The Writing Roundabout // Academic Coaching & Writing™

Contents // Academic Coaching & Writing™

Preface // Page 01

Introduction // Page 02

The Writing Roundabout // Page 03

Prewriting // Page 05

Writing // Page 10

Postwriting // Page 15

Free ACW Consultation // Page 21

PrefaceAcademic Coaching and Writing (ACW) is a group of professional academic coaches andconsultants dedicated to supporting your academic writing and academic coaching needs.Our mission is to help you discover the tools you need to succeed in academia.

Our Academic Writing Coaches help you formulate and communicate your ideas to master the craft of academic writing and research. They work with you at each stage of the writing process.

When you are in the early stage of Generating Your Ideas, they help you clarify and articulate your ideas; get a clear sense of audience, genre, and purpose; and identify the specific problem or issue you will address and why it matters.

During the Writing stage, our writing coaches help you create a plan or structure for your manuscript, develop a logical progression of ideas, use sources judiciously, write clearly and directly, use a consistent tone and style, write with a compelling strong voice, and develop mechanical competence.

During the Editing of your project, our coaches help you decide when your project conforms to the standards of academic writing and is ready to submit to your readers for review. Our Writing Coaches specialize in developing you as an academic writer and/or helping you get your work published.

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IntroductionWriting is an integral part of what academics do, and yet many have never considered what the act of writing involves.

Academics are not taught about the writing process, and those who learn about the stages of writing learn about it accidentally from an editor, or mentor, or colleague along the way. This ebook explains the stages in the writing process and is written for those less fortunate academics who have not had that special teacher who shared this knowledge with them.

There are a number of stages in a writing project. In this ebook, they are grouped into Prewriting, Writing, and Postwriting.

Prewriting. In the earliest Prewriting Stage, you find yourself generating your idea, reading about it, and narrowing the focus of your idea for a particular writing project.

Writing. When you are ready for the Writing Stage, you decide on a plan or structure, begin drafting your document, and then revise your content to clearly convey your idea in a logical and consistent manner.

Postwriting. Finally, in the Postwriting Stage, you have to shift your thinking from articulating your ideas to thinking about what the audience needs to know to understand the argument you are trying to convey. Postwriting involves numerous rounds of editing, dialogue with your readers, and more revisions.

These are stages in the writing process that you can’t skip, yet you often revisit previous stages over and over again during the course of completing a writing project.

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The Writing RoundaboutAcademic writing is a recursive process that involves prewriting, writing, revising, and postwriting.

As a writer, you may loop back to previous steps again and again, revisiting the idea, the research, and the focus over and over during the drafting, revising, and editing phases.

In the Writing Roundabout graphic, the Prewriting Stage consists of Generating the Idea, Reading the Literature, and Focusing the Topic.

The Writing Stage includes Planning, Drafting, and Revising the manuscript.

The Postwriting Stage involves Editing, Submitting, and Revising and Resubmitting the writing project.

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Prewriting:The Prewriting Stage involves generating your idea, reading the literature to see how your idea fits, and narrowing the scope of your idea for a particular writing project.

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Prewriting

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Idea: Generate the “big idea.”The first challenge is coming up with an idea for your writing project. Consider all the possibilities for your project and select the one that best matches your interests and research agenda.

Be creative. At the beginning of a project, allow yourself to brainstorm all sorts of ideas. Some people enjoy using mind-mapping techniques to help them generate novel ideas.

Be strategic. Once you have some possibilities, choose an idea that matches your goals and your resources. If you are writing a dissertation, think about developing an idea that you can leverage to further your career ambitions. If you plan to continue in the academic realm, try to generate a dissertation idea that is part of a larger research agenda, which will sustain you throughout your early career and will help you obtain the kind of position you are targeting.

If you are a junior faculty member, you may already have a research agenda that provides a broad outline of the direction your scholarship will take. New faculty members often begin by repurposing their dissertations, but fairly early in your journey toward tenure, you may need a new direction that either spins off from previous research or tackles a new area.

