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The Writing BASE is a diagnostic tool designed to help you broaden the behavioral, artisanal, social, and emotional dimensions of your writing practice.

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How do successful academics write, and how do they learn to write? What are their daily routines, their formative experiences, their habits of mind? What emotions do they associate with their academic writing? And where do they find the "air and light and time and space", as the poet Charles Bukowski put it, to get their writing done? These were among the questions that I asked as part of a research project that eventually took me to 45 universities in 15 countries.

Feedback from more than 1,300 academics, PhD students and other researchers from across the disciplines revealed that successful writing is built on a complex and varied set of attitudes and attributes, including behavioural habits of discipline and persistence, artisanal habits of craftsmanship and care, social habits of collegiality and collaboration and emotional habits of positivity and pleasure.

However, the abundant how-to literature on scholarly productivity focuses mainly on behaviour and craft: when to write; where to write; how long to write at a stretch; how to compose strong sentences or structure a persuasive argument. Much less frequently addressed are the social and emotional dimensions of academic writing: for whom do we write, and why? How is our writing supported by the various communities we belong to, and how might we better support the writing of others? How can we learn to overcome inhibiting negative feelings of anxiety, frustration and fear, and to draw strength from positive feelings such as passion, pleasure and pride?

Not that it really matters what the writing guides say: most academics don't read them. Nearly half my survey respondents confessed - some abashedly, some brashly - that they have never so much as attended a writing workshop or cracked open a book on grammar and style. Only 15 per cent learned to write and publish in their discipline via an accredited course or its equivalent. For many higher education professionals, it seems, a lack of higher education in academic writing is practically a point of pride.

Of course, all academics have learned to write somehow. Through an improvisatory process frequently described by my respondents as "sink or swim", we figure out how to navigate the swells and eddies of the publication process; how to stay within the lanes of our disciplinary conventions; how to negotiate the shark-infested waters of peer review.

Some of us have even been lucky enough to encounter supervisors or mentors who accelerated our transition from flailing survival to confident freestyling. Informal instruction, however, is a notoriously capricious form of education, unpredictable in its delivery and serendipitous in its outcomes. Senior academics who impart their own tricks of the trade to students and colleagues don't always realise that what worked for them might not necessarily work for everyone. If your only tuition in academic writing came from your doctoral supervisor, chances are you were taught to write like your supervisor, rather than being exposed to a wide variety of disciplinary styles and ways of working.

Paddling up and down the PhD lap pool won't prepare you for ocean swimming. Nonetheless, at most universities worldwide, doctoral students are offered little or no formal training in the writing-related skills that they will need as academics or full-time researchers. Most academic English courses are aimed at non-native speakers and concentrate on stylistic conventions and grammar. Postgraduate research methodology courses, meanwhile, focus mainly on research design, only rarely addressing topics such as developing and maintaining productive work habits, avoiding the seductions of disciplinary jargon, working effectively with co-authors or responding constructively to critical feedback.

Post-PhD, even these tenuous lifelines are pulled away. Only a smattering of universities offer continuing professional development programmes for academics in their capacity as research writers, beyond the occasional grant-writing workshop or weekend writing retreat. Where such programmes do exist, moreover, they have often been spearheaded by a single visionary staff member with a particular interest in academic writing. When that person moves to a new position or retires, the programme is likely to disappear.

In the 1980s and 1990s, university administrators woke up to the fact that they were doing little or nothing to support the professional development of academics in their roles as teachers - a gap that, in turn, affected the quality of their students' education. It would now be almost unthinkable for a major higher education institution not to provide some form of professional development in tertiary teaching. As universities face growing pressure to attract contestable research funding, recruit talented international postgraduates and boost their world rankings, what will it take for us to start better preparing academics for their roles as research writers? And how might we replace our current sink-or-swim approach with the kind of ongoing, on-the-job support and development that professionals in fields such as law, medicine and engineering regard as a natural part of their career progression?

We could start by acknowledging that subject expertise does not necessarily equal expertise in writing and communication. Likewise, craft expertise does not necessarily guarantee a nuanced understanding of the many other factors that underpin academic labour. Just because you know how to write elegant prose doesn't mean that you know how to maintain productive work habits, collaborate effectively with other writers or respond gracefully to a bruising referee's report. Nor does craft proficiency guarantee that you possess the vocabulary, confidence and skill to teach good writing to others.

Successful academics who think they have nothing to learn about writing are like champion swimmers who refuse coaching because they already know how to swim. They have what Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck calls a "fixed mindset" - a mode of thinking that enshrines the status quo - as opposed to a "growth mindset", which welcomes challenge and change.

In their 2005 book Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd note that humans are culturally programmed to "imitate the common type"; we acquire new skills mainly by observing those around us and doing as they do. Like any other form of higher education, continuing professional development moves us beyond this default mode by equipping us with the confidence and skill to challenge preconceptions, try out new approaches and extend our knowledge in new directions.

So what might an expert-facilitated, research-informed course in academic writing and research productivity look like?

For a start, it would be designed and taught by accomplished scholars familiar with the current literature on research writing and productivity - in the same way that university teaching certificates are taught by colleagues familiar with the current literature on student learning and higher education pedagogy.

It would be hands-on, iterative and practice-focused. You won't become a competent swimmer just by reading a book.

It would be interdisciplinary and cohort-based, bringing together researchers from across a range of fields to learn with and from each other.

It would encourage productive writing habits and foster strategic career development.

