Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Conferences as motivation to write When I talk to clients or potential clients about specific writing projects, I often ask them what they have already. It is not uncommon for them to reply that they have partial drafts of chapters or articles which are currently in the form of […]
Read More »Communicating scholarly knowledge
Publishing is an important part of your work as a scholar. Posts in this category address all times of publishing, understood as making your knowledge public: more or less formal methods, publishing for scholarly audiences, publishing for wider audiences.
For an introduction to how I approach the topic start with Communication vs Validation: Why are you publishing.
Motivating yourself to finish the damned book!
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Motivating yourself to finish the damned book Do you have a book project that’s been in progress for a long time? You are not alone. Over the years I’ve helped several mid to late career scholars who are weighted down by the unfinished projects they have lying around. Like […]
Read More »
How do I know when my book is ready to submit?
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · How do I know when my book is ready to submit? You are almost finished with your book! You plan to submit it to your publisher in a couple of months. You’ve been working on it for a long time. You’ve not only got a full draft but you’ve […]
Read More »
How grading has ruined peer review
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · How grading ruined peer review “Academics should not be terrified of one another’s judgments, just as students should not be afraid of their teachers. … we need to imagine things as they might be otherwise; in this case, a world where evaluation of others isn’t part of the daily […]
Read More »
How to find a book structure that works
A note from Jo: I saw a great Twitter thread by Allison Van Deventer that is related to a book she and Katelyn Knox have coming out in November: The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook. She agreed to write a blog post (with her co-author Katelyn E. Knox) based on that Twitter thread for November. Jo VanEvery, Academic […]
Read More »
Why are you writing this book?
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Why are you writing this book? A book is a big project. Depending where you mark the beginning, book writing can take years. Not only is it hard to protect the time, given all your other commitments, but it can be hard to sustain momentum. Some of that is […]
Read More »
Who are you writing for?
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide | Who are you writing for? One thing that’s difficult about writing a book is its scope. There is a lot of material to organize. It’s too big to hold in your head. It’s hard to maintain your motivation when you won’t see a finished product for a long time. […]
Read More »
You don’t have to find a “gap” in the literature
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · You don’t need to find a “gap” in the literature Your research, and the publications based on that research, need to make an original contribution to knowledge. Over the past 20 years, I’ve seen a lot of ways academics, at every career stage, get in a bit of a […]
Read More »
Academic Writing & Publishing: A Discussion with Katherine Firth
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Academic Writing: An Interview with Katherine Firth This post is an edited transcript of my interview with Katherine Firth in October 2019 to celebrate the publication of my Short Guide on Peer Review. JoVE: Hello. So I am Jo Van Every, and this is Katherine Firth. [Katherine confirms]. […]
Read More »
Peer Review is worth saving
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Peer review is worth saving There is a crisis in peer review. It affects all disciplines. It affects all types of publishers. It adds delays to the publishing process, which was already frustratingly long. I suspect it is also affecting the reviews themselves in various ways. The Peer Review […]
Read More »
What to do about a stalled book project
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · What to do about a stalled book project Are you *not* writing a book? Maybe it’s your “thesis book”. Maybe it’s something else. You might have a contract for it. You might not have started it, but think you should have by now. You might have a lot of […]
Read More »
Making Decisions: peer review
This post was originally written in February 2021 as a follow up to Planning Your Winter Semester and was shared in the Academic Writing Studio. It has been edited and divided into a series of shorter posts for ease of reading. The general principles—habits, routines, and default responses—are explained in the first post in the […]
Read More »
