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6 tips to re-start your writing practice

It’s happened to all of us who write: multiple conflicting commitments, “everything is due yesterday”, we need to deal with life on an every day basis. The end result: we stop writing. And that’s a HUGE challenge for those of us who make a living out of our writing, be it that we are academics, faculty, early career scholars, postdoctoral researchers, professors, or writers, more broadly.

Writing

Over the past few weeks, a number of scholars I admire and whose writing I love have come to me for advice on how to regain confidence in their writing, how to switch types and modes of writing, and more broadly, how to re-start their writing practice. This phenomenon (where I stop writing for myriad reasons).

First of all, I’d like to make two points about the challenge that restarting and sustaining a writing practice poses very, very clear:

  1. It happens to ALL OF US.
  2. You can snap out of it and re-start your writing practice.

It’s easy to leave writing to the bottom of our To-Do List. After all, there are always pressing matters to attend to. In addition to our personal lives, which are and should be the priority (we are humans, after all), we have meetings with students, colleagues, coauthors, teaching duties that include preparing materials, reading, grading, mentoring, service to our discipline, our field, and our institutions.

Thus, writing seems like something that can be left to “whenever I have a few hours clear in my schedule”. This approach detracts from enabling us to attend to a key component of our scholarly lives.

Highlighting, scribbling marginalia, reading, writing

Here are a few tips that may help you re-start your writing practice. I write these out of experience: these are the things I’ve done when I’ve fallen behind in my writing and when I need to get things out (or more importantly, when I realize that writing is an integral component of my life as a scholar, and that I need to get back into it.

  1. Block a reasonable period of time in your calendar where you can focus on writing.
  2. Set a reasonable goal for your writing objectives, then slowly increase.
  3. Re-start your reading practice, and use these reading materials as “brain fodder” for your writing.
  4. Stop beating yourself up if you fail to write one day, and just write the following day.
  5. Build repetition and routine into your schedule.
  6. Ask for help and rely on your community (including writing groups and coaches).

1. Block a reasonable period of time in your calendar where you can focus on writing.

In my calendar, I have scheduled time to write Monday through Friday. My goal is to spend 2 hours in writing-related activities, which may include reading (yes, reading IS writing), data analysis, outlining, etc.

Calendar Screenshot

I realize that not everybody can block 2 hours of their daily lives to write, and that not everybody can wake up at 4:00 in the morning (which is my normal wake-up time). I think that’s ok. We all write when we can. But blocking SOME time can help you focus. Book a meeting with yourself, a Meeting With Your Writing (as my dear friend Jo Van Every has defined it).

Claim that time as your own and use it to write. Even if it is only 15 minutes.

2. Set a reasonable goal for your writing objectives, then slowly increase.

I am the first one to establish unreasonable goals and targets for myself. Unfortunately, this comes from always pushing myself and thinking that I can do A LOT MORE than I can reasonably do within the limits of my physique. I am not as young as I used to be, and I can’t work long hours. When I was in graduate school, during my PhD, I clearly recall I worked A LOT of hours, and really intensely. I can no longer do this. So I have worked really hard at setting reasonable goals, for everything, including my writing.

The Social Hub (Delft, The Netherlands)

What is a reasonable goal for your own writing practice? I can’t answer that question, only YOU can decide what is reasonable. My dear friend Leanne Powner says that our brains can only reasonably work deeply focused for about 3-4 hours a day. I think this figure changes a lot depending on who you talk to, and whose research you read, but what’s clear is that we can’t focus for 8 hours a day. So, if you are in the process of re-starting your writing practice, perhaps choose a reasonable goal: 50-75 words? 10-15 minutes? Anything. Whatever amount of time/number of words will make you feel satisfied after you are done.

3. Re-start your reading practice, and use these reading materials as “brain fodder” for your writing.

It’s funny that every time ANYBODY asks me for writing advice, I go back to my own blog and read pieces I’ve already written. And that’s part of the writing process: reading IS an integral component of writing. But just like we tend to leave our writing to the last minute, when we are already buried under a pile of commitments and have to desperately search for pockets of time here and there to complete overdue writing assignments, we also tend to leave reading to the last minute, when we REALLY need to get up to speed on a topic because we need to finish a paper that is way overdue. I am guilty of this as anyone, so what I do is I get back to my reading practice (and I do have a forthcoming blog post on how to develop a reading practice that I plan to write as soon as I am out of the woods with a few overdue scholarly writing commitments!)