Most importantly of all, it would equip early career and experienced academics alike with the confidence and courage to question received knowledge, push back against disciplinary conventions and remain resilient in the face of criticism and rejection. Trained ocean swimmers know how to recover from rogue waves and cut across riptides that could otherwise drag them helplessly out to sea.

Ideally, a comprehensive writing development course would also attend to differences in participants' backgrounds and ways of learning. In particular, it would address head‑on the gendered nature of academic labour and career progression.

For instance, one of the most startling findings of my research was that male academics are significantly less likely than their female colleagues to attend voluntary workshops, courses or retreats that focus on academic writing and productivity. In fact, I can now walk into an academic writing workshop just about anywhere in Europe, North America or Australasia and confidently predict that about two-thirds of the participants will be women. The only notable exception occurred at a scholarly conference where my presentation was billed as a "keynote address" rather than a writing workshop; there, the men outnumbered the women.

My research suggests several possible reasons for this phenomenon. Mixed emotions about writing, I found, are common to men and women alike: about 70 per cent of my survey respondents across a range of demographic categories (age, career level, gender, discipline, language background and country of origin) reported that they associate both positive and negative emotions with their academic writing. At the margins of the data, however, a somewhat different picture emerged. At every academic career stage from PhD student to full professor, the female academics in my survey expressed higher percentages of negative-only emotions and lower percentages of positive-only emotions than their male counterparts.

Particularly striking was the emotion gap between female and male PhD students. The women in this cohort proved nearly three times more likely than the men to report wholly negative feelings about their writing, a finding that confirms the anecdotal experiences of many a doctoral supervisor.

Journalists Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, co-authors of The Confidence Code: The Science of Getting More, cite studies demonstrating that highly confident people, especially men, tend to overestimate their own abilities, whereas less confident people, especially women, tend to underestimate them. But while women who attend academic writing workshops may well be less confident about writing than their male colleagues, they are arguably more confident about publicly seeking help.

My husband, a former academic, has a different theory. Men, he tells me, "don't like being bossed around by women, especially in professional development workshops where there are lots of touchy-feely activities that they can't see any point in".

While I rather hope that my own practice-focused, evidence-based workshops would not be described in quite those terms, I understand what he means. We know from a variety of contexts - business, politics, schools - that men and women tend to operate differently in a range of social situations; those differences, in turn, inflect their relative performance and success. People who prefer a "feminine" mode of interacting often have trouble flourishing in a "masculine" environment, and vice versa.

Many academic men are comfortable operating as hunters (moving independently or in alpha-male-led packs, impatient to get going, ready to move in quickly on their quarry), while academic women more typically function as gatherers (working collaboratively, gleaning information bit by bit, taking risks only when they feel ready to do so). It is therefore easy to see why the collaborative, contemplative space of a writing workshop or a residential retreat might suit women better than men. Such spaces offer calm in the storm, an opportunity for rest and renewal. But in the gendered world of academe, where men occupy the vast majority of senior administrative positions, female-friendly initiatives like these may be less likely to get funded than, say, research seminars that focus on a more combative, "masculine" model of scholarship.

Gendered attitudes toward writing can also have broader career implications, particularly when it comes to surviving the peer review process. When asked how they respond to criticism and rejection, the successful academics I interviewed - men and women alike - described themselves as feeling wounded, stung, thrashed, pierced, burned, shocked, beaten up, crushed, whacked, gutted, knocked back, trampled and pissed on from a great height: images of pain and humiliation that bear no hint of redemption or pleasure.

Are women more likely than men to retreat from such perilous waters to safer shores? In the context of academic writing and publication, is "sink or swim" synonymous with "fight or flight"?

Professional development courses for academic writers won't necessarily answer these questions or resolve the underlying issues. However, wouldn't it be preferable for universities to support early career academics with lifebuoys and diving platforms, rather than arming them with spearguns - or, worse yet, simply watching them drown?
Helen Sword is professor and director of the Centre for Learning and Research in Higher Education at the University of Auckland and is author of Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (2017).

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How do successful academics write, and how do they learn to write? What are their daily routines, their formative experiences, their habits of mind? What emotions do they associate with their academic writing? And where do they find the "air and light and time and space", as the poet Charles Bukowski put it, to get their writing done?

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Posted 25 March 2018 by Lisa Meloncon

With the ATTW luncheon and my other responsibilities at both ATTW and CCCCs, I've gotten "behind" on getting a blog up. (and seriously, if you have something to say, please get in touch because we would love to have folks participate here.)

So today I'm gonna do something of a summary of the luncheon activity because it leads into an ongoing topic and concern of many, time management. At the luncheon, the topic was Values and Priorities. We did a couple of exercises where we asked participants to first write down what they valued both personally and professionally. The purpose of this activity was to get folks thinking about what is truly important to THEM in the their lives. Examples of this could include getting an article manuscript out each year or doing more community work or spending more quality time with children or significant others. We then moved to the barriers that can get in the way of what we value. Attendees were asked to write down some of the things that consistently get in the way of the things they value. We had table discussions around these ideas and then we moved to trying to create a schedule-and we gave attendees an actual weekly calendar-to see if they could brainstorm ways to make their values, priorities, and schedules align. The last activity was sharing a strategy to help align values and priorities to schedules. ( Those strategies are gathered here.)

