01 Friday Nov 2019
Posted in 3. Writing Practices
By Cally Guerin
November is Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo) – the perfect time to get some writing done before the end of the year. Inspired by Kay Guccione’s WriteFest at Sheffield University over the last few years, I’m trying out some extra events in my new role at ANU. I’ve reported previously on my experiments with AcWriMo, and am keen to keep refining the process. Things have moved on a bit since my first attempt in 2013, but the core concept remains the same. Continue reading
21 Friday Nov 2014
Posted in 3. Writing Practices, 5. Identity & Emotion, All Posts
By Claire Aitchison
I am watching the curious look inquisitively at this small group of people sitting outside in the sun tapping away at their keyboards. It’s hard to tell those who are intentionally part of our new ‘Shut up and write!’ from those who just happened, accidently, to lob here today. There’s the usual café sounds: orders being given and names being called out, cutlery clattering, cups meeting saucers and spoons. Some people look askance, others quickly soften their voices and look away – as if they have walked in on someone in prayer.
It’s 9.15am and people continue to join us. We are now eight definites and four fringe-dwellers: perhaps the outliers are hedging their bets; not sure enough yet to sit with us.
At the break we talk. Everyone is a doctoral student and immediately there’s an exchange about thesis topics, stage of candidature, software programs, the recent Boot Camp and other group writing opportunities on campus. Everyone wants to make writing normal business. Everyone needs to build writing into their lives so they can get their PhD done.
Then we settle down again to write. Together. In silence. It’s magic.
We have written before about group writing for doctoral scholars and academics including online writing groups, retreats and so on. In this blog I aim to give an overview of the group writing opportunities that I’m aware of – and to invite readers to tell us about others.
WRITING MARATHONS are productivity-focussed events that usually involve measuring output (eg word counts) against time. Some examples include:
AcWriMo is perhaps the most widely known and popular. Started in 2011 by Charlotte Frost, AcWriMo is an annual online month-long ‘write-a-thon’ fashioned after the successful NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). Writers participate via the host – PhD2Published; they determine their own writing goals and are supported by tonnes of social media including dedicated posts, twitter feeds and participant exchanges. You can read here about Cally’s experience with a more localised AcWriMo.
Boot camps work on a similar principle, except that those that I know of bring people together in the same physical space; they are mostly facilitated and very often centrally provisioned by University Grad schools or Writing Centres. Like AcrWriMo, participants set personal writing targets which they aim to meet in a set period of time, such as 2 or 3 days. This blog on the Thesis Whisperer gives a great account of how a Boot Camp works.
OTHER SOCIAL WRITING
‘Shut up and write!’ is a mini writing sprint, rather than a marathon, that usually runs over an hour on a regular basis (eg weekly) in a convivial place. This kind of writing event is popular with doctoral scholars and academics because it’s a relaxed arrangement without hard rules or long term commitment. Participants simply turn up and get on with their writing, in the company of others, for two lots of 25 minute bursts with a five minute break in the middle.
‘Meetup’ writing groups. ‘Meetup’ is a global social networking phenomenon and recently, when invited by a friend to accompany her, I discovered yet another vibrant social writing avenue. Her group meets weekly at a pub in central Sydney where participants write, eat and drink together for 2 hours under the ‘cone of silence’. Thereafter, people mix and socialise as they see fit. I was amazed to discover that these writers included professionals of all kinds, scriptwriters, bloggers – and doctoral students.
Writing retreats are another kind of extended writing together opportunity favoured by doctoral scholars and academics alike. Whether they are highly structured (as described by Rowena Murray) or more organic (see Barbara Grant’s Guide), there’s growing evidence of the value of being able to retreat from the everyday demands and routines of academic life, to spaces entirely dedicated to writing. Susan has written about the pros and cons of writing retreats.
Writing buddies and intimate circles of productivity Finally I’d like to include a plug for the common, but undervalued, practice of hiding oneself away with a colleague/s to write. I’ve been lucky enough to have spent weekends away with doctoral scholars in which we have shared writing, cooking, walking and talking. Pat Thomson’s recent blogs on working with her co-author Barbara Kamler describes the joy (and productivity) of this kind of companionship.
