Want to shorten your academic article to meet the word count limit? Here are three tips (plus 1 bonus tip for qual papers) I use to shorten my clients’ works to make the journal’s word count. Works every time!

In academia, the managerial notion of time is brought to bear on academics through the idea of "publish or perish". It catalyses anxiety and fears about thinking, experimenting and writing against a ticking clock. But academics are not managers and don’t need to use managerial time. They’re artisans, and need to work on artisanal time.

As the new year approaches, you will be tempted to make resolutions about writing. But when mid-February rocks up, we all know that “writing” will be relegated to the bottom of the to-do list. Join us in our “Finish That Paper!” Workshop: We’ve put together a workshop that starts in the New Year and helps you realise your New Year writing resolutions and more.

So if the last post resonated with you, and you suspect you might need to procure a developmental editor for your manuscript, you can read on to get a sense of what it’s like to work with a developmental editor, what the process may look like for you, and how much it might cost [not as much as you might think].

Every request for editing I get asks me for a copy edit. And yet, when I start reading the paper, I see that what it needs is not a fix for its writing issues but a fix for its thinking issues. The paper actually needs a developmental edit. What does your paper need?

Paper rejections can be deeply unsettling, especially for junior academics. Healing the wounds of a rejection takes time. It involves going through several phases, including acknowledging the upsetting and frustrating dimensions of a paper rejection early on.

Although rejection is an incredibly common event for academics, it remains a taboo subject in academia. This invisibility of failure creates false expectations of immediate successes for early career researchers on the one hand, leading to a complete lack of confidence. On the other hand, seasoned academics used to receiving rejections may continue having great difficulty with rejections, the cumulative force of multiple rejections acting as a battering ram to their ability to function normally.

Chefs practice mise en place—the key culinary technique we covered in our previous post—whereas most PhD students are expected to learn how and what to write on their own! This lack of training is a paradox, especially considering the importance of writing skills to academic success.

So, you want to finish a piece of writing you have been working on. Or you are attending a writing boot camp. Will you waste precious hours writing, deleting, writing and then eventually surfing the internet? Or will you create something of good and promising value?

Guest post by Dr Chris Hill.

Previously, I wrote about the role of inspiration and mental well-being in productive writing practice. Here I explore how good sleep habits can improve your writing productivity.

Here are the main things a writing coach can help with: Guide you with a methodical approach to writing; Analyse your writing for problematic patterns and show you ways to overcome them; Set deadlines to boost your writing dedication and productivity; and Provide writing and organisational tips to take that burden off your shoulders.

Is bad writing bad science? Bad science here refers to imprecision. Based on that idea, we can say that imprecise scientific writing—which is another way of saying “bad writing”—definitely creates bad science.

Writing is a solitary act, but it doesn’t have to be done in solitude and isolation. A Zoom writing community (a.k.a. writing circle, writing group) is a space for writers to come together and write synchronously; it provides companionship and support, intellectual and emotional.