Your life. Your career. Bristol Clear
Since writing comes in all shapes and sizes, here’s a limerick for a WriteFest Tuesday:
There once was a male academic
For whom writing was a bit of a gimmick
When at last he was fired
He claimed he’d retired
But his victory was somewhat pyrrhic
(OK, it’s not very good, but you try find something to rhyme with ‘academic’!)
(by Sérgio Waitman, Research Associate, Department of Aerospace Engineering)
As I was midway through the book by Pat Thomson and Barbara Kamler, it occurred to me that the choice of the subtitle “Strategies for getting published” might seem a bit misleading. Indeed, as the authors themselves emphasize throughout the text, the objective of the book is not to provide a set of writing guidelines with dos and don’ts and article recipes. Instead, they focus on more conceptual notions about the development of the writer identity and how the text should be seen as part of a conversation among members of a particular scientific community.
The book is mostly aimed towards PhD candidates and early career researchers. The first chapters are of particular interest, as they help inexperienced writers to understand the importance of locating their argument within the body of literature of a given journal as well as that of the scientific community in which it exists. The focus is then not on how to write a good report of results, but on how to put forward an argument that fills in a previously identified gap of knowledge. The author is encouraged to present its paper as another brick in the ever growing research wall, building on previous results and theory, but with a distinctive new take that will allow the wall to keep going up.
The last chapters are more directly related to the writing work per se and provide some good insights into how to put all this in the paper, as well as how to deal with co-authoring duties and feedback from peer review.
My only criticism of the book is its insistent reliance on examples from the field of Education. Even though it is understandable, given the background of both authors and their active research in this area, I would have expected more variability, especially with the extensive experience of the authors in ministering writing workshops around the world. Even though most of what is being said should remain valid and helpful for the majority of academic researchers, it is sometimes hard to appreciate how some of the arguments would be translated to the specificities of different subjects. Nonetheless, I would recommend this book to anyone starting their academic career and struggling to find their voice in the scientific discussion.
When we’re talking about writing, we often suggest that a regular routine is best. That routine doesn’t, however, have to be one that fits into a neat 9-5 day. As the following examples show, the routines adopted by some of history’s most creative people, vary widely.
Some are more 9-5… Maya Angelou worked regularly from 7 a.m. to about 3 p.m., and then took a break, doing about a half hour’s more work at 7.30 p.m.
Some, though, are very different. Honoré de Balzac, for example, did most of his creative work between 1 a.m. and 8 a.m., had an hour’s snooze, and then worked again from 9 a.m. until about half past three in the afternoon.
Charles Dickens worked only in the morning, spending the afternoon tramping for miles around London and in the countryside soaking up the atmosphere that he then wrote into his prose.
Voltaire, on the other hand, appears to have done little else but work, sleeping only 4 hours a night, and pausing only briefly to eat.
And in terms of working environment, they differ too. While Dickens wrote in absolute silence in his study, Angelou wrote only in hotel rooms. John Milton was blind by the age of 40, and so dictated his work. W. H. Auden (and this is one that, even as much as we encourage productivity and focus, we probably wouldn’t recommend) took a daily dose of Benzedrine to aid his concentration.
What’s your routine? And your own working practice?
(note – Due to copyright restrictions, these images are screengrabs. But various versions of these have proliferated online, so you’ll find alternative, or better quality versions by simply searching for ‘Daily Routines of Creative People’).
(by Dr Anupratap Tomar, Research Associate, School of Physiology, Pharmacology & Neuroscience)
Academic writing is stressful and can be frustrating especially in todays’ ‘publish or perish’ environment. Scholars often multitask, i.e., they research, teach, interact with students, and perform other academic duties, all while vying to publish their work.
If you are an overwhelmed academic suffering from writing blues, then “write no matter what”, by Prof. Joli Jensen is a book for you. Jensen possesses over 30 years’ experience as a scholar and heads the faculty writing program at the University of Tulsa, United States.
This book deconstructs the psychology behind delays and procrastinations often ‘suffered’ by academics and provides useful practical solutions. While it demystifies the “how”, this book does not delve into “what” to write in scholarly publications.
