How successful academics write - Helen Sword 2017

Notes

PREFACE

1. Charles Bukowski, “Air and Light and Time and Space,” in The Last Night of the Earth Poems (New York: Ecco, 2002), 44.

INTRODUCTION

1. Helen Sword, Stylish Academic Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Helen Sword, The Writer’s Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). For writing resources and tools based on these books, see also the Writer’s Diet website at www.writersdiet.com.

2. In an interview with Noah Charney for The Daily Beast’s “How I Write” column (v 17, 2013), historian Tony Grafton is quoted as saying, “If I’m writing full-time I’ll get about 3,500 words per morning, four mornings a week” (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/17/anthony-grafton-how-i-write.html). Blogger L. D. Burnett subsequently coined the phrase “the Grafton Line” and created the Twitter hashtag #graftonline for writers who wish to post their own daily word counts (Saved by History Blog, July 21, 2013); blogger Claire Potter in turn publicized the phrase via her widely read Tenured Radical Blog (July 22, 2013).

PART I: BEHAVIORAL HABITS

1. Robert Boice, Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing (Stillwater, OK: New Forums, 1990). For a more detailed account of this study, see Robert Boice, “Procrastination, Busyness and Bingeing,” Behaviour Research and Therapy 27, no. 6 (1989): 605—611. For a critical analysis of its methodology and reception history, see Helen Sword, “Write Every Day: A Mantra Dismantled,” International Journal for Academic Development 21, no. 4 (2016): 312—322.

2. Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity (New York: Tarcher / Putnam, 1992), 148.

3. Boice, Professors as Writers, 31.

4. Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2007), 24—26, 12, 14.

5. Boice, Professors as Writers, 128.

1. FINDING TIME TO WRITE

1. Robert Boice, Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing (Stillwater, OK: New Forums, 1990), 41—47; Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2007), 35—40; Patricia Goodson, Becoming an Academic Writer: 50 Exercises for Paced, Productive, and Powerful Writing (London: Sage, 2013), 21; Joan Bolker, Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis (New York: Holt, 1998), 38; Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 148.

2. Francis Crick, “The Impact of Linus Pauling on Molecular Biology,” Proceedings of the Conference on the Life and Work of Linus Pauling (1901—1994): A Discourse on the Art of Biography (Corvallis: Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections, 1996).

3. Henry Miller, Henry Miller on Writing (New York: New Directions, 1964), 141.

4. Boice, Professors as Writers, 124, 121.

5. Sylvia Plath, “Appendix 2: Script for the BBC Broadcast: ’New Poems by Sylvia Plath,’ ” in Ariel: The Restored Edition (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 195.

6. Ferris Jabr, “Why Your Brain Needs More Downtime,” Scientific American, October 15, 2013, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mental-downtime/.

7. Anthony Burgess, “The Art of Fiction No. 48,” interview by John Cullinan, Paris Review 56 (1973): 121.

8. Boice, Professors as Writers; Tara Gray, Publish and Flourish: Become a Prolific Writer (Las Cruces: New Mexico State University Teaching Academy, 2015); Silvia, How to Write a Lot; Eviatar Zerubavel, The Clockwork Muse: A Practical Guide to Writing Theses, Dissertations, and Books (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Bolker, Writing Your Dissertation; Rowena Murray, Writing for Academic Journals, 3rd ed. (Berkshire, UK: Open University Press, 2013); Wendy L. Belcher, Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success (Los Angeles: Sage, 2009); Keith Hjortshoj, Understanding Writing Blocks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001); Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber, Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016); John Perry, The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing (New York: Workman, 2012); John Perry Structured Procrastination website, accessed June 21, 2016, http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/.

2. THE POWER OF PLACE

1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929; London: Penguin, 1993), 79.

2. Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2007), 20, 21.

3. Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (New York: Knopf, 2013), 39, 41, 114, 122, 182—183; Ian Fleming Publications Ltd., “Jamaica (1946—1964),” Ian Fleming website, accessed June 21, 2016, http://www.ianfleming.com/ian-fleming/ian-fleming-inside/jamaica-1946-1964/.

4. Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 177.