Needless to say, that the discussions at the tables were lively and encouraging (and discouraging because of the number of folks who felt they had little control over their time). As I have said many times, this job is hard and because of all sorts of pressures, we often feel the need to overproduce or we lose the focus on what is most important to us. All at the detriment of our mental, emotional, and/or physical health. The goal of the luncheon was to encourage folks to think through what they value and then try to find ways to shift their own work habits and potentially to set up new boundaries to enable schedules that we truly value.

After the luncheon several people asked me for suggestions on how I manage my time. Time management is the key to aligning our values with our schedules. None of what follows is new or innovative. But it does give insights into the process of approaching work that you may find useful in thinking through your own lives. Hopefully, you can find a nugget or two that can help you manage your workflow.

Find a Planner

I use planner here loosely because I get that many of you do things electronically, while the dinosaurs among us (like me!) still use the old school, in print, carry it around planner. The key is you need to use one. Electronic versions run the gamut from robust task management tools like Omnifocus or Things to more lightweight free tools like Todoist or Wunderlist to tools more specific to projects like Trello. Then you have the old school type of planners. I currently use an Action Day but I have used or tried or bought, examined, and returned so many of the others on the market such as Passion Planner, Panda Planner, At-a-glance, and the bullet journal approach.

The key to a good planner is that it needs space for

weekly meetings and such: an actual day to day schedule with hours so you can block things off including writing and thinking time

tasks for that week: we need to be able to see at a glance things you need to get accomplished in a week

additional spaces: this means you can add parts of a project or ongoing administrative tasks that need to get accomplished

Here's a blank page of my current planner and the way I've shifted it's areas to fit my life and work.

So I use the planner's "Tasks to Execute" on the left in the same way the planner creators intended as my weekly list of things that I have to get done. But the areas under the calendar I have changed to keep track of weekly things specific to life: RHM (items for the journal I co-edit); Program (things associated with my work as program administrator); Service (tasks specific to my service obligations such as work for womeninTC or CPTSC or locally on a committee); Emails (self explanatory). The calendar area is used to block of time for class, class prep, scheduled meetings, and writign and research time. Typically, a week is pretty filled from 8-5 with some space for when things get awry and stuff has to shift.

The planner then becomes your weekly/daily guide.

Sticky Notes and Whiteboards

I combine sticky notes and whiteboards because I use them both sort of equally and mostly for the same reasons. These are tools to get a bigger picture of life. These contain the deadlines you have coming up (that when they get closer need to be transferred into your planner) and then other smaller deadlines and some big picture goals. So currently, I have a whiteboard that lists the things I am working on with deadlines (both given to me and also those I've kind of tentatively assigned to that project). then I have some sticky notes that list parts of those projects that need to get done.

For example, I'm finishing up this big data project about programs that also makes some pretty pointed and provocative arguments about what TPC needs to do to sustain programs equitably and ethically. My whiteboard has that project listed along with several big component parts that still need to be done. My sticky note then has a list of some things that I need to do next week. But see, this project isn't tied to anything but me wanting to get it done. So I use the sticky note so I can easily move it from week to week, and the whiteboard is the ever present reminder that it is in progress.

Here you can use most anything. I've also used a legal page taped the wall or a separate notebook. Project management scholarship and practice simply tells us that we need some system to keep track of the parts of the project. Using multiple tools in ways that make sense to you and your life ensures that you can break the projects down into manageable chunks that can be assigned daily and weekly slots so there is incremental and consistent movement forward. And some folks use sticky notes on white boards (which follows practices from project management in the workplace)!

The sticky notes and whiteboards or whatever you devise for yourself becomes your big picture and project management guides.

Prioritize

I have written before about making realistic schedules and plans. I wrote their that in the summer you need to cut your plan in half as a beginning move. The same holds pretty true for our work weeks. See, it always happens that we start to plan our weeks with the IDEAL scenario in mind, and the vast majority of weeks (I would guess upward of 85%) never even come close to the ideal. Why? Because, well, life. Things happen at school; things happen at home; someone gets sick; you just can't find the focus you need for the project you laid out; unexpected meetings come up and on and on and on.

Thus, the key to prioritizing is to realistically prioritize.

What projects do you need to get done based on where they are (e.g., does it make more sense to try to move the manuscript that is 60% done further along rather than work on the one that is just in the idea stage? OR does it make more sense to finish the programmatic work now rather than wait until just a couple of days before its due?)

Will the meetings or tasks planned this week be more draining? If so, then don't plan as much.

Are you sleeping well and exercising? If so, then you're likely to have more energy during the workday so you can plan a little more, but if NOT, then CUT BACK because you won't get as much done.

Did you account for prep time for meetings, for class, and for grading?

What's going on in the lives of those folks closest to you?

Did you remember to schedule exercise or time to eat?

See what I'm trying to get at? The need for you to be more realistic when setting up your schedule by prioritizing those things that need to get done and what you want to get done. All the while by not forgetting that you need to care fo yourself (and your families).

Re-evaluate

One of the lessons that took me YEARS to learn was that I had to (1) stick to a new approach to work for at least a couple of weeks and (2) then re-evaluate how it was working. One of the many tricky things about this job is that it changes from term to term and year to year. That's a great thing because it encourages a consistent evaluation of what is working and what is not in relation to your time management, value, and priorities.

Something for all us to remember is that when we're looking at what worked and what didn't we have to be mindful about our own practices. By that I mean, be self reflective about why something isn't working or why progress is not being made on certain projects or why we dread, dread, dread doing something, or why we procrastinate when we know we shouldn't. This is a such an important part of the re-evaluation process. Understanding some of these stressors and barriers is the first step in trying to find solutions to overcome them.

