Knowing the ‘what’ and ‘how’ for academic writing

Whilst we’ve had lots of different writers attend our retreats, both me and Nicky came to writing from an academic perspective. In our webinar ‘How to Write More’ we apply the Capability, Opportunity and Model (COM-B) to the behaviour of writing. The webinar is designed to be a structured reflection on what gets in the way of writing productivity, and the tools that might help people to overcome these and allow them to write more (hence the title!) Many barriers to writing can be minimised (or removed) during a structured writing retreat. However, writing retreats are not the only answer. Indeed, writing retreats help very little with one aspect of writing, which is within the ‘psychological capability’ category.

Psychological capability includes the cognitive and psychological skills to perform a behaviour. For writing, we have identified these as:

• Knowing how and what to write (task)

• Knowing the function of writing as a skill

• Having the mental strength to write

• Having the mental stamina to write

In our webinar, we suggest tackling the first of these (knowing what and how to write) by seeking advice from mentors. And for academic writers, this could also be supervisors, and accessing resources such as those produced by Rowena Murray. However, to build on this a bit more, I’ve created some suggestions with a bit more detail for people who might find this as a particular barrier to their writing, and I will be publishing these as blogs (stay tuned!)

However, in academic writing I do think we rely very heavily on people with experience of writing to support those who are new to academic writing through supervision and mentorship, and of course this means that the experience an individual gets can be quite variable. For me, I think one of the things I have seen is that experienced academics seem to forget what they had to learn about academic writing. This includes the really fundamental things about academic writing which someone new needs to know.

This is slightly compounded by the fact that senior academics often don’t do the nuts and bolts of the writing. This is often done by their PhD students, research assistants, associates etc. Yes, they definitely support the research, and hopefully comment on drafts, but they aren’t usually the ones wrestling with the submission system, tracking all the changes when it inevitably requires revision, meticulously responding to each peer review comment, and figuring out what the author submission guidelines are. Early career academics often figure this out through a process of trial and error. This is especially true if you didn’t know what an academic journal was until well into your undergraduate degree (and to be honest - not until I did my Masters, as is the case for us clinical scientific types where textbooks are prevalent).

So, when I got my first research grant and started being a ‘proper’ academic writer, I thought I would start documenting my process through a blog. The original still is available (see here) but me and Nicky have also pooled our collective experience into a workshop, which this year we are making available as a webinar.

The webinar contains all the tips and tricks and painful learning from my own journey to learn to write academically, and all the things I have told people I have supervised with their first piece of academic writing (wait, am I one of those ‘experienced academics’?!) Plus, thanks to a great webinar from Mushtaq Bilal we’ve also super-charged it with some advice on using online and artificial intelligence apps to help the academic writing process (all ethically of course!)

We’re switching to online webinars during the winter months, when our North East coast is still beautiful, but definitely more challenging to enjoy! You can join us back in person for our writing retreats, armed with the knowledge of what and how to start, when we return in the spring. We hope to see you online, or in person when the sea is a bit calmer!