5. Ronald T. Kellogg, The Psychology of Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 186.

6. Fausto Massimini, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and Antonella Delle Fave, “Flow and Biocultural Evolution,” in Optimal Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness, ed. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 68.

7. Don Campbell, The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 271. (For a meta-analysis questioning the validity of Campbell’s research, see Jakob Pietschnig, Martin Voracek, and Anton Formann, “Mozart Effect—Shmozart Effect: A Meta-analysis,” Intelligence 38, no. 3 [2010]: 314—323.)

8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan,” in The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (London: Penguin, 1997), 248.

9. Bruce Holland Rogers, “Cloistered Writing: When You Need a Dose of Discipline, Take a Writing Retreat—At Home,” Writer 118, no. 11 (2005): 15.

10. Currey, Daily Rituals, 13, 20, 25, 115.

11. Richard Louv, The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder (New York: Algonquin Books, 2012), 58.

12. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea (New York: Pantheon Books, 1955); William Zinsser, Writing Places: The Life Journey of a Writer and Teacher (New York: Harper, 2010); W. B. Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996), 39; Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 150th anniversary ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1.

3. RHYTHMS AND RITUALS

1. Robert Boice, Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing (Stillwater, OK: New Forums, 1990), 42; Rowena Murray, Writing for Academic Journals, 3rd ed. (Berkshire, UK: Open University Press, 2013), 104; Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934), 72—73; Peter Elbow, Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 13.

2. Charles Darwin, Autobiography and Selected Letters, ed. Francis Darwin (New York: Dover, 1958), 53.

3. Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2007), 76.

4. Eric Hayot, The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 32.

5. George Greenstein, “Writing Is Thinking: Using Writing to Teach Science,” Astronomy Education Review 12, no. 1 (2013); Richard Menary, “Writing as Thinking,” Language Sciences 29, no. 5 (2007): 621—632; Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, “The Pen Is Mightier than the Keyboard,” Psychological Science 25, no. 6 (2014): 1159—1168.

6. Cecile Badenhorst, Productive Writing: Becoming a Prolific Academic Writer (Pretoria, South Africa: Van Schaik, 2010).

7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone, 1988), 5—7.

8. Eviatar Zerubavel, The Clockwork Muse: A Practical Guide to Writing Theses, Dissertations, and Books (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 33—35.

9. Boice, Professors as Writers, 79.

10. Tara Gray, Publish and Flourish: Become a Prolific Writer (Las Cruces: New Mexico State University Teaching Academy, 2015), 12.

11. Murray, Writing for Academic Journals, 73.

12. James Hartley and Alan Branthwaite, “The Psychologist as Wordsmith: A Questionnaire Study of the Writing Strategies of Productive British Psychologists,” Higher Education 18, no. 4 (1989), 427; Ronald T. Kellogg, The Psychology of Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 193.

13. Robert Boice, “Contingency Management in Writing and the Appearance of Creative Ideas: Implications for the Treatment of Writing Blocks,” Behaviour Research and Therapy 21, no. 5 (1983): 537—543.

14. Brad Isaac, “Jerry Seinfeld’s Productivity Secret,” Lifehacker Blog, July 24, 2007, http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret.

15. Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope, and Repair (New York: Riverhead, 2013), 82.

16. Joan Bolker attributes this phrase to Kenneth Skier, who taught writing for many years at MIT (Bolker, Writing Your Dissertation, 163).

17. Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do and How to Change (London: Heinemann, 2012), 20.

18. “Big jets”: Maria Gardiner and Hugh Kearns, “Turbocharge Your Writing Today,” Nature 475 (2011): 129; “rocks in a jar”: Stephen R. Covey, A. Roger Merrill, and Rebecca R. Merrill, First Things First (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 89.

19. Margaret Atwood’s metaphor of “going down the writing burrow” is discussed by Pat Thomson on her blog: “A Metaphor for Thesis Completion?,” Patter Blog, March 13, 2014, https://patthomson.net/2014/03/13/a-metaphor-for-thesis-completion/.

20. Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2007); Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); Dani Shapiro, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life (New York: Grove Atlantic, 2014); bell hooks, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work (New York: Holt, 2013); Robert S. Boynton, The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2007); Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, eds., Critical Intellectuals on Writing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010); Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (New York: Knopf, 2013); Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from the New York Times (New York: Holt, 2002; Hilton Obenzinger, How We Write: The Varieties of Writing Experience (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015).

