Category Archives: Blogs and blogging

Blog Writing Practices – UVic’s Centre for Academic Communications

Blogs and blogging, Centre for Academic Communication, Graduate student writers

Blogs are becoming a standard medium for knowledge dissemination in an accessible and rather informal way. Such publications utilize accessible and informative language, speaking to a diverse yet targeted audience. This post describes how blogs that the CAC publishes are to be written, in a way that demonstrates the tips we provide and the practices we recommend our contributors follow.

Introductions and Openers

Like most text that you write, the first paragraph is very important in setting the tone and the purpose of the piece. For blog posts in particular, the first couple of sentences are the most important: along with tone and purpose, they set the theme and guide your reader as to whether or not this post answers their inquiries. While the openers for your blog are expected to be grabbing, they still need to be direct in presenting the key information. From there, continue to provide context and essential details on the topic. Move on from the introduction as soon as you have established your theme, purpose/argument, and the necessary context.

Concision and Brevity

Concision is key in writing blog posts. Your readers are looking for information that can be deciphered efficiently, perhaps even through skimming. Lay out the information as concisely as possible, using sentences of short to moderate lengths. Make sure that your sentences are engaging and vary in length though, so that the piece has rhythm and flows smoothly. Use anecdotes and personal experience wisely: where it drives the point home or clarifies it, is necessary to capture the reader, or is the actual topic of the post.

Further, lists and bullet points are your friends in a blog post. Where necessary, this practice provides a visual structure for readers’ attention, as well as a quick-to-read and easy-to-digest display of information.

Sections and Headers

Use sections and headers; these focus your reader’s attention and gives them a visual map of the post and which part they need to read. Given that some of your readers will be skimming the post, organizing it into sections with clear and descriptive headers will guide them towards the content of interest. A satisfied reader will come back for more, so if you are building an audience/following, make sure you attend to their expectations.

Purpose and Themes

Be aware of your purpose from the very beginning and make it clear to the readers. Make sure that by the end of the post, you have achieved your purpose. Know your themes and commit to them; avoid getting distracted by and/or distracting your reader with unnecessary information. You may find formatting helpful to highlight key terms and statements; where need be, bold the important word or sentence, but make sure not to overdo it.

General Notes:

  • If discussing a personal experience, avoid rants and focus on takeaways (Raising awareness, providing tips, etc.)
  • Be aware of the diversity of your audience, which includes backgrounds (social, cultural, religious) and academic standing (undergraduates, graduates, faculty)
  • Use language conscientiously. Our blog is a writing blog for building community; as authors, lead by example
  • Be respectful and professional, even if informal
  • Finally, be open to conversations pre and post publication. The editors of the blog go through a selection process and will get in touch with the authors for edits and revisions. Readers might wish to contact the authors to further the conversation, so consider providing contact information with your bio note.

Enliven your writing in 2021

Academic Writing, Blogs and blogging, Posts by Madeline, Writing resources

Welcome back. I hope you had a good break. We all needed a rest after an exhausting and challenging semester in the midst of a pandemic.  Would you like to join me in starting 2021 with a resolution to exhume “zombie nouns” from your writing? In this humorous video, Helen Sword contends that when we turn other parts of speech (verbs, adjectives) into nouns by adding a suffix, we create “zombie nouns” or nominalizations that suck the life out of our writing, making it more abstract and difficult to read.

I’ll take Sword’s example: “The proliferation of nominalizations in a discursive formation may be an indication of a tendency towards pomposity and abstraction” contains seven nominalizations and doesn’t leave us with a clear idea of who is doing what. Several of the bolded words started as lively verbs (proliferate, form, indicate, tend) and others started as adjectives (pompous, abstract), but they life drained from each of them with the added suffixes, which added unnecessary complexity.

Reanimated, this sentence becomes “Writers who overload their sentences with nominalizations tend to sound pompous and abstract.” Note that a human (the writer) was added for clarity. So much better!