Writing a draft of a paper by taking notes and writing memos

What I do when I am working to re-start my writing practice is that I set a goal of reading BEFORE I write. I learned this strategy in graduate school and I use it to this day that I am a Full Professor. It’s part of my pre-writing routine. Integrating reading with my writing routine enables me to get my thinking juices flowing.

If you can’t read an article or a book chapter a day, which I strongly recommend as a general guideline, then perhaps you may need to book some time (again, a meeting with yourself and only yourself) and batch-process some articles, book chapters and/or books. Batch-processing can help you catch up with the literature within a reasonably short period of time.

4. Stop beating yourself up if you fail to write one day, and just write the following day.

I am guilty of this as well. If I skip writing ANY day, I feel terrible, and then I bury my head in the sand. Don’t do this. We all feel overwhelmed, and current global circumstances don’t help either. So if you skipped ONE day of writing, then just write the next day. One day will not make a difference, but a series of days will create inertia and make the goal of re-starting your writing practice an unsurmountable challenge.

The real challenge lies not in the missed day itself, but in the mindset that we often fall into. When we allow ourselves to feel guilty, we frequently avoid the page the next day (The Dreaded Blank Page syndrome), and then the next, until returning feels almost impossible.

My full process for writing a paper

This inertia builds, not because we missed one day, but because we let self-judgment paralyze us. To counter this, I suggest that you make a conscious choice to return to your writing as soon as possible, even if it’s just for ten minutes. So, in my view, returning to the page after a missed day is the real win. It’s not about perfection, it’s about building momentum and cultivating a resilient, sustainable writing practice. What matters is not never failing, but developing the habit of returning, again and again, to our writing, and being kind to ourselves, always.

5. Build repetition and routine into your schedule.

Writing one day and then stopping for a month will not help you develop a sustainable writing practice.

I am a Virgo, Type A, Upholder. I need structure in my life. But even if you are not a person who loves structure, routine can still give you tools to restart your writing practice. If you make writing part of your routine, chances are that you will start getting into the flow. One of the main challenges I found as a graduate student, particularly during my PhD, was that I had all this unstructured time and I was supposed to produce a master piece of independent research

Mi oficina en la FLACSO México

Developing a structured routine for reading and writing was one of the keys to my successful completion of the doctorate. Even though as I’ve mentioned, I’m a Virgo, Type A, Upholder, I am also someone with many interests. It’s sometimes hard for me to focus. My symbol is the hummingbird for good reason. I jump from topic to topic the same way a hummingbird flies from flower to flower. And like hummingbirds, I also get tired easily. So creating a routine and a structure for my academia-related activities, particularly my writing, is fundamental for me, and perhaps it will help you, too.

6. Ask for help and rely on your community (including writing groups and coaches).

This is perhaps the most challenging of all the tips I have to share, because asking for help is hard. I struggle with this all the time. I am usually the one who helps others, I am not usually the one who requests help. But as with anything else in academia, and life more generally, asking for help is part and parcel of our life in society. Whenever I’ve been really overwhelmed and unable to produce words, I usually ask good friends for either advice or support writing in collective.

Desk in my room (Malakoff, France)

Writing groups are an amazing tool to help us develop a writing practice. I began participating in (and hosting) writing groups early during the first few months of the C0VID19 pandemic. Personally, I find that being part of a writing group really does encourage me to continue writing, even when I don’t feel like it, because I am surrounded by other like-minded folks who are working hard to get their writing commitments completed.

Perhaps you may also want to hire a writing coach or attend a writing workshop. I teach several of these workshops every year, across the globe, and for different audiences, from PhD students to full professors. This strategy of hiring a writing coach or attending a writing workshop really depends on your budget. I don’t want anybody to break the bank to hire help. But the reality is that these workshops and coaches might prove useful to you.

4 additional tips about how to develop a writing practice can be found in this blog post.

Hopefully these 6 tips will be useful to you as you work to re-start your writing practice.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 2, 2025

Learning how to deal with rejection in academia…

REAL TALK: I’m a full professor (have been for a few years now) and I have had …

1) journal articles desk rejected.
2) articles rejected AFTER at least one if not TWO ROUNDS of Revise-And-Resubmit
3) articles published after FIVE rounds of R&R
4) a reviewer tell me that my writing sucks “as an undergrad’s”

Writing a paper

I don’t know if this helps junior and up-and-coming scholars (and students), but the reality is that these shitty things happen to us, on a regular basis.

Dr. Mirya Holman keeps a tally of how many rejections she gets (because it means she is getting her work out, peer-reviewed).

Dr. Sara Mitchel keeps a “shadow” CV with rejections.

It’s normal to have our work rejected. It sucks, and I (like any other human being) also sulk, get angry, dwell on it.

