Book Review: How to Write a Scientific Paper: An Academic Self-Help Guide for PhD Students by Jari Saramäki

by Jasmine Stovall, Consultant

This book is a self-help guide written for the PhD student who is ready to begin writing a scientific journal article, but maybe doesn’t have a plan, doesn’t know how to begin putting words on paper, is having trouble developing a story to communicate their findings clearly and effectively, or all the above. Although only about 100 pages in length, this short read is jam-packed full of valuable, easily digestible information that you will find yourself referring to each time you begin a new writing project in STEM fields.

If you are like me (and every other busy PhD student) and don’t have the time to devote to a 100-page read at this very moment, keep reading for the TL;DR version of the book. While I do still recommend reading the book in its entirety, I’m going to give you the highlights.

The book is organized into sections outlining the writing process with a top-down approach from determining the story you intend to tell to dealing with reviewer comments and everything in between. This makes it easily navigable for a reader who may prefer to skip around. Saramäki helps with abstract and title writing, emphasizes the importance of outlining, offers a detailed how-to for writing each section of the IMRAD framework, gives tips for writing and editing your first draft, and even offers information on how to write a cover letter.

The following is summary of the sections of the book:

  1. What is your story?
    • Identify the key point and main take home message of your results. You should be able to convey this in two sentences maximum.
    • Choose your supporting information keeping in mind that your choices should support the key point and/or emphasize the significance of your main result. Anything that doesn’t satisfy one or both of those criteria should be excluded.Write your abstract using the hourglass method.
    • Write the title of the manuscript ensuring the selected title corresponds with the information presented in the abstract. 
  2. Outline, outline, outline!
    • Visualize the outline of your paper. This includes determining the order in which to present your results, selecting your figures and drafting their associated captions, and writing the main points of each section of the IMRAD framework.
    • Once visualized, materialize your outline by drafting the paragraphs of your paper. Use your outline as a guide to turn sentences (or bullet points that describe the main idea of each paragraph and the supporting content) into full paragraphs ensuring that each paragraph discusses one main point at a time.
  3. Write, revise…then revise again.
    • Fill in the gaps of your paragraphs from the previous steps to make for a complete first rough draft. Be mindful of your paragraph structure, making sure that the first sentence introduces the topic of the paragraph and that each sentence of the paragraph and each paragraph of the paper builds upon the next.
    • Revise your rough draft from a content and structure perspective. Don’t get too into the nitty gritty mechanics quite yet. Make sure the focus is clear and consistent throughout and that the story you tell through your results and discussion answers the question you pose in the introduction.Perform sentence level revisions on the rough draft. Pay close attention to word choice, ensuring that your sentences are logical, meaningful, and necessary to move the reader through your argument or story. Employ science writing best practices such as putting the subject and verb close together, writing in active voice, avoiding run-on sentences, keeping your language simple, and avoiding turning verbs into nouns.
    • Revise, rinse, repeat. Keep clarity, readability, and the overall quality of your story at the forefront of your mind. Pass your manuscript along to a second, third, even a fourth set of eyes for edits and comments. This could be your co-authors, PI, lab mates, or the GWC *hint hint* 🙂 Receiving feedback from people both inside and outside of your field of expertise allows you to assess whether enough background and context exists for any reader to not only understand but also appreciate your story.
  4. The moment of truth: Journal submission and reviewer comments
    • First, congratulate yourself for making it to this point. You’ve come a long way!
    • Write your cover letter.Submit your paper and wait for a decision. Exhale.
    • When you receive your feedback, remember to breathe. If it helps to open it up with someone by your side, do that. If you feel emotional, walk away from it until you feel you can approach it with a fresh, calm mind. Work with your advisor and co-authors to determine what the editor wants and what edits need to be made to satisfy your reviewers. Then, you guessed it, revise. Write your rebuttal letter with confidence. Then, resubmit.

Overall, I found this book to be extremely helpful and well worth the read as a GWC consultant but even more so as it pertains to my own writing as a PhD student in STEM. This book especially resonated with me because writing is a necessary skill for all academic disciplines, STEM included. Yet somehow, within the STEM community, there is this unspoken truth that writing is rarely ever explicitly taught to graduate students. Rather, it is perceived by students as something we are supposed to enter grad school already knowing or just pick up along the way. As a result, we may feel inadequate as both a scientist and a writer if we fail to do so. Saramäki’s book addresses this problem head on. The system that he lays out is effective in that it, “forces you to focus on the right things at the right time, one thing at a time,” ultimately alleviating the feeling of overwhelm and the fear of the blank page. I find from personal experience and working with clients that this is often the most difficult part. If you’re interested in the full text, it is available for purchase on Amazon at a grad-student-budget-friendly price. I hope you have found the information here useful, and that after reading you feel more motivated and confident as a writer to tell your story; good science stories deserve to be heard!

Citation: Saramäki, Jari. (2018). How to write a scientific paper: An academic self-help guide for PhD students.

Start STRONG: How to Create a Semester Writing Plan

by Kristin Huggins, Consultant

Photo by Dom Fou on Unsplash

The start of the spring semester is one part magic and two parts chaos. Christmas flew by in a peppermint-coated blur, and you suddenly find yourself standing on campus surrounded by the living organism of academia – crowds of students, staff, and faculty swarming about as if Christmas break had never happened. Your nerves are on edge with a new schedule of classes, filled with new colleagues, and the distinct feeling that you are forgetting something as you navigate your new Spring 2023 routine.

Such feelings are not restricted to the student experience. Even as a professor, I still get the tell-tale nightmare the night before the first day of class. Most recently, I dreamt that I mixed up the room numbers of my first class, teaching Italian Diction to a group of terrified History 101 undergrads who were too sweet to correct me for the first 15 minutes. Waking up with sweaty, shaking hands, I launched out of bed at 3am to log in and check my room assignment, still muttering the lyrics to “Si, mi chiamano Mimì” under my breath.

But amidst nightmares, nerves, and chaos is the true magic of the new semester: a fresh start. Today, you can set yourself up for the best chance at writing success. Take stock of the impending deadlines set before you: how many term papers, literature reviews, research proposals, book chapter proposals, articles, or pages of your thesis/dissertation are required to claw your way out of Spring 2023 alive and whole? While you may not be able to complete these projects up front without copious amounts of reading and in-class preparation, you are uniquely positioned to create a Semester Plan that will guide you through the minefield of writing projects.

To create a productive Semester Writing Plan, follow these four steps:

  1. Map out all semester writing deadlines to determine which you can start early
  2. Plan out your weekly writing blocks
  3. Use early readings as a launchpad for establishing a writing reflection routine
  4. Find a Peer Writing Group to establish consistent writing habits with peer accountability

Map Semester Deadlines & Start Early

Your syllabus and course schedules are your lifeline. Grab onto them with both hands and stay afloat! By now, you should have one or both of these documents from your professors. Set time aside this week to look at them collectively and map out how your deadlines fall throughout the spring calendar.

Take note of weeks where you have multiple deadlines stacked on top of one another. Determine whether you can start early on some of these assignments to save you the headache and long nights later. In some classes (especially Humanities and Social Sciences), you may be able to go ahead and start taking notes on the prompts given for term papers or discussion assignments.

