Happy October! Are you staying on track with your fall writing projects? Whether you are or you aren’t, Jodi Picoult’s advice—”You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”—seems an appropriate reminder. We may not always write things worth keeping or it may need heavy editing, but at least it is down on paper. Something is there that is workable and moldable. A blank page cannot offer that.
GUEST POST: 4 Ways to work-life balance in 4 minutes
Perhaps you’ve heard the term “work-life balance” so often that it makes you want to punch someone in the face — but you don’t have time to do that because as you read this, it’s not even 8 am, you’re late for a deadline, you have a class to teach, your daughter’s soccer coach wants to talk to you later today, you have 24 unread emails, and you forgot (again!) to pack a healthy snack for your daughter to eat before practice.
The most useful textbook & academic writing posts of the week: September 25, 2015
Most often in this series the posts I find from week to week are on many different topics. This week, however, there are two overriding themes “referencing” and “organizing,” with just a sprinkling of other topics to enjoy.
Featured Member Kathleen King – Motivation, marketing & the ‘easy fix’
Kathleen P. King, professor of Adult and Higher Education at the University of South Florida in Tampa, is an award winning author of 30 books, most recently 147 Tips for Emerging Scholars and The Professor’s Guide to Taming Technology, and more than 175 journal articles and research papers. She is known for her sessions and innovative topics and is a popular international keynote and conference speaker, mentor, and professor. King’s areas of research include instructional technology, faculty development, and mentoring. Here King shares what motivates her to write, tips on marketing your works, and the ‘easy fix’:
Make your dissertation your priority
As you undoubtedly already know, writing a dissertation is different from anything you’ve ever done. This enterprise requires you to adjust, if not radically change, your lifestyle. If you ever really want to complete the dissertation, and in a timely manner (if that isn’t an oxymoron), you need to rethink your priorities.
Your a full-time job, of course, should be high on the priority list. You may have been used to putting family first. But rethink this priority. Heartless and psychologically suspect as this statement may sound, you can make it up to them in many other ways—later (that’s another article).
The most useful textbook & academic writing posts of the week: September 18, 2015
“The best way to learn about writing is to study the work of other writers you admire.” –Jeffery Deaver
Isn’t this an excellent bit of advice that Jeffery Deaver gives us? Do we not do this in our own writing, but also in other aspects of our lives? I think one piece is missing from his advice, however. I believe that you also have to find and study writers that have a similar tone, style, and voice to that of your own. All of those things make up who you are and who you are as a writer.