I’ve had manuscripts that have laid dormant for YEARS because I couldn’t tackle the necessary revisions for the R&R to get published (see my recent post on zombie papers and book manuscripts).

I hope to motivate anybody who ALSO feels like I do. I hate having my work rejected (and criticized in a way that I feel is unfair, too), but it’s part and parcel of the academic enterprise. So we need to learn how to cope with it (sorry if you came to this post hoping to find strategies to better endure and survive rejection, I don’t think I have special advice other than dust yourself off, get up and keep moving forward).

And when it’s your turn to review, be as kind as you’d like others to be with your work.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – January 2, 2025

Developing a sustainable writing practice

One of the first things I teach my students *and* my thesis advisees is how to develop a writing practice.

15 minutes of writing

Perhaps the most challenging thing in the Hidden Curriculum of being a graduate students, one of the many things *I* wasn’t taught, was the idea of a writing practice, the “how to” of crafting paragraphs and creating papers and book chapters, and dissertation components. Nobody taught me how to do this. What is the process by which graduate students can learn to systematically put words down and produce texts?

Having a writing practice doesn’t mean that you write every day. Yes, for the better part of two decades, I’ve been a proponent and fan (not a tyrant, though!) of writing every single day of the work week.

But guess what? I’ve also gotten sick. I’ve travelled. My parents have required care. All of the above has made it extremely challenging for me to sustain 2 hours of daily researching, reading, thinking and writing, as I normally would do.

As I’ve written before, a sustainable writing practice is one where the process of producing words and putting them on the page/screen is part of a workflow. Something that can be done with less friction than we normally face on an everyday basis.

Perhaps your writing happens once a week/biweekly.

a sustainable writing practice

I’ve written about all three elements of my proposed sustainable writing practice, and you can find those posts on my blog. But here they are for your perusal.

1. A system that works for you.

I’m an early morning riser. My ex-boyfriend was a super-early-morning person. I had to change my habits. Once I realized he wasn’t going to become a night owl, I slowly switched to a morning schedule that would give me 2 hours of writing alone and the remainder of the morning (until we both left for work) available to spend with him. So I moved to a 4:00am wake up time. Writing very early in the morning (4-6 am normally, when my body allows, 7-8 am when I’m tired or I’ve been travelling) is what makes my life easier.

I am NOT advocating for YOU to go to that schedule. I am saying that you need to find what works best FOR YOU. Which time slot you can use to put some words down, to read materials that you need to absorb in order to write.

2. A structure of work that is feasible.

I would pay good money to be able to just send my thoughts telepathically to the page. This device hasn’t happened yet, so I have learned to adapt.

For me, the time I block to write is TO WRITE. I do research, think, outline, draft, create topic sentences. Like pretty much every single faculty member I know, I have to read dissertation and theses’ drafts, prepare lectures, write papers, travel to conferences, do care work, etc.

The reason why I write so early in the morning is also that it makes it feasible for me to THINK and LEARN and WRITE. Every single time I’ve broken up with a guy, it has been late at night, when we are both tired, and not thinking very clearly. I am a morning person. A VERY EARLY MORNING person. I think well up until about 2pm. Anything I do after noon-2pm should be stuff that doesn’t require me to think clearly.

I protect my writing time fiercely. You’ll see me pushing for meetings AFTER 11 in the morning. For some reason, people seem to really like to take meetings in the morning. That’s MY writing time. So I compromise. I don’t say “no meetings before 4pm”, I just say “any time after 11am is good for me”.

I also prefer to teach in the afternoons. But this isn’t always possible. So I delay teaching as late as possible within the reasonable limits of what my university requires (usually my classes start at 11 am or 4pm, but I’ve also been known to teach at 8am).

Teaching in the afternoon is easier for me.

But more importantly, I think the most important element of a sustainable writing practice is item # 3:

3. A piece of writing output that is doable.

So, turns out that I am not able to write for as long as I would like to (2 hours per day, 5 days a week). Well, I’ll write whatever I can take. And I won’t stress about it: I’ll do it MEMO BY MEMO. I borrowed the Memo-Writing practice from qualitative methods (I only learned what qualitative research methods entailed until I did my PhD – thank you UBC School of Nursing and UBC School of Social Work – I am a political scientist and a human geographer who first learned how to conduct qualitative inquiry from nurses and social workers).

#AcWri on a plane

Now that you know what I consider the elements of a sustainable writing practice, here are (in my view) the 3 key habits that you need to implement on a regular basis in order to DEVELOP A SUSTAINABLE WRITING PRACTICE:

1. Start small.
2. Break down the work in manageable pieces.
3. Make of writing part of your daily routine and integrate it into your workflow.