Think about your goals for publication and be strategic. Do you need to complete a manuscript fairly quickly to get it rapidly into the pipeline? If so, choose a project that will not require extensive data collection. Do you have a chance at a summer research grant? Choose the project that is the strongest candidate for the grant proposal.

Consider, too, external constraints that might influence your research time, such as teaching loads, new course preparations, service commitments, or funding limitations.

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What’s the fit? The first step in focusing your topic idea is to generate a review of the literature for your thesis, dissertation, book, or research article. Your goal is to determine where your idea fits into the existing research and to identify how it will go beyond what we already know about your topic.

Broad to narrow. To begin, read more broadly about your topic. Narrowing your focus too soon might lead you to overlook an important aspect of your topic. Try to remain open to modifying your original idea as you review the existing research. Some of the reading you do will become part of the literature review for your article, dissertation, or book, so keep track of complete citations. You may need to look outside your own field for related research if your initial searches yield few results.

Where are the gaps? Use your reading to identify the gaps in research and tweak your idea so that it addresses one or more of those gaps. At this stage, it’s not too late to shift your topic if you find that your initial idea has been thoroughly investigated or if the research literature indicates a stumbling block, such as inherent methodological problems.

When to stop? Continue searching the literature until you keep turning up the same sources. Once you have discovered which references are cited over and over again and have collected articles most relevant to your topic, it is time to move on to the next challenge.

Read: How does my idea fit with the literature?Once you’ve come up with an idea, the next challenge is to find out what other scholars have written on your topic and how your idea fits.

In this step of the writing process, the task is to narrow down your “big idea” into a researchable question within the larger topic. One strategy for narrowing your topic is to ask yourself: who, what, when, where, why, and how? By making specific delimitations, you define the scope of your research. For example “Facebook and Friendship” is too broad a topic for your writing project. • Whose Facebook use will you study? • What posts will be relevant? • How long will you monitor Facebook use? • Where will you get this information? • Why would Facebook help maintain friendships?

As you bring your research question into focus, shape it so that it ties into and expands on existing research. For instance, if most research on social media has focused on college students, you may choose to study high school students. If most research on friendship has focused on girls, perhaps you will look at boys’ use of Facebook. From your reading of the literature, you know that theories regarding friendship suggest male friendship is built around activities, so you expect Facebook postings to focus on that aspect of relationship-building. Now you have a research question: Does boys’ use of Facebook serve primarily as a way for them to learn about and participate in their friends’ activities?

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Focus: Limit the scope of your topic.The next challenge is to convert your big idea into a researchable question by focusing on one aspect of your topic and situating it within existing scholarship.

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Writing:The Writing Stage involves creating a plan or structure and identifying the parts of your project; drafting the project without critically reviewing it as you go; and revising it to strengthen the argument, including deleting unnecessary material; and adding the missing transitions that connect the pieces of the project.

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Plan: Break down your project into small assignments.Now that you have identified your research question, your challenge is to avoid becoming overwhelmed by the large writing project. Create a project plan with specific goals, small manageable tasks, and a timeline.

Most experts agree that the best way to approach scholarly writing is to devote regularly scheduled time each day and to limit your writing sessions to no more than 90 minutes each. To do so, you need to break your large project into smaller segments and then into even smaller tasks so that you can focus on one small assignment at a time. How you choose to do that depends on your personal preferences and work habits. You may want to outline your project using the guidelines provided by your target journal or dissertation guide, beginning with the introduction and moving on to the literature review, methods and so on. Perhaps you already have detailed notes on your topic, so you need to organize the notes and pull related information together. Organizing before you begin to write makes your writing project seem manageable.

It is too easy to get discouraged if you sit down and say to yourself, “Today I’m going to work on my research project.” Learn to break your project down into SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) goals to focus your writing.

Specific. Small, specific goals are those that you can accomplish in a short amount of time.

Measurable. Make your goals measurable in terms of output such as number of words, paragraphs, or pages.

Attainable. Your goals should also be attainable. Ask yourself if the goal is realistic. For example, you can’t write about a topic before you’ve read the literature on that topic.