The system that I have now has been working pretty well for a while, and with ongoing tweaks, I feel it will work for the near future. But I'll also be re-evaluating at the end of the term as I look forward to things that will be going on in the fall that are different than now.

And the summer is its own thing a little different from the rest of the year.

So I encourage you to use the latter stages of the term to maybe try out new time management techniques.

Wishing you peace, joy, and health!

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Posted 25 March 2018 by Lisa Meloncon With the ATTW luncheon and my other responsibilities at both ATTW and CCCCs, I've gotten "behind" on getting a blog up. (and seriously, if you have something to say, please get in touch because we would love to have folks participate here.)

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Advice Editor's Note: This is the third column in a new series, "Are You Writing?" Read and .

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In a few weeks, I'll be heading to Arizona with my husband and our preschooler. We'll be on vacation for 13 days, and I will not bring my laptop. That's because I practice what I preach as a writing consultant and academic-productivity specialist: Don't just finish your monographs and articles on time - finish them on time without compromising your quality of life.

I ask every client I work with - whether a graduate student writing a dissertation or an academic working on a book or article - to take semester breaks actually, unequivocally, 100-percent off. Decompress. Enjoy (or "enjoy") their families. Or just spend a week or two walking around in the fresh air, lingering over a fun conversation in a cafe, or binge-watching NewsRadio reruns and eating Red Vines at 9:30 a.m. Whatever.

The secret to taking holidays off is to be all caught up on your work plan before they start. And the way to be caught up on your work plan before the holidays start is to have a work plan. You'd be amazed (or not) at the number of perpetually aggrieved academics I know who don't. They just sort of launch themselves in the general direction of their research a few times a month, and then - you guessed it - sequester themselves miserably for a few weeks of life-ruining lockdown right before their deadline.

If you actually want to have a happy relationship with your work, you need a prescription for exactly what you want to do every day. Yes, it can feel overwhelming to executive-function intellectual labor. But I guarantee that spending a 10 minutes a day (plus about 30 minutes at the top of the week) organizing your writing projects will save incalculable time and effort down the line.

The key to a successful work plan is to start a project - an entire monograph, a chapter, an article - with a healthy work trajectory and a clear-cut blueprint. Only you know how you best impart new information into your big, smart noggin, so I won't presume that the structure I'm about to suggest will work for everyone. I will, however, presume that it will work 100 percent better than the most popular competing "strategy": fretting and doing nothing.

Step No. 1: Write first. Possibly the most unconventional suggestion I give clients for creating a first draft is: Write first, then read, then write again, read more, and write one last time.

That flies in the face of the general wisdom that faculty members impart to undergraduates, which is to read the material carefully before they write a word. And for them, that holds - but not for you, because you have already spent upward of two decades reading and writing smart things, and you've almost certainly read the primary source material of your project at least once.

Most of you don't follow that advice when you start a project. Instead you spend an untold amount of time attempting (and failing) to read Everything - every book, article, paragraph that could ever be relevant to your topic. Then you proceed to get more than a little psyched out by the polished quality of the published work: Will I ever be as good as this? Oh, no, what if I'm not? I'm not! I'll never be! Hey, my couch needs vacuuming.

Yeah, don't do that. Instead, at the beginning of a project - even if you have only the vaguest idea what it should be about - I suggest you set aside a week and free-write. On each workday of that week, spend 25 minutes twice a day (two " pomodoros" a day) and write down all the things that you know, want to know, are interested in, are confused, or are excited about in your new venture. Don't try for paragraphs or even full sentences. Revel in the mess.

At the end of that week, you may have 1,000 to 4,000 words of semi-gibberish - but it holds the key to your future brilliance.

Step No. 2: The baby bibliography. From that inspired semi-gibberish, you will then mine your first annotated bibliography. And the annotations are the most important part. You should never read anything without writing something down about it. Look up about 10 sources on your subject - the 10 best or, at any rate, the most famous, or most recent and "exciting," or most in vogue, or most something. Just start somewhere. For approximately two weeks, spend every work session reading (or rereading) those sources carefully, creating a full bibliographic entry for each one. Annotate each entry with:

The source's main thesis.

Its primary impact on the field.

Two or three representative quotes.

Your own opinion about the source - what you think is brilliant, what you think is flawed.

Step No. 3: A skeleton draft. Using your baby bibliography, begin to merge some of your insights with your free-writing to form a primordial outline. You know how.

Organize under subject headings all the quotes, summaries, and opinions inspired by your free-writing.

Copy, paste, shape, and cut stuff.

Always, always create another document to save everything you've cut.

Make note, at every turn, of unanswered questions. This is, in effect, the most important part: It's the part you can't write yet.

What you'll have at the end of about two weeks - provided you work on this in two or three 25-minute sessions a day, five days a week - is essentially a skeleton. It will have the vague shape of an article or chapter but will ask a lot more questions than it answers and will have a fair share of bracketed "notes to self" (à la Find a thing that ties these two ideas together).

Step No. 4: Close reading. Your skeleton draft is also a road map. Instead of attempting to read Everything (which you will never do), you now know what sorts of sources you need to find and read in order to flesh out your arguments and fill in the gaps. To identify those new sources, look to household names in your field, to scholars you've met at conferences, to people with whom you already collaborate, to that one exciting new hotshot you keep hearing about. And, of course, consult the bibliographies of your first 10 sources. Get to mining!

