Academics write a lot, but not all of their writing is the same. In fact, on a given day academics can write in two or three different styles. You might work on a peer-review of an article, then shift to your own article manuscript. Then, you might edit a grant proposal with an impending deadline.
A few days ago, I was working with a client on revising a section of their manuscript. The draft required some re-thinking, and as we discussed the reorganization, I could hear the hesitation in their voice. The revisions would be challenging, but that wasn’t what was giving this writer pause. Instead, it was the prospect
Have you ever sat down to work on an academic manuscript and just started writing…and writing… and writing? Not necessarily in one writing session. I’m talking about the academic manuscript that gets ahead of you, that starts with one observation or argument but turns into a piece of writing that’s twice as long as it
If you’ve been reading this blog, you know how important it is to break down big goals into small tasks. I’ve shared examples here and here. Good planning relies on paying attention to detail. I think about planning not only in terms of organizing your calendar, but also in organizing your thoughts. One of the
Writing is hard, and sometimes we don’t feel like doing it. When that happens, we make excuse after excuse. “I’m tired,” or “I’m busy,” when what we really mean to say is “I don’t feel like it.” There are a plethora of feelings one can have towards their writing, and my intention is not
Raise your hand if this has happened to you: You sit down at your desk to start writing and you have every intention to get a lot done. Unfortunately, there’s a pile of student papers on the desk. You begin to think about grading them, then you remember you have to make photocopies
Signposting is important – it gives your reader a map of sorts so they know where you intend to take your argument. I’m a strong proponent of the argument that in nonfiction writing, you have little reason to surprise your reader. I’ve made this point before on the blog. A well-structured manuscript should guide
Short story: I had a colleague in a workshop who offered generous feedback on my work. At the end of each workshop, they’d hand me a draft with all sorts of comments, questions, suggestions, and recommendations for future reading. There would also be grammar corrections throughout the document. For some reason, this copyediting infuriated me.
In the last post, we talked about the emotions you might feel when reading over reviewer’s comments and how to get organized to start revising. In this post, I’ll discuss how to start revising, from developing a plan to beginning to write. There are several questions you should consider before beginning work on your article revisions.
A revise and resubmit is no joke. It may be the piece of writing that begets the most procrastination and anxiety. I think this is because you are not writing just for yourself and an imagined audience, but rather for a real audience of readers who just offered you a critique that was at times
Beginning a new writing project can be simultaneously exciting and disheartening. There is plenty to look forward to – sinking your teeth into a new body of literature, making new discoveries, and entering a different intellectual conversation. There are also so many things you must plan, so much research to conduct, so many outlines and
Imagine this: you’re diligently working on a draft of a manuscript when you reach a section that would benefit from a bit more research. Perhaps you need to cite a few more authors to support your point, or you just need some background literature to provide additional context. You go to find the
I’m so excited to begin a new series on the blog! Behind the Words is an interview series with academic writers. One of my frustrations with academic writing as a practice has always been that as much as we give advice to writers, and lament about the writing process (then complain about the poor
In an earlier post, I discussed how academic writers often end up giving short thrift to the revision process – at their own peril, I might add. Today I’m going to focus on why academic writers are hesitant to revise. Our frustration with the revision process doesn’t only happen after the first draft. It
I picked up The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande planning to read it for insights into working with my time management clients. What I found upon reading, however, is much to think about for academic writing and editing. In a nutshell, Gawande argues in this book that checklists are one way we make sense
A few weeks ago I conducted an informal Twitter poll asking if writers wrote every day. While most said no, a significant number of respondents said they wished that they did. When I speak to clients about writing, they express the same desire but declare that they don’t write daily because they don’t have enough time. Maintaining a
It’s hard to convince yourself that it’s time to send your manuscript out. Beyond the checklist of making sure you’ve done all the tasks associated with your writing, there is the matter of “feeling” as if you’re done. This feeling can be elusive. You’ll always think there is one more sentence you can rewrite,
Writing an introduction well is one of the most important skills an academic writer can have. Most academic readers have a limited amount of time to consume a wealth of information. In order to make it through vast amounts of literature, they skim. This matters to you as an academic writer because you must write
If you’re writing a book, you might think that you should hold off on writing your proposal until the manuscript is complete. Don’t! There are two reasons you should write the proposal earlier than you think. First, so you can give it the attention it deserves rather than treating is as an afterthought. Second,
The deadline for paper submissions to the American Sociological Association Annual Conference is January 6th. The ASAs are a bit different than other conferences in that you are expected to submit your entire paper on January 6th, rather than just an abstract. That does not necessarily make the abstract any less important. Organizers
How many times have you finished a manuscript, ran your word processing software’s spell-check function, and crossed your fingers that all the grammar mistakes have been corrected? You’re mentally drained by the time you complete a manuscript, and the last thing you want to think about is taking another pass at your work – you don’t
In academic writing, and all writing, the goal of the author is to keep the reader’s attention. Lose the reader at the beginning, and you lose the opportunity to share your analysis and insights. That’s why it is so important to begin your article with a hook, or an explanation of what your paper
In the first post in this series I discussed trimming words. The reasons I outlined were mainly aesthetic, detailing how to cut the length of a manuscript that is analytically sound, with strong substance. That type of trimming is still painful, but doesn’t really change the substance of your ideas or argument. Adding length can
Crafting a manuscript to meet prescribed word limits is probably one of the most vexing issues that academic writers face. Journal editors and book publishers have firm ideas about the length of an article, book, or book chapter, and writers do not have much freedom to deviate from these rules. In a series of blog
Getting stuck in writing can hamper productivity and leave you feeling as if you are not accomplishing your writing goals. It’s hard to schedule creative thought, and the time you set aside for writing is not always the time when you have your best ideas. Being stuck, however, should not become an excuse to abandon
In academic writing, the author’s goal is to convince the reader that the argument they are reading is in some way novel or unique. A great literature review gives the reader a thorough backstory on the topic, explaining how it has been discussed by other authors. After all, you can’t convince a reader your argument
Many graduate students are at a loss when starting literature reviews. How do you start? What literature do you start with, and where do you find it? How do you know when you are done? I’ve put together a series of guides for writing a literature review, and here is the first. What challenges do
We are all guilty of it: getting caught up in academic jargon or using words that only a handful of people would recognize at first glance. It’s not surprising, because we generally write for people just like us – people with PhDs engaged in similar disciplinary specialties and literatures. We expect that our readers are