An interesting reflection by Rob Kitchen on the relationship between academic and fiction writing and storytelling on the Transforming Society blog. He says: The usual approach to writing an academic article or book is to produce a factual, discursive narrative that weaves together theories, observations and findings, contextualising the contentions made with respect to the …
I have just come across this fascinating journal which published its first issue in 2015. Shades of Jorge Luis Borges… You can read some interesting findings on the effects of lockdown in the May 2020 issue Journal of Imaginary Research A key aim of our journal/zine is to encourage academic colleagues to embrace writing simply …
Smith, Zadie. “Fascinated to presume: In defense of fiction.” The New York Review of Books 24 (2019). A really wonderful philosophical reflection by Zadie Smith on the reasons for writing and reading fiction and for an engagement with and inclusion of the diversity of human experience. A few extracts that I found particularly helpful. I …
While looking for resources for the creative writing course I am running this semester, I came across some fantastic sets of rules put together by a number of well-known authors at The Guardian‘s request. The lists are introduced as follows: “Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos …
This post was originally intended as a bare-bones response to Bruno Latour’s challenge to list hopes for change emerging out of the coronavirus crisis, but ended up being prefaced by a preamble on my difficulties with writing and a reflection on my current context. For quite some time, I have suffered (and I use the …
A useful article in The Guardian on the long standing prejudices against fan fiction and its emergence from the dungeons of dubious subculture particularly since the advent of the internet. From Star Trek to Fifty Shades: how fanfiction went mainstream Mikaella Clements Wed 8 Aug 2018 The divide between a fanfiction writer and an original …
These remarks are prompted by a recent short interview in The Guardian with Sam Taylor, a novelist and translator of 30 books from French into English. He comments ‘Ultimately, it’s a question of taste. My personal ideal for a translation is one that makes the reader forget they are reading a translation at all, but …
Jo VanEvery, The Scholarly Writing Process (A Short Guide) Published November 1, 2016 Ebook: ISBN 978-1-912040-72-8 Paperback (178 x 111 mm): ISBN 978-1-912040-00-1 Getting stuck is a normal part of the writing process, even for experienced writers. My aim in publishing this Short Guide is to help you generate new writing projects, keep your writing …
Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
LSE Impact Blog – “Six academic writing habits that will boost productivity” I’m not sure by the notion of ‘productivity’, but there is some good advice here. Here are the headlines: They “time-block” their writing in advance They set themselves artificial deadlines They deliberately seek “flow” (but don’t push themselves…
Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
Why do so many academics publish in unreadable outlets? I don’t mean the prose style is unreadable (though it might be), but I’m thinking of the outlets they chose to publish in. Obviously, I recognise that the ‘gold standard’ for many academics is the refereed journal article, and the majority of…
