Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.

GRAMMAR. If you haven’t done so before, now is the time to start taking an interest in grammar. Unless you’re an English super-scholar, nobody is going to expect you to have perfect grammar, but anyone interested in writing should be interested in writing well. There are lots of basic guides to grammar that can help you tidy up some common mistakes, but it’s also a good idea to start paying close attention to details in everything you read. This will help as you put your own mental map together of what good writing looks like. Editors will be there to help polish a final piece, but you’ll find your entire writing process easier if you write carefully from the start.

What else you should not do ? Maybe this tip can help you.

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.

TIME YOURSELF. Use something like the Pomodoro Technqiue, named after the iconic tomato kitchen timer. The idea is that you measure your working time in “pomodoros” which are blocks of time comprising 25 minutes of work, 5 minutes of rest. Each block of time is known as a “pomodoro” and signifies a unit of productivity. Even if you only do one pomodoro a day, you’ll find your writing output will increase greatly. Better still, though, try for 2 or 3 pomodoros a day. You can even use a focus boosting app – there’s lots based on the Pomodoro Technique which give you audio/visual reminders.

What else can help your Hackademic writing ? Click here to find out!

“… And so the frogs cast off and lived happily ever after.”
Image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/
sasha_kopf/3811949321/in/photostream/

When you think of academic writing, you don’t often think of a story in the conventional sense; academese is notorious for being dry and dull. But ‘story’ is a key piece of academic tacit knowledge.

Story: noun
Usual meaning: An account of events told for entertainment.
Academic meaning: A key conclusion/s of research which the reader is brought to through the flow of an academic paper.
Usage examples:
“I think I’ve got a story.”
“The story is coming together but it needs sharpening.”

The concept of story is an acknowledgement that a jumble of results doesn’t necessarily make a great paper. It’s easy to see the IMRAD structure followed by most scientific papers and think that all you need to do is fill in under each heading, and hey presto – paper. Not so. A paper needs results but also should have a punchy key message which the rest of the paper sets up and supports with a logical flow of ideas. The difficulty is that writing a great paper goes against most of the training PhD students have been given.

The concept of story in an academic paper is totally different to traditional essay structure. One of the key differences is balance – an essay is a balanced synthesis, whereas a paper is closer to a sales pitch. For those of you who have never been in sales, sales people deliberately control the conversation and lead the customer to buying the product. For an academic paper, the task is to control the reader’s thought-pathway so that they come to understand and agree with the key message. Though the word ‘control’ makes this sound awful, it’s not so different from the concept of classical style: the writer orients the reader to something in the world, which the reader can see with their own eyes. A paper attempts to lead the reader through the sequence of ideas so that they might come to the same conclusion as the author did. That’s a story.

The best papers draw you in to their narrative like a great story-teller. One of the ways that they do this is by telling a story and not getting distracted from it. That means paring down and building the story around the central logical sequence of ideas. A story needs the right amount of detail, at the right point. Too much or too little and the reader will go off down a mental side-alley. I realize that this is as clear as mud, so I will try to demonstrate using a crass example. Consider the following statement:

A person went down the street.

It’s informative and brief. This is fine, but leaves the reader wondering and potentially sidetracked by the lack of precision. What sort of person? How did they go down the street? What sort of street? The reader feels under-informed. Let’s try again, with more details:

The man in a blue coat skipped down the street with red brick houses on either side.

Lots more detail now, but how is the reader to ascertain what the salient point is? The sentence is longer, cumbersome and provides multiple opportunities for the reader to be derailed and wander off with a detail that may or may not be important to the story. Why is the man in a blue coat? What sort of red brick houses? The original purpose of the sentence, (to lead the reader down the street with the man), has been completely subverted by interesting but unimportant details. Third time lucky:

The man skipped down the street.

Here is a happy medium. Without increasing the word count from the original, the sentence provides two more (of the most salient) pieces of information. It keeps the focus on the person going down the street, with the most unusual element very clear (the skipping) because it isn’t hidden by other information.

So next time you’re writing, try asking yourself: what’s the story, and is this detail essential to it?

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.

LOVE WHAT YOU’RE WRITING. Jesse often tells his students when they’re working on class projects that if they’re not having fun, they’re doing something wrong. This doesn’t mean that every moment of the process will be fun, but it does mean that the overall trend should be to have the work be fun-inducing not pain-inducing. Countless studies have been done that show how much more we remember when learning is fun. When something is painful, we try to forget it as quickly as possible. Thus, if you love your project, you will learn more from the process and your learning will illuminate the page, improving the quantity and quality of your writing.

For more information on becoming a Hackademic , click here !

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.

