I sat on the “Writing and Publishing” table at the Environmental Studies Section Speed Mentoring Roundtable during the 2023 meeting of the International Studies Association (ISA) in Montreal (Canada). Photo credit:Lily Hsueh. My co-panelist was my coauthor and dear friend Dr. Kate O’Neill, so we agreed to talk about the process of academic writing and […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 19, 2023
Last week, I attended the 2022 Discards Studies Conference: Exploring Disposal’s Past, Present, and Future in New York City. As a scholar of waste, wastewater and discards, this was a really key conference for me to attend. This was also my first conference after 3 months of COVID, COVID sequelae and pneumonia. Though I am […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 25, 2022
I want to make something perfectly clear, particularly because it looks like people want to jump and “do research”, “collect data”, “analyse things” and would rather do any of those rather than read. READING IS WRITING. You NEED to read, to be able to situate your work. I get tired of having to repeat this […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 21, 2022
Whenever I teach academic writing I tell my students a number of things I strongly believe are fundamental. The three lessons I list here are in my view of the utmost importance. First, to learn how to write, you need to read. On my blog, I have written multiple times about the value of reading […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 21, 2022
I recently tweeted a thread of blog posts of mine that doctoral candidates can use to prepare for their defense (could be adapted to undergraduate or Masters) which I’ll turn into a blog post soon enough. Now, you may ask, what about those doctoral candidates still in the throes of doing the PhD?? My advice […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 16, 2022
This blog post describes my understanding of the “parking your writing downhill” strategy to kickstart your academic writing or simply to keep going. It was Dr. Veronica Kitchen who first said to me that she usually “parks her writing downhill”. It sounded like such an interesting strategy that I had to research it. How do […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 23, 2022
I wrote a thread in Spanish last night on puzzles and how to craft research questions. I’ve written about this topic several times in English, and in Spanish, but not on the actual topic of “puzzles”. This blog post is NOT about “puzzles” (I am preparing another one, in English, on this very topic). But […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 23, 2022
I love writing. I utterly, completely and absolutely adore writing. Am I naturally gifted as a writer? No. Is writing easy for me? Also no. Do I write in spite of the fact that I struggle with it? Yes. Am I a good writer? I suppose that by some standards, I am. The thing is, […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 23, 2022
One of the things I resented the most was not getting the guidance I required for a lot of the work that came with the PhD degree. There are things, of course, where I did get advice, and one of them was to write my doctoral dissertation as a package of three papers focusing on […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 23, 2022
Writing is hard. And writing field notes is hard, too. I don’t think that there is enough guidance on how to do it. I’ve written about the use of ethnographic fieldnotes in scholarly written output, but I don’t think I had ever written about how to write fieldnotes and how to teach or learn on […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– October 12, 2021
I found a request on Twitter by a professor on how to help students with “large N word” assignments (3,000 words, 5,000 words, a thesis). This is something I have thought about frequently because contrary to what people may think (with all the writing I do), I am actually not verbose. I hate having to […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 14, 2021
One of my biggest challenges as someone who is a Virgo, Type A, Upholder, is to avoid the pressure of wanting to Do All The Things. My time is limited, my physical energy is too. Often times, I also fall prey to the trap of devaluing my achievements. Yes, I read several drafts of my […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 7, 2021
A scholar from the global south asked me recently for references or some help on how to use ethnographic field notes in the actual writing of a paper, and how they should be reported (that is, how we can use the material we write in a fieldwork notebook in the actual writing of a manuscript). […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 19, 2021
This sub-page hosts my blog posts associated with skills, strategies, methods and techniques we can use to develop a writing practice. On the importance of the Reading, Note-Taking, Synthesizing and Writing sequence in developing an academic research and writing practice. In this blog post I explain my experience teaching how to read, take notes, systematize […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– December 26, 2020
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
This page hosts my blog posts on writing groups and retreats. How to get the most out of an online writing group or retreat This blog post outlines my experiences with online writing groups and retreats, and how someone might be able to benefit from participating in one. On the benefits of online and offline […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– November 29, 2020
I love writing groups, as you probably can guess from my raving about them on Twitter. I have also written on this blog about their benefits. Now, one of the questions people ask me frequently is: how can I get the most out of a writing group? Here are a few reflections regarding what works […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– November 29, 2020
My life changed right about March of 2020. Well, yes, there’s that pesky thing called a lethal global pandemic, SARS-CoV2, that also changed the lives of absolutely everyone on this planet. But I also feel changed through the work I have been doing with two amazing writing groups: one led by Dr. Amanda Bittner (Memorial […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– November 25, 2020
Anybody who follows me on Twitter or reads my blog will know that I am absolutely smitten with index cards. I have taken notes in index cards for decades, and I still do it. I loved index cards as a grade-school student and I adore them as a professor. I have a number of boxes […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– November 10, 2020
Because of the COVID19 pandemic, I’ve had more time (and concentration) to write despite my heavy teaching load (which I hope will not repeat itself ever in my entire life). This Fall term (and this past summer 2020) I’ve also taught a metric tonne of workshops and given a number of talks on academic writing. […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– November 7, 2020
Recently, Dr. Gretchen Sneegas (Texas A&M University) asked me how I manage multiple writing projects, a situation she’s facing right now as a post-doctoral researcher. This is not uncommon, even as a doctoral students: in academia, we tend to work on several projects at the same time. The biggest challenge for me is how to […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 13, 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
I have written before about how I believe that writing is a craft and an art. Writing solid prose requires technique, inspiration and knowledge of the subject matter. Learning how to write is a process that helps authors who are interested in producing cohesive, cogent and easy to read text. But I believe that the […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 6, 2020
I said on Twitter that my reading notes for this extraordinary book, Economical Writing: Thirty Five Rules for Clear and Persuasive Prose, by Dr. Deirdre McCloskey, would be simply an embed of a single tweet: this is a must-read book that everyone, even those not in economics, should buy and read. The truth is, one […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 6, 2020
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