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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Command Your Pet Words

Pets can be wonderful—I loved my orange and white cat. But when I received an editorial critique before publication of my short story “Casey,” I was horrified to learn it sheltered a whole menagerie of unwanted editorial pets —words, phrases, and grammatical constructions.

“Casey” is a story about a middle-school boy who feels like an outcast and later discovers he has healing powers. When I received the acceptance email, I was elated. Then the editor emailed me again: “Every author has pet words and phrases. Part of my job is to point them out so you can get rid of them.” She attached the manuscript and highlighted a herd of my pet words and phrases, in oxblood.

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Do Proliferating Ideas Threaten to Overtake You?

Do ideas flood your brain like a herd gone wild? Are you flailing around, physically and metaphorically, trying to corral them and drive them into the barn? Going mad trying to figure out how to use them all?

I am almost constantly barraged by ideas for essays, stories, poems, novel slivers, quirky descriptions, and metaphoric pearls. Ideas surface everywhere: as I work on the current creative piece, edit clients’ manuscripts, wash dishes, huff through workouts, wait on line, watch people, meditate, fall asleep, and even at business dinners.

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Are You Using Writing Models? If Not, You Should Be. Here is How and Why.

First, you may be asking, “What is a writing model?” A writing model is an example of writing like the one you need to produce.

Allow me to illustrate. Very early in my graduate program, I had never read a dissertation. But I knew I needed to write one. The best advice I received was to familiarize myself with the structure of a finished dissertation. I found dissertations that students in my own program had successfully written and defended under the guidance of my advisor.

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