The book is written in a conversational style using convincing and easy-to-follow language. The coherent arrangement of five sections into short (approx. 4-6 pages) well-structured chapters. The descriptive titles allow readers to identify specific sections/chapters in case they don’t intend to read the whole book.
Jensen has a knack for identifying toxic thought patterns that frequently mar academic writing and debunks the various myths underlying them. She emphasizes that we should avoid must-know-everything attitudes and advocates for acquiring a “craftsmen” approach i.e. learning and improving from every experience throughout life. Indeed, such advice can be applied to many other aspects of scholarly life.
A key message that I found compelling was about prioritizing projects using a front-burner/back-burner system. The suggestion is that when our main (front-burner) project is becoming overwhelming or we are stalled and frustrated, we should take a small break and collect material for our other (back-burner) project. This approach will likely ensure that we feel productive even while experiencing writer’s block.
In the last section, this book advises creating “faculty writing groups” where members find a supportive and motivating environment – which, according to Jensen, is lacking in current university setups. Such writing groups are a fantastic idea. Though Jensen clearly discourages egoistic attitudes, I am slightly sceptical that this will be a very successful forum at those universities where multiple faculty members may be vying for a few promotion spots.
There were a couple of typos, but they can be ignored since this book is a treasure trove of good advice. Overall, I found the book very useful and recommend that you grab a copy if you are stalled in your writing or seeking inspiration for productive writing under minimal stress.
There are two common problems that academics face when it comes to writing. They are linked by one thing: time. It is one of the most important resources when it comes to writing. We need time to reflect on our research and to think about the best way communicate it to our audience. During some phases of your career, you will need to fit writing around a range of other commitments and may feel that you simply do not have time. At other times, particularly when faced with long periods of research leave, you will have the opposite problem, too much time, making it difficult to focus.
This post addresses that second question.
So… You have a year to finish your monograph. Your teaching time has been bought out, your administrative roles have been re-assigned. Time seems to yawn ahead of you. Distractions are tempting as you feel the need to fill your time to feel busy and productive.
Here are five steps to think about:
… because, you know that old adage that ‘if you don’t choose a path, then someone will choose it for you’.
I’ve known a number of people start an entire year of writing with a wonderful sense of freedom, but then fail to deliver the promised monograph or research bid… or anything, in fact. The reasons that they give often boil down to the fact that they didn’t actually ‘choose’ to write.
In my book, choosing to write is OK, and choosing not to write is OK. Both are empowering, in different ways.
What’s less empowering is not making a choice – because that’s still, really, making a choice. Just not one that we own.
If we want to write, we have to choose to start.
Take time to plan. Having chosen to start, simply piling into writing might be the worst thing that you can do. You have time – loads of time. So take time to plan, to think, to experiment, to reflect, to change your approach and try again. If you find your best approach and rhythm, you’ll get a lot more done, and better, and with better mental health, than simply putting fingers to keys and seeing what comes out.
Be self-aware. Think about how and when you have worked at your best in the past. Do you write slowly and methodically, or do you take the Jack Kerouac route? Do you need human interaction to develop your ideas? Do you need seclusion for long periods of time? Do you need to move your writing space regularly? Do you need noise or quiet? Different people need different environments to produce their best writing. Work out who you are as a writer and arrange your time and space to fit your best habits (not your worst!).
Bring together all the tasks you need to do to achieve your project(s). You’ll almost certainly have background reading, data organisation and choice, structuring at different scales, writing (in chunks), proofing, image selection, correspondence, bibliographies etc. When do they need to be done by? What else is there that needs to be fitted in? Conferences, travel, training, being ill? Family birthdays, housework and improvements? Christmas shopping? (it’s a whole year remember, and anything that you can plan-in is planned and won’t hijack your timetable).
Break your writing into segments. Like eating an elephant, one person I know got so much stress from trying to work out how to write their PhD ‘as a whole’, that they were on anti-depressants and only days away from giving up. And then they realised that if they wrote just 500 words a day, they’d produce a chapter every 6 weeks, and the full thesis would write itself in about 9 months. Then it just became a question of hitting a very achievable daily target.