But back at the University of New South Wales’ ‘Shut up and write!’ I overhear a passer-by say (I’m not kidding, I promise!): ‘This is really good. I saw the Research Office advertising … I want to do it – but I don’t have time’.
But that’s the point, isn’t it? – ‘Shut up and write!’ and these other group writing activities are booming because they work especially for those who don’t have time. The popularity of writing in groups is evident everywhere – so if you haven’t already; get yourself into some kind of group writing activity and you will reap the rewards.
And we’d love to know about your own group writing adventures.
Other references:
Aitchison, C., & Guerin, C. (Eds.). (2014). Writing Groups for Doctoral Education and Beyond: Innovations in Practice and Theory. London: Routledge. http://www.tandf.net/books/details/9780415834742/
Grant, B. . (2008). Academic writing retreats: a facilitator’s guide. Sydney: Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australia (HERDSA).
Grant, B., & Knowles, S. (2000). Flights of imagination: Academic women be(com)ing writers. International Journal for Academic Development, 5(1), 6 – 9
Grant, B. M. (2006). Writing in the company of other women: exceeding the boundaries. Studies in Higher Education, 31(4), 483-495. DOI: 10.1080/03075070600800624 http://www.leadershipscolaire.uottawa.ca/documents/Grantonwritingretreats.pdf
09 Thursday Oct 2014
Posted in All Posts
By Cally Guerin
I was talking to PhD students recently about how they can’t afford to be precious about their writing – that they need to simply see it as something they do as part of their job (or what Aitchison & Lee call the ‘normal business’ of academic life). After the workshop, one of the participants (thanks, Steph!) sent me a comic that she has pinned onto her noticeboard. In it, an academic is explaining that, in academia, we have a saying ‘publish or perish!’. The other person, who is not an academic, responds matter-of-factly: ‘Yeah, we have that too. It’s called “Do your job or get fired”.’
It’s a harsh message, and one that I would be careful of endorsing without reservation. I am fully aware that some academics’ working lives are well set up to allow them to get on with their research and to publish it, while others have such heavy teaching and administration loads that their research output drops off. Nevertheless, anyone enrolled in a PhD does need to get the writing done, and many also want to see their work published. If they are to succeed in these tasks, I think it is very important to discourage two fairly common attitudes towards doctoral writing: firstly, that writing is somehow special and more difficult than other elements of research; and secondly, that writing requires all sorts of particular conditions before one can get down to the work.
I can’t find the reference despite hours of searching, but someone somewhere talked about a writer (was it Asimov?) whose routine preparation for writing was to “Sit down at my desk within reach of the keyboard, hold my hands over the keyboard, and start typing”. I think this is an excellent way to approach the task. (Please let me know if you have any kind of reference or verification for this attribution – I’d prefer to be a bit more scholarly about it!)
We’ve talked in other posts about establishing good writing habits that help us get on with the job (see, for example, New Year resolution: Get the right/write habit), and clarified that really means ‘good for you’. What works for one person’s life context and commitments is not necessarily the answer for someone else. Rising at 5am to write for three hours before breakfast is ideal for some, but not if you are unable to get to bed early or will be met by a crying baby at 5:30am; large quantities of amphetamines might have aided Jean-Paul Sartre, but this technique is unlikely to be sustainable for most of us.
Increasingly, academic writers are taking a disciplined stand, forming various kinds of writing groups and writing to order. Recalcitrant PhD students – and those who simply want to make some speedy writing progress – are joining ‘boot camps’ (see, for example, University of Melbourne and RMIT), where they are focussed on writing as much as possible during set writing periods. This is a model that is based on more peaceful writing retreats (see, for example, the models developed by Barbara Grant and Rowena Murray. Others are taking advantage of the Shut up and Write! movement, while yet more are signing up for Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo). These are all useful ways of getting on with the job of writing as an everyday practice. What I like most of all is that these approaches are pushing along thesis writing, whether that is in a traditional format or as a thesis by publication.
