The TAA Conference Committee invites proposals for its 2025 Textbook & Academic Authoring Conference, which will be held online June 6-7. Presenting at TAA’s 2025 Conference provides an opportunity to share your knowledge, experiences, and ideas with other textbook authors, academic authors, and industry professionals. The theme is “The Future is Now.” We welcome proposals from first-time and veteran presenters! The deadline for submitting a proposal is October 13, 2024.
How Social Connections Can Positively Impact Writers
By Angelica Ribeiro, Ph.D.
As a writer, you have likely experienced negative emotions at some point. Whether it is receiving a rejection letter for your manuscript, facing criticism for your ideas, or getting stuck in your writing, it is normal to feel this way. The key is to learn how to cope with these emotions rather than trying to eliminate them.
Social connections can be a great tool for managing negative emotions like stress, frustration, and disappointment. Robert Waldinger, the leading author of The Good Life, explains how warm social connections can regulate your negative emotions:
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.”
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!”
How Writing Can Make You Feel Good
By Angelica Ribeiro, PhD
Do you want to feel good after a writing session? If so, here’s what you should do.
As writers, we should consider three essential writing practices: Write daily or regularly, write in short chunks of time, keep a writing log.
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.