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Weekly Wisdom: Brought to you by the Letter M

BoxesHave a meeting. Rather than have a meeting about your project, have a meeting with your project. Maybe you’ve assigned a pet name to your research project, or otherwise seen that it has some anthropomorphic qualities. Imagine that your project has a persona. Fix it a cup of coffee or a cup of tea. Write an agenda if it would be helpful. Then you two can talk. What’s going well? Where does Project need more help? How has Project been successful? What resources can Project benefit from? What are your concerns? What do you need from Project? How can you help it along? It’s best recommended to not have this project meeting in public spaces…and you both might appreciate some privacy for your discussion.

Weekly Wisdom: Brought to you by the Letter L

BoxesGet to know your librarian. Researchers have few better allies than librarians, who are themselves trained to conduct research broad and focused, using any and all available sources. Good librarians love good challenges, so they are not only tremendously helpful but may also share your enthusiasm for finding an obscure document, a new theorist, or a new direction for your project. Librarians are also among the leaders at the forefront of digital humanities.Your campus librarian can be a great resource for promoting your scholarly work and helping you develop digital projects.

 

Weekly Wisdom: Brought to you by the Letter K

BoxesKeywords. Every discipline has its jargon, as well as its most significant keywords that are used frequently by scholars and others. Yet meanings shift over time, and certainly change from one discipline to another. Your use of these keywords includes all of the possibly connotations and interpretations by scholars who come before you. It is up to you to define your keywords specific to your usage and context. Those definitions can offer clarity, and can also indicate new directions in your research and findings.

 

Weekly Wishdom: Brought to you by the Letter H

BoxesIt’s going to be hard. If writing and research were easy, would we value our publishing successes so much? There is quite a lot of advice across the Internet (and certainly plenty here at PhD2Published) about how we might make these processes easier. But the work might begin best by acknowledging that it is hard. Perhaps that can minimize the frustrations that arise when what feels like it should flow ends up stalling, and when it is hard to find the place to start.

 

Weekly Wisdom: Brought to you by the Letter G

BoxesConsider being generous. Awhile ago there was a discussion about Tweeting during conference panels and whether doing so was making scholars’ research public outside of their established intentions. Academics are generally trained to be very protective of their ideas, their data, and their scholarship: there’s a reason for the term “intellectual property.” The inverse would be to apply the ideas of generosity and publicness to scholarship.

Michelle Moravec conducts her scholarly work in open places, inviting engagement and comments from others. She notes: “Writing in Public is my small contribution to making visible the processes by which history making takes place. I draft all my work in documents shared with readers for comments and critique.”

Author and artist Austin Kleon makes a similar pitch. His latest book is titled Show Your Work: 10 ways to share your creativity and get discovered. Kleon encourages readers to “think about your work as a never-ending process, how to build an audience by sharing that process.”

What might you gain from being generous with your scholarship?

Weekly Wisdom: Brought you by the letter E

BoxesExhale. For many readers in the Northern spheres, it’s the season for Spring Break. While a good number of students use the week off for time at the beach, the park, or other leisure activities, faculty might use the week to catch up on projects, cram to meet deadlines, or take care of outstanding teaching responsibilities. If you have time off, make sure you take time to exhale. Take a deep breath, put up your feet, sleep in an extra hour. Relaxation can be a prime remedy for preventing burnout.

 

Weekly Wisdom: Brought to you by the Letter D

BoxesDetermination. For its multiple meanings and applications, determination is a helpful quality to consider in writing and research. On the one hand, determining precisely what you want to accomplish is a first step in bringing those goals to fruition. On the other hand, approaching your work with a sense of determination and drive can put you in a frame of mind that pushes you toward completing the goals you set out to accomplish. To determine what you can accomplish in a particular block of time, figure out what the best measure is (word count, page count, time committed) and set realistic, manageable goals.

 

Weekly Wisdom: brought to you by the Letter A

BoxesMake Arrangements. Making, arranging, organizing: creating the spaces in which you write can be a first step to starting a new project, finishing a forgotten one, or moving forward with work already underway. How you arrange your space can make a difference in your comfort level–physically and otherwise. Being mindful and deliberate about how you make arrangements might lead to a more engaged writing experience.

Weekly wisdom: tips and tweaks #64 by Linda Levitt

Diorama_-_19_(8126284371)Create an emergency. Noting the similarity between “emerge” and “emergency” inspires some word play that leads to creative thinking about deadlines. Many writers will agree that deadlines can be a strong motivator: when you finally reach the point where you absolutely must get your writing done, there is little choice but to put everything else aside and focus on meeting that deadline. Now imagine creating a microdeadline that is an emergency: I absolutely must finish this paragraph/abstract/outline/chapter before I do anything else. On deadline, we’ll excuse ourselves from obligations to family and friends, let the call go to voice mail and let email go answered. What might emerge if you create a small space of no contact with an urgent deadline for yourself?