Prioritise and allocate time. Make a list of all the writing, the tasks, the deadlines and put them in order. Make sure all your objectives have an appropriate list of tasks to get them done – is there anything missing from your list? Then allocate time to each task. And be generous.
Be kind to yourself. And, if you miss a deadline, be kind to yourself and reschedule. In many ways, that’s the advantage of planning. If you miss one target, you can see it in the context of the whole (which is planned) and don’t feel like the entire project has gone off the rails.
Allow yourself to seek inspiration. Distraction [Dis-traction – or being ‘pulled away from’] prevents you from concentrating on a task. Inspiration [literally ‘breathing into’] feeds ideas into your task and transforms it. A key difference between the two seems to be the mental state that each puts you in. Distraction is about mental agitation, which prevents you from focusing on anything. Inspiration comes from deep focus – even if that focus isn’t your work. I’ve had some of my most inspired moments pruning fruit bushes in the garden!
Be in the moment, rather than being ‘always in the writing’. If you’re working to a plan, then this should be possible. If you’re on holiday, be on holiday – don’t be thinking all the time ‘I should be writing’. If you go to a conference, then ‘be there’. If you’re ill, then ‘get better’. If you’re reading, then ‘read’. Being always in the writing is – again – a state of mental distraction. Be where you are, and enjoy – knowing that the bigger project is planned, and still safely on the rails.
You’re looking to make all your writing time count. So these all bear repeating:
Once you have planned your writing project, then half and full days are best. Start each writing session by planning what you are going to do that session – don’t just start writing! It’s not always possible to write every day but write regularly, even in your research phase, to keep in practice and keep improving. Book onto our Regular, Productive Writing workshop to learn more about getting into good writing habits.
Or try the Seinfeld method known as ‘don’t break the chain’. Make a cross on your calendar every day when you write something – even if it isn’t much – some days it will be just enough to open up a new idea. Most of all, the visual cue of the calendar can help motivate you to make sure you write a little every day – just don’t break the chain:
Three things to read if you want to know more:
(by Dr Alice Baillie, Research Associate, School of Biological Sciences)
‘Writing for academic journals’ presents sound advice in an easy-to-read format for those looking to improve the quality and quantity of their academic publications. I imagine that this book would be of greatest benefit to those who struggle for the motivation or confidence to write, and particularly for those with no prior experience of publishing. Having co-authored a few papers, and naturally enjoying writing, I found much of the advice familiar and affirming rather than revolutionary. Nonetheless, I gleaned some useful tips which I intend to put into practice in my ongoing writing.
The cover of this third edition proudly claims to help you ‘get to grips with using social media’. I felt that this was a bit of an overstatement, with a mere two pages devoted to a brief and rather theoretical discussion of this topic. Aside from that, the book is true to its promise of offering practical approaches to help you to make time for writing and to write productively for publication. I thought that the chapter entitled ‘Responding to reviewers’ feedback’ was particularly good and a bit of a must-read for anyone going it alone with their first publication or two. The chapter on targeting your writing to your chosen journal would, I think, also be particularly useful to newcomers to the world of publication.
While some of the approaches suggested might not suit everyone, I think that the vast majority of ideas in this book could be useful to more-or-less all academic writers, even if they don’t initially like the sound of some of them! Murray is a particular advocate of regular writing, even if much of the output is not directly destined for a draft. This may strike some as a waste of time when writing time often seems at such a premium, but I suspect that taking an open-minded approach to such advice could help all writers to establish productive habits.
My overall verdict: a useful read for any writer or would-be-writer, and especially for those just starting out trying to publish their work.
There are two common problems that academics face when it comes to writing. They are linked by one thing: time. It is one of the most important resources when it comes to writing. We need time to reflect on our research and to think about the best way communicate it to our audience. During some phases of your career, you will need to fit writing around a range of other commitments and may feel that you simply do not have time. At other times, particularly when faced with long periods of research leave, you will have the opposite problem, too much time, making it difficult to focus.
This post is about the first problem. A second post, coming up on Wednesday, addresses the second.
