On 12 February 2013, a little academic advisor with dreams about writing a book one day, registered a free domain with Wordpress and started writing down the advice she was giving in workshops and individual sessions. 10 years later, look at us now.
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 .
How do you deal with self-citation in an article with anonymous peer review?
Over on the Whisper Collective Podcast, I’ve just released a series of audio recordings from the new book, Writing Well and Being Well for your
These are specialised tools that help me look at books, manuscripts, letters, drawing and prints–relevant for my research in cultural history. You may need other specialised tools for your research!
As I was getting to the end of the recent book, I was buying books at my usual pace but not reading them (as that brainspace was completely taken up with reading my own draft or references for the draft).
Now the book is in and the summer has started, I felt excited to dive into all these books but I also felt stuck. I couldn’t get into gear, let alone find my groove.
So I rummaged around in my toolbox, and came up with this list of techniques. None of them are perfect, but little by little we are turning the dial back to reading.
Mindfulness is about being present in the moment with your writing, but there may be difficult feelings there. It can help to move from rehearsing how badly you feel, to articulating a beneficial wish for everything and everyone around you, including yourself. And apply it more specifically to your writing practice.
Maybe you could dial up the positive talk, to yourself and others. How does that feel? What grace could be experienced?
Here is another breathing practice. In this fifth practice, I walk you through the second of three breathing practices. This one is best if you need to feel fired up. It’s hard to read and count and breathe, but it’s easy to breathe if someone else keeps count for you, so let me help.
“Deadline juice” is a term I just made up when talking to a student the other day, but it’s pretty apt. It describes the eustress response to an upcoming deadline—a healthy (yes short term appropriate stress responses are healthy!) jolt of adrenaline when your energy is up, your focus is up, your speed is up.
Now that the proofs for Writing Well and Being Well are off to the printer, I’m coming back to a previous set of questions I had about generous reading (this blog post turned into a chapter for the book, but it was just the beginning of things I wanted to explore).