Plan Weekly Writing Blocks

Balancing coursework with personal and professional obligations is a constant struggle, no matter your field or discipline. Like many graduate students, I imagine you are working off of a full plate. Take time this week to look at your weekly responsibilities and determine when you have free blocks of time that could be devoted to writing.

For example, my Tuesdays and Thursdays are filled with studio voice lessons for music majors and musical theatre students. On these days, I have an hour before lessons and an hour mid-day free, but those are my only available blocks. Based on prior teaching experience and knowing my body, my productivity would be best served by using those hours for studio prep and grabbing lunch! Teaching voice is a very physical activity, and if I chose to forgo my lunch in favor of writing, I’d be doing my voice students a disservice and putting my body in harm’s way. Instead, I can reserve writing hours on my non-teaching days, allowing me the office time to sit with my work and chase rabbit trails when needed.

Launch Writing Reflection Routine with Early Readings

Writing and reading make up a two-sided coin in academia. If your class requires copious amounts of writing, chances are you will also be given a heavy reading list. Resist the temptation early in the semester to fly through your reading requirements that don’t have a corresponding writing component. The reading completed early in the semester will likely culminate into the backbone of that term paper or literature review you’ll have to write in a few months. Grab yourself a writing journal and take notes as you read. Jot down your reactions to arguments and copy any quotes that stand out. If a piece reminds you of another author’s work, make a note of that and try to explain how the two are connected. Don’t wait until the week before your paper to do this work!

Find a Peer Writing Group

Before I get things thrown at me by the introverts in the crowd, let me assure you that I am NOT one for group activities. I hate breakout rooms in Zoom. I hate group projects in class. Quite frankly, I would rather eat my own hair. However, despite these professions of introversion, I am a huge advocate for finding a group of peers with whom you can work, write, and share.

Peer writing groups don’t have to be formalized through your program or the GWC. They can be friends you’ve made as a graduate student, preferably those who also share the heavy burden of academic writing deadlines. Regardless of how the group is formed, I have one piece of advice to make this worth your time: consistency. Whether meeting at the library or a local coffee shop (Fabled and Dichotomy are my favorites in Waco), or connecting for an hour via Zoom for quiet writing time, make it happen consistently so that you form the habit and keep one another accountable.

Finally, as you craft your ideal Semester Writing Plan, don’t forget to utilize the resources and support services the Graduate Writing Center provides! Several workshops will be available throughout the semester, highlighting topics of interest explicitly targeting the Graduate Writer. If you are looking for one-on-one assistance with your writing needs, submit a GWC Request to schedule an appointment with one of our writing consultants! Our consultants are here to help you become a productive, articulate academic writer–no matter the discipline or academic style guide!

Welcome back, dear readers, and have a lovely spring semester!

Book Review: Stylish Academic Writing by Helen Sword

by Kristin Huggins, Consultant

“Academic writing, like university teaching, is what sociologist Paul Trowler calls a ‘recurrent practice,’ one of the many routine tasks that most academics perform ‘habitually and in an unconsidered way,” with little thought as to how or why things might be done differently.” – Helen Sword (2012, p. 23)

This book is a culmination of several years of research on the conventions of academic writing, how academics feel about the writing process, and how students and early-career academics believe that academic writing must fit in a particular box to achieve any measure of professional success. Helen Sword is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Arts and Social Transformation at the University of Auckland. She earned her Ph.D. from Princeton University in Comparative Literature and has taught in higher education for several decades. By all accounts, her prestigious credentials certainly lend themselves to a traditional academic, yet her life’s work has been in the pursuit of breaking down barriers for writers who seek to infuse their academic work with elements of humanism outside of the conventional norms.

Upon first read-through, Helen Sword’s Stylish Academic Writing feels like a response to Strunk and White’s highly acclaimed Elements of Style, a quintessential text on traditional academic prose in the English language. Several chapters address topics similar to Strunk and White, such as structure and syntax, that are presented in new and innovative ways, pulled from Sword’s research on interdisciplinary writing components. Ever the professor, Sword’s chapters always conclude with “Things to Try,” offering the reader helpful ways to incorporate the chapter’s suggestions into their own practice. Examples include the following:

In the chapter Structural Designs: “Make an outline of your article or book based only on its chapter titles or section headings. How well does that outline, on its own, communicate what your work is about? Are you using section headings to inform, engage, or direct your readers, or merely to carve up space?” (p. 133)

In the chapter Jargonitis: “Ask yourself hard questions about your motivations. Do you employ jargon to impress others, play with language and ideas, create new knowledge, signal your membership in a disciplinary community, or communicate succinctly with colleagues? Retain only those jargon words that clearly serve your priorities and values.” (p. 121)

I found several suggestions particularly helpful as a Writing Consultant who works with clients in multiple disciplinary fields each week. I often feel like I’m a polyglot of academia – speaking several languages and trying my best to translate them into the same dialect of academic writing. During my first read-through, I found myself highlighting prompts and leading questions to retain for consultation use with clients. Some items also convicted me to discover blind spots in my own research.

Sword also strikes out against the “conventional” use of the word “style,” commonly understood in academia as the style guides assigned to respective disciplines. Instead, Sword argues that academics must strive to become “stylish academic writers” (p. 9), a persona embodied by the idea of actively pursuing engagement with an audience, clear communication of ideas with concise examples, and observation of interdisciplinary writing methods that might lend a humanistic quality to our work.

Three primary characteristics of a Stylish Academic Writer emerge from Sword’s work: Connection, Craft, and Creativity.

Connection – What I love most about this book was Sword’s persistence in reestablishing our purpose for producing academic work: to tell a story. Your research, dear reader, began as a response to a problem, a gap, a question about the world around us. Research seeks to connect, to create meaning out of the unknown. These are valuable stories, and Sword argues that no matter the discipline or style guide we must keep those stories and their meanings at the forefront of our writing process.

Craft – Sword encourages readers to find pleasure in the craft of writing.  The word “craft” encompasses the broader concept of writing (i.e., drafting, editing, revising, finalizing), and the smaller concepts (i.e., sentence-level constructions). She provides the following example below for the smaller concept of craft:

“A carefully crafted sentence welcomes its reader like a comfortable rocking chair, bears its reader across chasms like a suspension bridge… A poorly crafted or uncrafted sentence, on the other hand, functions more like a shapeless log tossed into a river: it might or might not help you get to the other side, depending on how strong the current is and how hard you are willing to kick.” (p. 48)

Creativity – “Numerous studies have documented the crucial role of lateral thinking in the creative process: that is, the ability of pathbreaking researchers to’ think sideways’ rather than always plodding forward in a straight conceptual trajectory.” (p. 169)

Sword takes the idea of creativity in academic writing and dissects it into three components: passion, elegance, and interdisciplinary exploration. She cautions readers not to mistake creativity as a call for writers to adopt creative writing practices. Instead, writers should be willing to explore writing strategies found in outside disciplines, especially those that promote clarity, conciseness, concrete communication, and eloquence.

Citation: Sword, Helen. Stylish Academic Writing. Harvard University Press, 2012.

