2019 TAA Council elections – Cast your vote

Seven candidates are running for five open positions on the TAA Council, the association’s governing board. Three are officer positions, Vice President/President-Elect, Treasurer, Secretary; and two are Council positions. Terms begin July 1, 2019. Officers serve two-year terms and Council members serve three-year terms.

A link to the ballot was emailed to TAA members on March 8. To be eligible to vote, individuals must be members in good standing. If you are a TAA member and cannot vote electronically, contact Kim Pawlak at Kim.Pawlak@TAAonline.net or (608) 687-3106 to request a paper ballot. The deadline for voting is Monday, April 8, 2019. Winners will be announced April 19.

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Q&A: What types of services do university libraries offer to support faculty authors?

University librarians offer a wide range of services to faculty and students to support their research and scholarly writing projects. Many of these services are used widely by faculty on campuses across the country, while other services may be little known and little used. As dean of libraries at William and Mary, I make it a priority to work with library staff and faculty to identify needs, develop useful services, and then communicate their availability to faculty. Here I highlight a few of our library services and suggest how faculty at other institutions can work with their university librarians to access services and support.

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Most useful textbook and academic posts of the week: March 8, 2019

This week’s collection of posts from around the web includes practical advice from past experiences balanced with ideas to move us forward. We start with practical advice on mistakes to avoid when doing your PhD, what nobody tells you about ‘minor corrections’, strategies to manage work and enjoy life, and reviewing literature to situate it in a research tradition. We then share some articles with new ideas for mapping a text (beyond the traditional mind map or concept map), addressing global imbalances in scholarly communication, and training PhD graduates for jobs outside of academia.

Celeste Alexander once said, “I haven’t finished writing my book, but it’s on top of my list.” This week focus on that item on top of your list. What can you do to move closer to crossing it off? Happy writing!

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Should we succumb to ‘the mood’ to write?

We all have trouble getting to the desk. Loads of articles, blogs, chapters, and seminars by writers for writers advise how to get to it, stay at it, and finish the damn thing. And some of them help, like Schumann’s (2019) dictum to do fifteen minutes a day or the pomodoro method (Cirillo, 2018) of twenty-five minutes on, five off. Schumann and others also counsel that inspiration is a cheat. If you believe you must wait to write until the right mood strikes, you’ll never get much done. Many writers nevertheless persist in this myth, supporting it with impressive rationales. Some blame external circumstances:

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TAA’s 32nd Annual Conference session spotlight: Revising your manuscript at the macro & micro levels

Erin McTigue, academic writing coach and workshop presenter, will present “Efficiency with Style: Revising Your Manuscript at the Macro & Micro Levels” at TAA’s 32nd Annual Textbook & Academic Authoring Conference. The conference will be held in Old City, Philadelphia, June 14-15, 2019.

McTigue, who after achieving tenured professor at Texas A&M University moved on to start her own business focused on mentoring and coaching academics in writing and productivity, will conduct an interactive session where participants will take a messy draft of their choice and apply 3 macro-level revision strategies to hone overall logic and organization of the manuscript. Next, working at the micro-level, McTigue will walk participants through 3 revision tools for coherence and writing style. Participants will leave with both a sequential approach and individual tools for transforming their future drafts with efficiency. 

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Reflections on negotiating a contract 2: Myriad details

In this, the second of my posts on the contract and negotiation process, I consider the wide variety of issues that came up as I read my contract. Not being a lawyer, contracts always seem long and intimidating to me.

As I said in my previous post, my contract was some 13 pages long, and like most legal documents, very detailed. It was not something I would like to handle from a place of ignorance, but it was also not something that I thought required hiring a lawyer to help me.

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