Search Results for: writing
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
I have been writing blog posts about different parts of the process of writing a book manuscript (I’m currently working on finishing 3!) so I decided to create a separate page with the blog posts I’ve written so far. How to write the introductory chapter of a book manuscript This blog post showcases how different […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 26, 2019
I was reviewing my Twitter feed after my website went down for a few days because of a coding error, and I found a request from Dr. Sara Chatfield regarding suggestions for how to write a literature review chapter for a book manuscript. Dr. Ryan LaRochelle suggested that she look through my website to see […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 25, 2019
I remember I came across this book, “Writing in Political Science: A Brief Guide (Short Guides to Writing in the Disciplines)” by Mika LaVaque-Manty and Danielle LaVaque-Manty (you guessed right, they’re married to each other) while at a conference, but never purchased the book. I finally got a copy last year, and got a chance […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 1, 2019
Since I teach in Mexico and mentor doctoral students in Spanish, but the requirements for a global academia are increasingly international, I am always on the lookout for stuff that I think will help my graduate students. I found Hilary Glassman-Deal’s book “Science Research Writing for Non-Native Speakers of English“ during my search, and wanted […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 1, 2019
This is another book that helps those of us who are in STEM fields or publish within the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) areas write more clearly. This book by David Lindsay, “Scientific Writing = Thinking in Words” is one of the best I’ve read as far as providing detail-oriented guidelines on how to write […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 1, 2019
I had corresponded with Dr. Stephen B. Heard about his writing book “The Scientist’s Guide to Writing How to Write More Easily and Effectively throughout Your Scientific Career” a few years ago and he was kind enough to email me a PDF copy. I hadn’t made the time to read it until recently when I […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 1, 2019
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
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
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
Two of the questions I get asked most often not only by my own students but by other scholars on Twitter as well are: “how do I write good topic sentences?” and “how do I write good paragraphs?“. These two techniques are important for many reasons, but the one I think about the most is […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– October 25, 2018
Lately, I’ve been experimenting with a technique to help me get words out, particularly as I have 2 revise-and-resubmit papers, 3 book chapters that are due, and I’m writing 3 books, two of them with firm deadlines. I noticed that when I am really stressed, no matter how hard I try, and how many of […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– October 1, 2018
Three of the most challenging concepts for me to explain are the interrelated ideas of a theoretical framework, a conceptual framework, and an analytical framework. All three of these tend to be used interchangeably. While I find these concepts somewhat fuzzy and I struggle sometimes to explain the differences between them and clarify their usage […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 28, 2018
As I often do, I blog about stuff that people ask me on Twitter. This is one of the most common questions I get: how do I write journal articles out of my doctoral dissertation? @raulpacheco Any advice or resources on helping newly minted assistant professors on how to tackle getting multiple articles from their […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 28, 2018
I decided to assemble all the blog posts I’ve written on the different components of research articles, conference papers and book chapters. I’ll do a similar process for my posts on how to write book manuscripts (since I’m completing 3 volumes at the time of writing this, August 2018). Titles of the blog posts are […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 1, 2018
I had known of the excellent work of Dr. Leanne C. Powner for a very long time. We are both political scientists, and since I write so much about academic writing, and I have taught research methods, it was just a matter of time until I got to read Leanne’s excellent book, published by Sage […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 24, 2018
This book, Howard Becker’s “Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article” is an excellent volume and should be read, though as I warned in my thread, must be read primarily by those who are Becker’s peers: doctoral students’ advisers. Because of the memoir style that Becker uses (a […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 9, 2018
As many people who follow me on Twitter know, I’ve been reading numerous books on how to write, and particularly in the past few months, how my doctoral students can write their doctoral dissertations. My goal with all this reading is not only to improve my own writing, but also to learn better techniques to […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 6, 2018
While I’ve followed and interacted with Dr. Pat Thomson (University of Nottingham) for a very, very long time (and I really like her), I haven’t read all the books she’s published. She’s someone who not only studies scholarly writing, but also does A LOT of it. But I am looking forward to reading more of […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 1, 2018
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 like inexpensive, easy-to-read, fast-paced, nimble books. Writing the Doctoral Dissertation: A Systematic Approach by Davis, Parker and Straub is exactly that kind of volume. My only complaint with it is that precisely because it’s so thin (150 single-spaced pages, regular font size), it misses a lot of trees in order to provide an overview […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 18, 2018
I’ll say it upfront: I HATE memoirs. I also hate the rhetorical moves that come with writing these memoirs. Even more so, I totally despise how some amazing and well-renowned authors use these memoir-writing strategies to provide writing advice. Having let that out of the way, let me say that Stephen King IS the king […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 17, 2018
One of the things that grates me is the assumption that students know a lot of stuff that would be transmitted through their school or life experience that is not translatable to everything nor everyone. Doctoral students who are non-native English speakers face this problem on a regular basis, particularly when it comes to feedback […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 16, 2018
The first book in a series of volumes I have been interested in reading is Joan Bolker’s “Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis“. First on my list of books is Joan Bolker's Writing your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day. Wishing had read […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 16, 2018
I have been travelling non-stop since January 2018 even though I had promised myself I would not do this ever again. But my scholarly research takes me to a number of places, including San Francisco last week for the 2018 meeting of the International Studies Association (ISA) and this week to the 2018 meeting of […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 13, 2018
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