12 Strategies for writing group success

Writing groups provide an opportunity for faculty authors to connect with their peers, create a sense of community, and find collaborators for joint projects. By meeting regularly as a group, author members can provide one another with peer support and accountability while sharing advice that can help improve writing skills and lead to greater publication success.

Providing valuable resources and grant funding, TAA’s Chapter Program offers an excellent foundation for establishing a successful faculty authoring community. Following are twelve TAA Chapter Program strategies designed to increase the power and success of chapter writing groups.

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Journal author and editor offer advice for writing articles for scientific journals

Writing journal articles can be demanding for an academic writer in any field, but authors seeking to publish their work in scientific journals face unique challenges.

Elaine Hull, a prolific writer in the fields of psychology and neuroscience, and Ushma Neill, an editor for The Journal of Clinical Investigation, offer the following advice for science writers:

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Learning as we go: Establishing a writing community

In 2011 Pat Mason and I set out to establish a TAA chapter writing community at Molloy College. Making the time to come together during a semester to share our work is an awesome task for many of us, but we try to make it interesting for our colleagues by providing writing sessions, newly published books, and refreshments. In addition, we have adopted various useful mottoes—the best being “Less surfing and more writing!”

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E-Yikes! The challenges of publishing in e-journals

There’s much to be said for e-journals. They save trees. Vast collections can be saved on a hard or flash drive, or on our newest shelf, the Cloud. Any of them can be read on an iPad or Kindle or a computer screen. Shipping costs are nil. Searching is incredibly easy. Entire libraries are accessible on line. An individual article can be purchased without a year’s subscription.

But e-journals have a couple of serious downsides: cost of publication and access, and journal issue preservation.

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Completing a major textbook revision: The after-the-fact outline

The after-the-fact outline provides a valuable strategy to help complete a major book or article revision. Sometimes referred to as a reverse outline, I learned of this strategy from Tara Gray, author of the book Publish and Flourish. I have tried most of the advice in her book, and now that I have tried this piece of advice, I had to ask myself: “Why did I wait so long?”

The first thing to point out is that this strategy is not a writing strategy, but a revising strategy. This strategy works best when you have a draft of your article (or a portion of your article) and are ready to rewrite it. It is best if your draft is rough, as you need to feel comfortable with the idea of deleting and/or rearranging large portions of it.

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