Struggling to finish your academic writing projects?
Sarah Lang explains how to identify and manage writing bottlenecks - and write more effectively, stay focused, and overcome procrastination
Struggling to finish your academic writing projects?
Sarah Lang explains how to identify and manage writing bottlenecks - and write more effectively, stay focused, and overcome procrastination
Hoping those familiar with #LaTeX can give me some advice here. I've started using it to create my assignments for school. I'm not writing technical papers yet, but I find using LaTeX with #Zotero in #VSCode more #accessible with a #ScreenReader than most other setups I've tried.
Since my discussion posts have to follow #APA style, I’m using LaTeX for those as well as full papers. That part is going well—but I’m running into trouble when I need to actually post what I’ve written.
My school uses Brightspace, which allows discussion posts in either rich text or #HTML. I have #Pandoc installed, so I tried converting my LaTeX source to HTML and pasting the code. But Pandoc didn’t include my references section in the output.
I also tried copying from the PDF, but that stripped all formatting.
Does anyone know how I can get a clean HTML version of my work—with references included—that I can paste into Brightspace?
Here’s the command I’ve been using:
pandoc main.tex \
--bibliography=references. Bib \
--csl=apa.csl \
--standalone \
-o main.html
It creates the HTML file, but the references section is missing.
Any tips?
#Accessibility #AssistiveTech #Pandoc #APAstyle #Brightspace #EdTech #AcademicWriting #InclusiveTech #BlindTech #HigherEd #CitationTools #OpenSource #WritingWorkflow
The Eisenhower Matrix, reviewer #2 edition #AcademicWriting #AcademicChatter
Reading scientific papers is so much more difficult when authors make up #acronyms for key phenomena and you have to parse through the paper to figure out what the hell it means. Please don't. Down with UMUAs! (unnecessary made up acronyms) #academicWriting
Many academic papers could be half as long—or less. But we write them to be self-contained and accessible to a broad scholarly audience, so we repeat background, define well-known terms, pad the argument just to be safe. And then publishers restrict the number of footnotes.
In an ideal world, a paper would be short, dense, even cryptic—and followed by a massive apparatus of notes explaining context, terminology, prior work, alternatives. Instead, we do the opposite: long main text, minimal notes
Developing a good research question is an art form, writes @vmmmh: Too broad and it's impossible to answer, too narrow and the results will be tedious and boring.
What if we thought of research questions not as fixed destinations but as evolving companions in a journey of understanding, as questions that are alive enough to grow with us?
"I decided that I didn’t want to be this deadline-driven, miserable writer anymore. I actually like writing. I like my work." Sarah Lang explains how a mindset shift and buliding low-stress routines helped her actually enjoy #AcademicWriting
Today in #PredatoryPublishing: A predatory journal encouraging me to submit an editorial piece I wrote for *another journal* about being an editor of *that journal*, for publication in their predatory journal.
Chef's kiss
New on the blog: Oxford University Press is going all-in on surveillance capitalism https://ideophone.org/oxford-university-press-is-going-all-in-on-surveillance-capitalism/
In which I show that OUP doesn't trust authors with offprints of their own publicly funded work & thinks scholarly exchange is piracy while at the same time selling out to AI slop producer OpenAI #academicchatter #OxfordUniversityPress #OUP #academicwriting
This is surely a metaphor for something? #AcademicWriting #AcademicChatter
Anyone happy to share a copy of:
Thickett, D. (2020B) Review of analysis for cultural heritage conservation, Current Topics in Analytical Chemistry 12:73-88
Academic writing has always been in flux
It can feel when reading academics discussing LLMs that previously settled practices have been suddenly upturned by the introduction of this strange technology into higher education. The reality is that our practices of writing and communication have been through many such changes, often within the span of an individual’s own career. I was reaching the midpoint of a PhD when social media came to be a prominent feature of academic life, offering a potent forum through which to connect with others and discuss ideas alongside an ever present possibility of distraction. During the same PhD I remember talking to my supervisor about producing an 800 page book on a type writer. I simply couldn’t understand how such a thing was possible. Much as I struggled more recently when reading Lamott’s (1994) description of repairing a three hundred page manuscript by placing it on the floor of a cavernous living room in order to reorganise it page-by-page:
“I put a two-page scene here, a ten-page passage there. I put these pages down in a path, from beginning to end, like a horizontal line of dominoes, or like a garden path made of tiles. There were sections up front that clearly belonged in the middle, there were scenes in the last fifty pages that were wonderful near the beginning, there were scenes and moments scattered throughout that could be collected and written to make a great introduction to the two main characters. I walked up and down the path, moving batches of paper around paper-clipping self-contained sections and scribbling notes to myself on how to shape or tight or expand each section in whatever necessary way.” (Lamott’s 1994: 100).
It’s not that I couldn’t do this with my own text. While I’ve still not had reason to find out how to print at my university, in my fourth year since starting to work there, I’m sure I could quickly print out this text if I was motivated to do so. I remember the feeling of holding my PhD thesis in my hands the first time I printed out the draft, suddenly feeling a sense of mastery over this diffuse thing which had been the horizon of my experience for so long. I can recognise the appeal in the physical, the ways of relating to ideas opened up when we get our hands on their material expressions.
It’s just that I struggle to imagine relating in such a physical way, even allowing for the fact that I would undoubtedly be printing an electronic manuscript as opposed to Lamott’s manuscript produced through a typewriter. I was never a routine user of a printer to begin with but the separation from my office printer during the pandemic, combined with a diffuse dislike of the clutter of paper, inexorably led me towards working without print outs. It’s now been at least five years since I last printed something out and it wasn’t something I did much to begin with. The physical manifestations of my writing have slipped out of my immediate experience, no longer presenting as ready-to-hand, in a way that leaves them lodged as an intellectual possibility. In the same way that academics of my generation will often find it perplexing to be reminded that paper journals were once collected and consulted in physical form.
