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On the fine balance between crafting new ideas and fighting writers’ block

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 ALL writing, including drafting, line-editing, etc.

Handwritten notes in academic research

Before I delve into the article, full disclosure: I loved Dr. Sword’s book “Stylish Academic Writing“. And if you read my notes, you’ll know that I did NOT love her latest book, “Air, Light, Time, and Space“. This happens, and it’s happened to me with two excellent authors (Paul Silvia and Helen Sword) who have published great books on academic writing (I loved Silvia’s How to Write a Lot). I don’t claim to be a guru of academic writing. But I do have graduate students, and part of my job is mentoring and training them, and teaching them best practices.

One of the practices I encourage (and fellow academics like Dr. Tanya Boza, Dr. Wendy Belcher, and Dr. Robert Boice do so too) is daily writing. A lot of people tell me “I am not a daily writing kind of academic”. You do you, of course. But my students need to be trained to get a certain number of words out by a specific deadline (this is called THESIS or DISSERTATION), and if the only mechanism to do that is to teach them how to do daily writing, that’s exactly what I am going to do.

I, too, read Sword’s blog post. But when I read it I became worried. Not for me. For students, and ECRs, and people who face writers’ block on a regular basis. I write every day. I don’t face writers’ block. I have specific routines (which include using prompts) to fight against those “demons” that convince me that my writing is terrible (I don’t claim to have perfect writing either – I just do it because I know it’s the vehicle I use to learn and share what I’ve learned too). You need to get the words out first, and THEN you can worry about editing.

As I read Sword’s post, I became worried, partly because she listed all the characteristics of a writers’ activities. What they think about. Like a laundry list. And the risk with laundry lists and graduate students or early career scholars or novice writers is that they may end up doubting their own writing for too long, thus procrastinating instead of actually getting words out. This is a real risk (and that’s why I preferred Sword’s Stylish Academic Writing much more rather than her latest book) when grad students read this.

As someone who has used thematic coding, and is familiar with qualitative research strategies, I can tell by reading the article that Sword is describing the empirical findings of her research coded in themes: “writers think about CLARITY, they think about VOICE“… etc. This is a particular data analysis reporting strategy, and one that Sword uses in a superbly apt manner in her Stylish Academic Writing book. HOWEVER… this list is not a laundry lists of things that graduate students, early career scholars and blocked writers MUST put their writing through and attempt to check all the boxes. This is not a list of pre-requisites, this is a list of things that successful academic writers (as interviewed by Sword and belonging to her specific sample) do.

I think there’s enormous value to Helen Sword’s ALTS book, BUT, as I have mentioned before, these books which are more complex must be read alongside (or taught by) an experienced writer, so that the nuances can be clearly exposed. I definitely will use Sword’s ALTS in my teaching, with the proviso that I believe Sword’s article is trying to push: you must value ALL writing, which includes editing and polishing your words. It takes time. Writing also includes throwing words out and THEN polishing them, creating stylish and well-articulated sentences, etc. But first, GET THOSE WORDS OUT.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – September 11, 2017

Pushing against Taylorism in academia: Say no to the “billable hours” concept

Before I became an academic, I worked for a consultancy company. As you may know, you bill your time (much like lawyers) by the hour. The main currency of work in consulting is your hourly rate and the number of hours you work. I didn’t really like that approach, but I ended up continuing as I wanted to gain experience in the consulting world.

Workflow

Later I got a job as a researcher at a research centre that behaved itself more like a consultancy. My boss, and the institution wanted BILLABLE HOURS. Look at the contradiction: a research centre, where you do R&D, asking you to put in BILLABLE HOURS, like a lawyer). So, we all worked really long hours. We worked insanely long hours, because time we spent reading, preparing lab materials, setting up analyses, writing up reports was considered NOT BILLABLE.

The industry that this R&D centre served didn’t really want to pay what real R&D costs, so they only wanted to pay “what was fair”. Obviously, when a client is price-sensitive, you have two choices: either you find new markets (and new clients) or you go with the flow and accept the price point that the market sets (which is often very, very low). This is the case as well in many academic contexts, where tenure-track professors are paid much better than contingent faculty who are paid very low wages. While that discussion is extraordinarily important, it’s not the focus of this post. I’m referring right now to the attitude that when we read, or reflect, this is considered or perceived as though we are not working.