PART II: ARTISANAL HABITS

1. Ted Hughes, introduction to Sylvia Plath: The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (New York: Buccaneer Books, 1998), 13.

2. Journalist Janet Malcolm experimented with a similar process in her New Yorker article about painter David Salle, “Forty-One False Starts,” New Yorker, July 11, 1994, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/07/11/forty-one-false-starts.

3. Rowena Murray, Writing for Academic Journals, 3rd ed. (Berkshire, UK: Open University Press, 2013), chap. 3.

4. W. B. Yeats, “Adam’s Curse,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996), 80; Ernest Hemingway, “Appendix II: The Alternative Endings,” in A Farewell to Arms: The Hemingway Library Edition, ed. Seán Hemingway (New York: Scribner, 2012), 303.

5. Throughout this book, I follow the convention of using L1 to designate speakers of English as a first or primary language and L2 to designate speakers of English as an additional or secondary language.

4. LEARNING TO WRITE

1. Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 120.

2. On constructivism, see John Biggs and Catherine Tang, Teaching for Quality Learning at University (Berkshire, UK: Open University Press, 2011); on situated learning, see Jean Lave and Étienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); on reflective practice, see Chris Argyris and Donald A. Schön, Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978).

3. Stephen R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 277.

4. Stephen Pinker, The Sense of Style: A Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Penguin, 2015).

5. Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer (New York: Little, Brown, 2008); Patricia Goodson, Becoming an Academic Writer: 50 Exercises for Paced, Productive, and Powerful Writing, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2013); Peter Elbow, Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Ralph Keyes, The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear, rev. ed. (New York: Holt, 2003); Anne Ellen Geller and Michele Eodice, eds., Working with Faculty Writers (Boulder, CO: Utah State University Press, 2013); Barbara Kamler and Pat Thomson, Helping Doctoral Students Write: Pedagogies for Supervision, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2014); Susan Carter and Deborah Laurs, eds., Giving Feedback on Research Writing: A Handbook for Supervisors and Advisors (London: Routledge, 2017); Barbara E. Fassler Walvoord, Helping Students Write Well: A Guide for Teachers in All Disciplines, 2nd ed. (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1986); William Zinsser, Writing to Learn (New York: HarperCollins, 2001); Kim Sterelny, The Evolved Apprentice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).

5. THE CRAFT OF WRITING

1. Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2015), 4.

2. Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Ballantine, 2008), 14.

3. William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, The Elements of Style, 4th ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000); Ernest Gowers, The Complete Plain Words, 2nd ed. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1973); Joseph M. Williams, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, 9th ed. (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007); William Zinsser, On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction (New York: Harper and Row, 1980); Bruce Ross-Larson, Stunning Sentences (New York: Norton, 1999); Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One (New York: HarperCollins, 2011); Claire Cook, Line by Line: How to Improve Your Own Writing (Boston: Modern Language Association of America, 1985); Joseph Harris, Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts (Boulder, CO: Utah State University Press, 2006); Richard A. Lanham, Revising Prose, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1992); Jay Woodruff, A Piece of Work: Five Writers Discuss Their Revisions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993); Eric Hayot, The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Stephen J. Pyne, Voice and Vision: A Guide to Writing History and Other Serious Non-fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Bryan A. Garner, Legal Writing in Plain English: A Text with Exercises (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Howard S. Becker, Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Michael Billig, Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Robert Goldbort, Writing for Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Anne E. Greene, Writing Science in Plain English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Harold Rabinowitz and Suzanne Vogel, The Manual of Scientific Style: A Guide for Authors, Editors, and Researchers (Cambridge, MA: Academic Press, 2009); Joshua Schimel, Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

6. THE OTHER TONGUE

1. Stacey Cozart, Gry Sandholm Jensen, Tine Wirenfeldt Jensen, and Gitte Wichmann-Hansen, “Grappling with Identity Issues: Danish Doctoral Student Views on Writing in L2 English” (paper presented at the English in Europe Conference, Copenhagen, April 2013). The quotations come from Danish doctoral students who attended an introductory course in academic writing in English at the Faculty of Arts at Aarhus University in 2011 and 2012.