Sword also created The Writer’s Diet, a tool that measures words and constructions that weaken writing, for example be-verbs and zombie nouns. I tested a paragraph of a recently published article*, and zombie nouns were off the chart! Academics tend to use many nominalizations. Indeed, you may think of nominalizations as a required feature of  formal writing, and perhaps you’ve even added nominalizations to make your writing sound more “academic.” But as Sword says, nominalizations obscure meaning, and you want to communicate important ideas and research as transparently as possible. I invite you to join me in analyzing your writing this year to see if you can enliven and clarify your sentences by reducing nominalizations.

screen shot of the writers diet website testing an excerpt of flabby prose

Resources:

Sword’s tool and video are a good place to start. You can add the Writer’s Diet app to your Microsoft Word program for free. Another resource on this topic is  OWL’s page on nominalizations.

Write for us! 

Would you like to write for the blog?  We welcome ideas and blog posts from graduate students, staff members, and instructors. Please send your query or post to Madeline Walker, Editor, at cacpc@uvic.ca

Before you write, please consider the following:

We love content relevant to academic communication (reading, writing, presenting) and graduate students. We value

    • a unique point of view,
    • posts reflecting the diversity of UVic students,
    • stories that illustrate difficulties and vulnerabilities,
    • posts with practical tips and ideas,
    • fresh topics,
    • humour,
    • content specific to UVic,
    • and motivating and inspirational themes.

Posts should be between 250-750 words and may be edited for clarity, grammar, and punctuation.

If your post is accepted for publication, please provide a good-quality jpeg photo of yourself (not a selfie) and a short (2-3 sentence) biography.

* This is the recently published article where I obtained the excerpt: Nils Dahl, Alex Ross & Paul Ong (2020) Self-Neglect in Older Populations: A Description and Analysis of Current Approaches, Journal of Aging & Social Policy, 32:6, 537-558, DOI: 10.1080/08959420.2018.1500858

 

Write for the blog: Be part of the Graduate Student Writers’ Community

Blogs and blogging, Centre for Academic Communication, Environment, Graduate student writers, Inspiration and motivation, Make writing social, Motivation, Posts by Madeline, Writing resources

By Madeline Walker, Editor

Hello. Coming back to the Centre for Academic Communication (CAC) after a year away feels strange. Rather than stepping back into the familiar, welcoming halls of  the library and sharing laughs with students and tutors, I navigate through the disorienting cyber-space of Zoom meetings and online communication. It’s hard to get my footing here. I feel like an astronaut floating far away from the mother ship. I miss you. But it’s great to be back, and I hope to see you in person soon.

Call for blog posts

Please write a post for the blog! This is your community, and we want to hear your voice, your opinions, and your ideas. You can write on anything to do with the experience of graduate student research and writing. Perhaps you could share how graduate research and writing has changed for you since the onset of the pandemic. How have you coped? What do you miss most? Have you discovered any unexpected treasures? Or perhaps you’d like to voice some thoughts on developing an academic identity, writing for publication, or attending conferences.  Maybe you’d like to review a useful book that helped you with your writing or research. Please browse previous posts to get an idea of the range of writing.

Blog posts should be between 250 and 750 words. Use plain English—make your post accessible. I encourage you to

  • provide hyperlinks to resources
  • include a catchy title
  • check out this template (yes, it’s from a marketing perspective, but the guidelines are sound)
  • read  “Write for Us” for further information.

Please send your inquiries and posts to me at cacpc@uvic.ca.

Start your own blog

Writing a guest post for the Graduate Student Writers’ Community blog might stimulate you to start your own blog.

Pat Thomson, academic blogger extraordinaire, claims that blogging has many benefits for the graduate student researcher/writer. Writing blog posts can help you set a regular writing routine, develop authoritative voice in your writing, and practise writing in a conversational style (Thomson & Kamler, Detox your writing, p. 120). She writes that blogging is a “productive way of performing your research for a wider public” (p. 118). If you would like to start your own blog, UVic’s instance of WordPress, the Online Academic Community,  is free for UVic students. Attend a how-to workshop and start blogging!

