Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Pressure vs Ease Deadline Day? I have noticed in social media posts and in conversations with clients that a lot of people use deadlines as a way to motivate themselves. Or at least the story they tell themselves, is that they need a deadline to ensure that they will […]
Read More »Developing a Practice
Your academic life is more than a string of articles published, classes taught, and meetings attended. You write because this is how you articulate and develop your ideas. You publish to communicate those ideas to others. Posts in this category help you develop the practices you need to do the work you love well without burning out or compromising your values.
You Need a Writing Practice is a good place to start to investigate the Writing subcategory.
Juggling 101: Elements of a good plan is a good place to start investigating the Planning subcategory.
Using the supports you need: Part 2
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Using the supports you need, part 2 I have written previously about how I learned in yoga that it can be helpful to use supports in your practice. I’ve been thinking about this principle again recently in a different way. I think this might help you see the difference […]
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Reconnecting with the desire to write
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Reconnecting with the desire to write I was talking with a client about writing and motivation recently. We started with “It’s really hard to write with a gun to your head.” which strikes me as a pretty widespread problem. Whether that metaphorical gun is the REF, the tenure process, […]
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Hiking as a metaphor for (summer) writing
As I was updating the script for the Planning Your Summer class, I felt a bit weird about the Juggling section. I mostly ignored it at the time because I couldn’t quite put my finger on the problem. The juggling metaphor has been central to how I developed all the planning classes and it seemed […]
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A strategy to overcome resistance to write
Sometimes you sit down and try to write and you just can’t. Resistance may show up as procrastination, or writer’s block, or gremlins shouting louder than usual about how you are not qualified to do this, or something else. The root of your resistance may be emotional, or you may just be really unsure how […]
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When you stop writing…
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · When you stop writing No matter how good you get at scheduling regular writing, sometimes you just stop. Maybe you just miss a week. Maybe you miss several weeks. It happens. There are lots of different specific reasons but it happens to everyone sometimes. Do not make things worse […]
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Coming back to a neglected project
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Coming back to a neglected project In any given session of A Meeting With Your Writing it is not uncommon for someone to be coming back to a project they haven’t looked at in a while. Summer and sabbatical are also times when you might revisit abandoned projects with […]
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Early morning writing
The benefits of early morning writing can often seem like preachy, unattainable, eye-roll inducing positivity. But I have brought together some real examples of this life-changing process for your writing, just to give that eye-roll some evidence first… Rachael Herron has written eloquently about how crazy the idea of early morning writing sounds and how […]
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Being an academic in dystopian times: Making time for activism
Whether current events have prompted you to become more politically active for the first time, or increase the time and effort you put into your activism, you must account for that in your plans. Neither your activism nor your health and work will benefit from you burning out. These will be difficult choices even if the need for being more involved is incontrovertible. Whatever form your activism takes, take the time to decide what is not going to happen, or be done to a lower standard, to make space for it.
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And you keep writing …
This is another excerpt from the first book in my Short Guide Series: The Scholarly Writing Process (A Short Guide). This post includes the conclusion. I have argued that scholarly writing is more than merely the production of specific publications. The term “writing” refers to both the process of translating ideas in our heads into […]
Read More »Writing an abstract to get unstuck
I’ve written before about how to write an abstract for something you haven’t written yet and how to write an abstract for a finished piece. Both of these situations are usually responding to some external need: a call for papers, or a requirement of the journal or book publisher. In those other two posts I used […]
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Writing as process and product
This is an excerpt from my book: The Scholarly Writing Process (A Short Guide). Designed to refer to whenever you get stuck, it breaks down the scholarly writing process into stages and provides both a description of that stage and writing prompts to help you get unstuck. Here’s the introduction and table of contents. Introduction […]
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