With an expanded list of sources in hand, it's time to read more intensely. Spend the next three to six weeks diving into those new sources and expanding your annotated bibliography. Again, do the reading two or three times a day, in 25-minute sessions, five or so days a week. Give yourself a deadline: Set a specific number of work sessions (such as 20 or 30), and when you've reached that number, cut yourself off. (Don't worry, you'll soon have time to read more.)

Step No. 5: A workable draft. At this point, you're ready to dive into your now-massive annotated bibliography and do more surgery. All those unanswered questions you had scribbled down in your free-writing? It's time to fill in the gaps. Extract quotes, summaries, and arguments (copy, don't delete, them from the bibliography), and paste them into the appropriate places in your Skeleton Draft. Your writing here can still be rough - don't trip yourself up worrying about transitions or squaring all the circles. This stage of writing is chaos. If it feels uncomfortable, you're doing it right.

By the end of this step, you will have a slightly more fleshed-out draft. Your next task, then, is to spend another two to three weeks tinkering on the sentence level, working on those transitions and cleaning up unnecessary jargon. Follow the same basic work schedule: two to three 25-minute writing sessions a day. At the end of those weeks, you may still have more holes to fill (especially in the footnotes.) But, by and large, you will have, miracle of miracles, a real draft of a chapter or an article that's 25 to 30 pages long.

From start to finish, the process will take 11 to 14 weeks - about the duration of a semester - of working on the project for no more than an hour or two a day. With a workable draft in hand, now is a great time to put it aside and let it breathe, as your backbrain spins its wheels while you're on break in earnest.

I know, I know - a fat lot of good this advice is doing you now, as you've once again put off your research agenda until the three weeks of winter intersession that you're already dreading. But take comfort: Spring break will be here soon - and by then, at least, you will have a plan.

Rebecca Schuman received her Ph.D. in German from the University of California at Irvine in 2010. She is an essayist, translator, consultant, and author, most recently, of Schadenfreude, A Love Story. "Are You Writing?" is a series on scholarly productivity. Her website is askagenxer.com and her Twitter is @pankisseskafka.

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Advice Editor's Note: This is the third column in a new series, "Are You Writing?" Read and . In a few weeks, I'll be heading to Arizona with my husband and our preschooler. We'll be on vacation for 13 days, and I will not bring my laptop.

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This is a review of six books that address productivity in academic writing (though some cover other topics too). They are listed in order of publication date. Page counts do not include prelims or appendices, indexes etc. All costs are recommended retail prices for paperback editions apart from Helen Sword's book which is only available in hardback. Prices were taken from Wordery (who offer significant discounts on the prices shown here) apart from Jo Van Every's book where the information was provided by the author.

The Clockwork Muse: A Practical Guide to Writing Theses, Dissertations, and Books. Eviatar Zerubavel, 1999, Harvard University Press. 98 pages. £15.95.

Zerubavel is a professor of sociology in America. This book is short, readable, and practical, with a decent index, and is lightly referenced using endnotes. It focuses on scheduling writing time, timetabling writing projects, and managing deadlines, both self-imposed and external. The voice is authoritative with touches of humour. Some points feel a little dated now: for example, Zerubavel advises the reader to check their electronic mail before they start to get it out of the way (p 19), but then the volume of email most people received in the late 1990s was very much less than it is today. But most of the advice given in this book is still sound, including the take-away message: that all progress is good, however slow or fast, and perseverance is key to making that progress.

How To Write A Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing. Paul Silvia, 2007, American Psychological Association. 132 pages. £15.95.

Silvia is a professor of psychology in America. He also focuses on scheduling, looking at goals, priorities, and ways to monitor progress, and again his book is lightly referenced. The voice is chatty, informal, often amusing, and the index is adequate. Silvia suggests setting up a writers' support group as 'a constructive source of social pressure' (p 56). Only half of the book is focused on productivity, the other half addresses writing style and gives advice specific to writing academic journal articles and books. The short concluding chapter comes back to productivity and reminds the reader to set a schedule, get on with it, and keep making progress.

Writing in Social Spaces: A Social Processes Approach to Academic Writing. Rowena Murray, 2015, Routledge. 135 pages. £29.99.

Murray is a professor of education in Scotland, UK, and has written several books on academic writing. She also conducts formal funded research into academic writing practices and this book is based on the findings from several projects. Although only one chapter of her book addresses productivity directly, it is a central theme. Her argument is that writing has a social aspect and that this can be leveraged to enhance motivation and productivity through goal-setting and progress management. The voice is clear and well-informed. This is a thoughtful book with a lot of detailed information on how to put its advice into practice. Sadly, the index rather lets it down, with only 32 main headings for a 150-page book, and no entries even for key concepts used such as leadership or containment. Nevertheless, the book is well worth reading.

Becoming an Academic Writer: 50 Exercises for Paced, Productive, and Powerful Writing. Patricia Goodson, 2017, Sage (second edition - first edition 2011). 235 pages. £32.99.

Goodson is a professor of health education in America. She has developed the POWER model (Promoting Outstanding Writing for Excellence in Research) from a study of academic productivity research, psychology and neuroscience literature on talent and elite performance, and the writing theory of Peter Elbow (1998). Her argument is that academic writing improves with practice. Her first eight exercises focus on productivity, and (among other things) they cover the now familiar areas of scheduling writing time and monitoring progress. I don't find exercises in books particularly useful, so I simply read the book and benefited from the information conveyed by the author. If you like doing exercises from books you'll benefit even more. The voice Goodson uses is warm and encouraging, and the index is excellent.

Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write. Helen Sword, 2017, Harvard University Press. 206 pages. £17.95.

Sword is a professor of education in New Zealand. She is also a poet with a background in academic literature. Her book is based on a specific research project: she interviewed 100 academics around the world about their writing. From this research she developed the BASE model (Behavioural, Artisanal, Social and Emotional habits) which demonstrates the complexity of the writing process. Productivity is covered in the section on behavioural habits which is designed to help writers identify their own best time, place, rhythm and ritual for writing. As you would expect from a poet, the book is beautifully written, and it has a calm reflective voice. Sword has an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of relevant literature to draw on for the 'read a book' sections at the end of the chapters. Also, her book has a very good index.

Finding Time For Your Scholarly Writing: A Short Guide. Jo Van Every, 2018, self-published e-book. $3.75. (paperback coming soon)

Van Every is an academic career guide in England, UK. I am grateful to her for the review copy e-book that prompted this blog post. Her book is full of practical advice on how to identify and manage writing time, whether that time is measured in minutes, hours, or days. Van Every covers the topics of scheduling and goal setting that are common to many of these books and, as with them all, the book is well written in itself. Like Zerubavel and Silvia, it is lightly referenced. The book has a lovely consistent voice, like that of a friendly, supportive, knowledgeable auntie; someone who is on your side and has helpful advice to offer. Van Every includes information about other resources: books - including those by Helen Sword and Rowena Murray mentioned above - and online resources. There is no index in the e-book, but that doesn't matter because you can search it electronically.

Each of these books is full of wisdom. Perhaps you may think you have learned all you need from this blog post: schedule time, set goals, monitor progress, persevere. At one level it is that simple. But if you're looking for ways to increase your writing productivity, I'd recommend reading one or more of the books I have reviewed. I hope this post will enable you to choose the book or books that suit you best.

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This is a review of six books that address productivity in academic writing (though some cover other topics too). They are listed in order of publication date. Page counts do not include prelims or appendices, indexes etc. All costs are recommended retail prices for paperback editions apart from Helen Sword's book which is only available...

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Please use this space to post your “Things to Try” goals and progress.  If you decide to try out different place to write as she suggests in “The Power of Place,” please share pictures of where you write or how you made your writing space more inviting. Happy writing!

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Advice Editor's Note: This is the second column in a new series, "Are You Writing?" Part 1 is .

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I have heard many irritating suggestions on scholarly productivity in my time, but none get my blood aboil faster than this bit of wrongness: You must rise at some ungodly hour - 5 a.m., better yet make it 4 or 4:30 - and then force yourself to write for two or three hours. Maybe even four.

It's ridiculous advice. Academics who tell you with a straight face that they wake up every morning at 4, sit at their desk in scholarly rhapsody for hours, and then go do a full day's work are not being truthful. And even if they are, they probably spend most of that time staring off into space and yawning. At any rate, they shouldn't be bragging about tragically mismanaging their time and doing long-term damage to their health.

Now, if you are the sort of person (whom I have never met) who truly enjoys early rising, and your 4-to-6-a.m. shift is the high point of your day, and somehow you still get (mostly) enough sleep, then, fine. I'm not talking to you. Ignore me and go about your day. (Get some more coffee, for example.)

I'm talking here to everyone else - everyone who's been told that rising super-early every morning is the best (or, God forbid, only) method of improving your scholarly productivity.

As a prolific author myself and a writing coach - and as someone who did get up today at 4 a.m. (not to write, but because my 3-year-old is a sadist) - I am here to reassure people who enjoy a good night's sleep: You can get your research done, on time, without dragging yourself out of bed at a ludicrous hour.

Because make no mistake: Doing some sort of "negative-first shift" isn't productivity. It's performative misery, a.k.a. the lifeblood of academe. And the reasons it's downright wrong to recommend - or, worse, idealize - this unhealthy behavior are numerous:

First, it's based on the Great White Academic Male caricature of the 1950s, he whose dearth of "domestic" responsibilities allowed him the time to spend 14 hours a day in his tower of brilliance. Everything else about academe and the working world has changed since then, but somehow the Platonic image of the ascetic tower-dude persists.

Second, it presumes that you cannot do any useful research or writing in less than two or three hours of total uninterrupted silence.

Finally, it presumes that the business hours of a working day preclude any "real" research or writing.

Those premises are false. The true sign of scholarly discipline isn't being willing to (pretend to) wake up in the middle of the night just to replicate the outdated, elbow-patched model of yore. True discipline is being willing to chuck that model, in favor of a far more flexible approach: Summon 25 minutes of laser focus on your work, one to three times during your work day.

I realize you may be thinking, "I can't get any substantive writing/research done in 25 minutes!" Well I am staring at two books with my name on them that suggest it is possible. Why not try? What could it hurt? Sometime this week, when you're in your office or workspace, do this:

Turn down the volume on your cellphone. Close your email program.

Close your eyes for two seconds and take a deep breath. Look a clock or set a timer and say aloud: "25 minutes. Go."

Then, either free-write something related to what you're working on, pull up a document and tinker with it, or read and take good, responsive notes.

After 25 minutes, stop and go back to whatever nonsense was occupying your day.

