Search Results for: writing
No writing book is all-encompassing, and therefore, I cannot in good conscience answer the question I get asked the most: which book on how to write/how to survive graduate school is the best? As I said on Twitter: “none of them”. Anybody who has written a book on this topic will agree: you gain insights […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 2, 2020
It took me about however long it took me to FINALLY buy and read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. People have recommended Bird by Bird to me (particularly the Shitty First Drafts chapter) FOR YEARS. And it’s August of the year 2020 and I JUST got it. I would […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 1, 2020
I’ve admitted this clearly from day 1: I ALWAYS HAVE A TERRIBLE TIME DEALING WITH REVISE-AND-RESUBMIT MANUSCRIPTS. Yes, I know that Dr. Sara Mitchell would say “R&R is the goal”, but still, it’s SO HARD for me to cope with reading reviewers’ comments and making the revisions. I have published quite a bit and yet […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 7, 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
As I write this series of blog posts on writing the thesis/dissertation, I get serious flashbacks of the period when I had to write my doctoral dissertation. The funny thing is, I have also had flashbacks from when I wrote my Masters’ and my undergraduate theses. Despite the fact that one was in chemical engineering, […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 31, 2020
This page hosts blog posts I’ve written on how to write different parts of the dissertation, from the introduction to the concluding chapter. Because most of my students use the 3 papers dissertation model, much of my focus here is on assembling a coherent dissertation by combining the three papers, but these posts apply (with […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 26, 2020
The other day, on Twitter I wrote a thread trying to think through my own ideas about a potential classification or typology of work. Like I normally do with anything that is scholarly, I write about it because I’m trying to clarify my thoughts in my own head. This typology of work should be generalizable […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 17, 2020
I really love writing. I absolutely do. But hasn’t always been like this. As a child, I actually did not like writing very much. Two factors influenced my enjoyment for the actual process. First, my Dad used to have a column in the local newspaper. Because his child was a book worm, he thought to […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 2, 2020
Thanks to a relatively extended bout of health, I have been writing a lot. Even more exciting than that, I’ve been FINISHING UP a lot of papers. This afternoon, I managed to finish a journal article that I had long overdue. I consider this achievement a major victory. Most of the stuff I’ve been writing […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 29, 2020
My oldest brother is a tenured, full professor at California State University Los Angeles, in Los Angeles, California (USA). As a result, we frequently talk about the challenges and joys of our lives as professors. This past week, we were chatting about all the stuff we need to submit for publication, and how difficult it […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 17, 2020
I find working at home every single day, all day, staying with my Mom, in my childhood room’s home office, and not teaching this semester, extraordinarily weird. COVID-19 (“the coronavirus”) is keeping me and millions of other people in Mexico and around the world locked inside our houses to avoid contagion and break the chain […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 12, 2020
I remember when I was starting my doctorate, a number of faculty told me that they did not foresee me finishing my dissertation because I was very social. I can only assume that my being social was seen as “not serious enough to work alone and concentrate in his research and writing”. Well, not only […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– February 21, 2020
Around 2018, I started reading several books on “how to do a PhD, academic writing, and writing more generally. I did so to help my own doctoral students (by the way, you can read my “Reading Notes of Books on How To PhD” by clicking on the hyperlinked text)). Through time, I have developed a […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– February 20, 2020
I find it slightly ironic that I am writing these blog posts to guide my doctoral students when a few of them have already graduated and I have two so close to completing their dissertations. I recently came to realize that a lot of students want to write their dissertations or theses AFTER some randomly […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– February 19, 2020
I am really glad to be able to write more technical threads on Twitter in 2020. Technical in the sense that they pertain to stuff I have scientific and technical expertise on. I love writing about academic writing, organization and time management, research planning and execution, but writing about research methods, and in particular, qualitative […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– February 2, 2020
There’s a lot of writing around about “writing retreats” and I had wanted to write about this for a long while, but I had not been able to do so until today when Dr. Katie Rose Guest Pryal asked me what I thought about writing retreats (you should read her entire thread, which starts here: […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 21, 2020
I had been wanting to transfer my Twitter reading notes about How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble: A Practical Guide but because of personal health issues I had not, so I am glad that I am now able to write, using January 1st, 2020 as the backdrop! I am having a coffee, and copying […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 1, 2020
Earlier this year, I was invited to Memorial University of Newfoundland (in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada) as the George M. Story Distinguished Lecturer (thanks to Drs. Amanda Bittner and Arn Keeling who successfully submitted an application for and won a grant to bring me to MUN). I gave a public lecture, a research talks and […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– November 13, 2019
When I first purchased Andrew Abbott’s “Digital Paper: A Manual for Research and Writing with Library and Internet Materials” I did not realize he was a sociologist of knowledge, which is why my comment on his ethnographic approach (below, on my Twitter thread) is ill-informed. I recently read an interview with him about Digital Paper […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 1, 2019
One of the things I realized as I was going through my Resources pages and more specifically, my Reading Notes of Books I have Read is that I have not tweeted nor blogged enough about methods. This makes me feel particularly bad because well, I am a methods guy. So I figured I’d write about […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 29, 2019
Henry Miller (the writer) is widely regarded for his avant garde approach to writing, particularly about s3x. Many people on the internet share his 11 commandments of writing. But Miller had much, much more to say about writing, as Thomas M. Moore shows in his Henry Miller on Writing published by New Directions Books. I […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 29, 2019
The one question that I get asked by just about every single person I have ever interacted with, who reads my blog and knows about my Reading Notes of Books I Have Read section of my Resources pages, is: “which writing book do you recommend? Which book should *I* read?” Well, I’m here to tell […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 16, 2019
While normally I write Twitter threads or blog posts in response to requests, particularly of my students and research assistants, but also when I hear from scholars across the globe, this post (based on my Twitter thread) comes from my own needs, both as a writer (I am writing and revising a literature review section […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 14, 2019
One of my former students asked me recently whether I had written anything on how to write a literature review, as he was asked to write one on a topic he hadn’t ever done research on (I do have a blog post on how to map an entirely new topic and write a literature review). […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 9, 2019
While I do not study nor research academic writing (there are people who do!), there’s something that has kept popping in my head: the notion of Overview Devices. I define Overview Devices as artifacts (diagrams, techniques, strategies) that help us sustain a “bird’s eye”, a panoramic view of what we are doing. While writing a […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 6, 2019
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