Reverse Outlining and Thematic Analysis

by Kristin Huggins, Consultant

Photo by Kaleidico on Unsplash

Imagine, if you will, that you’ve just finished drafting your paper. You sit back with smug satisfaction, eyes flitting down to the lower left-hand corner of your Word document to repeatedly read the page and word counts, further reminders of the quasi-masterpiece that fell from your fingertips. It feels as if a monumental task akin to the likes of summiting Everest has just occurred, and you are tempted to sit and marinate in its glow now that it has been accomplished. A voice whispers to you: “It’s done. It is finished.” (Ten points to the reader who recognizes both of these quotes)

For some writers, revisions are the bane of their existence; for others, it is the Valhalla of their writing process. No matter how you feel about it, revision work demands patience, dedication, persistence, and grit. It can be painful, and rightfully so, as the word revision itself denotes the act of alteration, change, or correction. You are essentially asked to take the thing which you brought into the world – often through tears and copious amounts of caffeine – and irrevocably alter it, sometimes beyond all recognition. This is understandably difficult for creators of any kind.

For these reasons alone, many writers (even the well-seasoned, battle-hardy ones) shy away from the act of revisionary work. Even if the word “revision” does not send a chill down the spine, writers may find it challenging to transition from drafting to revision, as these two actions require very different sets of writing muscles. Therefore, instead of allowing your work to gather figurative dust on your computer desktop, warm up those muscles by asking yourself the following questions:

  1. What am I trying to communicate? What was my original purpose/thesis/argument? Has this changed? Does my draft properly convey this purpose (new or otherwise)?
  2. Does each subsection of my work follow a logical progression of flow throughout? Are there any areas that could be moved elsewhere that make more sense?
  3. Can I confidently recite the main themes of each section? Do these themes make sense together?

This is where thematic progression comes into play. Thematic progression is a writing strategy where a developed theme is repeated, repurposed, and built upon throughout the document. This strategy is used to enhance the message the writer seeks to communicate through that theme (or themes) to their primary stakeholders (i.e., the targeted audience). A theme is versatile in that it can be as simple as a topic sentence, or as complex as a thesis statement. There are also a variety of ways to organize themes as a writer: linear, categorical, ordinal, etc. I like to imagine themes as colors on a palette; when placed together, some fit quite nicely while others are an afront to the eyes!

Several scholars have spoken about the power of themes, rhemes, and thematic progression in how students approach higher-level writing and how a better understanding of these concepts leads to higher-order communication through the written word (Danes, 1974; Halliday, 1985; Hawes, 2015; Lee, 2009; Thomas, 1991; Wang, 2007). However, the purpose of this blog is not to review the literature but rather to provide you – dear reader – with practical, real-world strategies for applying thematic progression analysis to your toolbox of tricks for revision.

When applied through the lens of a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation, writers can utilize thematic progression to identify macro-level ideas, concepts, and flow from a full text perspective. This reduces the risk of the writer getting “bogged down” in the weeds of the writing (a common experience for those completing larger works); instead the writer is placed in the stratosphere of their work with a bird’s eye view to consider whether they’ve achieved overall tonal congruency (i.e., complete alignment of their message/argument/goal).

This is especially vital when shifting from drafting to revision. At this moment, the bulk of your content is present (save for secondary rewrites/additions/removals). You have a decent preliminary idea of where your work is going, and how it will land. Now is the perfect time to go back, section by section, to determine whether each paragraph, subsection, section, and chapter supports one another and provides congruency throughout the flow of your writing. At the GWC, we refer to these as structural edits – writing concerns made with a broad stroke brush. Before you dive into copyedits, line edits, and proofreading (all arguably less stressful to tackle, yet less effective if the big-picture issues remain untouched), you must first address the structure, flow, and congruency of your work. 

Let’s put this into practice with an example exercise.

Reverse Outlining:

  1. Select a section (or subsection, if from a larger work) of your writing to review. Any section will do. If you’re faint of heart, start with your strongest one. For the adrenaline junkies out there, you know what to do.
  2. Methodically read through each paragraph and make notes elsewhere (I prefer journaling, but Notes/Word documents are also helpful tools) on the main theme/themes presented.
  3. Complete for the entire section. Make sure to list subheadings and headings where appropriate. You should now have a completed backward outline for review.

Action Steps:

  1. First: consider the flow of the themes. Does this order make sense? 
  2. Second: consider the marriage of themes and headings. Do any headings need to be revised to reflect the content within them properly?
  3. Third: consider whether more than one theme was identified in a single paragraph. Is this appropriate (i.e., a secondary theme), or does this require the creation of a new paragraph?
  4. Fourth: consider your topic sentences at the beginning of each paragraph. Do the topic sentences and themes match one another?

These actions are great launchpads for the beginnings of revision! They also work beautifully when completed in order. By following this blueprint, you begin with macro-level structural concerns and drill down though smaller areas of structural issues such as topic sentences and inner-paragraph civil wars (i.e., more than one topic presented). 

Take heart, dear reader. Revision is not a linear process. However, with the use of thematic progression analysis through exercises like Reverse Outlining, you will be well on your way to diving head-first into the deep end of successful revisionist writing practices. 

Teach a Person to Fish: Proofreading Strategies for Lifelong Writing

by Kristin Huggins, Consultant

In music, there is no such thing as an insignificant note. A musician must carefully examine each musical notation and interpret it through the lens of style, story, and audience. Similarly, writing demands that we, the writer, drill down through every clause, every synonym, every semi-colon to determine how our writing will be interpreted by our readership. However, when working through larger projects (i.e., a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation) these tiny details become blurred in the face of larger, macro-level writing issues. Where does this leave the proofreading process? Cue the green and gold smoke signal for help!

The seven tips below are a culmination of both personal habits and strategies shared by colleagues and professors over the years. While collectively these tips are not foolproof, they serve as a great way to start the proofreading process!

  1. Download Grammarly to Microsoft Word. I cannot stress enough the value of this program. Grammarly is AMAZING. Fun Fact: Word’s spell-check runs an entirely different algorithm than Grammarly when reviewing papers. This means that with the power of both, you’re more likely to catch those pesky issues hiding in the crevices of your paper. Grammarly offers both a free version and a paid premium version. I use the free version, mainly because the thought of paying for yet another subscription makes my stomach turn. But many colleagues swear by the premium. Try both for yourself!
  2. Read your work out loud. Yes, academic writing is not the same as colloquial speech. I’m well aware. However, when speaking through your paper, you’ll find moments where you pause subconsciously to consider a phrase or punctuation that doesn’t feel “quite right”. Follow that gut reaction. Question it. Determine whether it has merit and write from there. This trick is also helpful in addressing larger concerns such as flow or topic congruency.
  3. Become best friends with your Search Bar. If you open your Sidebar in Word, you will be able to Search specific phrases, letters, punctuation, or even extra spaces in your paper to see where and how often they occur. This tool has been my saving grace in finding places where I accidentally inserted two spaces after a period rather than one. I also use this feature to discover my “Word of the Week” (i.e., the adverb or adjective my brain has decided to play on loop during my drafting sessions). Searching for these repetitive words allows me the opportunity to consider whether they are truly appropriate and whether a synonym would be of better use.
  4. Do not attempt to tackle your entire work at once – especially if it is multiple chapters. This piece of advice is also applicable for writing consultations. You’re much more likely to be effective in your writing goal if you break it down into digestible chunks. The prospect of proofreading a 200-page dissertation within one sitting is inconceivable. I like to approach difficult chapters during my most productive hours of the day when I know my brain will be firing on (nearly) all cylinders.
  5. Proofread content and style separately. Many find it effective to proofread papers for academic style errors (i.e., APA, MLA, Turabian, etc.) without addressing in-text content. Some have this gift. I wish I was so blessed. Alas, I cannot rub my belly and pat my head at the same time, therefore I will assume that proofreading multiple levels of style, content, and grammar will only result in tears.
  6. Try tactile proofreading. Staring at screens for hours on end has an odd effect on how the brain processes language, at least in my personal experience. Some of my best revision work has come from printing a chapter and setting to it with a traditional red pen (or green, if you prefer soothing, positive colors). Feeling the crispness of individual pages while setting your thoughts to paper with actual ink is a very different experience than scrolling through Word document pages and adding strikethroughs. Try it once and see what happens.
  7. Use a Proofreading Checklist to help guide you. Even the seasoned scholar falls into the trap of trying to tackle all proofreading tasks at once. Experience may make the writer, but the writing process remains a fluid embodiment of evolving critical thought and creative output. This means that proofreading can never be worked into muscle memory, but must constantly be attacked at all angles methodically and carefully. The use of a checklist can be liberating, providing the writer with a strategic plan of attack. A sample proofreading checklist can be found here, provided by Southeastern University’s Writing Center.

