Holiday strategies to honor your all-important academic project

The holidays can be wonderful times for reconnecting with family and friends, taking breathers from the daily-weekly-yearly chase of accomplishment, kindling or rekindling feelings of love, warmth, and generosity even to those who have published much more than you, and indulging in delectable seasonal goodies. But we academics often feel conflicted about how much time to “take off.” Maybe we’re feeling the pressure of having to participate in holiday events. Maybe we’re worried about being grilled by well-intentioned family or friends about the progress of our dissertation, article, or book. Maybe we’re very aware of the dangerous loss of momentum from our work. Maybe we just don’t like all those jolly gatherings.

Here, from clients who have suffered through such “maybes,” I suggest three holiday strategies you can apply, depending on the severity of your “maybes” and your fortitude. We don’t have to be at the mercy of the holidays!

Holiday strategies to honor your all-important academic project Read More

How to build effective collaboration

As a graduate student or early career academic you likely have a packed schedule. Trying to get published can be a daunting task, especially when you feel you have to do it alone. But maybe you don’t have to. If you can find the right person or persons to collaborate with, say doctoral students Tracey S. Hodges and Katherine Landau Wright, you are less likely to be stressed, and more likely to be productive and on the path to publishing success. Hodges and Wright share the following advice for effective collaboration:

How to build effective collaboration Read More

10 Ways to tease out your perfect dissertation topic

If you’re beginning or in the throes of your dissertation, you may know from other long-suffering students that the work engenders a love-hate relationship, with all the exasperations, frustrations, teeth-clenching, and eye-rolling, and occasional affection, elation, and fulfillment (eventually) of a primary human relationship. Therefore, your topic, like your partner, should be one that initially excites you and sustains you throughout the inevitable rages and reconciliations, desires to divorce yourself from it or run back to its scholarly arms, and finally settle into a consistent satisfying relationship.

10 Ways to tease out your perfect dissertation topic Read More

Make your dissertation your priority

As you undoubtedly already know, writing a dissertation is different from anything you’ve ever done. This enterprise requires you to adjust, if not radically change, your lifestyle. If you ever really want to complete the dissertation, and in a timely manner (if that isn’t an oxymoron), you need to rethink your priorities.

Your a full-time job, of course, should be high on the priority list. You may have been used to putting family first. But rethink this priority. Heartless and psychologically suspect as this statement may sound, you can make it up to them in many other ways—later (that’s another article).

Make your dissertation your priority Read More

How to have a writing room of your own

My writing buddy’s face turned dark pink as she shouted over her latté. “No one can do anything worthwhile without a private writing place!” She thrust her face into mine. “It’s gotta be your own!”

I was as adamant. “Oh, come on. All you need is the desire and will and your stone tablet and sharp tool. It doesn’t matter where you write!”

Our little debate embodies two often-discussed viewpoints about writing. Despite my vehement response to my friend, I have long puzzled about the most effective place to write. If you too are in a quandary, or lament you have no writing spot to call your own, I’d like to help you enlarge your perceptions about your own physical and mental writing places, spaces, and times.

How to have a writing room of your own Read More

Be strict about the type of editing that is suitable for each stage of the revision process

Advice about academic writing often stresses the iterative nature of the writing process; the creation of an effective final draft generally requires multiple drafts and extensive revision. A crucial corollary to a commitment to extensive revision is an acceptance that revision mustn’t be allowed to go on indefinitely. Otherwise, a certain mania can set in: any draft can always be other than it is. After a certain point, we have to ask ourselves about diminishing returns and about the very real possibility of messing up what is already working.

Be strict about the type of editing that is suitable for each stage of the revision process Read More