How to Find the Singular Focus You Need: You will know how to write a literature review when you know its plot. And it doesn’t have to be some kind of a song and dance. Kind of like the drum solo in a rock song, you may be expected to write parts of your text as a lit review whether …
Professors and Grads: One Simple Technique to Shift Into Smooth Writing If it hurts to write your academic book, journal article, or dissertation, and it goes on forever, and you also sometimes have the ghastly thought that… “I would like to have a life,” then you probably wish you could write a bit faster. It’s not like you can …
But then there’s… Ugh—facing the pile. Or not, which is what often happens. If you have two weeks to grade papers, what happens in the first week? The first ten days even? C’mon, be honest. If you are like… well, anyone, there’s a good chance that you collect those papers, think “ah so nice that there’s two weeks for grading,” …
There’s an easy way to chart your course through it. There are two things you need any time you are stuck in writing. You need to set the course and steady the course. If you are stuck while writing a literature review, then each of these things– set the course and steady the course– have particular ways in which you …
There are many ghosts that visit the academic writer and this is one of the most malevolent ones: “It may already be too late.” Whatever ghosts are, if they are, they include some kind of strange relationship with time, and the order in which things play out. And that’s what the ghost thought of “I should have started sooner” is– …
What to Do with Our Big Dreams and Terrible Predicaments Not many people finish that book. You may have heard it said that something like 70% of Americans hope to write a book some day (surely by this point in American history the number has dropped, no?). In any case we know how that all turns out: very, very, very …
As a pressured academic writer, you can find yourself in a state of involuntarily quitting, watching yourself while you are not writing enough. Now don’t get me wrong, nothing wrong with quitting! It’s vastly underrated. When quitting is right, you escape all kinds of problems and get a chance for new possibilities. You don’t have to worry about getting an …
What is the #1 obstacle to our writing a lot, and with ease? Well for academic writers, the winner has got to be… The nasty things we say to ourselves about our selves. Chances are you don’t need any explanation about what this refers to. Writing has this way of naturally calling up a critical voice in the mind. Even if …
Simply put, writing is stressful for every single body. Plus, there can be anxiety while writing, while thinking about writing, while thinking about not writing, fear and dread can wrap itself all the way around a writer and leave them unable to go on. Or, like most of us, some unpleasant but not quite so extreme version of the above. …
There is a mistake that plays a role in every challenge you have when revising your dissertation, academic book, or journal article. And there are tons of those challenges, more than plenty to go around: How do you keep the whole in mind, and move between big picture changes and fine grained revisions, and all the moving parts? How do …