We hope that you continue to hone your skills as a writer, editor, and proofreader! If you’re new to the proofreading game, these seven tips should jumpstart your proofreading process. If you’re a veteran proofreader and you have additional tips or tricks to the proofreading process, please share below!

Happy writing, dear readers.

Graduate Pathways for Success: How to Create a Poster Presentation

With both the October GPS workshop on “Conferencing Well” (October 18th, register here) and the Fall 2022 Graduate Research Showcase on the horizon (October 20th, submit your proposal here), it’s important to set yourself up for success when publicly sharing your research. One of the best ways to share your research is by submitting a poster. Whether this is for a conference or for the upcoming Graduate Research Showcase, these tips from Alicia Briançon, one of our consultants here at the Graduate Writing Center, will ensure you set yourself up for success. At the bottom of this post, you’ll find a quick guide to using the Baylor Print Center for printing your poster.

Picture this: You are preparing for your first conference as a doctoral student. Maybe, you have a conference paper under your belt and are excited to present your findings for the first time. It is a privilege to have the opportunity to present, but the butterflies kick in, and you are not sure what poster is best. Is this like the 3rd-grade science fair, where you present with a three-fold cardboard cut-out? Should you splurge on a fabric poster? Does it even matter?  

Another question you are likely asking yourself is where each section should be placed and how much text you should include.  

First, to address the presentation itself, we know that how you display information matters and maybe even more than what you are presenting. Believe it or not, there is poster presentation pedagogy (of course there is!), and here are the key tips for planning and formatting conference presentations.  

Checklist for medical presentations (Foster et al., 2019) 

  1. Conference requirements (size, layout, poster ID, number of slides)
  2. Authors
  3. Presentation requirements
  4. Contributor list
  5. Funding disclosure
  6. Conflicts of interest
  7. Supplementary information (QR codes)

Checklist for general research posters (Hardicre et al., 2007)  

  1. Title 
  2. Abstract 
  3. Introduction 
  4. Methods 
  5. Results 
  6. Discussion 
  7. Acknowledgments 

Key takeaways: Presenters report that limiting the information to include is the most difficult aspect of poster making. To avoid this challenge, use bullet points, graphs, and charts to demonstrate your points (Moore, 2001). The most commonly used font is Arial, and your poster should be easily readable at 1.5 meters away (Hardicre et al., 2007).    

A great article to help you understand what each section entails is Ten Steps to a Successful Poster Presentation (Hardicre et al., 2007). According to their research, the introduction should define your topic and have key literature to add to your rationale. The title should be easy to understand, and it is not the time to get wildly creative. Include all researchers’ names, and if it is appropriate, logos should also be included. The methods section explains what you did and how you did it; diagrams are helpful. The discussion section is where you communicate to your audience what your results or findings actually mean. Ask yourself what the greater implications or impact are related to what you found in your study. 

We are all encouraged to attend conferences. Having a polished and engaging poster is a winning strategy, but by incorporating the researched methods above, you could have the best poster of all. Remember, the point is not to include everything for your study on the poster. Focus on the key points so that the audience communicates with you to learn more about your work. Remember that poster presenting can feel awkward, and that is completely normal, so relax, be confident, and have fun. Happy Poster Making!  

Resources: 

Foster, C., Wager, E., Marchington, J., Patel, M., Banner, S., Kennard, N. C., … & Stacey, R. (2019). Good practice for conference abstracts and presentations: GPCAP. Research Integrity and Peer Review, 4(1), 1-11. 

Hardicre, J., Devitt, P., & Coad, J. (2007). Ten steps to successful poster presentation. British journal of nursing, 16(7), 398-401. 

Moore, L. W., Augspurger, P., King, M. O. B., & Proffitt, C. (2001). Insights on the poster preparation and presentation process. Applied Nursing Research, 14(2), 100-104. 

Alicia Briançon is an Ed.D candidate at Baylor in the Education department. Her research focuses on informal faculty-student contact and its impact on course retention. She teaches public speaking at the College of Southern Nevada (CSN) and is a digital media consultant with a political Super PAC striving to protect our democracy. For two years at CSN, she worked with the Prison Education Program as well. She received a master’s degree in Strategic Communication from American University in Washington, DC, and a BA from the University of Maryland in College Park. She is active with the AEJMC as a Lillian Lodge Kopenhaver Center for the Advancement of Women in Communication fellow and is a member of Kappa Delta Phi. In Las Vegas, she teaches a dance fitness class on the weekends at EOS and loves to go hiking with her partner.

When the Writing Gets Tough: Utilizing Baylor’s Graduate Writing Center Resources

by Dr. Becca Cassady, Graduate Writing Center Director

Ask almost any graduate student—almost anyone in higher ed, really—and we’ve been there: So deep in a dissertation chapter that we can’t write our way out.  Stumped by cryptic “revise and resubmit” feedback. Unable to please a grant committee comprised of academics outside of our discipline.  Intimidated by a blank Word document at the beginning of a project. Even when we’re pretty pleased with a document, sometimes we still hesitate to hit “send.”

Writing can be hard. Especially if you feel like you’re in it alone.

Enter the Graduate Writing Center (GWC). The GWC is a Graduate School service designed to aid students with their various writing projects—from class assignments to dissertation chapters to job application materials.   We help brainstorm, reorganize complex arguments, reword ambiguous or unclear sentences, and more. All of our consultants are advanced stage doctoral students with extensive writing training and experience.  We offer writing groups that you can opt into each semester, occasional workshops, and one-on-one consultations.

I’ve had students ask me, “Isn’t this mainly for people in humanities?”Absolutely not!  Our consultants are from humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields; our coordinator, Anna Beaudry, does her best to pair students with a consultant within their discipline or a closely related one.

When they’re not experts in your subject matter, consultants act as “expert outsiders”: experts in writingwho can offer a fresh perspective, ensuring that you’re communicating clearly to an outside audience.* They are trained in what questions to ask and what concerns to look for.

“That’s great and all, but what if I’m a remote or online student?” Technology is a beautiful thing!  We offer remote consultations through platforms like Zoom. Phone appointments are also an option. We want to cater to as many graduate students as possible!

