How to make time for reading as an academic

This is another blog post in response to a reader request, and you can tell that by the title they supplied - here at Academic Coach, we don’t believe you ‘make time’, ‘find time’, or ‘manage time’. Time is immutable. But in the spirit of the request, I think I get to the nub of it here.

Academic reading

One of the most difficult things to get right as an academic is seeing ‘reading’ as your job, and consequently, scheduling time for it. Reading is of course an integral part of your job without which you can neither teach nor research, nor do service. But how do you find a balance between all the reading you have to get done. In other words, when to ditch what, or how to prioritise?

Different types of reading

There are a lot of different types of reading to get through in any one academic day (I’m not counting emails here).

Teaching related reading:

• reading essays to grade, and reading teaching related material to prepare for class.

• reading student work for continuous feedback such as PhD and master’s dissertation students (not ditchable but time spent doing it is elastic and within your control)

Internal service reading:

• Committee paperwork, Boards of Study paperwork, departmental memos and instructions, policies, guidelines and a plethora of bureaucratic nonsense

• Reading to review colleagues’ work for feedback, mentoring, REF review reading (at your discretion and on your timetable)

External service reading:

• Reading to enable review of articles, book proposals, book manuscripts, grant applications

• Reading submissions for conference calls, workshops and in preparation for chairing panels (ditchable in the sense of don’t take it on)

Research Reading -Required

• Reading that you need to do in order to carry out research - books, papers, chapters, articles, primary and secondary literature, and a plethora of other source material

• Instructions for filling in journal submissions, article guidelines, grant submissions

Time constraints

Of all the things you do as an academic, reading is one of the most time consuming activities, yet how many of us schedule time in our diary to read? How many of you have that entry in your diary - not many, I’m betting. Reading for research requires what Cal Newport calls ‘Deep Work’: concentration and long periods of it. Yet, as we are pulled from pillar to post, the idea of scheduling a diary entry to ‘read’ seems laughable. The truth is though we MUST read to do most of our job, and we don’t have the luxury of being able to research without reading. So whilst some reading is indeed optional or can be put on the long finger, some cannot.

Finding the balance

So how do you find a balance? You can see from the list above what is discretionary and what is not, what involves other peoples’ deadlines and what does not. So first things first. Schedule your own reading for research. You should have scheduled time for teaching prep already. Internal service reading should be allocated into your admin slot if it is core to your role, put in a folder for ‘later’ or ditched altogether. This prompts feelings of guilt and all the things, but tough. You don’t have inexhaustible time.

What about reading colleagues work for feedback? Well, if you have a trusted circle (they read yours) you should have an explicit understanding that you will return that work in x days/week with comments, and schedule that task - this is reciprocal help and you both need it. If it is one way traffic - get a new circle. There is not the time to be the only one everyone comes to in the department and serious writers will understand this. If you are somebody’s mentor, this is part of your core role as a mentor, and this should be prioritised alongside your own research.

External service reading is purely discretional, so if you do take it on, do it swiftly. Do not agree to peer review and then hold some poor author hostage for 8 months because this was not a priority for you. If you cannot do it within one month (by this I mean identify a two hour slot in your diary to complete the task within the next 28 days) don’t take it on. No-one is making you. A good rule of thumb is to review 2 pieces for every article you submit within 1 year. When viewed through this lens, you are providing a service to colleagues which is in line to the service you expect to receive in return. It is not too onerous.

The point is to remember that reading is time-consuming and takes up a large part of your job, so you need to schedule time to do it.

How to deal with 'gaps' in the dissertation?

This blog is in response to a reader request on PhD writing, and is a summation of a number of requests I have along this theme.

‘Gaps’

Thesis writing is a genre that has many requirements and tropes in order to be recognised as a PhD and pass examination. Regardless of your type of PhD - professional doctorate, creative-led PhD, practice-led PhD, traditional ‘big book’ thesis or PhD by publication - they all have the same benchmark for passing and that is an original contribution to knowledge. That is it.

So when I am asked the question about having ‘gaps’ in a PhD, and how one might go about dealing with those gaps, I find myself pondering what kinds of gaps we are talking about and whether they are significant enough to mean you cannot reach the threshold of an original contribution to knowledge.

First things first: the good news

The best thing about doing a PhD is that for the one and only time in your life you get to set the question and decide what the right answer to that question is. This is marvellous. The question can be reformulated at any point before submission (and in some cases the day before submission) to reflect the actual answer you provided. It is a joyous thing - remember all those times lecturers graded your papers and said hey, this is a great answer to a different question, but this is not the question you were asked? Those days are behind you. Because you choose the question and the answer, and you can swap the question for one that fits the answer you have written. Hooray!

So when I see this query, and armed with the knowledge of retrofitting the question to suit the answer, I am wondering what kinds of gaps can present themselves, that cannot be remedied by a change in question?

There are gaps, and there are gaps

How do you define a ‘gap’? Is it that you just didn’t get as many data points as you might have liked in an ideal world, or is it like an asteroid has hit and all you have left are the edges?

So, you have no data? That is a chasm of a gap, but not if you changed tack and made the PhD theoretical in nature: crisis averted. Some more reading and a different methods chapter, but not the end of the world.

Did your data collection get skewered by a global pandemic (lovely in person things were no longer possible)? Well, either you pivot your method to a method that can be conducted online (surveys, questions, interviews and so on) or pivot to a different type of inquiry that is paper based. Supervisory input here is crucial.

If you are in science, and have less experiments/ samples than planned, your supervisor should have a plan for you - accessing the lab at different times and in different ways might make collection slower, but still doable. What if you can’t get the chemicals you need? You definitely need supervisory input here. Can you redefine your study, and do different kinds of experiments?

Archival trips no longer available? Work closely with the archive and librarians to see what can be achieved remotely. If your archeological dig was cancelled that is quite a big problem, but your supervisor should have a plan, including an interruption as a nuclear option, until things can be started up again.

I certainly foresee a lot of theoretical work coming out in the next couple of years due to Covid and yes, that is marvellous work too.

The PhD students’ gap

There is I think a fundamental misconception that plagues all PhD students - and that is the nature of research as a thing. Research is messy. It is unpredictable. It doesn’t come out like we thought it would. You ask a bunch of questions and expect answer A, B or C, and they all say no, it is X, Y and Z (real example from my own PhD). Arrrrghhhhhhhh, this is not what I had foreseen.

A PhD is an act of creation, and these rarely follow straight lines. You can do all the reading and planning imaginable, and even without a global pandemic, your research will not go as you planned it to. This is the gap in your knowledge about the nature of all research: it goes its own way. It is like riding one of those rodeo horses - you hang on for dear life and hope you can hang on long enough. If your supervisor seems a bit nonplussed by your dilemma, yet you are running around screaming in horror, this is because this is how all their research goes. Every. Single. Time. And they have forgotten it is your first time. So if they are a bit ‘meh - these things happen’, it is not that they don’t care, it is just another day in research paradise for them.

Research doesn’t go wrong - if we knew the answer to the question, why would we bother asking it in a PhD? By definition an original contribution to knowledge is a voyage of discovery, it is not a linear journey from A-Z.

Will the examiners cut you slack because of COVID: bad news AND GOOD NEWS

No. You might be able to get accommodations at the ‘doing’ phase - funding and departmental / University extensions on time have been forthcoming on the whole, but once you submit, you will be held to the very same standard as everyone else. Of course, you will (as you always would have anyway) define in the introduction what the project is and is not. What it does and doesn’t do, and why you chose one method and not another. For the first time, you have the easiest justification of all time: PANDEMIC. A short section, no? And not one the examiner can realistically argue with. Choice of method and its justification is the one place a pandemic helps you if this was the reason you had to go with one method over another.

The question will remain: is it an original contribution to knowledge, or not? This requires you to confront that difficult question - what is my original contribution? If I subtract X or Y from the execution of that contribution, does it still stand up to examination?

Engage with your supervisor about this specific question

Keeping your panic to a minimum is your responsibility, and lecturers are feeling very fried right now. Don’t imagine for a minute you are their top priority and they are holding all your PhD in their mind and can immediately see this might be an issue for you. This is YOUR PhD, so you need to take the initiative in bringing up your worries to their attention so that they can engage with you. However, they can and should help you rationally and without drama reframe your project and help you to understand whether this still hits the threshold of originality (and that the claim of originality is properly substantiated). This might well mean adjusting long held plans, and doing a lot more reading in a new area that you had not foreseen at the beginning.

Keep calm. All is not lost and you can still get your PhD. Remember, redefining your question is the biggest flexibility you have.

Motivation and academic writing

Today I want to talk about motivation and why it is key to successful academic writing. Without motivation, writing happens in a sea of misery. If we are miserable about writing, we don’t want to do it and it is a vicious spiral all the way to oblivion. It is not impossible to write when motivation is either missing or low, but it is not a happy writing experience. We have all written when motivation is absent: in a PhD, doing an R&R, writing a grant proposal because our metrics require it rather than because we care about the research itself. Low motivation isn’t fatal to writing, but it is fatal to happy writing.

The motivation - procrastination mash up

Many people mistake a lack of motivation for procrastination, and don’t recognise the qualitative difference between the two. Procrastination is what happens when we avoid doing something. We may well be motivated to achieve this thing ultimately, but we don’t fancy doing it right now, or soon. That is procrastination. We accept ultimately we ought to be doing it, and we certainly want the end result of having done it, but we would rather clean the toilet bowl first. That is procrastination. At the heart of procrastination there lies many things - but a lack of motivation isn’t one of them.

