Want to submit that article you’ve been working on for years?
In my work with Academic Coaching & Writing, I’ve worked with many authors who have done substantial research toward a journal article but haven’t quite been able to put it all together and get it out the door. This delay often stems, at least in part, from a nagging fear that their piece may be rejected. To greatly improve your article’s chance of successful publication, consider taking these five steps. [Read more…]
I am a big, big fan of protecting time in your schedule. I live and die by my Google calendar, because I can always access it, but on that calendar, you’ll find more than appointments.
There are two kinds of scheduling – appointment and defensive. Appointment scheduling is pretty self-explanatory – you have somewhere to be at a certain time, and so you put it in your calendar. These are the kinds of things that people usually use their calendar/schedule/planner for, and of course, it’s useful. It gets you to where you need to be when you need to be there!
But defensive scheduling is a little different. It’s about protecting time, rather than filling it up. You put something on your calendar so you WON’T give that time away to someone/something else. You claim your time before someone else does. [Read more…]
“What did I do today!” you wail. For the life of you, wiped out at the end of the day and ready for binge TV, you can’t remember anything you did except overeat for lunch. Maybe you recall writing for eight minutes midmorning and half-heartedly pecking at your journal article in progress, but otherwise the day’s a blank. And paradoxically, you feel you’re always so busy, dashing from one thing to the next and never getting it all done.
Sound familiar? Where does the time go? Especially for academic writers, with the responsibilities of teaching, mandatory committee meetings, office hours, reading endless memos, emailing responses, and comforting a colleague who just got her article rejected—again—it’s an ongoing challenge to take hold and wrestle our writing time to the ground, or desk.
I found a remedy, though, that you may have read about: keep a time log. [Read more…]
Early registration for TAA’s June Conference ends April 15. All rates increase by $50 after that date. Join us in Old City, Philadelphia, June 14-15 and prepare to be inspired!
TAA’s conference program features three writing tracks:
Academic Writing Track: Learn tips on how to plan your writing projects for maximum productivity; create writing that is clearer, better organized, and more compelling; revise at the macro and micro levels with efficiency; safeguard your scholarship; get started with conducting and writing systematic reviews; use qualitative coding to enrich data analysis; collaborate more effectively; and more. [Read more…]
Veteran authors Dannelle Stevens, Micki Caskey, and Julie Reeder of Portland State University, and Tamara Bertrand Jones of Florida State University will present “From the Blank Page to the Published Journal Article: Let’s Practice Strategies to Ensure Success” at TAA’s 32nd Annual Textbook & Academic Authoring Conference. The conference will be held in Old City, Philadelphia, June 14-15, 2019.
This hands-on presentation will focus on three key strategies designed to take you from the blank page to the published piece. From these four accomplished faculty, three of whom are journal editors, session participants will learn how to identify the most compatible journal for their work, carefully structure articles to meet expectations, and respond appropriately to feedback from journal editors. [Read more…]
TAA’s 32nd Annual Textbook & Academic Authoring Conference speaker and mentor panels will feature several publishing industry professionals with expertise on topics such as intellectual property, copyright, publishing contracts, and royalties. The conference will be held in Old City, Philadelphia, June 14-15, 2019.
Intellectual property attorney Brenda Ulrich, a partner at Archstone Law Group PC, will kick off the conference with a session titled “Legal Issues for Independent Contractor Authors and Self-Publishers.” This session will explore legal issues in the “post-traditional publishing contract world.” [Read more…]
Do you juggle multiple teaching, scholarship and service projects and worry about ‘dropping the ball’? Do you wish you had one place to easily organize your life as an academic? Then Trello might be for you. Join us Monday, March 25 from 1-2 p.m. ET for the TAA webinar, How Trello Can Transform Your Life as an Academic, where Angelique M. Davis and Rose Ernst, both associate professors of political science at Seattle University, will provide an overview of the magic and logic of Trello. They will show you how to use it to masterfully manage multiple projects in one place—without having to switch between paper and multiple digital programs! They will also show you how to use Trello to move your scholarly projects forward. This will include a demonstration and template of a Trello board based on Erin Furtak’s publishing pipeline. You will leave this webinar with a plan to set up your Trello account so you can become a master juggler and calmly manage your academic life. [Read more…]
I am the worst at hiding in my office and working over lunch. Yes, we all have lots of work to do and not enough hours in the day to get it done. Why should 2019 be any exception? I should spend more time out of my office. Some would call it socializing, some would call it networking. Whatever you call it, getting out has got to be better for me than staring out the window (I know, at least I have a window).
With you as my witnesses, I have decided to get out regularly and have lunch or coffee with someone in my workplace. We all have to eat or caffeinate, right? There are over 1,400 employees where I work and I know at least a 10% of them, so it shouldn’t be too hard. Would it kill me if once every so often I had lunch with a colleague instead of never? There might actually be some benefits. [Read more…]
Faculty enjoy a break during the winter 2019 Writers Retreat and workshop hosted by William & Mary Libraries.
University librarians offer a wide range of services to faculty and students to support their research and scholarly writing projects. Many of these services are used widely by faculty on campuses across the country, while other services may be little known and little used. As dean of libraries at William and Mary, I make it a priority to work with library staff and faculty to identify needs, develop useful services, and then communicate their availability to faculty. Here I highlight a few of our library services and suggest how faculty at other institutions can work with their university librarians to access services and support. [Read more…]
We all have trouble getting to the desk. Loads of articles, blogs, chapters, and seminars by writers for writers advise how to get to it, stay at it, and finish the damn thing. And some of them help, like Schumann’s (2019) dictum to do fifteen minutes a day or the pomodoro method (Cirillo, 2018) of twenty-five minutes on, five off. Schumann and others also counsel that inspiration is a cheat. If you believe you must wait to write until the right mood strikes, you’ll never get much done. Many writers nevertheless persist in this myth, supporting it with impressive rationales.
Some blame external circumstances: [Read more…]
12 Ways to use creativity to separate your book project from the competition
By spending time up front using creat… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