Our approaches to Consultations

When we meet with you one-on-one, we aim to create meaningful writing experiences by using a variety of best practices.  I’ve listed a few of our priorities below.  (And just so you don’t have to take my word for it, I’ve included real student evaluations from our feedback surveys.)

We dedicate ample time to written and verbal feedback. We know that graduate level writing is complex and often long. (Those dissertation chapters are no joke!) Our consultants spend one to two hours with your project before your appointment to compile thoughtful written comments. This makes your one-hour in person (or online) meetings far more focused and productive.

“[My consultant] was wonderful, from communication before the meeting to the meeting itself. She also made such detailed comments on my paper that I felt I could even have sufficiently made changes without meeting to talk about it. That’s really important to me, as sometimes it’s easy to forget what is said in meetings.” (December 2021)

“[The consultant] provided feedback in a professional manner that did not make me feel dumb or incompetent. She helped walk me through the process so that I can apply what I learned to future assignments.” (December 2021)

We listen. Our goal is to help you say what you need and want to say.

“[My consultant] really ensured that she understood what I needed from her and what my assignment was so that she could help me to the best of her abilities. She continued to follow up with me to make sure I didn’t have anymore questions or concerns. [She] made me feel like I mattered and I am so grateful for her patience and knowledge.” (April 2022)

“I appreciated how unbiased the consultant was; even though he personally disagreed with my argument, was still helpful and thoughtful. As someone who is terrible at objectivity, I appreciated that.” (December 2018)

“It was so helpful and encouraging to work with [my consultant]. With English not being my native tongue, [the consultant] was able to provide me with cues that will help make my writing flow better, and further, she gave me meaningful feedback for my papers as well as general writing feedback that I will continue to use as I proceed through my program.” (April 2022)

We help students develop long-term writing strategies while working with assignments.  Much of our time is aimed at improving individual assignments sent our way: we discuss argument, content, sentence flow, wording, and more.  However, we also use those as opportunities to teach clients strategies and tools to help them in future writing projects.

“[My consultant] is amazing! She takes the time to teach me writing skills…[S]he doesn’t just help me correct mistakes. I have learned so much from her this year.” (May 2019)

We see our student colleagues first and foremost as people, not assignments.Sometimes what you need in graduate school is encouragement. Our consultants speak not only from a place of expertise but also from a place of understanding.  We have been and currently are experiencing the demands of academia right alongside you. You can be sure we’re rooting for you.

“Encouraging and constructive feedback that was sufficiently detailed without feeling overwhelming.” (December 2018)

In using these approaches, it’s my hope that you walk away with a stronger paper and clarity about recommended revisions and future projects.

Finally, I want to correct two common misconceptions about the Graduate Writing Center:

  1. “GWC consultants are proofreaders.” We believe our most helpful resource is our consultants’ position as writing experts or “expert outsiders.”  We want your time with the consultant to be spent talking through what we call “higher order concerns” – things like argument, structure, flow, and clarity—rather than punctuation or formatting.  We are not proofreaders and therefore we do not dedicate appointments to merely editing papers or checking formatting. We will never correct a paper and send it back without a meeting.  Almost anyone can double-check the use of italics or commas, but we value our consultants’ writing and content expertise and hope you will, too!
  1. “GWC consultants will perfect my paper.”We can’t guarantee perfection. (Wouldn’t that be grand if we could?!) From applications to class assignments, there are many factors that go into a project’s evaluation that are beyond our control. However, our consultants aim to get to know the project’s audience and context before providing feedback to help you craft a document that is clearer, more readable, better organized, etc.

I hope you’ll give us the opportunity to work with you on your upcoming projects.  Submit an appointment request form here, and you’ll have taken your first step towards what I hope will be an encouraging and helpful consultation!

*Adler-Kassner, Linda and Elizabeth Wardle, eds. Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing. UP of Colorado, 2016.

This article originally appeared on Baylor’s BearTracks Graduate Blog and can be read here. It has been modified and updated for republication.

How to Write a Good STEM Lit Review without Losing Your Sanity: A 5-step(ish) Guide for the Modern “Work Smart, Not Hard” Graduate Student

Photo by Karl Solano on Unsplash

by Grace Aquino, Consultant

The age-old aphorism, “publish or perish,” rings particularly loudly for graduate students in STEM. As soon-to-be Ph.D.’s, M.S.’s, and experts in our subject matter, the pressure to publish impactful papers that advance both our field of study and our career as independent researchers can be overwhelming at times, especially since we receive little to no guidance on how to write scientific papers, let alone impactful ones. (To learn more about how to write scientific papers, read “Scientific Writing: How to Write Papers that Get Cited and Proposals that Get Funded” by Joshua Schimel!) One such type of impactful paper and the cornerstone of a good dissertation is the literature review. What is a lit review? Besides being the one paper you repeatedly quote to make yourself sound smart, a lit review is a paper that systematically evaluates dozens if not hundreds of published peer-reviewed papers on a defined topic or question, and then summarizes them in a useful way to synthesize new information, identify new problems and questions/knowledge gaps, and ultimately offer new insights and areas of research for the wider scientific community to learn from and address. In fact, we’ve all stumbled across the one or two lit reviews in our field that not only have enlightened us on a subject but have also revolutionized how we think of a problem and/or springboarded us into research action. While reading a good lit review can be academically catalyzing, writing one, on the other hand, can be academically soul crushing. With the right tools, however, it doesn’t have to be!

This blogpost is a 5-step(ish) guide on how to write a good STEM lit review without losing your sanity, designed specifically for the modern “work smart, not hard” graduate student, like you.

 

Step 1. Define the research topic and identify the central question(s) you’re asking.

Before you even start searching for papers to evaluate in your lit review, you need to define your research topic and identify the central question(s) you’re asking. Specifically, your research topic should be the “big picture” problem or need in your field, and the question(s) you choose should be narrow enough to be answered (at least in part) by evaluating the existing body of literature on said topic. For example, if your research topic is evaluating the psychosocial effects that COVID-19 has on a certain group of people, your central questions might be: how does/did the COVID-19 pandemic affect grad students’ mental health and general outlook on post-graduate life? If your research topic is more methods-flavored, like improving protocols for extracting COVID-19 viral particles from different environmental matrices, your question(s) might be: what methods currently exist to extract viral RNA from waste-water samples and what are their advantages/disadvantages? The types of questions you can ask are infinite. But remember to choose a question that is large enough in scope to move the field forward but small enough in scope that you can answer it given limited resources (like time, available peer-reviewed papers, and coffee).

 

Step 2. Search for relevant literature and make a list.

What is relevant literature? What is irrelevant literature? And where do you even begin to search for it? Deciding these things can be tricky, which is why the first thing you’ll need is a predetermined list of keywords related to the research topic and/or question, and clear selection (i.e. inclusion) criteria. To use the same example as before, if your topic is on the psychosocial effects of COVID-19 on grad student mental health, you might use all of these words as keywords and then include a few more tangentially related or synonymous ones to ensure your search is broad enough (like “college student”, “psychological effects,” “social effect,” “stress,” “quality of life” and “COVID19 pandemic”).  Don’t forget to use the Boolean operators “and,” “or,” and “not” in your search.