A lack of motivation means you don’t want to do the thing, and you don’t really care anymore about the consequences (in the short term) of not doing it. It is an infinitely more negative space to occupy and it won’t go away when the house is sparkling clean.

Motivation is not accountability

Motivation is often mistaken for accountability in a lot of writing related advice: it might, for example, be treated as synonymous with writing groups or writing retreats. These types of solutions to unhappy writing are methods of writing, not motivation to write. Accountability through writing groups ensures you show up to write. Motivation comes before this - you are already motivated if you put these mechanisms in place.

Motivation - intrinsic and extrinsic

Why do you write? 'Because it’s my job'. True. But this is not enough to get us through the dark night of the soul when things are hard, because consequences of not writing are very far in the future (sometimes decades) and quite diffuse. This is in any case an extrinsic (negative) motivation (fear of one day being fired). These are negative motivations because you cannot control them. They do not hold sway for long.

You may write because you want to get past probation; get promoted or tenure; have a burning desire to be submitted to the REF (or fear the consequences of not being submitted); want to be the shining star of the impact case study; want respect of your friends, enemies, colleagues and complete strangers.

All of these are a mixture of 'hoop jumping' and of being considered successful by people whom we have no control over (ego). None of these are wrong: why we write is intensely personal and can depend on your career stage and personality / personal and financial circumstances.

Later on in your career, each of these (extrinsic, negative) motivations start to diminish. You have by then achieved a degree of respect as a scholar (your ego is somewhat satisfied); you are a professor or have reached the stage at which you are personally happy to stay so promotion no longer motivates; you have probably been through enough REFs to know none of that is in your control and cannot motivate you. If you don't show up to that conference and give that paper - well, shit happens, you have discovered this by now. If you are six months late on a book, or book chapter (and sometimes abandon a book altogether) there is very little consequence. So then what? Then what?

ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE

You need a raft of positive motivations to keep you afloat that are not based on threat or ego alone because when you don't want to show up to write, when you don’t want to show up to the sessions you have scheduled, something must keep you going. Something positive, or it becomes very difficult to keeping showing up for yourself without some outside moderator of your behaviour. And we don't have one.

Often people motivate themselves by working collaboratively with others (so you push each other through the tough times); or they find joy in actually getting out into the world of empirical discovery; or (common for me) they have something they just have to say because everyone else is wrong about X. They want to (and can) make a positive contribution to a field and change policy, the scholarship, contribute new methods of doing things that just excite them on an intellectual level. There are probably many more positive motivations you can identify for yourself.

But it is important that you know why you are writing. Try to identify something positive that you can control (hint: you cannot control other people's judgment, including REF, promotion, or journal editors or grant bodies accepting your paper or proposal). Stick these to your computer to remind you: why am I doing this?

The motivation - energy (Youth) level symbiosis

We tend to think of motivation as a static state or thing. I am motivated to do this, and I am not motivated to do that. And we also think that we remain in this binary state at a steady level, but this just isn’t true. Motivation levels wax and wane in response to the ebbs and flows of our career, and it ebbs and flows in response to any particular writing project we undertake, and let’s face it, in response to the ebbs and flow of life, and where we are in it.

Let’s take a book for example. At the beginning we are super motivated: we do a book proposal, we love the idea, and we get the contract. The initial stages of research are still exciting, but as we move further into the project, and things gets difficult, our motivation starts to ebb away. When we come to the middle, we are spent, yet there are miles to go. Motivation may desert use, or at least it feels that way, yet we are committed to completion. This is where we need to connect our motivation (or lack thereof) to our energy levels more generally.

A universal truth we can all agree on is that: bad sleep + bad diet + no exercise = low energy. At least if you are over 30 years old. And this age factor is relevant, and something it is hard to make your 30 year old self understand: you will not feel this effervescent sense of wellness and go-getterness forever. Yet in a cruel twist of fate your 30 year old self simply cannot comprehend of feeling any other way than you do now [ah but you will learn my fleet footed friend <laughs manically> you will learn]. I digress. My point is motivation to write is often easy to find when you are young(er) - you have many less life distractions, and if you are an academic, it is common to find people putting off life distractions (eg kids) until much later still (yes I am speaking in generalisations). Your energy levels are just HIGH. Motivation can be everywhere, intrinsic and extrinsic alike - it is a veritable buffet of motivational snacks.

Later though, things might get tough. Further into your career, having hit many of the extrinsic targets that motivated your writing originally, you begin to look more towards intrinsic motivations to keep you going…and you find the well has run dry.

Restocking the motivation well

Just like how we restock our energy levels through good sleep, diet and exercise, we need to do the same in relation to motivation. It is not in endless supply and when you have drawn down on it for a long time, it will run out without proper care-taking. Many times we don’t even notice this is happening, and we think we are just procrastinating.

I think this is especially hard now in isolation. We are missing the corridor conversations, intellectual exchanges, staff seminars and in person conferences that puts motivation back in the well. The chance exchange of comments or ideas that spark some creativity in our thinking is hard to recreate over Zoom.

The first step to restocking the well is noticing it is empty. It is not procrastination: it is something more fundamental, yet eminently fixable. For me, conversations with people in my research area become absolutely essential to restock that cupboard. Giving a paper, hearing comments (even if over Zoom). Perhaps a Zoom reading group to discuss new publications in your area. I find myself fixated on Twitter - not for doom scrolling - but for intellectual exchange of people in my research areas, like a woman in the writing desert searching for an oasis. Whatever activity restocks your creative well - and it might be baking - make sure you make time for that. Invest time in thinking about how you replenish motivation even in these direst of days and you will be rewarded ten-fold.

When motivation is low, we don’t always recognise we have hit rock bottom, and we just keep digging hoping to hit another spring but instead, we hit the molten core and burn out. This is not the time to start digging further in, it is time to restock. We need to do this ahead of hitting rock bottom and as often as we can.

How to edit your writing

I have these little mantras here at Academic Coach and this is one of them: write without fear, edit without mercy. Write quick, edit slow.

What is editing?

Let’s start with the basics. Editing is the process of re-sculpting your rough text into something that resembles an intellectual contribution. You can engage in large scale editing (macro, think structural issues) or small scale editing (micro, think sentence construction and paragraphs) and these serve distinct purposes in finalising your text.

Some writers don’t recognise editing as a distinct stage in the writing process because they are engaged in this process from the very first sentence (perfectionists). Others don’t recognise it because they have no discernible drafting process at all: writing, reading, researching, editing and polishing text is one unholy jumbled mess that is circular, unstructured and totally inefficient. Time ebbs away when we think of editing in these terms. ‘Writing’, or (properly speaking) producing a piece of finished research, becomes an interminable nightmare.

Why is editing painful?*

It is painful because if done at the correct time in your drafting process it forces you to confront reality, and that is despite your best heroic efforts the text still isn’t working. You might have come to this realisation yourself, or (more likely) you have come to this realisation because you have received feedback (criticism). Either way, this reality is inherently painful. Re-working the text is not re-working the idea necessarily and this is another reason that many lament editing. It starts to feel like this writing malarky is less Hemingway and his muse(s) and is more technical (mechanical) in nature. Less Leonardo da Vinci, and more spray painting the basement.** This can horrify the academic soul.

The joy of editing

I like editing. You are past the blank page. The hard (research) work is usually done and the joyous part of the writing process truly begins. It is here that you move from Frankenstein’s monster, to something that is quite well put together. It starts to flow. It starts to work as a piece of intellectual contribution. It stops lurching from one thought to another and starts to flow. Most importantly, it starts to make sense to someone other than you.

The guiding principle

This is the foundation of editing. It is no longer about you. It is no longer about your vision, your understanding, what you think is good and right and logical. It is about the reader. The reader! You have moved from it’s all about me to it isn’t about me at all. Regardless of what my internal narrator thinks is awesome and simple and clear, I now have to think about how someone else might encounter my work. What will make sense to them? How will they understand it?

This requires a bit of intellectual gymnastics. Hence the pain (for some).

Good editing is about structure, flow and signposts. It concerns your audience and how they will receive it. It is not about you. Your creation has left the building, flown the nest and is about to try and make its way in the world. Editing helps it to be useful to others and make a contribution to a dialogue that exists outside of your head. Embrace it: set it free.

*actual title suggested by a reader

** Paul J Silvia, How to write a lot, describes writing in these mundane terms.

How to set realistic goals for academic writing

It is the time of year when most of us get out the ‘big board’ and endeavour to do some planning about our writing goals for the year ahead. Last week, I talked about the importance of reflection in the writing process before we begin planning, so that we might learn a few things about our behaviour, what went right and what didn’t last year.

So, now we are at the goal setting stage, how do we go about it?

what is a goal?

Let’s start with the basics. A goal is something you intend to work towards, an idea or thing you intend to achieve. You decide that this is the ‘thing’ you want to make happen, and then make a plan in order to make that idea a reality. So in academic writing terms, a goal is a specific grant, specific book chapter, specific journal article, specific book that you want to complete. Note, I say specific. A goal cannot be ‘write 4 articles’. It is too vague to action - a goal is ‘write article X for journal X’. That is a goal.

What is realistic?

Goals need to be realistic. There are two mindsets in play when goal setting. Aim high, and be happy with what you achieve. Aim low, and achieve everything.

