need not be taken as a separate pressure or load.
Most of these tips are known by all they should work for all but despite knowing them a lot of scholars are found badly stressed with the writing process. This is because advice that is common to all may not necessarily be sufficient for all.
All those people who usually give writing advice are writers themselves and mostly they would be applying those tips in their own lives. But writing is not a straight path. It is a process of immense complexity and narrowing it down a single statement advice is actual oversimplification of the complexity of the process.
The reason I think these tips do not work is that you need to incorporate a skill to apply those tips in a customised manner for your own benefit. You need to leave the simplification of the advice and the subtlety behind to be able to make it useful for you.
When you read advice from various corners, you may find a lot of theoretical models that bring skill development but it is your expertise end of the day that will determine the amount of effort you have taken. When you are an amateur, there is a lot of concentration wanted in each element of writing, but to a seasoned writer, most of the things come without any conscious effort.
This principle is not just applicable in sports coaching, but it flows equally well in creative activities also that to come in the flow of doing things effortlessly, you must have high level of expertise. However, you being good at something doesn’t necessarily makes you a good advisor too. It is ultimately the writer who has to polish and surface out those skills to be able to adopt and adhere to the tips given by the advisors.