A few wrist stretches for editing
My co-author was doing his final read through of our big academic book, and complained to me that it made his wrists tired and tight
My co-author was doing his final read through of our big academic book, and complained to me that it made his wrists tired and tight
Everyone has a path to expertise, and sometimes it’s helpful to loop back to an earlier time, when I was trying to work out how these book-length things even were possible, long before I accidentally wrote three books in a year. It’s a story involving a typewriter and a very long poem.
But then I turned the page of my done-dairy, and … there were two entries for August. One said “Lockdown 6.0” and one said “Curfew”. And that was the end of my diary.
Do you have a writing practice? Has it grown or developed since you were last at university? Is it working for you? Is it painful?
Paragraphs are parts of sections, and a section is like a flight of stairs, taking you efficiently where your thesis needs to go. A new way to think about paragraphs as a ‘step in your argument’.
I hear a lot of conflicting advice on how to write sentences, and I bet you do too. Should you write short sentences, because they are easier to read? Should you write longer sentences because they sound more academic? Should you write a careful mix of sentences, because that creates good flow?
There is an important aspect of feedback that you may be ignoring… and that is accepting positive feedback.
gap between what you know, what your supervisors know, and what the people who are actually going to approve your work, your examiners, know.
Each revision, taking on board questions and concerns and advice and changes, takes my work a little bit away from me. For me, this is a good thing! Unlike this blog post, which I wrote, editing and published myself (hence the fact that there are often typos!), academic writing for publication has been read and commented on and changed by multiple people over multiple stages. The article or book goes from being ‘my’ work, to being, in some way, ‘our’ work.
It’s a typical piece of advice to give authors of articles and theses, that you need to explain the ‘so what?’ of your contribution. But in English you can use this phrase in two very distinct ways depending on how you say it.
