Becoming an effective academic writer is one of the key challenges facing doctoral students and early career researchers. Despite the centrality of writing, few writers feel comfortable with the process or confident about their product. Rachael Cayley, author of the blog, Explorations of Style, discusses the anxiety that attends academic writing.
I Don’t Write Enough Because…
I don’t write enough because…
I have a day job—teaching.
I have no unscheduled time.
8 Strategies for writing group success
Writing groups provide an opportunity for you to connect with your peers, create a sense of community, and find collaborators for joint projects. By meeting regularly as a group, you can provide one another with peer support and accountability while sharing advice that can help improve writing skills and lead to greater publication success.
Writing gifts: Blogging about academic writing
Peter Elbow once recommended that authors should try to write for non-evaluative audiences; they should experiment donating their writing as precious gifts to readers who would not judge, evaluate or critique, but would merely enjoy the words and ideas1. For academic writers like us — subject ad nauseam to evaluations and tearing apart of our writing – having a venue where we write merely for the pleasure of writing what others enjoy reading is strong medicine.
12 Strategies for writing group success
Writing groups provide an opportunity for faculty authors to connect with their peers, create a sense of community, and find collaborators for joint projects. By meeting regularly as a group, author members can provide one another with peer support and accountability while sharing advice that can help improve writing skills and lead to greater publication success.
Providing valuable resources and grant funding, TAA’s Chapter Program offers an excellent foundation for establishing a successful faculty authoring community. Following are twelve TAA Chapter Program strategies designed to increase the power and success of chapter writing groups.
Learning as we go: Establishing a writing community
In 2011 Pat Mason and I set out to establish a TAA chapter writing community at Molloy College. Making the time to come together during a semester to share our work is an awesome task for many of us, but we try to make it interesting for our colleagues by providing writing sessions, newly published books, and refreshments. In addition, we have adopted various useful mottoes—the best being “Less surfing and more writing!”