I will explain what I mean by each one of these habits:

1. START SMALL:

I don’t set out to finish a chapter, an article, not even a section.

I set out to write a certain number of words or a specific amount of time. When I teach learners this method, I encourage them to focus on 125 words, 15 minutes. Focusing on a small target or goal makes it much easier to create a habit of producing a specific number of words over a certain period of time.

2. BREAK DOWN THE WORK IN MANAGEABLE PIECES

Do I need to finish revisions to a chapter this week? Yes.

Can I do them in one day? Unlikely.

BUT I can focus on writing a memo that addresses 1-2 comments from the editors, breaking these into smaller pieces. Being able to systematically decompose an entire task or work package into smaller pieces makes it easier to focus JUST on one of those tasks. Remaining focused on a small piece of work also makes slow-but-steady progress feasible.

3. INTEGRATE WRITING INTO YOUR DAILY ROUTINE/WORKFLOW

I am a Virgo, Type A, Upholder. I have my Moon in Virgo, my Venus in Virgo, and my ascent in Virgo. I’m the Virgo-est Virgo to have ever Virgo-ed. Organization and structure are the backbone of my life.

Do I face challenges in my daily life and do I need to deal with what comes my way in unexpected ways? Heck, of course I do. But disorganization really screws up my life. I need structure. Even within the whirlwind that my life is, I have to keep things organized and under control.

AcWri while travelling

With my graduate students (I no longer supervise undergrads) I always try to show them the benefits of a structured daily routine. I developed my writing, reading and research habits well before I got to graduate school. But it was during the PhD that I found lack of structure most challenging.

When I started my PhD, I quickly realized that grad school is VERY unstructured. For someone like me, lack of structure is extremely disorienting. So I forced myself to retain structure: I took graduate school as a job, I worked at my desk on campus, etc.

My hope is that this blog post and those linked throughout will be useful to those of you who are seeking to develop a sustainable writing practice.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – January 1, 2025

Of zombie papers and manuscripts…

I have A LOT of zombie papers and book manuscripts…

Highlighting, scribbling marginalia, reading, writing

You all know those zombie papers and manuscripts: things you wrote, you ALMOST completed, you sent out for peer review and got a revise-and-resubmit that you never converted into published articles, books that were nearly completely written or edited, that perhaps got lost in the peer review because you could not fathom complete the revisions.

Those are zombie papers and manuscripts.

These manuscripts and papers haven’t died a slow death yet, but somehow remain in the imagination of researchers. I asked on BlueSky how do people deal with zombie papers and manuscripts.

A summary of responses here:

  • Some people use bits and pieces of the zombie papers to revamp and refine ideas.
  • Others were happy to just leave them be and make peace with the fact that these projects will never come to fruition.
  • And others said they do come back to their old projects.

Writing on campus

What I found extremely useful were the prompting questions about why I am hanging on to zombie projects:

  • Dr. Nicole Janz asked “are they sunk cost projects that you really should leave behind, or low hanging fruits that deserve one last polish? Do they push you towards your Future Self and help you set your next 5 years’ agenda?”
  • Dr. Nico Trajtenberg asked: “Are they still an intellectual challenge or you just dislike sunk costs?”

Personally, I do not like sunk cost projects. I have already invested a lot of time and energy (and in some cases, research grant money) for those projects to be gone and done with. I also think some of them (or for the most part, ALL OF THEM) are low hanging fruits that I could potentially revamp quite quickly.

I have three full book manuscripts in that zombie stage: I am pretty much done with the writing, with the fieldwork, and I just need to put some effort into getting them in the shape that they can then be submitted to the press. I also have a few journal article manuscripts that I plan to “resuscitate”.

However, I already have given up on a few R&Rs. I decided that it wasn’t worth my energy and all the effort to convert them. Some of them, the reviewers required extra fieldwork or analyses.

I am totally NOT doing that.

I’d be interested to hear from my readers on what you would do with your zombie papers.

  • Do you plan to let them sit idle for a while and pick them up again?
  • Do you want to just be done with them and not return to them?
  • Will you pick up some pieces and bits and use them for newer work?

Posted in academia, writing.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 30, 2024

A new year, a new era, and a new beginning for my blog

As most of those of you who read my blog regularly can see, I’ve been blogging less in 2022, 2023 and 2024. I am not certain that this was a product of more work at my university, but instead, a bit of a writer’s block because of fear of uselessness. Let me explain.

