Search Results for: writing
The first book in a series of volumes I have been interested in reading is Joan Bolker’s “Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis“. First on my list of books is Joan Bolker's Writing your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day. Wishing had read […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 16, 2018
I have been travelling non-stop since January 2018 even though I had promised myself I would not do this ever again. But my scholarly research takes me to a number of places, including San Francisco last week for the 2018 meeting of the International Studies Association (ISA) and this week to the 2018 meeting of […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 13, 2018
Since I usually write blog posts by request, unless there’s a pressing thought that I really want to get out and get off my chest, I normally make a list of what I’m supposed to be blogging about. A topic that I saw people insisting upon was the question of how to write an outline […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 17, 2018
Like many of my fellow professors, I feel the pressure of having to continuously write scholarly papers, present them at academic conferences, submit them for peer review and publish in highly-ranked journals. I share the same responsibilities: I lead a 19 people research team in a multiple-institutions, collaborative, large-scale, multi-method research project on water conflict […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 12, 2018
Despite the fact that I have interacted with Dr. Wendy Laura Belcher quite a lot, we discuss academic writing almost every day, I had never written my reading notes of her book (Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks – A Guide to Academic Success, published by SAGE). Mind you, I’ve used her book on […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 7, 2018
Writing book reviews, to me, feels as the service we all ought to provide other scholars. I don’t post actual reviews on my website (instead, I post my reading notes because I don’t know if my notes are detailed enough to be an actual review, and whether I’ll do justice to the author), but I […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– December 26, 2017
This year, I’ve been reading a lot about writing (in general), and academic writing (in particular), because more and more people come to my website for advice on how to write, and I’ve created a nice (small-but-growing) network of scholars on whose advice I rely on to make my own prose. I recently received a […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– December 23, 2017
One of the challenges we (professors, and I believe, graduate students, contingent faculty, and a broad range of other academics and adjacent-to-academia folks) face is that we increasingly feel that we don’t have enough time and that we are too busy, and sometimes we feel too overwhelmed by everything we have to do: supervise theses, […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– November 5, 2017
Friday (yesterday) was the last day of a conference and pre/post doctoral I co-organized with colleagues from INECOL, University of Helsinki, Universite du Luxembourg and obviously my own institution, CIDE. Being an on-site host for a conference is a logistical nightmare I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, but I have an amazing team and […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– November 4, 2017
I’ve had a “want-to-do-can-do-can’t-do-wish-I-could-do” relationship with AcWriMo (the Academic Writing Month, first started as #AcBoWriMo, Academic Book Writing Month, in November of 2011, by Dr. Charlotte Frost (@PhD2Published on Twitter). On its sixth year now, November has become the month where fellow academics decide that they need to push hard to get some writing out. […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– November 1, 2017
The second book in my list of volumes I’ve been reading which focus on academic writing is “Stylish Academic Writing” by Helen Sword. She has a series of three books, of which I had bought two, the first one being Stylish Academic Writing. A lot of people had recommended this book, on Twitter, when I […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 25, 2017
Before last year, I had actually not read academic writing books. I always loved the idea, but I never wanted to read what others had written about the topic before I developed my own writing practice. This year, I’m doing a concerted effort to read them since I am writing my own book on academic […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 25, 2017
While I have a couple of blog posts pending (both by request, on how to prepare for comprehensive exams and how to build a research trajectory and a project pipeline for early career scholars), I wanted to write a post on something that I get asked about quite frequently. I arrived to the daily writing […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 29, 2017
As anybody who reads my blog may know, I often write blog posts upon request. Many of them I’ve written because my own graduate students, undergraduate students or research assistants ask me to help them out with a particular component of the research process. Others, I write because faculty, students or practitioners ask me whether […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– June 30, 2017
In previous posts I have addressed how to write rhetorical precis (very brief, four sentence summaries of the reading you are doing), synthetic notes (brief summaries of articles, focusing on the Abstract, Introduction and Conclusion as per the AIC method), and memorandums (longer, 1000-2000 word briefings that synthesize the content of an article, but also […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 27, 2017
When I wrote my blog post on how to properly teach our students how to do Description vs Analysis in their academic writing, I linked to a number of resources. The one that Dr. Omar Wasow (Princeton University) recommended was “They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing“, edited by Gerald Graff and […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 13, 2017
When I switched from chemical engineering (my undergraduate degree) to political science and human geography (my doctoral degree), I went through economics of technical change and international marketing (my Masters). But the chemical engineering component was still very strong during my Masters. I remember reading comments from a professor’s marker (yes, my professor didn’t even […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 7, 2017
Earlier this week I shared Dr. Katrina Firth’s modified version of the Cornell Method’s Notes Pages. I used the Cornell Notes method in 2013 and really didn’t click with me, so I simply moved on. Had I discovered Katrina’s modified version earlier I probably would have “clicked” with the methodology much faster. Though her modification […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 3, 2017
One of the research products I find most useful for an academic, short of openly-accessible datasets and code for replication is the annotated bibliography. As I have noted before, I consider the annotated bibliography an intermediate step between a bank of rhetorical precis, a bank of synthetic notes, and a fully-developed literature review. I consider […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 28, 2017
Like many political scientists, I will be descending on Chicago this week to present two papers at the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA). I was invited by Dr. Kelly LeRoux (University of Chicago at Illinois) to give a talk to her PhD students, and we decided to make it a public lecture. I have titled […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 3, 2017
I just came back from a week in Paris attending a meeting of field experiments’ scholars, and I took the opportunity to do some fieldwork. There are perfectly good reasons why I study French water governance, specifically in Paris, but that discussion is reserved for another post. When I do fieldwork or when I am […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 8, 2017
If there’s a downside to being a polymath is that everything looks interesting. If I don’t control myself (and I have to be quite strict about this), I can easily spend hours down the rabbit hole of Twitter and Facebook, or the depths of the internet. Distractions come easy to me, sad as this may […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 9, 2017
My first degree is in chemical engineering, but I started taking courses in what my colleagues used to call “the soft sciences” (aka strategic management, business administration, and social sciences) towards the end of my undergraduate. I figured that if I wanted to ever get out of being a process engineer, I would need some […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– December 22, 2016
Right now, as of November 11th, 2016, I have two journal articles under review, 3 accepted with changes, two book chapters in press, and I’m in the process of submitting one book chapter and two more articles that are ready for (thanks, #GetYourManuscriptOut and #AcWriMo for the additional motivation!). Strangely enough, I am really fired […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– November 11, 2016
My relationship with #AcWriMo (Academic Writing Month, which happens at the same time as National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo, in November) has always been a bit of love and hate. In 2012, I joined thousands of fellow academics in #AcWriMo, and as expected, it was a bit too overwhelming for me, BUT I did achieve […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– October 29, 2016
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