The second thing you’ll need is your university’s and/or public scholarly search engines to help you find papers. Baylor University Libraries’ One Search is a good place to start (especially since you have access to most if not all scholarly articles via the university’s academic journal subscriptions and interlibrary loans) but you’re not limited to this search engine. There are other great search engines likes PubMed, PubChem, ScienceDirect, ResearchGate, Springerlink, JSTOR, Web of Science, PLUS ONE, Scopus, Google Scholar, and the list goes on. (For a comprehensive list, see Top 100 Best Websites to Find Academic Journals, Articles & Books – Quertime). One tool I’ve found useful for finding related papers and staying abreast with my academic reading in general is the online visualization tool, Connected Papers. This impressive mapping tool gives you a visual overview of the literatures in the academic field you’re interested in, based on keywords you input, and it shows connections between new relevant papers and prior and/or derivative works.  I highly recommend it!

Finally, don’t let your initial shock at the overwhelming or underwhelming number of papers that your search returns deter you. Instead, use your clearly-defined selection criteria (e.g. papers no older than X amount of years, studies including both male and female participants, clinical and/or nonclinical studies, etc.)  to choose the papers you will evaluate and then store them in your preferred reference manager (EndNote, Zotero, Mendeley, etc.). Read the abstracts of the paper and look through their reference section, which oftentimes is a goldmine of references. Add papers to your list that pass your initial criteria check; you can always come back and edit this list after reading through the abstracts. Your list may be long or short, depending on the abundance of papers that match your criteria and/or addressing your research topic. If your research topic is fairly new, you may not find many papers (but hey, that’s less reading for you and more opportunity to make a significant contribution!). Nonetheless, the selection criteria is important for your review to be considered systematic, so make sure you take the time to decide what the selection criteria are before you start your search.

 

Step 3. Read the papers to answer your central question and keep an annotated bibliography!

Shockingly, yes, you’ll have to actually read the papers you chose for your lit review. But you don’t actually have to read them in their entirety (unless you’re OCD like me). Since you’ll have read the abstracts at this point, focus on reading the papers in a given order (chronological, alphabetic, or another reasonable order) and smartly – i.e. to answer your central question. Be sure to keep good notes on the themes, knowledge gaps, debates, problematic findings, new insights, etc. that you discover as you read. Don’t underestimate the power of the annotated bibliography. For each paper you read, keep an annotated bibliography with these notes, which will significantly increase your ability to organize your lit review later and significantly decrease the crippling anxiety that comes from disorganized lit review processes. One tip to expedite the reading process is to briefly skim the introduction, skip the methods (unless your central question is about the methods), and spend a designated amount of time on the results and discussion sections, which are where you’ll likely find the answer your central question. If you find yourself spending an ungodly amount of time reading a single paper, use a productivity tool (like the Pomodoro technique) to help keep yourself on track. You can always come back to a paper if you need to clarify something later, but remember, you want to maximize your productivity from the beginning by finding ways to read and note-take more efficiently so that you can get to the meat of the lit review, the writing, sooner rather than later.

 

Step 4. Write an outline.

Based on your reading and notes, decide what lit review structure works best to write in light of the central question you’re asking. Use the central question explicitly as your thesis statement at the end of your introduction, after you’ve described the background of the “big picture” problem you’re addressing and highlighted the specific knowledge gap(s) in your field of research that further warrant your lit review. For the body of the lit review, the four main lit review structures typically used are:

  • Chronological – This is the simplest approach to map the development of your topic over time. If you choose this approach, avoid simply summarizing papers or listing them in order. Instead, focus on analyzing patters, key events, important debates or opposing views, etc. that have shaped the field and/or address the central question.
  • Thematic – This strategy uses recurring themes to organize your lit review into subsections that address different areas of the topic. For example, if you’re evaluating the psychosocial effects of COVID19 on graduate students, you might have several psychosocial parameters you’re evaluating, so you can use each of these as thematic sub-headers throughout the paper.
  • Methodological – If you’re comparing research methods from different fields or disciplines, you can use this approach to group similar methods together and juxtapose different ones. You can also discuss advantages and disadvantages of the methods in this strategy.
  • Theoretical – Oftentimes, the lit review is the foundation for a theoretical framework. This strategy allows you to discuss existing/new theories, definitions and key concepts, test models, etc. Like the methodological strategy, you can discuss the relevance of one theoretical approach over another, advantages, disadvantages, etc.

End the outline of your lit review with the conclusion/future direction section, where you will highlight the most important insights you’ve learned and offer new questions for the wider scientific community to address.

This outlining step is perhaps one of the hardest aspects of the lit review because putting an effective outline together can feel much like putting together a blank puzzle. However, once you’ve decided which outline structure works best for your topic and you’ve written out the outline, writing the paper will be easier (not easy!) than writing without a strategy in mind.

 

Step 5. Write the lit review.

There’s not much explanation needed here. For more help on writing the specific parts of the lit review, visit Scribbr’s “What is a Lit Review: Step-by-Step Guide and Examples”.

Consider joining a writing group to keep yourself accountable and writing routinely (and sane!). The GWC starts new ones every semester. Look out for our email! Remember, writing IS thinking, and writing CREATES knowledge, so make sure you give yourself time everyday to sit down and write something.

 

Step 5.5. Revise and edit, and send it to the GWC!

Once your first draft is done, have someone you trust in your professional circle review it and offer constructive criticism. Additionally, the GWC is always happy to help! You can send you papers direct to gwc@baylor.edu and we will pair you with a consultant to serve as an outside expert reader and offer feedback over a brief meeting.

If you’re writing the lit review for your dissertation or thesis, be sure to incorporate it following the guidelines and requirements given by your advisor/program. If you’re writing the lit review as a stand-alone paper or as part of a manuscript for an academic journal, follow the journal’s stylistic formatting and requirements, and ensure your citations are correct.

 

While writing a lit review can induce high levels of academic anxiety, we hope that this guide helps demystify the process and put some of that anxiety to rest. Remember that you are capable and that there are people here to help you! Email us at gwc@baylor.edu for help with your lit review (or any other paper) at any stage of completion.

How and Where I Write: Interview with Ryan Ramsey

For our first graduate student interview, we sat down with Ryan Ramsey, a third-year PhD student in Religion. Ryan studies World Christianity and Pentecostalism. He holds a Master of Arts in Religion from Yale Divinity School (’19) and a BA from Lee University (’14). He is also a fellow with Baylor’s Academy for Teaching and Learning. Before coming to graduate school, Ryan taught middle school. Ryan is husband to the lovely Ellie and father to the precocious Penelope. In his free time, he loves hiking, roasting coffee, and basketball. Ryan also gives a defense of Dichotomy, contra a previous post from BearTracks about the pros and cons of Waco coffee shops. Thanks so much for taking the time to tell us about your writing habits and coffee principles, Ryan!

 

BearTracks

So where do you like to write? I know you said this tends to be a lot of places, but, like, an office, home, coffee shops, outside? Where do you tend to cycle through?

Ryan Ramsey

I like to write in my backyard. I like to write, um, I have a writing group, we meet up in in the GRC, and I can usually get stuff done there. I write in the GRC a good bit, using the breakout rooms. If I have editing work to do, I will oftentimes go to coffee shops, like Dichotomy. Usually just Dichotomy. I don’t go to Pinewood because there are too many undergrads there.

BT

Yes, which is an unfortunate recent development. So it sounds like when you are in the creative mode you need more silence or less people-distraction, but when you’re in the editing mode you can have more of the buzz in the background?

