The Need for Graduate Writing Coaching
What is graduate writing coaching? I define it as the practice of using communication to improve the motivation, writing skills, and publishing rates of early career academics. With a Ph.D in Communication, I…
How AI Tools are Changing Academic Writing and What to Do About It
How should academic authors—particularly graduate students and early career academics—respond? How do Al writing tools change the profession of editing and writing coaching?
Talking about Ideas: A Conversational Approach to Academic Writing for the Rest of Us
How can professors and graduate students improve academic writing through conversations? We generally speak before we write. At least, to my knowledge, nobody has ever been born knowing how to write in APA…
The Conceptual Pyramid: How to Organize a Book Manuscript’s Ideas
How should you organize concepts in a large writing project? As an academic editor, I routinely hear these questions from clients: "How many concepts or theories do I need in my academic manuscript?"…
What Does my Editing Process Look Like?
When editors get together, we often talk about process. We ask questions like: What does your onboard process look like? How can you generate metadata that's helpful to clients? Why are projects successful…
How to Write a Conclusion: All Academic Books Must End
It's not you. Academic book conclusions are difficult to write, a difficulty that can be traced to the writing process itself. By the time an author gets to a book's conclusion, they may…
The Problem with Complexity in Academic Writing
All my academic clients are interested in communicating complexity. In some cases, authors are researching and writing about a complex social problem like poverty or housing insecurity. Others are exploring a new idea…
What happens to your book manuscript when your editor leaves a press?
You may find yourself confronting the reality that your editor has left the University Press you're working with. This can be a particularly crushing revelation if you liked working with them! Remember that…
Senior man sitting in classroom with a tablet pc on the table and making notes. Elderly man writing in his book sitting in a library.
“Argument Clinic”: How do you Recognize and Make an Argument in an Academic Book?
In the classic Monty Python sketch Argument Clinic, a man played by Michael Palin approaches a receptionist and says "I'd like to buy an argument." After paying for it and entering the next…
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“Remember the coinage!” Why a central concept is so important to your academic book
While still in graduate school, after reading a book of mutual interest, I turned to my mentor and asked his opinion of it. He said that he thought the material was good. However,…