Writing

When I began blogging (in 2006, 18 years ago), I did so to build a space for myself to think out loud, to write to a different audience (that was not entirely academic but also not the general public). As time has gone by, thousands of people began reading my blog and using my resources, either for themselves or to teach others how to do certain things in academia. While that made me extraordinarily proud (and still is a high point for me), it also made me feel responsible for posting USEFUL stuff.

And then, at some point, my blog stopped being (for me) a space for self-reflection and think things out loud, and began to remain in my head as a resource that I had to maintain, in one way or another. I felt that I didn’t have enough topics to blog about. That also led to a drought, and huge gaps on my blog.

This end-of-the-year in 2024 helped me think that this is not really a smart way of approaching my blog, especially for me. Yes, I want to write useful stuff, and particularly things that have been revealed to me through the many years I’ve been in academia (and government, and civil society, and industry), but I also want to have a space where I just dump thoughts and think things through. I’ll still write things that I have learned that I feel that might be useful for people to read, but I will also dump here my self-reflections whenever I feel that I need to think things through.

I hope that my blog and resources pages will remain useful for readers, but I also hope that rethinking my approach to blogging will enable me to feel even more free to write about the things that I am thinking about but I don’t have a scholarly space (in a journal or a book) to write.

Here’s to a new era and a new beginning for my blog.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 29, 2024

Connecting your specific research to broader questions in the literature, the field and the discipline

I am currently mentoring a few academics (my own PhD students and a few early-career TT scholars) and I am trying to teach them about how to frame their work in terms of the broader questions of a field, and a discipline. The kind of exercise I am executing, trying to teach how to connect specific case studies and approaches to the broader literature is not easy. The “hidden curriculum” is pervasive.

The Governance of Bottled Water in Mexico

Me giving a talk to students associated with the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of California Berkeley

So, how do we frame our work in terms of discipline- or field-wide questions or contributions to broader debates in the literature?

Here are three strategies that might help you frame your work more broadly and link your specific work to the larger discipline- and field-wide questions (click on each link to take you to the specific blog post where I already wrote in more detail about each strategy):

Each of the strands of my scholarly work contributes to different debates across disciplines, and to broader questions in the literature of each discipline and field. Below you will find some examples:

Example 1: One of my research areas is transnational environmental activism. While the case studies I examine are based in North America (Canada, the US and Mexico), my works speaks to broader debates on activism, protest and social movements. My research challenges preconceived notions and conventional wisdom that environmental non-governmental organization across countries form coalitions based on their shared values. Instead, I empirically demonstrate that the basis for collaboration and cooperation is a shared strategy, and to achieve consensus on these strategies, ENGOs share knowledge across borders and across the board.

This research strand and the projects I’ve conducted within it speak to broader debates on coalition-building within sociology, but also larger questions in international relations on the role of non-state actors in domestic, transnational and global politics and policy.

Example 2. Also within the realm of transnational environmental activism, but more specifically within the shaming and blaming academic bodies of literature in human rights scholarship and international relations, my work demonstrates empirically that countries are substantially receptive to external, non-state actors’ pressures to engage in domestic policy change. Our (Amanda Murdie and mine) research shows that environmental NGOs pusing for improved conditions have more success in countries where there is receptiveness and where civil society are substantively galvanized and organized.

Example 3: Another research area of mine is the governance of bottled water, primarily as an example of a negative commons. While the phenomenon I analyze (packaging a common pool resource, a commons) is rather specific (bottled water), in my work I dialogue with broader questions of resource governance, enclosure, property rights, etc. This empirical and theoretical work contributes to global debates on the human right to water, marketization and privatization. I extend the notion of commons (common pool resources) beyond its traditional boundaries and offer the definition of a negative commons: a commons that is only valued after a revaluation process, not intrinsically. Solid waste, wastewater and bottled water are all negative commons, according to my definition.

My work on bottled water also contributes to political science and public policy literatures, particularly to those focused on the interplay between interests, ideas and institutions. I show how bottled water consumption has increased not only as a result of increased marketing, a taste for “pure” water, and poor urban infrastructure but also as the result of weak regulatory regimes.

Example 4: I also study public policy (specifically policy instruments). While much of my work is specific to environmental regulation, I contribute to broader discussions on policy mixes, policy implementation, etc. My research demonstrates that policy instruments, particularly of the regulatory nature, work best when implemented in the form of policy mixes. This research contributes to debates on policy instrument design and implementation within the policy sciences literatures.

The following published pieces from other scholars do a masterful job of connecting their specific scholarship to broader questions and debates in their fields and disciplines.

In their article, Kiley and Vasey explain how their empirical results have implications for cultural sociology and political sociology, as well as for methodological advances on measurement of, and stability of cultural change.

