Register for 10/4 Two-Hour Workshop – ‘Efficiency with Style: Revising Your Manuscript at the Macro & Micro Levels’

Fast-writing and “allowing messy drafts” is often recommended as a productivity strategy for academics. But … how do we most efficiently transform the resulting messes into coherent and powerful prose?

Academic Writing Coach Erin McTigue will be presenting a two-hour interactive virtual workshop, “Efficiency with Style: Revising Your Manuscript at the Macro & Micro Levels.” on October 4 from 3-5 p.m. ET. Learn how to take a “messy draft” of your choice and try out three macro-level revision strategies to hone overall logic and organization of the manuscript and then three micro-level revision tools for coherence and writing style. You’ll leave the workshop with both a sequential approach and individual tools for transforming your future drafts with efficiency.

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Nominate Your Textbook for a 2024 TAA Textbook Award

Nominations for TAA’s 2024 Textbook Awards is now open. Recognize your textbook today by nominating it for one our industry-respected awards:

McGuffey Longevity Award – to recognize long-standing textbooks and learning materials that have been in print for at least 15 years.

Textbook Excellence Award – to recognize excellence in current textbooks and learning materials.

Most Promising New Textbook Award – to recognize promising textbooks and learning materials in their first edition.

Learn more and start preparing your nomination.

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Long-time TAA Member Phil Wankat Goes Back Into the TAA Newsletter Archives and Finds Gold

TAA Member Phil Wankat, who joined TAA in 1989, pored over his archival issues of the TAA Report (now The Academic Author), selected articles that have information that is still valid today, and included commentary on each. We will be adding these articles to the web page, “Articles from TAA Report Archives (now The Academic Author) with Commentary,” over the next few months. The articles are organized into 10 categories, including Authors Needed, Cartoons, Contracts, Ethics, Money, Production, Recognition and Rewards, Software, Textbooks as Scholarship, and Writer’s Block. The first installment is Authors Needed.

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Consider Creating a ‘Commonplace Book’ to Inspire, Remind, and Refresh You and Your Writing

A Commonplace Book is a way to compile knowledge important to you. It can become a valued snapshot of you and your interests as you grow in your life and career. I was keeping a Commonplace Book for decades and didn’t realize I was doing it!

Commonplace Books might include quotations, connections to important literature or sources, meaningful articles, key data, journals (personal or professional), your curriculum vitae, and any other centralized information. They are often informal and may sit on your desktop, in the cloud, in your notes program, or maybe even in your In Box.

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Register for 10/20 TAA Webinar: So, You Talk to Cows? A Faculty Author’s Publishing Story

Are you contemplating writing a textbook? It can be a daunting process but there are many success stories and opportunities to learn from colleagues who have recently published their content. Join XanEdu Publishing and Erica Irlbeck, Ed.D, Professor of Agricultural Education and Communications at Texas Tech and author of A Crisis Communication Guide for Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources, on Thursday, October 19 from 2-3 p.m. EST for the TAA Webinar, “So, You Talk to Cows? A Faculty Author’s Publishing Story.” Irlbeck will share her journey in this engaging and interactive webinar. She is a passionate advocate for anyone contemplating writing their own content and will share what she learned through her own authoring journey. “It’s not easy and it’s not quick, but I have loved this and would love the opportunity to do more.”

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Don’t Kill Your Chances With a Publisher By Making This Mistake

Kevin Adams, a research engineer at Vanderbilt University and author of over 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings and three books, including Systemic Decision Making: Fundamentals for Addressing Problems and Messes (with Dr. Patrick Hester), which won 2018 TAA Most Promising New Textbook Award, shares his insight into what can kill your chances with a publisher:

“Technical writing in the engineering field often suffers from insufficient clarity and supporting references, issues that significantly reduce the validity of the author’s notions. Having sufficient and properly cited references improves the reliability of the author’s thesis and gives the reader sources for further investigation. The use of quotation marks and page numbers for direct quotations provide context rich information and reinforce the author’s points in the paper. Properly cited references from scholarly sources that use the modern digital object identifier (doi) ensure that readers can locate and access the reference cited. Peer reviewed scholarly sources prove to be the best cited sources as they have both high reliability and validity.”

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