This week Tim Rutherford-Johnson is looking at writing outside the comfort zone. Tim is an  academic copy-editor and proofreader with a plan to help writers feel more comfortable. (It starts with cake.)

It’s sad but true: even if the central chapters of a PhD thesis – the home of the research itself – are strong, things like the literature review, the introduction, the historical background and the conclusion are often written to a noticeably lower standard. When I’m proofreading, these framing chapters are often where I spend most of my time. Read more

This week we explore something very close to my heart, grammar. Grammatical errors were something my PhD Supervisor constantly berated me for. Here Maria Rainier discusses what you should think about before pressing ‘enter’. Maria is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education where she writes about education, online degrees, and what it takes to succeed as a student taking a bachelors degree program remotely from home. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

There’s little more embarrassing or discrediting than being caught with a grammatical error in an otherwise pristine paper being considered for—or has already undergone—publication.  The green squiggly lines in Microsoft Word are no help, and Spell Check can’t correct the misuse of words like affect versus effect (which will be discussed below).  Instead, you’re better off knowing in advance what some common problem areas are and how to tackle these grammatical mishaps. Read more

Weekly Wisdom #35

Bear the global financial crisis in mind; this is a really difficult time to make a solid case for a speculative project!

Weekly Wisdom #34

If you haven’t before start taking an interest in grammar.

Weekly Wisdom #33

Learn to love writing.

Hello and welcome to my first post as Managing Editor of phd2published. Now that Charlotte has secured her book contract she has, partially, passed the baton on to me, so I can document my progress toward and my experiences with getting my book published. Charlotte will still be documenting her experiences of writing her first book as well as contributing other relevant posts here and there.

I thought I would use this first post to introduce myself and my plans and ideas for what I want to bring to this site:

Who am I and why am I here?

I am a social scientist, more specifically a Development Geographer and my research interests lie in the areas of international environmental governance and development planning and financing, particularly in relation to sub-Saharan African countries. I completed my PhD in the Geography Department of King’s College London in 2010 and I am now working toward securing a post-doctoral research position and, as my examiners keep reminding me, publishing!

I came to this site through twitter, I love to tweet, as you meet so many new people and find invaluable pieces of information like this site. I looked through the pages and thought while I know how to approach post-doc research through a mass of grant and job applications, how do I address the issue of publishing? I suddenly thought that I really don’t know how to go about developing a publishing strategy, this worried me. Read more

Weekly Wisdom #24

Squeeze in an extra hour of writing at the start or end of your day!

This is a guest blog post from Cat Bennett author of The Confident Creative: Drawing to Free the Hand and Mind.

The Road to Yes

I’m a veteran writer of sorts. I’ve been writing all my life—journal entries, essays, stories. But I’ve always made my living as an artist, primarily as an illustrator.  Now I’m a newly published writer, the author of The Confident Creative / Drawing to Free the Hand and Mind.  Findhorn Press is my publisher and the day I received a yes from them was indeed a happy one. I remember reading once that getting a book published doesn’t really change your life, so writers shouldn’t hope for that. Published writers still get out of bed in the morning and do the things they do. Their bank accounts rarely burst at the seams from newly minted millions. It’s true my life is much as it was a year ago before my book was published. But it’s also radically changed—I feel a new freedom. Read more

Weekly Wisdom #10

Remember that good writing is about what you take out, not what you leave in!

Weekly Wisdom #9

When it comes to writing, disconnect from the internet for a while (or at the very least from social networking sites and email) and just write!

As I’d decided this site was long over-due for a post on the actual nuts and bolts process of writing, I was grateful to find a post on Fuel Your Writing on Making Writing Easy: Practical Tools. It’s basically a list of tools to support your writing by helping you manage the process more effectively.

The interesting thing about doing a PhD, but which seldom gets discussed, is the natural way you tend to evolve your own techniques for writing and researching. I still like to hand-write notes when I do an initial trawl through a book, so when I started my PhD, I printed out a batch of note cover-pages. The cover-page allowed me to quickly and clearly record a complete reference for the book and summarise both its content and what areas were of particular relevance to my own research. It was a bit clunky (I didn’t get all the boxes the right size and never got round to changing it) but at times it was such a life saver when I knew I’d read something, somewhere, at some point that was sort of related…

Read more