When our routines are disrupted we often feel compelled to account for that disruption. If things don’t work as planned, we are led to reflect on what we expected to happen. It’s easier to see routines when they don’t work because when they do they simply fade into the background. The same is true for the role of technology within these routines (Marres 2014: loc 1919). The introduction of LLMs into academic writing provides such a disruptive occasion because it unsettles many of the assumptions upon which our routines have previously depended. It’s no longer the case that a coherent piece of text we encounter must have been produced by a human author. It’s no longer the case that completing our own text requires only human effort.
This technological shift forces us to confront what writing means to us beyond its mechanical production. Just as word processors transformed academic writing by making revision less laborious, LLMs challenge us to articulate what remains essentially human in our scholarly production. Perhaps what matters most isn’t whether we occasionally use AI assistance, but how thoughtfully we integrate these tools into practices that preserve intellectual ownership and creative engagement with our ideas.
Sisyphus as an academic #AcademicWriting #AcademicChatter
How to enjoy writing in spite of the lure of generative AI
Over the last year I’ve been working on a book How to Enjoy Writing exploring the implications of generative AI for academic writing. I felt I had something important to say about the personal reflexivity involved in working with large language models, but in recent months I’ve realised that I lost interest in the project. Given the book was about cultivating care for our writing, as opposed to rushing through it with the assistance of LLMs, I’ve decided to break it up into blog posts which I’ll share here:
This is Claude’s summary of the core argument which unites these posts into a coherent project. One of the reasons I lost my enthusiasm for the project was the manner in which its capacity to imitate my style, sometimes doing it when I hadn’t asked, disrupted the psychology of my enthusiasm for what I was doing:
The core argument of the book is that generative AI forces academics to confront fundamental questions about why we write and what writing means to us beyond mere productivity. While machine writing offers tempting solutions to the difficulties inherent in academic writing, these difficulties are actually integral to the creative process and intellectual development. If we embrace AI tools primarily as efficiency mechanisms to produce more outputs more quickly, we risk losing the joy and meaning that make writing worthwhile in the first place. Instead, we should approach AI as a conversational partner that enhances our thinking rather than replacing it, staying with the productive "trouble" of writing rather than seeking to escape it. This reflexive approach to writing technology allows us to resist the instrumental acceleration of academic life while still benefiting from AI's creative potential.
However I’ve used Claude to support the editing of these blog posts based on the 80% complete draft of the book, simply because I wouldn’t get round to it otherwise. It has copy edited extracts, condensed them at points, chosen some titles and generally polished the text. There’s a few bridging sentences it provided but nothing more than this. I’m glad it’s given this project a public life because I feel like I was saying something valuable here. But I wasn’t willing to produce a second book on generative AI in two years, as it felt like I was stuck in a performative contradiction which was increasingly uncomfortable.
Instead my plan is to focus on doing my best intellectual work by focusing, for the first time in my career really, on one thing at a time. I’ll still be blogging in the meantime as the notepad for my ideas, but I’d like to take a more careful and nuanced approach to academic writing going forward. I’m not sure if it will work but it’s a direct outcome of the arguments I developed in this book. It was only when I really confronted the rapid increase in the quantity of my (potential) output that I was able to commit myself in a much deeper way to the quality of what I wanted to write in future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IytEOXamsk
And this is how we rise - by taking a fall
Survive another winter on straight to the thaw
One day you'll learn to strain the tea through your teeth
And maybe find the strength to proceed to the peak
You press on into the thin again and cannot breathe
Swallow so much of my damn pride that it chokes me
The real risk is not a slipped grip at the edge of the peak
The real danger is just to linger at the base of the thing
This is a follow up to the 23 part series I did last summer on How To Enjoy Writing. In fact it emerged directly from “I have something to say here” to “I should write another book”, which is exactly the transition I’m now questioning in myself
The single most important thing I want students to learn about academic writing is that your paper is not a mystery novel! Please state your results right there in the introduction! #amGrading #academicWriting #academicChatter #ice515
Liebe Editor*innen, Conference Chairs und akademische Verleger*innen – wenn ihr wissenschaftliche Arbeiten zur doppelblinden anonymen #PeerReview-Begutachtung verschickt, achtet doch bitte darauf, dass die PDF-Dateien keine Metadaten enthalten, aus denen man die Namen oder Zugehörigkeiten der Autor*innen ablesen kann.
Ansonsten weiß man halt, wer das Paper geschrieben hat und die ganze weitere Anoymisierung ist für die Katz.
Vielen Dank an alle.
Why yes, I spent half a day chasing and reading some obscure sources. So that I may now transform a reasonably clear sentence that states something quite obvious into a whole new paragraph that will hopefully please the reviewer and their besties. Still love this job. #AcademicWriting #AcademicChatter.
I'm thinking of creating a sort of pledge/agreement to use with both academic collaborators as well as grad students, where we (the collaborating team or the student and I) would pledge to never use generative AI in our work.
That would mean I would not collaborate with other researchers who want to use these tools, and I would not supervise students who want to use these tools.
I'm curious to hear thoughts on this.
Heute ist Tag des Schreibens des Fachbereichs Geschichte der Universität Salzburg. Es gibt tolle Workshops zu Schreibtypen, Recherche, Schreiben und KI. Ich freue mich auf spannende Diskussionen!