If you’re writing your dissertation, you’ve probably experienced the all too common range of emotions, from initial elation to paralyzing fear to plunging despair, and in between many starts, stops, and freezes. Here I suggest how you can at least cut down on those maddening swings and coax, invite, and entice the Flow.
Most useful textbook and academic posts of the week: May 28, 2021
Do you ever feel like your writing needs a change of perspective? Do you feel as though your creativity has run short or that you see your own bias in your writing rather than the true results of your research? According to Sydney J. Harris, “The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.”
Taxes and authors: What you should know in 2021
In his TAA webinar presentation, “Taxes & Authors: What You Should Know in 2021“, Robert Pesce, a partner with Marcum LLP, provided guidance on when it is beneficial for authors to form a business entity, strategies for managing business income and expenses, and how the qualified business income deduction (QBI) applies to authors.
As soon as your authoring efforts produce income in excess of $400, you are officially running a business – whether you define a business entity or not. According to Pesce, any income in excess of $400 must be reported on a Schedule C filed with your tax return and is subject to self-employment tax.
Most useful textbook and academic posts of the week: May 21, 2021
Abraham Maslow once said, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” In this time of change in academia, catalyst by the past year of adaptations to learning processes as a result of the pandemic, there have been a multitude of problems and challenges. If there is a positive to the situation, however, it is that such problems have invoked creative responses and new tools shaping our future efforts.
In this week’s collection of posts from around the web, we see some new ideas for the future of our academic writing efforts.
Using IMRaD to organize article content
In his presentation “Why Your Journal Articles Are Confusing, and How IMRaD Can Help”, Thomas Deetjen, author of Published, offered advice for tightening your articles’ structure around the IMRaD format as a method for getting jumbled thoughts into words that your readers will understand.
Deetjen says, “If you know where things are supposed to go, then you can write your article that way in the first place, and you can edit your articles in a way that will move information around into the correct places.” He advises, quite simply, to put information where readers expect to see it.
When to consider authoring as a work for hire
Work made for hire is writing that is done as part of a person’s job or as an independent contractor who signs an advance written agreement that the work is “work for hire” or “work made for hire.” Authors of a work made for hire have fewer rights than authors who sign a copyright transfer agreement. In effect, the organization that hires the author owns the work. That organization can, within the constraints of the agreement, do whatever they want with the work including adding drastic changes or deciding to not publish it. If the work made for hire is done as part of the author’s regular job, the author will not receive royalties unless a written agreement assigns royalties to the author.