Search Results for: writing
Ever since I was a PhD student, I tried as much as I could to make it easy for me to write my doctoral dissertation. But since I am so analog in the way I work (I take notes by hand, I edit by hand, and I highlight and scribble on the margins of printed […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 1, 2016
Even though I strongly recommend NOT to do any work during your holidays, I had the pleasure of spending my holidays taking care of my 8 and 5 year old nephews, and during the time during which they allowed me to work, I basically caught up on my reading. One of the books I really […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 17, 2016
One of the challenges I face when teaching my students how to write effective memos (memoranda, memorandums) is that I have developed my own method of memo-writing after reading dozens of books, book chapters, articles, and implementing some of those ideas. I’ve written so many memos that I don’t actually know whether to recommend a […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 28, 2016
This page is dedicated to suggestions I provide to improve scholars, professors and students’ writing. These tips have worked for me, and I hope they will work for you! Producing New Text Writing a paper (going from generating ideas to finishing and editing manuscript) This post should be useful to those who are trying to […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 14, 2016
I have very odd methods of doing things, I recognize this. I don’t follow anybody’s “time management system”. I adopted many of the tips that are now praised in the methodologies that “Getting Things Done“, “the Bullet Journal” and other productivity systems boast since I was a child, and I’ve faithfully kept my working habits, […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 6, 2016
Anybody who reads my research blog and/or follows me on Twitter knows that I have very specific approaches to writing. Because I need a disciplined approach to life, I do things like the following: I schedule my life to the every minute, I organize my office every day, I organize my research notes and books/journal […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 11, 2016
Three weeks ago, I submitted a grant proposal for a project that would require four researchers (me and 3 others) to engage in a water conflicts project. I wrote the grant proposal in basically, three hours. 3 hours where nobody else but me, my colored pens, and my notebook were in the same space (mental, […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– October 21, 2015
Last night I submitted a book chapter I had committed to finishing before August 14th. Actually, I had promised I would have sent it sometime in July. Nevertheless, I didn’t think about the fact that this had been an incredibly exhausting semester and that I would actually need to take the three weeks holiday that […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 1, 2015
Every morning, as I woke up and walked to my home office to start writing, I checked my “To Do” list on my corkboard/whiteboard. I felt the weight of everything I needed to write. Six different papers, plus five conferences, plus writing slides for keynotes and invited talks. This was really stressful. For weeks, I […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 12, 2015
My good friend (and graduate school colleague) Amanda Bittner (who is a professor of political science at Memorial University of Newfoundland) was asking on Facebook how do other fellow academics keep up with journal article reading (and reading, in general) other than binge-reading for when we are preparing a syllabus or writing a paper. I […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 27, 2015
In a lovely conversation with my niece (who is studying Political Science at a prestigious US university), she said that she admired professors for all the writing and multitasking that we do (teaching, research, service to the university, to their own disciplines, and that she was impressed that I wake up at 4 in the […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– October 25, 2014
Most people who know my schedule know that I wake up at the ungodly hour of 4:00am to write on an everyday basis (I was doing 4:45am for a while but then I realized I needed the additional 45 minutes as a buffer, so now I start anywhere between 4:00 and 4:45am). I also follow […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 17, 2014
Most people who read my blog on a regular basis know that I write every single day of the week, either 2 hours in a row (from 4:00am to 6:00am), or in 4 blocks of 30 minutes every day, to ensure at least 10 hours of solid writing per week. What most people DON’T know […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 5, 2014
When I blog about academic writing, I do so from the vantage point of someone who does it on a daily basis. Someone who recognizes his own time limitations (because I’m pretty busy), and his challenges (because I write academic prose both in English and Spanish, each with their own challenges). Even though I have […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 2, 2014
I’ve just finished two more pieces (this week), a conference paper and a journal article, that I needed to have done by the end of the week. I still have four additional pieces to write, and I’m working towards completing those (particularly because they are co-authored). But all this “writing-in-excess” made me ponder about my […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 20, 2014
As I have mentioned before, I’m very lucky in that my institution is extremely supportive of my (and my colleagues’) research endeavours. There are a number of (internal) sources of funding to support scholarly research, from support via start-up funds, to individual research accounts, to competing for internal research grants, to funding conference travel. Because […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 7, 2014
Last term was my first time in more than 6 years that I taught in Spanish. During Fall 2013 I taught State and Local Government (Gestion Estatal y Municipal) at CIDE. Originally, my plan was that I was going to teach the course in English, but ended up having to teach it in Spanish, a […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 24, 2014
Last week I participated in a 3-day long workshop on transboundary water governance and transboundary river basins (I will be writing about it later this week or today). I really enjoyed having an intimate conversation with my colleagues. However, one of the things that I reflected on the most as I was participating in the […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 19, 2014
Given how often my Top 10 Tips for Academic Writing get retweeted, promoted and Googled, you would have thought I would have jumped at the possibility of doing #AcWriMo (Academic Writing Month, which happens in November) again. After all, I have done it in previous years, and learned a lot from doing it last year. […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– November 30, 2013
Reading is an integral part of academic life. We expect our students that they read journal articles, book chapters, books and other materials as background to our lectures. But with the haste of academic life, it looks like the only times when we actually engage in reading scholarship is when we need to engage in […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 1, 2013
Nobody that I know likes rejection. I’ll have to admit that I was very lucky through high school, undergraduate and graduate school. I worked hard, and that work led to high grades (I completed my PhD with an A+ average GPA). I always felt that I was pretty invincible. Then, I had to rewrite a […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– June 22, 2013
I have written grant proposals for research projects and successfully obtained funding to conduct research before, without much problem. But in the past couple of years, I’ve experienced my share of rejection. I will admit I wasn’t used to rejection (neither in publishing nor in grant-writing), so being denied funding came as a shock to […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– June 21, 2013
While I would like to say that I’m able to stretch the 24 hours in a day to fit in time to read EVERY DAY (which is one of the pieces of advice I don’t think I could ever give, much as I’d love to do it myself), I do try to make time to […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 7, 2013
The topic of academic writing has been popular in the blogosphere and Twittersphere in the past couple of weeks. I think it all came from Stephen Walt’s Foreign Policy piece “On Writing Well“. Several fellow academics responded to Walt’s scathing critique of our scholarly writing (read Stephen Saideman, Jay Ulfelder, Dan Drezner, Marc Bellemare, Thomas […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– February 24, 2013
When I set out to write my Research Plan for 2013 and my Research Trajectory for 2013-2016, I decided to write down one word that would establish my goals for the year. This year, the word was FOCUS. I decided that, no matter how many obstacles I face and regardless of how many different scholarly […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 24, 2013
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