Tag: writing
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Zadie Smith’s 10 rules of writing.
Another post from Brain Pickings on Zadie Smith’s 10 rules of writing. Brain Pickings is a fantastic collection of Interesting Things, that I highly recommend. When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else. When an adult, try to read your own work as…
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Neil Gaiman’s 8 rules of writing
Another short list in a series on writing tips from people who are way more qualified than I am. Write Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read…
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10 tips on writing from David Ogilvy
More tips on writing, again from the excellent Brain Pickings blog. This time the original author is David Ogilvy. The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well. Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches. Good writing is not a natural gift.…
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Six tips on writing from John Steinbeck
I found these tips on writing from John Steinbeck at the excellent Brain Pickings blog. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised. Write freely and as rapidly…
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Henry Miller on Writing
Henry Miller’s eleven commandments for writing.
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Results of the first round of my Delphi study
I’m away on a 3 day writing retreat where I’m trying to put together a full draft of the Delphi study that I’m busy wrapping up. I thought I’d take a break from writing and do something different (from writing, I mean). I took the full text of the open-ended responses from the first round…
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Developing research and scholarship in our department
I often speak to colleagues who seem surprised when I describe our departmental structure to develop capacity among our staff members. I thought I’d make a few notes here as an example of what I see as a system that works quite well(for us anyway). My university has an Institutional Operational Plan (IOP), which includes…
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“Reading” less and thinking more
“It may seem counter-intuitive that at a time when we know more than we have ever known, we think about it less.” I spend an enormous amount of time reading, a lot of it online using RSS feeds. I used to think that I was pretty good at filtering the content to find what was…
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Great Prezi on writing for publication
I’ve been doing a lot of writing this year, trying to catch for lost time at the end of last year, with the result that I’ve been thinking about writing a lot. At times, it had become more like getting through a list of tasks than the expression of meaningful ideas, which is why I…
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Learning through rejection
About a month ago I submitted an article to an international journal that I thought might be appropriate. Unfortunately I didn’t pay enough attention to the scope of the journal, which ultimately is why the paper was rejected. Having your work rejected is always disappointing but not always a bad thing. The letter I received…
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Reflective writing
As part of their clinical placements, our students are required to complete some reflective components and submit them along with their clinical files at the end of the block. These reflections are usually in the form of SWOT analyses, SPAR stories, reflective journals or critical reflections of journal articles. The writing exercises are meant to…
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Writing for publication workshop
A few weeks ago my department began a “Writing for publication” workshop, in which each participant would both write and review an article for publication. In theory, this has two distinct advantages: 1) Everyone gets to submit a peer-reviewed article at the end of the workshop, and 2) Everyone gets to experience the process of…
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Lyx: separating content and style through document processing
It’s been a while since I posted anything here, mainly because I haven’t read anything interesting in that time, which is mainly because we’ve spent the past month or so gearing up for undergraduate exams. Now that exams are effectively over, we’re marking…sigh. Together with the exams, our department is on a writing workshop in…