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writing

Are you waiting for permission?

Posted on February 8, 2011 by Jo VanEvery 1 Comment

One of the attractions of an academic career is the autonomy it affords. That means no one is going to give you permission. Or, perhaps more accurately, they already have.

Trusting your judgement is hard. You risk criticism. Disapproval. Perhaps even attack. Even though criticism is an inevitable part of academic life, many academics struggle with it.

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A trailing plant is in focus in the foreground with a laptop open on a multi-screen live group call with people on a laptop in the background.

A class provides structure

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Jo VanEvery 1 Comment

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 […]

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Writing essays is not a generic skill

Posted on December 9, 2010 by Jo VanEvery 3 Comments

Chris Atherton‘s most recent blog post makes a great contribution to debates about assessment, and essay writing in particular. Getting Students to Build Things Out of Concrete (Examples, that is) Go read it and come back. This post started as a comment that got out of hand. I’ll wait. Tum te dum te dum. Hi, […]

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I don’t like the term “unconference”

Posted on November 11, 2010 by Jo VanEvery 1 Comment

Call me an unreformed social constructionist but I think language has power. Calling these really cool new types of conferences things like “unconferences” “camps” and whatever just cedes the definition of “conference” to people whose primary goal seems to be to bore us to death. What is the purpose of the conference? There is plenty […]

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Who do you want to reach? An example

Posted on May 17, 2010 by Jo VanEvery 2 Comments

As I’ve argued in previous posts, publishing is all about reaching the people who can benefit from your ideas. For most academics, some of the people you want to reach are other academics. And the primary way you are going to reach them is through publishing in refereed journals. For too many of us, publishing […]

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It’s fine to only want to reach other academics

Posted on May 6, 2010 by Jo VanEvery 1 Comment

I know Knowledge Mobilization, Relevance, Knowledge Transfer and all that are hot topics right now. And if you are doing work that has immediate relevance to particular non-academic audiences, you really need to work out the best way to reach those audiences. Which is one reason that I wrote that earlier post. But that doesn’t […]

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Figure out who you want to reach

Posted on April 29, 2010 by Jo VanEvery 3 Comments

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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More on writing

Posted on March 23, 2010 by Jo VanEvery Leave a Comment

In my last post, Rebecca Leigh talked about the physical way you write — pen and paper vs. computer. Her main point was that we should do it the way it works for us and not get all worried about how we should do it. There is another big should in the writing world, especially […]

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Give Yourself Permission

Posted on March 22, 2010 by Jo VanEvery 1 Comment

I’ve subscribed to smart fresh updates from my friend and business writer Rebecca Leigh. The other day, I got this great story in my inbox. I immediately thought of you. Because writing is that thing you want to do but struggle with. And what Rebecca wrote was so inspiring and powerful. So, I asked Rebecca […]

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Impact, Interdisicplinarity, and Publication Strategies

Posted on February 11, 2010 by Jo VanEvery Leave a Comment

In May 2009 I did a talk in the Career Corner at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. The nice people from University Affairs videoed it and have now posted the video, nicely edited into short chunks, on their website. I thought you might like to see me in action. This section is […]

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Finishing the Dissertation

Posted on July 23, 2009 by Jo VanEvery 1 Comment

If you are still working on your PhD dissertation, or if you supervise doctoral students, this post is for you. As you may be aware completion times in the humanities and social sciences are long. Much longer than for other disciplines. And humanities disciplines tend to be longer than social sciences. This seems to be have […]

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