This is an excerpt from Finding Time for your Scholarly Writing (A Short Guide) which was published in late March 2018. The research day is a full day each week kept clear of teaching and meetings. The advantage of this way of thinking is that it makes a clear temporal boundary between different responsibilities and […]
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Making writing challenges like #AcWriMo work for you
I am writing this part way through November 2017. A few years ago Charlotte Frost and her team at PhDtoPublished got the bright idea to make an academic version of #NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and call it #AcWriMo. PhDtoPublished is geared to early career researchers and particularly those still in the late stages of […]
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Accountability vs Community
I’ve been reading Rowena Murray‘s Writing in Social Spaces, and it has helped me articulate something that underpins a lot of my work. Community is important to your ability to do this work. This got long, if what you really want are suggestions for creating writing community, jump here. When I talk about A Meeting […]
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Using all 3 types of writing time
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Using all 3 types of writing time Finding and protecting time for writing, especially during the parts of the year when you are teaching, is difficult. It may be helpful to consider the different kinds of time available. Writing, as far as I’m concerned, encompasses anything that moves your […]
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Maintaining your writing practice when things get busy
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Maintaining Your Writing Practice When Things Get Busy Although significant parts of your work during the main part of the academic year are scheduled weekly or relate to things scheduled weekly, your workload is not as consistent as your teaching schedule might suggest. There are periods of more intense […]
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Pressure vs Ease
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 […]
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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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You need a writing practice
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · You Need A Writing Practice Writing is central to your scholarly work and identity. And yet, you struggle to find time and motivation to do it. I argue that it is more effective to focus on the process of writing as a whole and establish an effective writing practice that enables […]
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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 a view to getting some of them finished. You don’t need to […]
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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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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 […]
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