Becoming an effective, efficient academic writer is key to academic success. An academic career is built on your research outputs, largely - but not exclusively - communicated through the medium of writing. Being a good writer matters. But how do we become better, happier writers?

Achieving both a productive writing habit, and being able to execute quality writing, depends on many different ingredients that ultimately coalesce around a symbiotic relationship between prioritising your projects, planning what outputs to do when, and activating that planning to support a bullet proof writing habit. It is these aspects of writing that clients come to me to improve. These things they understand and are happy to engage with. Academics like to improve, they understand the benefits of processes and systems, and the writing craft requires these types of interventions.

What is always missing?

No matter how dedicated the academic writer is to improving their craft, the one practice that academics resist - the one crucial thing to build both an effective habit and an ever improving quality of outputs - is the discipline of review. I don’t mean reviewing articles for other people, or grants and so on. I mean reviewing your own behaviour and emotions around writing, and the execution of writing so that you can improve it, rather than just get faster at doing it. Yes to new processes and systems, yes to more efficiency…but no to thinking about – and measuring - how I spent my time and why things might not have gone as I wanted. It seems obvious and yet…not obvious. It’s not sexy. It is not an easy sell. Yet, without it, all nascent progress on processes and systems will eventually fade away to nothing and old habits and old ‘methods’ will reassert themselves.

Think of athletes executing a race, or throw, or a jump. At the end of every event, they get out the recording of their performance and they review it. They cast a critical eye and ask questions about what could have been done better. Often in throwing or jumping disciplines, the review is instantaneous - immediately after they jump, and before the score comes up. The outcome is not even important at this stage, it is the technique that is being reviewed. Why? Because improving your performance requires REAL TIME review, and this is an integral part of any refining any practice or craft or skill.

Don’t stay in the now

Academics only want to think about the next race, the next jump or the next throw. At best, they might review on submission or publication of something. But it is so long since the performance, they can’t remember the details of what went right or wrong. Academics don’t actually want to remember what went right and wrong, or where they might improve; rather it is a sigh of relief that the job is over. They have no rear-view mirror at all. It is the nature of the academic environment that conditions to be ever more, bigger, faster, publish or perish that contribute to this aversion no doubt, but this is not the whole, or even most of the story. It is also the academic culture. Review is seen as a punitive exercise (grading, judging, reviewer2, appraisal) not something that leads to constructive adjustment.

Don’t think of review as something that happens at the end of a project or article: continuous review is crucial. Athletes face an even bigger pressure to be faster, stronger, better, much more than academics. But the culture is different. And they know the answer is to review - critically and carefully - by asking the right questions of the right people so that they can improve their craft.

If you are looking for a way to better review your work, and your writing practice, then having a solid review mechanism that assesses both your input, your behaviour and your output is a critical ingredient to academic success.