We all know that research produces more questions than answers. You can quickly get overwhelmed with those questions and lose the focus necessary to finish work on one of those questions. The best advice I got as a newish PhD student (some time ago), was to make a file for all the things I would […]
Read More »Developing a Practice: Writing
Writing is central to your scholarly work and identity. And yet, you struggle to find time and motivation to do it. Posts in this category focus on the process of writing as a whole. They will help you establish an effective writing practice that enables you to pursue your curiosity, create knowledge, and communicate that knowledge through publications.
You Need a Writing Practice is a good place to start.
Using all 3 types of writing time will help you imagine how you can fit writing in even when you are also juggling teaching, meetings, and so on. It also helps you understand how your writing practice may shift with the seasons of the academic year.
What’s Your Research Work Flow?
So many academics complain about not having enough time for research. This can be incredibly frustrating, especially if you have research that you really want to be doing. Often, we focus on how to manage non-research tasks to make more time for research. But maybe thinking about how you use your research time might be helpful, […]
Read More »Write Early, Write Often
An excellent post about writing, especially for those with heavy teaching and family commitments. She offers 4 rules: Write Early, Write Often | jliedl.ca.
Read More »From Conference Presentation to Journal Article
A conference presentation is an important stage in the development of your research. It allows you to get feedback, helps you refine your arguments, and begins to build an audience for your work. Now comes the hard part: actually sitting down to turn that excellent first draft into something good enough to submit to a journal. […]
Read More »Are you valuing your time?
It is really easy to overvalue tasks that other people ask you to do or see you doing. And to undervalue the tasks you do alone. Writing happens alone. Sometimes it doesn’t even look like work, especially when you have to do a lot of thinking. It takes a long time to get a product […]
Read More »Hook and Eye: Guest Post: Recycling is not a bad thing
Are you worried that you are “recycling” your work? Are you trying to make sure each paper and presentation is completely new and unique? You are not alone. But you are probably more at risk of not publishing enough and not reaching the people you want to reach, than you are of repeating yourself. I […]
Read More »In lieu of my own post on writing
Inger Mewburn at The Thesis Whisperer wrote a brilliant post recently on getting writing finished. The ‘Out The Door’ rant « The Thesis Whisperer In his superb book “Writing for social scientists” (which should be renamed “Writing for everyone”), Howard Becker talks about the importance of being the kind of writer who can get stuff […]
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How scholarship is evaluated
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · How scholarship is evaluated The quality and impact/significance of your research is usually evaluated based on where you publish. The advent of new outlets for your scholarly work has raised some interesting issues about how this is done. A blog exchange about Melville scholarship (read the comments, and also […]
Read More »How I help with writing
A hadn’t been publishing. He wrote regularly despite a full teaching load. But he wasn’t getting things finished. And he wasn’t submitting them. Writing was an intellectually satisfying process for A. In thinking about why he didn’t finish he realized that he wasn’t motivated by the product — an article or a book — but […]
Read More »Permission to think big thoughts, write …
If you don’t make and protect time for thinking big thoughts, writing, and other research tasks no one else will.
Research doesn’t always look like real work, especially to outsiders, but it is. In this post, I give you some tips on valuing that work for yourself and on finding time to do it regularly.
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A class provides structure
Now that so much information is available on the internet, this question arises more and more frequently. Why go to university? Why pay all that money to learn things you could learn on your own using resources available on the internet and in public libraries. Couldn’t you just do this stuff yourself? Perhaps with the […]
Read More »misunderstanding copyright
Copyright has been in the news recently thanks to an incident in which a profit-making magazine reprinted an article they found on the internet without the authors permission. (No, I’m not linking. They’ve had enough publicity for their nefarious deeds.) When the author challenged the editor, the response included what seems to be a common […]
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