How is your schedule?
If you are like the rest of the people I know, you either:
Feeling pushed to the max is the number one response I get nowadays when I ask someone about where they are with their writing and work.
Use spiritual principles or practices in your important academic project. “What!” you cry, “Academics and religion/spirituality don’t mix, like ice cream and boiled kidney!”
But . . . as you wrestle with your Major Work, do you crave less anxiety, more confidence, better work flow, even real answers to all those knotty quandaries?
Meditation and mindfulness can help. In my academic coaching practice, I’ve found, to my surprise, that many graduate students in their dissertations and professors in their articles use spiritual methods to help them through the Purgatory of academic writing. And I encourage them, primarily in two ways—meditation and mindfulness.
TAA member Julie Reeder coauthored an article published in the SAGE journal Autism (2022). The article, entitled, “Mobile and online consumer tools to screen for autism do not promote equity”, found that autism screening tools are available, but they are not easily found. Barriers include inaccessibility to parents with limited literacy or limited English proficiency, and frequent encounters with games, advertisements, and user fees.
I was intrigued years ago, when I first saw the cell phone feature that replied to a text that I was driving. I wondered where my life feature was “no emails, no phone notifications, no meetings: I am writing.”
While we are masters of where we focus our attention, small housekeeping habits may help our writing, and in fact help us.
The best insurance policy for success in academe is to write (and publish) your work. Yet, you say, where or where do I find the time to write, especially with all the feedback and grading I have to do?
This article is the first in a four-part series focused on finding hidden pockets of time for your own writing. This article will reflect on one aspect of your teaching practice: the assignments you have students complete.
What happens when you hand out your syllabus in that first face-to-face class? The students breeze past your well-crafted course description, clearly written objectives, and inspiring teaching philosophy to one place in the syllabus—the assignments.
In academic writing, abstracts are the most powerful aspect of a manuscript, says Erin McTigue, a writing coach with The Positive Academic. “Realistically, to extract key findings, busy researchers may read only the abstract, and for those who proceed onward, the abstract provides an advance organizer framing their comprehension,” she says.
Abstracts need to be clear, and they need to have well-structured sentences, says Wendy Kamman Zimmer, an assistant professor at Texas A&M University. They should include concrete examples, words, and ideas, active voice, and human elements, she says: “Arguably, abstracts that are stronger have a contestable thesis or a very strong argument, something that you can touch; something that’s tangible.”
