Category: writing exercises and advice
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Sure/unsure writing exercise
Often in our academic writing we’re expected to be sure of ourselves – to sound or be authoritative about something, or to know that we’re correct in what we’re arguing. At a final-product level, this is of course really important. But when we’re just starting out on a project, only writing about something we already…
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Getting traction as writers
This exercise is interested in the difference between what we academic writers need to get traction in order to write and what our readers need to have traction in their reading of our writing. The joke about all undergrad papers starting with the phrase “Since the beginning of time, humans have…” is about the disjuncture…
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One Hundred Words, Three Sentences
This is an editing exercise, using the power of constraint to liberate some creativity but also as a diagnostic to see what long sentences might be trying to tell us. Start by finding a long sentence in something you’ve written – usually longer than 60 or 70 words. Break that sentence into exactly three sentences…
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Not letting a quote hang in space
We often hear, or tell our students, not to just let quotes hang out in space. Sometimes we say that they should not end a paragraph with a quote, or that it’s important to explain why the quote is there, in the chapter or paper or whatever. This exercise is to warm up how to…
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Good Old Freewriting
I think Peter Elbow’s great book Writing Without Teachers was the first place I encountered a rationale for freewriting. Freewriting’s a really useful technology for academic writers in particular. The how of freewriting is very simple: You set a timer, usually for quite a short time (5-7 minutes) and write without stopping, editing, reading what…
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Impossible Task Exercise
My department has started a Discord server for students and faculty to support one another’s writing and teaching. This morning we had the first real-time audio meeting to do a quick writing-play exercise and a unit of collective work. Here’s the write-up for the Impossible Task writing exercise we did today. Many times when we…
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On not writing about what we love
I read a piece somewhere. I can’t find it now but I think about it often enough that maybe some of what I think about it wasn’t actually there. Anyhow, I remember that it made an argument for Peter Schjeldahl as a significant critic in part because of a pedagogical mode in his critical writing.…
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Grounding in why we write – internal and external motivations
In my thesis writing class this term we discussed Joe Kadi’s brilliant piece “Stupidity ‘Deconstructed’,” which looks at the experience of working-class people in the university. I teach this piece alongside Eli Clare’s book Exile and Pride pretty much as often as I can, because I find them both incredibly nuanced, beautifully done, and useful…
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Deciding whether to do academic writing right now
It is always a good exercise to think through why we write, though we pause to reflect on this question relatively rarely. In normal academic times, we might say things like: ◦ I need to finish this paper for my class because I’m trying to get through my first year of grad school ◦ I…
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A schedule is a net for catching December
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both…