TAA’s 32nd Annual Conference session spotlight: Revising your manuscript at the macro & micro levels

Erin McTigue, academic writing coach and workshop presenter, will present “Efficiency with Style: Revising Your Manuscript at the Macro & Micro Levels” at TAA’s 32nd Annual Textbook & Academic Authoring Conference. The conference will be held in Old City, Philadelphia, June 14-15, 2019.

McTigue, who after achieving tenured professor at Texas A&M University moved on to start her own business focused on mentoring and coaching academics in writing and productivity, will conduct an interactive session where participants will take a messy draft of their choice and apply 3 macro-level revision strategies to hone overall logic and organization of the manuscript. Next, working at the micro-level, McTigue will walk participants through 3 revision tools for coherence and writing style. Participants will leave with both a sequential approach and individual tools for transforming their future drafts with efficiency. 

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Reflections on negotiating a contract 2: Myriad details

In this, the second of my posts on the contract and negotiation process, I consider the wide variety of issues that came up as I read my contract. Not being a lawyer, contracts always seem long and intimidating to me.

As I said in my previous post, my contract was some 13 pages long, and like most legal documents, very detailed. It was not something I would like to handle from a place of ignorance, but it was also not something that I thought required hiring a lawyer to help me.

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New year welcomes thousands of copyrighted works into the public domain

This year marks the first in two decades that a significant body of copyrighted work has lost its U.S. copyright protection and fallen into the public domain. Why is that…and what does it mean for scholars and educators?

Prior to 1978, the term of copyright protection for a work in the United States was measured from its date of first publication in the U.S. Under the first U.S. copyright act in 1790, U.S. works enjoyed an initial term of 14 years of protection, with an optional second term of another 14 years.

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Learning As I Go: Running Into Happiness

By Angelica Ribeiro, Ph.D. When I was a PhD student, I found that my academic commitments were throwing off my work life balance, and I wanted to do something about it. My answer, as funny as this sounds, was to add another writing project to my workload, but this was a personal writing project. I wrote and published a book, Running into Happiness, during my busy life as a PhD student!

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Top 10 reasons to attend TAA’s June conference

There are a lot of great reasons to attend TAA’s 32nd Annual Textbook & Academic Authoring Conference. Past attendees consistently give TAA conferences high marks for content, networking, and inspiration:

“What a great conference! I came away inspired to write many more articles, book chapters and books. The conference gave the tools to accomplish that. It was a great friendly mix of authors at all stages of writing willing to share, mentor and interact.” ~ Betsy Stringam, Professor, New Mexico State University

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Reflections on negotiating a contract 1: Leverage and the power to negotiate

When I wrote my last series of posts, I was waiting to hear whether a publisher would offer me a contract for my book for graduate students. The publisher—Routledge—did make an offer, marking the pleasant culmination of the 10+ month proposal process, and I could begin to look forward to publication, most likely in 2020 of my book titled Literature Review and Research Design: A Guide to Effective Research Practice. Getting the offer was a great milestone, but it didn’t put an end to the larger process of getting published. The next phase began with the question of whether to accept the offered contract and whether and how to negotiate for changes. As with my previous series of posts, I offer the reflections of a relative novice, not the advice of an expert.

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