In this article, Humphreys and Weinstein explain how using field experiments can help us tackle broader questions in the political economy of development.

Demonstrating how specific research projects answer and are linked to broader questions and debates in the scholarly literature is challenging, but it is also an important task that we need to undertake in order to demonstrate that we have made a contribution to the literature.

Hopefully this blog post will help you in this process!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – November 15, 2024

The value and importance of the pre-writing stage of writing

A lot of people ask me about my actual writing process, so I figured I should share some of my practices, and make them into blog posts. I’m lucky that, as I write this blog post, I have a full day available to write (no meetings).

The first element of my writing practice is the pre-writing stage.

I am a person of rituals and routines.

First, I brew a pot of coffee. My first cup of coffee is very important as it’s what sets the tone for the day. I take a few minutes to just be with myself and have my coffee.

Coffee

I am a Virgo, Type A, Upholder. I need routines and organization. The next step in my daily writing practice is what many call the Pre-Writing Stage.

I am not the kind of person who does “stream of consciousness” writing. I need to read first to get my thinking juices flowing. A number of people who write about writing recommend doing “Morning Pages”. This is a method developed by writer Julia Cameron. Three pages, stream-of-consciousness. This method is very helpful if you are feeling VERY stuck. I will be very honest and say that I don’t use it often.

Personally, I write by memorandums and using outlines. What does this mean, in practice? Well, I don’t write entire papers. I don’t even write entire sections.

I write memos.

Memo v 4 second paragraph filled

The key, however, is to write EFFECTIVE memos. Memos that you’ll use. Memos that you can copy-and-paste into your papers.

In this particular blog post, however, I want to emphasize the Pre-Writing Stage, because I find that not having a routine that helps me focus completely hinders my ability to generate words. My Pre-Writing Stage includes drinking a cup of coffee, centering myself, but also READING.

I need to read in order to get my brain in order to write. I can’t just blurt words out.

What does my Pre-Writing Routine entail?

Pre-Writing in my case ALWAYS implies at least 4 things:

  1. Look over at my list of writing commitments (and prioritize what I need to write first. Deadlines are great for this!)
  2. Check which memos I’ve written and which ones need to be written.
  3. Read about the topic.
  4. Review which particular memo I need to write based on the paper outline I’ve generated.

For example, right now I’m writing about how research questions fit with other components of the research design process. So I re-read a few materials I’ve read about this specific topic, from articles to books.

Pre-writing stage

I find that sometimes, people think that reading is NOT part of their writing practice, and that the time they spend reading BEFORE starting to write is somehow a waste of time.

For me, reading and often times, re-reading is what gives me the brain fuel to start writing. READING IS WRITING. There’s no way around it. If you want to write, you need to read.

Though sometimes I can, in fact, sit down and start producing words, I find that doing a bit of re-reading and THEN sketching on paper what I’m going to write about and how I’m going to do it helps me. I usually sketch and draft on index cards, this helps me think through ideas.

Pre-writing stage

As you can see from the photo above, I developed 4 Guiding Questions that will help me start writing. I classify Guiding Questions as part of the “Prompts” category.

Writing Prompts, as their name suggest, are elements that help you get started, that set actions in motion.

Because I am writing about Research Questions, the 4 Guiding Questions that will act as prompts for me are:

  • what is a research question?
  • what elements or characteristics would make a research question “good”?
  • what are the different types and typologies of RQs?
  • how are research questions linked to other elements of research design?

I usually generate ONE memorandum per prompt. This breakdown of the work allows me to feel less overwhelmed.

I don’t think to hit 2,000 words. I just need to answer ONE Guiding Question.

To summarize my Pre-Writing Routine:

  1. Writing, most often than not, may require a Pre-Writing Routine. Mine includes reading, planning, organizing my thoughts and drinking coffee.
  2. A Pre-Writing Routine that includes reading and sketching your thoughts may be helpful to you as you develop your writing practice. Make the best of outlines.
  3. You don’t have to write 5,000 words per day. All you need to worry about is just a few words, a few minutes. ONE Memorandum.

I hope this blog post is useful to you as you develop your writing practice.

Carrie Bradshaw Pre Writing Routine

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 16, 2024

My experience teaching residential academic writing workshops

A few years ago, Dr. Andrew Fischer invited me to teach a workshop that would help doctoral candidates with structuring their dissertation and write it. Though the course is called “Post-Fieldwork Workshop“, I designed it to combine combine research design with research methods, project management, and academic writing.

I started teaching this workshop online, which was very complicated because obviously I had to teach at a reasonable hour for my students in The Netherlands, which is 7 hours ahead of Mexico City. Waking up at 1:00am to start teaching at 4:00am is really absolutely insane.

