Gosh, we’ve just passed a major landmark, with our 250th post here on Research Degree Insiders (about how to anonymise your research for peer review without erasing it!) Back in 2013, I started a tiny place on the internet to share the resources that I was talking about every day with students in one-on-one sessions as an Academic Skills Adviser at the University of Melbourne.
Over time I’ve shared tips, developed new resources and written about my own writing process. In the last five years, I’ve been increasingly using the blog to play around with early versions of sections or ideas for my books.
And I’m delighted that the recent #selfcare posts will have a new home for a fourth writing book, this will be my first single-authored book, Writing Well and Being Well for Your PhD and Beyond in Routledge’s Wellbeing and Self-care in Higher Education series, helmed by the awesome Narelle Lemon.
I recently shared my advice on how to write a proposal for an academic book over on the RED Alert for La Trobe University. After so many books, I now find book proposals pretty straightforward, but they were super hard when I started out. The trick, I discovered, was that book proposals are written not just for one reader but multiple teams within a publishing house. In other words, I needed to get familiar with how books get published, and to use theory of mind to talk to the people who make the book-magic happen.
Plus I just published an article about why we need to talk about quitting the PhD over at Times Higher Education. Somewhere between a quarter and half of PhD candidates don’t complete the degree–that’s a lot! And it makes it perfectly normal to be in a position to consider if that is the right choice for you. People make this choice for lots of really solid reasons, so there should be no shame or hesitation.
If you subscribe to my newsletter, you’d already know all of this because I managed to send a quarterly update, while the blog has had a couple of months to lie fallow while I write in all these other places.
I’m giving the blog time to work out who it wants to be for the next decade. Thanks for being part of the journey and the reason for its existence and persistence.
Photo by Zdeněk Macháček on Unsplash
