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How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble: A Practical Guide (my reading notes)

I had been wanting to transfer my Twitter reading notes about How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble: A Practical Guide but because of personal health issues I had not, so I am glad that I am now able to write, using January 1st, 2020 as the backdrop! I am having a coffee, and copying my Twitter notes about the Firth, Mewburn and Lehman book (to which I will refer by the unfortunate acronym FML, which also stands for F*ck My Life).

Reading writing working

Audience: faculty members, post-docs, advanced graduate students. I wouldn’t use this book with an undergraduate audience, nor with #AcWri (academic writing) beginners. The authors are very clear: we assume you already #AcWri. I would teach this book in an 8 week format, or maybe even a 1 week long workshop format.

We (everyone who writes about academic writing) tend to repeat some themes and topics all the time, but I strongly believe that Firth, Mewburn and Lehmann (FML) zeroed in on a couple of items we normally don’t discuss much:
– refining arguments
– presenting evidence

I like the conversational tone that FML maintain throughout the book (though, to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t all thrilled about the use of spider diagrams and snowflake diagrams – I think these two tools merit an entire book. They’re useful, but need to be explained in detail.

I like the conversational tone that FML maintain throughout the book (though, to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t all thrilled about the use of spider diagrams and snowflake diagrams – I think these two tools merit an entire book. They’re useful, but need to be explained in detail.

This means: you may want to get other 6 grad students and faculty, postdocs, etc. and follow along FML’s 7 chapters either in 7 weeks, or within an entire week (I would recommend one day per chapter, except beginning and end to fit within 5 days). Overall, a fine read.

Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book as a small token of appreciation for writing a blurb. This small gift does not affect in any way, shape or form my views of the book

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – January 1, 2020

Human Right to Water and Bottled Water Consumption: Governing at the Intersection of Water Justice, Rights and Ethics (new chapter)

Bottled waterSomething I used to do and for some reason stopped doing was to write on my blog about my recent publications. I am hoping to re-start this practice with all my current and forthcoming publications. This recently published book chapter (though with a publication date of 2020), “Human Right to Water and Bottled Water Consumption: Governing at the Intersection of Water Justice, Rights and Ethics”, is included in the new version of the acclaimed edited volume that Dr. Farhana Sultana and Dr. Alex Loftus produced in 2012. The 2020 new volume on the human right to water charts new debates regarding the global commitment to end water scarcity and facilitate access to the vital liquid. The new book, Water Politics: Governance, Justice and the Right to Water. I wrote a thread describing my main findings and summarizing the chapter, which I reproduce below. This chapter is one of a series of outputs I am generating on my research on the politics of bottled water.

I’m a chemical engineer with a Masters of Business Administration, a Masters in economics of technical change, & a double PhD in human geography and political science. This is why I really try to look at public policy issues from a multidisciplinary perspective. I do believe my work speaks for itself in this regard. I am hoping folks teaching water politics and environmental public policy will find this chapter useful. The citation can be found below:

Pacheco-Vega, R. (2020). Human right to water and bottled water consumption: Governing at the intersection of water justice, rights, and ethics. In F. Sultana & A. J. Loftus (Eds.), Water Politics: Governance, Rights, and Justice (pp. 113–128). London: Routledge.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 29, 2019

On “impostor syndrome” and “FOBMO” (Fear Of Being Missed Out) – the “Publish A LOT” strategy

Even though English is my first language (contrary to what many people may think because of my name and last names) and I was trained in English-language institutions (The University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and University of Manchester, in Manchester, England), I have published A TON of Spanish-language journal articles and book chapters. Despite my interest in dialoguing with the global scholarly literature, I always felt that I would be at some point working in Mexico and that I needed to publish in Spanish in order to talk to my target audience.

My publications folder

OH, SO FOOLISH OF ME.

I thought I’d get A TON of citations by publishing in Spanish. I didn’t. I haven’t. Despite the massive volume of Spanish-language publications I have, I am not as cited in this language as I am in English.

BUT…

For a while there, I didn’t have (in my view) enough publications in this language to show the complexities, nuanced shades, importance and relevance of my work. I felt an enormous sense of FOBMO (Fear Of Being Missed Out). Perhaps it was insecurity, perhaps it was FOBMO, I can’t quite pinpoint how I felt. I tried to articulate my feelings on this Twitter thread.

