Academic Writing – Research Degree Insiders

Writing Well and Being Well for Your PhD and Beyond is published

It’s publication week for Writing Well and Being Well for Your PhD and Beyond: How to Cultivate a Strong and Sustainable Writing Practice for Life. It’s available as a paperback and ebook on all the big book websites, and via the publisher. As with all my books, I’m delighted if you buy a copy but also delighted if you recommend it to your university library so you get to read it and so does everyone else.

I had the best time writing this book, and the pre-readers have given such warm and delightful feedback. My series editor described the book as ‘your best friend’; ‘it’s personable, relatable, oozing with strategies.. It simply is a gift’. The peer reviewers said things like: it’s ‘calming and supportive’, ‘a useful review and re-thinking of the writing process’ that ‘gives permission’ for you to write, containing a ‘sprinkling of humour’ but also ‘addictively practical’.

What I learned from tracking my writing for a year

Back in 2021, I tracked my writing for a year. I kept a done diary for 6 months (as I’ve previously written about on the blog), but I also met up every month with an old co-author and we each wrote a little report on what we’d been doing: what was growing in the garden, what we were eating, what was going on in the world, what we were doing to move, what we were reading, but also what we were doing to progress our next writing project.

Breaking through by going slantwise

Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to sit down and attack it directly. But sometimes, you need to come at it sideways. We are often most creative when we are wandering around a problem or when we have taken a break.

One way we have used to make decisions about the future, since deep history, is to attempt to make patterns out of random stuff.

Reading backwards: Reading against the grain

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).

What are page proofs and what should I look out for?

Page proofs (sometimes called first proofs or galleys or uncorrected proofs) are the last stage of an author’s engagement with a text before it goes to print.

On rejecting feedback

You might worry that examiners and reviewers will outright reject your work if you don’t accept every single piece of feedback, but I can tell you from experience, that is not true. I first had to learn how to reject feedback for my PhD examination, and have used the same skills to deal with journal articles, monographs and how-to books. It’s not IF you accept the feedback, it’s HOW you reject it that will matter in deciding whether the final piece is acceptable.

A journey of a thousand miles is finished with over 2 million single steps

You may have heard the proverb ‘a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’, it’s from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. But while getting started feels hard, finishing a research thesis is so much harder.

What’s the hardest stage of a PhD?

The doctoral journey looks different for everyone, but there are some common hard parts. Knowing that these parts can be hard for lots of people is often a bit reassuring. It also helps you to plan—I had a lot of friends doing their PhD ahead of me, so I was able to watch them and know what might be coming for me.

The blog is back

Not only is Writing Well and Being Well for your PhD and Beyond now in to my publishers, but we have a publication date and a preorder link.

The story of my thesis

If you have ever been to one of my workshops in the last decade, you will probably have done this warm up. In fact, if you came to a multi-day writing retreat I ran, you would have done this at the beginning of each day. It is the most powerful, most flexible, simplest tool in my writing tool box.

Category: Academic Writing