“I find pleasure, and feel excitement that I might get to spend a few hours of my day just noodling, shifting words around, finding satisfying arrangements that sound nice when you read them out loud.” – Eda Gunaydin

Permission to replace my academic writing routine with a more flexible toolkit? Yes, please and thank you very much.

Recently I was sketching out my monthly schedule and as I was blocking time out to do some writing on a journal article, I gave an involuntary ‘urgh’. And then I thought: ‘huh. Where did that come from?’…

“While writing, I pretend that I can lovingly offer time respite, demand that it stops and rests for a little while; I ask it to pause and sit with me, let the minutes and hours soak in words: where they come from, where they go, how they’re spoken, how we texture their histories with voices of our own.” – Q Manivannan

Each section of your dissertation has a particular job to do. And you can help the writing process along by putting on different ‘hats’ or personas depending on which section you are writing. Here are the five that I’ve come up with…

“Writing is not about waiting for a muse or a divine burst of creativity. It is getting words on a page and finishing something you set out to do as best you can.” – Megan MacKenzie

“For the past few years, I have lived by Scottish rivers, first the Allan water in Dunblane and now the river Eden in Fife. Walking beside these rivers sets a rhythm to my day. These walks are reliable. They happen whether I am having a good writing day or a terrible one. That reliability lends a cadence to my days.” - Roxani Krystalli

Welcome to Part 2 of the two-part blog on what I would do differently if I had my PhD time again. In this blog, I share the things that I did but wish I had done sooner, including being strategic about professional opportunities, making peace with the messiness of the thinking-writing-editing process, and getting a PhD squad.

“Often, early drafts of my work resemble slapdash mosaics of bits and pieces of disparate content that I come back to and work into something more orderly and readable over time.” - Will Clapton

“These days I love the blank page at the beginning of a new project; it signifies the promise of something new.” - Eliza Garnsey

Ach, the benefit of hindsight. If I could go back and do my PhD again, there are things that I would do differently, and there are things I’d do again, only sooner. In Part 1 of this two-part blog, I share the things I wish I had done, from getting clearer on what I wanted to do after my PhD earlier, to keeping a research journal, and treating my PhD like a normal job.

“The joy in language, the ease of expression, the ability to edit myself and try precisely to convey meaning – these are all reasons why I find writing so much easier than talking most days.” - Laura J. Shepherd

I am very excited to introduce the (academic) writer blog series. Essentially, I’ll be asking academics about how they write: the writing routines they have, what they do when they get stuck, how they approach the blank page of a new project, and so on…

You’ll often be asked to submit an academic biography if you propose a conference paper, contribute a chapter to an edited collection, or publish a journal article or book. Even early in your research candidature, it can’t hurt to start thinking about your bio. There are a few different ways that you can go about writing yours. In this blog post, I offer five different formulations: the short-and-sweet bio; the brief bio; the detailed bio; the independent scholar bio; and the academic-adjacent bio.

I have done a lot of work as a Research Assistant and Research Associate over the years, and I’ve learned so much by doing it. This work let me expand my networks, develop my research skills, and peek inside the brains of some brilliant people. Now I’m in a position to hire my own research assistants, I know the kind of emails I really appreciate getting from the people I’m working with. These are the top five emails you should be sending as a Research Assistant.

Academic conferences can be great for learning about interesting new research, expanding your network (and making new friends!), boosting inspiration, and sometimes even visiting a city or country you’ve never been to before. But it can also be daunting. It might be the first time you have presented your research to an audience, and not everyone considers public speaking fun. With that in mind, these are the things I wish I had known before going to my first conference.

When I think about all the research projects I’ve worked on, I can’t think of one that hasn’t experienced – and actually often benefitted from – things going wrong. Or at least not to plan. This has been quite upsetting – every single time – because I’m a planner; I like spreadsheets, and ticking things off, and colour-coding things, and putting things in order. And yet, as hard as it is for me to admit it, the accidental has actually been a very good friend to me in my research in all sorts of ways…