If you’re having trouble getting serious about writing in the new year after all the holiday time away, consider a writing journal. It’s an almost painless way to sneak back into writing and a longstanding writer’s tool to record and develop ideas, work out projects and plots, and save meaningful aphorisms and perfect overheard phrases. Whether you’ve kept a journal for decades, or have never started one, a journal not only can help you write more but also make your writing more effective.
Getting unstuck when your writing stalls out
Let’s acknowledge immediately that there are innumerable reasons why a writing project can get stalled: Maybe you took a break and lost momentum? Got irrevocably bored with the topic? Received critical feedback that you can’t get out of your mind? Therefore, we aren’t going to focus on the “why” part. Instead, regardless of why a project got cold, there are some common steps that help us get any project moving again. Today we will focus on steps addressing the underlying emotional and motivational issues. If we can clear those up, the rest will likely go smoothly.
How to write a confident-sounding CV
It’s important to present your academic self to the world with a confident-sounding CV, but CVs often don’t show all the effort and work that went into those achievements, just the end result, says Mary Beth Averill, academic writing coach, editor, and co-author of The Confident Academic: Overcoming the small fish, big pond experience… and other difficult matters.
“When you look at one person’s CV compared to another person’s CV, you really have no idea what those CVs are resting on,” she says. “What they’re resting on is probably a lot of tries, even a lot of failure.”
Five ways to increase your confidence as an academic
Many academics lack confidence in some aspect of their professional lives, and while some are open about this, for others, it’s a well-kept secret, says Mary Beth Averill, academic writing coach, editor, and co-author with Hillary Hutchinson of The Confident Academic: Overcoming the small fish, big pond experience… and other difficult matters.
“I’ve been working with academic writers for over 30 years, and one thing that comes up repeatedly in my work with clients is their lack of confidence,” she says. “Even people who look to me like they’re at the top of their field sometimes feel a lack of confidence in some areas of their professional life.”
Confronting the anxiety of academic writing: What if anxiety about academic writing were to be taken seriously?
The first step in confronting the anxiety of academic writing is to ask, “What if anxiety about academic writing were to be taken seriously, rather than ignored, treated as a punchline, or accepted as inevitable?” said Rachael Cayley, author of the forthcoming book, Thriving as a Graduate Writer: Principles, Strategies, and Habits for Effective Academic Writing, in her October 19, 2022 TAA webinar, “Confronting the Anxiety of Academic Writing”, available on demand.
“If we instead try to understand why academic writing is the site of so much anxiety, we can then find ways to improve the experience of academic writers,” she said.
Crush those horrible holiday questions about your academic project
Holidays can be welcome respites from our daily routines and the seemingly relentless pressures to produce. But at holiday gatherings we also risk what are often inevitable and often embarrassing questions from well-meaning relatives and friends. Whether you’re writing your dissertation or, post-dissertation, sweating through the first article from it, a book chapter, or an entire book, at least one person asks those questions that make you squirm. They’re right up there with the personal in-your-face ones: “How come you’re still single?” or “When are you going to have kids?”
To help you field the equivalent questions about your academic project, maintain your self-respect, and even jab a little in return, here are several of the most common questions and suggested replies I’ve collected from my academic coaching clients who are agonizing through working on their scholarly projects. Clients report, I’m glad to say, that these suggested responses have worked well—meaning they’ve shut the other guy up. Tailor your responses as appropriate, but curb your impulse to throw a punch.