Specious Barriers to Writing OR Are You Sure That's The Problem?

Jim, a participant in my ABD group, was kind enough to summarize this material from his current reading. There are two things interesting about this to me: (1) The specious barriers themselves — we tell ourselves all kinds of stories that may or may not be well-grounded, don’t we? T(2) That Jim knows one way to work on the dissertation is by paying attention to how he works and thinks about working on the dissertation. That is to say, it’s not just the creating the content of the project; it’s also about the process of creating. Anyway — now onto Specious Barriers!:

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12 Steps to becoming a more prolific scholar

These notes are from a writing workshop by Tara Gray called “Publish and Flourish: Become a Prolific Scholar,” presented at the 2006 Text and Academic Authors convention.

What I’ve done  is to extract the key points and snippets of some of them, but you’ll want to go the TAA website for the full article, for sure. Great content. Here goes…

The myth persists that prolific scholars are born, not made, but research suggests otherwise. Much is known about how to become more prolific — and any scholar can. These steps will show you how.

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Are You Ready to Write? Are You Sure?: Writing Pre-Preparation

OK, it’s Writing Time. Get going… No…Wait! Wait?? Did I say wait??? Well, yes, I did. If you have difficulty sitting down to write, you may want to start even before the very beginning. Let’s look at what happens before you even pick up the pen or put your hands on the keyboard. What do you do? Research by Robert Boice on successful academic writers shows…

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Using an Unschedule: The Rules

Ok, so you’ve created your Unschedule, you’ve started using the “open spots” to work on your project, and you’re tracking the number of 30 minute blocks you work uninterruptedly on your dissertation. Nicely done! But now that you’ve really gotten going, here a few Rules to keep you going. Counterintuitive as they may seem…

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Use Your Heart to Jump Start Your Brain

One of the tools you may not have thought to bring to your dissertation is your heart.

It seems such a head task, doesn’t it?

But your heart has a brain and for such an undertaking as this, you want to bring all your brains to bear on it ;-) 

In our UnDissertation Group this week, we’ll be exploring a tool to help you manage your anxiety and stress, get more focused on your 30 minute work period right at the start, and even help you access your intuitive connections for your work. Even more — it actually enhances the effectiveness of your brain.

So what’s not to like about this one?

I’ve written on another blog about the technique of heart coherence. So if you’d like some background reading, please feel free to click on over to The Heart of Neurofeedback. If everyone has read it, that may save us some time and let us do some more practice with the technique than otherwise.