Category: Academic Advice

This blog started out as an experiment. As I said in the beginning, I wasn’t sure what it would become. A conversation starter? A forum for advice I never got? A way to carry on the blog-honored tradition of public ranting?

The truth is, it has turned into something else entirely. I started the blog the same month I started grad school. Some—including myself—wondered if blogging was the best use of a grad student’s minimal spare time. However, I can now say it has absolutely been worth it.

So here are 7 reasons why grad students (or anyone) should blog:

1. It’s the foundation of a writing habit.

Every book of writing advice I’ve read repeats the same refrain: The key to writing is to make a schedule, stick to it, and protect it like gold. Writing is less about being struck by moments of grand inspiration or “binge writing” when deadlines come near; it’s sitting down and plugging away, day after day. Whether it’s a certain number of minutes, words, or pages, productive writers set schedules. And. Just. Write.

Blogging is an experiment in finding a writing habit that works for you. Keep track of your writing in a simple notebook or Excel file. What times of the day are you at your best? What helps you stick to a schedule? What gets you off track? Do you prefer to write in short, 25 minute bursts or longer blocks of time?  If it’s the latter, is that an excuse to procrastinate until you have a mythical block of uninterrupted time (I know because it’s me). If so, can you train yourself to write in shorter blocks?

So rather than thinking “I don’t have time to start a blog,” the truth is you don’t have time not to get yourself on a writing schedule. The consistency of a blog can help with that. Once you’re on a writing schedule, you will actually get all of your academic and professional writing done much faster. Seriously, you’ll meet deadlines. You’ll even run out of projects to work on (hence the blog to keep you going). Continue reading “Why Grad Students (or Anyone) Should Blog” →

“I realized that if I wasn’t writing, I could no longer call myself a writer.”

This quote came from an aspiring author who had recently suffered a long stretch of writers’ block (we’re talking months here). How did she cure this chronic ailment? Well… She wrote. Nothing good for a long while, according to her, but she wrote, and eventually regained her voice, as well her identity as a writer.

Writers’ block can strike out of nowhere. But what if this dreaded affliction is less of an actual condition and more of a mistaken view of the writing process? Here’s the issue: Most of us think we need to know what to write before we write it. But what if it’s the other way around? What if the very act of writing unlocks what we want to say? According to sociologist Kristin Luker,

“Someone once asked Balzac, who supported himself by writing reviews of plays, how he liked a play he had just seen. ‘How should I know?’ he is reported to have answered. ‘I haven’t written the review yet!'” Continue reading “Writers’ Block? Just Write.” →

People often talk about writing ability as if it’s one particular muscle you exercise until you’re categorically “good” at it – as if the craft of writing was a singular “it” in the first place.

But these days, writing “ability” should be pluralized – less like a single muscle and more like the various events of the Olympics. Today, there are so many venues writers use – books, blogs, magazines, social media – that being able to “code switch” between these genres is now more important than ever.

It’s a lot like dancing, actually.

I never imagined I’d have cause to reference “Save the Last Dance,” but here it is: Children of the 90’s may remember watching Julia Stiles realize her ballet skills didn’t get her far  on Chicaco’s South Side dance scene. So – like every dance movie ever – she explores new styles, creates something altogether different, and blows dance world away.

It’s the same with writing. And academia may just be the ballet of the writing world – technically arduous, treasured by a minute few, but can stick out oddly in the “real world.”

That’s why, earlier this month, I attended a workshop at a local writing center on writing newspaper Op-Eds. Both journalism and academia have the same goal of sharing factual information, but stylistically, they couldn’t be more different: Journalism is known for being punchy and to the point, whereas academic writing is infamously wordy and opaque (I mean, one genre evolved around copyeditors trying to conserve space and ink, the other around seeing how many books one could fill on the same topic). Continue reading “Break Into Publishing: My Three Hours of Journalism” →

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”

Ironically, I found this beautiful quote from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life in my “Things to Blog About Later” folder, which I’ve considered relabeling, “Where Good Ideas Go to Die”; Honestly, I almost never open it. And on the rare occasion I do, I’ve forgotten what had moved me about the idea in the first place or where I wanted to go with the topic. Like Dillard said, I open my safe and find ashes.

It reminds me of an old Sunday School skit where the main character finds a box of “love” and she proudly parades it around stage. Other characters, down on their luck, pass by and ask if she will share, but worried about depleting her limited supply, she apologetically declines. Continue reading “Give it All in Writing: Love and Courage” →

“Why write what no one will ever read?”

I hear this question a lot from people outside of academia (and, let’s be real, within it as well). Academics generally write for – if I may make an understatement – a rather concentrated readership: Blood, sweat, and tears go into pages of work that may never be read outside of the “Ivory Tower.” To some, so much work for such a small readership seems like (at best) a wasted effort or (at worst) a quasi-masochistic psychosis.

But let’s face it, academics write about some pretty quirky, obscure subjects that aren’t going to get one on the NYTimes Bestseller List. But what if that quirkiness is, in fact, the whole point? As Annie Dillard says in The Writing Life:

“Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it’s up to you.

There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voce to this, your own astonishment… Thoreau said it another way… “Know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it unearth it, and gnaw at it still.”” Continue reading “Writing What “No One” Reads” →