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Search Results for: writing

My daily workflow: Breaking down the work in accomplish-able tasks

I won’t lie: I used to be the kind of guy who would write endless, long To-Do lists. I would list EVERYTHING I need to do. At first, it felt like I was being thorough. “Here is ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING I NEED TO ACCOMPLISH BY X DATE“. If you’ve ever written long To-Do lists, you probably […]

My daily workflow: On focusing on ONE task at a time

Some people have asked me what my daily workflow is, or told me that they find my blog useful so I figured I could do a post or series of posts on the topic, as it varies day by day. When I teach, I normally don’t do anything else other than teach that day. @raulpacheco […]

8 sequential steps to write a first rough draft of a research paper from start to finish (relatively quick and easy)

I promised a few weeks ago that I would blog about how I write a paper from start to finish. I was hoping to have screenshots of every stage of my paper writing, but obviously doing my own research, fieldwork and travelling to academic conferences to present papers (and writing those papers in haste!) didn’t […]

Some advice on building conference panels

A couple of weeks ago, Dr. Yara Asi asked me for some advice on how to assemble good conference panels. I was super crazy busy after being ill for 3 weeks and doing fieldwork in Madrid for 2, so I just came around to writing this post. Apologies for the delay. Here are 5 tips […]

Working at my home office vs working at my campus office

A few weeks back, Ingrid Delavigne on Twitter asked me about my thoughts on working at my home office vis-a-vis working at my campus office. @raulpacheco You might have already written about this, but I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts re: working from home vs the office. — Ingrid Delavigne (@IngridDelavigne) December 22, 2015 […]

My 2016 word: FOCUS

If you follow me on Twitter you probably know that I decided not to write anything until I felt physically better. As usual for me, I finished the year 2015 sick. This was actually quite predictable. I accepted an invitation to participate in a “best practices in local government” judgment competition committee which increased my […]

“Thinking Polycentrically” Authors’ Workshop at the Ostrom Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis

This week was one of the most intense yet extraordinarily rewarding weeks of the past year. I participated in a week-long (well, 4 days, but you have to include travel to Bloomington too!) polycentricity workshop at the Ostrom Workshop. For many years, the idea of multilevel, nested, non-hierarchical models of governance of natural resources and […]

6 Twitter tips for busy academics (based on my own strategy)

Many fellow academics, when they meet me in real life, ask me if I really tweet every single minute of the day (if you follow me on Twitter, you probably have seen me tweet a lot). The reality is… I don’t. I actually tweet a lot less than you think I do. Here’s what I […]

Color-coding your highlighting when reading articles and book chapters

One of the skills that needs to be in undergraduate and graduate students’ portfolios (and even post-PhD folks) is the ability to read, analyze, synthesize and then produce summaries of the research work we do. Highlighting is one of the ways in which I help myself learn the material I read, and I do it […]

Environmental NGOs and strategic naming and shaming – Murdie & Urpelainen 2015 and Pacheco-Vega 2015

One of the things I have always wanted to do has been to engage in a dialogue with the authors of research papers whose work is along the lines of mine. This format of writing online commentary on other scholars’ research isn’t new (I was just invited to write a commentary on a colleague of […]

Organizing PDFs of journal articles, book and book chapters

As any regular reader of my research blog knows, I’m obsessive (and compulsive) when it comes to organizing. Organization is what makes my brain work properly. I schedule my life in very rigid ways, allocate and protect my time to research, teaching, service, meetings, following up with students’ work, office hours and also self-care time. […]

Organizing journal articles and books

On my Twitter account, I often post photos of my writing process, or my home office, or my campus office, and sometimes fellow scholars make remarks on whether my actions make sense or are helpful to them. In response to one of them, I made a joke on Twitter that people might not be interested […]

My lecture slide deck preparation process

As with everything I do, I’m pretty old-fashioned. I read (in advance), write my lectures by hand, and then I prepare the Power Point slides. While I did have a presentation coach (Janice Tomich, an excellent coach I can recommend who is based out of Vancouver), I recognize I’ve fallen back into some of my […]

Highlighting and note-taking on journal articles, books and book chapters as a model of engagement

As I’ve made it clear in most of my academic writing blog posts, I do things the old-fashioned way. This means that I’m a fan of printing out journal articles and writing on the margins, or making photocopies of book chapters, and highlighting passages that I think are important. I’m not a cognitive scientist so […]

Online resources to help students summarize journal articles and write critical reviews

The courses I teach tend to be very practical and applied. My teaching philosophy is founded on helping my students acquire employable skills. Writing solid, robust, concise and easy-to-read analytical summaries should be an acquired tool that they then can transfer to other fields. Politicians, bureaucrats and high-level people in government that I’ve talked to […]

My Fall 2015 weekly schedule

If you’ve followed me on Twitter or read my blog for any length of time, you’ll know that I’m pretty rigid in my schedule. Ever since I was a child I have done everything adhering to strict deadlines and I started using calendars perhaps in my very early years. A lot of people think I […]

On the need of slow scholarship: Towards a new paradigm of research

The “slow everything” movements (slow water, slow food, slow blogging) have become popular in recent years, largely as a response to the excessive speed at which we lead our lives nowadays. Given that one of my claims to fame has always been how fast I am at doing everything I do, my own response to […]

#MyAcWriStrategies: Write first, edit later, and edit by hand

Perhaps the weirdest thing about the way in which I conduct research and I write is that I find that the old-fashioned way works best. For me, doing everything online (on the screen) doesn’t work. I am quite well-versed in computer-aided qualitative analysis (I use N*Vivo, Atlas Ti and will start using Dedoose once I […]

Cleaning and organizing my office before the school term starts

While normally I try to keep my desk quite neat, both at my home office and at my campus office, I always need to spend some time cleaning up, organizing and rearranging my stuff before the new semester starts. I do this as well every time I finish a writing piece. I need to reorganize […]

On the power of ethnography in public policy research

I was going to write this blog post a long time ago, every since Ryan Briggs (Virginia Tech) alerted me to these posts by Tom Pepinsky (Cornell University), Ken Opalo (Stanford University) and Chris Blattman (Columbia University), but then the “worm wars” debate happened on Twitter, I got pulled into it (inadvertently and unwillingly) and […]

My State and Local Government Fall 2015 syllabus (CIDE)

If you follow me on Twitter, you probably know that I requested help both on the Facebook Political Scientists page and on Twitter on how to integrate more female scholars’ writing in my State and Local Government syllabus for this fall. As I’ve explained before, I teach in English at CIDE even though the main […]

Integrating under-represented scholars into my syllabi

About two years ago, Kim Yi Dionne (Smith College), Tom Pepinsky (Cornell University), Steve Saideman (Carleton University) and myself engaged in a really fun conversation on how much content by female scholars did our syllabi have (you can read the whole Twitter thread here). Being perfectly honest, the whole issue of gender parity rarely occurred […]

3 years with @CIDE_mx already!

Last July 1st I celebrated my first 3 years with CIDE (Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas, the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics). I joined CIDE on July 1st, 2012, after spending 2006-2012 teaching in the Department of Political Science at The University of British Columbia. I have extremely fond memories from UBC […]

My #AcWri strategies: Write memos about readings and about research

When I was in undergraduate (I studied chemical engineering), it was bizarre for my male colleagues that I would have such neat printing and that my notes were always drawn in different colors and clearly differentiated. For example, when I drew distillation towers, I would use purple for the distillate and pink for the vapor […]