Personal Consultations

My Approach

I developed the Writing Practice consultancy series out of a personal conviction that crafting scholarly prose need not be a laborious, intensive and time-consuming activity from the outset. As researchers such as Robert Boice have found, scholarly authors who face difficulties in writing may be imposing too many high-level demands on themselves, at too early a stage in the writing process.

My personal consultations are geared toward reducing the cognitive demands of writing in the early stages, while increasing the idea-rich content of the material. To accomplish this, I initially ask clients to make use of techniques that are decidedly low-tech: for example, writing by hand rather than the computer, writing on sticky notes, and piecing together what results in the form of a provisional puzzle or blueprint rather than a narrative draft. Each of these steps is preceded by discussion with clients about the content and sequencing of their ideas.

As work progresses, consultations focus on modeling how the same puzzle-crafting techniques used at the blueprint stage can be applied to the process of turning the ideas into scholarly prose at the computer. These steps make it possible to incorporate elements of developmental, structural, and stylistic editing into the writing process itself.

In my work with clients I draw on a combination of practical techniques for writing, insights gained from the scholarly literature on writing for publication, and from my own professional academic writing, editing, and language teaching experience. As clients make use of these resources over time, they are able to gradually change the way they work in ways that enhance writing productivity, add to the enjoyment of the process, and correspondingly reduce levels of mental and physical stress.