Aim high, and whatever you achieve might be more than if you had kept your sights low. Aim for the stars and all that. This really works for many people: having ambitious goals that will stretch you is a way to motivate and lift your performance. These still have to be realistic for you at your career stage - but what does this mean?

I am not referencing time here. I am not referencing how much teaching you have vis a vis X member of staff to whom you regularly compare yourself. I’m referencing experience and track record and so on, and also your motivation. So, don’t set a goal to apply for a €10 million grant in an area you have no track record in, or no track record in winning grants for example. This is not realistic. Otherwise, dream big!

People who adopt the aim high mindset are OK with failure. If they don’t achieve everything on their list, they are not wounded beyond all measure, they are not wracked with imposter syndrome, and they are not going to focus on the one thing they didn’t do. Rather they will focus on all that they achieved.

The other type of mindset is one that aims lower, but achieves everything on the list. This means you won’t be faced with any kind of failure, and you can build confidence in your ability to set realistic goals and execute them. There is nothing wrong with this approach. If you are the kind of person who focuses on the one thing that didn’t come off, make your goals something you can absolutely without doubt achieve. Keep it small, and manageable, yet more than ‘let’s see what happens’ (this is not goal setting). What is achievable for you depends on your life, your discipline, single or multi-authored and so on.

Break it down into priorities and tasks

Once your goals are settled, you need to break them down into tasks, and prioritise completing those tasks on a week by week basis. I talk about this a lot, because it is the single thing that academics do not do as a matter of routine. They set goals, but no concrete action plan is in place to achieve them. You can read here about priorities and tasks.

Set deadlines

You must set a deadline for any of this to work. Set a goal, and at the same time, set a deadline. Avoiding setting a deadline is a little bit like admitting you have no real plan to achieve that goal - a goal without a deadline is a wish.

Backward map

Once you have your goal, your deadline, your tasks and priorities, you can backward map in your diary - from the deadline to today - what you are going to do and when you are going to do it. Assign diary slots to your tasks, and make sure you have prioritised correctly.

This is how we set realistic goals for the coming writing year! Good luck!

New Year, new writing resolutions?

It’s that time of year where we start to think about what we want to achieve in our writing in the coming year, and when we might like to plan our goals moving forward.

But wait. Before we move forward it is really important to take a moment to reflect on what happened in 2020. Academics really suck at reviewing the things they did - they want to move on and on and on to the next big thing. No celebration, no reflection, and very little joy is taken in actually achieving things.

Is that the sound of the apocalypse?

2020 was…quite a year. It probably felt like a car crash in slow motion on repeat, and I can understand why you just want to wipe that slate clean and move forward and pretend that all that <gestures all around> is, if not over, not something you care to dwell on. As someone who managed to get cancer in the middle of a global pandemic, boy, do I understand that urge only too well.

Nonetheless it is important to think about what else happened. What, even in the midst of a global pandemic and its associated breakdown of how we work and live, might you have achieved be it personal or professional? (Survival is a listable achievement here).

Moving your mindset

I’m hoping that when you look back at 2020, despite everything, you can pick out some things you achieved that you never thought you could. If someone had said to you, in 2019, I’m going to throw a global pandemic in next year - this will mean you are too afraid to leave your house and you will simultaneously home school and do your work - but you will still manage to do x or y you would have laughed in their face. Absurd!

But somehow, someway, you managed.

Moving from deficiency to sufficiency

When you begin to think about the year ahead, I want you to do so from the perspective of having everything you need. From being everything you need to be. From the perspective of there being enough time, enough space, enough understanding and empathy to set realistic goals and then to achieve them. I know that is a big ask, I really do. But just try it for a second.

Along the way, you have probably achieved some amazing things in the last 12 months in the face of unimaginable disruption. I’m sure your writing plans took something of a hit, and maybe you didn’t hit the dizzying heights of your own predictions back in the before time, in January 2020. Radical adjustment of life is to be expected.

Taking time to appreciate the things you did get done is important. But also moving your mindset, from one that laments all you lack, to one that celebrates all you have, is an incredibly powerful motivating force. It celebrates your resilience, and your achievements, and tethers that appreciation to your lived experience.

On a practical note, it can help you set more realistic goals for the coming year where all that will still be going on in some fashion or another for much of the year. You will have managed to get things done you could never have imagined - so take a moment, before launching into the new year’s planning, to celebrate what went right.

You are still here for one, more or less intact. That is a thing worth celebrating all on its own.

What is an Academic Coach for?

There is something of a curiosity around people who leave a full-time, tenured, super secure position at a leading research focused institution at the peak of their career. Especially people who are still publishing, still writing, still actively engaged in research and for all intents and purposes are behaving as though they are an academic within an institution and, more importantly, still have a mighty fine relationship with their previous employer. That is me - I am a curiosity - perhaps not to close friends and colleagues who know me well, but I imagine those colleagues who are less close looking in wondering…what happened there! Leaving academia, or an academic institution, is considered shameful by other academics - an abdication of a core identity - and insane by those who are striving against the odds to obtain such a position.

Many people leave academia for all kinds of reasons. I am not typical. I have no hard feelings, I really loved my job, my colleagues and my academic life. Yet, I always knew there were other things in this life I could do, and wanted to do - alongside doing research - that I was not granted time for within a University structure. And that is what I do now.

What kind of an Academic Coach am I?

There are of course many coaching styles and approaches out there: executive coaches, life coaches, and so on. I am speaking about what I do. First, yes, I have undertaken training to be a coach: executive coaching, management coaching and so on. I have done various courses. I have also undertaken specialist training to support clients with dyslexia, and I will continue to train in all sorts of different ways I am sure. As a previous appraiser of mine was wont to comment ‘you sure do like going on a lot of courses, don’t you?’. Yes, I do! I like to learn things.

I have trained in coaching, but I am not the kind of coach who is going to ask you to colour in your wheel of life - that is just not my bag. I understand the principles and models of coaching - T-GROW, STEPPA, ACHIEVE, OSCAR and all that jazz, and I employ them as is appropriate. My courses and coaching is based on the latest research as well as my experience as an academic. But I am above all things pragmatic. So many years in academia has wedded me to research-based training and mentoring, but also ‘outcomes’.

What I do works.

I want to help you publish that book, get that promotion, win that best presenter title, get your paper published, change your attitude to, and relationship with, writing. Help you to rediscover your writing mojo. As the tag line says, I want to help you become a happier writer.* That is the kind of coach I am.

What kinds of things do I do as a Coach?

Besides training in coaching, I have a lot of experience in academia which generic executive / life coaches do not have. That is not to say these type of coaches cannot help you in other ways - each type of coach does something rather unique and different. I see many people without experience of ever having worked a full time permanent role in an academic institution setting up as academic coaches, which I find peculiar to say the least. There is a lot of tacit knowledge gained through long years of experience that outsiders will never possess and research does not necessarily convey. The unwritten rules, and how best to navigate them, is not taught on generic coaching courses.

My work covers a gamut of things: helping with promotion forms, job applications, providing feedback and editing articles in preparation, book chapters, R&Rs. Advice on how to navigate difficult colleagues, or difficult situations. Advice on how to navigate your career. Help with grant applications. I work with people who, for whatever reason, find writing a challenge for practical or emotional reasons. I help them to work out a way of writing that works for them. I provide accountability, I help with planning and organisation. I provide mentoring for more junior academics who through me, have access to all the tacit knowledge it took me 17 years to accumulate, so they don’t need to stumble around in the dark making bad decisions. I am a shortcut, a leg up, especially for those from non-traditional backgrounds whose parents were not academics themselves. I am a safe space where you can admit the unsayable. There is little I have not heard.

Coaching can be a short term intervention, or a long term partnership. Weekly, or intermittent. Ad hoc or a regularly scheduled conversation. I can provide a space to reflect, resources to use, or pragmatic editing of text. We co-design our sessions so you can get exactly what you need.

Why am I an Academic Coach?

I love mentoring. I love helping people in ways that I was never helped. I like to make other peoples’ experience of academia easier than mine. I don’t think junior colleagues / PhD students should suffer just because I did. I like to see other people have success, and if I can play some small role in helping them to achieve that, I am both honoured and delighted to have done so. This suits who I am as a person.

Coaching speaks to my core values, and what better reason is there to do the job that I do now? I still research, I still publish, I still advise government bodies. But coaching gives me something that none of that does - a sense of joy in watching other people reach their potential and go beyond anything they thought themselves capable of.

*These are just some examples of things I have helped clients achieve through my coaching. You will find me credited in papers and books and all kinds of things.

Writing academically when you are neurodiverse

This is another one in a series of request blogs, and one I was hesitant to tackle. Even now I am not sure I am really answering the question.

I want to start by saying (a) I do not claim to be an expert in neurodiversity and (b) I am not neurodiverse myself. I do have many neurodiverse clients and I have had neurodiverse students in my 17 year academic career. Due to the demand for this kind of specialised support, I have undertaken specific training on how to support neurodiverse students, particularly students with dyslexia.

When this blog came in as a suggestion, I felt hesitant about writing about it. I sought clarification and advice from my own clients (some of whom are neurodiverse) about the kinds of things that I do in my coaching that help them specifically with regard to their individual circumstances. I think we can all benefit from some of these writing hacks and techniques.

