100 Mistakes Academic Writers Make...and How to Fix Them

In spite of setting aside ample time to write, do you find that you're not as productive as you'd like to be? This episode explores the dual mistakes that might surreptitiously be eating up your writing time.

It can seem difficult to find time to write when your schedule gets busy, especially if you believe that you can only get substantive work done if you have large, uninterrupted blocks of time to commit to it. But there's real value in making use of random short bits of time for writing even on your busiest days. In this episode, we'll explore why.

  While we're away for Labor Day, we're rebroadcasting one of our most popular past episodes, Being Seduced by the Finished Page. In the new intro, there's information about my consulting webpage, stephaniedunson.com, where listeners can learn about my group workshops and advising services.  

In this is a continuation of my conversation with Dr. Rebecca Roache, she talks more about her podcast, "The Academic Imperfectionist," including discussing plans for upcoming episodes.

In the spirit of spreading news about support available to faculty writers, we have special episode this week to promote another podcast designed to help you face the demands of scholarly life. It's called “The Academic Imperfectionist,” and it's hosted by our special guest, Dr. Rebecca Roache. She brings a philosopher's perspective to bear in her exploration of many of the same challenges I aspire to address here on my show. 

Have you had that holy-cow-where-did-the-summer-go moment yet? Are  the long days of summer giving way to the creeping angst of August? If you wonder how you'll manage all you'd planned to do over the summer and all you need to do to before the start the semester, if you feel like you're only starting to get into a writing groove just as those pre-semester emails are starting to trickle in, in short, if you're concerned about the effect the transition to the school year will have on your writing routine, this episode is for you.

Let's be honest: for most of us, doing research is just more gratifying than writing. But a problem arises when the joys and safety of research eclipse our efforts to get writing done. If you too commonly feel like Alice tumbling down the old research rabbit hole, this episode is for you

So a journal or publisher is interested in work that you've submitted. That's great! But now you have to face the reviewers' comments. Maybe you've had bad experiences in the past, but shifting your perspective can help you learn to actually embrace the review process.

In this special listener-request episode, I do a deep dive into process/metacognitive writing with Erica Kaufman, poet, writer, and Director of the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College. 

In psychology, they call it optimism bias—that is the tendency to project productivity based on hopes for the future rather than on evidence from the past. And if time allotted and writing produced rarely line up as you plan, you likely to suffer from it. For those of you who are among the multitudes who routinely overestimate how much writing you can get done in a set amount of time, this episode is for you.

For this bonus track in my continued my conversation with Professor Cynthia Core, she shares how she's supporting her fellow faculty writers at George Washington University.  

Throughout the academic year, it's easy look at the summer as the time when major writing will get done, when long simmering projects will be brought to completion, when things will quiet down, and we'll finally meet deadlines we've put off. The problem is that summer almost never seems as long as we expect it to be and so by the end of the season, we're left scrambling for and often falling short of the writing goals we set. In the discussion, I'm joined by Professor Cynthia Core from George Washington University.

We spend so much time reading published writing that we forget that the finished product generally comes at the end of a necessarily messy process. Learning to expect, accept, and embrace imperfect writing as a meaningful part of the process can have a surprisingly positive effect your productivity.

Books about writing can seem so assuring. But reading too many can over-inform and confuse your writing process. If you've accumulated many books that seemed like they'd help you but didn't, this episode is for you.

Welcome to 100 Mistakes Academics Make...and How to Fix Them, a new podcast for academics and other writers who need to get work done.