Writing

One of the reasons that I wanted to start a work-related blog, was to give me an opportunity to do some less formal academic writing. All the wise academics recommend writing on a regular, even daily basis. This is not something that I have been able to achieve over my academic career, but I would love to get to that point.

As an academic, I do a variety of writing: teaching related writing includes things like syllabi, assignments, lectures, and exams; and research writing, which means writing abstracts for conferences, full-length research papers, and proposals. And let’s not forget all of the email correspondence that is required these days: student emails, emails from collaborators, administrative emails, etc. When contentious issues arise, these emails can take a lot of time to read and compose responses. A lot of my research writing lately has been collaborative, so paper and proposal drafts have been emailed back and forth to share changes and make additional edits. Usually, there are entire passages that I have written, but in the case of student work, I am usually just editing (and have two papers being published soon, that fall into this category).

This summer, I have done some proposal writing, but no new research writing. I have a nearly-finished paper that I ‘put on the back burner’ and haven’t managed to finish (I won’t tell you how long ago that was!). I also have new work to do on the summer project with my REU student. We have decided to scrap the MODIS idea for now, in the interest of doing something manageable over the summer. We are going to analyze new data in a similar way to some previous work. We are still in the data analysis phase, but some writing will come out of the project (I hope!)