Academese: Are You Narrowing Your Audience By Not Speaking Their Language?

By Sierra Pawlak

During TAA’s May 2024 Conversation Circle, several members shared their experiences with ‘academese’ and tips for how academic writers can avoid it in their writing. Academese is characterized by writing that is heavily filled with jargon, overcomplicated language, and/or convoluted sentence structure (Wikipedia).

“The biggest sin in academic writing is the passive voice,” said Barbara Nostrand, an Aquisitions Editor at Gakumon and Senior Fellow at the de Moivre Institute. “It makes it much more difficult for the reader to understand what’s been written, and it’s completely unnecessary.” She recommends using the active voice instead, for example, ‘I saw’, ‘I observed’: “A trick to doing that is to move the verb as close to the beginning of the sentence as possible.”

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Daphne C. Watkins Receives Pynn-Silverman Lifetime Achievement Award From TAA

Daphne C. Watkins, a Professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan, has been awarded the Pynn-Silverman Lifetime Achievement Award from the Textbook & Academic Authors Association (TAA). The award was established to honor individuals whose achievements over a career of devoted effort and service demonstrate the highest degree of commitment to excellence in authoring works to advance their discipline; encourage, enlighten and support the work of colleagues; and educate students in the field. The award is named for Ron Pynn and Franklin Silverman, two charter members of TAA who pursued and modeled these qualities in their own work.

“I am deeply honored to have been selected for this award,” said Watkins. “Thank you!”

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TAA Featured in Episode of The A&P Professor Podcast

TAA was featured in an episode of The A&P Professor podcast on April 12, “Pulse of Progress, Looking Back, Moving Forward,” with host Kevin Patton, an award-winning anatomy and physiology textbook author. Kevin’s comments about the benefits of TAA membership and invitation to attend TAA’s 2024 Conference on Textbook & Academic Authoring come in at 50:22.

In the episode, Kevin says: “With a strongly supportive network of colleagues, TAA provides many resources and active, engaging opportunities for growth and network-forming. TAA meets the needs of those interested in creating textbooks, lab manuals, workbooks, and other learning resources, as well as those who focus on academic writing, such as journal articles, dissertations/theses, monographs, and scholarly or other nonfiction works.”

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How a Writing Accountability Partner Can Positively Impact You

By Angelica Ribeiro, PhD

Do you have a writing accountability partner? If not, you should consider having one. A writing partner can help you more than simply holding you accountable for your writing. Here’s what they can also do.

According to Shawn Achor, author of Big Potential, not only are social connections the best predictor of happiness, but they are also one of the greatest predictors of success. One reason for that is the fact that social support can positively impact your perception of challenges.

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Be Good to Yourself

By John Bond

We have all read the stories about mental health over the past few years, particularly in the wake of COVID (not that it is gone). Whether articles about depression, anxiety, loneliness, or other challenges, mental health has been elevated in our national discourse. Thankfully.

All of that being said, mental health can have an effect on your writing, in both directions. Lack of progress, a false start, a problematic co-author, or movement in the wrong direction can hit a writer hard. It can cause one to question the work they are doing, or just stop.

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