But, but, but, you might say, that doesn't amount to much. It will if - twice a day during the work week and then two or three times on the weekend - you spend 25 minutes of uninterrupted time on your writing or research. Note: Do this on both weekend days only if you are: (a) teaching at least a 4-4 load; (b) in a new job with time-consuming new course preps; (c) a grad student or scholar with a full-time day job outside of academe; or (d) a slow prepper or grader (we'll tackle that problem in a future column).

When I work with writing clients, I often help them set up a daily schedule. Let's say you are a full-time, nontenure-track professor in a humanities discipline. You're teaching a 3-3 load of classes you've taught before, but you want to find time both to maintain your research agenda for the tenure-track job market and to be with your family (a working spouse, two school-age children and a pet). Here is a sample daily schedule I set up:

6:30 a.m.: Up, small tyrant wrangling, school drop-off.

9 a.m.: Office, 25 minutes of focused work. Do not open email program until after this 25-minute session.

9:30 a.m.: Check email and tweak prep for first class. Maybe do a bit of grading.

10:30 a.m.: Teach.

12 p.m.: Eat lunch.

12:30 pm: Do another 25 minutes of focused work on writing/research. (Sure, you may be tired, but not as tired as you would be doing this at 4 a.m..)

1 p.m.: Tweak prep for second class.

1:30 p.m.: Teach.

3 p.m.: Hold scheduled office hours. (If no one shows up, do some grading.)

4:30 p.m.: Pick up small tyrants, resume wrangling.

7 p.m.: Grade or prep while small tyrants do homework.

9 p.m.: Clock out for the day and do whatever you like. Do more work if you want, just not too late.

Of course that schedule would have to be adjusted during deadlines or exam periods, when you might have to do more work in the evenings or on the weekend. But if you begin to integrate just that one single (uninterrupted) hour of focus into your business day, in a single week you could write 1,500 to 2,000 words, annotate six articles, or edit 10 to 15 pages. In a month of seemingly minimal but consistent work, you could finish the skeletal draft of a short chapter, or do about a third of an annotated bibliography for a lit review, or edit most of a 40-page article.

So instead of forcing yourself to get up at 4 a.m., getting very little done, and then being tired for three days, why not give this 25-minutes-twice-a-day approach a try? Maybe even now.

Rebecca Schuman received her Ph.D. in German from the University of California at Irvine in 2010. She is an essayist, translator, consultant, and author, most recently, of Schadenfreude, A Love Story. Her "Are You Writing?" series is about ways to improve scholarly productivity.

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Advice Editor's Note: This is the second column in a new series, "Are You Writing?" Part 1 is . I have heard many irritating suggestions on scholarly productivity in my time, but none get my blood aboil faster than this bit of wrongness: You must rise at some ungodly hour - 5 a.m., better yet make it 4 or 4:30 - and then force yourself to write for two or three hours.

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It's a weird and complicated experience, picking up a book that covers familiar territory and realizing it's better than what you might have written. That was the case when I first read Helen Sword's Stylish Academic Writing.

Sword, who teaches at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, uses extensive research - both data and empirical studies - to back up everything I believe about how and why academic writing goes wrong, and what good prose looks like.

This year she published a new book, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Harvard University Press). An antidote to the preachy and rigid "Write Your Dissertation in Five Minutes a Month" genre, Sword's new book shows that there are as many ways to be productive as there are writers.

It's fair to say that Helen Sword has made my work life easier. Now, when I give talks to faculty members on writing, I just hold up her books and say, "Read these." Because I'm human, some grudging, competitive part of me wants to dislike her. But I can't. She's gracious and funny and, well, right about pretty much everything when it comes to writing, which makes her a fine candidate for the Scholars Talk Writing series.
In Stylish Academic Writing, you examine the actual style guidelines of academic journals and contrast those rules with what academics think they are and are not allowed to do. What were some of the major misconceptions about good academic writing?
Sword: I know of no major academic-style guide (e.g., MLA, Chicago, APA) that forbids first-person pronouns or recommends exclusive use of the passive voice. Nor have I ever met an academic editor who wants to publish anything other than well-crafted prose with a bit of life and energy to it.

Yet many researchers remain absolutely convinced that they won't be taken seriously unless they suppress their own voice and cram their sentences full of multisyllabic jargon. Like most myths, this one contains just enough truth to keep it alive. For example, some journal editors and peer reviewers still routinely demand that all personal pronouns be deleted from draft articles - even when their journal's style guide contains no such rule.
Have you learned anything new since the book was published?
Sword: I've learned that scientists care at least as much about stylish writing as humanists do. In fact, they've been among the book's most enthusiastic proponents. I've learned that so-called "L2" academics (those for whom English is not their first language) generally possess a much better grasp of English grammar than their "L1" colleagues, many of whom get a panicked look in their eyes the moment I start talking about nouns and verbs. And I've learned that women are more than twice as likely as their male colleagues to attend academic-writing workshops - a statistic that has made me wonder whether women are also twice as likely to read books on academic writing.
How did your new book come about?
Sword: While I was working on Stylish Academic Writing and its companion book, The Writer's Diet, I kept hearing stories from colleagues and graduate students about writing-related dilemmas that had little or nothing to do with style: for example, how to carve out time for writing, how to gain confidence as a writer, how to deal with a unsupportive adviser or respond to a negative peer review.

Although I'm a literary scholar by training - I'm used to working with texts, not people - I set out to interview 100 successful academics about their work as writers. What are their daily writing habits? (Do they even have daily writing habits?) How did they learn their craft? What emotions do they associate with their academic writing? How have they developed the courage to push against stylistic conventions, the resilience to cope with criticism and rejection?

