The Ultimate App You Need to Use for Academic Writing

A lot goes into writing in biblical studies.¹ And any number of tools can help you marshal your research into strong prose. For instance,

• Logos can give you access to hundreds of shelves’ worth of resources,
• Zotero can help you manage and cite this literature, and
• Word can give you a place to craft your arguments.

But there’s another application that’s vastly more important than all of these combined.

Introducing KYRIYS

If you’re not familiar with it, I’d like to introduce you to KYRIYS (pronounced like “curious”).

KYRIYS is entirely free (as in both “free books” and “free speech”) and works across all major operating systems. It also integrates seamlessly with a variety of other tools you might want to use for your writing.

Most importantly, however, KYRIYS will boost both the quantity and the quality of your writing. And it will do so in ways far beyond what you’ll see if you use only traditional word processing tools (e.g., Google Docs, LibreOffice, Pages, Schrivener, Ulysses, Word).

In my experience, using KYRIYS routinely doubles or triples the amount of writing I’m able to do in a given amount of time. Your mileage may vary, but such results aren’t at all uncommon for widely diverse KYRIYS users. So, I’m confident you’ll see good results with KYRIYS too. Are you ready?

Start Using KYRIYS

If you’ve been used to writing without it, there can be a slight learning curve at some points when using KYRIYS. But getting started is incredibly straightforward, and the more you use KYRIYS, the easier you’ll find it to navigate challenges with it when they arise.

So, to start using KYRIYS,

• open your preferred word processor and
• make sure you have any needed reference material readily accessible.

Then, keep your rear in your seat (= KYRIYS)—because the ultimate application for productive academic writing is the application of yourself to your chair and to the task of writing that posture supports.²

Of course, standing can be another helpful posture for reading and writing. But “keeping your rear in your seat” works well as a metaphor for attention to what you’re sitting down to do. And “keeping your rear in your spot [in front of the keyboard]” is markedly less pithy.

That is to say, in the end, there isn’t any magic. Academic writing is about sitting down and doing the work. There are tools that can help you do the work. But none of those tools will do any good unless you sit down and pay attention to the work you’re wanting to do with them.

Despite whatever inertia or inner resistance you feel to putting words down, your job is to start lining them up one after the other.³

An Extension for KYRIYS

Thinking further in terms of this metaphor, keeping yourself at the writing task means you’re not constantly getting up to move away from it.

You might move when you take a break, but the important thing is that you’re taking a break from writing not with writing from other activities that you’re using to avoid really sitting down to the task of writing.

Yet getting up physically isn’t the only way you might avoid writing. Perhaps it’s not even the primary way you might avoid it, given all the options for distraction that ready-to-hand technology affords.⁴

Given this fact, the “rear” that you need to keep metaphorically “in your seat” isn’t so much your posterior. Instead, it’s the back of your brain, your amygdala, the area of your brain responsible for your most basic and least thoughtfully controlled impulses like those to avoid writing when its easier to do something else.

When faced with such impulses, keeping yourself in your seat (mentally, physically, or both) is an exercise of self-control. You can support that self-control in various ways (e.g., with Freedom). But it’s ultimately only that exercise that makes possible either writing or improvement in the quantity or quality of writing.

Your chair is calling. Go, and write.

1. Header image provided by NordWood Themes. ↩︎
2. Image provided by Allec Gomes. ↩︎
3. Steven Pressfield, Do the Work: Overcome Resistance and Get out of Your Own Way (affiliate disclosure; New York: Black Irish, 2015); Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles (affiliate disclosure; New York: Black Irish, 2012). See also How to Inflect Spiritual Formation for Academic Life: A Bibliography. ↩︎
4. See Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (affiliate disclosure; New York: Portfolio Penguin, 2019). ↩︎