Last weekend, the blog underwent a serious overhaul, with a new look, new design, updated content and a sign-up for a newsletter if you want even more from Research Degree Insiders! I’m really lucky to have worked with Dr Bronwyn Eager of Ivory Tower who did all the design and technical work. This post tells you about Ivy Tower, about Bronwyn, and about our design process. As always, it’s about the insider tips!
I’ve just finished a book, and my co-author and I had fun thinking about who we would like to thank in the Acknowledgements section, and you will need to do the same at some point. But you might also want to make a less formal, less constrained, more honest version!
It will be no surprise to anyone that I hear a lot of writing advice—some good, some less helpful. But some of it is just literally untrue, and yet the myths are so pervasive that people believe they are terrible writers because they are not following that advice.
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.
People often think hobbies are for kids, or retired people; for people who have holidays that aren’t really conference travel, or weekends that aren’t spent
Often, we feel we should wait to feel ‘inspired’ to start writing. We want to wait until we feel we are filled up with ideas and certainty and energy to write. And yet, as Boice found in his research, turning up regularly and ‘just writing’, whether or not you felt inspired or had time or were ready, could make someone nine times more productive.
If you feel overwhelmed by your inbox and meeting demands, you are likely to be dealing with the challenge of reactive communication. That is, every day, you open your inbox and find tens or even hundreds of requests for information and tasks. Like many people, you may start the day with a sense of dread.
In the post back in January about ‘Not forgetting everything you did last year’ I talked about a new done notebook strategy. Four months later, this is a quick update on how I’m using it right now.
What these students show is they see reading as an intelligence test. (To be fair, they probably learned this from school.) As a graduate student, they have been a ‘smart’ person all their life, but maybe now they are not smart, or not smart enough.
Thanks to Anuja Cabraal who asked this question! It’s about 2,500 words of answer, so this is absolutely a Definitive Guide. A few of the