Take control

One of the most important things I do for clients is to allow them to tell me exactly what they need, rather than me trying to control the process from my end, and this becomes a flexible and fluid arrangement depending on what they are working on. I get out of the habit of trying to do what I would always do with students. Sometimes, for example, a client’s needs might be time focused - managing what happens when (and why) in a rigid and structured fashion provides clarity, especially if this is followed up by repeated engagements with the planning process. Some clients however hate working this way, and prefer to flit from one thing to the other, so we try and come up with methods of ensuring progress on the main things whilst allowing dipping in and out of other chapters. Working in short sharp bursts enables progress without feeling like I have imposed rigidity. Some clients need quite close editing of their work because there is a tendency to skip over sentences and paragraphs. Citation practices, never explained, can be especially problematic; unexplained assumptions about what we ‘just absorb’ from reading others’ work are to be avoided.

There are plenty of resources out there on the internet, in the form of books, scholarly articles and websites, that are dedicated to supporting students at all levels (including PhDs) who are neurodiverse, and I am not attempting to collate them here (see here for a website that does this).

I want to concentrate on a few simple things that students can do themselves and should flag up to their supervisors as soon as possible.

Disclosing your neurodiversity

This will give you access to resources in the University you otherwise cannot access.

Of course disclosure is your business, and you do not have to disclose. But if you do, UK Universities will have an array of resources, including dedicated 1-1 support, for students which you will greatly benefit from. You are entitled to this support and should absolutely take it. It can include:

• Writing support tutoring

• Particular equipment you might need

• Funds for particular software (eg voice to text software)

• Support for organisation of your time

• Funds for editing support services

My experience is that some students are hesitant (even when they have disclosed) to take up all of the resources available to them for a variety of reasons. My advice is take everything there is and figure out what works best for you. This is arduous, but it is worth the endeavour.

Be explicit in stating your needs as you discover them

Flag up to your supervisor exactly what you need (when you know what that is) in order to get the most out of your supervisions. Don’t expect them to be trained, or even mildly aware, of the kinds of things you might need; training in this area is woeful. I was never trained as a lecturer, and never offered training.

This might include:

• Very regular meetings dedicated to organisation of time as well as the ‘intellectual’ side of the PhD

• Recording of in person meetings to capture feedback so you can process and retain it at your own pace and in your own way

• Small text turnarounds that are frequent and very detailed

• Email clarifications on what you didn’t understand as and when

None of these requests are unreasonable and you are entitled to them. They may however mark a departure from how your supervisor is used to working. Tough for them. Explain to the best of your ability why you need these particular working patterns, or have a support officer do it on your behalf. Get this documented in a learning contract at the start of your PhD, whereby the supervisor is explicitly informed and agrees. I’m afraid this might need reiterating again and again and that burden will fall (unfairly) on you.

Make sure your particular needs are met

Institutions like one-size-fits-all people and they design policies around that concept. There is no one size fits all solution here. Some of the things that are helpful in moving your writing forward are:

• Reading. You might find reading long articles a challenge because of the amount of time it takes, but software that enables the computer to read it out to you will help a great deal and you can do it in bite sized chunks.

• Note taking. Get a good structure of note taking. Ensure you separate out the facts, from the author’s argument, from your argument or analysis. Use colour coding and headings in your notes. This is good practice for everyone and will help you define your ‘voice’ in the PhD.

• Writing. You can also get software where you dictate your thoughts into it and it is converted into written text. Everyone’s first draft is garbled rubbish. I find neurodiverse students are really very tough on themselves and the ‘standards’ they imagine they should be writing at straight out of the gate. My own first drafts are a train wreck. That is what first drafts are for.

• Editing. You may need more structured and definitive advice on how to push your text forward: ask for it. It might be about sentence construction, how you insert citations correctly, paragraph construction, creating flow in an argument, or chapter or section structure. Ask your supervisor to explain what is wrong and why and show you how to fix it. Supervisors can be poor at this, and you may need to be a little dogged - the truth is it might be ‘instinctive’ for them, and they have to think hard about the ‘why’ before they can tell you. This is very important for you to incorporate feedback properly and will need to be done repeatedly.

• Ask them to edit a section to show you how it is done. Ask explicitly what do they mean when they say ‘level’ or 'voice’ or it’s not ‘scholarly’ enough, or the structure just isn’t quite right. Don’t let them get away with this kind of bland commentary: it is lazy and not helpful to you. I should note here that not all academics have this skill set. Thinking about writing, and analysing the how, why and what is not something many academics take time for. They just do, rather than think about it, and hence their explanations might be poor.

• Organisation of text, of paragraphs and sections, might be a difficult challenge. Editing techniques like reverse outlining can really help to clarify a long piece of work so that it is digestible and easy to reformat. I do this with my own work; it is a common editing technique that helps everyone.

• You might need to print out your chapter and physically cut it up with scissors rather than on screen - so be it.

• Try using diagrams as another way of visualising the text to check for flow.

• Lastly I ask my clients to repeatedly use title separation (literally copying the titles out of your chapter and placing them in a blank document) to check (a) do they tell a story that flows on their own (b) are they descriptive (wrong) or analytical (right) and (c) are they in the right order?

Neurotypical people don’t understand how you learn

Essentially, neurotypical people think it’s about spelling, grammar and paragraph organisation. They don’t understand that they learn in one way, and you in another. For example, many neurotypical people learn by osmosis or mimicking. We mimic what we see in academic writing - there is an ability to see a thing (on paper), intuit what was done and why, and put that learning directly into our work, without really thinking about it too hard. Academic writing is ‘learned’ though this process. If your supervisor learned how to write through this absorption method, they will expect you to do it too, unless you tell them explicitly what you need.

Academic writing takes a particular form and is does not come naturally to anyone. It is learned, one way or another. Citations are required to show that we are not making unsupported statements. There is a formality to academic writing; it is not conversational. Whilst academics can and do write for a number of different audiences (and so adopt different writing styles) purely academic writing is for an academic audience and as such should conform to the requirements imposed by that discipline. All of this ensures that your work can enter the conversation with others - the form and content is recognised by other academics and is therefore deemed of an appropriate standard to contribute to the discipline. Find the form of help that enables you to make this transition in academic writing.

Get support

Writing hacks are all well and good, but proper supervisory support is essential, especially for micro planning (or getting help with micro planning) all the steps you need to take on your PhD journey, and in particular, close editing the individual chapters so they are organised correctly. This accounts for (by a long way) the highest proportion of my work as a coach. I try to create a predictable and stable architecture where there is stability of process, and lots of feedback on your written work. This is a really important first step in feeling like you are in control of the PhD text and not vice versa.

For more information on the various ‘genres’ of academic writing, (Analytical, Descriptive, Critical, Persuasive), check out Tara Brabazon’s excellent video series of three which deals with genres, quick fixes and jargon.

How is a PhD structured?

This is another blog in response to reader requests. If you have a request for a blog, please visit the Facebook page and write a request there.

What does a PhD thesis look like?

This is a question I find myself answering a lot. On social media, in direct emails to me, and from clients that I coach. Sometimes this comes in the guise of asking questions about editing, sometimes it is more direct.

As an academic coach, I am involved in coaching students from a wide array of fields: from various fields within social sciences and humanities, to STEM, to the creative arts. Coaching is not of course the same as supervision, although there is a massive overlap between the two when PhD supervision is done properly. Alas, it is sometimes a little lacking in various ways.

I obviously do not have an in-depth subject knowledge of all the students I coach/supervise: this is not what students really require, and once they have surpassed their supervisor’s own knowledge on their particular original contribution to knowledge (usually by the second year), it won’t be what they are getting from their supervisor either. What students do need however is writing advice, and this advice is rarely forthcoming from their own supervisors for a variety of reasons.

In my coaching practice, I ‘supervise’ traditional big book theses, PhD by publication theses, and artefact and exegesis or practice-led theses. Disciplines vary widely; from economics, to anthropology, from geography to digital communication, from politics to dance. Not to mention, of course, law theses (my own field). As such, I am probably one of a few academics that see a wide variety of shapes and sizes that a PhD might take. It is a privileged position to be in and I see such an array of amazingly brilliant work. Because I work across disciplines, I know there is no one-size fits all, that is for sure.

Start with the basics

I always make sure that students read multiple finished and recent PhDs in their department and if possible their sub-field. You can’t bake a cake, if you have never seen a cake, tasted a cake or even have a recipe for a cake. Often, this is what supervisors expect students to do - write a PhD, with no advice as to HOW (not what), never having seen one before. Inexperienced supervisors may have a very narrow view of what a PhD should look like (their own, for example, that was done 20 years ago), and may be nervous when a student strays from the path, or starts to question the advice being given about chapter structure and so on.

So, like most things, my advice is first do your research as to what a successful PhD looks like. Be aware though that the finished PhD that you are looking at doesn’t tell the story. It doesn’t tell you whether the student rescued their PhD through the viva, or whether they had major or minor corrections and so on. It might not be a perfect template. Doing interdisciplinary work is especially challenging as there will not be an exact fit between your project design and someone else’s. A clear introduction justifying structure and methods is key here, as well as smart decisions about the external examiner. But reading an already completed PhD is at least a place to start from.

What is the right size and shape?

There is no one answer here obviously, and much will depend on your discipline, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind. Try not to front load your PhD with too much ‘throat clearing’ material. So here I am talking about the methods and literature review chapters and if you do have a lot of this, make sure it is part of your novelty.