But if one more person mouths the tired cliché ‘publish or perish’ at me, I might well scream. The situation is obviously far more complicated than that simple dichotomy announces, and there are all sorts of reasons one ought to avoid publishing research prematurely (Paré, 2010). So the challenge I’d like to put to you readers is to devise an alternative motto to take its place. Any votes for the new slogan for doctoral writers that needs to replace this? ‘Write it or regret it’, ‘Write for your life’, ‘Stay calm and write’?
Aitchison, C. & Lee, A. (2006). Research writing: problems and pedagogies, Teaching in Higher Education, 11(3): 265-278.
Paré, A. (2010). Slow the presses: concerns about premature publication. In C. Aitchison, B. Kamler & A. Lee (Eds), Publishing Pedagogies for the Doctorate and Beyond, London, UK: Routledge.
05 Thursday Dec 2013
Posted in 5. Identity & Emotion, All Posts
by Cally Guerin
At Adelaide University we have just tried our first experiment with Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo). Inspired by National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), Charlotte Frost developed an academic version of this concept a couple of years ago that has grown and grown since then. Despite the feeling that the word AcWriMo sounds like it might turn into ‘acrimonious’, the exact opposite is true. I know that some academics have expressed reservations about the concept of AcWriMo, but I decided to give it a go anyway.
As an academic developer running programs for research students, I wanted AcWriMo to achieve several different things for participants at my university. Mostly, I hoped that this experiment would:
Of course, there were some teething problems. Originally I had planned to use Facebook for the community discussions, as other academics tell me they’ve had good success with engaging students in the space they already occupy. Perhaps that’s true for undergrads, but in the end I chose not to use Facebook after several students told me they prefer to keep it for purely private social interactions and/or had previously had bad experiences with too much information being ‘shared’ by others on Facebook. So we ended up using Wikispaces for the community discussions—partly because it’s free, and partly because it is really easy to use.
Quite a bit of the early correspondence to set up AcWriMo took place via the (supposedly outdated but really quite convenient) email system. This is probably because my initial email inviting all research students to participate was sent out through the university-wide email list. I’m of the generation that likes email, but the participants don’t seem to mind such an old-fashioned approach, especially since it is our university’s usual form of communication.
Then we used Dropbox to house a register of names, writing goals, and to tally each day’s writing achievements. I had tried out a couple of alternatives for the register, including Google Docs with spreadsheets, but any free versions seemed clumsy and hard to manage. Dropbox, in contrast, is good for Word documents, and it’s free. There were a few problems in terms of students receiving the right link, but one of the participants worked out what I was doing wrong. In the meantime, another resourceful participant had created a basic, editable table in Wikispaces, and many others have chosen to stick with this as their main place for recording daily output. One of the great advantages of working with clever, resourceful doctoral candidates is that they are very good at solving problems (thank you both!). Having all the information in one place is a better way to go and next time we will use just the Wikispaces site.
Participants set writing targets ranging from 100 to 500 words per day. Any kind of target is fine—the key is making a public commitment and then feeling an obligation to follow through. As a role model for my first group I wasn’t always quite as productive as I’d hoped, and several others commented on the Discussion Board that they’d had unexpected interruptions during the month too. Many, however, exceeded their promised word count, and I for one found myself trying to write just one more sentence so that I could meet my obligations.
Did I get all three of my pre-Christmas wishes? Yep, I think so. Thousands of words have been written during this concentrated effort; maybe they would have been written anyway, but this way there is a record of the achievement. There is certainly a sense of a community developing, with a few key contributors to the Discussion Board but no doubt plenty of others reading and lurking in the background—they are all busy adding to their daily scores, even if not responding directly to my discussion prompts. Already some have asked if they have to finish at the end of November, or can we continue to have the Wikispace (the answer is a resounding yes!). And finally, most of the names on the register are not people I’ve come across in the other writing groups and workshops I run for research students, so AcWriMo seems to have reached out to a different group from our other offerings.
Overall, as a lead-up to the end of both the calendar year and the academic year in Australia, this has been an invigorating experience. I’m already planning to do it again in 2014, and hope some of this year’s participants are keen to try again—unless, of course, they’ve established such good writing habits this month that they complete their theses before then!
Have you ever been involved in AcWriMo? If so, I’d love to hear about your experiences, both positive and negative, and any tips you have for making the most of it.