My workflow at my CIDE office

Continuing with my anecdote, one of the services I offered that was very popular was analyzing chemical compounds and creating Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS). Because clients were extremely price sensitive I charged the equivalent of, say $25 dollars per. This wasn’t the cost. My (arbitrarily assigned by the R&D centre) hourly rate was MUCH higher. So I had to work SUPER LONG HOURS to achieve the target number of billable hours. Basically, I had to under-sell myself and work long hours to ensure I could sell the service (writing an MSDS) to a price-sensitive buyer. I did this to keep my (then) bosses happy and be able to bill lots of hours, so that a “large percentage of my time (preferably, the majority) were billable“. But my thinking time, my reading-and-learning time wasn’t considered billable. The time I spent doing what I was supposed to be doing the best (thinking, learning, upgrading my skills) wasn’t “client-centred work time“.

We can’t, we should not let this approach creep on to academia. The time we spend reading, thinking, mulling over, meditating IS IMPORTANT. If I’m reading in my office (or my cubicle, as I used to when I worked in consulting), I’M NOT RELAXING. I AM DOING MY JOB. aylorism in academia is stupid. Efficiency, understood that way, is stupid. That’s what we ought to fight. We. Produce. Ideas. Academic work is not about the billable hours. It’s about being able to make an intellectual contribution and learn so we can teach what we learned. To be able to make this contribution we need to spend time reading, thinking, analyzing data, learning. That’s not wasted time. That’s INVESTED time. So, if you spent 3 hours reading an article, YOU DID NOT WASTE YOUR TIME. You are not billing hours. You are learning, reflecting.

I’m a professor of public policy. Public policy requires you 2 make hard choices on which policies to implement under resource constraints. I KNOW the trade-off between “writing” generative writing and writing notes on the margins of papers as I read. I don’t take it lightly. I know that the time I am spending reading is time I am not answering emails, or grading, or preparing class, or meeting with my research team. But it’s time I NEED to spend on that specific activity: learning, engaging with the literature, reading, thinking. Analyzing data works the same way.

To me, being able to spend the time to read and reflect and really craft an argument, understand the data, run a model, is VITAL. So the next time you book 30 minutes to read an article to catch up on the literature, don’t beat yourself up. THAT’S WORK TIME. I have spent entire mornings reading, and writing on the margins of the papers I read, and writing memorandums. All of that time, IS WORK TIME.

One reason why I don’t want to come back to consulting is because of the billable hours. My roommate in grad school almost died. She was a lawyer. She slept (no word of a lie) 3.5 hours every night. THREE HOURS. Because she needed to keep a certain quota of B. H. She then had to go on medical leave for a very long time because she had neglected sleep for so long.

I don’t want that life. EVER. I don’t think anyone should either.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – September 9, 2017

Professors 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 decided that I would write up my experiences as a faculty member on the tenure-track that I realized I also needed to read books on academic writing. So, I decided to buy my own copy of Robert Boice’s Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing.

The first thing that I noticed with Robert Boice is that he speaks about writing from the perspective of someone who studies academic writing, and as he himself said, from the vantage point of someone who writes about writing because he actually enjoys the activity itself. I love writing too, as you can tell if you follow me on Twitter, but it’s funny how I’ve actually become more interested in writing about writing

Like Helen Sword’s books, Boice’s books are grounded on research he’s undertaken on blocked academic writers.

It’s clear that Robert Boice’s Professors as Writers has had enormous influence on everybody who writes about academic writing, as I note below.

Basically, and in a rough summary of the entire book, Robert Boice says that you can become a better academic writer and overcome your blocks if you are able to provide yourself with the right conditions and train yourself to make writing automatic. I have done that for myself even though it’s super easy for me to get distracted, so I can assure you that there is science to the method that Boice proposes.

One reason why I love the idea of sharing writing advice is because it helps me push myself to continue writing.

My final verdict is that it’s required reading:

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – September 6, 2017

Air & Light & Time & Space – How Successful Academics Write (Helen Sword) – my reading notes

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).

Literature Road Mapping

And I’ll also be honest in voicing (like with Paul Silvia’s “Write It Up!”) my disappointment. I expected more from this book. As I have said, it’s NOT a bad book. On the contrary, it’s definitely worth buying, reading and keeping on your shelf. I just wish Sword’s book had been as good as her previous one, Stylish Academic Writing.

I write at 4 or 4:30 in the morning, but not everyone can do that, nor are they efficient doing that. Some people are (as I used to be) night owls.

This is my final assessment of ALTS and SAW.

Hopefully my reading notes will be useful to my readers!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 26, 2017

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 Paul Silvia’s second book (Write It Up!).

#AcWri while travelling

Given that I’m leading a mega research project now, it’s important to me that my PhD students and my postdoctoral research associates can have some resources on academic writing beyond my own blog. That’s also one of the motivations for me in buying books on academic writing (beyond, well, comparing my own contributions to the genre to theirs).

