Doctoral researchers are sometimes asked in their viva what their plans for dissemination are. Gulp. But this is a question worth thinking about. It’s not a trick question. Examiners are genuinely interested in how you think about what happens after the viva. They may also have some helpful ideas about what you could do. However, […] … learn more→

I teach writing and rhetoric, but my college students and I often overlook a surprisingly complicated question: What is writing? And can artificial intelligence really do it? Many people think of “writing” as putting words on a page. However, even from very early on, writers have seen their craft as something more. From Enheduanna, the first named […] … learn more→

There’s nothing quite like holding your first book in your hands. The tactile nature of the object somehow emblemises the years of hard work. It has weight. Physically turning each page feels satisfying. Black symbols on bright white paper stand as a beacon of hard-earned knowledge. If the Great Gatsby novel emblemised the jazz age, in a […] … learn more→

A coherent piece of writing is one where the parts connect to the whole. That sounds obvious, but it can be difficult to achieve. That’s partly because the whole is surprisingly easy to lose sight of, especially in long texts where the writing happens across days or weeks or months. The whole is never entirely […] … learn more→

I’ve just read a paper about epistemic placemaking. Epistemic placemaking is equipping and arranging places for knowledge work. The paper suggests that students might actively co-design the spaces they need, rather than simply inhabiting whatever institutional niche happens to be there. The nub of the argument is that knowledge work is deeply entangled with the conditions […] … learn more→

Concision is not the same as brevity. A short piece of writing can be wasteful with its words, and a long piece can be meaning-full right to the last sentence. Getting concise is about getting clear about meanings, not addressing the total word count. When you cut a sentence that does no work, or replace […] … learn more→

Procrastination often gets a bad rap in academic writing advice circles. It’s generally seen as a problem to be managed, a symptom of anxiety or perfectionism. In other words, it’s a productivity failure. Writing advice givers like me have designed entire systems to overcome procrastination  – tomato timers, accountability partners, writing retreats, word-count targets. And yes, before we […] … learn more→

We’ve probably all read papers where the writer has treated the literature as something to be surveyed and reported. the result often takes the shape of the dreaded laundry list, where the writer plods through their reading list book by book. Paper by paper. Summaries of what each source says, one by one. Occasionally the writer […] … learn more→

In February 2023, a little more than a year after the launch of ChatGPT, Vanderbilt University sent an email to its student body in the wake of a fatal campus shooting at Michigan State. “The recent Michigan shootings are a tragic reminder of the importance of taking care of each other,” the email read in part. In […] … learn more→

People often refer to writing as thinking without necessarily knowing where and how this idea developed. It is in part from Linda Flower and John Hayes who published a paper in 1981 offering a cognitive process theory of writing. And reading their paper again, now, shows that their observations are still pretty apt descriptions of the work that goes […] … learn more→