Note – If you simply do not have any time and space to write because your teaching or administrative load is too great then take care of yourself first. You will not write well if you are stressed and tired. Don’t simply add writing to an already exhausting workload:
Four steps to writing when you have little time:
(by Dr Charlotte Lloyd, Postdoctoral Research Associate, School of Chemistry)
If you are looking for an easy to read guide to science writing, then this could be the book you have been waiting for. I have started reading many a book about how to improve your scientific writing, how to design robust science experiments etc etc, however usually I only manage to wade through the first couple of chapters before I give up and decide I shouldn’t waste any more precious time and just get on with the work in question! This book however was different. It was incredibly easy to read, and I comfortably made it through the 206 pages in a few sittings (actually, the times while my baby was napping during a week’s canal boating holiday!). While I think this book is useful and the advice would hold for writing across different disciplines, I think it is extremely useful for anyone who is involved in science research, particularly the environmental sciences. The author provides numerous examples in each section to really bring the advice to life and uses extracts from actual science writing, whether it be journal papers or grant proposals, explaining why the text does a good or bad job, and importantly in the case of the latter, how the piece could be improved. This technique for teaching I found extremely useful and allowed me to reflect on my own and colleagues writing and as a result enabled me to rapidly provide constructive suggestions to improve text I have been involved with writing.
The book has a logical structure (perhaps the very least you might expect given the subject matter of the book!!), beginning with the fundamentals of how to tell your story and what makes a story compelling, before focusing in on individual aspects of the writing itself. The author covers the designing of the structure of a piece, how to plan paragraphs and even how to think about each individual sentence and making sure each and every line of text plays an integral role – this is invaluable when writing something like a grant proposal where tight space restrictions often apply. The chapters of the book are to a certain extent self-contained, so it is very easy to dip in and out of the book to gain advice about a specific aspect of writing you may be struggling with. For anybody who finds writing a challenge or feels daunted by the prospect of editing and refining their work, I would highly recommend reading this book. It has made writing a much more enjoyable experience for me, and this is fundamental because as the author points out, as research scientists we are in fact professional writers!
(by Elisabeth Meyer, Senior Research Associate, School of Physiology, Pharmacology & Neuroscience)
What makes academic writing challenging? Helen Sword captures a multitude of answers to that question from real-life scientists in her book ‘Air & Light & Time & Space’. She interviewed well-established academics in their field as well as grad students, post-docs and early career researchers to present a book in which scientists are given the chance to describe their strategies, their coping mechanisms and their motivations when writing. The sheer amount of individual experiences makes this book a multi-faceted reservoir of ideas and inspiration for the aspiring writer.
The first two parts of the book deal with rather classic writing advice, such as how to find the ever-elusive time to write, or to pick up a book about English grammar now and again. While these sections can hardly be expected to yield any novel insight, I nevertheless appreciated to read that instead of desperately trying to bash out 1000 words before the sun comes up, I’m being encouraged to find my own way of staying motivated and productive. Suggestions range from simply listening to music or watching penguins on YouTube (adorable) to engaging with fellow academics and/or writers in order to build up a solid support structure of people who are willing to offer constructive criticism or even just a shoulder to cry on over a glass of wine.
The last part of the book is dedicated to the emotional side of writing: How does the writer deal with the inner editor, with critics or inevitable rejection? Reading about established scientists receiving harsh rejections has put my personal experiences with reviewers in perspective. Additionally, she quite rightly calls out the serious lack of formal writing training for academics, since writing advice currently is mainly offered by mentors or colleagues volunteering their time and expertise.
Helen Sword has produced a very useful book jam-packed with inspiring stories about successful academic writers and their habits. And while no book will unlock a magic strategy that will suddenly make beautiful words effortlessly flow from the academics’ fingertips, this one might just give you the right idea about how to bring time and space and people (and maybe YouTube) back into your academic life to kickstart your writing project!
(image from @LorielAnderson, 8:18pm · 7 Nov 2018)
Following the huge success of the Bristol Doctoral College’s Thesis Bootcamp (Mon – Wed this week) in which Bristol’s PGRs wrote over a quarter of a million words, the Bristol WriteFest word count is now over 300,000.