Relevant. Ensure that your goal is relevant. Does it move your project forward? If not, replace it with one that does.

Time-Bound. Finally, you goal should be time-bound. Give yourself a deadline for each SMART goal.

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Just write! As you begin to write, move through your paragraphs and sections, trying not to revise and edit as you go. Your dissertation, research article, or academic book will need to be a polished, scholarly piece of writing when you submit it, but it does not need to start that way. You sabotage your progress when you second guess your ideas and agonize over every word choice. By letting go of the need for instant perfection, you can produce a “quick and dirty” version of your manuscript that has most of the parts in place. You may want to reread the last bit of what you wrote in your last session, but do not get caught up in reworking a section you have completed.

Perhaps later you may throw out some of your work, but recognize the value of writing as an exercise that helps you get your thoughts on paper. It’s discouraging to stare at a blank page. Once you have a text, you have ideas to play with.

Quiet negative thoughts. If you are beset with negative thoughts during the drafting stage, many writers find it helpful to use the techniques of “mindful meditation.” Become aware of thoughts and worries that distract you from writing (Should this part go later? I need to look up this citation now. I ought to be grading papers.). Instead of giving in to these thoughts, acknowledge them, and then let them go. If necessary, jot yourself a note to review the organization, look up that citation, or schedule time for grading. Then get back to your writing.

Draft: Don’t be overly critical of your drafts.When you are ready to write, use your first draft to sketch out your ideas without revising and polishing the prose as you go. Leave that for later.

Coherence. When you have drafted a complete manuscript, the challenge is to revisit the main idea and the argument you have developed by reviewing the sections, paragraphs, and sentences to focus on consistency and coherence and to tighten your argument. This stage is a conceptual task, not an exercise in proofreading.

Relevance. Read through the entire manuscript and think in terms of how each element relates to the others and to the overall goal of the project. Cut material that is not relevant to your thesis, expand or condense sections as needed for the development of your key points, and reorganize material for a logical progression of ideas.

Connections. Do not focus on sentence-level issues such as punctuation and grammar until the final editing stage. When you are satisfied with the organization, review the transitions between the paragraphs and sections so the reader knows how your ideas are connected.

Adjustments for readers. Don’t assume the reader knows everything that you do about your topic. You may have used the draft to get down your ideas and your argument, and now you need to shift to thinking about what the audience needs to know to follow your argument. Figure out what’s missing and make the adjustments necessary for your reader.

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Revise: Revisit your main idea and argument.Once you have a draft, your next task is to review your sections and paragraphs for consistency and reorganize, cut, expand, or condense to focus your argument.

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Postwriting:The Postwriting Stage involves the line-by-line, detailed-oriented proofreading, letting go of the manuscript to allow for the readers’ review and feedback, and the final round of revisions and resubmissions until the project is accepted for publication.

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Edit: Shift the focus from the ideas to the sentence-level details.You need a fresh pair of eyes for the editing process and a mental shift from thinking about the big idea to focusing on the sentence-level issues.

Editing is a different process than drafting or revising. The editing process requires you to distance yourself from your own writing and approach your work as an observer. You need to shift from considering the big picture idea to concentrating on style and on sentence-level issues of grammar, spelling, and word choice. This is the time to check references and citations and formatting issues.

Take time to read aloud one sentence at a time so you don’t miss things. Look for ways to rephrase awkward sentences and to improve sentence clarity. Eliminate wordiness and redundancies. Replace weak verbs (the moon came out) with strong verbs (the moon rose).

Change passive constructions (the data will be collected) to active sentences (I will collect the data). Choose words appropriate for your academic audience. Double-check your spelling and punctuation. You may fail to see all your mistakes because your mind automatically sees what should be there, rather than what’s actually on the page.

Don’t shortchange this part of the process. Editing is what makes you appear professional. Writing that is full of errors reflects badly on you and distracts the reader from your content. As a final check, before you submit your manuscript, ask someone else to proofread your work to find anything that you may have missed.