 

Weekly wisdom: tips and tweaks #63 by Linda Levitt

Diorama_-_19_(8126284371)What will you call it? When I teach public speaking, I encourage students to title their speeches in progress, often as a first step in writing. That title may never be spoken, or known to anyone but the speaker, unless someone read a written version of the speech. Perhaps even better than writing a thesis statement (which often seems to vex undergraduates), the title helps students remember what they are working on and stay on target as they are researching and writing. This method can be useful for any essay or manuscript in progress. Giving it a title is also a way of making it manifest.

 

Weekly wisdom: tips and tweaks #62 by Linda Levitt

Diorama_-_19_(8126284371)Did you make a resolution? Now make a plan. A goal without a plan is likely to go unfinished. We’ve talked about setting microdeadlines here before, and breaking big goals down into small pieces can make clear how to meet your goals in a manageable system. If you set a project goal, try to get an idea of all of the component parts. You might then set a backward timeline: if you know that you want or need to have that article finished by mid-April, how much work do you need to do each day or week in order to complete it on schedule?

Is your resolution to write every day? If so, determine if you can adequately manage that. That some days are quite full with other responsibilities may make daily goals difficult, so setting them quite small can be helpful. And if you miss a day? So be it. Set it aside and get back on track. It’s easy to abandon daily resolutions when goals are met for a day or two. Don’t give up, and don’t give up hope!

 

Weekly wisdom: tips and tweaks #61 by Linda Levitt

Diorama_-_19_(8126284371)Forgo resolutions and write a statement of purpose instead. With the new year around the corner, many of us have given thought to what we hope to accomplish in 2015. From quitting one habit to adopting another, many aspirations are affirmed on new year’s eve. While we often resolve what to do, how often do we articulate why we want to do it? As a writer, researcher, and scholar, what is your fundamental purpose? Examining why we do what we do can facilitate progress and productivity. Your statement of purpose can also be a reminder to stay on track when struggles arise.

 

Weekly wisdom: tips and tweaks #58 by Linda Levitt

Diorama_-_19_(8126284371)Watch a chilldren’s show. Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, which has just been released on DVD/BluRay in the US, might be one option, although it is certainly not the only children’s show rich enough in intertextuality to also delight adult viewers. A little bit of Teletubbies or Sesame Street can go a long way to clear one’s head and bring us back to the very basics of communication. When dealing with complex ideas and trying to articulate them, simple can be a good place to start.

Weekly wisdom: tips and tweaks #57 by Linda Levitt

Diorama_-_19_(8126284371)Engage in bracketing. This is a tip that comes from conflict management, and it carries over well to research and writing. When we are engaged in conflict, many different issues and concerns might come to the fore. If those issues create a digression, the original source of conflict might get lost and might never get resolved. Instead, the effort toward resolution turns into an even muddier puddle. In managing conflict, you should be mindful of those side issues and point out that they should be bracketed for a later conversation, once the current conflict is resolved.

As interested, engaged researchers and writers, we often find side interests that might take us down rabbit holes. This happens even after you have stopped reading your email and shut down your internet connection. Keep a notepad or an open document where you can jot down the “save for later” topics and keep yourself on track.

 

Weekly wisdom: tips and tweaks #56 by Linda Levitt

Diorama_-_19_(8126284371)Honor your ups and downs. Academic Writing Month offers a good opportunity for us to assess the flow of our work in research and writing. If there were no other responsibilities and distractions, it would be far easier to manage daily goals. But there are days when it is difficult to meet the demands of the everyday (deadlines, travel, one’s job, classes to teach or take…along with one’s personal life) and still accomplish writing goals. The crucial response is to honor those difficult days and press on.

As many know from setting new year’s resolutions, it’s easy to get frustrated by unmet goals and give up entirely. Research from the Journal of Clinical Psychology shows that only 8 percent of those who set resolutions at the new year successfully achieve their resolution. Don’t let that discourage you. Here’s the big reveal: “People who explicitly make resolutions are 10 times more likely to attain their goals than people who don’t explicitly make resolutions.” If you set specific AcWriMo goals, you are far closer to accomplishing them than you would be otherwise. If you didn’t set AcWriMo goals, there’s still almost half a month remaining…what would you like to achieve before December?