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 […]
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Writing & Resting
One of the main challenges you face in the summer is juggling writing and rest. The first step is to resist the urge to Write All The Things!. I’ve used a hiking metaphor to explain how your summer writing fits with the writing you do in the rest of the year to help you decide […]
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Why join the Studio in the summer?
You probably think of summer as the easiest time of year to focus on research and writing. You’ve probably been looking forward to it for months because of that. So why would you want to join the Studio? Some people who attend A Meeting With Your Writing regularly during the main part of the year, […]
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Planning in uncertain times
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Planning in Uncertain Times None of us are any good at predicting the future. On one level we are always planning for uncertainty. The level of uncertainty varies though and has been very high for the past year or so, both generally and in relation to your academic work […]
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Introducing: the Academic Writing Studio
The Beginning When I started A Meeting With Your Writing back in September 2011, I didn’t even know if it would work. All I knew was that virtual accountability and community was needed, and that I was prepared to facilitate something that might help. Now, it feels central to everything I do. Participants have told […]
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Starting your academic writing year in mid-summer
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Starting your academic year in mid-summer When do academics celebrate the new year? This is a serious question for those of us who live in the northern hemisphere, where the beginning of the calendar year in January is more like the middle of the academic year. It seems like […]
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Motivation and accomplishment in your writing practice
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Motivation & accomplishment in your writing practice Given how hard it is for most academics to find time to work on their writing, and how difficult it is to know how long some stages of the process will take, I advocate establishing a regular writing practice and trusting that […]
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Juggling, jigsaws, and navigating by the stars: making reasonable plans
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Juggling, jigsaws, and navigating by the stars I’ve written before about juggling as a metaphor for planning out your workload. Consider all of the things you want and need to do, at work and outside of work, as the box of things a juggler could be juggling. Identify […]
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Dealing with the loss of a physical boundary between work and home
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Dealing with the loss of a physical boundary between work and home The pandemic has made us all hyper-aware of how much of what we’d come to tolerate as “just how things are” is actually deeply unacceptable. The pandemic has not created an impossible to resolve conflict between your […]
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You are not broken. You don’t need fixing.
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · You are not broken. You don’t need fixing. One of the comments I got from my editor when working on the Short Guides was “What do you want them to do with this information?” She was really not happy with a prompt that asked the reader to notice something […]
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Transitioning to summer
Note: I wrote this just before the pandemic situation started to impact academic workloads in the UK, US, and Canada. I am re-publishing it now as a reminder that things would already have been in transition at this time of year. For more on the specific impacts of the pandemic response on academic life… …head […]
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Thoughts on academic freedom, scholarly publishing, and mundane practices
This post is something I initially wrote for my newsletter. I had come across something that I wanted to write about even though I didn’t have a neat conclusion or lesson. I value freedom and autonomy. I know freedom and autonomy are important factors for many people who choose an academic career. I also value […]
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