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.

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)

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. For me, reading IS a fundamental component of writing raulpacheco.org/2018/01/legiti… this means that I have a dedicated section on Reading Strategies in my Resources page raulpacheco.org/resources/read… the Abstract-Introduction-Conclusion (AIC) method can be found here raulpacheco.org/2017/01/findin…

#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'll be discussing Sternberg amazon.com/gp/product/031… and Bolker amazon.com/gp/product/080… as well as @PJDunleavy 's Authoring a PhD (which I actually already have read, and do recommend, but have never live-tweeted) amazon.com/Authoring-PhD-…

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…)

Thread on Rabiner and Fortunato's Thinking Like Your Editor. As someone who is writing books (don't ask how many) ... I *know* that one of the key questions editors and publishing houses ask is "is this book financially viable?" - can the book sell?

People, let me give you a few pointers about how to give a killer talk at a conference with 10-12 minutes as your allocation. You can sue me for giving counterintuitive advice but I don't care at all, because as always, YMMV. 1) state what you learned/found UPFRONT

Micro-thread on giving feedback (advisors/professors) & processing information (students). The most unhelpful phrase I know is "think hard" "You need to think hard about how X phenomenon occurs"

People have asked me how write how I outline a paper. I use a couple of methods. First one is asking questions. Note how the questions I ask may end up becoming sections of my chapter. Also, as I assemble my paper, I write memorandums for each one of these questions. raulpacheco.org/2016/04/8-tips… this process makes it easier for me to build the entire paper.

Lifting other scholars up is such a powerful action in the quest to push against the type of academia we dislike. Promote *other* scholars. Consistently, @maya_sen has been promoting up-and-coming early career political scientists (alongside @JohnHolbein1 and others too ❤️)