1 / 4

Preparing to write - some useful preconditions

Find practical advice on getting prepared to write effectively, understand the writing process, and enhance the quality of your academic work. Explore the importance of voice, sharing practices, and refining your writing product for success.

johnhsmith
Download Presentation

Preparing to write - some useful preconditions

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Preparing to write - some useful preconditions • A real deadline • ‘Cranking up’ takes place (Woods 1996, 2006) • Thinking underway but continues during the writing • Already read a lot of the relevant literature • Any fieldwork data sorted out and in an easy-to-use state • A draft structure and conceptual framework • Some clear time/space but not too much

  2. What gets in the way of writing • Routine tasks with earlier deadlines • Things you don’t need to do in your home • A parrot on your shoulder saying ‘you’re no good; you’re no good…’ • Memories of past writing difficulties • Worrying about who will read it and what they’ll say • Not knowing what you want to write • Not having read and thought enough • Thinking of it as a long difficult voyage rather than a set of easily managed short journeys

  3. PRACTICAL COMMUNICATIVE A C A D E M I C /WRITING PURPOSE who is it for? to communicate, limit jargon (explain concepts?) find your own style (how to choose & just one style?) take a position/so what is going on?(tell story?) criticality not advocacy (even in ethnography?) assembling parts; reading what others say & using own data drafting iterations of theory/data PROCESS VOICE reveals the taken for granted learn how others write (how?) basis for dialogue (with whom?) write regularly; the more you write the better you get (not necessarily?) SHARING PRACTISE ‘good’ writing should be an aspiration for everyone PRODUCT

  4. Thoughts on the process of academic writing • Writing a conference paper with a tight deadline (perhaps data not yet fully analysed, reading and writing quickly, provisional approach); maybe focusing more on the presentation than the paper per se. Use presentation slides to re-organise paper? • Turning a conference paper into an article (choosing a journal, reading relevant papers in that journal, taking account of conference and critical friend comments, ensuring data quality is good, reshaping arguments and conceptual framework) • Getting comments back on submitted paper - making sense of contradictory views, new reading to do, new ideas to absorb, slicing data differently or reducing/increasing data used, re-organising paper structure, reshaping conclusions, often cutting back on length. Rewriting is often slower than first writing.

More Related