2. Stephen Bailey, Academic Writing: A Handbook for International Students, 4th ed. (London: Routledge, 2014); Caroline Brandt, Read, Research and Write: Academic Skills for ESL Students in Higher Education (London: Sage, 2009); Ernest Hall and Carrie S. Y. Jung, Reflecting on Writing: Composing in English for ESL Students (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Sheryl Holt, Success with Graduate and Scholarly Writing: A Guide for Non-native Writers of English (Burnsville, MN: Aspen, 2004); Hilary Glasman-Deal, Science Research Writing for Non-native Speakers of English (London: Imperial College Press, 2010); Valerie Matarese, ed., Supporting Research Writing: Roles and Challenges in Multilingual Settings (Oxford, UK: Chandos, 2013); Norman W. Evans, Neil J. Anderson, and William G. Eggington, eds., ESL Readers and Writers in Higher Education: Understanding Challenges, Providing Support (London: Routledge, 2015); Donna M. Johnson and Duane H. Roen, eds., Richness in Writing: Empowering ESL Students (New York: Longman, 1989); John Flowerdew and Matthew Peacock, Research Perspectives on English for Academic Purposes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Claire J. Kramsch, The Multilingual Subject (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Theresa Lillis and Mary Jane Curry, Academic Writing in a Global Context: The Politics and Practices of Publishing in English (New York: Routledge, 2010); Ramona Tang, ed., Academic Writing in a Second or Foreign Language: Issues and Challenges Facing ESL / EFL Academic Writers in Higher Education Contexts (New York: Continuum, 2012); Vaughan Rapatahana and Pauline Bunce, English Language as Hydra: Its Impacts on Non-English Language Cultures (Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2012).

PART III: SOCIAL HABITS

1. Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (New York: Knopf, 2013); Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, eds., Critical Intellectuals on Writing (New York: State University of New York Press, 2010); Robert S. Boynton, The New New Journalism: Conversations with American’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2007); Mark Kramer and Wendy Call, eds., Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University (New York: Plume, 2007); Hilton Obenzinger, How We Write: The Varieties of Writing Experience (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015).

7. WRITING FOR OTHERS

1. Christopher Grey, A Very Short, Fairly Interesting, and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Organisations, 3rd ed. (London: Sage, 2013), 3.

2. See, for example, Ken Hyland, “Stance and Engagement: A Model of Interaction in Academic Discourse,” Discourse Studies 7, no. 2 (2005): 173—192; Alecia Marie Magnifico, “Writing for Whom? Cognition, Motivation, and a Writer’s Audience,” Educational Psychologist 45, no. 3 (2010): 167—184; and Peter Vandenberg, “Coming to Terms: Audience,” English Journal 84, no. 4 (1995): 79—80.

3. Dan Melzer, Assignments across the Curriculum: A National Study of College Writing (Boulder, CO: Utah State University Press, 2014), 106.

4. Gillie Bolton with Stephen Rowland, Inspirational Writing for Academic Publication (London: Sage, 2014), 69.

5. William P. Germano, Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Kathleen A. Kendall-Tackett, How to Write for a General Audience: A Guide for Academics Who Want to Share Their Knowledge with the World and Have Fun Doing It (Washington, DC: American Psychology Association, 2007); Lynn P. Nygaard, Writing for Scholars: A Practical Guide to Making Sense and Being Heard (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2008); Laurel Richardson, Writing Strategies: Reaching Diverse Audiences (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990); Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath, How to Write History That People Want to Read (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Dennis Meredith, Explaining Research: How to Reach Key Audiences to Advance Your Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Robert J. Nash, Liberating Scholarly Writing: The Power of Personal Narrative (New York: Teachers College Press, 2004); Gerald Graff, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Sarah Perrault, Communicating Popular Science: From Deficit to Democracy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Angelika Bammer and Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, eds., The Future of Scholarly Writing: Critical Interventions (New York: Springer, 2015); Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb, eds., Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

8. WRITING WITH OTHERS

1. See, for example, Jeanette Harris, “Towards a Working Definition of Collaborative Writing,” in Author-ity and Textuality: Current Views of Collaborative Writing, ed. James S. Leonard, Christine E. Wharton, Robert Murray, and Jeanette Harris (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill, 1994), 77—84; Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford, Singular Texts / Plural Authors (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 70.

