This Fall 2020, despite having to teach online and facing the challenges of a pandemic, I have had amazing experiences teaching research methods, research design and the mechanics of research. This past summer and fall, I taught these courses online and I realized something that I had been thinking about for a very long while […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– December 26, 2020
In a previous post, I indicated that one of the best ways to develop a writing practice was to read volumes that worked as workbooks, teaching readers how to write and how to gradually learn the craft of producing good prose. This post is a summary of the second part of my Twitter thread on […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 6, 2020
Because of the pandemic, I am now shuttling between Aguascalientes (where I live) and Leon (where my parents live). Any kind of inter-city movement should be stressful enough. What keeps me more or less grounded is that wherever I am (and have been – including Paris, last year), I always have more or less the […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– June 7, 2020
One of the best books I’ve ever read about academic writing was Joli Jensen‘s “Write No Matter What“. Ever since I read it, I pondered, “what does ‘constant, low-stakes contact with a writing project‘ mean, in practice?” This notion of regularly contributing to a piece of writing, even if it’s not daily writing, was one […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 7, 2019
One of the main questions that my doctoral students have asked me most frequently is “how do you structure your daily work routine, professor?“. While I am a scholar of neoinstitutional theory and I know the importance of routines, I have to confess that I don’t think about my own daily work routine often enough […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– November 17, 2018
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 wanted to write a post on something that I get asked about quite frequently. I arrived to the daily writing […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 29, 2017
While the vast majority of my research is in water governance, and more specifically on wastewater and sanitation, I have always had an interest in solid waste. In fact, at the beginning of my PhD, I was more interested (and did more research) on hazardous waste and municipal garbage than I did on wastewater. In […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 20, 2014
I’ve had an absolutely bonkers pair of months (April and May, and June is gearing to be the same). For the first time in 2.5 years, I attended in-person workshops (2!) I am, of course, behind on absolutely everything. I used to be a very big proponent of the “write whenever you have a small […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– June 30, 2022
“You need to stay on top of the literature” This is such a common trope in academic life (just look at this Twitter search I did). I have uttered more times than I want to admit. It’s important to note that just about everyone who does scholarly work feels the same. It’s absurdly difficult to […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– February 25, 2021
This blog post comes from a Twitter thread I did on snippets of wisdom that I have drawn from a broad range of writers. It’s like the synthesis/distillation of all (or most of) the books about writing that I have read. This wisdom applies to writers of books, articles, or theses. MAKING SPACE: Most authors […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 29, 2019
Lately, I’ve seen a lot of online commentary against the “write every day” mantra. Helen Sword, in a 2016 article, released results from surveys, interviews and focus groups she conducted with academic writers, challenging the results of Robert Boice’s research. For ME, writing every day (even if just a tiny bit, as I’ve explained in […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 21, 2019
Over the past six weeks, I’ve been reading a lot of books on the PhD journey. Mine wasn’t easy, but I wouldn’t say it was a nightmare. I made a commitment to read more stuff about how to better guide my own doctoral students, and I’m sharing what I’m learning with the world too. The […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– June 24, 2018
I’m definitely not someone who reads “pop psych” or “psycho babble” (short monikers for popular psychology, the easily digestible version of scholarly psychological findings), which is how some books on habits, speed reading, speed writing, etc. are categorized. I don’t read self-help books because I think I need them, but because they’re fun reading material, […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 5, 2018
There’s an article making the rounds on the academic circuit on the importance of writing good sentences: HOW ACADEMICS SURVIVE THE WRITING GRIND: SOME ANECDOTAL ADVICE. In the article, Helen Sword encourages the reader to improve academic writing by recognizing that writing involves editing, and rewriting. I have previously blogged about the importance of valuing […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 11, 2017
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 Academics Write“ (also published, like her previous book, by Harvard University Press). And I’ll also be honest in voicing (like with Paul […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 26, 2017
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 other type of reading other than my scholarly work. HOWEVER, I had heard so […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 8, 2017
This page is dedicated to suggestions I provide to improve scholars, professors and students’ writing. These tips have worked for me, and I hope they will work for you! Producing New Text Writing a paper (going from generating ideas to finishing and editing manuscript) This post should be useful to those who are trying to […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 14, 2016
I was going to write this blog post a long time ago, every since Ryan Briggs (Virginia Tech) alerted me to these posts by Tom Pepinsky (Cornell University), Ken Opalo (Stanford University) and Chris Blattman (Columbia University), but then the “worm wars” debate happened on Twitter, I got pulled into it (inadvertently and unwillingly) and […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 1, 2015
One of the first things other academics ask me is “why are you interested in toilets?” For the vast majority of people, the biological function of waste excretion is an after thought, an activity that nobody wants to talk about, and often times, the mere thought of talking about shit grosses them out. I am, […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– November 16, 2014
I got braces for the first time in my life last month. You may wonder “how does getting braces relate to Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega’s academic life?“. There’s a very simple response to that: In 2013, I decided to become the first priority in my life, both professional and personal. Out of context, undergoing teeth surgery […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 17, 2013
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