Over the past couple of years, I have been teaching this course in person, at the beautiful Buitengoed de Uylenburg in Delft, The Netherlands.

Cohort 2024

WHAT MAKES THESE RESIDENTIAL WORKSHOPS SO SUCCESSFUL?

As an academic, a substantial part of what I do is to analyze, and think. I have spent the past few weeks and months pondering what makes my residential workshops so successful.

Here are four factors that I believe make my residential workshop effective and an experience that all participants would want to repeat.

  1. The setting (The Buitengoed de Uylenburg)
  2. The workshop design (combination of academic writing, research desgin and qualitative methods)
  3. The in-residence component (including all meals)
  4. The composition of the cohorts

1. The setting (Buitengoed de Uylenburg)

The hotel that hosts my workshop every year (Buitengoed de Uylenburg) is absolutely beautiful, secluded, located just outside of Delft, in the Delfgauw region.

Buitengoed de Uylenburg

Buitengoed de Uylenburg

The hotel is obviously well fitted to host large(ish) groups, and we all had lodging that enabled us to write from within our own rooms too. Plus we could sit and have meaningful conversations and do nature walks around the site.

2. The workshop design.

I originally was asked to spend the entire week teaching how to develop a writing practice, and how to write a dissertation. Since the workshop’s goal was to help those who had just finished their fieldwork. But once I started teaching the course, even after having read a survey asking them what they needed support with, I realized much of my work had to focus on helping them craft a good research question, rethink their research design, manage their dissertation project, AND apply qualitative and mixed methods.

Cohort 2022

I have now designed the course to be a combination of research design, research methods, academic writing and project management. It’s only 4 full days (1 afternoon, 6 morning/afternoon sessions and 1 morning session on Friday for a total of 8 sessions) though we are together Monday through Friday. It IS a VERY intense course and both students and I end the week very tired, but really happy.

3. The in-residence component.

I will confess that I was initially a bit wary of doing a residential workshop. For better or worse, doing EVERYTHING together meant that they would see me in my pyjamas come down for breakfast, and that we would be sharing each and every single meal together.

Buitengoed De Uylenburg (Delft, The Netherlands)

But in hindsight, one of the best things about this residential workshop and specifically the in-residence component is that precisely, you are forced to eat each and every meal together and that creates and fosters a sense of camaraderie that perhaps wouldn’t be obtained without the on-site living arrangements component. Also, we were provided with all three meals, so nobody had to really think about cooking or shopping for groceries.

Buitengoed de Uylenburg

I cannot say enough good things about the Buitengoed de Uylenburg, both the facilities and the staff. And the food was FANTASTIC.

We ate breakfast and lunch within the facilities of the hotel, and for dinners, we ate at the Cafe Du Midi, right outside the gates of the hotel.

Buitengoed de Uylenburg

4. The composition of the cohort.

This is perhaps what seems most random of the four elements but in hindsight it really does make a difference. Whenever I have taught a residential workshop, many of the participants belong to the same PhD cohort or know each other one way or another, sometimes through the CERES School, or through their own universities.

Cohort 2024 CERES Connecting the Dots Workshop (Delft, The Netherlands)

Even when I’ve had participants from outside CERES, The Netherlands, they have completely develop a fantastic camaraderie. This closeness among course participants makes it easier to teach an entire group the same skills, because there’s continuous and collegial support among peers.

Cohort 2022

Overall, what makes me come back every year to teach this residential workshop is the very positive experience I have with every cohort I have worked with. Of course, I also loved teaching the same course online, but the in-person, in-residence component is definitely worth it.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 28, 2024

“State-Sponsored Activism: Bureaucrats and Social Movements in Brazil” – Jessica Rich – my reading notes

Rich State Sponsored Activism - Bureaucrats and Social Movements in Democratic BrazilDr. Jessica A. J. Rich is an incredible researcher, scholar, and writer. Her book, “State-Sponsored Activism: Bureaucrats and Social Movements in Brazil” is a textbook model for how to write a book in so many ways. I also study social movements in Latin America, so it was important for me to read her book and catch up with the most recent and cutting edge scholarship.

Furthermore, as someone who teaches both research design, research methods and academic writing, I wanted to read it to help my students learn how to write better, particularly those who have decided to write a book-manuscript-style doctoral dissertation. I can certify that her book’s introductory chapter is pure gold.

You can read the entire book yourselves, as it is a real delight, and extremely insightful. Most importantly, for those of us teaching Research Design, “State-Sponsored Activism” offers a great model that you can show your doctoral students for how to construct their PhD dissertation’s argument and structure.