KEEP SCORE. Writing is not a contest; however, as much as we’d like to say, “academic publishing is not a contest,” we can’t. There are winners and losers in academic publishing, so it makes sense to start keeping score. How many writing projects have you finished? Where has your work appeared? How many people have read it? How many times have you been cited? How many copies of your book have you sold? You can’t get to any of these larger questions without starting first with a more foundational one like, “How many words have I produced today?” So to start with, create a spreadsheet or just jot your daily word count onto a calendar. You can make yourself even more accountable by tweeting the numbers. The number of words is meaningless, really, except in the way that it inspires you to keep making more. We think this tips can also help you academic work as well.

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.

LOVE WRITING. A friend of Charlotte’s who finished her PhD a couple years before her once talked about the strange pleasures of the final writing stage. Charlotte thought she was mad when she told her about an unparalleled pleasure derived from delving deep into her thesis and thinking and writing intensely for hours. She spoke of a level of focus that was like nothing she’d experienced before and a connection with her work that was all-consuming and effervescent with ideas. Charlotte figured this was some strange state she’d invented to compensate for the final weeks of PhD work where bodily hygiene and a balanced diet would go out the window. But, later, as her own work reached that same stage, Charlotte discovered her friend was right. Let’s face it, we wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t find some kind of pleasure in thinking and writing, but deadlines and writer’s block often loom large and eclipse those moments of personal-writerly-discovery. Quite the best way to approach writing projects is to embrace the real joys of writing and keep them foremost in your mind throughout all the low points. As with relationships, all too often we tend to share the pain and anguish, but if we talk more about what is good, we’ll soon foster a better attitude to writing.

Want more tips on Hackademic? Click here!

Image from Mochimochiland.com

This blog post by Ben (author of the Literature HQ blog) is part of a series that asks after new forms of scholarship and demonstrates how academic out-put is changing in the digital age.

From blogs like the Thesis Whisperer to Twitter communities like #PhDchat there are a number of ways in which academics are harnessing digital communication technology to support each other and their work within and without institutions. And some are even outright reinventing what academic scholarship might be. We are well beyond the early phase of academic listserves and blogs and into a – perhaps third wave – of digital discourse design.

In this series I’ve invited the people responsible for these types of projects to share what their intentions were when they established them. How their projects have changed the way they (and we, as participants) work, research, share, support and interact with each other as global colleagues. And how they might describe what the emerging skill-sets are and their benefits and pitfalls.

Today’s celebrities are more accessible than ever before. It’s not uncommon for me to see my friends gushing after being mentioned by a minor (or sometimes major) celebrity on Twitter. While this may seem trivial, for me it’s amazing. I think it represents the shrinking of oceans between us and people who we thought were totally inaccessible. This includes vacuous celebrities, but more importantly, it also includes the greatest minds of the 21^st Century. This incredibly powerful phenomenon has become the new focus of my growing blog.

So where did it all begin? Well, I suppose my site is first and foremost an experiment. Now I have some idea of how I want it to progress but at the start I certainly didn’t. I just wanted to make a “complete” resource for people doing an academic literature review. By complete I mean that I didn’t just stop half way through but made it into something that someone could ultimately use to succeed with their own project.

Based on my early goal and the vision that I had the site has far surpassed my initial expectations. However, as the site has grown so have my ideas hopes for the future of the project. It has been a great vehicle for me to experiment and learn about communicating useful information through digital media such as Twitter, You Tube and Webinars.

Initially it was just me rattling around on the blog, not much of a community or input from others. Now I think that the community and the other contributors are the most important part. Perhaps the most influential section of the blog is a podcast that I use to talk to experts from all different academic fields to try and help my readers/listeners with their literature review. This was popular when it first started but I’ve recently been hosting the podcasts live with input from the audience which has been a huge success. I think it highlights the changing tide of media in general. It is no longer acceptable to just preach to crowds from a pulpit. Our audiences expect to be engaged by the people who are providing them with information.

Is this novel? Am I feral, hybrid and outstitutional? When Charlotte asked me this I couldn’t help but smile. I’ve never really thought about it before but yes, this is how I feel at the moment. I feel that what I do is provide an alternative to the way that a lot of skills training (especially writing) is done in universities. I feel like I’m providing an education that I needed myself about 3 years ago! I’m ok with this. It’s certainly not that the academic institutions are doing a bad job, but it’s very difficult to cater to everybody. That’s why I like what I do and I like providing an alternative resource and an alternative point of view. I think it’s ok to be feral as well. This way we are all a little bit leaner and meaner, ready to adapt to the ever-changing tides as larger institutions simply can’t be.