New Online Resources for Graduate Students at the CAC

The capable team at the CAC have been developing many online resources in the past four months, including CAC Online, a self-enrolling CourseSpaces site  (You must be loggged into UVic to access the link). In particular, I draw your attention to the valuable resources for grad students housed there, including videos by Emily and Kaveh about reading, writing, and publishing your research.

P.S. Pat Thomson and Barbara Kamler’s excellent book on doctoral research and writing, Detox your writing: Strategies for doctoral researchers,  is available from our library as an e-book.

 

 

Make writing social

Academic Writing, Blogs and blogging, Centre for Academic Communication, Dissertation writing, Environment, Inspiration and motivation, Make writing social, Motivation, Productivity, Tutoring, Writing groups

cropped-cropped-cropped-2110144017-2.jpg“Isolation is killing.” (Thomson & Kamler, 2016, p. 50)

Writing a thesis can feel isolating. Even if you are traveling the grad school journey with a cohort, you may get out of sync with others or feel different from the group. One way to break out of isolation and kick-start your writing is to connect with your peers and either write together and/or share your writing. Wendy Belcher, editor, teacher, and the author of Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks, is a proponent of making your writing social and collaborative, whether through involvement in a writing group or with a writing partner. Writing with others can allay writer’s block and other forms of anxiety, make you more productive, and help you feel connected to others.

Following are some ideas to get you started in creating a sense of writing community:

  • Thesis Writing Starter Kit: This resource provides tips on how to form a writing group or partnership.
  • The Centre for Academic Communication: Working with a tutor at the CAC can help you deal with writing challenges that you don’t necessarily want to bring to your supervisor. You can book a 50-minute session once a week (2 X 25 minute sessions, back to back), working with the same tutor for continuity or trying out different tutors.  Email cacmgr@uvic.ca to inquire about our face-to-face and online tutoring.
  • Every Friday from 10-1, the Centre for Academic Communication hosts a “writing room” for graduate students in Library 151B. It’s a quiet space where you can write alongside other graduate students.
  • Check out the twice-yearly Thesis Boot Camps for graduate students.
  • Blogging about your experience can help you feel less isolated on your journey and, according to Thomson and Kamler (2016), is an important part of performing your “scholarly identity” (see pp. 116-121). As a UVic student, you can use the Online Academic Community to start a free WordPress blog with technical support from the experts at Technology Integrated  Learning, UVic.  If you don’t want to start your own blog but would like to share your story, get in touch with me at cacpc@uvic.ca and we can talk about getting your story up on the Graduate Student Writers’ Community blog.
  • You may not relish the idea of connecting with a writing partner, writing group, or writing tutor. Have you considered reading academic blogs on topics relevant to you? Reading academic blogs can make you feel connected to the wider community of academic writers, graduate students, and researchers. A few recommended blogs follow; please let me know if you have a favourite one you’d like to add:

The Thesis Whisperer. From the blog: “The Thesis Whisperer is a blog newspaper dedicated to the topic of doing a thesis  and is edited by Dr Inger Mewburn, Director of research training at the Australian National University.” Mewburn and guest writers from across the world post about every possible topic related to writing a dissertation. Her approach is humanizing, playful, and encouraging.

Patter. From the blog: “Patter is Pat Thomson, Professor of Education in the School of Education, The University of Nottingham.” Thomson blogs often on scholarly writing, writing a dissertation, publishing, and writing or research problems and solutions. Her posts are organic—springing from what is happening in her busy life as an academic.

Explorations of Style| A blog about academic writing. From the blog: “Explorations of Style offers readers an ongoing discussion of the challenges of academic writing. The ability to formulate and clarify our thoughts is central to the academic enterprise; this blog discusses strategies to improve the process of expressing our research in writing.” Dr. Rachael Cayley, from the University of Toronto, covers many topics of interest to dissertation and other academic writers in a down-to-earth style. The blog appears to be inactive now, but there are some great classic posts about reverse outlining, paragraphing, and transitions.

