Reflect and reboot

In my part of the world, the days are short and bright, and the nights are long and dark. Without the screen of leaves, without colors from leaves and flowers, the brilliant blue sky draws my attention. Along with these seasonal changes, we can’t help but notice that we’re on the last page of the calendar. This is a time for reflection.

Let’s face it, in the pre-smartphone days we had small reflective moments now fractured by sound bites and fragments of news or photos of elementary school friends’ new babies. How can we pull away long enough to reconsider the proverbial big picture?

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Quandaries in your academic project? Use your inner mentor

Most of us probably had mentors in graduate school and may still maintain contact with them. But they may not be available every time we need their advice or guidance. I suggest that we all have a mentor that is always available, night and day, every season and semester, for every situation and circumstance.

The IM

This is your Inner Mentor (IM), also called your inner guide, self, voice, spirit, higher power, soul, subconscious, guidance system, intuition, even your heart or gut. It has more power than your department or committee chair, the dean of your school, and even the guy who issues your annual parking sticker.

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AcWriMo 2018: A month in review

Each November since 2011, academic writers from around the world have committed themselves to a month of forward progress in their personal academic writing efforts through an event known as AcWriMo (Academic Writing Month). To achieve greater levels of accountability and connectedness with other academics, many take to Twitter and other social media outlets to share their plans, challenges, accomplishments, and resources using the hashtag #AcWriMo.
While originally inspired by the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) concept, AcWriMo does not share the objective of completing a single project (i.e. a novel) in the 30 calendar days of November, but rather provides a means for focusing individuals on their own academic writing project(s) during that time. If you participated in AcWriMo 2018, we’d love to hear about your accomplishments in the comments below. If not, perhaps you can gain some inspiration from the documented efforts of others shared in this article.

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From solo to global: AcWriMo

Writing is usually a solitary activity. Staring at our monitors or notebooks, we wonder: is this brilliant or nuts? Is this straightforward and clear, or so simplistic that the reader will yawn? Have we written something that will entice the reader to follow our train of thought, or will they jump off with the next distraction? The way novelist Helen Garner described her work as a writer resonates with me:

the absolute inability, while you are working, to judge whether or not what you are doing has any value at all– thus the blind faith and grim stubbornness required in order to keep going; the episodes of elation, the occasional sense of hitting your stride, or of being in tune with the force that creates–the feeling that now you’ve got it, now you can’t put a foot wrong…

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5 Surprising lessons for writers from the business world

Like most writers, I keep bumping up against articles on how to treat my writing more like a business. And probably like many writers, I rebel at this advice, always trying to pry more time for the writing itself. But in an infrequent browse through an older business publication, I stumbled on an article that didn’t give me administrative agita. Even immersed in creative bliss, a writer can hardly resist the title: “Ten Traits That Make You Filthy-Rich” by Jeffrey Strain (TheStreet.com, February 1, 2008).

The five points I discuss here from Strain’s evergreen article  may be new to writers. The parallels remind us what we need to do not only to become rich (yes, it’s possible) but to stay true to our writing potential. (Strain’s traits are in italics.)  

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#AcWriChat: A year in review

To celebrate Academic Writing Month (#AcWriMo) 2017, TAA teamed up with member Janet Salmons from SAGE MethodSpace to begin a series of TweetChats on academic writing topics using the Twitter hashtag #AcWriChat. Throughout the year, TAA has continued to moderate TweetChat events every other Friday at 11am ET.

Beginning Friday, November 2nd, plan to join us for a weekly #AcWriChat event during #AcWriMo 2018 focusing on the 5 W’s of Academic Writing. But for now, as we reach the anniversary of our first #AcWriChat event, we want to take a look back at the year in review. Below is a summary of the questions discussed during our first twenty-six #AcWriChat TweetChats.

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