Backing off your writing ‘end range’
This is one of those posts where I think aloud. No need to come along for the ride, but you are welcome to if you might be interested! I was doing some yoga and thinking about discomfort and writing.
This is one of those posts where I think aloud. No need to come along for the ride, but you are welcome to if you might be interested! I was doing some yoga and thinking about discomfort and writing.
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.
Some workplaces and research cultures explicitly or implicitly run so that every conversation is actually a battle for airtime, and it’s common to try to sabotage other people’s chances. We should be working towards the exact opposite: energising, authentic, worthwhile, academic conversations. That’s what we love about getting together with our nerd pals.
You don’t get knocked down and bounce back stronger. At least not immediately.
All of this works because we start doing the work. By not delaying the real work through endless reading and procrastination, we start working towards our end goal, in ways that actually contribute to our goals. That is, we start making words on the page that can be added to and refined until you have enough good enough words to submit a passable PhD thesis.
A couple of people in my wider circle have recently asked me about how to get started on a PhD proposal. This advice is mostly
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.
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.
I cannot believe, after all my to-do list and planning your time blog posts, I’ve never actually talked about how to break down a big project, set goals and then plan to meet them: an essential aspect of doing a PhD thesis… Partly because when we teach this in a workshop we know there is so much diversity in the ways that different people achieve the same outcome
How do you differentiate between work that is hard because it’s complex and challenging, vs work that requires a large volume of labour?
