Thriving as a writer

A guest post to preview a new book about academic writing and revision

Happy June, Manuscript Workers!

I’m going to take a break from talking about the Book Proposal Accelerator today, because I know many readers of this newsletter are working on different kinds of writing projects over the next few months—not just book proposals—and you might be tired of hearing about my program by now. I will just let you know quickly that there are still spots open for this summer’s Accelerator and you can learn more about it here!

Today, we’re fortunate to have a guest post from Rachael Cayley, who has written a brand new book called Thriving as a Graduate Writer: Principles, Strategies, and Habits for Effective Academic Writing, published by the University of Michigan Press.

Rachael teaches writing at the University of Toronto and has a long-running blog full of helpful academic writing and revision tips. I’ve read her book and think it will be incredibly useful—not just for early career scholars and those who advise them, but for scholars at any career stage who want to take the time to improve their scholarly writing (perhaps because they were never really taught how before).

The book includes many practical revision tips, some of which I myself plan to use as I refine my current book manuscript in progress. If you’d like to check out the book yourself, you can use code UMS23 to get it for 30% off from the University of Michigan Press for a limited time.

I hope you’ll find Rachael’s post below helpful too!

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Previewing Thriving as a Graduate Writer

A guest post by author Rachael Cayley

Most of the graduate writers that I work with find writing deeply challenging: writing is often experienced as an obstacle to both academic success and personal happiness. In response, I’ve written a book arguing the graduate writing process can get better. Not that it isn’t consistently difficult but that it can be improved. As a starting point, graduate writers need to be introduced to a new way of thinking about the task of academic writing.

The four statements in the first column in the table below reflect what I regularly hear graduate writers say about academic writing: that they should already know how to do it; that this lack of expertise means that they are unsuited to graduate study; that academic writing itself is something that can't be done well; and that writing needs to be done alone. These common sentiments reflect the fact that many graduate writers feel unprepared, unqualified, alienated, and isolated. However, we cannot simply accept that graduate students will have such a negative experience of an activity as crucial as writing.

What if we were to reframe graduate writing as developmental, difficult, possible, and communal? In this scenario, a graduate writer could start to feel committed because academic writing would be treated as a legitimate part of graduate education; determined because academic writing would be recognized as challenging for everyone; engaged because the enterprise of academic writing would be seen as inherently worthwhile; and supported because writing would no longer need to be tackled alone.

My goal is for graduate writers to be able to utter the sentences in the final column of the table above with conviction:

• “Graduate writing is an ongoing learning process.”

• “Academic writing is challenging for everyone.”

• “Academic writing can be enjoyable for the reader.”

• “Graduate writing can be done with other people.”
  

While I believe that a new mindset can be powerful, graduate students cannot be expected to suddenly shift their way of thinking about writing because someone tells them it will help. Indeed, telling people to change their thinking without addressing the material conditions within which they think is worse than saying nothing at all. Each of these shifts must be grounded in concrete support. In my view, that support needs to take three forms. In the first place, graduate writers need to be introduced to the principles that underlie academic writing. Second, graduate writers need strategies to overcome the sense that they should already know how to do this. Lastly, graduate writers need to think about developing writing habits in order to overcome productivity challenges without suffering the effects of harmful productivity discourses.

An elaboration of writing principles is needed because graduate writing is something to be thought about rather than just something to be done. Writing is the activity of clarifying our own thinking; effective writing is created through the act of revision; and writing is fundamentally about meeting the needs of the reader. By adopting these three principles, academic writers can make conscious writing decisions that will support their efficacy as writers. In addition to these three durable academic writing principles, I suggest that graduate writers pay particular attention to the imperative that they must be visible in their own texts. Since graduate writers tend to de-emphasize their authorial presence, this principle offers a valuable reminder that the reader’s preeminent need is for guidance from the writer.

An elaboration of writing strategies is needed because graduate writing is something to be learned as a set of practical skills. The heart of this book is the discussion of strategies for managing the needs of the reader as they pertain to various aspects of an academic text: overall structure; sentence-level construction; and reader momentum. Those strategies can then be combined into a revision process that take an exploratory draft through to a reader-friendly final draft; by re-visioning writing through the lens of the reader’s many needs, a writer can create writing ready to be shared.

Lastly, an elaboration of how to build better writing habits is crucial because graduate writing is something to be cultivated in the face of unique productivity challenges. Productivity advice for graduate writers has to start with an awareness of their unique position within academia: the practical barriers, the intellectual struggles, the emotional costs. To be of any use, productivity strategies must move beyond the discourse that individualizes struggles as a lack of willpower or organization. Instead, productivity strategies for graduate writers must be grounded in an awareness that graduate writers all tend to struggle to build a writing habit in a world of competing demands, persistent isolation, self-doubt, and missing expertise.

This book offers graduate writers—and those who support them—the opportunity to rethink the whole writing process. By starting with principles before moving on to strategies and habits, I’ve attempted to create a concise self-study opportunity for graduate writers. The book is intended to be read straight through and then kept as a reference to be used when writers need targeted support with any aspect of the writing process. So much of the angst of graduate education revolves around the persistent challenges of writing. And so much of the conversation around academic writing is cynical about its weaknesses and fatalistic about its difficulty. With this book, I hope to give graduate writers the chance to understand the reality of academic writing challenges and then to build their own effective response. Thriving as a graduate writer will sound unattainable to many, but surely it’s a worthy goal.

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Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you next week!