Learn the power of Microsoft OneNote 2013, an unsung hero of Microsoft Office that can be used to organize your thoughts, ideas and projects in one place, accessible whenever and wherever you need them. Join us Thursday, March 10 from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. ET for the TAA webinar, “Get Organized With ‘OneNote”, for an overview of OneNote 2013, its features, and the ways to access and edit your OneNote notebooks from a PC to web browser, or mobile device. Register
The most useful textbook & academic writing posts of the week: February 19, 2016
What sorts of strategies do you use to catapult you into your day’s writing? Do you do as Jerry Jenkins does and start the day with “a heavy edit and rewrite” of the “previous day’s work”? Maybe you do as Rachel Toor suggests: “leave off at a point where it will be easy to start again.” Rachel adds: “Some writers quit a session in the middle of a sentence; it’s always easier to continue than to begin.” Various other writers suggest using bullet points at the end of a writing session that point them in the direction they want the writing to go when they next return to it. Perhaps you have a completely different method altogether. If you do, I hope you will share it in the comments below this post. Happy writing!
5 Key principles to building clear text transitions
A common weakness in novice academic writing is a lack of flow; for readers, this lack of flow means they can’t easily see how one thought follows from another. To combat this problem, we need to learn how to make effective transitions between sentences. Such transitions are usually managed in one of two ways: through transition words or through evident links in the text. Both strategies have a role to play, but novice writers, unfortunately, often see transition words as their main way of moving from sentence to sentence.
Work-for-hire or transfer of copyright? Understanding your rights
In the publishing world, the concepts of “work-for-hire” and “transfer of copyright” can be challenging to navigate. Authors are often confronted in the publishing agreements by language that is vague and complicated, such as: “The work will be a work-made-for-hire as defined by the Copyright Act, but, if the work is deemed not a work-for-hire, author hereby irrevocably transfers all right, title and interest in the work to the publisher for the entire term of copyright throughout the world.”
The most useful textbook & academic writing posts of the week: February 12, 2016
Violets are blue
‘Revise and Resubmit’
Roses are a prickly bush or shrub
Violets are a herbaceous plant
Watch for more #AcademicValentines on Twitter throughout the weekend—you don’t even need a Twitter account to see all of the hilarious tweets!
Happy writing!
TAA President: Publishing consolidation has consequences
Many trends are affecting the academic and textbook publishing industries. TAA regularly examines and reflects on these trends in its newsletter, during its annual conference, and in webinars and other communications with TAA members. One of the trends currently affecting the industry is consolidation, as corporations purchase academic and textbook publishing companies and consolidate them under large corporate umbrellas. A recent Chronicle of Higher Education article discussed an example of this trend. Informa, a corporation that owns the huge scholarly publishing company Taylor & Francis, bought Ashgate Publishing last summer. By November, Informa had closed Ashgate’s U.S. office and laid off several Ashgate staff, according to a petition at Change.org. The Chronicle article noted that Informa “has become the latest adversary for academics worried about consolidation in academic publishing.”