RR

Yes.

BT

That makes sense. So this question is maybe for, well, I’m doing a mix of talking to grad students and professors, but do you find you still acquire a lot of books at this point in your career or has the pace slowed somewhat as you’ve gone along in your PhD?

RR

That’s a strangely relevant question because I do, I have found when I was in seminary I frequented any free bin and would take anything remotely pertaining. You know I only got books for Christmas, things like that, but I think since COVID, I have been more interested in finding digital resources and books that are available online through the library.

BT

So what would you say are the best times and places for you to write? We already kind of covered places.

RR

In the morning, probably between 8 and 11.

BT

Is that when your writing group meets as well, is that a morning group?

RR

Yeah it is. I can’t write, I’m usually fried by the afternoon. I try not work in the evenings unless I have to. Usually the earlier, my brain is better.

BT

The perk of having a family in grad school. It means better boundaries, sometimes.

RR

Yeah, yeah. If I have to do editing, I can do editing in the afternoon, but…

BT

Not the creative process?

RR

Yeah.

BT

That’s fair! How do you capture your research? Are you a notecard or journal person, do you do it on the computer?

RR

I do it on my laptop, and I try as best as I can, to either copy full quotes and keep lists of quote sheets or I just write prose, as if I’m writing something that, theoretically, I could copy and paste. Usually with full citations, and that makes that a lot easier in the long run.

BT

Do you immediately start writing on the computer, or do you have any portion of your writing process that you do longhand?

RR

Uh, no, but occasionally, if I am somewhere away from my computer and an idea comes to me and I have something to write on, I will sketch out ideas, I might jot handwritten notes down.

BT

Are you a marginalia person in your physical books, or no?

RR

Oh yes.

BT

I think you kind of have to be as a scholar. Are you a detailed marginalia person? Because I find I have become less talkative with my books. I do a ton of underlining and starring things and bracketing things, but do you “talk” to your books in the margins?

RR

Occasionally. I more often make brief, one sentence, one word notes to highlight, say, “prophecy” in the margins, so when I go back through….

BT

I think you answered this earlier, but do you read digital books and what are your feelings on digital books?

RR

Yeah, I’ll say this. I read digital books and I listen to digital books using text-to-speech as a way to, A) give my eyes a break, and B) allow me to do other stuff while I’m reading, like washing dishes usually.

BT

Out of personal curiosity, is there a program you use for the text-to-speech, or do a lot of the books just automatically have that feature? How do you get the books to talk to you!?

RR

Well, if it’s a PDF, I’ll just highlight the text and use the program on my Mac, but if you use any books on Archive.org, which is a really great resource and has many books, that has an automatic with your account; you just hit the audio button and it automatically plays, but you do have to watch out because it will read the footnotes to you in unhelpful ways.

BT

That’s helpful. What is some good advice you’ve received on writing?

RR

Keep editing your work. Edit, edit, edit. That’s kind of general.

BT

What stage, do you do the Anne Lamott “sh***y first draft” and then edit, or are you an edit-as-you-go person?

RR

It depends. It depends most on the amount of research and footnotes I’m doing and the section or paragraph. I usually find the more I spend fiddling with footnotes, the more polished that paragraph tends to be, and the more I just plop it out, like it’s the first draft, the more likely I am to cut it entirely.

BT

What do you think is your best piece of written work at this point in your career? What are you most proud of? It also doesn’t have to be academic, I know people write other things.

RR

I mean I have a published article that I like a lot of, and I’m fairly proud of portions of it, especially the introductory framing.

BT

Okay, what was the article on and where was it published?

RR

It’s called “Christ in Yaqui Garb.” It’s about Teresa Urrea, who’s a figure I study. It’s published in an open-access journal called Religions. And then some of my other work, I’ve got a work that I’m presenting at the Conference on Faith and History, again on her [Teresa Urrea], that’s like a gender analysis about perceptions of her in popular U.S. newspapers, and I’m really happy with the analysis of that.

BT

So name a few favorite authors from your field of study. Who are the people who, when you read their stuff, you’re like, “Ugh, I wish I had written this”?

RR

I think Betsy Flowers is a fantastic writer. Theologian Miroslav Volf is a fantastic writer, and he’s someone that edits, edits, edits, and edits. I really like reading Robert Orsi. One of the people who’s written a lot of Teresa Urrea, who I study, is Luis Urrea who is a novelist. And so he writes novels on her.

BT

Is he any relation to her?

RR

He is! He’s like a kinda distant great-grand nephew. He’s just a fantastic writer, so I really enjoy reading him. That’s not really in my discipline, but it’s something I read for my discipline.

BT

That’s great, cool. Okay, finally, what’s a book you should have read by now but haven’t? And you can interpret that as you will. It could be in your field or literature in general or…

RR

Oooh. I don’t know.

BT

The Bible? Just kidding.

RR

I need to think, just then I have to include what books do I say I’ve read, but I haven’t actually read them! Haha.

BT

Haha. Grad-school “read” them?

RR

Yeah. I mean there’s a lot. And the fact that I have comps studying right now doesn’t help.

BT

Is there one you’re most embarrassed to admit? We ask real gritty questions here.

RR

That’s the problem. What would I admit that I haven’t read?

BT

This is a candid interview Ryan, you can be honest here.

RR

I know, I know. I don’t think I ever made it though Mere Christianity.

BT

For the addendum, I understand you took umbrage with BearTrack’s piece on Dichotomy, and we want to give you an opportunity to give a defense of Dichotomy.

RR

Okay. The important thing to know about Dichotomy is that you have to order the right thing.

BT

Okay, getting the good stuff here.

RR

I am well aware that their drip coffee and pour overs are not what they need to be – they don’t dial in their machines well enough to get the right ratios for that, so it ends up being a little watered down. Their espresso, though, is fantastic. You have to order espresso. When I moved here, before moving here I looked on Sprudge; it’s a really hip, weird coffee website. It writes news stories on coffee shops and stuff like that, and Dichotomy was the one featured. And so Dichotomy was a place that I knew about coming in and was excited about and not disappointed with! And the only time i’m ever disappointed there is when I order drip coffee. But anyway. I’ve got a lot of good memories there. Before COVID, our little history of theology cohort would go there. And that’s a place where, when out daughter was born, that’s where Ellie and I went out to get drinks when my mom offered to babysit for two hours. And when my in-laws lived with us for two and a half weeks before Penelope was born, because Pen was ten days late, my father-in-law and I went there do get out of the house, so he could do his crosswords and I could write my papers. So, all that to say, I have lots of good memories there, but the crux of it is you have to order the espresso.

BT

Okay, we will make due notice of this and put an asterisk in the original post and say “Since publishing this, we have heard from readership that…” haha.

RR

That sounds good.

 

This post was originally published on Baylor’s Graduate School blog, BearTracks, and can be read here.

How and Where I Write: Interview with Dr. Richard Rankin Russell

For our first installment of the “How and Where I Write” series, BearTracks sat down with Dr. Richard Rankin Russell, professor of English and the English Graduate Program Director. Dr. Russell’s areas of expertise include Modern and Contemporary Irish literature, though he began his graduate career studying the literature of the American South. Dr. Russell earned his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has been on the faculty at Baylor since 2001. He has published numerous books and articles, most recently his book Seamus Heaney:  A Critical Introduction, published in 2016, but he has a new book entitled James Joyce and Samaritan Hospitality coming out in November 2022 through the University of Edinburgh Press. It was a pleasure to converse with Dr. Russell about his writing habits and wisdom; we hope you enjoy as well!

