Category Archives: Writing

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How to kickstart your writing

It seems everywhere you look these days someone is running a Kickstarter campaign. I love the premise of Kickstarter. The idea is that someone can crowdsource the funding to make their idea become a reality. While we can’t exactly kickstart writing exactly the same way, there are some tips we can do to get moving and improve our writing quality.  In today’s post, I will share four tips for how to kickstart your writing.

Writing is hard work. Sitting around and waiting for inspiration just won’t get you where you want to go. Moreover, working to improve writing is a lifetime endeavor.

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Why I Declared War on Be Verbs

The only thing more difficult than learning scholarly writing may be trying to teach scholarly writing. Very few if any of us are well trained to teach writing skills or how to successfully navigate the writing process.  For many years, I did what I think most professors do. I had a long list of do’s and don’ts for students. However, I ultimately decided this way of teaching writing simply didn’t work. Even if students used the list, they didn’t learn how to improve their writing. Instead, I boiled the list down to a single item and declared war on be verbs.

Photo credit: kanegen

The last iteration of my writing do’s and don’ts list was 27 items long. It was out of hand.  

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Using Google Scholar for finding research

One of the biggest challenges for students is how to find good scholarly research. I have spoken with several of my doctoral students about this recently. Although the availability of electronic library resources are much better than in the past, I still find using library databases cumbersome and clunky. Instead, I recommend using Google School for finding research.

I want my students using empirical research to support their arguments when writing papers. However, I don’t want them to waste a lot of time trying to find research articles and books.

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Separate Writing from Editing

Peanut butter and jelly. Milk and cookies. Whip cream and, well, anything! Some things are just meant to go together. Plenty of other things should stay separate. Oil and water. Donald Trump and a microphone. You just shouldn’t mix some things– don’t do it! Unfortunately, many writers and especially graduate students make the mistake of mixing writing and editing. In today’s post, I will share why it is so important to separate writing from editing.

Photo credit: Flickr Anne

On the surface, it seems like it makes sense to combine writing and editing.

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How to get your writing groove back

What makes you a writer? It isn’t some special skill or ability, but rather simply being someone who writes. I think students and even early career faculty often look at senior scholars assuming they have some experience or ability that makes them better writers. While experience and practice helps with writing, the biggest help is simply writing. Yet, even the best writers lose their way. In today’s post, I want to share a few tips about how to get your writing groove back.

I recently completed two major writing projects. Even after working on them for months, I had to do a lot of extra work (binge writing) to get them completed on time. Binge writing is terrible for many reasons, but the greatest issue may be how burned out it makes us.

After those projects were finished, I was completely burned out on writing.

Simply put, I’d lost my writing groove.