Fifty-six textbooks were awarded 2024 Textbook Awards by TAA, representing more than 100 authors. We recently reached out to these award-winning authors asking several questions, including how they fit writing time into their schedule, what pedagogical elements in their textbook they are most proud of, and what they wish they had known before they started writing their textbook. We hope their answers provide insight and inspiration for your writing projects.
12 Articles on Writing Your Dissertation: A Curated Collection From Noelle Sterne, PhD
Dissertation coach Noelle Sterne, the author of Writing Your Dissertation: Coping with the Emotional, Interpersonal, and Spiritual Struggles, has contributed more than 30 articles to the TAA Blog over the past 10 years. We’ve curated all of these articles into a new TAA Blog category, Noelle Sterne’s Dissertation Posts, and have included 12 of them here. Enjoy!
Author Tech Tool Suggestions: For the Tech Bewildered
By John Bond
We are living in a Golden Age of technology for authors. But sometimes these new or improved tools can be intimidating. Here are some simple steps for getting started on considering these tools that might improve your writing output and quality.
Before we start, take an inventory:
- Currently am I making the best use of my time?
- Will new tools make me more productive?
- What’s wrong with your current tools?
- What is available to you now through your institution?
- What’s your motivation for a change?
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.” She recommends that people read “The Art Of Readable Writing” by Rudolf Flesch: “An important tip from that book, put yourself and your team into your writing. Begin sentences with words such as I, we, and the names of specific people.” Nostrand also recommended sentences be as short as possible, and no longer than twenty words. “Every generation of writers since Shakespeare has written shorter sentences than their forebears,” said Nostrand. “Motion picture shots have also been getting shorter and shorter.” Nostrand also said to “not be afraid of technical terms,” but that you should define jargon that your intended audience shouldn’t be expected to know.
Before You Start Writing: Identify the Journal You Want to Publish In
By Sierra Pawlak
Dave Harris, an editor and writing coach from Thought Clearing, says identifying the journal you want to publish in early helps you decide what goes into the paper you write.
“You want to identify what journal you’re writing to first, because every journal is different, and if you’re not doing a good job of targeting your article to a specific journal, you’re going to have a harder time getting accepted,” he said, during the April 2024 TAA Conversation Circle discussion on the topic of literature reviews. “At some point where you’ve got this research project that you’ve done and you’re trying to write it up, that’s when you say, ‘here’s the journal I want to go to,’ and you start there, thinking about how to frame your material to suit the journal.”
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.