If you struggle with writing anxiety, I want to assure you that it is possible to learn to love writing. Such love is the foundation and motivation for a healthy practice. Saying that it’s important to love your work and calling it “a labor of love” might suggest that I’m getting distracted by woo-woo new-age goals, so I want to be clear that my goal is to help anxious writers write more productively, any emotional benefits are secondary. It just so happens, however, that people often manifest high-level performance because they love what they’re doing and consequently spend a lot of time and effort on it. I imagine that anyone in academia has met at least one scholar who did good work and was truly, genuinely excited by and interested in the ideas they were pursuing.
4/7 TAA Webinar – Beyond Productivity: How to Build a Joyful Writing Practice
Are you tired of feeling anxious, overwhelmed, or unconfident as a writer? Do you long to recover your love of inquiry and cultivate a joyful relationship with your writing?
Join us Thursday, April 7, 2022, 1-2 p.m. EST, “Beyond Productivity: How to Build a Joyful Writing Practice”, presented by Michelle Boyd of InkWell Academic Writing Retreats. In this one-hour webinar, she will explain why writing is so emotionally taxing, describe how scholars can use social writing to overcome their writing fears. By the end of the session, each scholar will better understand their own barriers and have a step-by-step plan for implementing their personalized social writing strategy.
Tough love for dissertation drafts
As a dissertation editor and coach, I have much empathy for beleaguered doctoral graduate students wrestling with their tomes. Many candidates seem to get little support from their chairs in guidance, writing, or cheering on. However, a student recently brought to my attention an impressive exception.
At this university, the doctoral students were advised to maintain associations and seek dissertation feedback from their cohort members with regular group meetings. In addition, this chair, unlike many others, held bimonthly meetings (probably uncompensated) with his struggling dissertation students.
Get academic writing into your bones
How do you get academic writing into your bones—and mind? If you’re an experienced professor, you may not need to immerse as much as your students do. In my dissertation editing and coaching practice, I’ve noticed that many student writers write like they speak—conversationally and colloquially.
If you’re a closet novelist, fine. Write like your characters speak. But academic writing is a breed unto itself, and not giving it the proper attention is the downfall of many a previously good student.
Feedback on student work: a sinkhole or an opportunity – Finding time to write
Students expect and need feedback on their work. The basic goal of feedback is to enhance student learning. An anomaly of feedback is that more is not necessarily better. Research tells us that students may not even read your copious feedback (sigh) and may not understand what to do with statements like, “cite more references” or “this is confusing”. However, giving a judicious amount of feedback in a timely manner will make a difference in student learning. The purpose of this article is to describe how to refine, clarify, streamline, and improve your feedback practices with an eye toward spending less time on the task.
Collaborating across differences: Build writing relationships with co-author agreements
I had a conversation with a senior colleague recently about the purpose and value of co-author agreements in collaborative writing projects. He and I talk regularly about research and writing but had not touched on the nature of “agreements” in collaborations. He has built his career in a scientific field where co-authors are the norm, and the majority of his publications included graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, or government agency researchers as collaborators.