TAA Member Phil Wankat, who joined TAA in 1989, pored over his archival issues of the TAA Report (now The Academic Author), selected articles that have information that is still valid today, and included commentary on each. We will be adding these articles to the web page, “Articles from TAA Report Archives (now The Academic Author) with Commentary,” over the next few months. The articles are organized into 10 categories, including Authors Needed, Cartoons, Contracts, Ethics, Money, Production, Recognition and Rewards, Software, Textbooks as Scholarship, and Writer’s Block. The first installment is Authors Needed.
The Psychology Behind Writing: Tap into Your Natural Personality to Assist Your Academic Writing Process (Part 2)
Hello fellow TAA members, thank you for reading this second post of “The Psychology Behind Writing.” With monthly offerings, we’ll get into some of the psychological processes that support our academic writing as well as the ones that derail our writing. And, we will definitely explore strategies for amplifying the positive and mitigating the negative.
As many of you might know, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is structured with 4 personality scales, each with two “opposite” preferences that rest on a continuum of intensity for that personality scale. The key to remember here is that we all have all 8 preferences available to us (4 scales x 2 preferences), but we tend to have a natural preference for inhabiting one side over the other. One side tends to come more instinctively, we don’t have to think about it as hard, we can be on auto-pilot, we are more practiced with it, and we probably don’t have much anxiety around using it.
Consider Creating a ‘Commonplace Book’ to Inspire, Remind, and Refresh You and Your Writing
A Commonplace Book is a way to compile knowledge important to you. It can become a valued snapshot of you and your interests as you grow in your life and career. I was keeping a Commonplace Book for decades and didn’t realize I was doing it!
Commonplace Books might include quotations, connections to important literature or sources, meaningful articles, key data, journals (personal or professional), your curriculum vitae, and any other centralized information. They are often informal and may sit on your desktop, in the cloud, in your notes program, or maybe even in your In Box.
New TAA Workshop Presenter: Vernetta Mosely, PhD
TAA welcomes new Workshop present Vernetta K. Mosely, PhD, a Writing Coach, Editor and Consultant with Cultivate the Writer.
Vernetta offers four 90-minute workshops:
Busy TAA People: TAA Member Margarita Huerta’s Work Reaches the 1,000 Mark for Citations
TAA member Margarita Huerta, PhD, writer and Founder of Real Academics, reached the 1,000 mark for citations on her Google Scholar profile on August 25, 2023.
Her top three most cited articles (out of 20 articles tracked by Google) include:
- “Graduate students as academic writers: writing anxiety, self-efficacy and emotional intelligence” (2017), M Huerta, P Goodson, M Beigi, D Chlup, Higher Education Research & Development, 36 (4), 716-729. (205 citations)
- “The effect of an instructional intervention on middle school English learners’ science and English reading achievement” (2012), R Lara‐Alecio, F Tong, BJ Irby, C Guerrero, M Huerta, Y Fan, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 49 (8), 987-1011. (184 citations)
- “Connecting literacy and science to increase achievement for English language learners” (2010), M Huerta, J Jackson, Early Childhood Education Journal, 38, 205-211. (62 citations)
Don’t Kill Your Chances With a Publisher By Making This Mistake
Kevin Adams, a research engineer at Vanderbilt University and author of over 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings and three books, including Systemic Decision Making: Fundamentals for Addressing Problems and Messes (with Dr. Patrick Hester), which won 2018 TAA Most Promising New Textbook Award, shares his insight into what can kill your chances with a publisher:
“Technical writing in the engineering field often suffers from insufficient clarity and supporting references, issues that significantly reduce the validity of the author’s notions. Having sufficient and properly cited references improves the reliability of the author’s thesis and gives the reader sources for further investigation. The use of quotation marks and page numbers for direct quotations provide context rich information and reinforce the author’s points in the paper. Properly cited references from scholarly sources that use the modern digital object identifier (doi) ensure that readers can locate and access the reference cited. Peer reviewed scholarly sources prove to be the best cited sources as they have both high reliability and validity.”