In some disciplines, the structure can be a bit like this. There might be an introduction chapter, a literature review, a contextual and/or background chapter, and then empirical chapters (and if practice led, then an artefact). This has a fairly long lead-in before the ‘meat’ of the PhD is arrived at, but if it is a PhD by publication you might need this long lead-in to tie together the individual publications that make the ‘meat’ of the PhD. In other disciplines (and depending on your puzzle and research design), you might condense your introduction, methods, and literature review all into one chapter, and get straight into the ‘meat’ immediately. Other disciplines prefer a solid introduction, literature review and methods chapters as separate entities. But do you have to do it like this every time? Well, that depends on where your novelty is best expressed, and this comes down to your research design.

how much of this material is novel and how much is derivative?

Badly written literature reviews are entirely derivative and can cost you minor or major corrections. Your literature review needs to do more than be a litany of x said this and y said that. That is a masters level synthesis of material, and is not a review. You have not done anything with it to qualify as a review. If this is where you construct your theoretical lens however, and you are explicit in that construction, then you can claim novelty here. Same with methods - is this a novel method you have invented? Or are you employing a bog standard method to something new or through a new lens? If it is bog standard, don’t spend precious word count on it other than explaining the basics and why you have chosen that method. Don’t bore your examiners with things that might go in the appendices. Tell them what they need to know to understand your original contribution.

The test of a PhD is: have you made an original contribution to knowledge?

This means derivative material should be kept to a minimum to convince the examiner of your originality. Of course, you build on the work of others and reference it accordingly. You have a literature review to map the field and show (a) you have mastery over it and (b) where your scholarship will fit in and fill a gap or move knowledge forward. But you have to do something with it. Not just recite it. Same with the method - do something, or be brief.

You don’t want your examiner to have read 40,000 words and have not encountered anything novel; they start to write notes saying: ‘I can’t see why this is original’ and once that idea is planted, it is hard to shift.

This is how PhDs fail. Original contribution to knowledge is the standard and that is the standard regardless of your discipline. You showcase this at every possible opportunity and in every chapter your write - that is the commonality of all good PhD theses, regardless of shape and size.

If you want to know more about macro (size and shape) editing, and micro (chapter, paragraph, sentence, word level and title) editing, check out these two online webinars in the Academic Coach shop.

Managing expectations of yourself as a writer

This blog comes as a request from readers, and again, not one I would have thought to do on my own. I want to say this is not addressed to one particular individual, because this does come up a lot in various ways, from various different requests. However, the phrasing of this particular question caught my eye.

As a writing coach (and an academic who writes a lot) this thought would never have crossed my mind. The request was actually phrased as: ‘managing expectations of yourself as a writer in the context of other obligations in your academic job’.

My immediate response to this is that I can read this question in two ways.

Unrealistic ambitions?

The first way to interpret this is: my expectations of what I can achieve in my writing are all out of whack with reality. I am expecting myself to get a €10m grant, write a book and publish 7 solo articles in one year. And if that is the case, I am overjoyed at your ambition, and I can happily refer you to my previous blogs about writing in your reality, managing a publication pipeline and why planning is essential. Some time management and a bump with reality should sort that out in no time. Happy days! As those awful posters on the wall of my workplace used to say: you asked, we answered!

The second way to understand this question though is, to me, infinitely more depressing.

Teaching is all I care about

How do I manage my expectations of myself as a writer when I have so many (more important/other) things to do?

There is something underlying this statement that is unsaid. And that is that writing isn’t a priority, it just isn’t as important as teaching. Writing is just one thing on a long list of things I have to do in any given week/term/year and I’m not certain I can fit it in, and so, how can I lower my expectations of myself i.e. stop feeling the guilt of not writing or being disappointed in myself that I can’t get it done? If you genuinely feel that teaching is all you care about, the solution is to have a job that only has a teaching element to it. If this is not how you really feel, let me, as the song says, flip reverse it.

You are a writer

What if I asked you this? How can you manage your expectations of yourself as a teacher in the context of your writing obligations in your academic job? Oooooooh.

Have a think. Let that just roll around in your head for a while. Let it percolate. Let it breathe. You are a writer. You research. You read, for a living. That is what you do. You also teach. You fill out lots of forms. You manage budgets and book rooms. But you are a writer: this is actually what you get paid to do.

How does that sound? Do you feel called out and confronted? That is what I am going for.

I spend 10 weeks (it is that long for this sole reason) training people out of the mindset that they are teachers who write on the side, rather than academics whose job it is to write and teach. That they are paid for both, and must do both in their working week. Yes, it is possible. Yes there are lots of tips, tricks and hacks, but also solid research that supports my course materials. It is possible, and people do it. I did it. I trained colleagues to do it. I now coach other people so they can do it.

It is not easy. It requires discipline and just a teeny, tiny bit of brain re-engineering via repeated engagement with my online videos and materials.

This is such a wild idea for some people it takes repeated run throughs of my course for it to really bed in. People actually start to miss my video missives (rants? brainwashing? serious talking to?). It is the reason that once you are enrolled, you are in for life - you just keep on (for free) because it takes a while to get used to the idea.

You manage your expectations of yourself by knowing who you are and what your priorities are, and you plan your schedule accordingly. Not what you think they ought to be, or what tends to happen. Is this easy: no! It is easy to be overtaken by events, not commit, not stick to your word. It is hard to stay focused. Your expectations must be realistic, for you, in your life and coaching can help you figure those things out. But after that, it is a mindset.

Happily that is all in your control.

How to deal with feedback

*or what to do with a broken soul. This one’s for you!

This is a common problem for academics. Feedback in all its forms, from colleagues, from friends and family, from anonymous reviewers and editors, and of course, Reviewer 2, can be brutal. Academics can be fragile when it comes to receiving critique of their writing. Of course, we merrily criticise students’ work all the time and when they are broken, we are like: ‘get on with it’!

It is always so much worse when it happens to us. Of course.

We need feedback

Whilst this might seem a tad obvious, it is worth breaking this down a little. Feedback is provided when work is voluntarily handed over to be judged. When you press submit, you are inviting a critique of your work; this is what pushes your ideas and your communication of those ideas forward. We can’t do this alone and in a vacuum: we must have the input of others. Academia is a profession where you never do anything at all without it being criticised, be it teaching, research or administration. It is why a lot of people find solace in meetings - it is about the one place where criticism of your performance takes a break (mostly).

This never ending onslaught of criticism can grind you down, for sure. Hence, why academics are so prickly about their writing.

Recognising the difference between feedback and other stuff

Genuine feedback seeks to engage with your ideas. It seeks to see things from your point of view, and endeavours to push you to do better by suggesting where you might improve the text or the ideas so they can shine. When you see this kind of feedback, grab it, embrace it, even when you feel your hackles rise. This is just your ego talking, and it is not helpful.

Feedback might not, though, be dressed as gushing praise, and might initially make you feel a bit dense and demoralised. In my experience even the most egregious attacks on our intelligence, dressed up as feedback, contains within it in a kernel of truth. A nugget. A snippet of something that might be useful if only we could see it through our tears. Even the ‘newspaper editorial’ guy had some useful stuff to say before he slipped sidelong into his own personality vacuum.

Anyway, as we all know, there are many axes to grind in academia and occasionally someone decides to grind their axe on you. On your very writer’s soul. It is not remotely fair. I know this.

What about when you get rejected?

There is no two ways about it: this sucks. Not even being given a chance to remedy the situation is quite annoying. Worse if it gets rejected after major revisions (this should not happen as often as it does, and it is often down to totally new reviewers). Look, sometimes we just are not in the right knitting circles for that journal. Sometimes they just didn’t get it; it is a solid paper for the right audience. We must pick ourselves up and resubmit somewhere else the very next day. Don’t sit on it, don’t agonise, just change the style and re-submit. Publishing is a numbers game these days, and the key is to not give up. So what if it takes 10 submissions, just keep batting that thing back till it sticks.

Learn something

We all like to learn. It is why we became academics. Feedback is an opportunity to learn and we should grab it. Of course, it might sting for a few days, and by all means have a sulk. Call them names. Put it in the drawer for a day (or two, not more). But then take it back out with clear eyes, and find that kernel of helpful advice within it. It won’t all be helpful. Maybe not even most of it. But some of it will be helpful. Make a list in a table of the comments, rephrased in your words, and then slowly and surely work your way down the list in order to improve your piece.

You may not think it improves your piece, and this is just somebody’s hobby horse that you have to ride to get it published. So be it. Don’t get precious; this is how the journal article game is played. Reviewers want to be acknowledged and heard, so absolutely address every (meaningful comment) using a table. Any defamatory language will naturally not have made it into your table. Don’t sweat it. Once it is not in your table, it is like it never existed in the first place. Then tabula rasa. Move on.

How to do a peer review of an article

This blog once again comes as a request from readers, and surprisingly, it is something I see again and again on social media forums.

In the past, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was a junior scholar just starting out, there was a thing called ‘mentoring’. Not the kind your institution writes about on a REF submission, but the real kind where senior scholars actively tried to help and ‘train’ more junior scholars into the mysteries of academic life. One of the things they might have instructed you in, is the secret art of how to do a peer review for journal articles.

It seems that time is long past (for many and various reasons I will not rehearse here). So, instead, I will provide some pointers on how (and crucially how not) to do a journal article peer review.