Do you have a recommendation about how to “make writing social”? Send your ideas and resources to Madeline at cacpc@uvic.ca

This is adapted from a page written by Madeline Walker in the Dissertation Writers Resource on this blog; last updated November 22, 2018

 

 

 

 

Just do it: Enter our contest now!

Blogs and blogging, Centre for Academic Communication, Contest, Creative writing, Environment, Graduate student writers, Inspiration and motivation, Social media, Web-based writing groups, Writing coaches, Writing groups, Writing process, Writing resources

photo of student writing near a windowGraduate  students:  Tell your writing story

For a chance to win a prize, enter our blog post contest about how the University of Victoria’s extraordinary environment matters to your writing.

Describe where you love to write, take a picture of yourself in that location, and share with us how the amazing environment at the University of Victoria and its environs inspire your writing.

Or, describe who helps you write: a writing group, counsellor, tutor, librarian, instructor, supervisor, or friend? Tell us how this relationship matters to you and your writing and include a photo of yourself and whoever makes UVic an extraordinary environment for you and your writing.

Submit your entries (blog post plus photo) to cdrcac@uvic.ca by 11:59 p.m., February 28, 2018 for a chance to win one of three prizes:

  • First prize: $100 gift certificate at UVic Bookstore
  • Second and third prizes: $50 gift certificates at UVic Bookstore

Winning entries will be published on the Graduate Student Writers’ Community blog.

Please read the Contest RULES

 

 

 

 

Writing to get your ideas heard

Blogs and blogging, Cognitive process and writing, Commentary, Dissertation writing, EAL graduate students, Feedback, Law, Op-ed, Women's voices, Writing process
Qian Liu

By Qian Liu

Writing is a process of thinking. In the process, ideas are recorded and become important sources for further thinking. Publication is a by-product of this process. Instead of keeping your ideas to yourself, publishing your work is a way to communicate with others and makes the journey of thinking less lonely.  At the very beginning of my Ph.D. program, senior students in our program told me that being a Ph.D. student is very isolating, as you spend too much time in the carrel alone working on something that people do not care about. They said that you may end up spending five years writing a dissertation that only your supervisory committee members will read carefully. This does not discourage me to continue my studies, because I believe that writing a dissertation helps me address the questions that I am always trying to address or know more about. Besides, there are always plenty of opportunities out there to have our ideas heard during the process of dissertation writing.

One good thing about conducting a research study that you are passionate about is that often there are moments when you feel that it is your responsibility as a scholar to get your ideas out both inside and outside academia. Doing research on the impact of law on Chinese women’s choices in marriage and childbearing, I always feel the need to say something when I see any chance to contribute to social and legal changes to benefit women. In 2015, I wrote a commentary for Blogging for Equality when the law’s denial of Chinese single women’s access to freeze their eggs became a hot topic worldwide after a famous 41-year-old Chinese actress and film director announced that she had travelled to the U.S. to freeze her eggs. When feminist activists and lawyers in China put forward a report titled “Single Women’s Reproductive Rights—A Research Report on Policy and Lived Experience” and received media attention worldwide, I published an op-ed for Impact Ethics and argued that an overemphasis on state law’s impact on unmarried women’s childbearing may shift our attention away from some other social norms that are more influential than state law in stopping Chinese women from being single mothers by choice.

“Instead of keeping your ideas to yourself, publishing your work is a way to communicate with others and makes the journey of thinking less lonely.”

I also write journal articles and book chapters, but I have realized that it is more rewarding and enjoyable to write commentaries (also known as “op-eds”). Journal articles and book chapters may contribute to the knowledge in your academic field, while writing op-eds is a better way to disseminate knowledge to the general public and get your ideas out quickly. I remember it took me more than half a year to develop my first major publication for the Asian Journal of Law and Society, with quite a few emails back and forth with the editors. A commentary, however, usually only takes a few days before your ideas are delivered to the public. More importantly, op-eds can be very influential. In August 2017, I received an invitation from BBC World News to comment on Chinese women’s egg freezing issues for their live show. The journalists contacted me because they found my commentaries online when they were looking for a legal expert to speak about this issue. Although I may not be among the most influential scholars in the field of women’s studies and women’s rights, I got this opportunity because of my willingness to share my research outside academia.