Two core questions animate Dr. Rich’s book: “how does civil society develop the capacity to organize and advocate for collective political goals? And what explains the endurance of civic activism once the initial success of setting policy has passed?” (p. 4, Rich 2022)

Rich’s book argument can be summarized as follows: “Brazil AIDS movement was able to endure and even expand over time because the movement was cultivated by national government bureaucrats who depended on activists to help them pursue their policy goals” (p. 4). This finding resonates with results from my own research.

In my work I found that SEMARNAT officials actively aided and supported RETC activists as they wanted to harmonize environmental policy instrument design for PRTRs across all of North America, even though the Mexican was targeted for policy change (Pacheco-Vega 2005). Insights I gained from this research tracks with what Rich finds in her own work. Bureaucrats can, and often will, use their relationships with civil society organizations to advance their own policy goals, through them. In a way, they operate in a similar way to what I call a second-order pressure transmission mechanism (Pacheco-Vega 2015).

Table of Contents State-Sponsored ActivismThough I loved the entire book, two sections in the introductory chapter really stood out for me: Alternative Explanations (where Dr. Rich clearly lays out different potential AEs to her research questions) and the Contributions section (expanded in Chapter 8).

When I teach Research Design, I actively emphasize to my students the importance of making their research contributions VERY CLEAR. Rich makes her contributions stand out by contrasting her findings with traditional theories of civil society. This theory-empirics link is KEY.

Overall, a fantastic book that I enjoyed and plan to assign in my Research Design class and thesis completion workshop.

10/10 recommended reading.

PS – I’ve used one of Jessica A.J. Rich’s published journal articles to showcase reading strategies on my blog too.

Posted in academia, reading notes, research, research design, social movements.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 27, 2024

Reading Like a Writer – Francine Prose – my reading notes

Francine Prose's Reading Like a WriterI brought Francine Prose’s book, Reading Like a Writer with me on a research trip to London in the fall of 2022 for 2 reasons: 1) I thought the plane I was taking would not have power plugs in each seat so I believed I wouldn’t be able to work, and 2) I wanted to read it while on The Tube while roaming London.

What Prose asks of her readers (also, would-be-writers) is that we pay attention to EACH WORD.

This statement, I know, is going to stir a debate in the scholarly realm, for multiple reasons. I advocate for having multiple reading strategies: skimming, close reading, etc. A couple of tweets by scholars I know and respect (and love) have gone viral on whether we should read each word or skim all the time.

Well, I very strongly believe that there is a place for each strategy: meso-level reading, super quick skim, in-depth.

What Francine Prose asks of us is to consider that, for all the value that skimming has, learning how to write WILL demand of the would-be-writer to READ EACH AND EVERY WORD from the stuff they read. She does NOT devalue skimming (nor do I, see my post)

I will very openly say here that while I learned to speed-read when I was in grade school, and I can read quite fast, I actually took the time to Read Every Single Word of Francine Prose’s “Reading Like A Writer” because she proposes that we do so, in order to learn how to write.

It took me about 1 hour and 25 minutes-ish to get from Terminal 3 at Heathrow to where I am staying, at Queen Mary University of London. I decided to ONLY take the Underground, and to NOT check my iPhone and solely read Prose’s book. I made it through page 67, reading EACH WORD.

I also took abundant notes (remember I now carry a small notebook everywhere I go? I learned my lesson the hard way).

Prose goes out of her way to show us two remarkable things:

1) How to sign-post properly, and

2) How to read authors to distill their insights to help us.

Part of what has made me successful as a writer has been that I always do what Prose suggests we ought to do: read authors whose writing I love and try and draw insights from the way in which they line words up, construct sentences, and build paragraphs and cohesive narratives.

I went through Prose’s book looking exactly for the markers of a good sentence, a well-crafted paragraph, how she put words together. Her sign-posting is unreal. Each paragraph she writes is self-contained and gives you an important insight on how to write. 1 IDEA PER PARAGRAPH.

I read Prose the way she suggest we ought to read other writers: looking for what I could draw from her writing to inform mine. Other authors who write books on writing often give you their pearls of wisdom, what THEY believe is THE RIGHT WAY.

Not Prose. She shows you multiple scenarios, possibilities, ways of knowing and understanding writers’ craft. While Prose DOES distills her own wisdom into gems, she does so in a conversational style that makes you feel like you’re sitting besides her while she teaches you the craft of Reading and of Writing.

Bottom line: 10/10, I will keep this book in my “To Continually Check Out” shelf.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 26, 2024