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Deciding when a manuscript is “finished” and ready for submission is a challenge for writers, especially if you’re a perfectionist. Although you need to have a polished work, you also need to be realistic about when your work is ready to receive feedback from others.

Until now your writing process may have been a private experience, and you may feel some reluctance to make your writing public. Yet, if you aim to finish your degree or to publish, you need to take the next step. One reason you need to “let go” of a manuscript is the lengthy peer review process. In addition, if your research is of a timely nature, you do not want to wait so long that your research is outdated.

If you are submitting an article, many journals have a backlog of accepted manuscripts, which can delay publication even further. If you are a new faculty member, consider your tenure clock in terms of your scholarly productivity. It is best to have research in the pipeline (articles out for review). Many universities do not let you “count” a journal article until it is accepted for publication. And “published” is always stronger on your curriculum vitae than “accepted for publication.”

Before sending your work out to be read, make one last check to see that your submission meets the requirements for length, documentation style, and format. The act of “letting go” is challenging, but now is the time to send your project out to your reviewers and wait for their feedback.

Submit: Let go of your manuscript.Many writers have a hard time “letting go” of a writing project. When it’s time to stop editing, send your manuscript to your readers for review.

In the world of academics, it is the graduate student’s committee that makes the determination about whether the dissertation is finished and the academic journal’s editor, with the help of peer review, who decides whether an article will be accepted for publication.

Accept, reject, or revise and resubmit. In academic publishing, one of three outcomes is possible. One, your manuscript is accepted for publication. Two, you are asked to revise your manuscript and resubmit it for consideration. Three, your manuscript is rejected. After all of the hard work on your manuscript, it can be crushing to get anything less than a note reading, “Your manuscript has been accepted for publication.” This outcome is infrequent so prepare yourself to receive a response that asks you to revise the manuscript and resubmit it for consideration.

Receiving feedback. One response to reader comments may be to reject the criticism by arguing that the reviewers do not understand your research area well enough. Another response is to overreact to criticism, decide the project is unsalvageable, and abandon it.

Find the middle ground. Look for the value in the criticism and move forward. If you can defend your work, do so. If you think the comments are valid, address the concerns.

Moving on. Work through the revisions quickly to get your document back to the readers. If you receive a “No, thank you” response, use the reviewer comments to correct the flaws in the manuscript and target another journal. Keeping your publication objective in mind will help you through the revise and resubmit process.

It may seem like a long time from your initial enthusiasm for your idea, to the actual writing of your document, to the endless edits and revisions, to the final publication. You will eventually be rewarded with the satisfaction of seeing your idea in print. Now may be the time to consider the next writing project. With experience, the writing process may become more familiar, but there is no way to shortcut the nature of the process: idea generation, writing and revising, and editing.

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Resubmit: Accept criticism, revise, and move on.It’s hard to receive criticism, but most scholars will be asked to revise their work and resubmit it (R & R). Use feedback constructively to revise and strengthen your writing.

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How an Academic Writing Coach Can Help YouMany academic writers go round and round the Roundabout, losing sight of their destination or simply not knowing how to stop looping. An experienced coach can help you determine when to move from prewriting to writing, when to stop writing and start revising, and when it’s time to submit your work.

Working with an Academic Writing Coach, you can expect to:

• Brainstorm novel ideas for your writing project• Engage in a dialogue about your ideas to help

you identify your focus • Develop a book plan or a structure for your

dissertation, your chapter, or your article• Discuss how your idea fits with the literature• Receive help breaking your project down into

small assignments• Receive constructive appraisal and developmental

editing of your drafts

• Learn more about your own writing process• Identify issues that support and hinder the

writing process• Gain a sense of compassion about yourself

as a writer• Learn to interpret criticism in a dispassionate way

that does not impact your self-esteem • Create an accountability structure that will help

you achieve your goals • Receive support rather than writing in isolation.

LEARN MORE ABOUT WORkING WITH AN ACADEMIC WRITING COACH. Click here for a free ACW consultation.

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