#AcWri while travelling

Well, I have to admit I was disappointed in the second book (which is not unsurprising – there’s a saying in Spanish “segundas partes nunca fueron buenas” (sequels have never been good). This happens with movies, and also with books (you’ll notice I didn’t love Helen Sword’s latest book either). I am not saying either of the books (Silvia’s Write It Up and Sword’s Air, Light, Time and Space) aren’t good. They are. They are VERY good. But I expected so much more from them because I was so in love with the writing they presented in their first books. At any rate, here are some of my notes from reading Silvia’s Write It Up.

I disagree with Paul Silvia that you should think about the journal before you even do the research. This is where I struggle with following anybody’s academic writing advice: what works for you and your scholarly discipline doesn’t necessarily work for me.

While I loved Silvia’s first book, I was disappointed in his second one. I think the problem I found with it is that many of the suggestions he offers are discipline-oriented (psychology) and very specific. I think it’s definitely a good book to read and have on your shelf, but not to read on your own if you’re not experienced in the craft of doing academic research and writing scholarly prose.

Paul Silvia is an excellent writer and his books are agile and easy to read. But I would definitely encourage graduate students to read the first one, and then when they read the second one, approach a senior scholar or mentor and ask for advice, particularly when it comes to responding to referee reports and prioritizing where you submit your scholarly research output.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 26, 2017

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 PhD did I read a book that would help me write more or less, or better (or worse, as the case may be!)

#AcWri at the SFO airport

Nevertheless, given the way in which many readers of my blog use it, I decided to read more books about academic writing to see if there was anything that I could contribute to the genre (I am writing a book, myself, on academic life, writing, literature reviews, reading strategies, time management, organization, and surviving academia without selling my soul to the Devil – but that’s something that I’ll discuss another time). Also, I am hopeful my reading notes can help readers decide which books to read and use.

In the past month, I’ve bought five or so books on academic writing. Two of them came very well recommended, specifically Zinsser’s On Writing Well and Paul Silvia’s How To Write A Lot. I picked up Silvia’s book first and then ordered his second one, Write It Up.

Paul Silvia is an associate professor of psychology, and someone whose writing sounds youthful. His prose is agile and easy to read, and I found myself enthralled with trying to finish the damn book and thinking to myself “yes, yes, absolutely yes, of course, damn I already have said this on my blog and in my tweets for like, forever and ever“.

I’m definitely not the only one who loved it (Silvia has two books, and as you’ll find out from my reading notes from the other book, I didn’t love it as much as this one). “How To Write A Lot” provides numerous good, actionable and practical tips on how to crank words out.

I think what I loved most about this book was that it was (a) inexpensive (b) pragmatic (c) written from the viewpoint of someone who is an academic who writes a lot. I don’t write about #AcWri because I *study* #AcWri, but because I write a lot, and in a very broad range of fields. I also use my writing tips for my own PhD and Masters and undergraduate students, and to help my colleagues.

I have also read Silvia’s Write It Up, and as my tweet mentions, I think the latter volume (and possibly this one) are best read with the help and guidance of a mentor (like a PhD advisor, for example).

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 26, 2017

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 first one being Stylish Academic Writing. A lot of people had recommended this book, on Twitter, when I first started doing Twitter threads on books on academic writing.

#AcWri setup

Trust me when I say that my credit card will be suffering for a long while, because I went on a shopping spree for writing academic articles’ books. I had already read Patricia Goodson’s “Becoming an Academic Writer” and Graf and Birkenstein’s “They Say/I Say“, which I use in my writing policy lab.

I think I got excited about doing these threads because people responded so well to my previous one on Patricia Goodson’s “Becoming an Academic Writer”.

I had previously written about William Zinsser’s book, “On Writing Well”. Sword’s book is very different from Zinsser, not only in tone and focus, but also on the actual premise. Sword did an actual, rigorous, scientific study of stylish academic writers. Like Zinsser, Sword argues (quite correctly) that nobody teaches us how to write academic prose. We are sort of expected to imitate our PhD advisor, I suppose?

Helen Sword, in Stylish Academic Writing, recommends the use of the active voice (“I”). I am a big fan of this mode of writing. I find the passive voice to be an oversimplified model of how we should be writing for a particular target audience. I also find it pseudo-scientific.

One of the things that has become really hard for me to teach my students is how to find the key (foundational) sentence in a paragraph. Most writing courses will encourage you to have it at the very beginning of the sentence. Many academic authors don’t do it, unfortunately.

One of the things I found most useful was the “Creating A Research Space” (CARS), or what Zinsser and others call, “the hook”. Why exactly did you do the research you conducted?

I am a fan of storytelling. I teach my students that “research is stories you share based on rigorous data analysis and robust theoretical grounding” (a very similar model to what I was taught by my PhD supervisor). I’ll confess that I was very disappointed by the little coverage that Sword devoted to Storytelling.

