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.”
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.
From the Archives – Articles on ‘Writer’s Block’ From TAA Report, Compiled by TAA Member Phil Wankat
The tenth installment of TAA Member Phil Wankat’s curation and commentary of the archival issues of the TAA Report (now The Academic Author), Writer’s Block, is now available. Articles include “Emotional Aspects of Writer’s Block,” “Cognitive Aspects of Writer’s Block,” and “The New Paradox of the College Textbook.”