How would I describe Literature Review HQ now? Well I’d say deep down it hasn’t really changed. I still want to make a “complete” resource for anyone doing an academic literature review. However my definition of “complete” has changed. Now it’s not just about me sharing my experiences and advice. I feel like now it is my responsibility to find the very best experts in the world and to try get them to impart their wisdom to my audience. In the future I also want to focus even more on engagement. I think it’s really exciting how we can deliver information online. I also think it’s exciting how accessible people genuinely are. We really have the best information within reach. If we want we can talk to experts and learn an awful lot. I feel that it is my responsibility to use my blog as a platform to aggregate all this information for the benefit of anyone who wants to really write an amazing literature review.

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.

PURGE YOUR THOUGHTS. Instead of asking yourself to practice writing, you might instead think of your daily writing as a sort of mental purging. You could, for example, start or end your day with a diary-style cleansing of your thoughts. Why would so many people write diaries if it wasn’t so incredibly useful in making sense of your own head? And besides, therapists can be really expensive! Sometimes we can’t see the forest for the trees, so siting down and writing whatever comes to mind can be a good way of getting some of distracting ideas out of your way. Likewise, engaging in a free-form writing session can spark some untapped creativity, helping us see some wilder connections in our ideas that we hadn’t considered before.

This tip also can help you with your thoughts.

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.

FIND AN AUDIENCE. Without an audience, you have no real motivation for writing. Your work becomes an exercise in speaking to an empty room, which is – to be fully honest – kinda crazy. So first it is a good idea to really think who you are aiming your work at? Who would you like to speak to and why? And then think about building this audience more literally. For example, students can be an excellent audience for rough pieces of writing and early ideas. Blog posts and conferences are other great platforms for building an audience for your work as you’re writing. Of course you need the writing to really win an audience, but building an audience one step at a time works really well. Then, once you have an audience, the demands of that audience will keep you writing.

Want more tips on Hackademic? Click here!

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.

WRITE SOME MORE. Write regularly to improve your communication skills in all areas of your work and ward off that dreaded writer’s block. Try to allot a bit of quiet time – even half an hour is enough – to get some thoughts onto paper/screen every single day. At first it will seem like a chore, but all too quickly you’ll notice how productive you can be. Some of the material you produce might well make it into your book or article, or perhaps it will become a blog post, or some other way of publicly discussing your work. In fact, blogging regularly can really help. It adds an important level of accountability if you imagine you have to blog once a week or you’ll lose face. Reporting on the ideas you’re processing in this lighter more chatty style will be easier and it will help you get to the crux of the matter – don’t underestimate how important it is to be able to communicate widely. Try to keep this daily writing routine no matter what else is going on. So, even if you’re traveling, consider setting aside just a small amount of time to do some writing, even if you’re just pecking letters into the notes app on your smart phone. It doesn’t have to be academic writing; every bit of writing we do ultimately helps hone our craft.
This tip also can help you with your thoughts.

* Acknowledgements at bottom of blog

Today’s post is by Ellen Spaeth, a PhD candidate in Clinical Psychology and Music. Her research concerns how listening to music could help people with anxiety disorders. She has an excellent blog about academic writing, productivity, technology, and music psychology and Tweets about those things, and her ukulele as @ellenspaeth. In today’s post she creatively uses a video gaming metaphor to consider ways of developing motivation for writing a PhD; an approach also relevant to the academic publishing journey post-PhD. 

When I was 13, I spent hours playing Super Mario on my Nintendo 64. I would try again and again to get something right. My dad asked me why I was happy to work so hard to make Mario wall-kick off ice cliffs, but had no patience when it came to practising the clarinet.

Last year, the answer just popped into my head: motivation. Since then, I’ve been trying to figure out what it is about video games that motivates me to play them, and how I can use those things to make my PhD more fun and productive. What did I find? Here are 4 things…

1. Big goals are divided into manageable chunks

If you divide a big goal up enough times, the goal becomes tasks, and tasks become instructions.

Can you imagine a 3-or-4-year video game where your only instruction was “Complete the game”? Make sure you don’t view “Complete the PhD” as your only goal. For more advice on this, see my posts on identifying, scheduling, and reviewing tasks.

2. Cost/benefit analyses are easier

In a video game, you’ll usually be told what you need to do (cost), and what you’ll gain (benefit). A quest, or task might be necessary for the game to progress. Or it might get you a great, rare, item. It might get you something that you didn’t even want.

But if you know in advance what you stand to gain, you can make the decision of whether the amount of work involved is worth it. Is it worth doing the tedious, lengthy task for the unwanted item? Probably not. Is it worth it for the great item, or to continue the game? Almost certainly.