2. James S. Leonard, Christine E. Wharton, Robert Murray, and Jeanette Harris, eds., Author-ity and Textuality: Current Views of Collaborative Writing (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill, 1994); Jane Speedy and Jonathan Wyatt, eds., Collaborative Writing as Inquiry (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2014); Bruce Speck, Teresa R. Johnson, Catherine P. Dice, and Leon B. Heaton, Collaborative Writing: An Annotated Bibliography (Greenwich, CT: Information Age, 2008); Ede and Lunsford, Singular Texts; Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede, Writing Together: Collaboration in Theory and Practice (Boston: Bedford Books, 2011); Ernest Lockridge and Laurel Richardson, Travels with Ernest: Crossing the Literary / Sociological Divide (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2004); Ken Gale and Jonathan Wyatt, Between the Two: A Nomadic Inquiry into Collaborative Writing and Subjectivity (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2010); Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, The Mind’s I (New York: Basic Books, 1981); Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980); Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg, “I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

9. WRITING AMONG OTHERS

1. Francesco Cirillo, “The Pomodoro Technique,” revision 1.3, June 15, 2007, http://baomee.info/pdf/technique/1.pdf.

2. See, for example, Matthew R. McGrail, Claire M. Rickard, and Rebecca Jones, “Publish or Perish: A Systematic Review of Interventions to Increase Academic Publication Rates,” Higher Education Research Development 25, no. 1 (2006): 19—35; Rowena Murray and Mary Newton, “Writing Retreat as Structured Intervention: Margin or Mainstream?,” Higher Education Research & Development 28, no. 5 (2009): 541—553; Virginia Dickson-Swift. Erica L. James, Sandra Kippen, Lyn Talbot, Glenda Verrinder, and Bernadette Ward, “A Non-residential Alternative to Off Campus Writers’ Retreats for Academics,” Journal of Further and Higher Education 33, no. 3 (2009): 229—239; Iain Macleod, Laura Steckley, and Rowena Murray, “Time Is Not Enough: Promoting Strategic Engagement with Writing for Publication,” Studies in Higher Education 37, no. 6 (2012): 641—654; Wendy Belcher, “Reflections on Ten Years of Teaching Writing for Publication to Graduate Students and Junior Faculty,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 40, no. 2 (2009): 184—199.

3. Barbara Grant and Sally Knowles, “Flights of Imagination: Academic Women Be(com)ing Writers,” International Journal for Academic Development 5, no. 1 (2000): 6—19; Grant and Knowles, “Walking the Labyrinth: The Holding Embrace of Academic Writing Retreats” in Writing Groups for Doctoral Education and Beyond: Innovations in Practice and Theory, ed. Claire Aitchison and Cally Guerin (New York: Routledge, 2014), 110—127.

4. Jean Lave and Étienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 94.

5. Judy Reeves, Writing Alone, Writing Together: A Guide for Writers and Writing Groups (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2002); Pat Schneider, Writing Alone and with Others (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Julie Phillips, The Writers’ Group Handbook: Getting the Best for and from Your Writing Group (Hampshire, UK: John Hunt, 2014); Barbara M. Grant, Academic Writing Retreats: A Facilitator’s Guide (Milperra, NSW: Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia, 2008); Rowena Murray, Writing in Social Spaces: A Social Processes Approach to Academic Writing (London: Routledge, 2014); DeNel Rehberg Sedo, Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Andrew Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Anna Duszak, ed., Cultures and Styles of Academic Discourse (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997); Ken Hyland, Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); Michèle Lamont, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Steven Mailloux, Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition (New York: Modern Language Association, 2006); Tony Becher and Paul Trowler, Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2003).

PART IV: EMOTIONAL HABITS

1. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, On the Art of Writing: Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913—1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916), 234—35; William Morris, “The Beauty of Life,” in Hopes and Fears for Art (London: Longmans, Green, 1919), 114.

10. THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE

1. Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance—What Women Should Know (New York: HarperCollins, 2014).

2. Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2007), 7.

3. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York : Harper Perennial, 1997).

4. Alice Brand, The Psychology of Writing: The Affective Experience (New York: Greenwood, 1989), 45.

5. Ronald T. Kellogg, The Psychology of Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). See also Laura R. Micciche, Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching (Portsmouth, NH: Boynton / Cook, 2007); Dale Jacobs and Laura R. Micciche, eds., A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003); Angela Dwyer, Bridget Lewis, Fiona McDonald, and Marcelle Burns, “It’s Always a Pleasure: Exploring Productivity and Pleasure in a Writing Group for Early Career Academics,” Studies in Continuing Education 34, no. 2 (2012): 129—144; Jenny Cameron, Karen Nairn, and Jane Higgins, “Demystifying Academic Writing: Reflections on Emotions, Know-How and Academic Identity,” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 33, no. 2 (2009): 269—284; Alice Flaherty, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004); Anna Neumann, “Professing Passion: Emotion in the Scholarship of Professors at Research Universities,” American Educational Research Journal 43, no. 3 (2006): 381—424; Robert S. Root-Bernstein and Michele Root-Bernstein, “Learning to Think with Emotion,” Chronicle of Higher Education 46, no. 19 (2000): 64; Rebekah Widdowfield, “The Place of Emotions in Academic Research,” Area 32, no. 2 (2000): 199—208.

6. Robert Boice, “Which Is More Productive, Writing in Binge Patterns of Creative Illness or in Moderation?,” Written Communication 14, no.4 (1997): 436; Silvia, How to Write a Lot, 102.

7. Silvia, How to Write a Lot, 4.

8. On positivity and creativity, see Barbara Fredrickson, Positivity (New York: Crown Archetype, 2009); on intrinsic motivation, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being,” American Psychologist 55 no. 1 (2000): 68—78; on the relationship between positive affect and luck, Richard Wiseman, The Luck Factor: The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind (New York: Random House, 2011). See also the “Things to Read” section at the end of Chapter 11.

9. Fredrickson, Positivity, 12.

10. Barbara L. Fredrickson and Christine Branigan, “Positive Emotions Broaden the Scope of Attention and Thought-Action Repertoires,” Cognition and Emotion 19, no. 3 (2005): 313—332.

11. James Axtell, The Pleasures of Academe: A Celebration and Defense of Higher Education (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); Kim Stafford, The Muses among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003); Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (1973; New York: Hill and Wang, 1975); Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962—1980, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 178; Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing (Santa Barbara, CA: Joshua Odell, 1994); Bill Bryson, Mother Tongue (London: Penguin 1991); Anthony Burgess, A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (London: Cornerstone, 1992); Roy Peter Clark, The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English (London: Hachette UK, 2010); Karen E. Gordon, The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993); Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose, rev. ed. (New York: Three Rivers, 2013); Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (London: Profile Books, 2003).

11. RISK AND RESILIENCE

1. Howard S. Becker, Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 110, 113.

2. Richard Wiseman, The Luck Factor: The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind (New York: Random House, 2011), 21—37.

3. Quoted in Doreen Marcial Poreba, Idiot’s Guides: Unlocking Your Creativity (London: Penguin, 2015), 292.

4. See, for example, Princeton psychologist Johannes Haushofer’s “CV of failures,” which he posted on Twitter in April 2016. “CV of Failures: Princeton Professor Publishes Résumé of His Career Lows,” Guardian, April 30, 2016.

5. Stanley Fish, Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Linda Cooper and Lucia Thesen, Risk in Academic Writing: Postgraduate Students, Their Teachers and the Making of Knowledge (Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2013); Mark Edmundson, Why Write? A Master Class on the Art of Writing and Why It Matters (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016); Jordan Rosenfeld, A Writer’s Guide to Persistence: How to Create a Lasting and Productive Writing Practice (Blue Ash, OH: F+W Media, 2015); Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living beyond Fear (New York: Riverhead Books, 2015); Joni B. Cole, Toxic Feedback: Helping Writers Survive and Thrive (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2006); Catherine Wald, The Resilient Writer: Tales of Rejection and Triumph from 23 Top Authors (New York: Persea Books, 2005); Barbara Fredrickson, Positivity (New York: Crown Archetype, 2009); Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire, Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind (New York: TarcherPerigree, 2015); Brené Brown, Rising Strong (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015); Emma Seppala, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success (London: Piatkus Books, 2016; Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges (Boston: Little, Brown, 2015); Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (New York: Random House, 2016); Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York: Scribner, 2016); Wiseman, Luck Factor; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Happiness (New York: Random House, 2013); Martin E. P. Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012).

