“I really hate writing conclusions. I am writing something now and I am very tempted to write the following as my conclusion: I wrote, I argued, it has finished. You can stop reading now. Thank you.” — (via Bluesky January 2024) This is a very common sentiment. I have seen it numerous times on social […]
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How to stop writing for your harshest critics
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · How to stop writing for your harshest critics I had a question from a client a couple of weeks ago that I suspect resonates with many academic writers. In my book: The Scholarly Writing Process, I talk about the importance of identifying the audience for the article or book […]
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Communication vs Validation: why are you publishing?
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Communication vs Validation: Why are you publishing? The primary purpose of publishing, even scholarly publishing, is communication. If you centre the communicative role of publishing, with a focus on the audience and the difference you would like your work to make for that audience, decisions about when and where […]
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Stop worrying about recycling
Back in 2011, Aimée Morrison wrote a post on Hook & Eye, ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’, in which she discussed the question What I’ve been really thinking about lately is this: how much reusing and recycling of our work is appropriate here? This is a common concern, especially among early career researchers. I responded with a […]
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Writing for the people who will like your work
It strikes me that many academics spend a lot of time and energy worrying about the people who will hate their work. Even before you’ve written the article, you are imagining someone criticizing it, probably in a particularly mean and hurtful way. No wonder you have trouble writing. Write for the people who are eager […]
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Book proposals
Someone on Twitter mentioned book proposals in response to my post on planning. This is a good example of getting stuck in the plan (and then possibly getting stuck with the plan), so I thought I’d talk more about it. What is a book proposal for? The obvious answer is that it is the means by which […]
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Making Writing Less Scary: Getting feedback on your writing
You don’t have to write in obscurity waiting to be discovered. Whether you write on a blog or you create multiple documents on your own computer, you can create an audience for your writing. In this post, I offer several options for creating conversation on a blog.
Read More »The best argument I’ve heard for Open Access publishing
Global reach. It has recently come to my attention that there are all sorts of academics out there that don’t read your academic articles either. (HT @ernestopriego) They are your audience. They are engaged in the academic debates that you are engaged in. And they can’t get access to your articles because the funding situation in their institution is even worse than it is wherever you are.
Read More »Getting useful feedback on your conference paper
There is plenty of evidence that conference presentations don’t necessarily get you any useful feedback.
But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t.
You have to build an audience
Do you tell people you know are going to be at the conference when you are presenting? Do you ask them to come? Do you tell them you would like feedback?
Read More »Fear is in the eye of the beholder (PhD2Published)
I have a post on publishing and fear up at PhD2Published. It starts like this: The biggest barrier to publishing is fear. Fear of rejection. Fear of criticism. Fear that you really don’t have anything to contribute. And then I talk about how to move forward anyway under the following headings Look for the contribution to […]
Read More »Figure out who you want to reach
In my last post, I talked about how perfectly reasonable it was not to be publishing if you think no one reads journal articles. The problem is, you are doing all this work and you aren’t sharing it with the people who need to know about it. You have great ideas. These ideas are important. […]
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