Flex your writing muscles in the TAA Writing Gym. This 6-week work-out-on-your-own gym time will serve as your writing accountability partner as you work to achieve your writing goals. The gym is free with your TAA membership, and is open to those writing textbooks, scholarly journal articles, and dissertations.
The gym will be open 24 hours from July 16-August 26, 2018. The deadline for signing up is July 9.
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.
Preface: This is the second of two posts on dissertation support groups (read the first post, Dissertation support groups (part 1): Watch out!). In the previous piece, I described several benefits and cautioned readers about drawbacks of a group. In this piece, I report on a successful group in the words of its founders and members. The philosophies and method may help graduate students seeking support groups and faculty desiring to start them.
“I couldn’t write. I’d be in the library, staring at the portrait of the bearded benefactor, and the time would just tick by. That’s when I decided to join the group.”
This member of a dissertation support group was not alone in her dilemma.
Recently, publishing has undergone an indie revolution similar to what occurred in the film and music industries. While these changes…
Danae Hudson and Brooke Whisenhunt have been awarded a TAA Textbook Contract Review Grant for their textbook, Introductory Psychology, to…
It is incumbent upon early-career academics to distinguish their research as mature scholarship, not student work. So as an editor who often works with junior faculty and recent PhDs, I’m always on the lookout for hallmarks of amateur writing that scholars can identify and excise.
Perhaps most academics can name some of the tics that unfortunately characterize graduate-student writing: overqualification, hedging, extensive literature review, and a high ratio of quotation to original material are just a few.
