The Psychology Behind Writing: Tap into Your Natural Personality to Assist Your Academic Writing Process (Part 2)

Hello fellow TAA members, thank you for reading this second post of “The Psychology Behind Writing.” With monthly offerings, we’ll get into some of the psychological processes that support our academic writing as well as the ones that derail our writing. And, we will definitely explore strategies for amplifying the positive and mitigating the negative.

As many of you might know, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is structured with 4 personality scales, each with two “opposite” preferences that rest on a continuum of intensity for that personality scale. The key to remember here is that we all have all 8 preferences available to us (4 scales x 2 preferences), but we tend to have a natural preference for inhabiting one side over the other. One side tends to come more instinctively, we don’t have to think about it as hard, we can be on auto-pilot, we are more practiced with it, and we probably don’t have much anxiety around using it.

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Consider Creating a ‘Commonplace Book’ to Inspire, Remind, and Refresh You and Your Writing

A Commonplace Book is a way to compile knowledge important to you. It can become a valued snapshot of you and your interests as you grow in your life and career. I was keeping a Commonplace Book for decades and didn’t realize I was doing it!

Commonplace Books might include quotations, connections to important literature or sources, meaningful articles, key data, journals (personal or professional), your curriculum vitae, and any other centralized information. They are often informal and may sit on your desktop, in the cloud, in your notes program, or maybe even in your In Box.

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New TAA Workshop Presenter: Vernetta Mosely, PhD

TAA welcomes new Workshop present Vernetta K. Mosely, PhD, a Writing Coach, Editor and Consultant with Cultivate the Writer.

Vernetta offers four 90-minute workshops:

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To Promote Your Book, Consider a Webinar

In addition to all the social media, a webinar is an excellent promotional tool for your book. Combining PowerPoint slides and audio and posting on your website, YouTube, and the ubiquitous social media, a webinar delivers valuable information and shows you’re the one to deliver more. But you’ve gotta do it well, or people (potential readers/buyers of your book) will click off. As the proud veteran of one webinar (I blush to admit with some excellent feedback), here I share what I learned about designing and delivering an excellent webinar.

For the webinar on my book Trust Your Life: Forgive Yourself and Go After Your Dreams (Unity Books, 2011), I had wonderful help and structure from the publisher’s promotion director. You can achieve similar results alone or with a few seasoned colleagues. In any case, the steps are similar.

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Don’t Kill Your Chances With a Publisher By Making This Mistake

Kevin Adams, a research engineer at Vanderbilt University and author of over 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings and three books, including Systemic Decision Making: Fundamentals for Addressing Problems and Messes (with Dr. Patrick Hester), which won 2018 TAA Most Promising New Textbook Award, shares his insight into what can kill your chances with a publisher:

“Technical writing in the engineering field often suffers from insufficient clarity and supporting references, issues that significantly reduce the validity of the author’s notions. Having sufficient and properly cited references improves the reliability of the author’s thesis and gives the reader sources for further investigation. The use of quotation marks and page numbers for direct quotations provide context rich information and reinforce the author’s points in the paper. Properly cited references from scholarly sources that use the modern digital object identifier (doi) ensure that readers can locate and access the reference cited. Peer reviewed scholarly sources prove to be the best cited sources as they have both high reliability and validity.”

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The Psychology Behind Writing: Tap into Your Natural Personality to Assist Your Academic Writing Process (Part 1)

Hello fellow TAA members, lovely to meet you and thank you for reading this inaugural post of “The Psychology Behind Writing.” Over the next 12 monthly offerings, we’ll get into some of the psychological processes that support our academic writing as well as the ones that derail our writing. And, we will definitely explore strategies for amplifying the positive and mitigating the negative. 

Active Writers vs. Reflective Writers

Let’s start this series by looking at our natural personality preferences and how these influence writing processes as well as the preferred approach of our chosen discipline. We’ll use the tried-and-true Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) as our personality framework and starting point.

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