Flex your writing muscles in the TAA Writing Gym! This 6-week work-out-on-your-own gym time will serve as your writing accountability partner as you work to achieve your writing goals. The gym is open to those writing textbooks, scholarly journal articles, and dissertations.
Here’s what previous Writing Gym participants have had to say:
“The writing gym was fantastic. It raised my commitment to writing productively.”
“I loved the opportunity to change my writing habits. Now I am feeling guilty if I don’t at least find 30 minutes to work on a project!”
The gym will be open 24/7 from July 20-August 29, 2020. Gym time includes:
- A TAA Writing Gym-branded writing journal
- Weekly inspirational emails
- Six on-demand writing classes
- Several writing stations that allow you to target specific writing areas
A participation certificate (view sample)
At the end of each week you’ll be asked to share your accomplishments for weekly prize drawings.
Members: $49
Non-Members: $99 (includes a one-year TAA membership)
The deadline for signing up is July 13. We hope you’ll join us!
In a statement issued on June 19, 2020 – Juneteenth – the Textbook & Academic Authors Association (TAA) Council has resolved to lead its members in establishing short term and long-term goals that affect positive change toward social equality in textbook and academic authoring as we move forward. 
Dillon is counseling faculty and a professor at Grossmont College. He curated, co-authored and edited three College Success textbooks including Blueprint for Success in College and Career (Rebus Community, 2018), which won a Textbook Excellence Award from TAA and the Open Textbook award from Open Education Global. 
In our final discussion of this series on distinguishing features of academic writing, we focused on accuracy. Specifically, we considered what it means to be accurate, how understanding and vocabulary affects accuracy, how to check for accuracy in sources we use, how accuracy affects the structure, style, and grammar of a manuscript, and why accuracy is important in academic writing. Below is a summary of the discussion. 
Did you know that over 1 billion works — including scholarly articles and a growing number of academic textbooks — have been licensed with a Creative Commons (CC) license? Though widely adopted, these continually-updated, legally-enforceable tools remain a mystery to academic writers. Many authors are unaware of the permissions afforded to them through the CC licenses, and many are unaware of permissions afforded to users when a specific CC license is applied to their work by an open-access publisher.
A good researcher is objectively seeking answers to their research questions and reporting those findings objectively to the community at large. But what does it mean to write objectively? How do we maintain objectivity where possible? Finally, how do we make efforts to identify and avoid bias in our academic writing?