First principles

A decent and well run journal should send reviewers a review template which should guide your review. Not all do this, and perhaps when they do, these guidelines can be a bit wooly. In the absence of such a guide, there are some cardinal rules of good reviewing:

1. Don’t take too long to return it. You know what I mean - someone is desperately refreshing ScholarOne every 30 seconds to see what is happening to that paper. If you can’t do it briskly, don’t take it on.

2. How long should it take to do the review itself? Not long. 2 hours to read the paper (10,000 words) and construct feedback. Get on with it, you are not scouring the earth for the last Airbender. Move on with your life.

3. How long should your review be? Maximum 2 pages and preferably shorter. If you are writing more than this, you have fallen into asshole territory and should stop and check yourself. Nothing screams ‘insecure junior scholar who knows nothing’ more than someone who feels the need to write lengthy reviews to demonstrate the extent of their own brilliance. DON’T DO IT. Also know that senior editors are unimpressed by your posturing and you look like a fool.

Content rules

1. The question you are answering is: is this paper worth publishing?

   • Is it well researched? Are the appropriate scholarly articles/areas included? Is the referencing sufficient, careful and complete?

   • Does the author do what they claim to do - do the composite parts add up (abstract, introduction, middle and conclusions)?

   • Are any claims made properly substantiated?

   • Is it rigorous and does it display originality? Does it bring a new angle or way of thinking about something? Or is it addressing a pressing issue, or filling a gap by updating something?

   • Does it fit the brief of the journal (the editors should have already desk rejected anything that doesn’t, so this isn’t really your area to comment on unless something has gone very wrong).

   If the answers to the above questions are YES, then you should recommend that the article is published.

2. What do you do if there are minor infelicities in the language or errors (I mean errors in the literal sense) or some of the things listed above are there, but could have been articulated in a clearer fashion?

   • Send it back with minor revisions pointing out exactly what could be better articulated with the above list in mind, and construct that advice with word count restrictions in mind.

   • Be concise and specific.

3. What do you do if there are major problems with the piece (i.e. the list above has not been met)?

   • You can send it back with major revisions, indicating what these revisions are. If this is ultimately a new paper, it is not a major revision.

   • If you do this, be prepared for a second round of reviewing. Do not indicate major revisions if you cannot be bothered to do this again. It is rude beyond belief and a massive pain for editors.

   • Finally, and exceptionally, you can reject the piece.

Reasons to reject a piece in good conscience:

• It is not well researched. The appropriate scholarly articles/areas are not included (with the word count limit in mind). The referencing is insufficient, sloppy and incomplete.

• The author does not do what they claim to do - the composite parts do not add up (abstract, introduction, middle and conclusions).

• The claims made are not properly substantiated.

• It is not rigorous and it does not display originality. It does not bring a new angle or way of thinking about something.

• It is a partial piece of research that has been ‘salami sliced’ too many times from a bigger project so that it no longer really contributes something meaningful in its own right.

How do you construct your feedback?

Just like we are told to do for students, it should be a feedback sandwich. You know just how much effort that poor academic has put into that paper. They have wept, they have bled.

• Start by saying how much you enjoyed reading it, and list some positive aspects of the paper and inquiry. It costs you nothing and it must have something positive about it or it would not have been sent out for review.

• Then move on to any critique and weigh your words carefully. Imagine you were reading this review on your own paper. Phrase it professionally at all times. Don’t be an asshole (I’m looking at you: ‘this sounds more like a newspaper editorial than a scholarly paper’). Reader: I was published.

• Finish the review with something positive about the project in general and why it is interesting.

Things you must never ever do

1. Reject a paper because it is not the paper you would have written. This is bullshit scholarly backstabbing and should not ever be entertained. Why don’t you go ahead and write that paper yourself, and leave this poor creature to publish the paper they have actually written?

2. Write endless reams of feedback to demonstrate just how smart you are. Yes, we are all smart. Get a life. Short and structured in deference to the word count is professional.

3. Request minor revisions but really you are asking for a whole new paper (a different paper, i.e. the one you would have written). This is impossible for the author to do in the word count available to them. If you want something included, why not point out the things that could be cut to make room. If you can’t find anything, you are being as asshole again. Everyone needs to respect the word limit, including reviewers.

4. Get personal. Don’t be snarky, snidey, supercilious, hectoring or patronising. Be professional. Someone has spent an awful lot of their (probably unpaid) time writing this piece of research. Respect the author.

Reviewer 2 is a thing because we make it one. Don’t be that person.

How to plan your writing week: goals, priorities, and tasks

Academic Coach is a planning fanatic, because planning works. It just does. It works. It moves you from A-Z because you know where (and what) A is, and you know where (and what) Z is. 

I have more blogs on planning than on any other topic because (a) it works and (b) I still feel there is a lot of resistance to serious planning. Most academics tend to, let’s be honest, lurch and stumble through the teaching term, hanging on with their bare fingernails for the end, only to be faced an avalanche of grading the minute teaching stops.

Academics are notoriously pushed for time due to many reasons which we need not rehearse here. The purpose of this blog is to try and help you to understand the fundamentals of planning. I’ve talked about planning a publication pipeline, what goes in it, how you understand how long things take you, and planning in the midst of Covid, but I have not broken down planning into the specifics steps and concepts that you need to get to grips with.

 Scheduling your week

One of the first things I get coaching clients to do is to have a proper online schedule. Yes, you can also have a paper diary, but an online one is essential. The reason for this is the detail an online diary allows you to visualise. You can colour code, you can write detailed notes. I ask clients to programme in all of their non-negotiable commitments (work and life) each week. Then we talk about what non-negotiable means. Sometimes this is straightforward and sometimes a momentous battle of wills commences. Eventually, when the dust settles, I ask them to weed out things that are not really non-negotiable, but are more in the genre of ‘someone else expects this’, or ‘I’ve always done this (so I always will)’, or ‘FOMO’, or ‘I might upset people’. Once the schedule is set, we go about filling the diary with writing, reading, and note taking slots that are feasible and realistic for that particular person. Everyone is different, because everyone’s life is different. We fill it with breaks and rest periods. We make it as realistic as we can. Often I end up reining in clients who enthusiastically pencil in 8 hours straight research: not realistic if we want to stay healthy.

This is pretty straightforward stuff (getting people to stick to it, not so much, hence the coaching). But then we start to talk about how we are going to fill those slots and a blank expression arrives. Now we have to talk about goals and priorities and tasks, and the difference between the three.

Goals

Goals are aspirations, or big picture end results (outcomes if you will) that you want to achieve. Goals are your long term objectives. You want to submit a promotion application, submit a grant proposal, submit my book for a prize, submit 4 journal articles this year and so on. These are goals. Your goals are best planned on a long term basis – quarterly and yearly (sub goals and main goal). These need to be realistic for you, because if they are too aspirational (i’d like to win the lottery) you will repeatedly fail and this is not good for your writing confidence. Too easy and there is little point in setting a goal. Notice I didn't write ‘win a grant’. That is not in your gift or control, so don’t set up goals you alone cannot achieve.

When you are breaking down your writing projects, you can do so by setting mini-goals if you will - quarterly, monthly, weekly. These should be discrete elements that take you to the big goal at the end of the year.

Priorities

Priorities, on the other hand, start to narrow down which goals have more importance (a ranking function if you will), and what concrete steps you need to take (and which concrete steps should be prioritised) in order to move towards the bigger picture goal. It is most effective if you plan these in weekly segments – anything longer than that, and you soon find your weeks are spent doing things that are in fact not furthering your progress towards your goal. You weekly priorities should amount, when added together, to the steps you must take to hit your weekly mini-goal.

Tasks

Tasks are the discrete things you need to do daily in order to meet your priorities each week. These should be broken down into as much detail and as small a task as possible because they should be able to fit around your other non-negotiable commitments.

Whilst this appears quite straightforward, academics are usually great with goals, but not so much with prioritisation or making task lists. The reason for this: fear and reality. This provokes a very hard look at life as it really is, rather than what we would like it to be and some people are more willing to do this than others.

As we lurch towards to the end of [gestures vaguely to the *outside*] all this year has brought us, it might be time to think about how we are going to move forward towards our goals come the new calendar year. To meet our horizons, we have to see the path the get there.

Writing accountability through social writing

I wanted to write a post to mark the Academic Writing Month of November (yes, it is a thing). I don’t know who decided this was a good month for writing. November is not a particularly auspicious month in the academic calendar. Perhaps it comes at a time where that first sting of term has (supposedly) died down, and we might turn our attention to all the writing projects we have been neglecting.

In any case, it is now that #Acwri comes alive, and things like NaNoWriMo (for novelists, but academics can use it too) get underway.

It is a good excuse for me to talk about my favourite writing subject - social writing - and give a shout out to my writing buddies (hello to Susannah and Marieke) without whom I am certain much less writing would have taken place in the last couple of years.

Why do people fear social writing?

First though, I must convince you on the efficacy of social writing. Alot of people work in (largely) sole author disciplines so by and large do not write with other people. Writing has been formulated as a solitary and private space where the small sparks of joy are enjoyed and the deluge of fear, doubt, shame, avoidance and procrastination are endured. Many academics (of a certain age) dismiss the possible benefits of social writing out of hand - they never learned to do it as a PhD, therefore, it can’t be real.

I know that doesn’t sound very much like a scholarly or evidenced based reaction. Nonetheless, I do encounter this kind of reaction in response to my coaching suggestion that social writing might just be the key to getting unstuck. It might be the first step in medicating the malady that ails them.

