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How to respond to reviewer comments: The Drafts Review Matrix
As I have been sharing my academic workflow with my blog readers, I realized that much of what I have been writing may be of help not only to PhD and Masters’ students, or early career scholars...
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The 30 minute challenge: Achieving short-term goals
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a strategy I use to keep myself motivated: the Quick Wins method. I use this method because I am actually someone who faces enormous challenges in keeping himself focused...
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Simplifying paper writing with Mendeley’s Cite-o-Matic and MS Word
Ever since I was a PhD student, I tried as much as I could to make it easy for me to write my doctoral dissertation. But since I am so analog in the way I work (I take notes by hand, I edit by hand,...
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Using the rhetorical precis for literature reviews and conceptual syntheses
An important component of writing is reading and summarizing the literature. This exercise helps the author situate his/her work within the broader set of related works. I maintain a systematic process...
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Upcoming talk “Writing YOUR Way to your PhD (and Tenure): Doing Academic Work...
Like many political scientists, I will be descending on Chicago this week to present two papers at the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA). I was invited by Dr. Kelly LeRoux (University of...
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Writing synthetic notes of journal articles and book chapters
Earlier this week I shared Dr. Katrina Firth’s modified version of the Cornell Method’s Notes Pages. I used the Cornell Notes method in 2013 and really didn’t click with me, so I simply moved on. Had I...
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Distinguishing between description and analysis in academic writing
When I switched from chemical engineering (my undergraduate degree) to political science and human geography (my doctoral degree), I went through economics of technical change and international...
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They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing (my reading notes)
When I wrote my blog post on how to properly teach our students how to do Description vs Analysis in their academic writing, I linked to a number of resources. The one that Dr. Omar Wasow (Princeton...
View ArticleBecoming an Academic Writer (Patricia Goodson) – my reading notes
Even though I write a lot about Academic Writing, I rarely read books now on #AcWri. Not because I don’t want to, but because I have so much stuff that I need to write myself that I end up shunning any...
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Four strategies to help build an academic writing routine
While I have a couple of blog posts pending (both by request, on how to prepare for comprehensive exams and how to build a research trajectory and a project pipeline for early career scholars), I...
View ArticleOn Writing Well (William Zinsser) – my reading notes
Before last year, I had actually not read academic writing books. I always loved the idea, but I never wanted to read what others had written about the topic before I developed my own writing practice....
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Stylish Academic Writing (Helen Sword) – my reading notes
The second book in my list of volumes I’ve been reading which focus on academic writing is “Stylish Academic Writing” by Helen Sword. She has a series of three books, of which I had bought two, the...
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How to Write A Lot (Paul Silvia) – my reading notes
As I’ve said repeatedly in my other blog posts with reading notes of academic writing books, it’s only been since early this year that I started reading books about academic writing. Not even during my...
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Write It Up! (Paul Silvia) – my reading notes
So, since I had already read Paul Silvia’s first book (How To Write A Lot) and devoured it within like an hour, and spent said hour basically yelling “YES, YES, YES, AGREED!”, I was very eager to read...
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Air & Light & Time & Space – How Successful Academics Write (Helen Sword) –...
I’ll be the first one to confess that, after having loved Helen Sword’s “Stylish Academic Writing”, I was very much looking forward to reading “Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful...
View ArticleProfessors as Writers (Robert Boice) – my reading notes
As I went through the first few pages, I realized that I had read Boice’s book at some point in my doctoral degree, but never paid much attention to the book, to be perfectly honest. It wasn’t until I...
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#AcWriMo Day 1: On the importance of gradually building an academic writing...
I’ve had a “want-to-do-can-do-can’t-do-wish-I-could-do” relationship with AcWriMo (the Academic Writing Month, first started as #AcBoWriMo, Academic Book Writing Month, in November of 2011, by Dr....
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#AcWriMo Day 2: Deciding on which writing projects to tackle and in what...
One of the challenges we (professors, and I believe, graduate students, contingent faculty, and a broad range of other academics and adjacent-to-academia folks) face is that we increasingly feel that...
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Writing Without Bullshit: Boost Your Career by Saying What You Mean (my...
This year, I’ve been reading a lot about writing (in general), and academic writing (in particular), because more and more people come to my website for advice on how to write, and I’ve created a nice...
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Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks (A Guide to Academic Success) (my...
Despite the fact that I have interacted with Dr. Wendy Laura Belcher quite a lot, we discuss academic writing almost every day, I had never written my reading notes of her book (Writing Your Journal...
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