Again, I used this Twitter thread to reflect on my publication strategy. I can’t say if it is good or bad, but I think that there is value in not letting your own insecurities be an obstacle to your intellectual development. Perhaps I could have used a different publication strategy, I don’t know. But I do know that I sometimes have felt FOBMO. Despite the fact that I have a pretty decent publication record.

google scholar rpv

I strongly believe that losing my FOBMO is partly because I now have a much larger, stronger and robust publication record that shows my intellectual development. Again, this entry is NOT a “this is a strategy I recommend” suggestion but more like a “I wouldn’t recommend this strategy” blog post.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 28, 2019

On the importance of rest and recuperation (R&R) over the holidays

I won’t tell anyone what to do, but as I close out a terrible year, health-wise, I want to share a reflection regarding MY OWN EXPERIENCE with overwork. I think everyone can do whatever they prefer, I’m just using my experience to reflect on the profound inequalities and inequities of the higher education system and academia in general as it stands now (much as it has improved over the last few years).

Hotel San Trópico (Marina Vallarta, Puerto Vallarta, México)

Photo of me on holidays in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, a couple of Decembers ago

My reflective Twitter thread started like this:

I have A LOT of experience with overwork. I was brought up as an overachiever. My life as a child was pretty regimented and (because 2 of my grandparents were in the military), quasi-militarized. I do not regret my upbringing and I’m grateful to my parents that they did this. I grew up expecting to balance and juggle a full-time school load, piano lessons, swimming lessons, and volunteering teaching adults how to read and write in gang-riddled neighbourhoods. I switched piano for theatre and competitive dancing (note I didn’t just dance, I COMPETED).

I switched from swimming and basketball to volleyball. I THRIVED while playing volleyball, and trained 4 hours every single day. I reached juniors national-level competitive team-status and travelled the country and abroad to play tournaments. All of this, while balancing school.

To me, my friends and my social life were irreplaceable, so I balanced competitive volleyball, competitive dancing, volunteering, a full-time school load (chemical engineering, which isn’t an “easy’ undergraduate degree) with having a social life, friends and a close-knit family. I have plenty of experience with big workloads and the challenges of juggling activities trying to keep a semblance of balance. I had tough and rigorous professors, and I do not regret having faced these challenges at all whatsoever.

HOWEVER…

When I entered grad school, more specifically my PhD, I felt that trying to manage the workload was like drinking water through a straw that was coming from a firehose. I am 5’11 and often felt that my workload was like 7 feet tall.

I frequently felt like I was drowning. LITERALLY

Note, I DO have special skillS. I speed-read, I touch-type over 100 words per minute, and I have quasi-eidetic memory. To me, preparing for comprehensive exams was a total breeze, and when I defended my doctoral dissertation, I basically hit the ball out of the park.

Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega at CIGA-UNAM (Morelia)

Me giving a talk at UNAM in 2014. This is one of the things I love doing the most.

But even with those skills, I STRUGGLED. When I transitioned to being a professor, I reflected on the fact that even with my skills and extended experience being a systematic planner, I WAS STRUGGLING, I thought to myself: “what happens with everyone else who doesn’t have the privileges that I do? How much do THEY struggle?”

Being in a highly competitive environment drives up self-imposed excessive workloads. In graduate school I started getting tired regularly (despite playing competitive volleyball on a regular basis too), and this has followed me through my professor career.

THIS WAS NOT, AND IS NOT NORMAL.

I’m ok with being competitive, working hard, but I also like playing hard and more than anything, RESTING HARD. I regularly face this challenge of having a fulfilling academic career all the while trying to achieve some semblance of balance. I’ve written about this since 2013 (you can check my posts below).

2018 brought a really bad chronic pain episode, and 2019 started with a similar case. My first 2019 pain-free-day was February 15th, 2019. Over the second semester of 2019, I developed a terrible case of psoriasis/eczema/dermatitis combined with chronic fatigue/chronic pain. I am grateful that for the most part, I lived in Paris with relatively low-levels of pain, or pain-free (for the last few months of my visiting professorship at Sorbonne Nouvelle’s Institute D’Etudes D’Amerique Latine”). Because at least, I got extended periods of time to THINK.

I know for a fact from my experience this year that chronic pain, chronic fatigue and dermatitis all have impeded my scholarly performance. What I could accomplish with my full capacities, I did from February 15, 2019 to September 15, 2019 (which is when my dishydrotic eczema manifested itself alongside the chronic fatigue).

