Want to shorten your academic article to meet the word count limit? Here are three tips (plus 1 bonus tip for qual papers) I use to shorten my clients’ works to make the journal’s word count. Works every time!

This workshop will help you live a life of intent. It will help you find a clear path to your deepest desires, and help you live a year that is lead by your truest wishes.

Examine the year that we just left behind, take the lessons learnt into the next year, identify areas of your life that need your attention and care, uncover your desires, and lead with intent for the next year so that you can achieve what you set out to have.

This kind of safe creative space, away from the prying hyper-critical laser-sharp eyes of peers and colleagues and even co-authors, makes my clients feel a level of support with their writing and thinking that they have often never experienced. This kind of partnership with author and editor is a rare and precious thing in academia.

Research shows that experts are made, not born. Deliberate practice is the key, and deliberate practice requires an investment of time. Twenty years should do it? I have been an editor for 20 years. So what does that bring you? What can I do that someone who has been editing for, say, five years wouldn’t be able to?

For the past 20 years, I've worked alone at home. The lifestyle is great, but it can be really hard to work alone. It’s lonely. So how do we motivate ourselves to work? How do we find the energy to not only get started, but to keep going?

In academia, the managerial notion of time is brought to bear on academics through the idea of "publish or perish". It catalyses anxiety and fears about thinking, experimenting and writing against a ticking clock. But academics are not managers and don’t need to use managerial time. They’re artisans, and need to work on artisanal time.

As the new year approaches, you will be tempted to make resolutions about writing. But when mid-February rocks up, we all know that “writing” will be relegated to the bottom of the to-do list. Join us in our “Finish That Paper!” Workshop: We’ve put together a workshop that starts in the New Year and helps you realise your New Year writing resolutions and more.

Why is academic writing so hard? After editing for 20 years, I might have an idea or two about this sore topic. Well, four ideas for today, to be precise. Five seemed too blog-y. I may have more later.

So if the last post resonated with you, and you suspect you might need to procure a developmental editor for your manuscript, you can read on to get a sense of what it’s like to work with a developmental editor, what the process may look like for you, and how much it might cost [not as much as you might think].

Every request for editing I get asks me for a copy edit. And yet, when I start reading the paper, I see that what it needs is not a fix for its writing issues but a fix for its thinking issues. The paper actually needs a developmental edit. What does your paper need?

I’m just rounding up a year in Lyon, France before my move back to Singapore. And a move is a time for reflection. Looking back, I’d say: it’s been a GREAT year. And the main reason for that? My two-hour workday lunches.

Paper rejections can be deeply unsettling, especially for junior academics. Healing the wounds of a rejection takes time. It involves going through several phases, including acknowledging the upsetting and frustrating dimensions of a paper rejection early on.

Although rejection is an incredibly common event for academics, it remains a taboo subject in academia. This invisibility of failure creates false expectations of immediate successes for early career researchers on the one hand, leading to a complete lack of confidence. On the other hand, seasoned academics used to receiving rejections may continue having great difficulty with rejections, the cumulative force of multiple rejections acting as a battering ram to their ability to function normally.

Chefs practice mise en place—the key culinary technique we covered in our previous post—whereas most PhD students are expected to learn how and what to write on their own! This lack of training is a paradox, especially considering the importance of writing skills to academic success.

So, you want to finish a piece of writing you have been working on. Or you are attending a writing boot camp. Will you waste precious hours writing, deleting, writing and then eventually surfing the internet? Or will you create something of good and promising value?

I started using the Pomodoro technique last year when the pandemic hit and the kids stayed at home to study, and it’s the best thing to ever happen to me.

Guest post by Dr Chris Hill.

Previously, I wrote about the role of inspiration and mental well-being in productive writing practice. Here I explore how good sleep habits can improve your writing productivity.

If I am not happy and balanced, then it is no surprise that I am easily distracted and uninspired. And so, achieving balance and happiness will involve some kind of reflection on my thoughts and emotions. Let’s use techniques that can improve your mental well-being and cognitive performance to make you a more productive writer.

Here are the main things a writing coach can help with: Guide you with a methodical approach to writing; Analyse your writing for problematic patterns and show you ways to overcome them; Set deadlines to boost your writing dedication and productivity; and Provide writing and organisational tips to take that burden off your shoulders.

The writer Peter De Vries once famously quipped: I only write when I’m inspired, so I see to it that I’m inspired every morning at nine o’clock. It sounds like a quote about discipline and the rigour of regular practice, but seen another way, what De Vries is really talking about is inspiration.