The latest #acwri live chat was all about writing grant applications for research funding. Jeremy has done the storify summary of this chat and you can view it at his webpage as well.
The latest #acwri live chat was held on Thursday 7th June 2012 at 6pm on Twitter, chaired by PhD2Published. This week the community voted for the topic ‘Tools for academic writing’. The chat was well attended and lively and has created a great resource for all academic writers (and indeed writers!). Included are some fantastic links to different websites and software that can be used to boost writing processes and productivity including Scrivener, Mendeley and 750 words.com. Dr Jeremy Segrott has now Storified the chat (below).
The latest #acwri live chat was conducted on Twitter on Thursday 10th May 2012 and Jeremy chaired it.
Through a Tweet poll the community cast their votes on a choice of four topics to discuss this week; finding motivation to write, writing an academic blog, collaborative writing and grant application writing. Interestingly there was a tie for discussing writing an academic blog and finding motivation to write so we decided to go with finding motivation first (which is of course fundamental to all forms of academic writing) and we shall be discussing writing an academic blog next time (come and join us Thursday 24th May 2012, 6PM GMT). We are really keen that the community has as much of as a say as possible about the topics we discuss so if you’re on Twitter, keep an eye out for our links to the topic polls and to the final summaries.
Until then, here is the really useful summary of finding motivation to write:
Since the AcWri live chat officially launched on Twitter recently, Jeremy and I (Anna, PhD2Published) have been summarizing the chats with the aim of generating a useful and lasting resource for all academic writers. From now on, the plan is that each summary will be posted to both the PhD2Published site and Jeremy’s own personal blog so that everyone can access them after each event. The first of the chats have already happened and provide some great information, hints and tips about academic writing. The summaries for these from previous weeks can each be individually accessed using the following links:
Thursday 16th February 2012: The very first chat initiated by Jeremy: Starting a chat
Thursday 23rd February 2012: With PhD2Published, the second chat involved further exploration of potential academic writing related topics to discuss during the chats, including some initial discussion about academic writing issues. See the summary here.
Thursday 5th March 2012: Writing Journal Articles
It is hoped that these provide a great online resource and introduction to the AcWri community. If you are an academic writer, or a writer more generally, please do get involved. The bigger the community, the more ideas and questions we can discuss and the more support we each gain. Acwri live chats are run on Twitter on Thursdays at 6pm GMT every fortnight.
The latest #acwri live chat held on Thursday 12th April 2012 is summarised below and is available here:
It was identified that there is very little information on the subject of actually writing conference papers (P2P found one useful one during the chat and I am sure there are many more – please do share!). Predominantly focus is on presenting them. This is a significant gap given that presentations are so important in trying out new ideas and networking, and are also another form of academic writing:
Today’s post complements our new #AcWri project and is written by Jennifer S. H. Lim, a Computer Science graduate, currently working on her final submission of her dissertation as part of the fulfillment for her Master in Computer Science at University of Malaya, Malaysia. In the first of a two part series, Jenn introduces her now established academic writing initiative. She also blogs about her studious life and tweets as Studious Jenn @mystudiouslife.
I love writing. I use it to share ideas and information with the hope that it engages people in conversations that generate more ideas. That’s why I also love blogging, where I can write freely about topics that interest me whenever I like. However, academic writing is a different story. I still write topics that interest me but the need to actually write is more intense than merely writing a blog post. Academic writing projects are usually longer and more time consuming and no matter how much I love writing, when it comes to writing academically, the process can become overwhelming. Most of the time, writing just doesn’t happen at all. Procrastination ensues and then I just panic and write last minute, which doesn’t meet any quality control.
This approach just doesn’t work well for me, especially at the point when I needed to write at least 10,000 – 30,000 words of a dissertation over a period of time. Although there was no set due date in that situation, I knew that the longer I delayed writing, the longer I would take to finish it. My biggest problem is that when there is no one to ‘force’ me to write I eventually procrastinate more. Hence, in order to succeed, I have to take actions. I need to be the one who ‘forces’ myself to write and I must be accountable for my own progress and success. This is the reason I started the Academic Writing Accountability initiative, where writing goals are shared in a spreadsheet and progress are updated daily. This initiative revolves around a Twitter community made up of anyone who is interested in academic writing and is willing to share their writing progress. Hopefully, this initiative helps as many people as possible to become more productive in writing to achieve their goals.
It all started when I was feeling ‘blocked’ while I was writing my last few dissertation chapters. I thought I couldn’t write because I didn’t have enough time to write for long hours due to my full-time job. When PhD2Published started the Academic Book Writing Month (#AcBoWriMo) project last November however, I was glad to join so many in the initiative to achieve my goal. My writing goal at that moment was to complete two chapter and by the time November ended I had completed Chapter 4 and started Chapter 5. I realized that such an initiative had actually helped me progress better even though I didn’t achieve my goal completely. I still continue to be in touch with the writing community.
Eventually, #AcWri was formed because there were still people (including me) who were keen to continue the writing initiative. One day, I was tweeting about how to improve academic writing productivity. After some tweets, I suggested using Google spreadsheet to share productivity progress so we can keep track of our own goal and progress online and at the same time let others hold us accountable. Once the spreadsheet was created, a few of the #AcWri regulars joined the initiative by sharing their ultimate/daily goals and their updated daily progress.
Why writing accountability? I have a few beliefs that motivated me to start this initiative:
- Daily writing habit is essential for academic success and this habit can be cultivated through practice. This is the practice where you become the one to ‘force’ yourself to write daily.
- Be accountable for your own writing by publicly sharing your writing goal: ultimate goal (i.e. complete a dissertation) and daily goal (i.e. write 500 words). By sharing your goal, all will know what you are trying to achieve and you are being hold accountable for achieving your goals.
- Productivity will increase when it is being measured or monitored. By keeping a record of what you have done, it’s good for reflecting and planning to improve your productivity.
- Peer support is the best motivation in academic writing. Knowing you do not struggle alone in the writing process is helpful.
Does accountability in writing work for everyone? The answer will vary among individuals but most importantly, you can just give it a try and see for yourself. It works wonderfully for me. My ultimate goal of completing dissertation chapters and a journal article was achieved using this initiative. Regardless of what you choose to do, be sure it works for you in achieving your goals. If you have any other ideas about increasing writing productivity, I would love to hear from you.
Source: http://seo-contentwriter.com/
PhD2Published has made some exciting changes in the past couple of weeks. We have officially joined forces with Dr Jeremy Segrott to run fortnightly live chats on Twitter focused on academic writing (or AcWri, which is our associated hashtag). To celebrate this we now have a new live chat tab on the home page of the site!
In the about section you can find out more about the live chats and a little bit about us but essentially we saw this as a fabulous opportunity to build upon the previous success of the AcBoWriMo project and to develop the community of academic writers that this helped to establish. We will also be posting summaries of each discussion on a fortnightly basis in the archive section so if you miss the chat itself you can still see what was discussed and benefit from the communities wisdom by picking up some useful hints and tips.
If you’re interested in participating (the more the merrier!) you can either join the fortnightly live chats on Thursdays at 6pm GMT or contribute to the more regular community conversation using the #AcWri hashtag on Twitter. We also welcome AcWri themed blog posts so if you have something to say and want to join us get in touch!
