When it comes to academia, the quality of your writing has a lot riding on it. Whether you are in university or are employed as a teacher and/or researcher, the work you produce can make or break your academic career.
Strong writing (and empirical content, of course) is a major factor in whether a paper you write will be published in a reputable journal. So before you begin drafting your next article, consider these 9 ways to improve your academic writing.
Why does it seem like there’s never enough time to write? One of the key challenges of academic life is balancing the many demands on our time; while writing is generally key to professional success, finding time to write is consistently challenging. Most academics realize that they need to protect their writing time but still struggle to do so. Rather than seeing not-writing as a simple failure, it can be helpful to see it as a reflection of the inherent difficulties of writing and time management.
Join us Friday, November 18 from 12-1 p.m. ET for the TAA webinar, “Becoming a Productive Writer: Strategies for Success,” where presenter Rachael Cayley, who blogs at Explorations of Style and tweets at @explorstyle, will discuss how and why academic writing is so hard and look at some strategies for establishing a productive writing practice.
It’s hard enough to start, much less continue, our writing, scholarly or otherwise. When we ask ourselves some important questions and act on the answers, we can more easily sneak up on the current project and get started.
The questions and answers are completely between us and us, and we have the best and only answers. Whatever other advice we’ve read or heard, however loudly others swear theirs is the only way, it’s our own answers that matter.
For my own writing and that of the dissertation- and article-producing clients I coach, I’ve found the following questions are the most crucial and tell us what we need to know about our working preferences. Answer the questions below and others that may arise to diagnose your perfect work environment.
For many of us, conducting an interview is easier than being interviewed. But when promoting a book, or even making a career move, you may be the interviewee. What does it take to deliver a “good” interview? How do you build a relationship with your interviewer? How do you prepare? What are the different ways to handle an in-person, an audio-only interview, and one that takes place on camera? How do you turn a bad question into a good answer? For on-camera interviews, what are the special considerations for attire that works on video?
Join us Friday, October 14, 11 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET, for the TAA Webinar, “The Art of Being Interviewed”, led by Amy DeLouise, an experienced interviewer and video producer-director who has conducted thousands of interviews. She will walk us through the process, field questions, and help you feel confident for your next interview.
TAA’s 30th Annual Textbook & Academic Authoring Conference session proposals deadline is October 6, 2016. TAA invites the submission of presentations relevant to authoring and publishing textbooks and academic works (journal articles, academic books, and monographs).
The conference will be held at the Renaissance Providence Downtown Hotel, Providence, RI, June 9-10, 2017. The conference will be attended by authors and aspiring authors of textbooks, journal articles, and other academic works, as well as by industry professionals from across the country.
The obsession with work seems embedded not only into our current civilization but also into academic pursuits. We are all focused, dedicated, committed, even driven in our scholarly work. We live, breathe, almost eat our work, or always eat while we work.
