Good morning! Students (mine and others) as well as faculty members have asked me if I do have a particular sequence of blog posts about reading strategies, academic writing, literature reviews that I would recommend. I have to get my #2ThingsADay done, so here's a MICRO-THREAD.
When my own students have to undertake a literature review, I ask of them to systematize their reading in an Excel table, the Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED) raulpacheco.org/2016/06/synthe… combining #AICCSED allows you to stay on top of the literature raulpacheco.org/2017/12/carvin…
A lot of scholars (myself included) often struggle to do #AICCSED (one article read, one row entry of CSED typed), hence why I suggested that when under pressure, they do #2ThingsADayraulpacheco.org/2018/04/the-ac… (like today for me, when I have TOO MANY THINGS TO DO).
Mapping a new field of scholarship, writing literature reviews, creating annotated bibliographies and producing banks of rhetorical precis and synthetic notes are all activities that I do based on having a robust CSED. My posts on Literature Reviews: raulpacheco.org/resources/lite…
I spend a lot of the time with my research assistants and students (undergraduate and graduate) creating a SHARED LANGUAGE. They know what I mean by "I need an Excel Dump on water insecurity that covers the years 2010-2018" or "I need to see your synthetic notes for waste theory"
I think reading my "From Beginning to End" blog posts requires already having a shared language, so I would encourage you (if you are faculty) to teach with the basics first (reading strategies, systematizing texts, writing memoranda and synthetic notes) THEN do the FB2E posts.
And since I have A TON of stuff to do today and I haven't even touched my #2ThingsADay, this is the end of this micro-thread, which at some point I will transform into a full-blown blog post. </micro-thread>
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I’m going to share a little story about why I never delete words and instead cut them from a paper and put them in a memorandum elsewhere. My PhD advisor wanted a lean dissertation. He made me cut TWO CHAPTERS out of the freaking book (I was not happy AT ALL). Then...
At my PhD defense, external examiners started asking questions I (a) knew the answer to because (b) they were answered in those two chapters. The final version had to include both. I was like.
To note: I’m not bitter with my former PhD advisor. He suggested doing what he thought best. He had no way to anticipate external examiners questions (I did because well, once you finish a dissertation you ARE the expert in this field/topic, and I was). That’s also a signal.
I want to share a micro-thread reflecting on burnout in academia. Earlier this month, I recognised I was burnt out. Clear signs were the following: on a Sunday at 5pm, I started getting palpitations and dreaded driving back to Aguascalientes (where I live and teach).
For almost a week, I felt absolute dread about reading an academic article. This is coming from someone who reads academic books FOR FUN. I was cranky, exhausted, sleeping poorly and still ploughing through. I was also ill for most of July (and despite illness, kept working)
I preach (and for the most part, practice) self-care. I write, and advocate against overwork in academia. And yet, I, too, have fallen prey to the pressure of trying to keep up. This is a feature of the system, not a bug. I know many people who fall sick during their tenure year.
#PhDChat PhD students: you're in luck, because for the next couple of weeks, my Reading Notes and book live-tweets will be on books on how to write a doctoral dissertation. I am doing this because I have PhD students at all 3 stages of the process.
I feel like at some point I read Kate Turabian's book, but I may or may not have done it amazon.com/Manual-Writers… (I do know I have several books on how to survive a doctoral dissertation back home in Vancouver in one of my many boxes, but I don't have them here in Mexico).
Micro-thread on building community across #AcademicTwitter - fellow scholars often ask me "how do I build a community, how do I get myself noticed, and how do I establish myself online?" One strategy I've used that is pretty robust, in my not-so-humble-opinion is PROMOTING OTHERS
You can take time every day (10-15 minutes) to find blog posts, articles, stuff that others have written that you can then pre-schedule on Buffer or Hootsuite. This way, you're not stuck at the computer all day (see: raulpacheco.org/2015/11/6-twit…)
For me (I've been on Twitter for 11 years) it's a relatively easy process by now. I search for Core Tweeters and Core Bloggers (people whom I know work in certain fields and who produce content on a regular basis) and find stuff that they may have written of broader interest.