I understand that many of you may need SOME time to catch up with the accumulated workload you have. I had to do it too. FINE. I still suggest that you ought to take at least a few days off, in the way “off” is important to you (I can’t stop reading scholarly literature, so “time off” = “reading a nerdy book at a leisurely pace”). In closing:

As I was writing my thread I came across an important addendum: I am well aware of the fact that contingent faculty may be forced to overwork precisely because of the very nature of their labour precariousness. This is why academics’ wellness should be also higher education organizations’ responsibility. It’s a structural issue. We can’t let academic institutions off the hook without taking responsibility of the well-being of staff, faculty and students.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 28, 2019

On the importance of teaching robust work using qualitative methods in the social sciences

One of my biggest pet peeves is how we end up rehashing discussions all the time about the same topics. I feel forced to write Twitter threads and blog posts about the validity, rigor and importance of qualitative research on a regular basis, particularly because for some scholars, qualitative work appears to be considered “easy”. The relatively recent popularity of quantitative and experimental approaches in political science combined with an apparent belief that qualitative research is less relevant/rigorous/well done than quantitative work seem to be two factors that influence uptake and popularity of qualitative research methods in political science.

Mazapil - Concepcion del Oro - Salaverna - Fieldwork June 8 2018

Photo from one of my trips doing ethnographic fieldwork in Zacatecas, Mexico, over the summer of 2018.

A recent article in PS: Politics titled Graduate Qualitative Methods Training in Political Science: A Disciplinary Crisis by Cassandra Emmons and Andrew Moravcsik reports that there appears to be a dearth of training in qualitative methods in the political science field at many universities. I really don’t have much time to discuss it in detail so both this post and my Twitter thread only discuss two aspects of the debate: the importance of teaching qualitative methods and of publishing good qualitative work.

I admit that I DO have a stake in the development of qualitative methods as a field.

My Twitter thread draws from my experience here in Mexico. While I do field research all over the world, I do have a lot of work that focuses on Mexico, and as a result, I need to read scholarship in the Spanish language. In my experience reading a lot of the Spanish-language stuff that is being published in Mexico (and A TON of what’s published in English worldwide), it seems to me as though people are teaching that “qualitative methods is everything that is not quantitative methods”.

WRONG.

The conversation on research methods and qualitative vs. quantitative is far from over, and I am hoping this blog post will contribute to the discussion too.

Posted in academia, qualitative methods, research, research methods.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 27, 2019

On the importance of cultivating a network of friends and colleagues OUTSIDE of academia

I have had a very diverse life and with that, I have developed various networks of friends who do NOT work at all in academia. These friends and colleagues have enriched my life enormously.

Rebecca, John, Ryan, Tanya and myself

John, Rebecca, Ryan, Tanya and myself when I was in graduate school. All of them worked in the tech industry, while I was studying my PhD.

One of the reasons why I have never feared the tenure process outcomes is precisely the broad range of activities I have developed in my previous lives and the extensive and diverse network of networks I have. I am lucky to have friends and colleagues in many industries, and because of my interdisciplinary training and work experiences in government, industry, consulting, academia and business, I can do a lot more than being a professor.

I myself have done a number of different things. I have waited tables, served coffee, managed an office, danced and modeled professionally, designed marketing campaigns and blogger relations programmes. I have done public relations and media training work. I have advised startups. I was my parents’ assistants when they were lawyers (my Mom decided to leave law behind, did a PhD in Spain at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and became a professor of political science).

Having friends of very diverse backgrounds and doing different things myself, (working as a chemical engineer in a plant, working in government as an advisor and within the bureaucracy, tutoring and teaching disadvantaged and marginalized adults some basic literacy skills) has expanded my world from the narrower academic field.

I can do A LOT MORE.

I have worked as a management consultant, as a website programmer, and I have a super strong network of friends in extremely diverse fields. I love being a professor, don’t get me wrong, and I’m very good at it, but I don’t necessarily need to stay in academia. I have plenty other options.

Having friends with diverse backgrounds and engaging in other professional activities not directly related to academia has made me a lot leas worried and wary about a turbulent job market. Because I can do a lot of things beyond being a professor. That’s greatly thanks to having friends who work outside of academia.

Moral of the story: cultivate a network of people who are WITHIN academia AND a network of people who are OUTSIDE academia.

Both are very important.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 27, 2019

Project management for academics I: Managing a research pipeline

I am always honored when fellow scholars mention my name as someone worthy of being followed for advice on planning.

I am a very systematic planner and I love having my life neatly organized and planned (I am a Virgo, a Type A and an Upholder).