Try to think about your PhD that way. If you’re finding something really difficult and distressing, think about what you’ll gain. Is it worth it? If not, don’t do it. If it is, focus on the thing you’ll gain. It should motivate you more.

3. If you’re stuck, someone can help you

Video games are popular. That means there are a lot of people talking about them on the Internet. Some of those people have made “walkthroughs”, which are step-by-step instruction guides for video games. So if you have no idea where you’re going, and have run out of patience, you can look at the walkthrough.

After you’ve looked at the walkthrough, you can make an informed decision (as per step 2). If you decide you’re not getting anything out of the game, you can choose to stop playing. But at least you’re making an informed decision.

So if you’re stuck with your PhD, look for help. Go on a development course. Have coffee with a friend. Read a book or a blog post by someone else who’s experienced the same problem as you. If you still decide it’s not worth it, you won’t be making the decision blindly.

4. Achievement is built in

When you’ve completed a task, you are rewarded. Maybe you’ll get an item, or a new area will be unlocked, or you’ll be given a star for completing the level. The game is teaching you to value small achievements. If you were never rewarded for any of your actions in a game, how long would you play for?

Do you value small achievements in your PhD? It’s something that I find difficult. On completing a task, my brain is less likely to say “Fantastic! Good job!” and more likely to say “Oh. Well. That wasn’t much of an achievement. I’d better do some more work.”

To me, completing a task for my PhD feels a bit like putting money into an overdrawn bank account – the money just disappears into a hole, leaving you feeling even more panicked to make up the difference. I think this happens because we don’t stop to notice when we achieve things. So stop, and take notice!

And finally…

In an attempt to apply some of these ideas, I’ve written a short series of blog posts on trying to create frequent bursts of achievement within my PhD. The first post looks at using free writing and doing lists (with Scrivener, a pad of paper, or another word processing tool) to identify specific and achievable tasks. The second discusses how to schedule those tasks using a diary or task management app (such as Producteev). The third post shows how reviewing your progress each week can improve your feeling of achievement and your ability to judge how long a task will take. If you have any experiences, suggestions, or tips to share (or nice things to say), I’d love to hear from you in the comments section.

* The following tutorials aided in the drawing of the blog image. (C) Ellen Spaeth

How to Draw Mario and How to Draw Tutorials

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.

HACK YOUR TIME. Some weirder tricks here: 1) If you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep, rather than tossing and turning in bed, get up and write. 2) Give yourself bizarre and unrealistic deadlines, and make yourself stick to them. 3) Ask friends to join with you on bizarre and unrealistically-deadlined projects for moral support. 4) Never stand in a line without a mobile device and work you can do on it. 5) Get hands-free bluetooth in your car, so you can make phone calls while driving. 6) Get a dictation app for your smart phone, so you can write while driving. 7) Do work for friends (preferably work they loathe doing) and then ask them to do work for you (work you loathe doing). 8) Use the dead time in between other things to do work – take shower, work while hair dries, call taxi, work while waiting for it to arrive, etc. 9) Keep written summaries or mind maps of major projects handy at all times and review them often. Newer and better ideas will occur to you at the strangest moments and you’ll find it easy to share these ideas and get useful feedback in chance encounters. 10) When you have no work implements at hand, work in your brain (train rides are good places for this).What else do you need to hack ? 

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.

ESTABLISH ROUTINES. One of the things we’ve found most noticeable about the whole PhD process is that it forces us to be very resourceful and find our own ways of doing things. This ranges from the cover sheets Charlotte attaches to all her notes (so she can see the essence of a book or article and her own thoughts on it at a glance) to how we structure our day. The seemingly random and ad hoc ways you invent to do things are actually very important. By inventing your own systems you are often responding to the way you research and write up ideas. One afternoon’s quick solution can turn into a tool you use again and again throughout your career. Look at the way you do things. Think about what you’re not great at and find a better approach. Share your systems with your peers and see if they have other ways of doing things that are better than yours and speedily establish your own systems. Ultimately, you want to make sure you have ways of doing things that work for you and that you can stick to.It is also important to Hack your time too!

In the first #acwri live chat of 2013 we talked about a range of things relating to academic writing. Much of the discussion was focused on making plans for the year to come in the form of New Years Resolutions, but from this, lots of interesting tips emerged in relation to how to make 2013 the most productive academic writing year yet. As well as declaring New Year’s Resolutions and plans, we discussed a range of practical tips that can help to improve writing and increase motivation, suggestions were made about how to make the most of a sabbatical and there was also a short discussion about where best to make notes for writing. A selection of the Tweets from the chat are included below: