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Granular planning and The Rule of Three
One of the things I’m an expert on is overwhelming myself with the sheer amount of work I have to do. In the past decade, I have slowly become better at simply reducing the size of my To-Do list and...
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Using the rhetorical precis for literature reviews and conceptual syntheses
An important component of writing is reading and summarizing the literature. This exercise helps the author situate his/her work within the broader set of related works. I maintain a systematic process...
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Using #AcWriMo to develop a daily writing practice
My relationship with #AcWriMo (Academic Writing Month, which happens at the same time as National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo, in November) has always been a bit of love and hate. In 2012, I joined...
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On doing the grunt work in academia
While I have pushed for reflection and slow scholarship in my blog, I have to admit that some of the less romantic and glamorous parts of academia don’t particularly excite me. I call that “the grunt...
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Mind mapping as a strategic research and writing tool
My first degree is in chemical engineering, but I started taking courses in what my colleagues used to call “the soft sciences” (aka strategic management, business administration, and social sciences)...
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Reverse-planning (backcasting) a paper (or a research project)
Funny how some ideas have grounding on different disciplines and yet, we all end up learning more or less the same concept across several of them. I first heard of the concept of future studies (aka...
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Using prompts to motivate writing: Five strategies to get some words out
I just came back from a week in Paris attending a meeting of field experiments’ scholars, and I took the opportunity to do some fieldwork. There are perfectly good reasons why I study French water...
View Article#GetYourManuscriptOut #SendOutFortNight (April 15-30th, 2017)
Almost three years ago, Dr. Steve Shaw (McGill University), Dr. Mireya Marquez (Universidad Iberoamericana Santa Fe) and I founded the hashtag #GetYourManuscriptOut. I was frustrated that I had SEVERAL...
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Writing an annotated bibliography
One of the research products I find most useful for an academic, short of openly-accessible datasets and code for replication is the annotated bibliography. As I have noted before, I consider the...
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Distinguishing between description and analysis in academic writing
When I switched from chemical engineering (my undergraduate degree) to political science and human geography (my doctoral degree), I went through economics of technical change and international...
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They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing (my reading notes)
When I wrote my blog post on how to properly teach our students how to do Description vs Analysis in their academic writing, I linked to a number of resources. The one that Dr. Omar Wasow (Princeton...
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Writing a memorandum based on a synthetic note
In previous posts I have addressed how to write rhetorical precis (very brief, four sentence summaries of the reading you are doing), synthetic notes (brief summaries of articles, focusing on the...
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A step-by-step guide to writing a research paper, from idea to full manuscript
As anybody who reads my blog may know, I often write blog posts upon request. Many of them I’ve written because my own graduate students, undergraduate students or research assistants ask me to help...
View ArticleBecoming an Academic Writer (Patricia Goodson) – my reading notes
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...
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Four strategies to help build an academic writing routine
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...
View ArticleOn 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....
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Air & Light & Time & Space – How Successful Academics Write (Helen Sword) –...
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...
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