12. METAPHORS TO WRITE BY

1. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act 5, scene 1, lines 16—17.

2. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 144, 158.

3. Ibid., 10.

4. “Turbocharge your writing”: Maria Gardiner and Hugh Kearns, “Turbocharge Your Writing Today,” Nature 475 (2011): 129—130; “Fly in your writercopter”: Hillary Rettig, The Seven Secrets of the Prolific: The Definitive Guide to Overcoming Procrastination, Perfectionism, and Writer’s Block (Infinite Art, 2011), 102—104.

5. Barbara Kamler and Pat Thomson, Helping Doctoral Students Write: Pedagogies for Supervision, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2014), 30, 36.

6. Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, 10th anniversary ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007), 153—154.

7. Ibid., 154.

8. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 122; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (London: Bibliolis Books, 2010), 52.

9. Daniel P. McAdams, The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 26—27, 44.

10. Robert Neimeyer, “Re-storying Loss: Fostering Growth in the Posttraumatic Narrative” in The Handbook of Posttraumatic Growth: Research and Practice, ed. Lawrence G. Calhoun and Richard G. Tedeschi (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006), 68—80; Lila Jacobs, José Cintrón, and Cecil E. Canton, eds., The Politics of Survival in Academia: Narratives of Inequity, Resilience, and Success (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2002).

11. Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2007), 21.

12. For more on how concrete language can aid readers’ understanding of abstract concepts, see Stephen Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (New York: Penguin, 2015); Mark Sadoski, Ernest T. Goetz, and Joyce B. Fritz, “Impact of Concreteness on Comprehensibility, Interest, and Memory for Text: Implications for Dual Coding Theory and Text Design,” Journal of Educational Psychology 85, no. 2 (1993): 291—304.

13. Denis Donoghue, Metaphor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Andrew Goatly, The Language of Metaphors, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2011); Alan Wall, Myth, Metaphor, and Science (Chester, UK: Chester Academic Press, 2009); Rick Wormeli, Metaphors & Analogies: Power Tools for Teaching Any Subject (Portland, ME: Stenhouse, 2009); L. David Ritchie, Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., ed., The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Murray Knowles and Rosamund Moon, Introducing Metaphor (London: Routledge, 2006); J. Berenike Herrmann and Tony Berber Sardinha, eds., Metaphor in Specialist Discourse (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015); Timothy D. Giles, Motives for Metaphor in Scientific and Technical Communication (Amityville, NY: Baywood, 2007); Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By; George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

CONCLUSION

1. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 72—78.

2. Helena K. Rene, China’s Sent-Down Generation: Public Administration and the Legacies of Mao’s Rustication Program (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013).

3. Jung H. Yun and Mary Deane Sorcinelli, “When Mentoring Is the Medium: Lessons Learned from a Faculty Development Initiative,” To Improve the Academy 27 (2009): 365—384.

4. Jean-Michel Fortin and David J. Currie, “Big Science vs. Little Science: How Scientific Impact Scales with Funding,” PLOS ONE 8, no. 6 (2013): e65263, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0065263.

5. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971), 143.

6. Ibid., 152.

7. Martin Heidegger, “… Poetically Man Dwells …” ibid., 212, 224—225. The title of Heidegger’s essay comes from Friedrich von Hölderlin’s poem “In lieblicher Blaue” (“In Lovely Blueness”) in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, Gedichte nach 1800, ed. Friedrich Beißner (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1953), 372.

8. Emily Dickinson, “I Dwell in Possibility,” in Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, ed. Helen Vendler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 222.

9. Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).

AFTERWORD

1. Malvina Reynolds, “Little Boxes” (Schroder Music Company, 1962, 1990).