Along the way, I also gathered questionnaire data from 1,223 academic writers who attended my writing workshops at more than 50 universities and scholarly conferences in 15 countries. By the end of it all, I had talked to, and heard from, a lot of writers, from a wide range of backgrounds.
What surprised you in the interviews?
Sword: At first I assumed that the writing habits of successful academics would align fairly closely with the advice I had read in the abundant how-to literature on "how to be a productive writer": Write every day, write at the same time every day, always schedule your writing time - that sort of thing. Within the first half-dozen or so interviews, I realized how wrong I was. Not only did very few of the academics I talked with follow the recommended practices; many of them actually reported engaging in behaviors that the writing guides explicitly warn against, such as "binge writing" or writing only when they feel like it.
One of the things I find so interesting (and perhaps obvious) is that there's no secret sauce: Each of us finds different ways to be productive. What are some of the most common things that came up?
Sword: It's not your day-to-day habits that matter, I found, so much as your habits of mind. Successful academics don't necessarily write every day, but they're constantly strategizing about how and when they'll get their writing done. They don't necessarily consider themselves to be "stylish writers," but they care deeply about wordcraft. They don't necessarily enjoy every aspect of the writing process, but they relish the challenge of communicating complex ideas to others. These core attitudes and attributes remained fairly constant across nearly all the writers I interviewed.
You've devised a system that you call BASE. Can you explain that?
Sword: My research showed that successful academics build their writing practice on a complex set of attitudes and attributes that I call their "writing BASE" - behavioral habits of discipline and persistence, artisanal habits of craftsmanship and care, social habits of collegiality and collaboration, and emotional habits of positivity and pleasure.

More than 80 percent of the how-to literature focuses on behavioral and artisanal habits alone. I wanted to tip the balance toward its social and emotional dimensions as well. My book includes a diagnostic tool for helping readers visualize the BASE on which their current writing practice is built. There's also a free online version available, www.writersdiet.com/base, that offers a personalized profile and targeted suggestions for broadening your BASE.
What are some of the most useful exercises you came up with for the book?
Sword: I particularly enjoyed writing the chapter on metaphor, which provides tools for reframing negative emotions about writing. Working through these exercises myself, I realized that I tended to describe my writing process as fiddly, finicky, and laborious - words redolent of incompetence and frustration. By shifting to different metaphors - sculpting, crafting, shaping, polishing - I have learned to rework my own narrative, recognizing perceived weaknesses as core strengths.
Can you summarize your overall findings?
Sword: I learned so much from writing this book! But I can point to at least one major finding for each quadrant of the BASE:

Behavioral habits. Successful writers don't follow a formula. Productivity-boosting strategies such as writing every day or keeping a writing log may well prove beneficial and are certainly worth trying. However, I've become quite cynical about how-to books that prescribe a specific set of rules, usually based on the author's own personal experience rather than on robust empirical research. The approach I'm suggesting is powerful because it situates behavioral habits within a larger ecology of writing.

Artisanal habits. All academics write, but very few - no more than around 15 percent worldwide, by my estimate - have learned to write and publish in their disciplines via an accredited course, formal mentoring scheme, or other cohort-based, expert-facilitated program. For most of us, it's a matter of "sink or swim," a phrase that I heard frequently from the academics I surveyed. Is this really how we want to treat our early-career colleagues? Throw them in at the deep end and watch to find out whether or not they'll go under? ("Not waving but drowning," in the words of poet Stevie Smith).

Social habits. Writing is, at its heart, a social enterprise. Trained in the humanities, I have always regarded scholarly writing as an individualistic and lonely task. My work on this book has taught me the value of cultivating positive social habits around writing: seeking out opportunities to write with and amongst others; sharing my experiences and emotions with my colleagues and students; exchanging early drafts with sympathetic readers.

Emotional habits. Writing is frustrating! In my survey of academic writers, frustration emerged as the most frequently mentioned writing-related emotion by a factor of nearly two to one. However, for the 100 successful writers in my interview cohort, pleasure and satisfaction topped the table. I've now learned to regard frustration not as an impediment to successful writing but as a necessary part of the process: the blockage that enables the breakthrough.

So what's next for you and your research?
Sword: I'm interested in exploring how my findings - particularly regarding the lack of development opportunities for academic writers and the gendered nature of academic labor - might be used to influence the kinds of research-support programs that universities provide to graduate students and faculty.

For example, a male provost or dean who has never attended a writing workshop or residential retreat himself may unconsciously regard such events as touchy-feely and frivolous, in which case he is likely to tilt research support away from social learning situations in favor of gladiatorial-style research seminars and targeted grant-writing clinics. I'd like to help academics in senior management roles recognize how their personal biases could be disadvantaging all those colleagues - men as well as women - who crave a more collaborative, less combative research environment.

Moving forward, I'd also love to delve more deeply into the role of positive emotions in academic practice. There's plenty of literature about the paralyzing effects of negative emotions on the writing process, but hardly anyone talks about the relationship between productivity and pleasure.

Rachel Toor is a professor of creative writing in Eastern Washington University's writing program. Her website is http://www.racheltoor.com. Her latest book, just out from the University of Chicago Press, isWrite Your Way In: Crafting an Unforgettable College Admissions Essay.

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It's a weird and complicated experience, picking up a book that covers familiar territory and realizing it's better than what you might have written. That was the case when I first read Helen Sword's Stylish Academic Writing.