Thinking of writing as a process can help you get started. And prewriting is the first step. Instead of staring at the proverbial blank page, assign yourself some prewriting tasks. What is prewriting? It’s all the activities you do before you start to write the first draft of your project. This, of course, includes research, but I’ll save that topic for another post (or series). Today, we’ll focus more narrowly on activities closer to the actual writing.
Writing is a process. So is baking. But writing is not like baking a cake, where once you have stirred in the eggs, you are finished with that part and can move on to the sugar. Rather, writing is more like cooking a complicated sauce. You add a little cayenne, taste to see how that worked, then maybe add a bit more until you achieve the flavor you’re looking for.
Graduate writing tips from experience — both my own and that of others with whom I’ve worked. As you’ll see, many of these tips are double-edged, with a “do this” and a “yes, but” side.
In this post, I share some resources on academic writing that I — and the students I work with — have found particularly helpful.
How to create a table in APA format with instructional video.
For many graduate students, writing academic papers is one of the most anxiety-producing parts of the grad school experience. But even if your program isn’t giving you much direction, there are strategies you can use to become a strong academic writer.
Four things to worry about with ChatGPT include: loss of student voice, bias, damage to community, and loss of learning.
We all have problems. I argued in an earlier post that admitting what you don’t know and seeking out the resources that can help is a (maybe the) key to success in graduate school. But what if you don’t know what you don’t know? What if you don’t even know what the problem is? The…
Some thoughts about how to think about the role of generative AI in research and writing. While in K-12 education and undergraduate programs, generative AI is a hot topic, there seems to be less frenzy about how graduate students might think about or use tools such as ChatGPT. In a show of extremely unscientific survey…
Admitting ignorance can be difficult for graduate students. But learning to say, “I don’t know” opens the door to academic success in graduate school.