BearTracks

Where do you like to write? Your office, at home, coffee shops, outside? Where is your chosen place to write?

Dr. Richard Rankin Russell

I cannot write at coffee shops and not usually in my office. I can edit, and I’m doing edits now on a book in my office, but I have a study at home. And I write on my grandfather’s desk from the furniture store that my family had started in Paris, Tennessee where I grew up.

BT

That’s really special.

RRR

I write there, and it’s usually late at night into the early morning, just as I did as a graduate student with my dissertation, and now with kids, that’s when the house is quiet.

BT

So you’re a total-silence-when-you-write person?

RRR

Yeah, or maybe classical music in the background, but yeah.

BT

I’ve recently discovered, I think, Miles Davis is going to be my go-to writing music.

RRR

Miles is good. I’ve got on repeat a five-album series by Wynton Marsalis, just instrumental jazz; it’s really good and bluesy.

BT

Yeah, something about the rhythms just kind of keeps the energy up; it’s good. Do you still acquire lots of books as your career has progressed or has the pace slowed somewhat as you’ve gone on?

RRR

I’d say the pace has slowed somewhat. I’ve been really consciously trying to give books away lately. I’ve got a lot of books in here, except for Irish literature, which takes up close to this much at home in my study. I’ve slowed down some on book acquisition, because I think I have enough but still like to get authors I like.

BT

How do you capture your research? Are you a notecard person, a journal? Do you keep a document on the computer? How does that process work for you?

RRR

I mark sections in books in pencil and with bookmarks, and I have those piled around me. I write directly to Word documents now and edit as I go, but I definitely have scattered written notes around me in those books.

BT

Do you immediately start writing on the computer or do you do anything beginning with longhand, just to get thoughts down?

RRR

I try to do a little bit of that. Maybe on a legal pad, a little bit of flow, but I’ve also done that directly to the Word file, and then I just go. I’m kind of a spur, or jag, or streak writer. I don’t believe in the hour-a-day writing thing, because when I write, I really write, and I’ll go for four or five hours at a stretch. That’s the only way I can get anything done. That’s why I have to carve out that time at night, and that’s harder than it used to be, to stay up until one or two.

BT

I take it you’re a marginalia person?

RRR

Oh yeah, absolutely! And I do write in library books – in pencil!

BT

I told that to someone once, I also dog-ear library books, and they were appalled; it was like I had just denied the divinity of Christ or something. I see it as a gift for future readers, but maybe I have too high an opinion of myself!

RRR

Haha! Yeah, absolutely, exactly! They’ll be interested in our marginalia, I’m sure they will!

BT

Do you ever read digital books?

RRR

No. The only time I ever read them was after back surgery when [my wife] had The Hunger Games trilogy on her Kindle. And I read the whole thing. It was very odd, let me tell you.

BT

What is some good advice you’ve received on writing?

RRR

Hmmm. One piece that comes to mind comes from my dear friend Dr. Fulton, down the hall, who, when I came here, said, “I know you want to get your dissertation published but try to think several books ahead.” I was like, What? That sounds impossible. I think, if you’re in a research position, you want to get your dissertation published, and you don’t think how that book is going to connect to your whole intellectual profile, but you should. And his saying that one time, in his Fulton-esque way, helped me to think that way, and I feel like my career has had some intellectual integrity because of that, and it’s arisen organically because of that comment.

BT

Do you feel like that also took some of the pressure off of individual works in a certain way because there was that holistic viewpoint?

RRR

I think so. And it also stems for an unfortunate bad habit I have, which is whatever the written version of logorrhea is. I tend to write too much, so this book here that I’m doing revisions on, this book on Brian Friel, that was a dissertation chapter originally. And I took that and got an article or two out of it, and then, I just really loved Friel, I ended up working it into a book. So the advantage of writing too much is that then you can send signals to yourself in a given project, “There needs to be work done on this!” And then you can do that work later.

The second [good piece of advice I’ve received], I had a friend in graduate school – I’ve never forgotten what she said – she said, “Think about you’re writing to an intelligent but ignorant child.” Ignorant, you know in the best sense of the word, meaning not knowing the field, but intelligent. So that’s been helpful to me to think about audience in that sense.

BT

What do you think your best piece of written work so far, or perhaps the piece of work you’re most proud of?

RRR

That’s a good question. I really like this book, the Seamus Heaney Region’s book, that won the Cleanth Brooks-Robert Penn Warren prize. I really felt like I got a lot in there.

But I’m maybe most pleased with a piece a lot of people don’t know about, which was a piece in Five Points on the Emmett Till lynching in my father’s home county. So I worked up a piece that’s part memoir, part literary criticism. Long story, but these photographs [in the piece] are from a friend of mine, Maude Schuyler Clay. His body [Emmett Till’s] washed up on her family land. I got to know her when this was done. I loved doing the literary criticism with the Hughes poems and the blues, and thinking about what it was like for my dad growing up where we go now every summer, learning about this horrible thing. But then, when I got to meet Maude, I realized that her first book of photographs ended with this, which is to his [Till’s] memory, and then, fairly early on as we talked, I realized that my grandmother was her beautician, her mom’s beautician, and her grandmother’s beautician. My grandmother ran a beauty shop in my dad’s house where he grew in the Delta. And she retired when she was 87, so she ran a beauty shop for over 60 years, so all the women in the Delta came around. So it’s not a straight academic piece, but that I think is an important for me, thinking about my family history, thinking about literature as power to remember such atrocities, but it’s hopeful too, because the Hughes poems are Christian, and there’s a lot of good things that have come out of that. So that’s been really important to me.

But I’m really excited about the Joyce and Good Samaritan book that’s coming out.

BT

Congratulations on that! I saw your email yesterday.

RRR

Thank you. That’s been important for me thinking about how literature is not some ivory tower pursuit, but it’s generative, and it can include us all as potential readers and rescuers of others.

BT

Very nicely, succinctly put. Would you name a few favorite authors from your field of study?

RRR

Oh my goodness. I’d have to put Yeats and Joyce up there near the top – and Heaney, for sure. Goodness. I love Virginia Woolf. I love George MacKay Brown. There’s so many.

BT

How about critics?

RRR

Oh. I really like Rita Felski. I really liked Denis Donoghue’s work. Those two are great. I’ve really been influenced by Helen Vendler, I think she’s one of our great living critics, and then I’d say Christopher Ricks as well. Also one of our great living critics. The biggest of all would be my own advisor, Weldon Thornton, who passed away last year on July 15th. I love that combination of rigor and close reading, but also reaching outside the text at hand.

BT

Okay, final question. And this one’s the mean one. What is a book you should have read by now but haven’t?

RRR

That’s a good question. It would have been, before this year, Dante, but I’ve read two thirds of it now. Oh goodness, there’s so many. Oh, let’s put The Aeneid. That’s a big omission on my part; everyone’s got them. People used to play that game, like, literary critics, and there’s a story that went around. Someone finally said, “Hamlet, I haven’t read Hamlet.” They laughed him out of the group.

 

This interview was originally published on Baylor’s Graduate School blog, BearTracks, and can be read here.