I am very grateful to my supervisors Gillian Calder and Maneesha Deckha, as well as the founder of Informed Opinions, Shari Graydon, for always encouraging me to write op-eds about my work. As an international student coming directly from China, I had no experience in writing commentaries for Canadian blogs. Fortunately, my supervisor recommended Informed Opinions to me, and I learned how to write op-eds from this website. The website provides a variety of resources, which includes op-ed elements, engaging openers, editors’ advice, submitting commentary, turning media requests into opportunities, and even building relationships with reporters and columnists. If my experience convinces you to start the very enjoyable journey of blogging, you may find this website helpful to you as a beginner.

You may be wondering whether you, as a graduate student, have the authority to speak to the public about a particular topic. This thought haunted me for a long time. Sometimes, however, somebody just needs to stand out. A message from Shari after my BBC interview reconfirmed the belief that I should get my ideas heard by the public. Shari said, “diverse women’s voices are so necessary to address topics that otherwise get little attention.” Still not sure whether you can write and publish commentaries? As I said before, writing is a process of thinking and publication is the by-product of this process. If you understand writing and publishing in this way, you will find that publishing is simply a way to share your imperfect ideas in order to get some useful comments to help you think.

Qian Liu is a Ph.D. candidate at the Faculty of Law, University of Victoria, Canada. Her research interests include gender and China, legal consciousness, legal pluralism, feminist legal theory, reproductive rights, law and policy implementation in China, and qualitative research. Qian is the recipient of an IDRC Doctoral Research Award from the International Development Research Centre, Canada. She has published in the Asian Journal of Law and Society and the Asian Journal of Women’s Studies. Please direct correspondence to Qian Liu at liuqian@uvic.ca.

 

 

The abstract is “an argument, writ small”

Abstracts, Academic Writing, Blogs and blogging, Centre for Academic Communication, Dissertation writing, EAL graduate students, Graduate student writers, International graduate students, Structure, Tutoring, Writing process, Writing resources

By Madeline Walker

The word abstract is a bit confusing.  When I looked up this word in the dictionary, I found the first definition is for the adjective, to do with “thought rather than matter, or in theory rather than practice; not tangible or concrete.” Thus an abstract concept, such as love, good, or evil, has no physical referent. The noun definition is “a summary of or statement of the contents of a book.” When you write an abstract for an article, thesis, or conference, you are “abstracting” (a rarely used verb form of the word, meaning to extract or pull out) some key bits from the whole. Yet contrary to the adjectival meaning of the word (non-concrete), it’s a good idea not to be too “abstract” when writing your abstract! An abstract abstract is likely to be ineffective because your goal is to deliver a clear picture of your research in your reader’s mind, and abstract language won’t do that. When you have only a few words to say a great deal, you had better be as concrete as possible in order to deliver your purpose to the reader directly.

I am a big fan of Thomson and Kamler’s four-move abstract described in Detox Your Writing: Strategies for Doctoral Researchers (available as an e-book in our library). Their model works well for all types of abstracts, and it can also be used to kick-start your writing. Thomson and Kamler write that the abstract is not a summary—it’s actually an “argument, writ small,” and it must contain your central argument in abstracted form.  You might say, “Well mine is a computer science article—I don’t really have an argument.”  I imagine T & K would respond that any piece of academic writing can be abstracted into an argument. You are trying to persuade the reader that your computer science finding/development/algorithm contributes to the research/makes a difference in some way. And that’s an argument. Here are Thomson and Kamler’s moves; please refer to the chapter “Learning to argue” (pp. 83–106) in Detox Your Writing for more information and samples of ineffective/effective abstracts.

LOCATE: this means placing your paper in the context of the discipline community and the field in general. Larger issues and debates are named and potentially problematized. In naming the location, you are creating a warrant for your contribution and its significance, as well as informing an international community of its relevance outside of its specific place of origin.