The reason for this out-of-hand rejection is simple; people want to keep their fear, shame and procrastinating habits private, because the overwhelming feeling they have in relation to writing is shame. I get it, I really do. But the only way out the other side is through. What you are doing isn’t working, so why not try something new.

Research shows it works

Regardless of scholarly discipline (science to humanities), research shows that academic productivity increases as a result of social writing. Social writing can be enacted in person (difficult now of course) and on-line. It can be done in physical or on-line writing retreats, writing workshops or informal (or formal) writing groups set up within departments, amongst colleagues, or can transcend departments, Universities and disciplines. My own social writing groups are across different countries, Universities and disciplines. The key is to try lots of different methods until you find the mix that works for you. I had a few brushes with social writing that really didn’t work for me but eventually I got there.

Why does it work

Social writing enables accountability, visibility and shared learning. It enables solidarity in the same struggle which no-one except another academic can really empathise with. It centres your writing in your academic life, and gives you the opportunity to talk about your on-going projects in a pragmatic fashion (today I am doing X to move my article forward). It provides an opportunity to make an appointment with your writing that involves other people: this means that you will show up. The shame of being a flake is weightier than the shame of not writing.

The key to all this is to find writing buddies that WILL show up and who, like you, prioritise their writing. These might not be your closest friends and allies, and in some ways, it is better if they are from outside your department because you will not be tempted to rant about the latest office debacle in a precious writing slot.

So, if you have never tried social writing before, do give it a whirl. It is the gift that keeps on giving.

Stopped writing? How to start again

Wow. It has been a tough few months. Many of us will have been hanging in there, particularly parents, waiting for the mythical day when children go back to school. That thought has probably sustained you, right up until they did actually go back to school, and then came back days later with a cough. And around and around you go.

Worse - on top of the into school, out of school Hokey Cokey - you were faced with the mother of all onslaughts: preparing on-line teaching. I’m sure some of you work for institutions that had this all organised well in advance of term starting (I mean, surely somebody did), but for the rest this term is starting to feel like a programme of torture. Between dealing with the technology, wondering whether you will literally survive in person teaching and supporting the isolated and bewildered student body and fearing for your own mental health, there is rarely a moment to sit back and breathe.

But just for now: breathe. Slowly. Take a moment.

What happens when you stop?

I want to talk about what happens when the hopes and dreams and coping mechanisms of the last few months start to falter, because that is sure to happen. Right now you might be in the white heat of it all, and are merely crawling through each day. I’m sure you had great hopes for your shiny new on-line all singing and all dancing teaching module, yet instead, you sit in your room staring at 400 blank black boxes wondering if anyone is out there. You created this thing of beauty in a frenzy pushing all other obligations aside, including writing.

There might be a sense around you that you have successfully pivoted - and somehow it is, in a sense, all over. You are done here. You have got used to it. You have become a teaching robot. The new normal. But it is anything but normal and don’t be moralised, brutalised or gaslit into thinking anything else.

At some point, whatever coping mechanisms you have developed to keep on pushing through will likely come to a crashing halt. And then what?

Rethink your goals and priorities

It is time for a serious rethink about your priorities and where exactly you spend your energies. It is time to re-think the publication plan, but not so much that you have nothing on it. The thing about writing is that it is both a joy and a time suck, a respite and an unbelievable pressure, the thing that gets put off and the thing where deadlines start to loom hard. Some of you may have re-set your expectations in the summer, only to have missed the mark (repeatedly) and piled on additional pressure now it is term time.

It is time to get real. But it is also time not to fall into the trap of saying ‘I have no time to write’. This isn’t true. It just isn’t. Writing can take 15 minutes. Everyone can find 15 minutes, but some of us just don’t want to. Cool. Own it. Just own it, and feel that rush of denial just slip out of your body. This is the first crucial step forward.

Writing is a habit, but not the fun kind. It has the inverse effect of most habits. When you break the writing habit, it is unbelievably difficult to start up again. When you have the writing habit, it is like being on a gentle down hill slope - you kick your little pebble along the ground without thinking about it too much. Break the habit, and you are Sisyphus pushing that boulder up the steepest of mountains. Then you think this is what writing is like, and you don’t much care for it. This gets hard wired into your brain - you begin dreading writing - and around we go. Denial. Fear. Avoidance. But that is not the truth of writing. Writing is only like this when you break the habit.

Identify your motivations

When things get tough on the writing front, the most important thing to re-centre is your motivation. Why do you write? What is it about your research that gets you up in the morning? I talk a lot on the course about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, the differences between the two, and that what really matters is that you can locate some motivation whatever its form. Be it instrumental (I need x publications to get promoted / a job) or more cerebral (I just have to tell the world about x), it doesn’t matter. Even if it’s ‘I need to keep this job’ that works too. Motivation comes first.

Start the habit

Starting writing again after a long halt is a bit like aversion therapy. Small, repeated exposures build up a tolerance. Don’t start in a rush or start big: ‘today I will start my paper’ is a sure way to fail. Start small: ‘today I will find my notes, read them, for 30 minutes’. Then ‘tomorrow I will open up a document and bullet point/ write headings for 15 minutes'. Slow and steady. Break your writing tasks down into 15 minute jobs. If necessary, do one 15 minute job a day until you start to lessen that fear reaction. Eventually you will build up the momentum you need to get to a 25 minute Pomodoro. A couple of these a day and you are back on the down hill slope, writing merrily without drama.

I made that sound easy, and it isn’t. It requires a concerted effort to change your mindset - that is where the real work is. After that, it is all down hill from there.

The video abstract

Today I want to talk about different modes of communication for research (and teaching) and how these are skills you are likely going to have to teach yourself.

As a result of Covid, in person conferences were cancelled. Some moved on-line with more or less success, and this move has prompted a discussion about the efficacy and ethics of in person conferencing and long distance travel. In parallel we have moved to the zoom method of communication for teaching. We have, of necessity, being doing things differently. Some have clearly embraced this shift, making movie trailers for taught courses, and some will be more reluctant to change from doing what they have always done. So now is an apt time to introduce some technology based solutions to communicating research.

The opportunities to disseminate research in various different formats have been around for a while and for some podcasts and video abstracts as methods of research communication are decidedly old hat already. However, for other disciplines, successful adoption of podcasts and videos are still seen as novel (if not down right heresy). Today I want to talk a little bit about one of these modes of communication, and that is the video abstract.

Dissemination by video

Science has been doing video abstracts for ages, and is particularly suited to this mode of delivery with animated cells and complex biological processes rendered undersandable in bite sized chunks through visual aids. Publishers have been keen to jump on the bandwagon offering yet one more thing you can pay them for (besides your free labour) so that they can provide you with a video abstract.

You can of course do this yourself and for free. They are not particularly complicated, and there are many (some terrible) Youtube videos on ‘how to’. Whether you choose to simply talk to camera interspersed with basic graphics or go full on J J Abrams, it is really up to you. How amenable is the subject matter to different media? Record on your iPhone, edit on iMovie - technologically speaking it is not that complex to produce these videos.

The question I want ask and answer first is ‘why’?

If you casually google this question, you will get many a page from the big multinational publishers telling you about increasing your altmetrics. You may or may not care about this, but it is certainly true on a basic level search engines rank video first so that optimising your research content to make it more discoverable can certainly include (amongst many other things) having some video content.

I think a better way to think about it is what is the function of a video abstract, and do you want or need to engage with this style of communication? Clearly a video abstract is not you simply reading your paper abstract out to the camera, or indeed summing up the conclusions of your research in the same way. Neither is it talking over animated lecture slides in an on-line lecture fashion.

Some reasons are:

1. To tell someone clearly why you wrote the paper, what is the puzzle or problem, and what are your conclusions in a short, clear fashion that indicates to them whether or not they should read the paper for their own research;

2. To update a paper that has been published but is already out of date when it came out due to publishing lags;

3. To update a paper previously published with new events/ findings;

4. To promote a paper / book (as a teaser or trailer);

5. As a teaching aid to ease students into the content;

6. To share on social media in an engaging and quick fashion your research findings.

If you have your own website, or use social media a lot, having video abstracts is a good idea in terms of search engine indexing and because you have a forum that you can manipulate to suit your needs. If you are stuck with an institutional page, it is probably not worth it. You most likely won’t be able to in any case.

So since you are about to become achingly familiar with all things video, maybe consider developing the skill of including a video abstract to accompany published work. You are after all a practiced marketing guru.

The Entrepreneur Academic

Today’s academia is much like being in the circus, except in this circus you are the ring master, fire eater, juggler, clown, acrobat, tight-rope walker and every other single act inside the tent. There is no support act. You are the main, and only event.

Here is a crude representation of the evolution of the academic job. In a galaxy far, far away, it looked like this:

I know this is a little simplistic but it was a reasonably simple job.

Alas, it has now morphed into this:

There are no more hours in the week than before. This is upsetting, I know. This is what academia looks like now. Yet, you are perplexed why it is so hard to find time for writing. Wonder no more. This is why.

And of these burgeoning responsibilities, what exactly have you been trained for? By now, most people have been trained to teach classes (though not-online). You have been trained in some aspects of research via your PhD. Everything else you have taught yourself. Every single thing.

You are already an entrepreneurial academic, albeit, not through any choice of yours.

This is not a vocation

I want to end this series of 9 blogs with a particularly challenging concept: academia is not a vocation.

