Have you ever said a word so often that turns to gibberish on your tongue? Linguists call this semantic satiation. It’s good metaphor for a phenomenon that happens in many academic projects—usually close to the end. Have you ever worked on a manuscript long enough that you begin to wonder: is there a dissertation in […]

Have you ever realized that you will have to jettison some or even most of the writing you have done on a project? For some writers the prospect of having to ditch even small amounts of writing can be agonizing. This is particularly true for writers who struggle to get any damn words on the […]

In third grade a learning specialist pulled me out of class and said, “you’re reading at an 8th grade level, but you can hardly spell. Don’t you look at the words when you read them?” I was nonplussed. Was it possible to read the words without looking at them? I chalked her question up to […]

If you’re an academic, you know that not all of the obstacles to scholarly work have to do with funding opportunities, the search for mentors, or even the challenge of wresting ideas from our own brains. Some obstacles are internal. One theme that keeps recurring in my work with academic writers is the impulse to […]

In the groggy days after a baby arrives, sleep deprived new parents are likely to hear the phrase “sleep begets sleep,” meaning: the more a baby sleeps, the more likely it is to sleep. I was writing my dissertation when my sleep-addled brain contemplated this catch-22. How could I get the baby to sleep more […]

Back in the (probably mythical) day, it was enough just to have an advanced degree. Relatively few people went to graduate school, and those who did were largely destined for the professoriate, the clergy, law, and medicine. In these cases, the relationship between the educational path and the professional path was fairly straightforward. It would […]

  Conclusions can be tricky to write for a similar reason that introductions and abstracts can be: because it’s hard to write about our own writing. Metadiscourse, to use a fifty-cent word, requires that we have enough distance to be able to describe and reflect on the work we’ve done. This can be difficult for […]

Interdisciplinary. Intersectionality. Let’s face it: the “inters” are sexy. They hold the promise of new ways of knowing, new ways of conceptualizing, and new ways of doing scholarship. But the reality is that interdisciplinary work often seems like stepchild of the academic world. Traditional academic fields exert a great deal of power simply because they are written […]