FOCUS: this means identifying the particular questions, issues or kinds of problems that your paper will explore, examine and/or investigate.

REPORT: this means outlining the research, sample and/or method of analysis in order to assure readers that your paper is credible and trustworthy, as well as the major findings that are pertinent to the argument to be made.

ARGUE: this means opening out the specific argument through offering an analysis. This will move beyond description and may well include a theorisation in order to explain findings. It may offer speculations, but will always have a point of view and take a stance. It returns to the opening Locate in order to demonstrate the specific contribution that was promised at the outset. (Thomson & Kamler, 2016, p. 92)

The authors encourage you to keep writing and rewriting your abstract throughout the broader writing process; each time, you will  refine it further. Try preparing a draft abstract of your article/thesis, regardless of the stage you are at. You’ll be surprised at how it focuses your writing and cements your motivation.  I’ve had more than one student tell me it worked to get them writing again after a dry spell.

Call for graduate student blog post writers!

A huge thank you to all of our student writers so far this year: Kaveh Tagharobi, Russell Campbell, Kate Ehle, Marta Bashovski, Cindy Quan, Jonathan Faerber, and Arash Isapour.  Your writing resonated with so many of your fellow graduate students. Thank you for taking the time to craft wonderful posts and share your experience.

We need more student writers for the 2017/2018 academic year, so please consider writing for us.  We need students from different disciplines and backgrounds and at various stages of study to volunteer to write for the blog. Your topic can be anything related to academic communication and graduate students; see the guidelines here. If you feel uncertain that your writing skills are sufficient to the task, please make an appointment with me cdrcac@uvic.ca  I’ll be happy to coach you on how to improve your draft until we are both happy with it.  As Peter Elbow says, “Everybody can write.”

Additionally, we need some specific topics covered this year, and perhaps one of these attracts you:

  • The “thesis by publication” or article-based dissertation. This model, popular in the sciences and social sciences, requires that you write three or more “publishable” articles (plus weave them into a whole with intro/conclusion). Although the book-length dissertation is still with us, the article-based version is definitely a trend in our university, and I’d love somebody to write about it. Are you a student who is following this model or considering it?
  • Writing in different disciplines. Perhaps you are writing an interdisciplinary thesis, dissertation, or article and you need to negotiate with supervisors from various faculties. How’s that going for you? We would love to hear from you if you’ve had this experience or you have written in different disciplines (say, you did your MA or MSc in one area and are doing your PhD in a different one).  What have you learned about disciplinary differences in writing?
  • Communicating with your supervisor.  Okay, this may seem elementary, but some of us have struggled for hours to craft communication with supervisors or other professors.  EAL students unfamiliar with the Canadian university context may find this especially difficult. Would you like to write about this challenge and some strategies that have worked for you?

Don’t want to write, but want to read about something in particular? Please email me to suggest a specific blog post topic: cdrcac@uvic.ca.

We are taking a break for August, and the next post will be published in mid-September. Happy summer everybody, and thank you for reading the blog.

 

 

 

Our blog

Academic Writing, Blogs and blogging, Centre for Academic Communication, Tutoring

We at the Centre for Academic Communication (CAC) are excited to launch this resource for graduate students.  Starting in 2017, we’ll be blogging bi-weekly with juicy material on writing your thesis or dissertation and  surrounding issues. We’ll be reaching out instructors, students, and staff to provide guest posts.  Is there an academic writing topic you want to share about? We’re interested in topics from technology to terror of public speaking. Do you have a story to tell about your own writing journey as you develop your thesis or dissertation?  Are you a faculty member with wisdom you’d like to impart?  Please email Madeline Walkercropped-cropped-cropped-2110144017-2.jpg at cdrcac@uvic.ca and sketch your idea or story in 250 words (final blog posts will be 300-800 words).

Check out the Thesis Writing Starter Kit and the Dissertation Writers’ Resource for lots of information (see menus at top of page).

The Centre for Academic Communication will re-open for regular tutoring appointments on January 9th, 2017. Our experienced tutors can help you with all aspects of academic communication, from pre-writing to presentations.