Drafts monthly plans

While I have taken Masters-level project management courses and have read the entire Project Management Institute PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge), I have a very particular set of processes that work for me, and sometimes, work for other folks.

The one question I saw on Twitter today regarding how to do research planning prompted me to curate a list of resources and scholars whose research pipeline processes might be of help for anybody who follows me or reads my blog. Here is my Twitter thread.

While this thread was about project management, I had to discuss something equally important: if you are the principal investigator of a laboratory, or you use the lab model to engage your students and research assistants, you can’t develop your own research pipeline without consulting others. Each member of the team’s research pipeline needs to align with that of the principal investigator, and vice-versa.

A few respondents offered their own advice on research pipeline management and I link to their responses in my thread.

Overall, I do hope that this thread and blog post will be useful to scholars as they plan their research pipeline! Also grateful to every scholar I quoted here for sharing their processes.

Posted in academia, planning, productivity, research.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 19, 2019

Analysing and teaching theoretical debates using a set of articles in Point-Counter Point-Rejoinder format

One of the things I find most challenging to teach is the skill necessary to map out scholarly debates. I find that most professors offer a list of articles, book chapters and books that (in theory) map the field as they see it. However, I find that very few if any provide any guidance on to how to understand an entire field or sub-field of scholarship through scholarly exchanges and conversations. In this blog post I show how we can teach theoretical debates using a set of articles in Point-Counter Point-Rejoinder format (PCR).

Reading highlighting scribbling

I strongly believe we ought to teach our students how to map out scholarly debates. It’s on us, rather than on them, to show them the road map: who says what in the field, who says the opposite thing (or a counter point), and is the balance of evidence supporting Theory A or Theory B or neither?

To be perfectly frank, I DO think that within a course, faculty owe it to students to draw the map of the literature rather than asking of the student to make sense of all scholarly work and create the map themselves. HOWEVER, I strongly believe that for comprehensive/qualifying/preliminary exams, students SHOULD be able to map out the debates themselves.

Beyond the corruption theory Point-Counterpoint-Rejoinder set of articles I show above, I found another set that discusses environmental justice.

Now, so far I have only provided two sets of articles in PCR format. I draw from one of these sets to showcase how to write the argumentation in a Point-Counterpoint-Rejoinder kind of way.

I also believe it is important to teach our students how to write critiques that are firm but courteous. They should also be able to highlight their own contributions without destroying the scholarship of people who came before them.

Hopefully this blog post will be of use to those of you who want to teach strategies to map out the literature using scholarly exchanges as examples.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 10, 2019

Teaching proper citation practices: avoiding “Daisy chains” and grandparented cites when doing citation tracing

I have written a lot about how to do proper citation tracing (both forward and backward) to search who has cited whom and facilitate proper attribution of ideas.

I am a fan of always going back to the original source.

And I know grandparenting citations is often the result of not being able to go back to the original source.

Robust and ethical citation practices are an important part of what we do as scholarly writers. I am not a fan of what I used to call grandfathered citations

This is an example of a grandparented citation:”As Pacheco-Vega argues (2010, p. 874, in Gomez-Alvarez 2013, p. 30)…” I understand that historians will push back against my dislike of grandparented citations, but as noted by several scholars elsewhere (and in the paper I link below), there is a high risk that you’ll end up quoting someone saying something they did not intend to say.

Dr. Harrison, Dr. Academic Batgirl and I aren’t the only one concerned with Daisy chains and grandparented citations. See Patronek et al (2016) “Who is minding the bibliography? Daisy chaining, dropped leads, and other bad behavior using examples from the dog bite literature”

I think grandparented citations should be only valid when it’s really next to impossible to find the original source. Thoughts?

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 5, 2019

Prioritizing work and the TOMs/TOTOs hierarchy

One of my biggest problems, as I have openly said everywhere, is that I often prioritize other people over myself. This is partly because I’m overly generous by nature, partly because I also know that helping others will come to me naturally, whereas sometimes tackling my own work is hard and difficult.

Writing while in Berlin

One of the tricks I use to force myself to prioritize my own work and well being before others is using the TOMs/TOTOs hierarchy.

As I said on Twitter, for my #2ThingsADay I focus on TOMs, and when I get to campus, I work on the TOTOs – this may sound selfish, but seriously if I don’t carve time for my own writing, I simply work on stuff that I owe to other people and I never focus on my own writing.

You may want to consider start prioritizing your TOMs.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 1, 2019