You are not on the front lines (probably) battling Covid. No-one is clapping for you. Even the handful of academic scientists working on a vaccine like science for science I bet. Finding stuff out. Everything after is a bonus. 

Why is it important to recognise this? It is about creating balance in your life, and enabling you to set boundaries about what is and is not reasonable working hours. It is about being able to carve out time to do the various aspects of your job without sacrificing the rest of your life (health, family and friends) on the altar of academia.

Some academics bridle at being told it is not a vocation. It REALLY winds their clock and I’ve seen a lot of angry social media exchanges on this topic. I rarely use generational / class tropes, but forgive me, I am going to. The belief that academia is a vocation is particularly prevalent amongst a certain millennial-and-later generations, and I have to say it, folks from the middle classes more generally. Millennials and the after millennials (and the middle classes) have been brought up in a world where they believe work should be:

• (a) rewarding (on a personal level)

• (b) they should receive personal recognition of their greatness and be taken care of, nurtured and cherished by their employer

• (c) that work should be their passion.

There are outliers of course, and I personally know a few Gen Xer’s who need a reality check. Whilst these are lovely sentiments, they are just that. Sentiments.

I call bullshit here. This became a thing only to convince people to work for free and be enslaved by neoliberalism. Also it’s a thing that makes you feel important and special because I know we can all think of jobs that do not fulfil a, b and c and yet are critical to the functioning of society. The people that do those jobs are not inferior to you. 

Work is to there to pay you for your labour. It puts food on your table and a roof over your head. The minute it is unable to do this, you are engaged in charity. It is not work. When people use the phrase ‘vocation’ they mean working for free. You work for free, for nothing. There is a certain kind of self-indulgent bullshit in this narrative I cannot imagine my father, who worked down a mine, ever partaking in. 

This is not academia. Academia is for profit. Yes, you may enjoy some parts of your job, and that is wonderful. It’s still a job, and there is a lot of bullshit nobody enjoys in that job. You would not think working for Goldman Sachs was a vocation (trust me, I did, it wasn’t), and if anyone suggested it to you, you would laugh. They are for profit too. You probably don’t think working in Tesco’s is a vocation either, yet I think if recent times have taught us anything, it is a far more important job than yours. 

Academia is not special. It is a job. Nothing more, nothing less. When you frame academia through this lens, things look a little different. You may start to ask questions like ‘why am I working on Saturday to do the 30th open day this year when my contract states Mon-Fri 9-5?’. Why am I working evening and weekends and never taking my contractually entitled annual holiday? Why do I revel in busyness exchanges? Why do I not call in sick when I am in fact sick? Why am I checking my emails at all hours? Why do I allow myself to be routinely exploited, and then feel terrible about not meeting the norms of my exploitation?

It is not a vocation. It is a job for which you are paid. 

This is important to remember as in 2020/2021 all kinds of requests are going to be made of you that engage some kind of latent charity (vocation) instinct. They are not reasonable, humane, or your job.

Why I am saying this and making your feel bad? Because 2020/21 is going to be tough, and if you want to preserve your sanity and your writing and research career you need to start saying no to things otherwise you will have a mental or physical health crisis in the name of a vocation that does not exist. 

It is nice to like your job. But it is much better to have a life beyond it.

(If you are not being paid, please find a job that actually pays you. It is the very least your humanity demands for your labour – being an academic is not that great you should sacrifice your life trying to achieve it. It is a literal human right to be paid for your labour).

Changing gears in your writing practice

The purpose of the Academic Coach Writing Course is to build up writers who feel stuck, and writers who are not stuck but need better habits through a series of modules that gradually increases your writing time to solid blocks that are regularly scheduled. 

The psychology blocking many academic writers from being more productive and efficient is based on the one of the toughest writing myths to crack: ‘I can only write when I have big blocks of time’. Because big blocks of uninterrupted time rarely materialise, writers who believe this don’t write, or if they do write, it is gruelling through the night binge writing. And when sabbatical or other ‘big block’ opportunities do arise, they still don’t write as they are so out of practice writing has become a THING of fear and loathing. They cannot work without being 3 months over a deadline.

 Cracking this particular nut is hard work.

The course progresses from writing for a mere 30 minutes to longer periods (perhaps 2-3 hours). This is about bringing you into the writing habit, making it like the brushing your teeth habit. No fuss. No drama. We call this rhythmic writing, from Cal Newport’s book ‘Deep Work’. Writing is just a thing that, at a particular time of day, appears in your diary and you do. The aim, by the end of the course, is to move you from not writing, to writing regularly, to writing in fairly large regularly scheduled blocks. Once you become proficient at this, the course aims to move on from this type of rhythmic writing (regular scheduled slots) to so called journalistic writing – anytime, anywhere.

We look at other types of writing practices of course, what Newport calls bimodal scheduling (big blocks of writing and big blocks of non writing time) and monastic scheduling (the archetypal cabin the woods, or writing retreat). These two particular writing philosophies are generally not that practical, but it’s possible in the time of Covid 19, at least some element of monastic scheduling might be either necessary of attractive depending on your particular life circumstances.

The changed practices of HE in 2020/21 are going to pose a particular challenge to those writers who are welded to the ‘I can only write in large blocks’ myth. Even small blocks of time might be hard to come by. Practicing the art of journalistic writing will be crucial for moving projects forward. Dipping in and out of writing, 15 minutes here or there, will move your writing projects forward enormously, but this type of writing requires a massive mind shift and a writing practice that facilitates it.

If you’ve never done this before, it can sound rather fantastical, but with support this kind of writing can become second nature. Join us on Academic Coach to find a supportive writing environment where we can change up our writing practice together.

Happier writing needs a flexible mind.

Planning in the new reality

Academic Coach is a big advocate of planning: it is a prerequisite of becoming a happier writer. Many academics don’t like to plan, and in the case of reluctant or sporadic writers, there is some underlying writing anxiety that provokes a disdain for planning. Without a plan, you don’t write, and if you don’t like writing, well that all works out just fine. 

Here are ten reactions I see when planning is raised as a must to be a happier writer. In no particular order:

1. I don’t plan – I’m not a planner (the absolutist rejection of planning as a concept)

2. I don’t plan my academic writing because … (this accepts planning might be beneficial per se, but has one thousand excuses about why they don’t do it, along the lines of ‘I can only write when…eg all the planets are aligned).

3. I don’t plan as it never works out (the defeatist position)

4. I don’t like planning (I only do things that make me feel good position) 

5. I can’t plan because I don’t know how to do this effectively (the perfectionist position: this I can help with)

6. When I plan and it doesn’t work out, self-loathing occurs (the perfectionist position)

7. Things never go as I planned (the fatalist position)

8. Planning makes me feel bad (the fear of failure position)

9. I don’t like to estimate how long things take me (the fear of reality position).

10. Other people ruin my plans, so I don’t make them (the lack of personal agency position). 

To hijack Silvia’s phrase, these are specious barriers to writing. None of it is real, it is a story you choose to tell yourself. Excuses 1-4 are simply excuses not to change your behaviour. But these excuses are a substitute for a more visceral fear of writing that has developed over time, and accordingly you have reverted to the Ostrich position. 5-9 are rooted in perfectionism, the twin of the fear of failure. The last one is my absolute favourite because it’s so very common and so easily cured by taking control of your own diary.

If you recognise your reaction to planning in this list, fear not, Academic Coach has the cure where over 10 weeks we engage in some gentle brain reengineering about planning, imposter syndrome, perfectionism, procrastination, and all the other reasons you don’t like to plan.

Planning has always been important to being a happier writer, but in the next year or two, planning is indispensable to your happiness, precisely because ‘here there be dragons’. When the unknown presents many terrors, planning is the remedy. You will have to take control of your diary or you will do absolutely nothing of merit writing wise. Enough with the Churchill nodding dog routine. It is not possible to do all that is being asked of you, so choose the things you will commit to and accept there are things you cannot do.

Micro planning

Once your teaching has been allocated to you, you can plan all your writing and research activity in slots in your on-line diary. At the beginning of term, there will be official meetings you have to attend – exam boards, boards of study and so on that are planned a year in advance. Put these in. When unplanned meetings appear out of the ether, missing a fixed agenda, you can ask yourself: do you have space in your plan, or don’t you? If that slot was allocated to writing, you do not move writing to attend that meeting. You would not move teaching. Don’t do it.

Macro planning

This is the part academics struggle the most with. Or should we say realistic macro planning. Planning the year, or two, when it comes to your research is seriously important. You set (realistic) targets for yourself, that in turn requires the micro planning above to achieve. Let’s say it takes 100 hours to complete an article to submission, and you are planning your diary from Sep-Sep. If you have not started, it is pointless putting in ‘article completion by October’. It is not going to happen, because you can’t find 100 hours in your diary between Sep-Oct to complete it. This is why planning upsets people. The cold hard reality is, this stuff takes time. But with realistic deadlines (perhaps you can find 100 hours over 3 months), stuff does get done. This also means sticking to your allocated slots, which helps when saying no to meetings. It is a lovely virtuous circle of writing harmony.

A viable plan for the year will differ depending on your teaching load, career stage, and discipline, single or multi authored, theoretical or empirical research, so I am not here to say X is a realistic target for you. This is something you learn after trial and error (note, error, not failure).

I have some planning resources you can find here if you absolutely don’t know where to start, but the basics you need to consider is what, why, how and when. It’s that simple.

 Happier writing begins with serious planning.