Personal Consultations

Why a Series?

What features distinguish high-quality scholarly writing? Broadly speaking, we can say that it is writing that communicates worthwhile and creative scholarly ideas, develops them to the fullest possible extent, and in the course of doing so makes meaningful contributions to ongoing scholarly discussions. Publishers and editors reiterate that while good research is essential to scholarship, it is the unfolding of the ideas gleaned from research—what you yourself make of it—that should be the lead point of any scholarly writing project. While as professionals we’ve all learned to get our writing done in some form or fashion, I believe there are ways to best ensure that our writing does justice to our ideas, and that the ideas we present are ones that we have engaged with fully and allowed to mature.

I’ve designed the Writing Practice consultation series on scholarly writing around the premise that developing ideas for writing draws on a repertoire of skills related to, but distinct from, those that underlie actual draft writing, and that there are ways to cultivate and manage idea development as a discrete phase of the writing process. The series will guide you in creating blueprints of thoughtfully crafted ideas for your project to serve as a basis for draft writing, and will see this process through to a completed draft manuscript ready for copyediting.

Initial consultations meet for approximately 1-2 hours weekly to provide an orientation to relevant idea-crafting skills. Later sessions will draw on the idea framework you develop to help you give form and shape to your writing as you produce it. Consultations will continue for as long as you or your project requires.

The benefits of approaching scholarly writing in this way are wide-ranging. For any major undertaking, working from an idea blueprint greatly eases the transition to formal writing or comprehensive revision, and makes it far more productive. It also leads to better quality drafts and reduces writing-related procrastination and stress. Having a clear picture of the idea framework of your project opens up new ways to conceive of its overall structure and visualize the interrelation of parts, a perspective that allows you to choose from alternative ways of organizing your material and make decisions about form, content, and publication potential accordingly. In short, it results in articles and manuscripts that display an editorial sensibility, a feature much valued by gatekeepers of high-quality publishing.