I disagreed with Sword on the politics of citation, and I also had a few minor quibbles here and there, but overall, I loved the book, and I would recommend it to anybody who is interested in academic writing.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 25, 2017

On 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. This year, I’m doing a concerted effort to read them since I am writing my own book on academic writing, time management, organisation and the life of an academic. This week, I had to pick my Mom up from the airport (she lives 2 hours away from me, by car), and thus I brought along four books I recently purchased, so that I could read them while waiting for her flight, and for her to go through customs.

One of the first books I read was William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well”. Since I hadn’t read anything by Zinsser I didn’t know what to expect. I was delighted to find the reasons why so many people love his book(s).

I love that Zinsser takes a light-hearted, easy-to-digest approach to writing about writing (beyond solely academic writing). He basically tells you his life story and how he learned the craft and techniques of writing well.

Zinsser writes short chapters that deal with a broad range of aspects of the craft of writing which are very much applicable to academic prose generation. I particularly loved that he urges his readers to READ so that they can learn to write. I have peer-reviewed hundreds of articles and I have read thousands, and I can tell you, there are very good academic writers and there are some terrible ones. Personally, I find convoluted and jargon-laden prose very boring.

Zinsser’s “On Writing Well” is a book you really ought to read and keep on your shelves for frequent consumption. He writes amazingly well and his book will help you improve your prose.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 25, 2017

Grad school time management: If you *must* work weekends, work on Sunday

When I was in graduate school, right about after my comprehensives, people told me that they were working 100 hours a week. Heck, I was told I needed to work 100 hours a week! There is no way in hell I can put in that much work, to be perfectly honest. While I know many people will shun the idea that academics can work only 40 hours a week and not overwork (which is an idea championed by Dr. Meghan Duffy, Dr. Sherri Rose and Dr. Tanya Golash Boza), I understand that there are times when we need to work beyond the normal workload. Finishing my doctoral dissertation required me to work well beyond 60 hours a week, and closer to 100. To do this, I also had to work on Sundays.

To-Do list handwritten

And YES, I know. I’m the one who champions NOT working on weekends and NOT overworking. I’m the one who advocates against glorifying busy. But I am also well aware that in graduate school, *sometimes* you need to put in a different kind of effort and you may need to work 6 days a week. When I was finishing up, my PhD advisor told me “DO NOT WORK AT LEAST 24 HOURS PER WEEK“. What he meant was, “take at least ONE day fully off“. I usually took Sundays off, so I played volleyball, had brunch with my brother, then spent time with my partner for the rest of the day.

UNTIL… I realized this practice left me really discombobulated because I had no plan for the week ahead. I was arriving to my office on campus and had to start the day off by creating a list of To-Do items. Which of course, took at least a solid hour of my morning and left me even more discombobulated.

So about two years before defending my PhD I changed my habits, and when I need to work 6 days a week I try to do this as well: If I must work on a weekend, I’ll work on the Sunday. The rationale for this is quite simple: I will be tired from the week on Friday, so I’ll need Friday night and Saturday to recover. I can spend Saturday with my parents, and have dinner with my friends on Saturday night. Then, Sunday I can easily have breakfast with my Mom and then drive up to Aguascalientes, land at my office on campus, and work for a few hours, get a few items off of my To-Do list, and head home at a relatively early time (usually I’m home by 5pm, when I arrive to campus at 1pm).

Everything Notebook and travel kit

If I work on a Sunday, I use the last few hours of the day (early night) to write my list of To-Do items in my Everything Notebook, my priorities, check my weekly and monthly calendars, and evaluate where I am. I also catch up on reading on a Sunday. If I try to do work on a Saturday, I know I will be exhausted from the week and my productivity will be very low. That’s why I recommend to my students and colleagues that, IF and only IF they must work on a weekend, they should do so on the Sunday.

If you liked this blog post, you may also be interested in my Resources for Graduate Students page, and on my reading notes of books I’ve read on how to do a doctoral degree.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 10, 2017

How to prepare for doctoral comprehensive (preliminary, qualifying) exams

I often get asked about how did I prepare for my comprehensive exams. This is the process I used, but of course, your mileage may vary. The usual disclaimers apply.

As always, your mileage may vary. This is what worked for me. There are strategies that work for other people. Self-care, resting, and socializing can’t be overstated. You NEED to make sure to take care of yourself, always.

For me, doing my comprehensives along my cohort colleagues was really empowering. It helped me feel that I wasn’t alone.

If you liked this blog post, you may also be interested in my Resources for Graduate Students page, and on my reading notes of books I’ve read on how to do a doctoral degree.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 8, 2017